Economic pressures

[Danny B]

Armstrong on banking

Armstrong has an excellent article comparing the traditional relationship banking model to the transactional banking model. This changeover meant that the banker didn't care whether or not you paid your loan. Is it any surprise that they made bad loans?
Musical Chair Banking | Armstrong Economics
Armstrong projected that we would have a crash 2015.75. Naturally, people are going to believe that it all crashes down on that day. He has had to come out and clarify things.
"The big shift will not unfold until the crisis becomes more acute after 2015.75."
"Sorry – the crack in Global confidence is not NOW – that starts from October for the next 4 years. It will not even be a one day event so the haters will instantly say you are wrong for the world did not end October 1st. This is a bubble in government – NOT the markets. So we should NOT see a profound event in market to that day alone."
Capital Flows Are Obviously Not Understood By Many | Armstrong Economics

Understand that Armstrong was thrown in prison for refusing to turn over his program to GOV. He thought that he would get out after his 7 years. They threw him back in prison on a trumped up securities fraud charge. They served notice to him that he wouldn't see the light of day as a free man for as long as they desired.
What price freedom?

Since then, Armstrong has avoided saying anything bad about the FED. He has avoided saying anything good about gold.
As brilliant as he and Socrates are, I find it easy to disagree. I'm not yet wearing a leash. He is.
He makes it clear that the massive bubble is in GOV securities.
"for the next 4 years. It will not even be a one day event "
He wants to keep his freedom. How can U.S. GOV bonds collapse without affecting all the funds, States and countries holding them. How can the bond market collapse without a resulting bank closure? What happens if/when the credit markets collapse?
"Major General: Why Are Domestic Government Agencies Purchasing Enough Lethal Ammunition to Put 5 Rounds In Every American?"
Major General: Why Are Domestic Government Agencies Purchasing Enough Lethal Ammunition to Put 5 Rounds In Every American? Washington's Blog

[Danny B]

As I posted twice, Iceland is planning to get rid of private banks and just use the central bank to print money as needed by the economy. 95% of those in the economic profession are talking about how STUPID this plan is. EVERYBODY knows that it won't work.
In our current arrangement, the central bank prints a small amount of money to adjust the system. The private banks create the main body of new money in the form of loans. ALL their money is created as debt and the interest flows into the coffers of the bank.
Iceland plans to do away with private banks. The CB would create all new money that is needed. The interest would flow into the GOV general fund.
The financial community (pack) is claiming that the CB would always create too much money. I haven't heard a single one of them claiming that the FED has NOT created too much money.
50% of the cost of everything that you buy is for interest. Just imagine if that 50% of everything accrued to the GOV general fund.
The financial community is poo-pooing the whole idea. You can smell the fear in the air.

"Chinese economy is in a state of perpetual free fall since the mid 1990s. It has to be. From the most respected economist, experts, analysts, and seasoned columnist to the senior treasury and FED officials, all have been predicting the ‘‘unavoidable’ collapse of the Chines economy and the ‘imminent’ ‘bubble burst’ of the Chinese real estate and financial sector for more then two decades."
"The Chinese economy has emerged as the unstoppable economic engine that is pulling the entire global economy. "
"It was almost the same period (2008) that the high power Treasury and FED officials were visiting Beijing and warning them of an impending financial collapse and systemic failure of Chinese banks unless they fully adopt to the western banking standards and ‘open up’ to the West."
"It has been almost a biannual ritualistic indulgence on part of our western experts to launch a media blitz against the Chinese economy – rejuvenating their aging predictions of impending collapse of the entire Chinese economic and industrial system. To their dismay, China is still the world’s fastest growing economy. They seems to be unable to comprehend it."

"First: Unlike the West, where the economic model is the sucking blood out of the working class – depriving them of the living wages, China has opted for the Ford model – continuously increasing the purchasing power of the masses to keep the economic engine running full blast. Following on this scheme, China has been able to sustain the highest income growth rate in the world for its masses for more than two decades – no other economy come even close to it.

