Planet Earth – F.U.B.A.R.
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Warning: This commentary is not for the faint of heart. I thought I’d start this particular Monday morning, May the 14th, with a little rant. Sometime
[See the full post at: Planet Earth – F.U.B.A.R.]If you still recognize this world as the one from ten years ago, then you just aren’t looking at it hard enough.
Yesterday died on 09/11.
…. then the nightmares started.
…. I cannot wake up
geeees … maybe I was in a drugged sleep until 09/11
This reality shit stinks!
Let’s assume, as a talking point (a strong talking point, lol) that you are dead on about China/Japan. At some point, presumably soon, they are going to have to call in their chips, which are held mainly in the form of US Treasury bonds. The alternative would be to fiddle while Tokyo/Shanghai burns.
So I think this is the crux of the biscuit. How does this particular bubble get unwound? I know there is a quadrillion of OTC derivatives, but JP Morgan just lost a bundle fooling around with them, and not only are they still standing, they are still profitable. And someone else just put two billion in their back pocket. So I don’t think that is the bubble that does us in, but rather the biggie will be US Treasuries.
Quite frankly, I’m having trouble even coming up with a bluff here. How on Earth does this bubble get unwound? I mean, China says, “we need half a trillion to buy up every soy bean in Brazil, and half your corn. Where do we exchange this script you gave us a while back?”
What is Ben supposed to say? “Just dump them on the open market.” Or, “here’s the phone number of a buddy of mine in the Cayman Islands. He was just telling me the other day that he was in the market for a half trillion in treasuries, lol.”
I just don’t see the dollar surviving this.
I don’t think Canada escaped the housing bubble — it just hasn’t popped yet. It’s especially crazy in Vancouver, BC, hence the popular “Crack Shack Or Mansion” quiz site: https://www.crackshackormansion.com/part2.html
Ash is right, of course, the converging ecological and economic crises are already changing the world in profound ways. People will cling to expectations of technological miracles, and we will continue to see heroic efforts made to “keep up appearances”, but the math of depleted resources and overflowing planetary sinks is relentless and unswerving.
We may have been able to pull out of this nose-dive, just barely, if we had started pulling back HARD on the yoke a few decades ago, but now the ground is rushing at us at full speed even as they cry goes out “Damn the doomers! More gas! Faster!”
That said, and not to be an apologist for the status quo, but it is precisely because of reading about places like China and India, and especially Africa, that I temper my expectations of catastrophic collapse.
People have a remarkable ability to survive, and yes sometimes thrive, in situations and environments that to the wealthy industrialized world must seem horrific and abjectly inhumane.
I am not suggesting that the Earth can support all seven-going-on-nine billion humans, we will certainly see the return of famine, plague, and war in a big way. Poorer countries that are currently dependent on international aid and food imports to support marginal populations will be hit the hardest.
But for those in more fortunate countries I think a clear picture of the future can be seen in the teeming slums of the so-called “third world”. Hungry and desperately poor crowds of people cram into ramshackle streets, decrepit buildings, and if they are lucky onto broken down but still barely maintained train systems. Otherwise it is foot, bicycle and maybe scooters or motorcycles on dangerous, crowded and smog choked streets. Day to day life is ruled by a strict hierarchy of corrupt police and vicious crime gangs, yet people still manage to run shops and markets as best they can, and a lucky few hold down government jobs in a bloated crony capitalist bureaucracy, or serve in the military.
Yes, it will be bad for people who have been accustomed to having so much more, many will fail to adapt, but just as many will find a way to muddle through. Just as humans always have.
“hyperinflation”? what “hyperinflation”? apparently “Ashvin’s” perspective contradicts “Automatic Earth’s” consistent perspective of “a severe deflation would come imminently”.
why such a contradiction? why? editors should discuss this conflict in mentality extensively…“OMG”! hard to believe such situation exists.
explain to viewers and reader why “hyperinflation” is imminent, Please, “Ashvin”!
i demand “Ashvin’s” complete honesty to explaining why “hyperinflation” is imminent.
natureisnature post=2923 wrote: explain to viewers and reader why “hyperinflation” is imminent, Please, “Ashvin”!
i demand “Ashvin’s” complete honesty to explaining why “hyperinflation” is imminent.
The word “hyperinflation” came in the paragraph that came after the question, “so what happens after that?” Meaning, what will happen in EUROPE after Greece exits, and/or others eventually follow. If Greece reverts back to the Drachma, there is a good chance they will experience HI.
I was NOT talking about the USD.
ashvin post=2925 wrote: [quote=natureisnature post=2923]
The word “hyperinflation” came in the paragraph that came after the question, “so what happens after that?” Meaning, what will happen in EUROPE after Greece exits, and/or others eventually follow. If Greece reverts back to the Drachma, there is a good chance they will experience HI.I was NOT talking about the USD.
whatever explanation, “hyperinflation” contradicts “Automatic Earth’s” persistent view point of “a severe deflation would be ubiquitous and pervasive imminently”
how would a few countries defy “steady and globally deflationary trend and progression in memorable global deflationary depression”?
reason and examples, please.
pipefit post=2912 wrote: Quite frankly, I’m having trouble even coming up with a bluff here. How on Earth does this bubble get unwound? I mean, China says, “we need half a trillion to buy up every soy bean in Brazil, and half your corn. Where do we exchange this script you gave us a while back?”
