Ben Bernanke’s Banksters Legacy

With Ben Shalom Bernanke set to depart on the last day of January 2014, the critique and speculation of his tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve begins. The mainstream financial press is giving mostly favorable accounts. Heretofore, such praiseworthy acclamations strike a shape contrast with the actual record of the state of the economy. However, the admirers of the Fed and his specific enactments live in a time warp that only masters of the universe encounter. For the remaining population, an intense struggle for survival is the actual experience, remembered from the Bernanke years.

Investopedia expresses a complimentary score of The Legacy Of Ben Bernanke, and cites distinguished highlights and concludes that “Under Bernanke’s stewardship, the Fed became the most transparent it has ever been in its history.”

Yet, they are compelled to mention that from 2008 onward, Bernanke and the Fed embarked on a series of unparalleled – and often unconventional – rescue programs and stimulus measures. These included:

• ratcheting interest rates down to the lowest levels in American history;
• force-feeding the U.S. economy with trillions of dollars through successive rounds of “quantitative easing”;
• bailing out troubled Wall Street firms and institutions;
• orchestrating the rescue of other troubled financial institutions through shotgun weddings; and
• lending funds to diverse sectors of the U.S. economy to revive stalled credit markets.

, is an assessment that one would expect from the Mother Jones publication.

“Bernanke’s problem is pretty simple here: he almost certainly wants higher inflation . . . Once the Fed has reduced interest rates to zero, it can’t go any further. But what if the economy is so bad that all the standard models suggest you need negative interest rates to get the economy back on track? The only answer is higher inflation. If inflation is running at 2% and interest rates are at zero, the real interest rate is -2%. If you borrow money, you’re effectively being allowed to pay back less than you borrowed.”

Then there is the valid point made by Bill Sardi in LewRockwell.com. “The Fed been printing new money at the rate of $85 billion a month which is being distributed to close member banks who are gambling it on the Wall Street stock market to recapitalize themselves rather than lending it out into the economy so citizens can buy new homes, automobiles.”

The example of Paying back retirees with cheaper dollars illustrates the real costs of built in systemic inflation, not just for citizens on a fix income, but for everyone. This lost in purchasing value of the currency is obvious to any honest person.

“The average social security check was $321 in 1980 and in 2011 it was $1183 (adjusted for inflation). But if that $321 pension check were to be fully adjusted for inflation according to way inflation was calculated in 1980 (cost of gasoline and food included), then that $321 should be $3636 to have the same purchasing power today.”

The severity of income disparity has reached staggering levels. Elite insiders game the system with insider speculation certainty, while the constructive producers that keep the real components of the economy functioning, are pushed to the margins.

Bernanke’s real legacy produced the following outcomes. The always-reliable ZeroHedge site states some undeniable facts under Bernanke’s watch.

•  The US has never experienced 3% GDP growth.
•  The labor participation rate has fallen to levels not seen since the ‘70s.
•  Inflation-adjusted median incomes have fallen 7%.
•  The US’s debt load has risen from $8.4 trillion to over $16 trillion.
•  The Fed’s balance sheet has increased from $800 billion to over $4 trillion (larger than the economies of Brazil, France and even Germany).
•  Food prices have hit record highs fomenting revolutions in the Middle East and untold suffering around the globe.
•  The Fed has funneled trillions of Dollars into both US banks and European banks.
•  The Fed has allowed fraud, insider trading, and corruption.

The banksters demanded a bailed out because their derivative greed exacted losses that required an immense infusion of liquidity to rescue their balance sheets. Under Bernanke, the titans of finance have an unlimited line of near zero rate interest of new credit. When the establishment financial press applauds the savior of the economy, their loyalty towards corporatist governance, dictates that the economic interests and the public welfare of ordinary people is expendable.

Look to a prime example of this concentration of wealth and control. The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class by Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro, focus on BlackRock.

“BlackRock is one of the most concentrated power networks among the global 1 percent. The eighteen members of the board of directors are connected to a significant part of the world’s core financial assets. Their decisions can change empires, destroy currencies, and impoverish millions. Some of the top financial giants of the capitalist world are connected by interlocking boards of directors at BlackRock, including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, PNC Bank, Barclays, Swiss Reinsurance Company, American International Group (AIG), UBS A.G., Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley.”

These crony capitalists are the prototypes that benefited from Bernanke decisions.

During the Bernanke era, the debt bubble entered the point of no return to solvency. His place in the history of shame sets the stage for further economic turmoil. The Federal Reserve after Ben Bernanke article indicates that the Fed is boxed into a pattern that is likely to escalate out of control.

“With the uninterrupted, increase in federal debt, much of which is held by the Federal Reserve, the prospects of achieving prosperity by growing the economy, when interests rates have been near zero, failed miserably. It becomes almost absurd to believe that higher rates on Treasury Bonds will succeed. The new chair of the Fed will be hard pressed shutting down Quantitative Easing.”

A depression in the real economy is foreordained with the retraction of credit to most enterprises. This starving of access to funding is a conscious and deliberate strategy to force competition out of business. The grand scale that the banksters operate on has little room for upstarts or hanger-on’s. At the end of this very destructive Bernanke term, the rich got fabulous more wealthy, as the country sinks into decline on so many levels.

The Retail Death Rattle

“I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest, to make money they don’t want, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like.” ― 

If ever a chart provided unequivocal proof the economic recovery storyline is a fraud, the one below is the smoking gun. November and December retail sales account for 20% to 40% of annual retail sales for most retailers. The number of visits to retail stores has plummeted by 50% since 2010. Please note this was during a supposed economic recovery. Also note consumer spending accounts for 70% of GDP. Also note credit card debt outstanding is 7% lower than its level in 2010 and 16% below its peak in 2008. Retailers like J.C. Penney, Best Buy, Sears, Radio Shack and Barnes & Noble continue to report appalling sales and profit results, along with listings of store closings. Even the heavyweights like Wal-Mart and Target continue to report negative comp store sales. How can the government and mainstream media be reporting an economic recovery when the industry that accounts for 70% of GDP is in free fall? The answer is that 99% of America has not had an economic recovery. Only Bernanke’s 1% owner class have benefited from his QE/ZIRP induced stock market levitation.

The entire economic recovery storyline is a sham built upon easy money funneled by the Fed to the Too Big To Trust Wall Street banks so they can use their HFT supercomputers to drive the stock market higher, buy up the millions of homes they foreclosed upon to artificially drive up home prices, and generate profits through rigging commodity, currency, and bond markets, while reducing loan loss reserves because they are free to value their toxic assets at anything they please – compliments of the spineless nerds at the FASB. GDP has been artificially propped up by the Federal government through the magic of EBT cards, SSDI for the depressed and downtrodden, never ending extensions of unemployment benefits, billions in student loans to University of Phoenix prodigies, and subprime auto loans to deadbeats from the Government Motors financing arm – Ally Financial (85% owned by you the taxpayer). The country is being kept afloat on an ocean of debt and delusional belief in the power of central bankers to steer this ship through a sea of icebergs just below the surface.

The absolute collapse in retail visitor counts is the warning siren that this country is about to collide with the reality Americans have run out of time, money, jobs, and illusions. The most amazingly delusional aspect to the chart above is retailers continued to add 44 million square feet in 2013 to the almost 15 billion existing square feet of retail space in the U.S. That is approximately 47 square feet of retail space for every person in America. Retail CEOs are not the brightest bulbs in the sale bin, as exhibited by the CEO of Target and his gross malfeasance in protecting his customers’ personal financial information. Of course, the 44 million square feet added in 2013 is down 85% from the annual increases from 2000 through 2008. The exponential growth model, built upon a never ending flow of consumer credit and an endless supply of cheap fuel, has reached its limit of growth. The titans of Wall Street and their puppets in Washington D.C. have wrung every drop of faux wealth from the dying middle class. There are nothing left but withering carcasses and bleached bones.

The impact of this retail death spiral will be vast and far reaching. A few factoids will help you understand the coming calamity:

• There are approximately 109,500 shopping centers in the United States ranging in size from the small convenience centers to the large super-regional malls.
• There are in excess of 1 million retail establishments in the United States occupying 15 billion square feet of space and generating over $4.4 trillion of annual sales. This includes 8,700 department stores, 160,000 clothing & accessory stores, and 8,600 game stores.
• U.S. shopping-center retail sales total more than $2.26 trillion, accounting for over half of all retail sales.
• The U.S. shopping-center industry directly employed over 12 million people in 2010 and indirectly generated another 5.6 million jobs in support industries. Collectively, the industry accounted for 12.7% of total U.S. employment.
• Total retail employment in 2012 totaled 14.9 million, lower than the 15.1 million employed in 2002.
• For every 100 individuals directly employed at a U.S. regional shopping center, an additional 20 to 30 jobs are supported in the community due to multiplier effects.

The collapse in foot traffic to the 109,500 shopping centers that crisscross our suburban sprawl paradise of plenty is irreversible. No amount of marketing propaganda, 50% off sales, or hot new iGadgets is going to spur a dramatic turnaround. Quarter after quarter there will be more announcements of store closings. Macys just announced the closing of 5 stores and firing of 2,500 retail workers. JC Penney just announced the closing of 33 stores and firing of 2,000 retail workers. Announcements are imminent from Sears, Radio Shack and a slew of other retailers who are beginning to see the writing on the wall. The vacancy rate will be rising in strip malls, power malls and regional malls, with the largest growing sector being ghost malls. Before long it will appear that SPACE AVAILABLE is the fastest growing retailer in America.

The reason this death spiral cannot be reversed is simply a matter of arithmetic and demographics. While arrogant hubristic retail CEOs of public big box mega-retailers added 2.7 billion retail square feet to our already over saturated market, real median household income flat lined. The advancement in retail spending was attributable solely to the $1.1 trillion increase (68%) in consumer debt and the trillion dollars of home equity extracted from castles in the sky, that later crashed down to earth. Once the Wall Street created fraud collapsed and the waves of delusion subsided, retailers have been revealed to be swimming naked. Their relentless expansion, based on exponential growth, cannibalized itself, new store construction ground to a halt, sales and profits have declined, and the inevitable closing of thousands of stores has begun. With real median household income 8% lower than it was in 2008, the collapse in retail traffic is a rational reaction by the impoverished 99%. Americans are using their credit cards to pay their real estate taxes, income taxes, and monthly utilities, since their income is lower, and their living expenses rise relentlessly, thanks to Bernanke and his Fed created inflation.

The media mouthpieces for the establishment gloss over the fact average gasoline prices in 2013 were the second highest in history. The highest average price was in 2012 and the 3rd highest average price was in 2011. These prices are 150% higher than prices in the early 2000′s. This might not matter to the likes of Jamie Dimon and Jon Corzine, but for a middle class family with two parents working and making 7.5% less than they made in 2000, it has a dramatic impact on discretionary income. The fact oil prices have risen from $25 per barrel in 2003 to $100 per barrel today has not only impacted gas prices, but utility costs, food costs, and the price of any product that needs to be transported to your local Wally World. The outrageous rise in tuition prices has been aided and abetted by the Federal government and their doling out of loans so diploma mills like the University of Phoenix can bilk clueless dupes into thinking they are on their way to an exciting new career, while leaving them jobless in their parents’ basement with a loan payment for life.

The laughable jobs recovery touted by Obama, his sycophantic minions, paid off economist shills, and the discredited corporate legacy media can be viewed appropriately in the following two charts, that reveal the false storyline being peddled to the techno-narcissistic iGadget distracted masses. There are 247 million working age Americans between the ages of 18 and 64. Only 145 million of these people are employed. Of these employed, 19 million are working part-time and 9 million are self- employed. Another 20 million are employed by the government, producing nothing and being sustained by the few remaining producers with their tax dollars. The labor participation rate is the lowest it has been since women entered the workforce in large numbers during the 1980′s. We are back to levels seen during the booming Carter years. Those peddling the drivel about retiring Baby Boomers causing the decline in the labor participation rate are either math challenged or willfully ignorant because they are being paid to be so. Once you turn 65 you are no longer counted in the work force. The percentage of those over 55 in the workforce has risen dramatically to an all-time high, as the Me Generation never saved for retirement or saw their retirement savings obliterated in the Wall Street created 2008 financial implosion.

To understand the absolute idiocy of retail CEOs across the land one must parse the employment data back to 2000. In the year 2000 the working age population of the U.S. was 213 million and 136.9 million of them were working, a record level of 64.4% of the population. There were 70 million working age Americans not in the labor force. Fourteen years later the number of working age Americans is 247 million and only 144.6 million are working. The working age population has risen by 16% and the number of employed has risen by only 5.6%. That’s quite a success story. Of course, even though median household income is 7.5% lower than it was in 2000, the government expects you to believe that 22 million Americans voluntarily left the labor force because they no longer needed a job. While the number of employed grew by 5.6% over fourteen years, the number of people who left the workforce grew by 31.1%. Over this same time frame the mega-retailers that dominate the landscape added almost 3 billion square feet of selling space, a 25% increase. A critical thinking individual might wonder how this could possibly end well for the retail genius CEOs in glistening corporate office towers from coast to coast.

This entire materialistic orgy of consumerism has been sustained solely with debt peddled by the Wall Street banking syndicate. The average American consumer met their Waterloo in 2008. Bernanke’s mission was to save bankers, billionaires and politicians. It was not to save the working middle class. You’ve been sacrificed at the altar of the .1%. The 0% interest rates were for Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. Your credit card interest rate remained between 13% and 21%. So, while you struggle to pay bills with your declining real income, the Wall Street bankers are again generating record profits and paying themselves record bonuses. Profits are so good, they can afford to pay tens of billions in fines for their criminal acts, and still be left with billions to divvy up among their non-prosecuted criminal executives.

Bernanke and his financial elite owners have been able to rig the markets to give the appearance of normalcy, but they cannot rig the demographic time bomb that will cause the death and destruction of our illusory retail paradigm. Demographics cannot be manipulated or altered by the government or mass media. The best they can do is ignore or lie about the facts. The life cycle of a human being is utterly predictable, along with their habits across time. Those under 25 years old have very little income, therefore they have very little spending. Once a job is attained and income levels rise, spending rises along with the increased income. As the person enters old age their income declines and spending on stuff declines rapidly. The media may be ignoring the fact that annual expenditures drop by 40% for those over 65 years old from the peak spending years of 45 to 54, but it doesn’t change the fact. They also cannot change the fact that 10,000 Americans will turn 65 every day for the next sixteen years. They also can’t change the fact the average Baby Boomer has less than $50,000 saved for retirement and is up to their grey eye brows in debt.

