Debt Rattle January 7 2025

 

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    Jan van Eijk The Arnolfini portrait 1434   • Trump Urges GOP to Pass Bill Advancing His Policies (ET) • Dollar Reverses Losses After Trump Blasts
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 7 2025]

    #178699
    John Day
    Participant

    Hitting Bottom https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/hitting-bottom

    A new year may engender false hopes, but it is also true that societies hit-bottom sometimes, and refuse to proceed in the same dysfunctional spiral, particularly when they see obvious paths to immediate and longer term improvements in the manner in which political economy is conducted.
    I’m not making any predictions, but there does appear to be an opening for western and BRICS political economies to incorporate better efficiencies in order to meet the human needs of human societies.
    The failings of the directions taken since the 2008 global financial crisis have been made more clear by the extreme swings of the narratives during the COVID pandemic, and the revelations that much of this was manipulated to stabilize global financial interests, and that the various strains of coronavirus showed genetic evidence of gain-of-function manipulation in bioweapons labs, funded by the US, China and Canada.
    The insult, added to those injuries, appears to be that the gene-therapy “vaccine products”, promoted as the solution to the lab-leak problem, carried the most toxic element of the virus, the spike-protein, as the core mRNA protein-product to be produced in the treated human cells. This has resulted in considerably greater harm than the leaked viruses, as shown by increases in excess deaths in “vaccinated” populations, beginning with the months that treatments began, and still continuing at the present time. The definition of “vaccinated” began 2 weeks after the second injection, which caused most of the immediate deaths to be recorded in the “unvaccinated” cohort, a handy trick. The further waves of excess deaths, notably in workers with employee life-insurance policies, have been dramatic, but more from strokes, autoimmune disease, cancers, myocarditis and heart attacks. They are simply denied by governments, and the recorded evidence is obscured and misinterpreted, but not addressed in detail. This stonewalling defense is beginning to crack in a few public sectors, a few US states, like Florida, for instance. The indignant cohort of society is not lessening with time, rather the vaccination-control-narrative is becoming progressively untenable.
    The real, productive economy is enabled by energy and resources, especially oil, but also coal, natural gas, mined resources and farm products. This is the real arbiter of societal wealth, and subject to physical and environmental constraints, particularly as easily obtained fuels and ores are depleted, and many forms of pollution build up. Financial economy is supposed to be the management ledger of real economy, but has been separately gamed in a way which has caused financial ledgers to reflect something like 7X the amount of wealth which real economy embodies, or will ever be able to provide in the near future. This gross mismatch demands that reality be acknowledged, and losses assigned. Most of us would choose to assign the bast book-losses to the ultra-wealthy, who would still survive comfortably, rather than to ordinary people who might well die as a result. The desires of the ultra-wealthy are the opposite, and are better represented in the halls of power, but paradoxically, if the real economy ceases to function, they lose all of their wealth.
    This is a moment in history where talented politicians can be helpful in distributing benefits and losses in a society, as fairly as possible, and so facilitate a societal unity of purpose, within an equitable social contract, such as was the case in the US after World War-2.
    Looking at all parts of the world, excess debt-service, which parasitizes real economy, needs to be shed, and the perverse-incentives which cripple nations by extracting what is needed for life-support, such as food, fuel, housing, medical care and social health, and giving it to elites, needs to be renounced. The needs of human societies need to be respected first and foremost, for political economy to adapt to the new and less permissive conditions which we now face, and which will tighten further going forward.
    Existing political structures can do this and have done it before, but the controlling cultures within them will need to change by eliminating perverse incentives to feed the rich, starve the workers, and maintain the status-quo, which is further extracting wealth from the real economy, weakening it over time. Certain powerful and obviously corrupt people might be made examples of…