Second: China, unlike the West – in particular the US, where the privately owned central banks (the Federal Reserve Bank in the US) hold the economy hostage, owns and controls its central banks. As such, all the interest earned by and through the central bank is recycled back into the economy – it doesn’t end up into the coffers of the major banks."
Chinese Economy in Free FallViews and Previews

[Danny B]

Riding out a depression

Armstrong calls for a 4 year drop and a total time of depression of 26 years. World debt is about $ 100 trillion. I’m not counting a $ quadrillion, notional value of derivatives. A very large number of Westerners are living off GOV or working from check to check. They aren't going to pay off the debt. That leaves the rich.
The coming collapse in the bond markets will subtract perceived wealth from the rich. This collapse will also gut the pension funds that believed they were rich also. The pensioners will go from poor to penniless. When the rich go broke, it affects the rest. The investor class put their money into paper investments that are soon to drop in value. When the rich join the poor and cut back their spending, stocks that depend on consumption will crash also.

The Chinese have a centuries-long acquaintance with "flying money". The West goes on and on about the 64 million empty housing units in China. These are all owned by wealthy Chinese. They refuse to buy bonds and buy houses instead. They may be crappy construction but, at least they are something tangible.
Investors continued to roll over their investments. They feel rich. They hold ENORMOUS claims on wealth. When al these debt noted evaporate, they will feel poor and stop spending. It takes a long time for all the rot to be cleared from the system.

" I think it’s horribly regrettable that we find ourselves in a position where we are on government life support. We should’ve stayed on the gold standard in 1968. The global economy would be much smaller today than it is, but we wouldn’t now be in this position where we have to rely on money creation on a trillion-dollar scale to keep our global economy from collapsing. But now that we are here, I’m not sure that there are other alternatives other than 1) keeping the thing inflated or 2) allowing a new Great Depression to wipe away globalization. And not just the savings of the American public, but a huge part of the global economy altogether.



This is not going to be a 1921-style two-year recession that we bounce back from after a little bit of pain and unpleasantness. After a 50-year global economic boon involving what is now a $59 trillion expansion of credit in 50 years, this isn’t going to be a one or two-year hard recession. This is going to be a multi-decade global depression and I’m not sure that anyone alive today would live long enough to see the recovery. I mean, it’s like Rome: when Rome fell, there was a recovery, but it was 1,000 years later. This is the kind of depression we're looking at if we allow this $59 trillion credit bubble of ours to implode."
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...bal-depression

[Danny B]

David Stockman,, deflation. T-Bond market

Many people screamed that hyperinflation was just around the corner,,, like global warming.
A few years ago, global currency reserves were about $ 13 trillion. They have dropped by about $ 1 trillion. Even with massive money printing, most economies are in price deflation. David Stockman has a good explanation for that.
"The bottom line is therefore straight forward. The credit channel of monetary policy transmission is now broken and done. The impact of ZIRP and QE never leaves the canyons of Wall Street——meaning that it functions to inflate financial assets rather than main street wage and prices as it did during the era of inflation in one country.

But that makes for both a considerable irony and an incendiary danger. Today’s clueless Keynesian central bankers essentially believe that they can keep the pedal-to-the-metal until a 1970’s style inflationary spiral arises. But none is coming because the worldwide central bank money printing spree of the last two decades has generated massive excessive capacity and malinvestment all around the planet. What is coming, therefore, is not their father’s inflationary spiral, but an unprecedented and epochal global deflation."
Meet The New Recession Cycle——Its Triggered By Bursting Bubbles, Not Surging Inflation | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Here is a TV economic report that everybody should watch.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...oull-ever-need

The bond market seems to be conforming to the expectations of Martin Armstrong.
"3 Sigma Extremes In the Bond Market" "US T-Bond futures closed Friday, March 27 up nearly 12% from the February close. That was the 3rd largest monthly percent move since 1977 when my data begins and created a 3.61 standard deviation change. "
3 Sigma Extremes In the Bond Market | The Deviant Investor

Beppe Grillo lays it all out how Italy is going back to a New Lira.
Beppe Grillo's Blog

[Danny B]

Stock crash

Armstrong; "This is a bubble in government – NOT the markets. So we should NOT see a profound event in market to that day alone."
Robertson; "Will a bursting bond bubble disrupt the equity rally? Robertson is honest enough intellectually to admit that bond and stock bubbles are connected and says that a bursting bond bubble will crush stocks and the Fed is "frightened to death" over fears a plunge in stocks will also crush the economy."
"And so we hit peak irony: when even those who reap the biggest benefits of the Fed's idiotic, bubble-blowing policies explicitly warn that these same policies will lead to a bubble crash that results in a ~70% collapse in stocks. Only this time it will be far, far worse, because once the Fed loses credibility, and no amount of verbal intervention will restore some faith"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...-contains-boil
Maybe now isn't the time to buy stocks.
"profound event in market to that day alone." Maybe we will have profound events on several days.