With over 15% of all 25 to 34 year olds living in their parents’ basement and those under 25 saddled with billions in student loan debt, the traditional increase in income and spending is DOA for the millennial generation. The hardest hit demographic on the job front during the 2008 through 2014 ongoing recession has been the 45 to 54 year olds in their peak earning and spending years. Combine these demographic developments and you’ve got a perfect storm for over-built retailers and their egotistical CEOs.

The media continues to peddle the storyline of on-line sales saving the ancient bricks and mortar retailers. Again, the talking head pundits are willfully ignoring basic math. On-line sales account for 6% of total retail sales. If a dying behemoth like JC Penney announces a 20% decline in same store sales and a 20% increase in on-line sales, their total change is still negative 17.6%. And they are still left with 1,100 decaying stores, 100,000 employees, lease payments, debt payments, maintenance costs, utility costs, inventory costs, and pension costs. Their future is so bright they gotta wear a toe tag.

The decades of mal-investment in retail stores was enabled by Greenspan, Bernanke, and their Federal Reserve brethren. Their easy money policies enabled Americans to live far beyond their true means through credit card debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, and home equity debt. This false illusion of wealth and foolish spending led mega-retailers to ignore facts and spread like locusts across the suburban countryside. The debt fueled orgy has run out of steam. All that is left is the largest mountain of debt in human history, a gutted and debt laden former middle class, and thousands of empty stores in future decaying ghost malls haunting the highways and byways of suburbia.

The implications of this long and winding road to ruin are far reaching. Store closings so far have only been a ripple compared to the tsunami coming to right size the industry for a future of declining spending. Over the next five to ten years, tens of thousands of stores will be shuttered. Companies like JC Penney, Sears and Radio Shack will go bankrupt and become historical footnotes. Considering retail employment is lower today than it was in 2002 before the massive retail expansion, the future will see in excess of 1 million retail workers lose their jobs. Bernanke and the Feds have allowed real estate mall owners to roll over non-performing loans and pretend they are generating enough rental income to cover their loan obligations. As more stores go dark, this little game of extend and pretend will come to an end. Real estate developers will be going belly-up and the banking sector will be taking huge losses again. I’m sure the remaining taxpayers will gladly bailout Wall Street again. The facts are not debatable. They can be ignored by the politicians, Ivy League economists, media talking heads, and the willfully ignorant masses, but they do not cease to exist.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – 

Source: The Burning Platform

Like Pulling Teeth: Adventures In Gardening And Dentistry

Two rather interesting things have happened to me lately.  First, I had one of my teeth pulled this week — totally not a fun experience.  And, second, while still oozing pain and eating Hydrocodone and climbing the walls, I started reading a book about plants by Michael Pollan, entitled “The Botany of Desire”.  So now I have suddenly become an expert on both pain-killers and gardens.

Having one’s tooth pulled is like, er, pulling teeth.  It really hurts.  So from now on I plan to brush and floss constantly and do whatever it takes to keep my remaining teeth healthy and clean.  Someone recommended gargling with Bombay Sapphire twice a day.  I’d try even that.

Even though the student doctor who pulled my tooth at the UCSF School of Dentistry was an angel of mercy combined with Dr. McDreamy, having one’s tooth extracted is never pretty.  I kept reciting that mantra “Challenges make me stronger” in the dental chair and  — but even that didn’t work.  I’m a wimp.  And not only that but once the tooth was out, they wouldn’t even give it back to me to give to the Tooth Fairy.  Rats.

Then, once finally back home and safely collapsed into bed, I took some of those “opioid” pain-killers they gave me — and dreamed that I was an escaped convict running a funeral parlor in my childhood hometown (Millbrae) and hiding under my daughter Ashley’s bed (probably from NSA).  Forget that.  No more weird Kubla-Khan dreams for me.  I’m sticking with aspirin.

Now I’m wishing there was something I could do to replace my poor sweet little lost tooth, but there doesn’t seem to be anything.  Getting a dental implant is expensive — $3,000 per tooth, even done by a dental student.  Who can afford that?  Not me.  So now I’ve got a big gap in my teeth.  How ugly is that!  However, I won’t be alone for long.  Two-thirds of America will soon be joining me in being gap-toothed as well unless affordable dental insurance becomes available reasonably soon.  But if not, then we’ll all be totally ugly together, not just me.  America goes third-world.  Who would have thought.

I also have a postage-stamp sized garden attached to my apartment, which grows nothing.  According to Michael Pollan, this shouldn’t be happening — unless there has been some really heavy-duty weed killer sprayed there at one time.  Yes, there was.  But not by me.  So, apparently, what I need now is all new dirt.  And at the rate that American agribusiness keeps using millions of tons of herbicides and pesticides each year, all of America will soon be needing all new dirt too.

“Actually, it’s not the heavy use of herbicides and pesticides that is causing the most problems on huge agribusiness farms,” to summarize one of Pollan’s chapters on the potato, “but rather the monoculture nature of their crops.  Organic farmers can vary and rotate what they plant and thus stave off insect and fungal infestations — but if your main customer for potatoes is McDonalds, then you have to plant Burbank russets and only Burbank russets all of the time.  So it is Americans themselves that are causing the major use of [stuff] like Roundup and Roundup-Ready GMOs.”

So if I promise to plant a huge variety of everything in my garden, from fingerling potatoes to roses to dandelions, then will at least SOMETHING finally grow?

And will I also be able to grow a new tooth?

Aside from Michael Pollan, why else have my thoughts been turning to gardening lately?  In the middle of freaking January?  Because this winter has been the sunniest one in Berkeley that I have ever seen.  It’s like freaking summer here now, like July, every day — even going beyond April or May.   even declared Berkeley a drought area the other day.  Time to bust out the seeds.

Michael Pollan also wrote about cannabis in his book on plants.  “Marijuana doesn’t make you forgetful of everything.  It just makes you forget [stuff] that’s not important.”  Interesting.  I always forget names.  So I guess names aren’t all that important or necessary for me to remember.  Whew.  I’m off the hook then.  Am not getting senile dementia after all, just sorting out my priorities.

And maybe that’s why Alzheimer sufferers forget so much mental stuff too — they might be shutting down everything that won’t immediately help them to cope with this devastating disease (yes, I know that Alzheimers also rots its victims’ brains — but isn’t that just one more good reason for them to shut said brains down?)

With regard to raising the minimum wage here in soon-to-be-toothless America, wouldn’t it make more sense to just cut the rate of inflation instead?  Starting by eliminating the Federal Reserve and its tendencies to print meaningless Monopoly money and to finance Endless War?  And, while we’re at it, let’s stop giving out billions in “food stamps” to corporate welfare queens like Bank of America, BP, WalMart, Halliburton and Monsanto.  Works for me.  And can we also please bring our millions of jobs back from overseas too?

Back in 1963, I made $1.75 an hour while working in the post office on weekends and during summers.  With this money plus some help from my parents (yes, they could also afford to help me back then), I was able to graduate from San Jose State College without requiring any student loans.  And in 1966, when I got a big salary-bump to $3.50 an hour for working the stamp window instead of sorting mail, I was able put myself through graduate school at UC Berkeley, just by working during summer vacations.  Can you even imagine staying alive and not homeless in Berkeley today on that kind of salary — let alone paying for your tuition at Cal as well.

What has happened to all of America’s jobs and wealth since the 1960s, back when we were the richest country in the world?  That’s a no-brainer.  It’s all flown away into the pockets of Wall Street mega-bankers, the numbered Cayman accounts of war profiteers and the fat wallets of all those corporate welfare queens who currently own and run our government.

While it’s always a good idea to raise America’s minimum wage a few dollars, it’s also important to stop runaway inflation — and to also start lowering a certain type of maximum wage as well:  The maximum amount that rich guys can steal from us before they get sent to jail.And we need to put some teeth into these new regulations too.

Bitcoin: The Sexiest Non-Solution of All Time?

A few years back, at the end of 2009, I was approached on two separate occasions by people claiming to be “representatives” of a digital alternative currency format. I was, of course, intrigued by the initial proposal, being that I had been writing for some time on the concept of non-participation as a way to insulate average Americans from the dangers of our unstable fiat driven mainstream economy. Before that, I had already dealt with just about every currency alternative one could imagine; from paper scripts backed by goods, to scripts backed by time or labor, to gold and silver laden currency cards, etc, etc. All of them had the advantage of NOT relying on private Federal Reserve notes, and all of them had flaws as well. The proposed digital script, which the representatives called “Bitcoin”, was no different.

The idea was to recruit my website as a promoter for bitcoin, but I had many questions before I would stick my neck out on a brand new high-tech anti-currency, and most of these question were not answered in any satisfactory manner.

There is no shortage of “solutions” in Liberty Movement circles, but many of these solutions require that we work within the system according to establishment rules (which they can change at any given moment). They assume that the system will abide by some kind of internal code, that our candidates will be treated fairly, that elections will not be rigged, that a better methodology or technology will be acknowledged and eventually adopted, that the “majority” of the public will someday see the light and back our cause, that the elite will not simply decide to put a bullet in our head.

The reality is, if a solution is dependent on a paradigm controlled by the corrupt system you are trying to change, it is no solution at all. Because of this, my focus has always been on methods that separate Americans from reliance on the system as much as possible.

When first confronted with bitcoin activism, I recognized almost immediately that this was NOT a method that operated outside the system, even though it tried very hard to appear that way. It was high-tech, it was sexy (admittedly far sexier in its presentation than gold and silver), and it catered to the egos of the digital generation, the loudest voices in media today. This thing was certainly marketable. However, just because something is highly marketable does not make it a good idea, or a meaningful alternative.

The Tantalizing Allure Of Non-Solutions

When a person invests a sizable amount of capital into an idea, not to mention a sizable amount of philosophical faith, they tend to lose a measure of objectivity. This is not just a struggle for proponents of bitcoin but for proponents of ALL methodologies. I do believe that many bitcoin promoters have the best of intentions, and that they are seeking some way to break from what they understand is a corrupt financial structure. That said, there is an escalating streak of elitism within the bitcoin culture, and I have witnessed on numerous occasions the kind of anger and immediate dismissal the average statist would spew when they are confronted with criticism. If you dare to question the greater details behind Bitcoin, be prepared to be accused of anything from “conspiracy theory”, to “jealousy” for missing the boat on bitcoin profits, to “ignorance” of the genius of cryptography.

What I came to realize through my questions to bitcoin followers was that many of them were not actually involved in the deeper aspects of the Liberty Movement, constitutional activism, sound money, self defense, and so on. Almost none of them had a preparedness plan, few of them had experience with precious metals, none of them owned firearms, and none of them had any inclination towards the building of local networks for mutual aid. Worst of all, many of them had no understanding of the wider threat of economic collapse that America faces today. In fact, when the possibility of full spectrum collapse is brought up, many Bitcoiners actually respond with the same brand of shallow dismissals that one would expect from the Paul Krugman’s and Ben Bernanke’s of the world.

This reaction is not necessarily shocking. Most people imagine themselves accomplishing heroic feats, and why not? It is one of the more noble and beautiful traits of mankind. For the crypto-engineers of the new century and the digital generation overall, heroics have felt unattainable. Elections are finally being recognized as the sham they represent, while protest activism has fallen flat on its face. The concept of peaceful redress of grievances has been met with rather frightening displays of state violence and censorship to which a physical response for the common protestor is unthinkable. The signs and slogan chants may have inspired the education of some, but in the meantime, they have accomplished very little in terms of political or social change. The bottom line is that the establishment LOVES non-aggression protests – they have no plan, few concrete goals, and present no overt threat to the elite.

The system only grows more despotic, more invasive, and more dangerous. Anti-establishment champions have been searching for something that goes beyond mere “education”, or clamoring like caged monkeys for media attention. They want to storm the castle, they want to fight back, but they haven’t the slightest clue how. They desire an intellectual method of combat, something with far less fear, far less risk, and far less pain. Enter Bitcoin.

Bitcoin gives the digital generation the chance to feel heroic where they never could before. They don’t have to face the machine head on. They don’t have to fight. They don’t have to suffer. They don’t have to die. All they have to do is utilize some cryptographic wizardry within the supposedly anonymous safety of the web, buy bitcoins en masse, and the system would crumble at their feet, rebuilt in the name of free markets by the electronic commons and without a shot fired. Again, very sexy…

Unfortunately, the real world does not necessarily lend itself to the demands of the digital. The digital world is at the mercy of physical. The real world is rarely sexy; often it is ugly, brutal, hypocritical, illogical, and psychotic. The real world, at times, can break, and when it does the digital will break with it. The digital world is in large part a fantasy supported by the whims of the real. Which leads me to the core failings of the bitcoin adventure…

Bitcoin Theater

We’ve all heard praises lavished on bitcoin, not only from the web activists but from the mainstream media itself. Establishment controlled outlets like Reuters and Bloomberg have an astonishing number of bitcoin stories per week, and most of these stories paint the crypto-currency in a positive light. We’ve heard about bitcoin’s “unbreakable” cryptography. Its finite supply. The inability to duplicate the currency from thin air. Its rising acceptance in the corporate world. The Cinderella stories of bitcoin investors buying Lamborghinis and New York brownstones. Even Ben Bernanke seems to have a soft spot for bitcoin:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ben-bernanke-on-bitcoin-2013-11

But is bitcoin’s rise really all it’s cracked up to be? Here are just a few of the problems which lead me to believe the digital currency is ultimately a clever distraction.

Who really started Bitcoin?

One of my first questions to bitcoin representatives back in 2009 was WHO, exactly, founded the operation? Well, Satoshi Nakamodo, everyone knows that, right? But who the hell is Satoshi Nakamodo? Who is the original designer of bitcoin? Who holds the foundational key to the structure of bitcoin’s cryptography? Is Nakamodo a person, or a group? Why should we trust him, or them, to safeguard our wealth any more than the Federal Reserve? The fact is no one except maybe Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, knows who is behind the digital currency. We actually know more about the banking elites behind the Fed than we do about the founders of bitcoin.

The common response to this concern is to suggest that it doesn’t really matter, bitcoin is secure, it is open source, it is cryptography’s holy grail, the creators are protecting their identities against retribution from the establishment, and the excuses go on…

I’m sorry, but this attitude constitutes an act of blind faith in a currency mechanism, which is exactly what proponents of the dollar are guilty of. If an activist individual or group is going to offer a solution to the movement, then they had better be willing to take the risk of being personally available to the movement. If you don’t have the balls to show your face to help legitimize your idea, I can’t take your idea seriously. Maybe I’m just old fashioned…

For all we know, bitcoin is a creation of the establishment, not a creation countering the establishment.  After all, the globalists WANT the destruction of the dollar – why not let the public destroy the dollar using a mechanism that ultimately does not represent a threat to the greater bankster cartel?

