Economic pressures

[Danny B]

Jim Sinclair and confiscation

"In bankruptcy of your bank, broker or fund, you can find your assets in the majority of cases are backing the liabilities of the entity in front of yourselves. This is why you must act to protect yourself.

No one in this financial world is going to do it for you, and few will have the courage to recommend you escape Street Name. You can wake up one day and find out that your investments are gone.

The insurance programs will function as long as the incidents of bankruptcy are isolated events.

In a systemic collapse the insurance funds are not capitalized to meet the potential obligations. The guarantor you are relying on will have to be bailed out.

For securities there are only three ways to hold them:

1. Street name.
2. Direct registration.
3. Certificate form.

Anyone advising you to stay with the Street Name option is a babbling idiot not interested at all in your welfare.

In street name the inferred ownership is the broker or bank, not you. In Direct Registrationand Certificate form, the distinct ownership is you.
In 99.9% of the cases of retirement accounts the answer is you are in Street Name. "
"How would you like your gold shares at $3500 gold, outperforming gold, and one morning you wake up to having nothing anymore? You now are behind the back burner in a bankruptcy situation with any fiduciary.

The system and their minions will do everything to keep you trapped in Street Name."
If / when confidence flows out of sovereign debt, GOV will try to grab everything within reach.

[Danny B]

Sovereign debt, consumption and socialism

This is a follow-up to the commentary on the article from Credit Bubble Bulletin, Credit Bubble Bulletin: Weekly Commentary: Bubbles, Money and the VIX
It discusses the nature of different types of bubbles. I find this very interesting.
Historically, all bubbles were related to something tangible like stocks or land or tulip bulbs. John Law of France was given authority to form a central bank and issue paper money.
The Mississippi Bubble of 1718-1720 |
The whole scheme was tied to land in France's Mississippi Territory.

Sovereign debt can't really turn into a bubble if debt creation is linked to gold. The inception of the welfare-warfare State broke the last linkage to gold for the U.S. Treasury. Nowadays, it is stated that US GOV credit is backed by oil or taxing ability or national productivity. All 3 of these are diminishing.
Japanese sovereign debt is up to about 300% of GDP. Everyone is wondering what the limit is for debt that isn't truly linked to something tangible.
If the Central Bank continues to buy sovereign debt when nobody else will, how far can it go?

Trickle-down in the private sector just isn't working. The State hires as many people as possible. The State spends about 24% of the GDP. The State is buying up stocks and bonds with both fists. The Japanese central bank owns huge chunks of the stock and bond market but, the Yen is regarded as a safe-haven currency.
The advent of electronic money has allowed liquidity injections of a scale never seen before. There is a debt bubble the likes of which the world has never seen before.
Currently, the debt bubble is not terribly difficult to service. The CBs print what is necessary to keep the bubble inflated. They print to hold interest rates down.
Reportedly the CBs are winding down QE. China makes a good object-lession of what happens when you try to save all sectors of the economy. If QE is truly ended, ZIRP goes with it. ZIRP wiped out all sectors of the economy that depend on interest income. ZIRP was intended to save certain sectors of the economy but, all it did was to create a huge wealth transfer to sectors that were already quite wealthy.

Socialism is incompatible with human nature. To each, as to his needs just doesn't work because we all project our desires as being needs.
The Jews have always championed socialism and / or Marxism. Keynes advocated the euthanasia of the rentier. The head of the FED is generally a Jew as we march towards a one-world bank and world socialism.
Capitalism is not a perfect system but, it puts limits on runaway spending on mal-investment. It's not truly so much mal-investment as it is pure consumption. Socialism just focuses on consumption. It never works out because it breeds a class that focuses on consumption with no desire to work.

While capitalism thrashes the environment pretty hard to turn a profit; think what would happen with the unbridled consumption of socialism. Global warming is a scheme to pry loose money from the rich States and send it to the poor States. What will happen to their birth rates and consequently, their consumption when they have far more resources?
Socialism promotes greater population expansion. That is something that we just don't need. Capitalism tends to allow reproduction in people who are smarter and more responsible. That group of people have limited their reproduction to an extent that the lack of growth has crashed against the credit-money system.