I just don’t see the dollar surviving this.
I see China naturally becoming even more dependent on the US and its currency as European export markets fall off one by one. China needs to continuously bring investment capital into its export industries, and the best way to do that is curry favor with foreign (US) corporations that operate in China, which also bring dollars into China and its governments – dollars that still have a lot of purchasing power for input commodities compared to euros. If we are trying to guess what asset the Chinese will sell first to defend its financial sector, I would start looking at those hordes of gold rather than USTs.
natureisnature post=2927 wrote: whatever explanation, “hyperinflation” contradicts “Automatic Earth’s” persistent view point of “a severe deflation would be ubiquitous and pervasive imminently”
Nope, it doesn’t contradict anything, because that’s not anyone’s view point here. TAE has repeatedly made clear that HI could easily occur in the Euro periphery – see Stoneleigh’s, The Special Relativity of Currencies. Deflation is “ubiquitous” in the sense that credit availability/velocity is slowing down or shrinking just about everywhere now, and especially in the West, but that does not mean any and all currencies will increase in purchasing power relative to domestically-provided goods/services (and obviously not relative to other currencies).
One brief note. I think there is a bit of confirmation bias here, but there is something else going on too, and that is that it is generally easier to spot forces for change than forces for the status quo. That doesn’t mean we won’t see economic collapse, but just that it won’t happen as quickly as we think it will.
One note on Canada. Canadian tar sands have an EROI of about 5:1 which is lower than imported oil today, but is higher than a lot of other sources of energy. One implication here is that it creates a significant wealth transfer into Canada. If, as I argue, the economic instability of the last thirty years is due to oil becoming far more scarce relative to demand, this provides important benefits to Canada. A drop in may or may not be catastrophic depending on when it happens.
Nice Going Ashvin, I always knew you had it in you to can the mannered verbosity and lay it on the line plain, cold, and simple. What a friggin mess we are in. Throw in a possible developing world war with some possible nuclear fireworks displays for background music and we have the perfect horror show. I feel so bad for all the good people of the world, who just went about their daily lives with a good moral compass and trust and respect of others who have to go down with the rotten bastards that caused all of this.
Nobody knows what’s really going down and what the outcome will be. Change of plan for me: stop worrying and obsessing… I’m gonna enjoy myself, my life, my wife, my friends and whatever happens happens and I’ll deal with it. I’m gonna do what I’ve always wanted to do… spend most of my time studying and playing music. Think I’m gonna form about 3 bands and just MAKE MUSIC. Maybe it will be the soundtrack to TEOTWAWKI!!
Great rant Ash. Don’t let the nitpickers ah… nit pick. I am just reading Tim Flannery’s the Weather Makers. It’s not news to me by a long shot but he paints the clearest picture of the environmental pickle of anyone I’ve read. We are so f**ked! 100,000 years ago our plucky ancestors survived a mini-ice-age. DNA evidence indicates there were as few as 2000 fertile adults, 1000 breeding pairs at best.
They gave us a future and this is what we’ve done with it. Makes ya wanna cry. What will our children think of us as they navigate this ninth circle of hell future.natureisnature post=2927 wrote: [quote=ashvin post=2925][quote=natureisnature post=2923]
The word “hyperinflation” came in the paragraph that came after the question, “so what happens after that?” Meaning, what will happen in EUROPE after Greece exits, and/or others eventually follow. If Greece reverts back to the Drachma, there is a good chance they will experience HI.I was NOT talking about the USD.
whatever explanation, “hyperinflation” contradicts “Automatic Earth’s” persistent view point of “a severe deflation would be ubiquitous and pervasive imminently”
how would a few countries defy “steady and globally deflationary trend and progression in memorable global deflationary depression”?
reason and examples, please.
Hyperinflation in the drachma could easily be deflation in dollar terms.When Argentina hyperinflated their currency, did that mean that an American with dollars lost purchasing power or gained purchasing power?
It depends on one’s perspective. Think about it for a bit, I’m sure you’ll get it..
This FUBAR Planetary Clusterfuck is caused by human psychopathic predators that, unlike the predators in nature, are so willfully greedy and stupid that they failed to FOSTER THE HEALTH OF THE PREY POPULATION.
Any successful predator in nature selectively preys on it’s prey population so that the health and reproduction is enhanced. This ensures a continued food supply for the predator and the survival of his species.
Wall Street twisted Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ portion of the Theory of Evolution so out of proportion to reality that they effectively adopted a murder/suicide pact for humanity.
Fucking IDIOTS!
Great rant.
And of course I know we’re fucked.