The Media Love Affair With Bitcoin

During the first and second Ron Paul campaigns, the mainstream media made a blatant and obvious effort to purposely ignore the candidate, his arguments, and his successes. Coverage was next to nil. His expansive crowds of supporters were edited out of news footage. His high polling numbers were censored. If not for the independent media, you wouldn’t have known the guy existed. When someone or something presents a legitimate threat to the establishment, the establishment’s first tactic is to make sure no one knows.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has received a steady flow of positive media attention, with the random critical piece thrown in for good measure. Overall, the establishment has embraced, if not directly fueled, the bitcoin trend. This is rather surprising to me considering the “destroyer of the dollar” has only been around for four years.

When an anti-establishment vehicle suddenly becomes the center focus of establishment affections, and when globalist monsters like Ben Bernanke throw flower petals in its path, I have to wonder if Bitcoin is a real threat, or just a ruse.

Bitcoins Can Indeed Be Confiscated

Some of the early hype surrounding Bitcoin claimed that the currency could not be confiscated, making it “better than gold” (the better than gold motto has been widely espoused by Gavin Andresen). This claim turned out to be false when the FBI became the holder of the world’s LARGEST Bitcoin wallet:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/fbi_wallet/

I find arguments that this is only a temporary condition and that the feds will eventually auction off their holdings a bit laughable, but indicative of the denial inherent in Bitcoin culture.

Bitcoin Values Can Be Manipulated

Another claim heard was the assertion that bitcoins cannot be created out of thin air, they must be “mined” using powerful computers, which removes centralized manipulation of value. This may be true in certain respects (for now), but anything digital can be exploited in one way or another.

Bitcoin malware, for instance, hijacks the computers of unwitting people and uses them to artificially “mine” the currency.

http://about-threats.trendmicro.com/us/webattack/93/Cybercriminals%2BUnleash%2BBitcoinMining%2BMalware

The bitcoins mined are then transferred into the hands of anonymous hackers. This represents a serious threat to the stability of bitcoin because it creates an invasive form of attack speculation. Bitcoins can be removed from the market and deliberately hoarded. Hackers, or governments could conceivably kill bitcoin by mining a large portion of them out of circulation, artificially hyperinflating the value of the remaining coins (like a speculator would do with commodities), or dumping a large portion and abruptly cutting the value. Major bitcoin hoarders could use their massive bitcoin stakes to shift values at will. As long a Bitcoin operates on supply and demand, it can be threatened through speculation like ay other commodity (if you consider digitized numbers floating around the web a commodity).

Bitcoin Is Not Private

While bitcoins can apparently be stolen or criminally mined by anonymous persons or organizations, honest users are subject to considerable scrutiny. A disturbing aspect of bitcoin is the group surveillance that goes into tracing transactions, otherwise known as the “proof of work system”. The bitcoin network is constantly dependent on decoders who track and verify bitcoin trades in order to ensure that the same bitcoins are not used during multiple trades or purchases. Anyone with the desire could decode the transaction history of the network, or “block chain”, including governments. Though Bitcoiners are considered “partially anonymous”, tracking the individual identity of a bitcoin trade is not difficult for entities such as the NSA because every transaction leaves a digital trail..

The use of anonymising browsers like Tor also have not produced the kind of privacy that was promised when bitcoin was introduced.

This is exactly the kind of currency system global bankers have sought for some time – total information awareness of all financial transactions and purchases within the system. While bitcoin proponents claim that their currency is a revolution against centralized oversight of monetary transactions, the truth is they have built the perfect centralized surveillance solution. Paper dollar purchases are difficult to trace. Gold, silver, and barter purchases are nearly impossible to track. Bitcoin, though, is the most traceable form of currency on the planet, and this is basically REQUIRED by the network itself. The entire trade history of every bitcoin is recorded. The digital landscape is the ultimate form of privacy invasion, especially for the likes of super computer wielding agencies like the NSA. Bitcoin aids the development of this intrusive system.

Bitcoin Relies On The Continued Survival Of The Open Web

Yes, bitcoins can be stored on physical wallet devices, but the majority portion of bitcoin trading and bitcoin mining requires the continued operation of the web. The internet is NOT a creative commons, as many believe. It is in fact a controlled networking system that we have simply been allowed to use. The exposure by Edward Snowden of NSA activities has proven once and for all that nothing you do on the web is private. Everything is tracked and recorded. Period.

Web access can also be easily denied by governments, and power centers around the globe have been utilizing this option more and more. During a national crisis, whether real or engineered, the continued function of the internet as we know it is not guaranteed. A currency relying on a government dominated internet is not truly independent. A grid down situation would also make bitcoin stores virtually useless.

The Suspicious Nature Of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is consistently touted as a superior option to precious metals as a way to decouple from central bank fiat. Under examination, though, it appears to me that bitcoin is instead a deliberate distraction away from gold and silver, and other tangible solutions; in other words, I believe it to be a form of controlled opposition.

A vital aspect of physical gold and silver investment is not only to break from the dollar, but to also remove physical metal from the system and starve international banks that issue millions of fraudulent unbacked paper certificates. The strategy, which I still stand by, is for the public to absorb as much of the precious metals market as possible until manipulators like JP Morgan finally have to admit that they don’t have the coins and bars to back all the fake ETF’s they have been issuing investors for years. In the process, we decouple from the dollar AND do damage to the banking cartel itself. The bitcoin fad, in my opinion, is designed to lure the public away from overtaking the metals market while banks and foreign governments vacuum up remaining physical in preparation for a dollar collapse.

Bitcoin’s market value is not only extremely volatile, the currency is also subject to replacement at any time. Anyone with an interest can create a cryptocurrency. There is nothing particularly special about the bitcoin design, and if someone offered a digital currency tomorrow that was truly anonymous, it could quickly supplant bitcoin. Though its cryptography makes it difficult to artificially inflate (again, for now), other digital currencies can still be produced out of thin air. Bitcoiners desperately want to equate cryptography with tangibility, but the truth is that there is no comparison. Physical gold and silver cannot be artificially produced by anyone, anywhere. Digital currencies can be produced at will and hyped like Dutch tulip mania.

The most unsettling aspect of bitcoin, however, is not its distraction away from precious metals. Rather, it is the distraction away from localized solutions. Bitcoin proponents may be searching for decentralization, but they seem to have forgotten the most most important part of the process – localism. The trade of digital mechanisms over impersonal web networks and online marketplaces is not conducive to local economic stability or sustainability. Bitcoin does not encourage people to build local markets, to adopt useful trade skills, to prepare for a grid down scenario, or circulate wealth within one’s community. Bitcoin only furthers the removal of independence and self sustainability from local economies by fooling activists into thinking that buying things without dollars is enough.

If Americans in particular want to pursue any solution to the threat of globalism or dollar collapse, they are going to have to start with themselves, and the community around them. Online trade is the last thing they should be worried about. Only when neighborhoods, towns, and counties become producers and self suppliers will they be safe from financial instability. Only when those same communities band together for mutual aid and self defense will they be safe from tyrannical political entities. Bitcoin accomplishes nothing in either of these categories, making it possibly the most popular non-solution for liberty to date.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse

2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.

Did we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his alternative to the Queen’s Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.

Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.

The privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths, which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in “filling stations” where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car’s fuel tank, check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires, and clean the windshield. A dollar’s worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5 would fill the tank.

Even in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they conveyed the idea that calls were private.

The notion that telephone calls are private left Americans’ consciousness prior to the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I entered the men’s room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its value.

I remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964. I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with American telemarketing.

The efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone. What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.

When one flies today, unless one stops up one’s ears with something, one hears one’s seat mate’s conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing. Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?

If you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox “News” going on about the need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing their latest sexual affair.

Americans, or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of privacy is a loss of self. They don’t understand that a loss of privacy means that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff. Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.

The loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.

Consider this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which they live.

Normally, this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police. 
“We’re here for you,” the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.

The news report doesn’t say what happened to the children, whether the father appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned the kids over to Child Protective Services.

This shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about “authoritarian” regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower prison populations than “freedom and democracy” America.

I was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play. Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to the mother’s judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed their own judgment.

When I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my mother would be arrested for child endangerment.

In America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve’s subsidy known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers, depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster care where many are abused.

According to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed finger while saying “bang-bang” are arrested and carried off to jail in handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the females who were “Tom boys” would have been taken to jail. Playground fights were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have been tolerated.

From the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in police custody in 1963. 4FDDuRSgzFk Oswald was believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been beaten, his nose wasn’t broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused of sassing overbearing police officers.

In America today people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become subjects, an indication of social collapse.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Gerald Celente: Top Ten Trends 2014

In 33 years of forecasting trends, the Trends Research Institute has never seen a new year that will witness severe economic hardship and social unrest on one hand, and deep philosophic enlightenment and personal enrichment on the other. A series of dynamic socioeconomic and transformative geopolitical trend points are aligning in 2014 to ring in the worst and best of times.

Ready or not, here they come.

March Economic Madness: One of the most difficult aspects of trend forecasting is getting the timing right. And when it comes to economics, there are many wildcards that can stall or detour any on-rushing trend. We called the Crash of ’87, the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis and the Panic of ’08 (we even established the domain name in 2007) right on the button. But we missed the mark with our Crash of 2010 prediction.

Why? The Federal Reserve and central banks around the world were secretly pumping tens of trillions of dollars into a failing financial system. These were, at the time, unimagined schemes for nations that pride themselves on capitalism. And while we are not naïve to the dirty dealings of the financial industry, rigging the daily multi-trillion dollar LIBOR and FOREX markets was not on our radar. Thus, what we believed to be economic truths and hard facts were, in fact, cover-ups and lies….

Such unforeseeable factors aside, we forecast that around March, or by the end of the second quarter of 2014, an economic shock wave will rattle the world equity markets. What will cause this econo-shock? How can you prepare for it? It’s a Top Trend of 2014. Read about it in the Winter Trends Journal.

Global Chinatowns: Name the continent or pick a country, every one contains its own brand of Chinatown. The Chinese global buying binge, now in its early growth stage, will noticeably accelerate in 2014. From coal mines in Zambia, to Borscht Belt resorts in New York, to factories in Italy, and to farmlands in Ukraine, a seemingly endless variety of Chinese development projects are being incubated around the world. If there is a deal to be had and a need to be filled, Chinese players are increasingly at the front of the line.

Wealthy investors, college graduates without jobs, skilled and unskilled laborers will be migrating out of their overpopulated, congested and highly polluted nation to foreign shores. Where are the new growth areas? What actions will be taken to stop or control the trend? Who will benefit? Who will lose? And what are the dangers and opportunities? You’ll find the answers in the Winter Trends Journal.

Wake Up Call: Last year we forecast the Great Awakening 2.0, a period reminiscent of the first Great Awakening that provided the intellectual, philosophical and spiritual ammunition that ignited the American Revolution. The “Awakening” has begun. Throughout 2014, and beyond, you will hear the Wake Up Call. It will be loud and distinct.

In 2013, the White House and Congress proved their extreme incompetence with a series of public failures. From closing down the government, to the debt ceiling debacle, to the aborted attack on Syria and, ultimately, to the disastrous launch of Obamacare, the ineptness of our political leaders was overwhelming. As polls show, a majority of citizens registered levels of scorn and ridicule unparalleled in modern America.

But this phenomenon is not limited to America. Around the world, citizen distrust has turned into universal disdain for entrenched political parties whose draconian austerity measures and punishing economic policies have thrown millions into poverty and pushed millions of protesters into the streets. Civil wars, civil unrest, revolts and revolutions will be just some of the cards dealt by an angry public that has lost everything and has nothing left to lose.

Will those in power hear the Wake Up Call? Or will they attempt to stamp it down and drown it out? Hear it or not, the movement is unstoppable. It will be a battle of the classes. What will it mean? Where will it take the biggest toll? Can the protests and disturbances of tomorrow bring peace and enlightenment that will lead to the Great Awakening 2.0? It’s all in the Top Trends 2014 Winter Trends Journal.

Seniors Own Social Media: Seniors now comprise the fastest-growing user segment of the social media world, and the year ahead will see the retail, business, political, health and entertainment industries evolve aggressive strategies to realize the robust economic potential in engaging seniors.

The gamut of possibilities is so grand that we forecast technological and product advances that impact everything from nursing home life to political campaigns and causes. Read the Winter Trends Journal to pinpoint how this trend will unfold and affect you and your interests.

Populism: Regardless of how professional politicians deride it or how the traditional media describe it, “populism” is a megatrend sweeping Europe, and it will soon spread across the globe. Mired in prolonged recession, disgusted with corrupt political parties, and forced to follow EU, ECB and IMF austerity dictates, populist movements are seeking to regain national identity and break free from the euro and Brussels domination. These movements are positioned to bring down ruling parties and build up new ones.

The discontent of the one-size-fits-all Euro Union formula is so deep that populists are expected to gain some 25 percent of the European Parliament seats in next year’s elections. “We have the big risk to have the most ‘anti-European’ European Parliament ever,” cried Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta. “The rise of populism is today the main European social and political issue,” Mr. Letta added. “To fight against populism, in my view, is a mission today – in Italy and in the other countries.”

Already, some nations, such as Spain, have passed new laws restricting public demonstrations while imposing police-state measures to stamp out dissent. What is the future of populism? How far will it spread? Will it lead to the formation of new parties, or lead to civil wars? Read about it in the Trends Journal’s Top Trends 2014 edition.

Trouble in Slavelandia: Even as total US personal wealth soars above a record high of $77 trillion, fueled by the stock market’s own record highs, life for the growing number of have-nots in Slavelandia has become more desperate. In today’s Plantation Economy – driven by the bottom line needs of multinationals and flailing austerity-prone governments – low-paying service jobs and reduced hours engineered to evade corporate responsibility to provide benefits, are making it tough for the working poor, a group that now includes debt-burdened and underemployed college graduates and seniors as well as the traditional underclass.

Nearly half of the requests for emergency assistance to stave off hunger or homelessness comes from people with full-time jobs. As government safety nets are pulled out from under them – as they will continue to be for the foreseeable future – the citizens of Slavelandia will have no recourse but action. The fast-food worker strikes of 2013, seeking a higher minimum wage, were just a mild taste of what is to come. Learn more in the WinterTrends Journal.

The New Altruism: Several burgeoning trends identified for 2014 will coalesce in a welcome trend toward selfless concern for the wellbeing of others and an interest in the common good. Across the age divide, from people in their youth to those of advanced years, the search for meaning will intensify and become more widespread in response to waning resources, want, and an over-commodified culture. As despair quietly takes more prisoners, Doing Good will be recognized as the key to escape.