    Tim Morgan at Surplus Energy Economics presents, Predicament, not outcome
    What we’re witnessing is the inflexion of the economy from growth into contraction, and this will apply leveraged pressure on the markets for discretionary (non-essential) products and services upon which so many corporate behemoths rely…..As is surely self-evident, energy, resources and environmental tolerance can’t be lent into existence by the banking system, or conjured out of the ether by central bankers. When we allow the supply of credit-money to expand at rates exceeding the current or forward claim-honouring capabilities of the material economy, we set up stresses which can have only one outcome.
    This brings us to the inevitability of a much larger “GFC II” sequel to the 2008-09 global financial crisis.
    Although the available data is neither complete nor timely, we can estimate that, stated at constant values, worldwide financial assets have increased by at least USD 450 trillion, or 150%, during a twenty-year period in which global real GDP grew by only 70%, or USD 44tn… The apparent implication – which is that more than $10 of new financial claims have been created for each dollar of growth – is a serious understatement of the true severity of the situation… ..Today’s over-centralized, top-down systems and institutions are likely to be replaced by decentralized, bottom-up alternatives operating at a more human scale. Before any of this can happen, though, we have to navigate a financial crisis on a scale that will dwarf the events of 2008-09. Whilst the sheer chaos likely to be caused by this event is apparent, a less obvious consequence will be the destruction of large swathes of what is currently understood as “wealth”. “GFC II” could turn out to be, as the first global financial crisis never was, a great leveller, resetting the relationship between wealth and incomes… ..SEEDS analysis indicates that, other than in the very weakest economies, the provision of the essentials to everyone can remain affordable well into the 2040s, by which time the definition of ‘essential’ will have changed. In other words, if the trend towards the immiseration of millions continues, it will have done so as a matter, not of necessity, but of choice. https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/296-predicament-not-outcome/