But it all still seems unreal. We are going to have to let go of SOMETHING… but we don’t want to. And so I have no idea what that “something” is. Greece is the case in point. They don’t want austerity, but they do want to stay in the Euro. They don’t want to balance their budgets (who does, really!) but Germany won’t keep siphoning off billions to keep the Greeks in cigarettes. I just can’t figure out how this will end. I actually think there is SOME small chance that Greece might STAY in the Euro, as they stand at the cliff’s edge facing something far more painful and unknowable. Papa Germany might be mean, but you know he’s there if you “behave”. It’s not the first time the poor will have been scared into accepting that they can only become poorer. Seems like a case of mutually assured destruction to me, and in such a scenario, I can imagine a very, very long stalemate.
Obviously, I’m not saying that is the right thing to do. I’m saying I just don’t see a solution in any way shape or form, but can’t imagine the alternative either! Can you? I mean, can you really IMAGINE the alternative collapse? It’s too surreal, and so even if it’s probable, we just won’t do what we have to do to really prepare because it’s like a pitch for a cheesy Hollywood sci-fi movie. Or maybe the reality we end up with will be even stranger than our fiction?
Or, because I simply can’t make my mind up entirely, things really do unravel as chaotically as Ash believes. Like when your mum dies, you just always knew it would hapen, but never really believe it.
TheTrivium4TW post=2942 wrote:
Hyperinflation in the drachma could easily be deflation in dollar terms.
When Argentina hyperinflated their currency, did that mean that an American with dollars lost purchasing power or gained purchasing power?
It depends on one’s perspective. Think about it for a bit, I’m sure you’ll get it..
So, you are predicting that, no matter the size of the budget deficit of the USA federal govt., the US dollar will INCREASE in purchasing power? In that case, why don’t they run a deficit of a million dollars per person (320 trillion) and give a million dollars to every person in the states?
You are quite out of date with your prediction. We are on the wrong side of the social security and medicare ponzi schemes, and their fictitious ‘trust’ funds. Apparently, you trust in the ‘trust’ funds, lol.
All the chatter about eliminating the Bush tax cuts, restoring the prior social security tax rate, etc. is just that. I don’t think it will happen. But let’s say that it does happen, as a talking point. It won’t shrink the size of the federal budget deficit. Has austerity worked in Spain? In Greece? You shrink your deficit with economic growth, not by forcibly creating an economic contraction.
RE,
Sure, cross-posting fine with me.
skipbreakfast post=2944 wrote: Obviously, I’m not saying that is the right thing to do. I’m saying I just don’t see a solution in any way shape or form, but can’t imagine the alternative either! Can you? I mean, can you really IMAGINE the alternative collapse? It’s too surreal, and so even if it’s probable, we just won’t do what we have to do to really prepare because it’s like a pitch for a cheesy Hollywood sci-fi movie. Or maybe the reality we end up with will be even stranger than our fiction?
Or, because I simply can’t make my mind up entirely, things really do unravel as chaotically as Ash believes. Like when your mum dies, you just always knew it would hapen, but never really believe it.
It’s a very good question, Skip. The problem with rants is that they are, after all, rants, and not very precise analyses. They emotionally (and forcefully) get across a general message, but that message isn’t going to be the best description of reality I can come up with. The message here basically being, “from a big picture perspective, it’s very hard to say I even recognize this world anymore”. Like with most things, there are +s and minuses with putting it all into a rant.
I don’t want people to think that I am a strong advocate of the Mad Max, total anarchy overnight scenario. When I say “Europe will be FUBAR”, that’s not really what I mean. When WWI and then WWII erupted over there, it’s not as if all life came to a grinding halt and people thought, “WOW, I can’t even imagine that this is happening right now!” or “I never could have imagined that this would happen”. I don’t think that’s necessarily what we will be thinking, either.
OTOH, there are obviously reasons why an even more chaotic unwind of economic, sociopolitical structures than THAT is a bigger risk now than it was then. There are so many different (yet inter-connected) fault lines across the Earth now, and any one of them has the capability of producing dramatic consequences, above and beyond the pain that billions of people are already experiencing. If it’s not Greece exiting the EU that sets off a chain reaction, then it may very well be something else, and if it’s not that something else, then maybe the breakdown ends up being less rapid and less concentrated.
BUT, no matter what, the breakdown will occur and our lives will be dramatically changed. Over here in the developed world, we hold sacred this idea that none of the consequences of collapse, either occurring now gradually or materializing more rapidly in the (near) future, will ever get TOO painful for us or will be too much for us to handle. I believe that idea needs to be shattered, and quickly, if people want to have a good chance of understanding the reality of the risks we face, and reacting appropriately. That’s really the message here.
pipefit post=2945 wrote: [quote=TheTrivium4TW post=2942]
Hyperinflation in the drachma could easily be deflation in dollar terms.
When Argentina hyperinflated their currency, did that mean that an American with dollars lost purchasing power or gained purchasing power?
It depends on one’s perspective. Think about it for a bit, I’m sure you’ll get it..
So, you are predicting that, no matter the size of the budget deficit of the USA federal govt., the US dollar will INCREASE in purchasing power? In that case, why don’t they run a deficit of a million dollars per person (320 trillion) and give a million dollars to every person in the states?