Ironically, the Internet that has been much maligned for currying narcissism will make the donation of money, time and talents so easy that people will be able to enact their better natures without resistance. Be they Boomers in renaissance or populists in revolt, people will discover and expand the humanist side of globalism and act accordingly. See why in the Top Trends of 2014 Winter edition of the Trends Journal.

Private Health Goes Public: While the world focused on the blockbuster NSA surveillance revelations and other cyber-snooping episodes of 2013, another powerful trend line was firmly planted: Your health data has been progressively mined, assembled and made accessible to a widening group of interested parties.

While signing up for the Affordable Care Act brought some attention to this developing trend, around the globe, data on individuals’ health status, behaviors, prescriptions and even their genetic indicators have been funneled to a wide range of databases. Those databases have many purposes and a growing number of hands on them.

The positive and negative implications of this trend are equally powerful. Individuals and their health care providers can more easily tie vital physical data with worldwide medical databases to anticipate and potentially prevent disease. But, in the wrong hands, the data can be used to exploit, damage and take advantage of individuals and their families. Security concerns will rise in equal importance with the potential benefits of this critical trend line.

What does this mean for you, your family, or your business? The Winter Trends Journal will provide the answers.

Boomer Renaissance Arrives: Distinct and strengthening economic, lifestyle and societal determinants are building a creative foundation for the older population as it discovers new approaches to work and finds long-elusive contentment in the process.

You already know that older workers, seeing their retirement plans shattered, have to work beyond traditional retirement years. You also know that those same economic dynamics are forcing aging Boomers to entirely rethink retirement. And, of course, you know that as Boomers are living longer, traditional thinking about retirement has been stood on its head. What you might not realize is how these factors are compelling Boomers to unearth potent creative energies not only to survive, but to realize potential that evaded them in traditional work roles.

In 2014, we will see growing evidence of this Boomer Renaissance, accentuated by waves of self-guided entrepreneurism that alchemizes commerce, survival and self-actualization into a new world and self view. The Winter Trends Journal will explore this compelling 2014 trend in depth.

Digital Learning Explodes: Fears that online educational platforms fall short of providing depth and effectiveness in the learning experience will all but disappear. Across the entire educational spectrum, online learning will expand to include not only course instruction, but also a wealth of real-life learning experience, with considerable participation by the skills-hungry business community.

For individuals, educational institutions, industries, small businesses and up-and-coming entrepreneurs, the implications are enormous. From traditional degree-based education to very specific micro skills-based learning, this trend line explodes. The Trends Research Institute will break down the implications for individuals, business professionals and a range of industries in its Winter Trends Journal.

Source: Gerald Celente  |  The Trends Journal via LewRockwell.com

After 100 Years of Failure, It’s Time To End The Fed!

Indeed. End the Fed.

Sounds so radical doesn’t it? Isn’t the Federal Reserve there to smooth out the economy, to stabilize the currency? To make sure the world doesn’t blow up?

What if I told you that it doesn’t smooth out the business cycle, but exacerbates it. That the dollar has lost 95% of its value since the establishment of the Federal Reserve. And that the world has “blown up” multiple times under the Fed regime? The world is worse for having the Fed in it.

A reasonable person might ask, “Well, I don’t buy it. That’s not what I’ve been told. Wouldn’t things have been even worse without the Fed?”

No. The Fed is the reason we have so much economic instability, and why the world economy is prone to long periods of sub optimal performance. The Fed juices the economy to counter what it perceives as downturns. In so doing it creates malinvestment while times are “good.” When (artificially) easy money flows businesses and governments make stupid decisions. They leverage themselves out too much, much more than if the market set the overall rates of interest. They build where they shouldn’t build. They loan money to people they shouldn’t loan money to. And eventually all this malinvestment crumbles on itself and creates a recession or depression.

Sadly the Fed doesn’t then just abolish itself in the face of another failure. No, it is usually during these times where the Fed, the very entity which has created the problems in the economy, gains more power as politicians scurry around trying to look as if they are solving the country’s economic problems.

This is what happened in the wake of 2008.

The Fed screwed up by keeping rates too low for too long. The banks took advantage of the easy money.Then the big banks came tumbling down – really just a reversion to the mean. Then the Fed bailed out the banks and in the process expanded its power.

The Fed failed. The manipulation of interest rates failed. The manipulation of the market mechanism failed. But because people (especially Congress) think the bankers at the Federal Reserve have some God-like insight into the world of high finance, they hand over more of the economy to the Fed in the wake of each Fed induced crisis.

It’s as if America has fallen into a Stockholm Syndrome induced trance. The Fed has captured the economy and after 100 years the general public (and Washington) now look to its captor for economic answers. We know nothing else. Won’t the world end if we take off the chains the FOMC has told us protect us? What if we decided to be free?

Nope, nope, too scary to contemplate. The wizards at the Fed will take care of things.

The so-called wizards, are just men and women. They are prone to mistakes (obviously.) But because the Fed has such massive power when these men and women made of flesh and blood mess up, they mess up the whole world. No political entity should ever be able to do this.

The Fed is far too powerful. It’s time to stop identifying with our captors and to put the bank in its place, which is to say in the dustbin of history.

Source: againstcronycapitalism.org

The Hidden Motives Behind The Federal Reserve Taper

“The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.” – Carroll Quigley, member of the Council on Foreign Relations

If one wishes to truly understand the actions behind private Federal Reserve policy, one must come to terms with a fundamental reality – everything the Fed does it does for a reason, and the most apparent reasons are not always the primary reasons. If you think that the Fed simply acts on impulsive stupidity or hubris, then you haven’t a clue what is going on. If you think the Fed only does what it does in order to hide the numerous negative aspects of our current economy, then you only know half the story. If you think the Fed does not have a plan, then you are sorely mistaken…

Central Bankers and their political proponents espouse a globalist ideology, meaning, they are internationalists in their orientation and motivations. They do not have loyalties to any particular country. They do not take an oath to any particular constitution. They do not have empathy for any particular culture or social experiment. They have their own subculture, with their own “values”, and their own social hierarchy. They are a kind of “tribe” or “sect”; a cult,if you will, that views itself as superior to all others. This means that when the central bankers that run the Fed act, they only act with the intention to support and promote globalization, not the best interests of America and Americans.

The process of globalization REQUIRES the dissolution of the U.S. economy as it exists today. Period. There is no way around it. America can no longer remain a superpower in the face of what globalists call “harmonization”. The dollar can no longer maintain its petro-currency status or its world reserve status if total centralization under a new global currency is to be achieved. Globalists believe that America must be sacrificed on the altar of “progress”, and diminished into a mere enclave, a feudal colony of a greater global system. The globalists at the Fed are no different.

Once this driving philosophy is understood, the final conclusion is obvious – the Fed exists to destroy the U.S. financial system and the U.S. currency mechanism. That is what they are here for.

This is why the dollar has lost 98% of its value since the Fed was established in 1913. This is why the Fed deliberately engineered the derivatives bubble crisis through the implementation of artificially low interest rates. This is why their response to the crisis was to create yet another massive bubble in stocks and bonds through QE stimulus. This is why the Fed is cutting stimulus today.

How does the taper play into the long running program of dollar destruction and globalization? Let’s take a look…

The Multifaceted Taper Strategy

In my article ‘Is The Fed Ready To Cut America’s Fiat Life Support’, and my article ‘Expect Devastating Global Economic Changes In 2014′, I predicted that a Fed taper was highly likely. Central banks almost always implant policy shift rumors into the mainstream media a few months before they implement them. They did this for TARP, for QE1, QE2, QE3, and the Taper. In fact, the Fed spent the better part of the past quarter conditioning investors to the idea of stimulus cuts, so I was not at all surprised when they followed through.

The Fed has, of course, now announced a $10 billion QE reduction just in time for Christmas and the 100^th anniversary of the privately run institution. In the past, I have pointed out the tendency of central banks to enforce detrimental policy changes while the government, the economy and/or the bank itself is in the midst of a major transition. The Fed’s taper announcement comes just in time for the end of Ben Bernanke’s term as chairman, and the expected nomination of Janet Yellen.

This is done, I believe, because it provides an opportunity to divert blame for a crisis event they know is on the horizon. If attention is ever focused on the Fed specifically for a market downturn or bond disaster triggered by the ever present dollar bubble, Yellen can simply blame the QE policies of Bernanke (who will be long gone), while promising that her “new” policies will surely repair the damage. This placates the public and buys the central bankers time to do even MORE damage.

The taper itself is not just a “head fake”, however. It is a far more complex action. Tapering provides a method of psychologically distancing the Federal Reserve from the consequences of market movements. The banksters are essentially proclaiming to the public that their work is done, they have saved the economy, and now they are moving on, be it only $10 billion at a time. Whatever happens from here on is “not their fault”.

Most alternative analysts expected no taper of QE, and for good reason. While the mainstream touts the propaganda of economic recovery, independent financial experts understand that little to nothing was actually accomplished by the bailouts. Virtually no stimulus was absorbed in a localized way by mainstreet business. Real unemployment counting U-6 measurements still stands at around 20%. Real estate markets and home prices have a received a small boost, which at first glance appears positive until one examines who is actually buying; namely big banks and international investment firms snapping up properties only to reissue them on the market as rentals:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/behind-the-rise-in-house-prices-wall-street-buyers/?_r=0

U.S. holiday retail sales and annual retail sales have been the weakest since 2009:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-30/black-friday-traffic-seen-thinning-as-stores-open-early.html

The only thing that QE ultimately accomplished was a spectacular rise in stocks through direct manipulation, which Fed agents like Alan Greenspan and Richard Fisher now openly admit to. The problem is, while gamblers in equities proudly boast about the Fed induced bull run in the Dow and how much money they have made, they remain oblivious to the underlying cost of the charade. Market investors have been enriched, yes, but little do they know that stock legitimacy is about to be sacrificed.

The price to earnings ratio of stocks (the market value of stocks versus what they SHOULD be valued according to the actual earnings of the companies listed) in the S&P 500 today stands at around 15, which is the highest it has been since before the 2008 market crash. Mainstream economists attempt to dismiss the issue by using a 15 year average while claiming that the P/E ratio in 2013 is mild compared to the tech bubble of the late 90’s. What they don’t seem to grasp is that the market of the past four to five years is an entirely different animal compared to 15 years ago.

Stocks in general have received considerable support through purchases by Fed bolstered banks and the Fed itself, creating an atmosphere of artificial demand for equities using QE fiat injections. Though no full audit of the bailouts exists (TARP is the only measure audited so far), it is projected that the banking sector alone has garnered tens of trillions in Fed fiat, which they have used to bolster their otherwise debt ridden holdings. It is only logical to expect that this capital tsunami has been used by numerous companies as a way to present false earnings. while at the same time reporting massive liabilities caused by the derivatives crash so that they could collect on the bailout bonanza.

So which one is it? Are companies making profits, or are they wallowing in insurmountable debt while presenting government stimulus as a form of profit?

What the Fed and corporate banks have done is create a market in which neither earnings, nor stock values can be trusted. The fact that the P/E ratio is higher than it has been since 2008 despite this manipulation should concern anyone with any sense.

Worst of all, the Fed’s monetization of U.S. Treasury debt has only expanded while foreign investment in long term debt has contracted. With our official national debt growing by at least $1 trillion per year, our country cannot continue to function without an ever increasing amount of foreign investment, or, Federal Reserve printing. The Fed cannot make cuts to QE if our system is to survive (if you want to call it survival), the Fed must expand QE forever, or at least until the dollar implodes due to hyperinflation.

So then, why has the taper been introduced at all? No one wants it. The government shouldn’t want it. Investors certainly don’t want it. Our economy is utterly dependent on the opposite. What purpose does it serve?

The assumption has always been that the Fed wants to keep the system afloat. I submit that things have changed. I submit that the Fed no longer wishes to prop up our fiscal structure, or at least, no longer wishes to be seen as propping it up. I submit that the Fed is not pursuing dollar destruction through standard hyperinflation, but rather, they are preparing the U.S. for default, which also will result in currency implosion.

The Taper Parallels

“It must not be felt that the heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up, and who were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks. “ – Carroll Quigley, Tragedy And Hope

Initial shock over the taper scenario has not sunk into the markets yet (as Zero Hedge points out, the last time a major central bank cut stimulus measures to a dependent country, stocks rallied, then crashed within months). Few people see much difference between $75 billion per month and $85 billion per month, but the size of the cuts is not really the issue. Rather, it is the Fed’s act of fading into the background that should concern us.

The taper announcement parallels perfectly with the accelerating debate over the U.S. debt ceiling, and I do not think this is at all a coincidence. Tapering seems inconceivable to many, but for the Fed it makes perfect sense if the goal of the globalists is to generate a default scenario while diverting blame. I believe that Americans are being prepared psychologically for just such an event. Already, the White House is warning that government funding will essentially disappear by the end of February:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/19/us-usa-fiscal-idUSBRE9BF1FW20131219

The expectation fostered by the mainstream media is that a debt fight similar to the October theater will not happen again. I agree. I believe the next debate will be much worse. The vast majority will assume that the “can” will be kicked down the road again, and they may be right, but given the Fed’s behavior, and given that they have begun to taper despite what appears logical, many people may be in for a shock when our government also suddenly decides one day soon to buck assumptions and default rather than prolong the pain.

The full spectrum failure of Obamacare only adds excuse and incentive. There is no longer a legislative centerpiece rationale for further spending. Obama’s approval rating is at historic lows for any president. The stage has been set for the most epic of fake political battles.

The Left and Right leadership, at the top of the pyramid, are nothing more than flunkies for the global elite. If globalists have decided that it is time to apply the final death blows to the dollar, default would be the quickest and most efficient way, and political puppetry can easily make it happen. The calamity would be blamed on “partisan bickering” and “government gridlock”, or even the inefficiency of “democracy”. The Fed, with its taper in place and its fake recovery established, would be presented as the only “sane” institution at America’s disposal.

Perhaps at this point even more pervasive QE programs would recommence, perhaps not. At bottom, though, the taper is not a peripheral issue. It is an action at the center of a much more elaborate process, an action that seems to have been undertaken in preparation for a larger event. The next year is shaping up to be the most chaotic since the debt crisis began in 2008, and as the situation progresses, the subtleties of the Federal Reserve and the international banks that back it must not go unnoticed, or in the end, unpunished.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

The Incredible, Shrinking Presidency of Barack Obama

According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, Barack Obama now ranks among the least popular presidents in the last century. In fact, his approval rating is lower than Bush’s was in his fifth year in office. Obama’s overall approval rating stands at a dismal 43 percent, with a full 55 percent of the public “disapproving of the way he is handling the economy”. The same percentage  of people “disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president”.  Thus, on the two main issues, leadership and the economy, Obama gets failing grades.