[Danny B]

Socialiism and pollution

The finance class lives and breathes on debt expansion. Debt expansion requires expansion of consumption and population. When the natives are just too responsible to expand their numbers irresponsibly, the socialists import the missing numbers. Angela Merkel attended Karl Marx university. That should tell you her inclination.
Angela Merkel’s government plans to bring 12m migrants | World | News | Express.co.uk
As China conveniently proves, rapid urbanization and industrial expansion bring huge pollution problems. BUT, it's not just China.

[Danny B]

Jim Rogers, criminal German banks

Marc Faber writes the Doom, Gloom and Boom Report. You can guess the contents by the title. Jim Rogers is a real smart investor that has his ear to the ground very well to catch future trends. This is what he has to say.

"...get prepared because we're going to have the worst economic problems we've had in your lifetime or my lifetime and when that happens a lot of people are going to disappear.

In 2008 Bear Stearns disappeared, Bear Stearns had been around over 90 years. Lehman Brothers disappeared. Lehman Brothers had been around over 150 years. A long, long time, a long glorious history they�ve been through wars, depression, civil war they've been through everything and yet they disappear.

So the next time around it's going to be worse than anything we've seen and a lot of institutions, people, companies even countries, certainly governments and maybe even countries are going to disappear. I hope you get very worried."
[The dollar]is going to go too high, may turn into a bubble, at which point I hope I'm smart enough to sell it because at some point the market forces are going to cause the dollar to come back down because people are going to realize, oh my gosh, this is causing a lot of turmoil, economic problems in the world and it's damaging the American economy. At that point the smart guys will get out. I hope I'm one of them."
I have to disagree with him. The dollar goes up because it is so widely distributed AND because the FED isn't as screwey as the BOJ, PBOC and ECB.
Jim Rogers: "We're About To Have The Worst Economic Problems Of A Lifetime, A Lot Of People Will Disappear" | Zero Hedge

The German banks loaned money to Greece knowing that they couldn't repay. They just figured that the load would be thrown on the backs of the European taxpayer.
"It�s simply better for their careers -or so they think- to further impoverish the entire Greek nation and the poorest of its citizens than it is to come clean, to tell their people the whole story has been based on dirty tricks from the start. "
"Perhaps Greece�s best hope is, of all people, Donald Trump. Yeah, a long shot if ever you saw one. But Trump can overrule the IMF board simply because the US is the biggest party involved in the fund. He can tell that divided board to get its act together and stop harassing a valuable NATO member. At least he has the business sense to understand that a country with 23% unemployment -and that�s just the official number- and 50-60% youth unemployment cannot recover no matter what happens"

" Trump�s apparent choice for EU ambassador, economist Ted Malloch, was accused by European Parliament hotshots Weber and Verhofstadt -in a letter, no less- of �outrageous malevolence� towards �the values that define this European Union�,
"Why would he say that? How about because of the numbers in this by now infamous graph, straight out of the IMF itself, which shows EU countries have conspired to plunge one of their fellow �Union� member states into a situation far worse than the US was in during the Great Depression? Would that do it?"
" Do these people really want to risk peace in the eastern Mediterranean, or inside Greece itself (which will inevitably explode if this continues), just in order to keep Commerzbank or BNP Paribas out of the trouble they rightfully deserve to be in?

No, it�s not Tim Malloch�s �statements that reveal� �outrageous malevolence� towards �the values that define this European Union�. It�s the actions of the European Union itself that do. "
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/20...s-malevolence/

Post Script;
In the last post above, I had 2 more paragraphs and one link. The paragraphs were about the cost of pollution. I tried 5 times to post it,, wouldn't go. I tried it without the link,, same result. It was about pollution in I****l. AKA Judea.
Israel's Environmental Challenges ? Green Zionist Alliance: The Grassroots Campaign for a Sustainable Israel
Finally, I was blocked from accessing the site. It would appear that the Hasbara have some control of this forum. It wasn't a long post and didn't have any "trigger" words I doubt that the length set off some kind of limit. I couldn't even access the forum from Google.