How about looking at gold as your base monetary unit? From that point of view, the cost of American goods and American labor is decreasing. You can buy more stuff with the same number of ounces. That’s textbook deflation.Or anther thing to consider — if the Fed printed x% more money since 2008 and the economy hasn’t increased in size, then you’d expect (on average) all goods and services to cost x% more. So if money supply is up 25% and groceries up 10%, that could be considered deflation (less inflation than expected).
Planet Earth- F.U.B.A.R. cross posted on the Doomstead Diner
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/05/15/planet-earth-f-u-b-a-r/
RE
hircus said, “How about looking at gold as your base monetary unit? From that point of view, the cost of American goods and American labor is decreasing. You can buy more stuff with the same number of ounces. That’s textbook deflation.”
Finally, someone gets it. Exactly, from the perspective of the holder of real money, we have massive deflation over the last 10 or 11 years, even with this recent severe correction.
Here’s the deal. The headline federal deficit is $1.3 trillion. But that doesn’t include interest on the tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities, off balance sheet items, and any other funny business going on. John Williams (shadowstats) estimates the GAAP measured deficit is $5 to $7 trillion per YEAR!! Take the mid point, $6 trillion. That is 40% of GDP!!!!!
The defaltionists will reply that the government will default on social security, medicare, federal govt. worker pensions, military pensions, VA benefits, etc., so whether they are keeping track of how much interest owed is an unnecessary exercise. They are probably right. But the aftermath of that default will be FUBAR, not deflation.
Its worth noting that Japan has not yet brought Fukushima under control. They hope to begin a clean up next year sometime. The size and scope of the fall out exceeds the perimeter so greatly the Island is in many ways divided in half. This is a game changer for this country and may in fact shut it down.
They are definitely FUBARed and internationally we need to consider how to prevent this many reactors from going into meltdown and just how many can be located in one area without posing so great a risk.
To me this is an example of over extended resources to supply the endless growth economy. As demands so greatly outstrips resources the country compromises protocols and safety.
This is not the conclusion but the precursor to the problem of suppling infinite growth without infinite resources. The short sited solution is to continuously compromise the rules so the public doesn’t realize.
agelbert post=2943 wrote: This FUBAR Planetary Clusterfuck is caused by human psychopathic predators that, unlike the predators in nature, are so willfully greedy and stupid that they failed to FOSTER THE HEALTH OF THE PREY POPULATION.
Any successful predator in nature selectively preys on it’s prey population so that the health and reproduction is enhanced. This ensures a continued food supply for the predator and the survival of his species.
Wall Street twisted Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ portion of the Theory of Evolution so out of proportion to reality that they effectively adopted a murder/suicide pact for humanity.
Fucking IDIOTS!
agelbert, at the very top of this cesspool, there is some method to this madness. Exponentially growing populations with exponentially growing resource requirements will drain the psychopathic oligarch resources down to a level they do not.
In short, they know economies can’t grow forever, the name of the game, from their point of view, is to take control of the Earth’s resources and, shall we say, “cull demand” for the resources they want to retain for themselves.
I’m sure you can be creative and think about how they would “cull demand.” Some people believe that means kill of a whole lot of people – they do say over population is their #1 concern for “humanity” and mass death *is* the only solution to their problem.
Somehow, I don’t think they will volunteer to be the solution, if you get my drift.
IOW, their interest is not the status quo, but to roll up the real assets under their front corporations and to prevent humanity from using up the Earth’s limited resources.
They are reckless to a degree, though. IMHO, that will be their undoing, but they will be able to take down a lot of the rest of us as they work out their empire building, “demand culling,” societal enslaving strategy.
skipbreakfast post=2944 wrote: Great rant.
And of course I know we’re fucked.
But it all still seems unreal. We are going to have to let go of SOMETHING… but we don’t want to. And so I have no idea what that “something” is. Greece is the case in point. They don’t want austerity, but they do want to stay in the Euro. They don’t want to balance their budgets (who does, really!) but Germany won’t keep siphoning off billions to keep the Greeks in cigarettes. I just can’t figure out how this will end. I actually think there is SOME small chance that Greece might STAY in the Euro, as they stand at the cliff’s edge facing something far more painful and unknowable. Papa Germany might be mean, but you know he’s there if you “behave”. It’s not the first time the poor will have been scared into accepting that they can only become poorer. Seems like a case of mutually assured destruction to me, and in such a scenario, I can imagine a very, very long stalemate.
Obviously, I’m not saying that is the right thing to do. I’m saying I just don’t see a solution in any way shape or form, but can’t imagine the alternative either! Can you? I mean, can you really IMAGINE the alternative collapse? It’s too surreal, and so even if it’s probable, we just won’t do what we have to do to really prepare because it’s like a pitch for a cheesy Hollywood sci-fi movie. Or maybe the reality we end up with will be even stranger than our fiction?
Or, because I simply can’t make my mind up entirely, things really do unravel as chaotically as Ash believes. Like when your mum dies, you just always knew it would hapen, but never really believe it.