An even higher percentage of people are upset at the way the president is implementing his signature health care system dubbed “Obamacare”.  When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling “implementation of the new health care law?” A full 62% said they disapprove, although I suspect that the anger has less to do with the plan’s “implementation” than it does with the fact that Obamacare is widely seen as a profit-delivery system for the voracious insurance industry.  Notwithstanding the administration’s impressive public relations campaign, a clear majority of people have seen through Obama’s health care ruse and given the program a big thumb’s down.

Of course, Obamacare is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The list of policy disasters that preceded this latest fiasco is nearly endless,  including everything from blanket pardons for the Wall Street big-wigs who took down the global financial system, to re-upping the Bush tax cuts, to appointing a commission of deficit hawks to slash Social Security and Medicare (Bowles-Simpson), to breaking his word on Gitmo, to reneging on his promise to pass Card Check, to expanding to wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, to droning 4-times as many civilians as the homicidal maniac he replaced as president in 2008.

Obama’s treatment of undocumented immigrants has been particularly shocking although the details have been kept out of the media, presumably because the news giants don’t want to expose the Dear Leader as a heartless scoundrel who has no problem separating mothers from their children, locking them up in privately-owned concentration camps and booting them out of the country with nothing more than the shirt on their back.  Check out this blurb which sums up Obama’s “progressive” immigration policy in one paragraph:

“Obama is on track to deport 3 million immigrants without papers by the end of his second term, more than any other president. George W. Bush deported about 2 million over two terms. Obama will likely hit that mark this month….. The average daily count of immigrants in detention now is about 33,000. In 2001, it was 19,000. In 1994, it was 5,000, according to the Detention Watch Network. Almost all of the detainees and deportees are Latino. True, the population of illegal immigrants has also doubled in that time to more than 11 million. But the detainee and deportee counts have escalated more than twice as fast.

“He could go down as the worst president in history toward immigrants,” said Arturo Carmona, executive director of the liberal activist group Presente.org.

Hooray for the Deporter in Chief! You’re Numero Uno, buddy. You even beat Bush! Is it any wonder why the man’s ratings are in freefall?

All told, Obama has been bad for the economy, bad for civil liberties, bad for minorities,  bad for foreign wars, and bad for health care. He has, however, been a very effective lackey-sock puppet for Wall Street, Big Pharma, the oil magnates, and the other 1% -vermin Kleptocrats who run the country and who will undoubtedly attend his $100,000-per-plate speaking engagements when he finally retires in comfort to some gated community where he’ll work on his memoirs and cash in on his 8 years of faithful service to the racketeer class.

But, let’s face it; no one really gives a rip about “drone attacks in Waziristan” or “hunger strikes in Gitmo”. What they care about is keeping their jobs, paying off their student loans, putting the food on the table or avoiding the fate of next-door-neighbor, Andy, who got his pink slip two months ago and now finds himself living in a cardboard box by the river. That’s what the average working stiff worries about; just scraping by enough to stay out of the homeless shelter.  But it’s getting harder all the time, mainly because everything’s gotten worse under Obama.  It’s crazy. It’s like the whole middle class is being dismantled in a 10-year period. Wages are flat,  jobs are scarce, incomes are dropping like a stone, and everyone’s broke. (Everyone I know, at least.)  Did you know that 76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Check it out:

“Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings, according to a survey released by Bankrate.com Monday.

Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses, enough to help cushion the blow of a job loss, medical emergency or some other unexpected event, according to the survey of 1,000 adults.

Meanwhile, 50% of those surveyed have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all….

Last week, online lender CashNetUSA said 22% of the 1,000 people it recently surveyed had less than $100 in savings to cover an emergency, while 46% had less than $800. After paying debts and taking care of housing, car and child care-related expenses, the respondents said there just isn’t enough money left over for saving more.”

Savings?!?

Are you kidding me? What’s that? Who do you know that’s able to save money in this economy? Maybe rich uncle Johnny whose lived on canned sardines and Akmak for the last 50 years, but nobody else can live like that. Subtract the rent, the groceries, the doctor bills etc, and there’s barely enough leftover to fill the tank to get to work on Monday. Saving just isn’t an option, not in the Obamaworld, that is.

Now check this out from Business Insider:

“Thousands of Americans aged 55 and older are going back to school and reinventing themselves to get an edge in a difficult labor market, hoping to rebuild retirement nest eggs that were almost destroyed by the recession….

According to the Federal Reserve, household financial assets, which exclude homes, dropped from a peak of $57 trillion in the third quarter of 2007 to just over $49 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, the latest period for which data is available.

A survey to be released this summer by the Public Policy Institute of AARP, an advocacy group for older Americans, found a quarter of Americans 50 years and older used up all their savings during the 2007-09 recession. About 43 percent of the 5,000 respondents who took part in the survey said their savings had not recovered.” (“Unemployed Baby Boomers Are Getting Hired By Going Back To School”, Business Insider)

Sure they’re going back to work. What do you expect them to do? They’re broke! They got wiped out in Wall Street’s mortgage laundering scam and they’re still behind the eightball five years later. And what’s left of the money they set aside for retirement is yielding a big zilch thanks to the Fed’s zero rate policy which is forcing people back into another decade of penal servitude at minimum wage. That’s why you see so many hunched over graybeards in red vests with “Happy to Serve You” splattered on their chests lugging shopping bags out to the cars for old ladies. Because they’re broke and out of options. Everyone knows someone like this unless, of course, they’re one of the fortunate few who make up the Nobel 1%; aka–The Job Cremators. Then they don’t have to fret about that sort of thing.

Here’s another gem you might not have seen in USA Today a few months back:

“Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend….

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63% of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn’t generate much income….

Nationwide, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15% of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white…

“Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them’, it’s an issue of ‘us’,” says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. “Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.”  (“4 in 5 in USA face near-poverty, no work”, USA Today)

Does Obama have any idea of the damage he’s doing with his Rich-First policies? The country is in a terrible state and yet Obama continues to approve bills that throw millions of people off unemployment benefits, sharply cut government spending, or undermine vital safetynet programs that keep the sick and the elderly from dying on the streets.  It’s like he’s trying to reduce 300 million Americans to grinding third world  poverty in his short eight-year term. Is that the goal?

Did you know that–according to Gallup–20.0% of all Americans did not have enough money to buy food that they or their families needed at some point over the past year? Or that –according to a Feeding America hunger study–more than 37 million people are now using food pantries and soup kitchens? Or that one out of six Americans is now living in poverty which is the highest level since the 1960s? Or that the gap between the rich and poor is greater than any in history?

Everything has gotten worse under Obama. Everything. And, not once, in his five years as president, has this gifted and charismatic leader ever lifted a finger to help the millions of people who supported him, who believed in him, and who voted him into office.

These latest poll results indicate that many of those same people are beginning to wake up and see what Obama is really all about.

Who Else Is Paying For Their Endless War?

Let’s think about all those trillions of dollars that have been constantly pouring into war profiteers’ pockets ever since they invented Vietnam.  All those trillions must have come from somewhere.  Of course we all know that some of them came from the Federal Reserve where they print Monopoly money like crazy.  And, ironically, some of them have also come from multiple humungous loans from China.  Plus some of that money also found its way into the pockets of War Street at approximately the same time that “all the gold in Fort Knox” mysteriously disappeared.  And a few trillion also seems to have just materialized out of thin air — as if there was some ethereal war-profiteer fairy out there happily waving her magic wand.  But a lot of this destructive blood-money also came out of the pockets of us American taxpayers.  Trillions of dollars.  From you and me.

All too many of us hard-working Americans have been forced to gird up our loins and go without so that war profiteers can afford to live like kings, buy multiple yachts, drink Veuve Clicquot champagne and smoke Cuban cigars.

You and I have gone without jobs, schools, roads, police, fire departments, hospitals, etc. in order to pay handsomely for War Street’s right to kill babies and Live Large.

And, apparently, we are also being forced to live without the high-quality court system that we here in California had grown accustomed to.  How do I know this?  Because the Berkeley-Albany Bar Association just told me so!

At a recent luncheon meeting of BABA at the famed Berkeley City Club (designed by Julia Morgan herself) and over roast chicken, fruit salad and pie, a judge from the Alameda County Superior Court gave us a talk on the struggles that Alameda County is going through just to keep its court system working and its courthouse doors open these days.

“One billion dollars was lost in the budget last year,” the speaker told us.  “This is the toughest time financially in the history of this court.  We have never has to worry about money before — but now we worry about money all of the time.  It is very difficult to juggle to keep all of our programs alive.”  

“For instance, there have been 26 furlough days this year, where court employees didn’t get paid.  Courthouses are closed.  We used to have 72 judges and nine commissioners.  Now there are 18 vacancies this year.  We went from 940 employees to 720 employees.  We need 104 more just to operate.  There used to be seven civil court locations.  Now there are only two.  Four family courts have been reduced to one family court.  Four probate locations have been reduced to one.”  Heaven forbid that you should have to die and your ghost be forced to stand in line for hours at probate court.

“And if you get a traffic ticket anywhere in the county, you will have to drive all the way down to Fremont to contest it.  People stand in line for blocks at 5 am to get their tickets handled — and may still have to come back.  And the only reason Alameda County is barely keeping its head above water right now is because we have so many employees who are dedicated to bringing access to justice for all.  Sacramento County, for instance, doesn’t even have a civil filing office bull pen.  You just leave your unfiled summonses, pleadings and other documents in a drop-box.  Some counties have over 5000 unfiled documents right now.”

And where is the money from all those unpaid salaries going?  As far as I can tell, it is going into the pockets of tax-dodging corporate welfare queens and heartless and immoral war profiteers.  Christmas is coming up.  Would Jesus approve of all this random bloodshed and not-random greed?  Can you actually imagine Him saying, “I am Jesus and I approve this message.”  No way!

“Then there is the problem of criminal realignment.  30,000 prisoners have been released but next year there will be no money for their realignment — so more petty thefts will occur.  This will be very interesting to see.”  In other words, 30,00 prisoners will get out of jail with only bus fare and the clothes on their backs.

And also court electronic data systems have suffered.  “In some smaller counties, the filing system consists of putting papers in a box.  And our county no longer has the personnel to support inter-court filing of documents either.”  So you have to go to one specific court if you want to file a complaint or a probate document or a traffic ticket protest or an unlawful detainer.

And speaking of unlawful detainers (that’s where people who don’t pay their rent get invited to court by their landlord), the California court system has been flooded with them.  “There are so many banks with foreclosures.  These are our priority cases.  And 95% of them are getting settled because judges from other departments volunteer to help out and get these cases heard — because where else are people being threatend with foreclosure evictions going to go if they lose their homes?”

PS:  At its next monthly luncheon meeting, BABA asked a federal judge to speak — only he talked about an excess of money in America instead of a dearth of it, and how there have been whole tornadoes and hurricanes of money, flooding down on the USA like hailstorms ever since Citizens’ United took effect.

“And there is the additional problem of having individuals with unlimited personal bank accounts now running for office,” said the judge.  “When all this money flows into the election system, only wealthy people are elected.”  And why shouldn’t rich people invest in buying elections?  For every dollar a huge corporation or war profiteer spends on buying an election, he gets a 5000% return in pork-barrel dollars sent his way.

“Swing states are already saturated with money on the presidential-campaign level,” and so any more money being poured into those campaigns will have decreasing effectiveness.  “But large sums of money have an overwhelming effect on local elections.  But even though voters aren’t stupid, even when being constantly  bombarded with expensive ads, fair elections are still impossible under the current system,” said the judge as I happily ate roast beef, baby spinach and cheesecake.

“We in America have a very narrow view of what constitutes corruption.”  It’s not corrupt to buy an election any more — just as long as you use the new Supreme Court guidelines or have a friend at Diebold.  You can’t just slip a poll-worker a fin any more.  That’s corrupt.  You gotta be new-school about it.  

“Chief Justice Roberts stated that, ‘The Supreme Court doesn’t make the laws.  We just call balls and strikes’.  That is wrong.”  Especially when the current Supreme Court continuously calls out “strike!” even after a batter has obviously hit a home run.  
PPS:  “So, Jane.  What’s your moral here?”  The moral here is that we need to protect the integrity of our court system at any cost — even if it means that a few more war profiteers have to go without one of their yachts.  And also that I love all those Berkeley-Albany Bar Association luncheons.

Did Someone Say “Crash”?

Guess who’s investing in America’s future?

Nobody, that’s who.

Just check out this excerpt from an article by Rex Nutting at Marketwatch and you’ll see what I mean. The article is titled “No one is investing in tomorrow’s economy”:

“The U.S. economy simply isn’t investing enough to ensure that there will be enough good paying jobs for our children and our children’s children. Net investment — the amount of capital added to our stock — remains at the lowest levels since the Great Depression. …

Net investment…measures the additional stock of buildings, factories, houses, equipment, software, and research and development — above and beyond the replacement of worn-out capital. In 2012, net fixed investment totaled $485 billion, only about half of the $1.1 trillion invested in 2006…

If businesses, consumers and governments were investing for the future at usual rate, the economy would be at least 3% larger, employing millions more people. That’s a huge hole in the economy that can’t be filled by heavily indebted consumers, especially at a time when government is handcuffed by forces of austerity.” (“No one is investing in tomorrow’s economy”, Rex Nutting, Marketwatch)

Now the author seems to believe that the lack of net investment is just a temporary phenom that will work itself out in the years ahead. But he could be wrong about that. After all, why would a company build up its capital stock for the future when the future is so uncertain? Certainly, there’s nothing in the data that would suggest that the US economy is about to shake off its five year post-recession funk and shift into high-gear again, is there? No, of course not. In fact, it looks like the economy has reset at a lower level of activity that will only get worse as the impact of budget cuts and stagnation are felt. That will further curtail consumer spending which, to this point, had been the primary driver of growth.

Bottom line: Net investment is down because there’s no demand. And there’s no demand because unemployment is high, wages are flat, incomes are falling, and households are still digging out from the Crash of ’08. At the same time, the US Congress and Team Obama continue to slash public spending wherever possible which is further dampening activity and perpetuating the low-growth, weak demand, perma-slump.

So, tell me: Why would a businessman invest in an economy where people are too broke to buy his products? He’d be better off issuing dividends to his shareholders or buying back shares in his own company to push stock prices higher.