There are many places where ZIRP has morphed into negative interest rates The banks charge you to hold your money. All this is an effort to force money off the sidelines and into the economy. A market crash will necessitate a bank closure. Bummer

[Danny B]

Stock-Flow Accounting and the Coming $10 Trillion Loss in Paper Wealth

"That’s really the main effect QE has – to encourage yield-seeking speculation that drives up the prices of risky securities, but without having any material effect on the real economy or the underlying cash flows that those securities will deliver over time."
" for every investor who calls some security an “asset” there is an issuer that calls that same security a “liability”; 3) the net acquisition of all securities in the economy is always precisely zero, even though the gross issuance of securities can be many times the amount of underlying saving; and perhaps most importantly, 4) when one nets out all the assets and liabilities in the economy, the only thing that is left – the true basis of a society’s net worth – is the stock of real investment that it has accumulated as a result of prior saving, and its unused endowment of resources. Everything else cancels out because every security represents an asset of the holder and a liability of the issuer. "

" Understand that securities are not net economic wealth. They are a claim of one party in the economy – by virtue of past saving – on the future output produced by others.

Because the surplus of one economic sector must be identically equal to the sum of deficits across all other sectors, the net funds available to acquire financial assets across the economy as a whole (including net flows from abroad), will always be precisely zero."
"Financial assets now represent over 82% of the net worth of both households and U.S. non-financial corporations (Data: Federal Reserve Z.1 Flow of Funds). Except for periods where total net worth had itself retreated (for example, 2008-2010), the concentration of private net worth on financial assets, rather than real assets or productive capital, has reached the highest extreme in history in recent years. In our view, this is just temporarily overvalued paper masquerading as something durable."
Hussman Funds - Weekly Market Comment: Stock-Flow Accounting and the Coming $10 Trillion Loss in Paper Wealth - April 6, 2015
"overvalued paper masquerading as something durable."

Yanis Varoufakis;
"In short, production and growth depends on material or physical capital. And while capital is a form of wealth, a great deal of wealth is not a form of capital; i.e. it is not an input into any production process generating hitherto non-existent commodities. Thus, the growth of an economy cannot rely on wealth. It needs a particular kind of wealth: capital goods. So if we conflate capital with wealth, our theory of production will suffer to the extent that we will have wilfully misspecified a key input, mistaking all increases in wealth as increases in capital’s contribution to the production process.

…

When a capital good has a physical form, we more or less know its material utility since it is a technical matter to work out, e.g., how much electricity an electricity generator produces per hour per given quantities of diesel. But what is the return to an art collection that the collector is not auctioning off? Or to an owner-occupied home in which a family insists on living? Indeed, what is the rationale of treating (as Professor Piketty must do, to remain consistent with his wealth-capital conflation) the income of a stamp collector from trading in stamps as a return to capital (and not as income from work) while the super-sized bonuses of money market traders are counted not as returns to capital but, instead, as… wage income?"

",,,,,which is that capitalism leads to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a rate where the return on wealth (the risk-free income received from savings, investments, wealth and capital without doing any work and without touching the principle) amounts to a third of GDP and the total liquidation value of that wealth grows to six times GDP.

In other words, one third of all of the productive output of the global labor force goes to service the consumption of the non-working capitalists, and the remaining two-thirds goes back to the labor force. Furthermore, since wealth can be inherited and passed on from generation to generation, as long as the wealthy save a portion of their labor-free income at a higher rate than the poor save a portion of their labor wages, the wealth gap grows larger and larger. "
FOFOA: Confessions of an Erratic Marxist

[Danny B]

Borrowing money to reduce the debt

“What is the problem? Quite simply, the key numbers are terrible. According to the OECD, after five years of ‘austerity’ the UK’s budget deficit is 5.3%, down from 11.2% in 2009."
And, how did it get down there?