    Michael Hudson: Cracks in the Empire – Is the American Superpower Fading?
    I’ve been thinking what a good title for the show should be, and I think it should be, “Today’s world economy is as good as it gets.” I think the United States, Europe, and the Near Eastern economic and political situation is, obviously, it’s unstable. And almost any specific forecast we make is likely to be wrong because there are so many variables at work and competing interests at play. But actually, this is what mathematicians call an optimum position. That may sound optimistic, and I’m never one to be optimistic, but an optimum position is technically one that, wherever you move, it’s going to be worse.
    This is mathematically as good as it is. And that’s pretty much the situation you have today. You could say we’re now in the best of all possible worlds, given the policies that have led to the conflicts that we’re seeing: the conflict of national interest, the conflict of domestic interest, the conflict between the United States and Europe, and the United States against all the rest of the world. And I think that this year is going to be more than just change. I think that chaos is now official US policy. And that’s what you do when you’re trying to stop the world from moving in a direction that’s not in your interest… And the basic aim of the U.S. policy is to keep an optimum position from changing by creating such chaos that there’s not going to be an alternative…
    ..I think there are two areas that we have to concentrate on. One is gas, and the other is debt. And the most immediate problem is gas right now, because that’s the political key as well as the economic key. The United States foreign policy for the last century has been to try to control Near Eastern oil and gas production, because energy is the key to economic production. And the reason the U.S. wants to control it is to prevent other countries from having it if these countries act in a way that the United States opposes…
    ..United States strategists are, on the one hand, they’re saying, well, we’re going to insist in exporting more to Europe. President Trump is insisting that Europe buys more American LNG, liquefied natural gas, at four times the price it was paying Russia. But if it does this, then that’s going to create shortages in the US and US gas prices will go up. And if US gas prices go up, then the US consumer price index is going to go up. And that’s what the Republicans are in Congress opposing…
    ..You’re having gas prices now going up for the whole rest of the world. And that includes the global South countries. So something has to give because Africa, Latin America, other very heavily indebted countries can’t afford both to pay more for their gas these days and still keep up with their foreign debt service in hard currency, in US dollars. So the US selling more gas to Europe at high prices is going to create a rise in the dollar… And the US foreign policy doesn’t think of the world economy as a whole system. It’s tunnel vision. How do we hurt Russia? Let’s do that first. And then we’ll think of the rest of the world. So this is why the US policy is creating chaos in the rest of the world…
    ..I don’t see anyone except the right-wing parties opposing this. The left is completely on board with the U.S. Cold War because the left-wing parties, as I think we’ve discussed before, have been staffed by politicians who have been dependent on very heavy subsidy and grants from non-governmental organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy to build up. So you really don’t have a domestic formulation of what would a rational European economic policy be to restore prosperity, and in fact, is there a way to restore the dismantling of heavy industry, steel industry, automobile industry, manufacturing industry, even fertilizers and chemicals that have already been dismantled? Or does Europe have to go the way that the Baltics have gone? … The Eurozone, as we’ve discussed before, is basically dominated by NATO and by the United States indirectly. I don’t see much of a solution except poverty for Europe…
    ..This is an Orwellian 1984 world that we’re seeing in Europe. And I don’t see… it is obviously worst of all in England under Starmer and the Labour Party. But what’s happening to the Labour Party is the same thing that’s happened to the German Social Democratic Party that’s now fallen behind the Alternative for Deutschland in the polls and is going to be pretty much wiped out in this month’s election. And you’re going to have one European country after another going the way of Romania. What are you going to do when people do not vote for the United States, but vote for their own national welfare? …
    ..The first aim is you need to cope with the foreign debt problem. There is no way that the BRICS countries can grow and at the same time pay the foreign debts that they’ve been saddled with for the last 100 years and especially since 1945 by the neoliberal philosophy that’s been pushed by the United States and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
    The policies that have been imposed on the BRICS countries have forced them into a chronic balance of payments and trade deficit as a result of their dependency on the United States and its allies that have made them not viable countries. That means that the loans that were made to these countries have no chance of being paid…
    ..And the fact is that the people that hold these dollar bonds are client oligarchies who don’t want to hold their own currencies because the global south countries and their oligarchies realize the debts can’t be paid… And this is a problem for the BRICS countries. On the one hand, the BRICS countries, in order to grow, have to write down their debts… So the vested interests in many of the BRICS countries are not favoring the national interests. That’s the big conflict you have between the fact that these countries are bifurcated between a U.S.-centered elite and the country as a whole…
    ..What are you going to do about the fact that as a result of the debt crisis, these countries have been driven by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and U.S. policy to sell off their oil, mineral rights, their natural resources, their natural monopolies of public infrastructure to foreign investors? How on earth can they grow if all of their national patrimony and all of the revenue, the land rent, the raw materials rents, the monopoly rents from this national patrimony is paid to foreigners? Well, you could look at the BRICS countries in very much the same way as Russia under the kleptocrats…
    ..The whole logic of industrial capitalism was to free economies from the landlord class and its land rent, to free economies from economic rent. And that was what classical value theory from Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Marx, the American economists all said, “we want to prevent rent seeking… to bring prices in line with actual cost of production.” That’s what enabled England first to become the workshop of the world, and then enabled the United States and Germany to replace England by creating a mixed public-private economy with its own national control of money.
    The BRICS countries could follow this policy that made first England and then America and Germany able to organize their industrial takeoff. But in order to do that, you have to have a concept of freeing economies from economic rent. You have to have a concept that basically goes back to Adam Smith. His idea of a free market was a market free of economic rent…
    ..So, if the BRICS economies said, we’re going to recover our natural patrimony from the kleptocrats, not our own kleptocrats only, but the foreign companies that have bought our oil and gas, we’re going to use that as our natural, our fiscal base. And that we’re going to use that fiscal base to finance our own economic development. Well, then you’re going to essentially be able to do in this century what the late 19th century European countries did… And what they do see is China’s remarkable economic takeoff. And China calls this socialism with Chinese characteristics, but it could be called the American economics takeoff with Chinese characteristics, because that’s the American economic takeoff…
    ..And there’s a third aim that the BRICS countries should have, and that has to be to raise living standards and raise labor productivity. Because you can’t have a class war against labor and expect labor to be highly educated, well-fed, well housed, and productive. If you want productive labor, you’re going to have to raise living standards. And the vested interests in most of these BRICS countries want to keep wages low. If they have factories or whatever their business is, they look at labor’s wages as being antithetical to themselves. And the way that the United States solved this problem was to say, okay, we know that you industrialists don’t want to pay high wages to labor. But what we’ll do is have the government pick up many of the costs of living for labor. The cost of education, the cost of health care, the cost of low-priced transportation, communications. And so that you don’t have to pay labor high enough wages to pay for its own health care, education, and all of that. Well, obviously that’s not what the United States is doing today. You’re having just the opposite…
    ..Again, you need an economic theory and economic doctrine for this. The doctrine was what 19th century classical economics was all about… The way to create a prosperous economic growth is to avoid private debt. Keep debt and money creation domestic. The debts you owe are in your own currency and you control your own currency in the same way China does, through a public bank, not through private commercial banks. You want to tax economic rent and unearned income to encourage earned income by actually being part of the production process, not part of the rent-seeking… superstructure… And you want to create a prosperous domestic labor force so that it can become high-productivity.
    That’s how the United States developed a high productivity labor force itself. The way in which the BRICS countries can follow their national interest is clear, but you need a doctrine for that and an economic philosophy. That’s the missing element that I see right now. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01/michael-hudson-cracks-in-the-empire-is-the-american-superpower-fading.html