And, guess what? That’s exactly what CEOs are doing. Check this out in the Washington Post:

“Battered by months of dis­appointing sales, networking giant Cisco needed a way to give its shareholders a pick-me-up. So the San Jose-based firm did what has become routine for many big U.S. companies in a slow-growing economy: It announced last month that it was buying back shares of its stock…..

This is what U.S. multinationals do now with their cash. Rather than tout big new investments, raise worker wages or hire more employees, companies are more likely to set aside funds to reward shareholders — a trend that took a dip during the recession but has roared back during the recovery.

The 30 companies listed on the Dow Jones industrial average have authorized $211 billion in buybacks in 2013, according to data from ­Birinyi Associates, helping to lift the benchmark stock index to heights not seen since the tech boom of the late 1990s. By comparison, the amount is nearly three times what the group spent on research and development last year, according to data from S&P Capital IQ.

Why spend so much on stock repurchasing?

When the number of shares outstanding falls, the value of each one goes up, instantly rewarding shareholders.” (“Companies turning again to stock buybacks to reward shareholders”, Washington Post)

Corporations don’t care about the future. What they care about is maximizing shareholder value, that’s the name of the game; profits. If that means boosting net fixed investment then, okay, that’s what they’ll do. But if the Fed creates incentives to do something else, like gaming the system with stock buybacks, then they can make the adjustment. And that’s what the Fed’s zero rate policy does. It’s incentivizes businesses to use their capital in a way that’s damaging to the real economy. Here’s more from the same article:

“Helping to fuel the stock market’s meteoric rise is the Federal Reserve’s stimulus program designed to lower borrowing costs. Companies are taking advantage, often by borrowing money at low rates to repurchase shares, although it’s unclear how much of the debt is being used to pay for buybacks.

“It somehow feels scarier if they borrowed the money to buy back stock than if they had some investment opportunities,” Inker said. “That somehow seems more sustainable than just levering up to reduce the share count.”

Some analysts say companies are better off repurchasing shares than pouring money into investments promising dubious payoffs, especially in a slow-growing economy.” (“Companies turning again to stock buybacks to reward shareholders”, Washington Post)

There you have it; instead of investing in R&D, factories or new technologies, (all of which produce more high-paying jobs) companies are taking advantage of the Fed’s cheap money, goosing stock prices and raking in hefty profits. That’s just the way the policy works. The only way change the outcome, is to change the incentives. But the Fed doesn’t want to do that, and neither does the Congress because, at present, they have working people right where they want them, under their bootheel.

If you are looking for proof that workers are getting shafted, just look at the condition of the US consumer who is still on the ropes 5 years after the recession ended. Now, according to the latest Fed’s Flow of Funds report, “Household net worth rose by $1.9 trillion in the last quarter” which means that everything should be hunky dory, right? It means the long period of deleveraging should be over and consumers should be ready to go on another madcap spending spree like they did up-until 2007. Unfortunately, the Fed’s report is a bunch of baloney. The $1.9 trillion merely accounts for rising asset prices that have been reflated by Bernanke’s quantitative easing boondoggle. While working people have seen some uptick in housing prices, the bulk of the gains have gone to stock and bond speculators who’ve made out like bandits. As for consumers, well, they’re still stuck in the doldrums as economist Stephen S. Roach points out in this article at Project Syndicate. Here’s a clip:

“In the 22 quarters since early 2008, real personal-consumption expenditure… has grown at an average annual rate of just 1.1%, easily the weakest period of consumer demand in the post-World War II era.” (It’s also a) “massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007.” (“Occupy QE“, Stephen S. Roach, Project Syndicate)

So, personal consumption has dropped from 3.6% to 1.1%?!?

Yep. No wonder there’s no recovery. And, keep in mind, this is no short-term deal either, mainly because Democrats and Republicans are equally committed to future budget cuts which means it will be more difficult for households to get out of the red and resume spending. More austerity means more retrenchment and hard times for consumers, households and workers. Economist William R. Emmons provides a good summary of what’s-in-store for consumers in a recent post titled “Don’t Expect Consumer Spending To Be the Engine of Economic Growth It Once Was”. Here’s a clip from the article:

“Lower wealth: First and foremost, U.S. household wealth took a beating during the Great Recession. …., the loss of significant amounts of wealth and the severe pressure in some households to deleverage their balance sheets (reduce debt) are likely to contribute to restrained consumer spending for some time.

Stagnant incomes: The economic recovery under way since mid-2009 has been mediocre, at best. Job growth barely matches population growth, while incomes of the typical worker are barely keeping up with inflation. …, most of the overall gains in income appear to be flowing to high-income workers.

Tight credit: Consumer lenders either have disappeared altogether or are offering credit on a much more restricted basis than before the downturn.. …

Fragile confidence: Major consumer-confidence indexes have rebounded from their lowest levels during 2009 in the immediate aftermath of the recession, but they remain below the levels that prevailed just as the recession began in late 2008 …

Looming reversal of stimulus: The Federal Reserve has explored options to “exit” its extraordinarily accommodative monetary policy, while Congress and the president agree that budget consolidation is necessary in the not-too-distant future. In both cases, a tightening of policy measures represents a withdrawal of support for household incomes and wealth and, therefore, consumer spending.”

Individually, any of the five obstacles noted above might be surmountable. But combined, these contractionary forces make the outlook for broad-based consumer spending growth challenging. To be sure, some households weathered the economic and financial storms well, but we can’t count on these fortunate few to step up their spending sufficiently to offset the lost spending caused by declines in wealth, income, access to credit, confidence and government support.” (“Don’t Expect Consumer Spending To Be the Engine of Economic Growth It Once Was”, William R. Emmons, The Regional Economist |via The Big Picture

Emmons offers a bleak, but realistic assessment of our present predicament. There’s really no way the US economy can rebound without a dramatic reversal in the current fiscal policy. Most Americans appear to grasp this point which is why survey after survey show that the majority think the country is “on the wrong track”. The public’s frustration with Congress -(whose public approval rating is at all-time lows) is reflected in growing pessimism which is affecting their spending habits. This is completely normal, given that most middle income working people do not expect their financial situation to improve in the next year. Lower expectations mean more penny pinching, fewer job openings, skimpy net investment, and sluggish growth. That’s the future in a nutshell.

It’s worth noting that the investor class will also pay a heavy price for the current misguided policy. Stocks have had an impressive 4-year run, but there are signs that the day of reckoning is fast approaching. Get a load of this from USA Today:

“A potential warning to stock investors: the fourth-quarter earnings pre-announcement season is shaping up to be the most negative on record. In what seems like a major disconnect, the number of profit warnings relative to upbeat guidance is the widest it has ever been — at a time when the U.S. stock market is trading near record territory. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index notched a new closing high of 1809 Monday.

For every 10 companies warning of weaker-than-expected earnings for the October-through-December period, only one has said it will top forecasts, says earnings-tracker Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. The actual 10.4-to-1 negative-to-positive pre-announcement ratio is on track to eclipse the prior record of 6.8 warnings for every positive one back in the first quarter of 2001. The long-term ratio is 2.3 warnings for each positive one.

“This is off the charts, I’ve never seen it this high,” says Gregory Harrison, analyst at Thomson Reuters.” (“As stocks hit record highs, so do profit warnings”, USA Today)

So why is Wall Street taking such dire warnings in their stride, you ask?

It’s because investors no longer pay attention to the fundamentals. Demand doesn’t matter. Earnings don’t matter. What matters is the Fed and the Fed alone. “Is Bernanke going to keep pumping trillions in liquidity into the financial markets or not?” That’s the policy upon which all investment decisions are made.

So when Bernanke announces his plan to “taper” his asset purchases (scale-back QE), equities will adjust accordingly.

Did somebody say “crash”?

Federal Reserve 100 Years of Failure

Researching economic publications on the first century of the Federal Reserve System provides a wealth of financial information that attempts to explain the way the central bank works. Rarely will the academic studies and official reports address the raw nature of a money creation by a private banking monopoly. The common practice of disparaging sources outside government or corporatist business circles, attempts to avoid addressing, much less confronting the plutocracy that controls the debt created money system.

One such source list of the ownership of the Federal Reserve, compiled by Thomas D. Schauf appears on The Federal Reserve Scam! However, before getting to the particulars of the actual families behind the central banking cabal, it is important to go directly to the source of the primary chronicler who investigated and exposed the scheme. The late, , video reveals the entire sordid background.

Now review 25 Fast Facts About The Federal Reserve You Need To Know, from ETF Daily News that advises investors. The way these items play into the central banking model practiced by all 187 nations that belong to the IMF, demonstrates that banksters of the most select rank, are behind continued debt bubbles that are strangling the world.

On the Left Hook site by Dean Henderson, a five part series on the Federal Reserve provides added documentation. Mr. Henderson cites from Part 1 in this series, The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families, “They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.”

 

Finally, watch the video by . Mr. Griffin explains the broad picture in simple and clear terms.

With such definitive information available and widely known within financial circles, why is the public so content to remain in the dark? They live under the aftermaths of the Federal Reserve is a Cache of Stolen Assets, but resign themselves to the oblivion of lost expectations and the burden of diminished opportunities.

“Think about who really owns the land, the buildings and the resources in our country. In order to really understand the scope and extent of the economy, the differential between actual Main Street enterprise, that feeds, clothes and shelters the population, is minuscule when compared to the financial assets, both liquid and real property, that is under the command and control of the central bank.”

The political class and the business establishment simply refuse to buck the controllers of the currency. Attempts for a Jackals of Jekyll Island – Federal Reserve Audit, are pushed aside because any accountability for the Fed would ripple throughout the entire world fiat paper banking system. “The FED’s grip on the global moneychangers’ racket is based upon maintaining the U.S. Federal Reserve funny money, as the reserve currency for the planet. The value and worth of Treasury Bills and Bonds are on the path to have the value of

Reichsbank marks. Recognize the enemy that is destroying the country and world economy.”The Cato Institute provides a working paper, Has the Fed Been a Failure?, that traces the history, avowed mission and actual results of the Federal Reserve System. This scholarly approach acknowledges that other financial frameworks are “relatively easy to identify viable alternatives to the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.”

“However, recent work suggests that there has been no substantial overall improvement in the volatility of real output since the end of World War II compared to before World War I . . . the Fed cannot be credited with having reduced the frequency of banking panics or with having wielded its last-resort lending powers responsibly. In short, the Federal Reserve System, as presently constituted, is no more worthy of being regarded as the last word in monetary management than the National Currency System it replaced almost a century ago.”

Lastly, the essay, Who Owns The Federal Reserve?, by Ellen Brown, substantiates that the “Fed is privately owned, and its shareholders are private banks. In fact, 100% of its shareholders are private banks. None of its stock is owned by the government.”

Since the adoption of a private banking, money creation venture, the dollar has lost virtually its entire store of value. The currency has lost its universal acceptance, as multiple alternatives circulate to replace its reserve status.

The Federal Reserve’s First 100 Years: A Dismal Record by Dan Ferris, identifies the ultimate consequence of the stewardship under a central bank. “The century prior to the Fed, despite setbacks, was a century of improvement in the dollar’s value. The century after it, despite enormous gains in productivity, was a century of rampant Federal Reserve destruction of the dollar’s value.”This failure to maintain and preserve the integrity of the dollar is no accident. The actual purpose of the architects of the Federal Reserve System has never changed. Consolidate the control of money into a concealed cartel of banking houses that ultimately decide economic and political policy.

Dispensing of credit to corporatist projects, owned or run by reliable operatives of the cabal is the objective. The only beneficiaries are the original stockholders.

“Under the terms of the Federal Reserve Act, public stock was only to be sold in the event the sale of stock to member banks did not raise the minimum of $4 million of initial capital for each Federal Reserve Bank when they were organized in 1913 (12 USCA 281). Each Bank was able to raise the necessary amount through member stock sales, and no public stock was ever sold to the non-bank public.”

For the rest of Americans, the Federal Reserve conspiracy is an ongoing theft syndicate. It only takes the will to admit the undeniable. Without the courage to abolish this usury monster, the next century will witness the total destruction of the country.

Silver – A Rigged Market Coming To An End

No one can question the fact that the demand for silver has grown exponentially in the past few years, record sales for American Eagle coins being one small example, record buying in India, another larger example. Demand has never been greater. Supply, on the other hand, keeps diminishing.

Global mining production is at its lowest in the past decade. The annual Consumption/ Production ratio is indicative of acute deficits. Whenever there is a situation where demand rises sharply, while supply commensurately declines, it is a recipe for higher prices, and usually, much higher prices. This is true, unless one is talking about the silver market. Under the conditions of record rising demand and considerably less supply, the price of silver is at its lowest levels in the past three years.

With talk of silver going anywhere from $150 to $500 higher, it currently struggles to hold $20, why is this so?

The answer is not to be found in the myriad supply and demand figures, no matter how cogently presented: as absolute numbers, or dramatically presented graphs, and with so many comparisons to other times/situations. Facts and figures do not lie. Politicians and bankers do.

The reason why silver continues to languish is purely a political one. Silver, along with gold, compete against fiat currencies. All [Western]currencies are issued by central banks. All central banks are owned by the elites, New World Order, [NWO], the moneychangers, call them whatever you will. These elites have a vested interest in preserving the Ponzi monopoly they have enjoyed ever since Mayer Amschel Rothschild discovered the power of interest collected on debt, over 200 years ago.

Debt = Wealth. That is the motto for the elites who charge their central banks with running up as much debt as possible for every man, woman, child. and country. The more debt, the more interest owed to the 1/10th of 1% who own the world’s wealth. As an example, what was the answer to resolve Greece’s unmanageable debt problems? Have that country borrow even more!

The problem today is that the NWO is losing its grip as the growth of debt escalates to previously unimagined levels. The biggest threat to fiat currencies is sound money, such as being backed by gold and silver. This is why the United States eliminated the backing of United States Notes with silver and gold. This move was instigated by the elites who have controlled the United States since it was forced into bankruptcy in 1933.

The next move was to have President Nixon repudiate gold backing in 1971. The stage was set to flood the world with Federal Reserve Notes, backed by oil, hence the petro-dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The US has been exporting its debt-ridden society on the world ever since. What it did not count on was China, even Russia, to a lesser extent, emerging as world powers, and world powers that now have the gold.

The Western central bankers have been leasing, hypothecating and re-hypothecating gold with impunity, no country ever strong enough to challenge Western financial supremacy. Then, in the 1990s, China wanted its gold back from the United States. “Sorry, Chinks!” was the arrogant response from the US. It was gone, “leased” out to keep a controlled lid on the world’s price of gold. Central bankers were running a scam, one of the largest Ponzi schemes, ever.

Huge mistake.

