Showing posts with label economic collapse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic collapse. Show all posts

Saturday, June 1, 2024

"The Wall of Death for Western Economies" by Elizabeth Nickson

 

Source: Welcome to Absurdistan

The Wall of Death for Western Economies

This is an easy fix - you just have to demand it

 
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When I drove 20,000 miles through rural America a few years back, I was struck by the dilapidated nature of, well, just about everything. The towns were rundown, there were thousands of abandoned farms and ranches and family houses.  Sidewalks broken, every other shop was abandoned. Fields ran untended, forests filled with brush and fire ladders, hangers-on in trailers with a junkyard dog and rifle racks on trucks. Hunting was a necessity, not a sport.

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In sharp contrast I grew up in a country village of 500 surrounded by tidy productive prosperous farms, and we were a going concern with stone and brick buildings, and beautiful crafted family houses, lawns and weirs, a village pond with ducks, mature trees.  Some estates, but not vulgar monstrosities like today. Everyone adult chipped in. It was vivid, active, close-connected, multi-generational and I never wanted to leave.

What the hell happened?

I didn’t fully understand until a hydrologist in Denver, retired from a career at the Department of Interior, told me at lunch in an Olive Garden, that in the mid-70’s, the blanket instructions coming down from DC switched from enabling business and development to preventing it. He, in his retirement, had a small ranch and on his wells, four meters from four different federal and state bureaucracies, indicating just how closely he was being surveilled. Over the years, regulations had come down so thick and punitive, near everyone operated in a catch-22 situation. You might hurdle one set of regs, only to discover that your success meant another set of regs cancelled you. It was so irrational it was fiendish, I thought to myself. Now of course, I see it as actually fiendish, the work of evil. The government was deliberately ruining peoples’ lives, drawing them down, impoverishing them, with malice.

The only prosperity to be seen was in the rather splendid buildings of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the palatial “farmhouses” owned by what I came to recognize as government farmers, the ones who had lobbied hard and got all the subsidies. Oh yes, and ethanol plants, one of the first green scams. They ate money.

Last week I was in the provincial capital near me, picking up something in Oak Bay Village, ultra-posh in a villagy Englishy way, half-timbered buildings, human-scaled, friendly. And found it to be in the same state, everything covered in a wash of grey, empty shops, abandoned stores, people shriveled and tired.  I used to take my mother shopping there, and since she died, hadn’t had the heart to go back. Therefore I was disturbed, even shocked at the change. If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dying….I’m sorry, Leading Indicator.

If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dying….I’m sorry, Leading Indicator.

In fact, in Canada, even the food banks are running out of food. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries because people can’t afford to bury their dead. Chronically injured soldiers are offered Medically Assisted Dying in lieu of treatment. MAID has saved the “free” health system $90 million in end-of-life care, since it began. So we have to expect more of that.

A recent report showed the MAID drugs mean you drown to death, but are paralyzed so can’t communicate your distress. That means you can drown for 45 minutes before you actually die  – autopsies have proved it. That is how careless our health bureaucracy is. I cannot watch another single mother weeping on TikTok because she cannot feed her children and is always sick. Another once athletic mountain climber sit in a wheelchair detailing her story of neurological pain so intense after vaccine, her husband had to sit with her so she wouldn’t kill herself. Every bureaucracy is killing us.

typical “nice” house in rural America

The U.S. still has the healthiest economy in the world. The thirteen other less rich countries are in per capita recession, which means GDP per person is shrinking: Canada, France, Germany, UK, Australia. Japan just registered a -2% growth rate, but it is already a zombie economy with families living paycheck to paycheck. Like addicts.

It may be that all I have is a hammer but, to me, this is due to impossible green mandates, the choking of energy supplies, the insane expense of green energy infrastructure which doesn’t produce and doesn’t “save money” and above all regulation that means that every job in a small cap public company labors under $50,000 of government ESG mandates. For every $1 you pay your average employee, you pay the government $1.50. That’s before taxes. Not that you have any income to tax. Government is literally eating us alive.

The U.S., according to Bloomberg, is facing a Wall of Death. Or Debt. Bloomberg says 42% of small public companies are losing money; not only that they face a $832 billion wall of debt, $600 billion of which comes due at much much higher interest rates in the next two years.

Let’s be really clear about where that debt came from. It came from people like our Fed Chair who asset stripped all these companies, loaded them with debt, mis-stated their value and sold them on. This is how Jerome Powell made his $50,000,000. He ruined a widget manufacturer. That debt is his dirty-but-not-illegal play; his fortune, his I got mine and now I’m in “public service”.  Suffer you peons, suffer more. And the dirty profoundly unethical play of all his associates. When Warren Buffet says he has $180 billion in cash because the market is over-valued, that is down to him and his pals loading up every small and medium manufacturer in the U.S. with debt, selling them on, whereupon another pirate buys the company, mis-states its value, borrows a bunch of money against it, raises the price, and sells it on. ALL small cap street profits in the fifteen years come from that criminal activity by our financial elites. Of course the market is over-valued. They over-valued it to steal from it.