The monetary system was ENGINEERED by some oligarchs to systematically asset strip society and enrich themselves. Period. It is a FRAUDULENT system. I get that this BIG LIE makes people so uncomfortable that they can’t even entertain the idea in their mind, BUT IT IS TRUE!
Here is a graph representation of the process used to extract wealth from “main street.”
https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/3325954/debt-dollar-tyranny-2-54k?tr=77
If you want simplified text based walk through of how this fraud actually works, check out…
When Money is Debt, Wealth is Poverty
https://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/blog/2012/03/31/money-debt-wealth-poverty/
There is NEVER enough money in main street to pay back their debts BY DESIGN!
It is the BIG LIE, hidden in plain view. Until we admit it, we have no chance of addressing the BIG LIE.
pipefit post=2945 wrote:
So, you are predicting that, no matter the size of the budget deficit of the USA federal govt., the US dollar will INCREASE in purchasing power?No. What I’m saying is there is the narrative fed to the proles and then there is reality.
The narrative is that the government is sovereign and that it makes the decisions in its best interest.
This is 100% false. The truth is that a bunch of financial oligarchs are in charge and elections are 95% about what lying psychopath will serve the interests of the oligarchs.
I get that the education system, the media system, the political system all claim otherwise, but they are all funded by the financial oligarchs… and predators don’t tell the prey what process is being used to victimize them.
Debt based money is a fraud. It is a weaponized monetary system ENGINEERED to asset strip society AND GOVERNMENTS and transfer wealth and control to the financial oligarchs.
Think of it as “The Ultimate Revolution” – but of the financial oligarchs on everyone else. They are following The Art of War and using deception to wage war on the people and their nation states.
The borrowers (government) is SERVANT to the lender (financial oligarchs). No sovereign government would ever set up a system where they depended on someone else to fund it – only a captured government would do such a thing.
So, the hypothesis that the government will defend its debt by “printing” is one that fails to understand the underlying data of the system.
The financial oligarchs WANT the nations to crash and burn and they won’t finance or promote anyone who won’t execute their strategy. Ron Paul is an outsider, so they do everything they can to minimize his influence. He wins Iowa, they lie and say he didn’t. They lied and said one of their operatives won it and the “establishment” played right along – THE PEOPLE’S WILL BE D*MNED.
The point being is that this whole process is about wealth and control conveyance from the proles to the control freak financial feudal lords.
All you really need to know is that they are in charge and they control trillions in debt instruments (shedding toxic debt instruments to “government” as fast as they can – again, no sovereign government would kneel and slobber like this!) and they control the destiny of the nation’s monetary future through their Trojan Horse – the Federal Reserve System.
Once you know this, you will realize that straight to hyperinflation, or even serious inflation, ultimately hurts the oligarchs AND THEY WON’T HURT THEMSELVES, THAT’S WHAT SOCIETY IS FOR – to be hurt by them.
When they are done turning over the toxic assets to the proles via their government operatives, they will eventually pull the plug on the world’s economies and bankrupt the world.
They will make sure that their wealth is left intact in order to buy up the world for PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR. They will ELIMINATE THE COMPETITION NOT TIED INTO GOVERNMENT. They will CAPTURE STATE ASSETS.
Governments will go broke as their operatives in government execute their will. This is all PART OF THE PLAN.
Once the oligarchs have rolled up as many assets under their front corporations and seized control of as much nation state assets as they can (toll roads, water plants, power plants, etc…) and eliminated their competition, then they will hyperinflate and “balance their books,” all while wailing on about how “capitalism failed” and black holing the idea that they were the ones who criminally murdered it.
Got it?
Now, what does that mean here? Is QE done? It all depends on the oligarch decisions. If they can steal trillions from the ignorant proles and use QE to do it, why not? If the suckers keep lining up to get sucker punched, punch ’em, right?
“Man who would not reason (think and use his own observations), a man who could not reason for himself is therefore a beast of burden and meat on the table by choice and consent.”
~Albert PikeThey’ll continue to eat up the monetary wealth of society and blame the idiot morons who let them do it. You know, “survival of the fittest” and all. It is “nature’s” way, or so the psychopaths have taught us.
What they won’t do, AND THEY WILL MAKE THIS DETERMINATION *NOT* GOVERNMENT, is to destroy the dollar BEFORE turning those debt instruments and dollars into society’s real wealth.
It is sooooo elementary.
This *is* Art of War economic warfare and they mean to do severe harm to the world’s populations. They’ve set up a structure to starve the third world to death BY DESIGN. 25 million a year – Hitler in his darkest moments could never dream of such death… and to obfuscate it with a systemic weapon instead of a real weapon? Wow. Mao and Stalin are jealous as well.
pipefit post=2945 wrote:
In that case, why don’t they run a deficit of a million dollars per person (320 trillion) and give a million dollars to every person in the states?Your premise is wrong. Everyone in the United States, outside of the financial oligarchs, EXIST TO BE PREYED UPON, TO BE ROBBED, NOT GIVEN HANDOUTS.