“Since the government is spending more than it earns, it is hardly surprising that it is borrowing more, and that the debt-to-GDP has risen from 68.95% in 2009 to 93.30% in 2013,"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...king-time-bomb

"The US now sports a Debt to GDP of over 100%. The Fed's balance sheet is over $4 trillion with no possible way of exiting "
Bernanke's True Legacy | Zero Hedge

[Danny B]

Odious debt and neo feudalism.

"Another Crisis Is Coming": Jamie Dimon Warns Of The Next Market Crash"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...-flash-crashes
" For example, the market depth of 10-year Treasuries (defined as the average size of the best three bids and offers) today is $125 million, down from $500 million at its peak in 2007. The likely explanation for the lower depth in almost all bond markets is that inventories of market-makers’ positions are dramatically lower than in the past. For instance, the total inventory of Treasuries readily available to market-makers today is $1.7 trillion, down from $2.7 trillion at its peak in 2007. Meanwhile, the Treasury market is $12.5 trillion; it was $4.4 trillion in 2007. "
Treasuries are in trouble4.

This is about "odious debt" that I wrote about previously.
"Odious Debt" Has Finally Arrived: Greece To Write Off "Illegal" Debt
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...e-illegal-debt

Neofeudalism 101: Strip-Mining the Upper Middle Class
2 out of 3 taxpayers pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes:
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: Neofeudalism 101: Strip-Mining the Upper Middle Class

Globalization is very expensive and reaches a point where it isn't very efficient. Various groups are pushing globalization but, the future seems to offer fragmentation.
"The purchasing power of the average salary in the U.S. is at the level of 1958, all the rest - is induced demand due to the growth of private and public debt, said Khazin.
"The global economy harbors a potential recession, exceeding the scale of the Great Depression by 2.5 times," - said the economist."
Khazin: The global recession will exceed the Great Depression by 2.5 times - Fort Russ

[Ruphus]

Debt payment options

So I looked up 401k participation. The latest data from 2013 shows approximately $10 trillion in these retirement funds (401k, IRA's, ect). Participation is at a record high with 80% of eligible employees contributing.

This must be the biggest ponzi scam ever! The banks have bought into the stock market since FED money is record cheap but the average American is carrying to much debt to be a safe bet to lend to. The banks make an average 4-7% in the stock market on money that costs them next to nothing.

If the FED raises interest rates the banks pull out of the market. In order to sell their holdings there needs to be a buyer. This is why the 401k's and various retirement funds are in place. They are deliberately set with rules that make it damn near impossible to get your money out of once in the fund. These retirement funds are the sucker that remains in the "game" after the play clock has run out. The funds buy the junk the banks sells in order to cash out. These funds, the hard working men and women, the retirees, lose trillions in wealth.

Amazingly people don't riot in the streets, or try to overthrow the banks. Why? Because all of this is thought to be because of a free market system. It just happens and everyone loses. No one pays attention to where the money goes, they just think it's lost.

[Danny B]

Yes, Ruphus, it's a sad state of affairs and the retirees are going to get robbed badly.
"March 13, 2015—Esteemed economist Larry Kotlikoff warned the Senate Budget Committee last month that Greece is more solvent than the United States."
The Fiscal Gap: Why We're the Most Insolvent of Developed Nations

[aljhoa]

Yes, Ruphus, it's a sad state of affairs and the retirees are going to get robbed badly.
"March 13, 2015—Esteemed economist Larry Kotlikoff warned the Senate Budget Committee last month that Greece is more solvent than the United States."
The Fiscal Gap: Why We're the Most Insolvent of Developed Nations

U.S. DEBT - A Visual Perspective


Al

[Danny B]

oil and the dollar crash together

As everybody knows, the dollar is going up,up,up. Why?
There were $ trillions of derivatives written on energy contracts. The financial industry bought $ billions of oil to re-sell later back to the oil companies for a profit.
You have to read the history connected to the oil barons as published by Lindsey Williams.
Lindsey Williams
A few years ago, they told him that they were going to drive down the price of crude to $ 25. Nobody believed him but, they did indeed drive down the price to $ 25. Not too long ago, they told him that they were going to crash the system. Exxon earns 5.5 cents per gallon of refined products,,, $ 2.31 per barrel. The speculators "earn" about $ 27 per barrel.
They waited until the speculators were heavily invested.
"Investors were borrowing physical oil, which made them feel safe, and knew that the oil companies would eventually repurchase the physical oil from them in due time. With the fall of the price of oil, all of this purely investment demand vanished, and the price dropped further."