Leonard describes in detail how they stripped and sold on every small corporation and loaded it with debt

The big companies only carry 50% of the debt of small caps. For small caps, the absolute heroes in this story, in the first quarter of 2024, their sales rose .3%, but inflation for that quarter was 1.1%. Bank of America says that small cap earnings will drop by one-third in the next year. Thanks to the miracle of Bidenomics, sales are dead other than the doom spending of hopeless millennials.

In contrast, big companies have gained 14% and big tech stocks earn 90% of all the gains. Where do you think the next play might be? That’s right, tech.

Median priced houses are now worth 7.8 times median income, twice the normal level, that ratio even above the housing bubble of 08.  Housing prices are slated to rise 20% in the next year. One in five renters are either skipping meals or selling personal belongings to make rent.  Rents will rise double digits in the coming year according to the New York Fed. Millennials have given up, reverting to a nihilistic hand-to-mouth existence.

According to economist Peter St. Onge, who aggregated many of the above states, the first twenty rungs of the ladder have been knocked out.

This is due entirely to the gutting of the heartland, the shipping of manufacturing to the CCP slave state, and the subsequent financialization of the economy. Value is now calculated on the future labor of people whose jobs are being killed off.  They are financializing something that is dying. They know it, you know it, the government knows it.

The core reason for the invasion at the border is for immigrants they can pay dirt wages to keep the whole thing going for a few more years. Your kids, your future? Forget about it.

Of course the bankers have a solution. You know they do. It’s not a sensible, compassionate, creative and exciting solution whereby your life and mine is going to get much much better. It is a solution that means your kids and grandkids are going to live in a world wrought with poverty-driven crime, and dying cities and towns. But never mind! The market will make out like a bandit. The secret lies in the fact that 90% of all gains are currently being made by the digital aristocracy.

That will continue and this is how. To make up for destroying production, the government and markets will list you, your house, yard, cars, boats etc., as a federal asset. As well as national parks, conservation areas, wildlife areas, all ecological study zones, and so on. Then they will borrow against it. Everything you own, because of our federal debt, will be theirs.

The secret, obviously lies in the fact that currently 90% of all gains being made by the digital aristocracy,

It’s the only way. We are de-developing; correction, we are being forced to de-develop. We are de-industrializing, and our hard assets, our water, land and mineral resources are being sequestered from use. We cannot use anything to build anything. We won’t even own our houses, our gardens. We will have a senior partner in our financial lives who tells us what we may do and how much oxygen and water and power we may use. We are finished. We are future peasants.

The Play

Earlier this year, American Stewards, a few state governors and a handful of Congress people managed to stop the SEC from installing a rule allowing for the financialization of America’s national parks. But under the radar, because no media does any work whatsoever on this file, the Biden adminstration has reworked the proposal. Herewith is what is happening in the U.S.

The 2030 Agenda means that 30% of America’s lands have to be turned into a nature preserve by 2030. All those withdrawals from use hold incredible natural wealth and beauty never to be used or seen by Americans. The April 22, 2024, Fact Sheet notes some of the significant land and mineral withdrawals made to help reach 30×30. That wealth could be used by Americans to build cities and companies and full-on effulgent family and community lives. But it is to be locked away. How much is being locked away? The Biden administration estimates that land held privately, one-third of the U.S. to be worth $32 Trillion. So 2030 lands are worth $32 trillion.

So the idea is to lock away at least $32 trillion worth of resources. While people can’t make their rent. While single mothers weep and beg on socials. While people are electing to die because it is too expensive to live. While an entire generation has no hope and is descending into nihilism.

American Stewards reported the two significant Earth Day announcements released from the White House

“The Administration has already protected more than 41 million acres of lands and waters, and President Biden is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any President in history. This includes establishing five new national monuments and restoring protections for three more; creating four new national wildlife refuges and expanding five more; protecting the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, the nation’s most visited wilderness area; safeguarding Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska; and withdrawing Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Thompson Divide in Colorado from further oil and gas leasing to protect thousands of sacred sites and pristine lands.”

Next, they unveiled a new website, conservation.gov that houses the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas mapping tool. The Atlas was created to track the progress of 30×30 including the protected status of the lands as well as quantifying natural processes such as photosynthesis and pollination used to manufacture an arbitrary ecosystem service value.”

This is where the digital comes in. All those lands have to be surveilled. All those assets, including you and your house and your car, have to be surveilled. The money that will require installing these surveillance tools will be made by the digital titans, because that’s where the money is, now that lands, resources, labor have been destroyed.

As American Stewards reports: in January of 2023, the White House announced the “National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental – Economic Statistics.” Since then, they have been working to establish a methodology to value the ecosystem services.