[Danny B]

Armstrong and civil unrest

Jim Rogers is sounding uncharacteristicly negative. What does Socrates say? That is Armstrong's program.
" the media and Democrats are determined to bring down the Trump Administration at all costs. And we wondered why out computer was projecting the greatest rally in American history with respect to civil unrest that will exceed even the Civil War."
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...-trump-really/
Armstrong is still mixing ideas. Gold was never used as a transactional currency. It was just too valuable for everyday use. It was set aside as a store of value. True, gold is money but, it is money that you don't willingly show or let out of your possession.

"In terms of gold being involved, this is indeed a throwback to barbarous relic of the past because the financial system does not match the idea of gold being money. The problem has never been whatever we use as a standard. The real problem is the people who manage government."
I've got news for you; the financial system is about to croak.
The real problem is that gold was the only thing historically that held back the politicians. Just look at currency expansion after 1971.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/a...gold-standard/

[Danny B]

Nothing new here

It's amazing just how much of the news just isn't new.
2/12 Bank for International Settlements warns of looming debt bubble � Forbes
2/12 Income share for the bottom 50% of Americans is �collapsing� � MarketWatch
2/12 EU in disintegration mode � Armstrong Economics
2/12 Watch what indexing does for public pension funds � Chicago Business
2/12 China�s debt could cause economic disaster �worse than 2008� � Express
2/12 China economy forecast 2017 signals potential collapse � Lombardi Letter
2/10 Hell hole on Earth discovered at Fukushima � Dr. Sircus

2/12 US special forces deployed to 70% of the world in 2016 � Zero Hedge
2/11 Civil asset forfeiture ruining lives, failing to stop crime � FM Shooter

[Danny B]

Can you spare $84 trillion?

As Credit Bubble Bulletin reported, sovereign debt is a completely different kind of bubble. Since it is not tied to anything tangible, it can grow to higher highs. Also, if the Central Bank buys it up without limits, it always has a buyer. So, what is the limit? Foreign investors are dumping our sovereign debt. Can the FED carry the whole load?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...rning-to-trump

Just how much debt is there?
"� $8.5 trillion: Federal employee retirement benefits, and environmental clean-up liabilities.
� $29 trillion: Obligations for current Social Security participants"
$32.9 trillion: In obligations for current Medicare participants
If we add these unfunded liabilities to the debt we discussed before, then subtract the debt which one department of the government owes to another, we come to the grand total of $84,000 billion. This is over four times the $20 trillion number which people generally fret over.
U.S. liabilities amounts to 2,362 percent of annual federal revenues?

Most estimates for the shortfall in Medicare come in at $47 trillion or more. Using $47 trillion, the total value of U.S. liabilities is roughly equal to the GDP of the planet.
(The total of all assets) came to 93 percent of the $84,000 billion projected shortfall.
in order for the government to make good on its future liabilities would require the confiscation of over 95.3 percent of everything everyone currently has. The reality is worse than this because I have not yet added the liabilities of local government, corrected for a $3.5 trillion
Ask them if they know that their household�s �share� is already, $670,000, and counting.
Understanding the federal debt part II, it gets even ‘better’ - standard-journal.com : Letters To Editor

[Danny B]

AI, work and avoiding boredom

�I am less concerned with Terminator scenarios,� MIT economist Andrew McAfee said on the first day at Asilomar. �If current trends continue, people are going to rise up well before the machines do.�
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/ai-thr...CNDID=38901740
So, AI takes over everything. Then what do we do?

"Healthcare, education, and caring for the elderly and children were all seen as occupations that would still require a human touch"
https://www.wired.com/2014/08/when-r...-for-us-to-do/
That really doesn't leave much for most people. They already have elder-care robots. In Mexico, they took their most charismatic teachers,,, put them in front of a class,,,, and beamed it by Sat all over the country.
So, just what would people do to avoid boredom in an automated society?
This is something that I wrote a few years back;

I was thinking about life on the Serengeti plain in Africa. The animals have been there for thousands of years. Man has been there too. Nowadays, there are other "creatures" too. Vehicles. Vehicles carry curious people who want a close look at animal life in the wild. They could watch from far away with telescopes or CCTV cameras. They prefer to be up close. The animals have gotten acclimated to these odd "creatures" and now ignore them.