It is now payback by the Chinese. Now aligned with Russia, Brazil, India, and South Africa, the BRICS nations have formed a trading alliance outside of the US petro-dollar. The world’s reserve currency has not only been challenged, it has fast become irrelevant, except in West and EU, and even in the EU, that is changing.

The golden genie was let out of the bottle over a decade ago, and all the central bankers cannot put it back. Every attempt has been made to keep a lid on the price of silver and gold by central bankers desperate to hang onto their waning power. This is why Germany was told it would have to wait seven years to get its gold back from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It simply ain’t there, anymore. Gone. Guess where it is?

China. Retribution can be a bitch. The East is over taking the West, and they are doing it by buying all the available physical silver and gold. Even more. China has been on a shopping spree, buying as many precious metals mining operations around the world as are available. Here is your largest demand factor, followed by the remaining BRICS nations.

What about diminishing supply? What about the almost empty vaults at COMEX and LBMA? What about the demand of 68:1 claim for each ounce of gold? What about… insert your own example of how supply is being exhausted. All factual, all true.

The elephant in the room no one is addressing is the political one. The elites have kept pressure on PMs to keep their last gasp efforts of control alive. The current price of silver has nothing to do with supply and demand, nothing. It is all about central banks being used by the elites to prevent silver and gold from exposing the fraud.

There was a reason why, in the Wizard of OZ, the theme was to “follow the yellow brick road.” The all-controlling Wizard behind the curtain was a fraud. The all-controlling elites behind the central bank curtain are also a fraud, but a more sinister one that has been cornered like a rat, and they are fighting back.

The way in which the elites are fighting back is why silver is under $20, right now. If the price of silver were allowed to rally and reflect reality, the exponentially higher prices would expose what lies behind the central bank fraud. The market is rigged. The sad truth is all markets are rigged. The Libor interest rate market, the Federal Reserve taper-on stock market, the OPEC oil market, the De Beers diamond market, the US world-wide drug trade market, the pharmaceutical market, the food supply market. Each factor that controls a specific market is also ultimately controlled by the elites, the New World Order.

If you want an idea of what to expect for the future price of silver, one only has to look at Bitcoin. It is not a government regulated market, and it is one that has taken the world by surprise. Just a few years ago, Bitcoin was under $1. Recently, it ran up to over $1,200. The appetite for any fiat alternative is huge. Bitcoin is not a currency, nor does it have the history of being currency-backed like silver and gold do. Once the lid is taken off the precious metals markets, they will leave Bitcoin in the dust.

The good news is: every single fiat currency throughout the history of the world has failed. An ounce of silver is still the same ounce of silver from thousands of years ago. The bad news is: no one knows for how much longer the elites can keep control, via their central banks, in suppressing the price. The good news to the bad news is that the end is near.

We are looking at the sale of the century for the price of silver, right now. There is a reason why China, Russia, and India have been huge buyers of physical silver and gold. Because of silver’s properties of being an indispensable necessity for industrial use, it has been used up considerably more than has gold. Both will rise incredibly in the not too distant future, and odds based on the gold/silver ratio favor silver.

One is likely to experience a greater return on investment in silver over gold. There is never any guarantee, but using historical relationships between the two makes silver a better buy and hold. The ratio is around 62:1. As both metals rise, once freed from central bank tentacles, the probability is that the ratio will move more toward 20:1. Wherever it goes, anything less than 62:1 makes silver preferred, on that basis.

This remains the best opportunity to be buying and holding physical silver. Only buy the physical metal, in coin or bar form, as you can afford. Do not buy silver in any form of paper, for you are unlikely to ever received physical, if promised. Plus, the fine print will tell you that delivery can be made in some form of paper payment in place of physical delivery.

If one has learned anything over the past few years, it is that governments cannot be trusted, and there is zero credibility in banks, all thieves, given the opportunity. Does it make sense to wait for the “best price possible?” Not as far as we are concerned. Silver may not be available at any price, or in very limited quantities, at some point. Plus, the reasons for buying are about wealth preservation that will eventually lead to increased wealth, when price finds its eventual true level. It is not worth the risk if you intend to accumulate silver and then not be able to buy any.

There could be one more new low in the near future, but that does not mean the physical will be commensurately lower. It is a personal choice. The time to buy is now, in the present. When silver eventually reaches over $150 the ounce, will it have made any material difference if you paid a dollar or two more or less the ounce? We live in an increasingly Orwellian world. Name, address, and SSN may be required, at some point. Anonymity will be lost.

The past cannot be changed, the future has not yet happened, so we can only deal with the present tense. The use of charts has its detractors, many simply from an inability to understand them, some from misapplying them, and a few from saying the charts are not real because they reflect the paper market, which is rigged. True, true, and true. However, paper valued or not, even the price for the physical is dictated by the paper market, [at least for now]. Until that changes, it is the only game in town.

Most people have something to say about the silver market. Here is how we see what the silver market has to say about the people trading it. For anyone not overly used to looking at charts, they do convey a certain degree of logic, and the message can, at times, be incredibly helpful.

A chart reflects the directional momentum of price behavior exhibited by participants. It is a way of tracking the results of all bets being placed, and it is the best way to see how the most skilled and informed, what we call smart money that moves markets, operate. Smart money trades with prevailing price direction, called the trend. They buy low and sell high, axiomatically, so it pays to have an idea of what they are doing.

A monthly chart provides the overall history and context of a market, and it is closely followed by smart money. Most traders/investors do not even look at monthly charts. We look for any existing synergy between the various time frames, for it tells a more compelling “story” about what is likely to happen. To the degree any synergy may be apparent, the greater the degree of logic one can glean from the charts.

According to the charts, the price of silver is not ready to reverse its trend. The monthly chart, and the lower time frames, clearly indicate the trend as down. Knowledge of the trend is the most important piece of information one can have, as a starting point.

Source:  Michael Noonan | Goldsilverworlds.com

When Saving Interest Rates Go Negative

What is more frightening, then the loss of your money. Since most people have, some meager amount held in some form of a financial institution, the prospect of the banksters’ cabal placing a charge against your account for the mere privilege of maintaining a deposit, is horrible. The Business Insider warns, In The Future, You May Have To Pay The Bank To Hold Your Money, and raises a very dreadful prospect.

“In recent weeks, economists have discussed the idea of how to implement a negative interest rate while preventing people from hoarding paper currency. Economist Miles Kimball has discussed creating an electronic currency and having an exchange rate between it and dollar bills. Others have discussed going cashless and eliminating paper currency altogether.”

Negative interest rates simply mean it will cost you, in fees or service charges, to hold money in banking accounts. Examine Professor Kimball’s ivory tower justification for seizing the value and purchasing power of your savings.

“University of Michigan economist Miles Kimball has developed a theoretical solution to this problem in the form of an electronic currency that would allow the Fed to bring nominal rates below zero to combat recessions. He’s been presenting his plan to different economists and central bankers around the world. Kimball has also written repeatedly about it and was recently interviewed by Wonkblog’s Dylan Matthews.”

Now dig deep into the mind of a mentally ill pseudo intellectual to see just how far from rational money policy such monetary eggheads go to provide cover for the fractional reserve central bankers.

“If we repealed the “zero lower bound” that prevents interest rates from going below zero, there would be no need to rely on the large scale purchases of long-term government debt that are a mainstay of “quantitative easing,” the quasi-promises of zero interest rates for years and years that go by the name of “forward guidance,” or inflation to make those zero rates more potent.”

 

This threat is a continuation from the initial trial balloon that appeared in the Financial Times. A video rant about, , goes ballistic with outrage that the money-centered banks are emboldened as to telegraph their intentions of raiding the nest egg savings of depositors. While the justifiable emotion is understandable for a beleaguered public, the economic aftermaths of interjecting massive QE reserves is explained well by Zerohedgein recent reports with the accompanied chart.

“Furthermore, contrary to what the hypocrite banker said that “the danger is that banks are pushed into riskier assets to find yield“, banks are already in the riskiest assets: just look at what JPM was doing with its hundreds of billions in excess deposits, which originated as Fed reserves on its books – we explained the process of how the Fed’s reserves are used to push the market higher most recently in “What Shadow Banking Can Tell Us About The Fed’s “Exit-Path” Dead End.”

What the real danger is, is that once the Fed lowers IOER and there is a massive outflow of deposits, that banks which have used the excess deposits as initial margin and collateral on marginable securities to chase risk to record highs (as JPM’s CIO explicitly and undisputedly did) that there would be an avalanche of selling once the negative rate deposit outflow tsunami hit.”

Hence, this move to prepare the bank customer for another hosing by imposing negative rates actually is a desperate attempt to keep the derivative “day of reckoning” from hitting. This strategy will not work. In the Negotium article, Low Interest Rates Impoverish Savers, makes the point: “Designed lowering of our standard of living is visible at every turn. The money-centered banks recapitalized their balance sheets at the expense of the passbook accounts customers.”With the expectation that bank accounts will actually experience debit fees for parking money will result in a massive outflow of capital. Where will the money go? Will the banks allow the return of your deposits in cash or will they impose significant costs and delay withdrawals?

Consider that under a banking system, which automatically reduces your balances, the acceleration of stripping your net worth goes into high gear. No sane individual would accept this theft willingly. However, the transition to a cashless economy might well inflict a call back of cash (Federal Reserve Notes) in circulation for an enforced substitute legal tender. Or else some variation of the “killer” Kimball electronic compulsory account may be imposed under strict governmental supervision.

Under such a circumstance, the mandatory medium of exchange strips all personal ownership from the individual. Money, in whatever form it takes, no longer will be your own property.

Negative interest rates institutionalize systemic inflation into every transaction. Throughout history, usury is condemned for charging interest on lending. What term should be used for paying no interest on capital saved? Anthony Migchels argues in Our Chains are Forged by Usury, that the objective is to create an interest-free money supply. Much like the Kimball electronic currency, the Migchels alternative resides in his own twisted hermitage, read accordingly.

“The problem is not the creation of money! Quite the opposite: it’s marvelous that we never need to have a shortage of money. The problem is when the bookkeeper starts raping the debitor with interest for no other reason than the associated minus.”

While debt is the central issue in all financial bubbles, the solution is not to destroy wealth creation through capital saving. Until a universal model of wizardry or alchemy is adopted that creates a stable store of value, independent from work, ingenuity or greed; expectations of an interest free currency are pipe dreams.

The benefits from negative interest rates all go to the banksters. The borrower never sees FREE interest loans, nor does the saver earn a fair rate of return. The maxim remains, Those with the Gold, Make the Rules, is no different in the age of the New World Order of central banking. Starving the saver is negative for the rest of us.

The Money Changers Serenade: A New Plot Hatches

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a protege of Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers, has received his reward for continuing the Rubin-Summers-Paulson policy of supporting the “banks too big to fail” at the expense of the economy and American people. For his service to the handful of gigantic banks, whose existence attests to the fact that the Anti-Trust Act is a dead-letter law, Geithner has been appointed president and managing director of the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus and is on his way to his fortune.

A Warburg in-law financed Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign. Part of the reward was Wilson’s appointment of Paul Warburg to the first Federal Reserve Board. The symbiotic relationship between presidents and bankers has continued ever since. The same small clique continues to wield financial power.

Geithner’s career is illustrative. In the 1980s, Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates. In the mid to late 1990s, Geithner served as a deputy assistant Treasury secretary. Under Rubin and Summers he moved up to undersecretary of the Treasury.

From the Treasury he went to the Council on Foreign Relations and from there to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). From there he was appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked to make banks more profitable by allowing higher ratios of debt to capital, thus contributing to the financial crisis.

Geithner arranged the sale of the failed Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns, helped with the taxpayer bailout of AIG, and rejected saving Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy in order to create the crisis atmosphere needed to more fully subordinate US economic policy to the needs of the few large banks.

Rubin, a 26-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, was rewarded by Citibank for his service to the banks while Treasury Secretary with a $50 million compensation package in 2008 and $126,000,000 between 1999 and 2009.

When a person becomes a Treasury official it is made clear that the choice is between serving the banks and becoming rich or trying to serve the public and becoming poor. Few make the latter choice.

As MIchael Hudson has informed us, the goal of the financial sector has always been to convert all income, from corporate profits to government tax revenues, to the service of debt. From the bankers standpoint, the more debt the richer the bankers. Rubin, Summers, Paulson, Geithner, and now banker Treasury Secretary Jack Lew faithfully serve this goal.

The Federal Reserve describes its policy of Quantitative Easing — the creation of new money with which the Fed purchases Treasury debt and mortgage backed securities — as a low interest rate policy in order to stimulate employment and economic growth. Economists and the financial media have parroted this cover story.

In contrast, I have exposed QE as a scheme for pumping profits into the banks and boosting their balance sheets. The real purpose of QE is to drive up the prices of the debt-related derivatives on the banks’ books, thus keeping the banks with solvent balance sheets.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” November 11, 2013), Andrew Huszar confirms my explanation to be the correct one. Huszar is the Federal Reserve official who implemented the policy of QE. He resigned when he realized that the real purposes of QE was to drive up the prices of the banks’ holdings of debt instruments, to provide the banks with trillions of dollars at zero cost with which to lend and speculate, and to provide the banks with “fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions.” (See: www.paulcraigroberts.org )

This vast con game remains unrecognized by Congress and the public. At the IMF Research Conference on November 8, 2013, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers presented a plan to expand the con game.

Summers says that it is not enough merely to give the banks interest free money. More should be done for the banks. Instead of being paid interest on their bank deposits, people should be penalized for keeping their money in banks instead of spending it.

To sell this new rip-off scheme, Summers has conjured up an explanation based on the crude and discredited Keynesianism of the 1940s that explained the Great Depression as a problem caused by too much savings. Instead of spending their money, people hoarded it, thus causing aggregate demand and employment to fall.

Summers says that today the problem of too much saving has reappeared. The centerpiece of his argument is “the natural interest rate,” defined as the interest rate at which full employment is established by the equality of saving with investment. If people save more than investors invest, the saved money will not find its way back into the economy, and output and employment will fall.

Summers notes that despite a zero real rate of interest, there is still substantial unemployment. In other words, not even a zero rate of interest can reduce saving to the level of investment, thus frustrating a full employment recovery. Summers concludes that the natural rate of interest has become negative and is stuck below zero.

How to fix this? The way to fix it, Summers says, is to charge people for saving money. To avoid the charges, people would spend the money, thus reducing savings to the level of investment and restoring full employment.

Summers acknowledges that the problem with his solution is that people would take their money out of banks and hoard it in cash holdings. In other words, the cash form of money provides consumers with a freedom to save that holds down consumption and prevents full employment.

Summers has a fix for this: eliminate the freedom by imposing a cashless society where the only money is electronic. As electronic money cannot be hoarded except in bank deposits, penalties can be imposed that force unproductive savings into consumption.