There are four accounts: Land, Water, Air Emissions and Economic Activity.

The Pilot Land Account measures the economic activity and total market value for all the land in the United States, 2.3 billion acres. They estimate that at around $100 trillion, which includes the 30% owned by humans.

In essence, the administration is conscripting private citizens’ land to secure the national debt, unbeknown to the American people and Congress. And using common land as well. Common land is owned by the people of the country, not the government and not the Nature Conservancy. It is yours. But, they are developing mechanisms to make it theirs. This is the first step.

The Pilot National Air Emissions Account “measures greenhouse gas emissions associated with specific industries on a national scale.” And you. Your CO2 emissions will be tracked and your allowance measured.

Ten years ago I sat in a rancher’s house deep in Wyoming and he told me that his land would be used as collateral for the National Debt that China holds. I felt dread in the pit of my stomach because I felt instinctively he was right. Subsequently, I don’t know how many people told me that was impossible, I was wrong, he was wrong, crazy.

No baby, we weren’t wrong. They are monetizing all public and private land to pay or support the national debt. And the way they are doing it, is by shutting down economic activity, across the board. We will be a resource to be played, monetized, surveilled and restricted for the profits of the market, and the destructive machinations of the bureaucracy.

And all the money to be made from it is digital. And that money, those resources they are stealing? They belong to us.

Tomorrow, I will describe in detail the players in this game, how the National Security State, Mossad, the PayPal Mafia, Drexel Burnam heirs, President Trump’s economic advisers, are working to destroy the hope of South and Central America. It is complex, fiendish and fascinating. Absurdistan is running a series starting today, pointing out that the Green takeover, mostly surreptitious is driving the world’s economy into the dirt. It is based on falsified science, and convoluted financial ideas that fail repeatedly. Fix this, and we will be living in a Golden Age.


Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org

Monday, December 4, 2023

"The Economic Writing is On the Wall, and Professor Putin is Holding the Chalk" by Phil Butler

 


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Source: New Eastern Outlook

04.12.2023 Author: Phil Butler

The Economic Writing is On the Wall, and Professor Putin is Holding the Chalk

The Economic Writing is On the Wall, and Professor Putin is Holding the Chalk

In the wake of the most drastic sanctions ever placed on a nation, Russia’s economy is a modern miracle. However, in the Western press, Vladimir Putin’s administration is on borrowed time economically and in every other facet of progress. However, the reality is that Russia’s economy is growing three times faster than that of the Eurozone.

Ursula von der Leyen and her colleagues in the EU shot off both feet when the bloc followed Washington’s lead. This, and other boneheaded measures, reveal to all the world that European leadership are nothing more than modern satraps to the American empire. They may as well be viceroys or chieftains of the Achaemenid Empire, doing what they are told or else. But their loyalties and temperaments are not the story here; their malfeasance against the interests of their own people is.

According to some Western analysts, Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) will grow by 1.5 percent in 2024. By comparison, expectations for the Eurozone economy’s growth next year are a mere 0.5 percent. This is by analysis from Russia’s enemy, if we can finally use this term. Like the previous year, these estimates do not match what’s happening in Russia. Recently, Vladimir Putin said that Russia’s economic growth was set to exceed 3% this year, slightly better than previous official forecasts. And there’s no reason to underestimate the “miracle” Putin’s administration has managed to pull out of the hat.

Looking at the EU’s most powerful economy, this miraculous Russian trend seems almost unbelievable. With economic activity in Germany expected to decline by 0.3% in 2023 and Luxembourg’s growth for 2023 coming in at half what it was in 2022, we see a grim picture for the people and businesses of the EU. To make this reality sting more for Ursula von der Leyen and her benefactors, most of the economic decline in the EU is because of the loss of Russia as a trade partner, investment source, and energy provider. Western experts predict that real GDP will grow by 2.4 percent (1.6% – according to OECD) in the United States in 2023 and then fall to 0.8 percent in 2024. For Americans, this means the people have not seen the worst of the disastrous Biden Administration’s executive idiocy yet.

As we know, Russia began its military campaign in Ukraine in February 2022 after Kyiv’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, the clear buildup of a NATO contingent there, and the continual killing of Russian speakers in the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk regions. America and the Europeans are practising a massively expensive proxy war on Russia, and none of the West’s economic shifts has stated the looming depression set to hit Western nations.

Meanwhile, Russian firms successfully reoriented most of the trade to the BRICS partners, Brazil, India, China and South Africa, as well as to Turkey and Kazakhstan. And since the last BRICS conference, dozens of nations have shown interest in joining this bloc. Relations between Russia, China, India, Iran, North Korea, and many Latin American and African nations reveal a multipolar world unfolding and one that encircles the United States. With all Washington’s talk of encircling and containing Russia and the other nations I mentioned, isn’t it a cruel irony that it is my country being reined in, ringed in, and potentially left out in the cold if something does not change? The Ukraine conflict is lost, and Russia more or less just sat still until Zelensky’s human and armaments resources dried up. Now Israel is in a conflict where things are going horribly for the Zionists. The Syrian regime change backfired. Egypt is now being leveraged more heavily from the East than from the West. Despite all the fancy footwork Biden’s team has done, Turkey is emerging as a major power. And the story goes on and on and on.