I was also thinking about aircraft. It's not uncommon to see something small like a Cessna 170 just flying around wherever the pilot wants to go. Sure, you see lots of big commercial aircraft. They follow along strict routes. You never see high performance military aircraft. Who is going to go out sightseeing in an X-15,,, SR-71,,,F-117 stealth ? Like the "creatures" on the Serengeti, it's the "sightseer" aircraft that appear wandering here and there with no apparent fixed route.

The other thing that I was thinking about was UFOs. Sightings are so common that they don't elicit much comment. Pictures abound. 40,000 people saw a huge UFO over Phoenix. They saw the local military base scramble interceptors. They show up everywhere. All over the world, people see and photograph UFOs. Airline pilots see them frequently. They don't bother to report them. Political and military leaders all over the world publicly state that they are worried about all the appearances of so many UFOs.

The UFOs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes,,,, like so many Land Cruisers, Jeeps, Land Rovers, Uni-Mogs and tour buses. They don't seem to be particularly worried about being seen,,,, like safari vehicles. They come up close like so many tourists. Presumably, they have very advanced optics that could easily observe from low orbit. Apparently, they prefer to be up close,,, like tourists on the Serengeti. They show up in back yards, over small towns,,, here, there and everywhere. Like a tourist in a glass-bottom boat, they don't fear the shark.

Like a rickety Cessna, they occasionally crash. Life in a completely automated society could probably become a complete bore. Why not take the "Cessna" for a tour of some primitive civilization and get a good look at the natives. If it crashes, well that's what makes it an adventure.
Just as some humans are drawn to live with gorillas or bears or dolphins, some tourists may be interested in studying humans. They may even hang around to try to steer the culture. After all, humans have taught sign language to gorillas. The resident investigators ?/ teachers would probably ignore the frequent tourists.
The frequent visits may even be an action of the investigators to acclimatise the Terrans to innocent visitors.

The visitors probably don't plan a wholesale contact by aliens. The Terrans don't have the mental stability to absorb the implications of extraterrestrial societies.
Have we become a tourist stop?

[Danny B]

Missing income in the lower loop

So, jobs are scarce and wages are bad.
"A new research paper from economists including Thomas Piketty finds that the bottom 50%�s share of income in the United States is �collapsing.�
Income share for the bottom 50% of Americans is ‘collapsing,’ new Piketty research finds - MarketWatch
Nothing new there. The 1% didn't seem to care about the loss of wages until it hit our purchasing power. Now, they are getting nervous wondering about the pitchforks and torches. They know that we aren't going to see our pensions and they are trying to print money to fix everything.
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/artic...ution-indexing

Labor has missed out on over $1/2 trillion in income since 2000 http://i2.wp.com/dollarcollapse.com/...size=600%2C431
" Zero Hedge has come up with a new one depicting how long the typical wage slave has to work to buy the typical stock. And � surprise � it shows historic, egregious overvaluation which, if history is any guide, implies a crash is close at hand."
This Is Why You Don’t Own A Lot Of Stocks - DollarCollapse.com
So, just how long can the FED hold everything together?

[Danny B]

AI and the future direction of the world

Armstrong's primary model is the confidence model. I can't write about the economy and ignore the social system. I already mentioned AI and some of the effects. There is lots more and you need to do a bit of reading.
Elon Musk talks blithely about retraining people who have been displaced by AI;
Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age
FED GOV spends about 24% of the GDP. They count it once when the print it and once again when they spend it. This pumps up the headline GDP rate by quite a bit. Keep in mind that the debt is at least twice as high as GOV claims. The economy is like a hovercraft. If the air blast stops suspending the car, it doesn't go anywhere.

In spite of all the $trillions pumped in, the economy is shrinking
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-ec...-slowing-down?
This isn't surprising when you consider that uncounted millions of people are not participating in production and participating very little in consumption.
Wages have crashed but, the "economists" are mystified why the economy isn't growing.