Summers’ scheme, of course, is a harebrained one. With governments running huge deficits, who would purchase bonds at negative interest rates? How would pension and retirement funds operate? Would they also be subject to an annual percentage confiscation?

We know that the response of consumers to the long term decline in real median family income, to the loss of jobs from labor arbitrage across national borders (jobs offshoring), to rising homelessness, to cuts in the social safety net, to the transformation of their full time jobs to part time jobs (employers’ response to Obamacare), has been to reduce their savings rate. Indeed, few have any savings at all. The US personal saving rate is currently 2 percentage points, about 30%, below the long term average. Retired people, unable to earn any interest on their savings from the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, are being forced to draw down their savings in order to pay their bills.

Moreover, it is unclear whether the savings rate is an accurate measure or merely a residual of other calculations. With so many people having to draw down their savings, I wouldn’t be surprised if an accurate measure showed the personal savings rate to be negative.

But for Summers the plight of the consumer is not the problem. The problem is the profits of the banks. Summers has the solution, and the establishment, including Paul Krugman, is applauding it. Once the economy officially turns down again, watch out.

This column first appeared as a Trend Alert, Trends Research Institute

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Expect Devastating Global Economic Changes In 2014

By any reasonable measure, I think it is safe to say that the last quarter of 2013 has been an insane game of economic Russian Roulette.  Even more unsettling is the fact that most of the American population still has little to no clue that the U.S. was on the verge of a catastrophic catalyst event at least three times in the past three months alone, and that we face an even greater acceleration next year.

The first near miss was the Federal Reserve’s announcement of a possible “taper” of QE stimulus in early fall, which sent shivers through stock markets and proved what we have been saying all along – that the entire recovery is a facade built on an ever thinning balloon of fiat money.  Today, markets function entirely on the expectation that the Fed will continue stimulus forever.  If the Fed does cut QE in any way, the frail psychology of the markets will shatter, and the country will come crashing down with it.

The second near miss was the possible unilateral invasion of Syria demanded by the Obama Administration.  As we have discussed here at Alt-Market for years, any invasion of Syria or Iran will bring detrimental consequences to the U.S. economy and energy markets, not to mention draw heavy opposition from Russia and China.  Though the naïve shrug it off as a minor foreign policy bungle, Syria could have easily become WWIII, and I believe the only reason the establishment has not yet followed through with a strike in the region is because the alternative media has been so effective in warning the masses.  The elites need a certain percentage of support from the general public and the military for any war action to be effective, which they did not receive.  After all, no one wants to fight and die in support of CIA funded Al Qaeda terrorist cells on the other side of the world.  The establishment tried to hide who the rebels were, and failed.

The third near miss was, of course, the debt ceiling debate, which has been extended to next spring.  America came within a razor’s edge of debt default, which many people rightly fear.  What some do not yet grasp, though, is that debt default of the U.S. was NOT avoided last month, it is INEVITABLE.  Debt default will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the world reserve currency, and the petro-currency.  This final gasp will lead to hyperstagflation within our financial system, and third world status for most of the citizenry.  It is only a matter of time, and timing.

“Timing” is truly what we are all concerned about.  Those of us in the field of alternative media and economics understand well that the U.S. is on a collision course with disaster; it is a mathematical certainty.  We no longer think in terms of “if” it happens – we only question “when” it will happen.  Our fiscal structure now hangs by the thinnest of threads, a thread which for all we know could be cut at a moments notice.  However, economic and political storms appear to be brewing with the year 2014 as a target.

Globalists have been openly seeking the destabilization of U.S. sovereignty, and they have openly admitted that the destruction of the dollar and our economic foundations will aid them in their goal.  It is important to never forget that international financiers WANT to absorb America into a new global economic structure, and that the U.S. must be debased before this can be accomplished.   Here are a few reasons why I believe 2014 may be the year they make their final move…

Debt Debate On Steroids

Nothing concrete was decided during the highly publicized “battle” between Democrats and the GOP on what would be done to solve the U.S. debt addiction.  Some people might assume that the fight will go on indefinitely, and that the “can” will be kicked down the road for years to come.  This assumption is a dangerous one.  If you thought the last debt debate was hair raising, the next is likely to give you a coronary.  Think of 2013 as a practice run, a warm up to the main event in 2014.  Why will next year be different?  Because the motivations behind a debt ceiling freeze (and thus debt default) are now supported by the obvious failure of Obamacare.

Funding for Obamacare was the underlying issue that gave strength to the push for new debt ceiling extensions.  The U.S. government has overreached financially in ever way imaginable.  We have long running entitlement programs that have been technically bankrupt for years.  But, Obamacare was so pervasive during the debt debate that we heard nothing of these existing liabilities.  Ultimately, Obamacare is the primary reason why so many Americans on the “left” want unlimited spending and inflation, and why so many Americans on the “right” are actually seeking debt default.

We all know that at the top of the pyramid the debt debate itself is false left/right theater, but it is still theater with a purpose.

In my articles ‘The Socialization Of America Is Economically Impossible’ and ‘Obamacare: Is It A Divide And Conquer Distraction’, I discussed why universal healthcare could not be implemented in America, and I predicted in advance that Obamacare was actually a farce that was designed to fail.  The program’s only purpose is to provide a vehicle by which divisions between the fake left and the fake right could be solidified in the minds of the common populace.  A lot of cynicism was directed at the notion that the government might create a socialized healthcare initiative and then allow it to fail.  Of course, we now know that is exactly what they had in mind.

During the last debt debate, Obamacare was just a policy waiting to be implemented; next debate, that policy will be rightly labeled a train wreck.  Obamacare is falling apart at it’s very inception, and evidence makes clear that the White House KNEW in advance that this would occur.  In the days before it’s launch, performance tests on the Obamacare website showed conclusively that the system could not handle more than 500 users.

Obama promised that preexisting healthcare plans would be retained by Americans and that the Affordable Care Act would not do damage to established insurance models.  He made this promise knowing full well that he could not or would not keep it.  This dishonesty has resulted in rebellion by Democrats who have sided with Republicans to pass a bill which obstructs the erasure of existing health coverage.

States once disturbingly loyal to the White House are now moving to limit the application of the Obamacare structure.

The White House had foreknowledge that the program was nowhere near ready, yet, they moved forward anyway.  Why wouldn’t they stall?  Why would Obama knowingly unleash his “opus” before it was finished?  He had it in the bag, right?  He won, right?  All he had to do was build a functioning website and keep his promises at least long enough to sucker the majority of Americans into the system.  Instead, he throws the fight and hits the canvas before he’s even punched?  Why?

It all sounds rather insane if you aren’t aware of the bigger picture, and I’m sure the average Democrat out there is wide-eyed and bewildered.  Some might blame it on “ego”, or “hubris”, but this makes little sense.  Obamacare is an American socialist’s dream.  With a simple working public interaction model, Obama would be worshiped by leftists for decades to come as the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Hubris should have ENSURED that the White House launch of Obamacare would be flawless.

Once you realize that this is not about Obama, and that Obama is nothing but a middle-man for the globalists, and that the actual implementation of Obamacare never mattered to the establishment, the fog begins to clear.

With Obamacare in shambles, the dynamic of the debt debate theater changes completely.  Some Democrats may well show support for a hold on the debt ceiling, for, what reason do they have to champion more spending?  Obama has already made fools of them all, and the Obamacare motivator is essentially out of the picture.  The GOP will be energized and more unified than the last debate, giving more momentum to a debt ceiling lock.  The argument will be made that a resulting debt default will not be harmful, and that the U.S. can carry the weight of existing liabilities until the budget is balanced.
This is certainly a lie, but it is a fashionable lie that Americans will want to hear.

Americans do not want to hear that our economy is too far gone and that any motion, to spend, or to cut, will have the same result – currency collapse and fiscal implosion.  They do not want to hear that pain must be suffered before a realistic solution can be applied.  They do not want to hear the the system will have to be brought down before it can be rebuilt.  And, they definitely do not want to hear that the system will be deliberately brought down and replaced with something even worse.

Will the next debt debate in Spring 2014 end in debt default and the collapse that globalists desire so much?  It’s hard to say, but many insiders appear to be preparing for just such a scenario…

The Fed’s Buzz Kill 

No one, and I mean no one, believes the private Federal Reserve will ever commit to a taper of fiat stimulus.  Hell, I barely believe it’s possible, and I’m open to just about any scenario.  That said, I have to ask a question which few analysts seem to be asking – why does the Fed keep pre-injecting the concept of taper into the mainstream if they never intend to implement it?  When has the Fed ever pre-injected a plan into the MSM which it did not eventually implement?

The banksters have the markets in the palm of their hand, or at least they seem to.  Stocks now rise and fall according to whatever meaningless press release the central bank happens to put out on any given morning.  What do they have to gain by consistently shaking the confidence of investors around the world by suggesting that the fiat party they created will abruptly end?

The impending approval by the Senate of Janet Yellen, a champion of the printing press, would suggest to many that QE-infinity is assured.  We know that the black hole generated by the derivatives implosion cannot be filled (debts still exist in the quadrillions of dollars), and that the Fed will have to print endlessly in order to slow the deterioration of the the banking sector.  We know that none of the currency flows created by the Fed are trickling down to main street, which is why credit remains mostly frozen,  real unemployment counting U-6 measurements remains at around 25%, food stamp recipients have risen to around 50 million, and the only sales boosts to property markets are those caused by big banks buying bankrupt houses and then reissuing them as rentals.

We know that it makes sense for the central bank to continue QE, if only to continue pumping up banks and the stock market and hide the truly dismal state of the overall system.  But let’s forget about what we think “makes sense” for just a moment…

What if the Fed no longer WANTS to hide the true state of the system anymore?  What if QE is now giving back diminishing returns, and will soon be no longer effective at hiding economic weakness?Central bankers surely don’t want to take the blame for a collapse, but what if the perfect patsy is already lined up?  A patsy so hated and despised that no one would think twice about their guilt?  I am, of course, talking about the Federal Government itself.

Think about it; the failure of Obamacare promises a debt debate in the Spring of 2014 that will rock the very foundations of the global economy.  Both sides, Democrat and Republican, are ready to blame the other fully for any disastrous outcome, though “Tea Party” conservatives have been painted by the mainstream media as the lead culprits behind a financial catastrophe that began before the Tea Party was born.  The idea of “gridlock” leading to impasse and calamity is already built into the country’s consciousness.  The general public’s opinion of all areas of government has recently hit all time lows.  In fact, our opinion of government could scarcely go any lower than it already has.  Everyone HATES what government is, or what they think it is.  Most Americans would be happy to place the brunt of the blame for an economic disaster on the shoulders of Washington DC.

The genius of it is, they deserve a large part of the blame.  They helped to make possible all of the horrors the citizenry will face in the coming years.  The problem is, the public may become so blinded with rage over the failure of the political system, that they may completely forget about the role of international and central banks and turn on each other instead.

Why is the Fed now discussing, just before the possible confirmation of Janet Yellen, a stimulus dove, the need for taper measures by 2014? 

Is it just coincidence that the taper discussion is taking place parallel to the debt ceiling battle, or are these two things related?  What if the Fed plans to apply QE cuts during or after the renewed debt debate in order to make the market effects even more negative?  What if the Fed is timing the taper to give energy to a debt default?  What if the Fed wants to reduce support, so that later, when all hell breaks loose, we’ll come begging them for support?

Whether you believe a debt default will be deliberately induced or not, certain foreign investors have been preparing for such a U.S. breakdown for years, and once again, the apex investor, China, has made plans for dramatic economic policy changes to take place in 2014…

China Is Ready To File For Divorce 

The economic marriage between China and the U.S. has been touted Ad nauseum as an invincible relationship chained in eternity by unassailable interdependency.  I’ve just never bought this fanciful tale.  For years I’ve written about the likelihood that China will decouple from the American dollar apparatus, and so far, most of my warnings have come to pass.

China has pushed forward with massive physical gold purchases despite all arguments by skeptics that gold is no longer necessary or prudent as a safe haven investment.  Apparently, the Chinese know something they do not.  China is on pace to become the largest holder of gold in the world as early as 2014.

China has now issued Yuan denominated bonds and other assets around the globe, and its central bank has expanded its total balance sheet to at least $24 Trillion, outmatching the reported increased balance sheets of all other central banks:

Now, some feel that this Chinese liquidity should be considered a massive bubble on the verge of exploding, and that it will be Chinese instability, not U.S. instability, that triggers renewed crisis.  I would like to offer an alternative view…

I am not shocked at all by this incredible spike in Yuan circulation.  In fact, I expected it.  The fall back argument against China dumping the dollar as the world reserve has always been that there is no alternative currency that boasts as much liquidity as the dollar.  Well, as we now know, China has been raining Yuan down on every continent.  International banks like JP Morgan have been HELPING them do it.

China is not desperately attempting to prop up its own markets like we are in the U.S.  China is DELIBERATELY generating massive liquidity because they seek to aid the IMF in its longtime plan to replace the greenback as the world reserve currency.  These are not the activities of an investor that wants to stick with the U.S. or the dollar.  These are not the activities of a nation that wishes to continue its limited role as a source of cheap industrial labor.

China, being the largest importer of petroleum surpassing the U.S., is now planning to price its crude oil futures in Yuan, instead of the dollar.

And, the Chinese central bank has announced that it now plans to stop all purchases of U.S. dollars for its reserves.

These decisions are part of a precision strategy, a formula which was finalized during a little discussed and very secretive economic policy meeting which took place in China this past month.

While much of the media was focused on China’s call for softer restrictions on its one-child policy, they ignored the thrust of the meeting, which was to establish Chinese consumption over exports, and internationalize the Yuan.  All that is left is for China to “float” the Yuan’s value on the open market, which is an action the head of the PBOC, Zhou Xiaochuan, says he plans to expedite.

All of the reforms discussed at China’s Third Plenum meeting are supposed to begin taking shape in…that’s right…2014.

A Storm Of Septic Proportions

As I have always pointed out, economic collapse is not necessarily an event, it is a process.  The most frightening elements of this process usually do not become visible until it is too late for common people to react in a productive way.  All of the dangers covered in this article could very well set fires tomorrow, that is how close our nation is to the edge.  However, the culmination of events so far seems to be setting the stage for something, an important something, in 2014.  If the worst is possible, assume the worst is probable.  The next leg down, or the next economic carpet bombing.  Maybe slightly painful, maybe mortal.  Sadly, as long as Americans continue to remain dependent on the existing corrupt system, global bankers can pull the plug at their leisure, and determine the depth of the wound with scientific precision.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

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