As an American, it’s sad to see what our leaders have done to my country. One look at once-thriving cities like Detroit, New Haven, Memphis, and Stockton, California, warns of the coming fall nationwide. And one bustling Camden, New Jersey, is a dystopian mess with almost half the population living in abject poverty. Such cities have the highest crime rates and are deemed almost unlivable by real estate forecasters. Meanwhile, Biden and his colleagues on The Hill funnel hundreds of billions for far-off proxy wars and to leverage third-order nations for their resources to feed our wealthy class.

Is Russia writing on the wall the fate of a dying Western hegemony? Some of us can hear Putin’s chalk screeching across the blackboard. Russia is conducting a class on “how to” succeed no matter what.

 

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Sunday, April 30, 2023

"The Banking Collapse Has Begun…Shush, Don’t Tell the Kids" by Rusere Shoniwa

 

The Banking Collapse Has Begun…Shush, Don’t Tell the Kids

A boy holding money
 Read Time:26 Minutes

Published first on www.plagueonbothhouses.com on 11 April 2023.


Three US banks and Credit Suisse collapsed in March. At the centre of the US disaster scene was Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th largest US bank (out of a total of 4746), making it the largest bank to fail since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Here’s how the Bank of England’s (BoE) governor attempted to mollify a Treasury select committee:

“I don’t think we are at all in the place we were in in 2007 … but we have to be very vigilant”.   

To be fair to the guvnor, he is disingenuously correct – we are not in the same place as the pre-2008 GFC, simply because things are in fact far worse now than they were back then. Having got off to a fairly good start in the art of diplomacy – the skill of being more or less dishonest without making a provably false statement – he proceeded to blow it by saying that he didn’t “think there’s a problem going forward”. Hence the title of this piece.

Without labelling the guvnor an out-and-out liar, I shall attempt to explain why his statement is patently not true.

What just happened?

Back in August 2022, based on a tip from William Engdahl of Global Research, I explained why I thought that the bond market could be the touchpaper for the $303 trillion post-2008 debt bonfire. In quiet times, bonds are a safe investment for banks, but their market trading value is inversely proportional to the prevailing interest rates. The effect of Central Bank rate hikes has been to seriously deflate the bond market, which is the heart of the financial system. Wind the clock forward to March 2023 and it turns out it was the bonds wot done it for SVB. But there could have been other, murkier factors at play, more of which later. 

SVB was heavily invested in Treasury Bonds, but as interest rates rose, the bonds declined in value. SVB was thus sitting on paper that was worth far less than the bank had paid for it. If forced to sell that paper, it would realise heavy losses. And that’s exactly what happened when its customers, many of whom are in the technology industry, began making large withdrawals from their accounts. SVB was forced to sell their depressed bonds to meet the sharp and unexpected increase in customer withdrawals, but in the end couldn’t keep up because of the losses it was making on liquidating its bonds. The sudden withdrawals that precipitated its demise are discussed further below, under the heading: Do these US bank failures mark the beginning of the Fed’s war on crypto?

Where things get really interesting is why and how SVB was saved. The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insures bank deposits up to $250,000. However, most of SVB’s customers had deposits over $250,000, which immediately tells you that these were not ordinary customers. Fearing the contagion effect of so many high-value depositors going under, the FDIC decided to step in and save them all even though most of the deposits were uninsured. I will discuss the significance of this later. 

The FDIC then oversaw the sale of SVB’s good assets to First Citizens Bank while retaining in receivership a mere $90 billion of risky assets rejected by the buyer and which were responsible for sinking SVB in the first place. To be sure, not all of that $90 billion is worthless, but it was too risky for First Citizens Bank to touch, and when these assets are eventually liquidated, an estimated loss of $20 billion will be borne by the FDIC. As a result, this cost will effectively be spread out across the banking sector in the form of increased premiums, which banks will recover by charging customers more interest and / or giving them less interest on savings. So, rich venture capitalists who forgot to take precautions in limiting their deposits to the insured value have just got a free get-out-of-jail card, but there will be no free lunch for you, Joe Public.

First Citizens Bank has acquired some $110 billion in assets and $72 billion in loans for $0.5 billion – a fraction of the price SVB was worth before it went bust. HSBC Holdings Plc announced on March 13 that it would buy the UK arm of the company, Silicon Valley Bank UK Limited, for £1.