So, not only did the price of their oil crash, the derivatives were called on to compensate for the losses. There were about $ 2.5 trillion of derivatives written against energy prices. The price hasn't recovered and the derivatives HAVE to be settled. There is great demand for dollars to settle these accounts. That is where the demand for dollars is coming from to drive up the dollar.
Expert: Oil Price Wars Fatally Wounded the Petrodollar

Previously, the carbon industry provided about $ 450 billion a year of liquidity to Wall st. NOW;
"For the first time, too, we see the end of the petro-dollar as a system for recirculating oil revenues to Wall Street.

For the first time, it has turned negative: It is sucking liquidity out from Wall Street, not putting it in. The fall in the price of oil has suddenly created huge financial turbulence, which is endangering the global financial system."
The financials bought gobs of oil that they can't sell even for a loss. We're running out of storage space. The "elites" of Pastor Williams acquaintance are pumping oil as fast as possible to complete the destruction of the "vampire squid."
America threatened to throw Russia out of the SWIFT system as they did with Iran. SWIFT was quick to say that they had no intention of ever doing this. Russia, China and many others created an alternative to SWIFT and the World Bank and the IMF,,,, possibly, even the BIS.
Now, SWIFT is in talks to bring Iran back in the system.
PressTV-SWIFT in talks to revive services to Iran

Almost every country has signed up with the Asian Infrastructure Bank. This is a clear recognition that Pox Americana is coming to an end. The American nutjobs are trying to herd everyone back into the fold. It isn't working. I believe that Europe will avoid a war for the neocons when push comes to shove. No matter how many planes we crash as revenge for signing, the R.O.W. knows that America is poison.

The R.O.W. can't clip our military wings directly. They can let us fall into the dirt economically and let internal strife occupy the military. It will have to get very bad for the nutjobs to finally abandon the empire.

With the soothing assurances from GOV, Americans forgot to save for a rainy day. That rainy day is here and nobody has any savings.
19 Signs That American Families Are Being Economically Destroyed

[Danny B]

Darryl Robert Schoon

In 2007 Darryl Robert Schoon predicted an economic crisis that would trigger another great depression. In this episode he makes another prediction of similar consequence. This show aired March 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZJC...ature=youtu.be
Darryl Robert Schoon is an old-school kind of guy. Like many others, he is trying to warn people to get prepared. He knows his stuff.
Gold, Greece, The Death Of Paper Money And The Modern State | Gold Silver Worlds

Our whole system is warped to return the most rewards to those who produce the least.
"I hope you now understand that the current system of issuing money and credit intrinsically benefits the few at the expense of the many. This vast privilege and the equally vast inequality that is the only possible output of the system cannot be reformed away; it is intrinsic to centrally issued money and private banking.

The problem isn’t fiat money—currency that isn’t backed by scarce commodities; it’s centrally issued money that is distributed to the few at the expense of the many. This centrally created money is issued not to facilitate the production of goods and services and the demand that naturally arises from the expansion of the real economy, but to serve the state and its cronies."
The Fatal Flaw Of Centrally-Issued Money | Peak Prosperity

[Danny B]

China and the SDR

From an earlier post;
"Second: China, unlike the West – in particular the US, where the privately owned central banks (the Federal Reserve Bank in the US) hold the economy hostage, owns and controls its central banks. As such, all the interest earned by and through the central bank is recycled back into the economy – it doesn’t end up into the coffers of the major banks."
China owes much of it's success to the fact that the interest burden is recycled back into the economy. BUT;

"China’s only purpose in its historic fiscal expansion has been to achieve inclusion in what the IMF calls the “global economic reset.” Part of this reset is the introduction of the IMF global currency basket system, or Special Drawing Rights (SDR), as a kind of centralized control mechanism for all currencies around the world. The IMF and China have continuously called for the SDR basket system to replace the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.

I covered this developing scheme in great detail in my article 'The Economic End Game Explained'.