Varoufakis; "The world we live in, is increasingly rudderless, in a constant slow burning recession, while at the very same time, the increasing concentration in the IT sector is creating the new technologies that will do that which the Left has failed to do: overthrow Capitalism. It is really very simple."

"And at that point we have a major rapture that the political system which has been completely depleted of any semblance of Democracy, will not be able to regulate. At that point, humanity will be facing a juncture: will either move to a Star Trek-like Utopia, where technology becomes our slave and we manage to utilize its wealth creating capacity for the purpose of the common good, which will be democratically determined and not technologically, or, we are going to move towards a Matrix-like Dystopia where humans, independently on whether are the owners of these magnificent machines or the masses who are miserable and completely cut off productive society, will all become servants to the machines."

"The ruthless elites are now breaking the social contract due to hyper-automation. They own the corrupted politicians and are using them to deregulate the system completely, according to their interests. "
"One dangerous illusion of the elites is that they can go away, as always in the past, in case of a massive, ugly collapse."

" However, the odds are totally against this perspective, exactly because the elites are using their increasingly concentrated power to pull societies away from it. We all need to fight in order to change this balance. We need to bring back the political process at the center of all critical decisions which will determine our future. To use the technology for the benefit of all. Otherwise, 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.', as Stephen Hawking, among other scientists, already warned."
the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens: Varoufakis: IT technologies will overthrow Capitalism

Greece has been destroyed but, the bankers insist on putting them up against the wall. There is a problem though. There are elections coming up in Netherlands, France and Germany. If the voters in Netherlands and France fear that they will receive the "Greek" treatment, the will vote for nationalist parties like LePen. Germany is trying to drive Greece out of the Eurozone by destroying it. With a little luck, they will drive out France, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens: Greece: the low-noise collapse of an entire country


Related:

Greece's creditors gone completely insane!
Varoufakis calls Tsipras to prepare for breaking the deal with Greece's creditors
Operation "looting of Greece" reaches final stage
The German sado-monetarists seek to destroy the EU!
A plan for Greece to exit the euro currency
Trump, Brexit reinforce Germany's appetite to dominate Europe

There is much talk of the "elites" forcing a neo-feudalism on us. It just isn't likely. The biosphere is crashing so rapidly. Were drifting in to an ice age,,, major or minor. The aquifers are disappearing in the most populace parts of Asia. We've destroyed much of the farmland with chemicals. These same chemicals are destroying our children.
MIT States That Half of All Children May be Autistic by 2025 due to Monsanto | New Eastern Outlook
The demographic crash is changing everything. The coming financial crash will wipe out the whole credit system.

[Danny B]

Did I mention the elections?

ALERT: Former Soros Associate Just Warned We Are About To Witness ‘Absolute F*cking Chaos’ Across The Globe | King World News

In living color; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdxK4K8lQeo&t=325s
One chart; https://www.milesfranklin.com/wp-con...17/02/a4-4.jpg
Another chart; http://d1w116sruyx1mf.cloudfront.net...confidence.png
The Most “Horrifying” Chart in the World | Casey Research
http://www.milesfranklin.com/signs-of-the-time/

"Yes, Germany, which, in its increasingly isolated role of being the only force, via smoke and mirrors, holding the EU and Euro currency together, is experiencing as much angst internally as externally � as evidenced by this weekend�s election to the Presidency of a Social Democrat, foreshadowing Christian Democrat Angela Merkel�s likely defeat in September�s Prime Ministerial election; likely, to a coalition in which the violently anti-EU �Alternative for Deutschland� party holds considerable power.
Not to mention, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble calling Merkel�s likely-to-be usurper, Martin Schulz, the �German Donald Trump.� You know, like Marine LePen, the �French Donald Trump�; Geert Wilders, the �Dutch Donald Trump�; and Beppe Grillo, the �Italian Donald Trump.� So many of them!

[Danny B]

The rise of the machines and the fall of man

There is no question that we are seeing the rise of the machines. Lights-out manufacturing refers to manufacturing facilities where no humans are present. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights...nufacturing%29
BUT, if a person doesn't have a niche in the industrial economy, he must revert to the agrarian economy for survival. As the working man is displaced by machines, he loses confidence & resources and cuts back on procreation. Birth rates are below replacement levels in many areas. Reversion to an agrarian economy is not practical for most people.