In anticipation of more bank runs in the near term, the US Fed has also sanctioned a loan fund program that financial institutions can draw on in the event of sudden unexpected depositor demands. It is set to run for a year to March 2024.  

Let’s review some of these facts to understand the bigger picture behind this curious bank failure that morphed into a bank heist.

All depositors are equal but some are more equal than others

The SVB depositor profile had many tech start-up businesses with venture capital backing — hence most deposits being more than the insured threshold of $250,000. The rescue under a Biden Administration of depositors perceived as allied to the Democratic Party is a sore point for pundits to the right of the political spectrum who feel they should have been hung out to dry. With no real evidence that this particular bank run would have caused a systemic failure, some pundits have argued that this was really about saving Big Tech venture capitalists who should have hedged their risks but chose not to. This in turn raises valid questions about whether the depositors’ financial backers who stood to lose might have unduly influenced the FDIC’s decision to step in and save them.

No problem going forward? 

Recall the BoE governor’s assurance that we should all just keep on moving because there’s nothing to see here? Well, I beg to differ based on an analysis of the parlous state of US banks that was done by John Titus roughly four weeks before SVB, Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital went to the wall in early to mid-March. As Titus astutely points out, the US banking system is going into “cardiac arrest” and yet the World Economic Forum, the global oligarchy’s club that touts itself as the leader in providing solutions to all of humanity’s social and economic problems, issued a 100-page report on global risks which doesn’t even hint at any sort of banking or monetary crisis. This from an institution with the word ‘economic’ in it.

As Titus points out, the reason why the looming US banking crisis does not appear on the WEF’s list of ‘risks’ is because it’s not a list of risks. It’s a list of signposts about where the psychopathic controllers intend to meddle next and the cover stories that will be trotted out when very real risks like the debt crisis end up “blow[ing] everyone’s face off”, as Titus graphically expresses it. Hence the World Economic Forum is concerned about climate change and cyber insecurity but has no views whatsoever about the potential impact of rising interest rates on the debt ponzi scheme it has effectively sponsored for the past 30 years.

It is therefore somewhat remiss of a forum with the descriptors ‘world’ and ‘economic’ not to devote even a passing mention to the state of US banking when US dollar denominated assets account for 60% of the global total, and US banks are the biggest source of US dollar liquidity in the world. The FDIC’s latest (Q3/2022) Quarterly Banking Profile that was available when Titus shared his analysis was for September 2022 (released 1 December). It’s a succinct summary of the state of US banks, and what it lacks in timeliness is more than made up for in quality. The economic fundamentals driving his analysis will not have changed, and in fact the March bank runs confirmed things got worse.

The starting point of Titus’ analysis reinforces the point that SVB is by no means unique – US banks collectively are in the same precarious situation. The composite unrealised losses reported by 4,746 US banks on the type of investment grade securities that sank SVB amount to $690 billion. The comparative losses reported immediately prior to the 2008 US bank bailout were less than $100 billion, so we are talking about current losses of an order of magnitude of 7 times the 2008 situation.

But this isn’t the whole story. Once we factor in other hidden losses and discount “fairy dust assets”, a reported net positive composite banking balance sheet turns into an insolvent one. Here’s how it works:

  • The reported net cushion of all 4,746 US banks –assets minus liabilities – is $2.165 trillion. That’s alright then…but is it?
  • Whoops, remember we need to knock off $0.69 trillion for those unrealised losses on bonds and mortgage-backed securities not booked by the banks but which will be incurred should they need to sell them to meet a liquidity demand. So now the cushion is $1.48 trillion.
  • Let’s knock that down further with a best-case scenario for losses on another category of assets that no-one is talking about – loans and leases of $12 trillion. Titus applies the same discount (11.7%) to that category as the banks themselves had applied to the stressed bond securities in the bullet point above to arrive at a further unrealised loss of $1.4 trillion. Now the cushion is $0.08 trillion, or $80 billion.
  • Included in the starting net cushion of $2.165 trillion is an asset described as goodwill and valued by the banks at $0.425 trillion. As its name suggests, it is not an asset you can take to the bank and, as an accountant by training, I can confirm Titus’s assessment of it as “fairy dust”. After subtracting the fairy dust, the cushion has been wiped out. It’s now negative $0.35 trillion or $350 billion in the red

I hesitate to call the BoE governor a liar for saying that he doesn’t “think there’s a problem going forward”, so I will be diplomatic and just say that he may be correct provided that chronic US bank insolvency is defined in economic textbooks as “not a problem going forward”. 

Why is the Fed provoking a financial crisis?

Having proven that US banks are collectively insolvent, Titus goes on to address a 350-billion-dollar question – why is the Fed provoking a financial crisis by driving up and holding interest rates at levels guaranteed to stress core bank assets and create a liquidity crisis? He demonstrates that in every single banking liquidity crisis that has preceded this one, the Fed has stepped in to increase the value of the banks’ assets and ease liquidity by driving interest rates down. When that hasn’t worked, it has resorted to printing money out of nothing and injecting cash into the banking system by buying up the banks’ assets. That makes things worse in the long run by merely delaying the inevitable reckoning, but until now, they seemed to want to avoid immediate calamity. Titus does not provide a direct answer to the big question, but let’s read between the lines. 