You have the system exactly backwards.
pipefit post=2945 wrote:
You are quite out of date with your prediction. We are on the wrong side of the social security and medicare ponzi schemes, and their fictitious ‘trust’ funds. Apparently, you trust in the ‘trust’ funds, lol.Actually, everything is going according to plan. The financial oligarchs aren’t trying to save anything – they know the system is doomed… THEY CREATED TO BLOW UP IN OUR FACE!
QE isn’t about restarting the Ponzi scheme THAT MUST COLLAPSE at some point. It is all about quantitatively easing the losses of the oligarchs by transferring trillions in toxic assets to the proles and using public money to pump up the stock market so the insiders could get out at inflated prices.
Again, you probably think the government is sovereign. It isn’t. It is under the thumb of those PRIVATE INTERESTS, many of whom are FOREIGN, that finance the operations of the government as well as the candidacies of their political operatives.
Obama works for the financial oligarchs, NOT the poeple. Bush worked for the financial oligarchs, NOT the people.
Social security, Medicare, bank accounts, etc… will eventually default in the world’s biggest credit destruction bust… and the proles will be impoverished and the oligarchs will claim the Earth as their own.
pipefit post=2945 wrote:
All the chatter about eliminating the Bush tax cuts, restoring the prior social security tax rate, etc. is just that. I don’t think it will happen. But let’s say that it does happen, as a talking point. It won’t shrink the size of the federal budget deficit. Has austerity worked in Spain? In Greece? You shrink your deficit with economic growth, not by forcibly creating an economic contraction.One of the chief goals of debt based money IS TO DESTROY THE NATION STATE for the benefit of the financial oligarchs who WEAPONIZED MONEY by defining it as debt.
It isn’t a bug, it is a feature. Don’t you get it?
You can’t come to the chess board with checker pieces and expect to be able to play the game.
william post=2962 wrote: Its worth noting that Japan has not yet brought Fukushima under control. They hope to begin a clean up next year sometime. The size and scope of the fall out exceeds the perimeter so greatly the Island is in many ways divided in half. This is a game changer for this country and may in fact shut it down.
They are definitely FUBARed and internationally we need to consider how to prevent this many reactors from going into meltdown and just how many can be located in one area without posing so great a risk.
To me this is an example of over extended resources to supply the endless growth economy. As demands so greatly outstrips resources the country compromises protocols and safety.
This is not the conclusion but the precursor to the problem of suppling infinite growth without infinite resources. The short sited solution is to continuously compromise the rules so the public doesn’t realize.
The #1 driver of growth is the fraudulent debt based monetary Ponzi scheme that will collapse and its Ponzi operators.
If we had debt free money held in stable quantity and a populace that abhorred anything big (understanding big is bad) and wanted to be sustainable, it could.
Under a debt based Ponzi monetary system, the concept of sustainability is a non starter because the monetary system CAN’T BE STABLE.
Yet, the Ponzi operators and their Ponzi monetary scheme get a near complete pass – BECAUSE THEY CONTROL THE ESTABLISHMENT INSTITUTIONS VIA FINANCING THEM.
Who is the #1 producer of carbon? The Ponzi operators inflating the debt based Ponzi monetary scheme… This credit bubble correlates very nicely to a carbon bubble!
https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/3324744/wmdebt-graph-3-79k?tr=77
Carbon follows credit, ladies and gentlemen… that means the banksters are more to blame for excess carbon and enforce “grow or die” onto the population via their fraudulent debt based monetary system.
Not to mention these Central Banking cartel criminals finance the wars that are massive carbon emitters…
So why do I have to make this point – which is so obvious when the data is actually reviewed without the Big Finance Capital propaganda filter?
Because I’m not on their payroll – a payroll that self selects people who will say what they want them to say and will hush up what they want hushed up.
Hircus post=2948 wrote: [quote=pipefit post=2945][quote=TheTrivium4TW post=2942]
Hyperinflation in the drachma could easily be deflation in dollar terms.
When Argentina hyperinflated their currency, did that mean that an American with dollars lost purchasing power or gained purchasing power?
It depends on one’s perspective. Think about it for a bit, I’m sure you’ll get it..
So, you are predicting that, no matter the size of the budget deficit of the USA federal govt., the US dollar will INCREASE in purchasing power? In that case, why don’t they run a deficit of a million dollars per person (320 trillion) and give a million dollars to every person in the states?
How about looking at gold as your base monetary unit? From that point of view, the cost of American goods and American labor is decreasing. You can buy more stuff with the same number of ounces. That’s textbook deflation.Or anther thing to consider — if the Fed printed x% more money since 2008 and the economy hasn’t increased in size, then you’d expect (on average) all goods and services to cost x% more. So if money supply is up 25% and groceries up 10%, that could be considered deflation (less inflation than expected).
Gold as a currency isn’t good for the following reasons.1. The financial psychopaths own the vast majority of this. BTW, I suspect they could institute some form of gold standard to usher in the depression – and they’ll just blame the inflexibility of the gold standard and claim “nobody saw it coming.” I believe this is why the IMF is now floating the idea of a gold standard. The IMF are run by Art of War class criminal warriors – if they want it, watch your back.