There is a huge reduction in the number of people needed to operate the lower loop of the economy. The same is increasingly true for the upper loop.
"The World�s Biggest Hedge Fund is Embedding Its Founder�s Brain in an Algorithm"
"At the heart of the project is Dalio�s view of human beings, and the larger world, as complex machines. His management philosophy regards emotion as a detriment to the smooth functioning of those machines."
World’s Biggest Hedge Fund Embedding Founder’s Brain in an Algorithm | Fortune.com

In nature, the more competent (or murderous) species rises to the top. Man is definitely falling. He has invented and perfected his replacement.
The U.S. military is hard at work through DARPA trying to perfect a battlefield robot. They really aren't practical if they have to run on batteries. Reportedly, "Robotic Technology say the robots will collect organic matter, which �could� include human corpses, to use for fuel."
https://www.wired.com/2009/07/milita...eating-robots/

No, they essentially must roll out ZPE to power battlefield robots. How long before that technology was implemented to control the population with robot cops?
Man is definitely slipping away. The machines could be his slave or his master. There is little recognition that; as man loses his pre-eminence in the world, the machines lose their usefulness. The world can't be run as a "lights-out" enterprise.
Google's new AI has learned to become "highly aggressive" in stressful situations - ScienceAlert

[aljhoa]

The rise of the machines and the fall of man


Al

[Danny B]

Kunstler,,, the Eurozone

That video gives me the willies,,, even though my audio isn't working.
James Howard Kunstler gives his roundup opinion of our current situation. He's considered a pessimist but, might be a realist. Takes your breath away. I won't excerpt.
Made For Each Other - KUNSTLER

The majority of the workers in the West are slip-sliding away due to wage arbitrage,,, both from low-wage competitors and robots. Western aggregate consumption has fallen by quite a bit. It is propped up by liar-loans. The financial system demanded to grow even though productive enterprise was shrinking. The productive capacity is still there but, the consumptive capacity has greatly diminished. The upper loop was inflated but it didn't trickle down as wages,,, only price inflation. The rescue of the non-productive sector penalized the productive sector.
The most necessary item from the productive sector is babies. With the population dying out, everything else is superfluous. The day will come when birth-control will be illegal unless you can fail an IQ test.
In the short term, you have to survive the financial reset.

The Eurozone is on it's deathbed. It was expected to crash by the original architects. They assumed that they could force a debt union after the inevitable crash. The Euro has crashed every economy it touched,,, except Germany. Finland and France are questionable. The fallout from it's death is so bad that negative press will forbid the forming of a banking union.
"Euro May Already Be Lost" - Vice-Chairman Of EuroThinkTank Warns "No Way To Avert Break-Up" | Zero Hedge

" When the dollar union of the US threatened to fall apart during the Great Depression, the federal government enacted federal income transfers from prosperous states to aid ailing ones. "
"The Eurozone is in a stalemate. A federal union would be needed to fix its problems, but there is no public support for it. Returning to national fiscal responsibility would lead to defaults and exits. Half-way solutions will prove insufficient but expensive and obfuscate the issues. Therefore, there may be no way to avert the partial or complete break-up of the Eurozone in the years to come. The fate of the euro may already have been sealed."

Their fate is sealed, all right. 50% youth unemployment makes sure of that.
there is lots of talk of reverting to national currencies. It just isn't that easy. Iraq needed to change from the old Dinar to a new Dinar. Apparently, America obliged (2003).
"we are bringing in twenty seven 747 plane loads of new Dinar or 2300 tons."
I suspect that Greece will be the first "crash test dummy".

[Danny B]

Lower wages,,, more credit

That posted without my doing it.
"The consumer credit (excluding mortgages) is approaching 20% of the GDP which is a record. The figure below represent this increasing trend in consumer credit."
https://i.redditmedia.com/2msWo9Pb_2...oMI.jpg?w=571&
The graph shows that we are increasingly living on credit as wages buy less and less. Strong Indicator Of An Imminent Potential Financial Crisis – InvestmentWatch