The casino phase of banking, which began in the early 1990s and correlated with the death of manufacturing in the West, is now over, and they know it. What we are now seeing is an attempt by the Central Bank mafia at a controlled demolition of the debt ponzi scheme and a transition into a new system of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The Central Bank mafia has controlled economies through the monetary system for well over 100 years and they aren’t about to give up that control just because the current system is dying. CBDC is a fiat currency system just like the one that’s in flames right now, but Central Banks want a shinier replacement fiat system because fiat currencies offer corrupt banksters the control they crave. 

The CBDC fiat currency is the perfect adjunct to the Fourth Industrial Revolution of a digital world powered by data, delivering a level of hyper-centralised control that will make us monetary slaves. With CBDCs, Central Banks could exponentially increase their control over the money supply because they will be able to control how, when and where it is spent, in real time and at the flick of a switch.

A crisis is being provoked because there is no longer any choice and, if a crisis is inevitable, it may as well be used to bring about the desired end state – CBDCs. Increasing interest rates was never going to be effective in controlling inflation because the root cause of inflation is primarily rampant money printing combined with artificially jacked up energy prices. There is plenty of oil and gas to go around but the West has decided to use the Ukraine war as an excuse to impose energy sanctions on itself. It even took the precaution of blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines to pre-empt the possibility of Germany getting the shakes for some of that cheap Russian gas and throwing in the towel on Nato’s proxy war with Russia. 

Applying the interest rate lever to inflation at this juncture is like walking into a burning building with a bottle of water. It merely provides the pretext for fighting inflation but has the desired effect of flushing out the worst banking zombies or turning softer targets into easy prey for the cartel to swoop in on. So rather than saving banks, the aim now is to collapse the junk debt balloon with as little pain as possible to the giants who already control banking while consolidating the remaining banks into a hyper monopoly represented by the titans in charge – the banks that are too big to fail. 

A tiny number of banks who are already part of the Central Bank cartel is a prerequisite for administration of the desired hyper-centralised CBDC system. The SVB collapse provides a microcosm of how this controlled demolition and consolidation might work to bring about the new economic and social slavery system of CBDCs.

The three Cs – Controlled demolition, Consolidation and CBDCs

There are strong arguments for and against why SVB should have been hung out to dry. On the one hand, there is obviously a strong case for rich venture capitalists bearing the risk that goes with their job description. On the other hand, there is something to be said for avoiding the unpredictability and potential chaos that could ensue from letting the 16th largest US bank fail. But the arguments either for or against are in fact irrelevant for the purposes of understanding how things will work during The Collapse because what SVB teaches us is that Central Banks will use their power to pick and choose which zombies live and which ones die. 

We’ve just witnessed the controlled demolition of three banks whose assets were acquired for a song by favoured survivors. The end of this game of banking musical chairs, if it goes according to plan, will be a consolidated last-bank-standing cartel that rules over everything, making the roll-out and administration of CBDCs much easier while providing a tighter noose for consumers.

Tellingly, nobody (or at least nobody the banking cartel cares about) really got hurt in the SVB collapse. The venture capital depositors were saved by the FDIC despite holding sums well in excess of the insured amount. But what about the owners of SVB? They must be in pain right? Well no. Who owns SVB? The largest shareholders are institutional investors – Vanguard Group, SSgA Funds Management, BlackRock, Alecta Pension Insurance Mutual, JPMorgan Investment Management. The bank that acquired SVB’s good assets for a fraction of the cost, First Citizens Bank, is owned 67.85% by the same institutional investors that owned SVB. The incestuous ownership of banks by the same asset managers and institutional investors who own 60-80% of nearly all listed shares means that these collapses and acquisitions amount to a wealthy man transferring money from his left pocket to his right pocket. The $20 billion loss suffered on the depressed $90 billion bond portfolio is offset by the gains made on buying the good assets for nothing. 

Furthermore, rinsing that $20 billion loss through the FDIC will translate into higher interest rates on loans for the consumer (or even lower/negative rates of interest on deposits) and, should such losses get too big for the FDIC to handle, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be passed on to the taxpayer via the Federal Reserve.

Provoking bank collapses to catalyse consolidations carries the risk of unpredictable chaos, and we should not fall into the trap of believing that the psychopaths in the financial mafia aren’t capable of miscalculation. There is as much stupidity as there is cunning in all of this because if they really knew what they were doing, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. That said, it’s easy to see how a series of bank runs followed by bail-ins would “frighten the pants off everyone”, which is the name of the game in politics today, according to the former UK Health secretary. The most secure prison is one that people are begging to be locked up in, and this can be achieved by leveraging maximum fear to convince them that their money would be safe in a CBDC digital wallet, lovingly watched over by Big Brother.