2. Gold isn’t flexible and it doesn’t account for credit. The gold standard didn’t prevent the Great Depression, nor any of the other myriad of depressions we’ve seen in the past under a gold standard.
3. The gold standard has never worked in history, except for the rich to asset strip everyone else.
I get that it is shiny and cool and stores value, but money needs to be more than that – like accessible to poor folks and not so easily manipulated by the uber wealthy.
Do some research on Bill Still (The Secret of Oz on Youtube is a great place to start).
“Gold and money are separate things, gold is the trick mechanism by which you can control money. That is the root of all evil.”
~ Thomas Edisonhttps://s6.zetaboards.com/Bill_Still_Reforum/topic/1177306/1/
https://s6.zetaboards.com/Bill_Still_Reforum/topic/1176791/1/
Any analysis of “money supply” has to take into account credit as well. In spite of creating $2.5 trillion in *debt receipts,” aka “dollars,” per year, monetary and credit aggregates have essentially flat lined (small improvement).
Since that isn’t sustainable, what do you think happens when that $2.5 trillion goes away as the banksters eventually defend their trillions in debt paper and their cash?
There will be no bailouts for debtors… just servitude.
Bailouts are for the oligarchs… debtors are the “pod” bodies in the Matrix that the oligarchs suck dry.
I mean, isn’t it obvious by now?
Regarding money, I have found John Medaille’s essay {https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2012/01/friends-and-strangers-a-meditation-on-money/) on the subject to be very insightful and worth contemplating. It also provides plenty of ideas for how to keep economic activity going in a monetary collapse by using models which have worked in the past.
TheTrivium4TW post=2969 wrote:
There will be no bailouts for debtors… just servitude.
Bailouts are for the oligarchs… debtors are the “pod” bodies in the Matrix that the oligarchs suck dry.
I mean, isn’t it obvious by now?
Sorta correct, except that it really does depend on who you ARE as a Debtor. Really, the Oligarchs/Illuminati are the biggest Debtors of all. It is small debtors who suffer debt servitude issues, not big debtors. If you can ammass a BIG enough Debt, you become TBTF.
The problem with real BIG debtors is the way the Legal System is constructed. Anyone who borrow REALLY big does it under the cover of a “Corporation”, and by the LAW, unless you can prove some sort of malfeasance, just getting a corp into Debt is not a criminal offense for a manager of a corp.
So for say someone like Carl Icahn, he can load up a Corp he buys with Debt, pay himself well for a while and then when the Corp goes belly up, he walks away scot free with debt money the now defunct Corp cannot pay up on.
Really, it is this corporate architecture which prevents individuals from being held accountable for the malfeasance; there is no acountability in it. If you can afford to set up a Corp and buy the Scum Sucking Bottom Feeder Lawyers, you can steal as much as you would like to steal and never be held personally accountable. This methodology is of course not available to the small debtor.
MOST of the money though is created by BIG Debtors, Nation States and Multi National Corps. How do you “enslave” a Corporation? You can’t really, nor can you really enslave a Nation this way, unless the people of the Nation buy into the idea, which of course they usually do because they can;t figure out how to operate in teh ABSENCE of Money.
All you have to do to get rid of this form of slavery is get rid of the money entirely, Gold or Fiat based does not matter. Money is the ROOT of all Evil. Eliminate it, you eliminate 99.99% of the problems we created for ourselves. Of course though there is Hangover Problem, and even eliminating all money tomorrow won’t cure the Hangover.
RE
RE
ashvin post=2946 wrote: I don’t want people to think that I am a strong advocate of the Mad Max, total anarchy overnight scenario. When I say “Europe will be FUBAR”, that’s not really what I mean. When WWI and then WWII erupted over there, it’s not as if all life came to a grinding halt and people thought, “WOW, I can’t even imagine that this is happening right now!” or “I never could have imagined that this would happen”. I don’t think that’s necessarily what we will be thinking, either.
[…..]If it’s not Greece exiting the EU that sets off a chain reaction, then it may very well be something else, and if it’s not that something else, then maybe the breakdown ends up being less rapid and less concentrated.BUT, no matter what, the breakdown will occur and our lives will be dramatically changed. Over here in the developed world, we hold sacred this idea that none of the consequences of collapse, either occurring now gradually or materializing more rapidly in the (near) future, will ever get TOO painful for us or will be too much for us to handle. I believe that idea needs to be shattered, and quickly, if people want to have a good chance of understanding the reality of the risks we face, and reacting appropriately. That’s really the message here.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot. (No surprise–how can we NOT think about this?) But at the moment, I’m increasingly sitting on the now rather contrarian side of the prediction, and I doubt Greece will exit in the next 6 months. Maybe not even first. Mainly because the recent Greek vote was not a vote for an exit. It was simply a vote AGAINST austerity, as evidenced by the highly fractured election results. The next election is framed much more as a vote for or against an exit, and I think the Greek people might surprise us by voting heavily in favour of one of the nearly-out-of-favour mainstream parties, crazy as that sounds. These parties are adjusting their platforms as we speak.