Despite the hopes of some alternative writers that China will somehow break the chains of the central banking monopoly, every Chinese action since at least 2008 has been in preparation to become a full slave nation under the control of IMF policy. China has now officially submitted its currency (the Yuan) for inclusion as a reserve currency in the SDR basket. China's central bank has openly called for the IMF to take a dominant role in the management of the world's currencies through the SDR basket system:"

OK, so China is currently trying to get onboard with the SDR and become another slave nation. China has been screwed by the West for centuries. Why would they kowtow now? Why would they buy all that gold if they were going to use the SDR for storage of reserves?
Why is japan beating the drums of war against China at the same time that they signed on to the Chinese AIIB bank?
International exchange of fiat currencies demands trust. When the bond collapse hits, all trust will be gone and only gold will remain standing. In the meantime, the East will entertain the West with kabuki theater.
One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes - Part 4

[Danny B]

No austerity for arms dealers

Yemen was destabilized and now Saudi is a big arms importer. The European PTB insist on strong austerity for Greece but, NO reduction in arms purchases.
"The current EU-IMF bailout remains conditional on further austerity measures, including reducing pensions, the minimum-wage and civil service jobs. However, one area of the Greek budget doesn't seem to have received much scrutiny: its huge military spending.

The fact that Greece, a relatively small and democratic country with not much in the way of global ambitions, should spend as much on its military as it does is perplexing. In 2006, as the financial crisis was looming, Greece was the third biggest arms importer after China and India. And over the past 10 years its military budget has stood at an average of 4% of GDP, more than £900 per person. "
Greece's austerity doesn't extend to its arms budget | Paul Haydon | Comment is free | The Guardian

Germany says that they will raise defence spending but,,, later.
Schäuble signals defense hike, but delayed | News | DW.DE | 01.03.2015

" a Western military-industrial complex attacked by budget cuts and austerity plans and it’s not because the German finance minister, Schaüble, has announced that it will be necessary to increase military budgets again out to 2017 (!) as if that changes anything as regards the fact that German military expenditure will only fall again this year[7], that Tsipras’ Greece won’t fail to undertake reducing the huge drain caused by the army on the Greeks through the financing of an army wholly disproportionate to the Turkish “threat”[8], that UK military budget reductions worries the US[9], that Bulgaria has just cancelled the whole military budget[10], etc…"
2015 – Media, finance, oil system, military-industrial complex, QE : the narratives war | GEAB

Pretty funny that Greece has to buy tons of arms to counter the Turkish threat when Turkey is a NATO country. Russia is now routing their gas pipeline through Turkey to the border of Greece. The pipeline specs have been published so that Europeans can build a connecting pipeline.
The arms manufacturers are deathly afraid that the Iran war won't come off as planned. The House of Saud has nurtured myriad enemies for decades and faces a fair chance that they won't survive. That would stop arms imports.

The F-35 is a turkey BUT, it is an expensive turkey and that is all that matters.
The old A-10 is an extremely effect offensive weapon. The generals are all beholden to the arms industry and do not like to see a low cost weapon prevent a high-cost weapon from being bought.
Air Force general loses job for telling airmen lobbying to keep A-10 ‘is committing treason’ — RT USA
A very expensive B2 crashed in Guam due to moisture in one sensor. I'm sure that this made some contractor very happy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZCp5h1gK2Q

The Russians now have the “Khibiny” system that the West has no defence for ,,or even an understanding.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/11...s-donald-duck/
Aircraft carriers don't look too good but, they are expensive so, the navy wants to build more.
http://beforeitsnews.com/war-and-con...e-2456402.html

"Back in the 70s, Admiral Rickover, the "father of nuclear navy," had to answer the question before the U.S. Senate: "How long would our aircraft carriers survive in a battle against the Russian Navy?" His response caused disillusionment: "Two or three days before they sink, maybe a week if they stay in the harbor."

http://www.unit587.com/bbs/leaked/10...y-hide-in-port
Screw the Pentagon.

Edit;
Peace must be stopped at any cost –Mish
The world of threats to the US is an illusion –Boston Globe
Nato war propaganda: a danger to world peace –Neo

Government most definitely does NOT want peace.
http://www.stopthecrime.net/docs/Rep...n_Mountain.pdf
Should peace break out, there would be little to hold the union together. Without a union centered in D.C. it would be very difficult to skim off the wealth.