At what point could this be achieved? As Ed Dowd puts it, at the “bottom of the crisis”. This is when sufficient consolidation has been achieved, when the CBDC infrastructure is ready to roll out, when sufficient pain has been inflicted, and when people have had enough and will agree to whatever solution is put in front of them, however little sense it makes.

A chronic prolonged period of immiseration will act as an economic deflationary lid on both debt and inflation and a steroidal shot for wealth concentration, more of which below. The endgame is CBDCs because, while the current fiat monetary system has failed, as they all do in the end, the banking cartel will lose all of its power unless it can monopolise control over a new fiat currency. 

To understand why a new fiat currency would not solve the problems of the old one, let’s try to get clear about the similarity and difference between the current system and the new CBDC system that central banks want to move to. The similarity is that they’re both fiat currency – central bank-issued and not backed by a commodity like gold. Printing money became standard operating procedure, with the result that the West is hurtling towards the same demise as a country it has spent the better part of twenty years laughing at – Zimbabwe. The mafia that controls the Central Banks hasn’t suggested that they’ll fix a lock on fiat v2 that will jam the money-printing button should a rogue BoE guvnor develop a twitchy finger and try to click away at the mouse to create extra trillions in response to the latest bank liquidity crisis. So, you would be completely justified in concluding that jumping from fiat 1 to fiat 2 is hardly a remedy for the money printing woes we are in now. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what a Parliamentary Committee that looked into CBDCs thought too. Its report, cleverly titled “Central bank digital currencies: a solution in search of a problem?” (they must have had help from The Sun on that one), concluded:

“there is no convincing case for why the UK needs a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The committee found that while a CBDC may provide some advantages, it could present significant challenges for financial stability and the protection of privacy.” [emphasis added]

Job done then? Not quite. Central banks are not in the habit of listening to parliaments, even on the rare occasions such as this one when the latter actually do their job, so don’t think for one moment that the BoE guvnor has shelved his plans to roll out CBDCs

It’s the difference that should really concern us, and the difference is fundamentally that CBDCs move money from a medium of exchange to a medium of control. It’s that simple. And that’s why they want to do it. There is no other reason. And if money stops being a medium of exchange and becomes a medium of control, then I would suggest we completely abandon our now pathetic pretence at democracy – shut parliament down, rule by decree and instruct the opposition party to agree with the government of the day on everything that really matters. Oh, we’ve already done that for a virus, have we?

Well, we could go a step further by making sure any rogue MPs in the new pretend parliament are properly censored. For instance, should a rogue MP make a speech that really embarrasses the de facto one-party state, then one of the other 649 stooges could simply instruct his fellow stooges to leave the august House before the speech begins and then make sure YouTube blocks the speech so the general public cannot witness the descent into fascism. Oh, that’s actually happened, has it? Well then, I guess the end of the pretence of democracy would explain why they’re wrapping the whole sordid farce up with CBDCs, a foolproof system of financial slavery, to formalise the totalitarian system that was introduced during covid!

Central banks want a digitally modified fiat system which they believe will be failsafe owing to the enhanced control it offers over the money supply and the economy. But that means failsafe controls over you and how you are allowed to spend. That’s all a CBDC is – hyper-digitalised control of the banking system and of you. This hyper-digitalised control will be packaged as a selling point, and it will sound appealing to many because everyone wants control, order and discipline, especially when it comes to money. But what people will not realise is that the control applies as much to them as to the money supply. 

And make no mistake – this centralised digital control will allow a tiered system in which the rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me principle will apply. As your CBDC rewards you with a bonus earthworm for performing your civic duty of munching 35 spiders this month, rest assured that WEF acolytes will not have their dining at premium steak houses curbed and nor will they know what bugs even taste like. You, on the other hand, will start to look like a bug, walk like a bug and smell like a bug.

The WEF acolytes shall fight climate change on the golden beaches of Southern Europe, they shall fight it with every take-off and landing of their private jets, they shall fight in daffodil laden fields and in expensive city cafes, they shall fight in the hills; they shall never surrender their right to eat organic grass-fed beef, probably reared on a farm owned by Bill Gates. They want you to fight climate change holed up in a 15-minute smart city, buying carbon credits to visit a dying relative, waiting for instructions from your cretinous mayor to get your Spring covid jab. Because that is how we will celebrate Spring in 2030. No dancing around the Maypole for you! It’s Russian roulette with mRNA injections.  

Do these US bank failures mark the beginning of the Fed’s war on crypto? 