    Jim Rickards, Trump’s Plan to End Currency War 3.0
    As reported in The Washington Post, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance and other outlets, Trump is working on a secret plan to devalue the U.S. dollar. The goal would be to cheapen U.S. exports and thereby help the U.S. balance of trade and create exported-related jobs…
    ..The critics are wrong and don’t understand what Trump is actually trying to do. Trump is not trying to start a currency war; he’s trying to end it once and for all…
    ..Far from the reckless, inflationary process the media claim, Trump’s actual plan is based on the highly successful model developed by James Baker for Ronald Reagan and implemented in the Plaza Accord of 1985 and the Louvre Accord of 1987… The parties reached a joint agreement that would devalue the U.S. dollar in an orderly fashion versus the French Franc, Japanese Yen, UK pounds sterling, and the German Deutschemark. Once the targeted level for the dollar was achieved, the parties would use their best efforts, including market intervention as needed to maintain those levels within narrow bands.
    A separate meeting in Paris at the Louvre in 1987 agreed that the devaluation phase was over, and the dollar would be maintained at the new parities. This was not currency war; it was currency peace achieved by agreement and implemented in a cooperative fashion…
    ..Trump’s goal is to repeat the success of the Plaza and Louvre Accords. Trump’s advisor on this is Robert Lighthizer, who is one of the most brilliant financial minds around and was Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative (2017-2021). Lighthizer was also USTR for Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985 so he’s a veteran of prior currency wars and was in the administration around the time the Plaza Accord was being developed. Lighthizer is the perfect individual to help Trump achieve the kind of success that Reagan and Baker had in the 1980s. The media are trying to portray Trump as reckless when in fact he’s proposing something highly beneficial for U.S. jobs and U.S. industry. https://dailyreckoning.com/trumps-plan-to-end-currency-war-3-0/

    Alex Krainer, The political tides in Europe are turning against the Empire
    It seems that the same cultural countercurrents seem to be gripping many nations as the recent elections in the United States, Slovakia, Romania, Georgia, Hungary, France, Germany, Croatia and Moldova have shown (yes, Moldova too).
    ​ It may be that in spite of the loud banging of the war-drums in mainstream media, and among our political class, very different currents are gathering below the surface. These currents might continue to gain strength; it’s what our ruling establishments like to label as Russia’s malign influence. More likely, the truth is that ordinary people got tired of the lies, hatred, hostility and the wars, as well as the intellectual and cultural junk food that’s become the pervasive staple among Western nations. This is a hopeful sign, because escalating the wars could prove difficult for the imperial establishment. What if peace starts to break out all over the place in 2025? It’s a worthwhile idea to pray for and struggle for.​ https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/the-political-tides-in-europe-are

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