As you point out, Ash, when WWII hit, people probably weren’t thinking “I can’t believe this is happening.” Their world had deteriorated so much that the people knew it was coming. I don’t think the people of Europe, or the people of Greece, “know” an exit is coming, and so I think the impetus for such an exit is absent…yet. The exit comes when all is lost. The Greeks still truly hope they can go back to the way things were only a few short years ago. They really think they can reject austerity and stay in the Euro. And you know, given the mutually assured destruction Europe faces, they might just be right. Instead, the first exit might blindside us all and come from little Portugal, who we’ve been hearing almost nothing about of late.
Just more conjecture. But I think I’d be shocked by a Geek exit. And I think the Greeks would be shocked by it too. Which is why I don’t think it can happen yet. They have so much more to lose first before that happens. In short, the irony is they have to lose everything before the people really believe that the exit is worth it–and at that point they have nothing left.
They really think they can reject austerity and stay in the Euro. And you know, given the mutually assured destruction Europe faces, they might just be right.
Here is the key phrase that is being kept out of the discussion.
… mutually assured destruction…
The Greeks have a bigger gun that the EU
reposted from doomsteader article “Civilization, Really?” because I believe it is germane here as well.
The problem Freud had is that his outlook was anthropomorphic.
Take this paragraph, for example:
“Freud’s perspective is psychological, not philosophical and moral. He is less interested in what we should do than what we do in fact do, though he framed the questions as to whether or not we should regard civilization as a benefit or harm. This “should” however, is less a moral should than an investigation to see if this course of action is likely to lead to more or less happiness. Freud seems not to believe that his choice of happiness — the avoidance of pain and the achievement of pleasure — is a value. Rather, this need is implanted in us by nature in the deepest instincts with which we have evolved.”
Freud’s perpective is anthropomorphic rather than psychological. His claim of objectivity and disinterest in morality (i.e. the “rightness” or “wrongness” of some human behavior) is false because, as you pointed out, he is very interested in whether our actions produce a “benefit” or a “harm” in the form of generally accepted cultural practices in civilization.
Since he has a clear axe to grind against the golden rule because of the alleged unhappiness that the mythical super-ego visits on humans when they can’t give their aggressive/sexual nature full reign, it is normal and expected that would eschew morality as a positive influence on humans. He is clearly at odds with Aristotle who said that happiness cannot be directly achieved but can be obtained only through a life of virtue. Well, now we know where aggressive and sexual drives and behavior originate in the brain (amygdala) and where the “super-ego” resides as well (prefrontal cortex). We understand the biochemistry of aggression, sex and delayed gratification as well as feelings of ‘wellbeing’ and ‘happiness’.
The reality of using the basest instincts of humans to manipulate their purchasing habits (Freud’s nephew) and distract them through dog and pony shows so they can be scammed into wars and economic slavery does not mean that Freud was accurate or objective in his search for the formula for human happiness (I guess he would call it a non-neurotic or well adjusted existence).What he needed to do and what we must do now is look at human existence as a function (as in mathematics) of the ecosphere. The fact that we are a product of the ecosphere requires us to recognize that we cannot view our happiness or viability separately from the viability of the ecosphere. If it’s viable, it is right. If it’s not viable, it is wrong. Science is the search for truth. The objective truth of the ecosystem components deems it WRONG to use resources in such a way that you diminish or destroy a portion of the ecosphere. The only RIGHT behavior for humans and their civilization is a behavior that recycles ALL resource extraction and any other human activity so the ecosphere remains in balance.
Our self awareness and advanced tool making MUST be accompanied by sustainable practices, period. If they aren’t, as is the present case, we and a large portion of the ecosphere perish because of our incredibly stupid practices.
Freud did something very valuable, however. He made it clear (indirectly, I believe) that we as a species have enormeous difficulty delaying gratification and easily give in to short term gratification. The industrial revolution and the consequent ability to do multi-generational damage to the ecosphere required MORE morality, not amorality. Our civilization needed to make it clear to all its’ membrs that we cannot mess it up for future humans and millions of other species that dwell on this planet because it is suicidal. This required generational level delayed gratification rather than Wall Street mad max resource extraction, war profiteering and I’m okay, you’re okay morality. We now know that giving in to that version of ‘happiness’ in our ‘civilization’ that Freud espouses as the ‘well adjusted’, neurosis free, aggressive, sexual desire driven human must be dumped if we and most of the planet are to survive. We need a world class super-ego, in other words.
A final note. In Freud’s day, the elite were noted, like they are today, for giving lip service to ethics and controlled behavior as well as integrity in business practices but were, in fact, the most conscience free members of society in everything they did from fomenting wars to rampant sexual activity. They were, and are, amygdala controlled people. Freud was just voicing, with great erudition and myriad rationalizations, what his elite group wanted to hear. Well, they heard it and so did Madison Avenue. And that is why, as Ashvin said the other day, things are FUBAR.
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