SVB was one of the few major financial institutions offering services to crypto companies as other banks have shied away from this sector, fearing risk and imminent regulatory crackdown. In an almost instant replay of the SVB collapse, days later Signature Bank was put into FDIC receivership, ostensibly to avoid contagion from a bank run. As the 29th largest US commercial bank, this was the 3rd largest bank failure in US history after SVB and, like SVB, the vast bulk of Signature’s deposits (90%) were uninsured. Like SVB, the FDIC stepped in and rescued all depositors and then brokered a deal that saw its good assets picked up for a bargain by one of the largest regional banks in the US – a subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp, Flagstar Bank.

Like SVB, Signature Bank was also a major crypto currency services platform. Former Congressman Barney Frank, who was a director of Signature Bank, saw the closure as an anti-crypto message by regulators. He told multiple media outlets that the bank was not insolvent, and he thought regulators took it over to serve as a warning for US banks to avoid cryptocurrency dealings. Tellingly, Signature’s crypto deposits were not included in the sale of assets to Flagstar Bank.

Silvergate Capital, along with Signature Bank, was one of the two main banks for the crypto sector. It too shut down in March following a bank run that forced it to sell assets at a loss. 

Crypto was not the underlying cause of any of these bank failures, but it’s an odd common denominator given that not many banks offer crypto currency services. Barney Frank’s speculation is reasonable – as the US Fed moves closer to rolling out its CBDC, is it taking a hostile stance towards any competition from decentralised crypto currencies?

Adding to the murkiness of the US bank failures is the speculation surrounding conservative billionaire Peter Thiel’s possible role in precipitating the run on SVB. Tech industry insiders allege that a venture capital fund founded by Thiel drained all of its SVB accounts while making calls to other investors to get their cash out of SVB and into bigger, safer banks. They allege that this sparked a bank run that ultimately led to $42 billion in withdrawals – a sum too large for SVB to cope with. 

Banking consolidation promotes the wider wealth consolidation agenda 

It should go without saying that this is not just a banking consolidation. Bank runs and consolidations will sow fear, causing credit to tighten and putting small and medium size businesses under more financial stress. As recession deepens, those businesses will go bust, just as they were forced to in the covid heist. Mortgage defaults will trigger a collapse in property prices. Banks will swoop in, seize the properties from defaulting borrowers. The plan seems to be for banks to morph into landlords who will then rent back the properties they seize. The broader wealth consolidation agenda will be served in the same way it was during the covid shakedown which underwrote the transfer of $5.1 trillion into the pockets of 2,755 billionaires, taking their total net worth from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion, a 64% increase.

Taxpayer money will continue to be siphoned into the coffers of the banks, Big Pharma and the climate industry to fund the banking crisis, the pandemic industry and the ‘climate crisis’. The net zero swindle is being used as a pretext for many things, one of which is an audacious global land grab. In the Netherlands, the second largest agricultural exporter in the world, the government is forcing farmers off the land under the pretext of reducing nitrogen emissions. 

In the US, the Biden administration under the climate change agenda has committed to private farmland grabs under their “30 by 30” policy to “conserve” 30% of US land and coastal seas by 2030. How do the 21st century neo-fascists justify tripling land under government ownership? With the well-worn slogan that was used to justify covid fascism – it’s “backed by scientists”. 289 million acres in the US are currently “protected for biodiversity” but, under the “30 by 30” plan, an additional 440 million acres need to be “set aside” – grabbed in plain talk. The fly in the ointment is that “around 70 percent of land in the U.S. is owned by individuals or companies.” The oligarchy has not been slow off the starting block in the race to acquire land, with Bill Gates leading the way as the single largest landowner in the US.

There are at least three things to note when the head of JP Morgan, the largest US bank, calls for seizure of private property to build wind and solar farms which, it is no longer controversial to say, are not viable replacements for fossil fuel energy. 

First, while this might be dressed up as a government seizure, it’s a good bet that the banks will end up somehow owning large tracts of land under the emerging fascist public-private partnership. Why else would the gatekeepers of 21st century Western capitalism be furtively thumbing through newly acquired copies of Mao’s Little Red Book and calling for land nationalisation? 

Second, substituting windmills for food production is even barmier and will be more destructive than Mao’s infamous great leap forward. 

Third, twenty years ago, even if you had locked up the best comedy writers in a room and supplied them with copious amounts of cocaine and Jack Daniels, there is no way they could have come up with bullshit as whacky as this. And yet today, the New Normal capitalists are telling us, with a straight face and apparently not under the influence of drugs, that a necessary revolution is underway in which everything of any value, no matter what the societal and economic cost, will be transferred into the hands of a public-private partnership led by the corporate oligarchy, while governments handle the paperwork and pass legislation to make it happen.

There is only one spectacle that beats the surreal quality of this insanity – watching the ‘progressive’ left cheering it on, not because they think it makes any sense but simply because too many on the right are opposing it. They are fully signed up to jumping into a burning building because some conservatives on the right would prefer to stay cool in the shade.

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