They know exactly what they are doing. The “experts” that run the Federal Reserve know that if they dramatically hike interest rates it will cause countless American workers to lose their jobs and it will absolutely crush the housing market. And even though those two things are already starting to happen, they just announced another massive rate hike. If there was a school for central bankers, one of the very first things that they would teach you is that you should never, ever raise rates as an economy is plunging into a recession. Every Fed official knows what has happened in the past when rates have been hiked at the beginning of an economic slowdown, but they are doing it anyway. To call this “economic malpractice” would be a major understatement, and the American people should be deeply alarmed about what they are doing to us.
After everything that has already happened, it is hard to believe that Fed officials would continue to be so reckless. On Wednesday, it was announced that rates would be raised by another 75 basis points…
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised its benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points for the third straight month as it struggles to bring scorching-hot inflation under control, a move that threatens to slow U.S. economic growth and exacerbate financial pain for millions of households and businesses.
The three-quarter percentage point hikes in June, July and September — the most aggressive series of increases since 1994 — underscore just how serious Fed officials are about tackling the inflation crisis after a string of alarming economic reports. Policymakers voted unanimously to approve the latest super-sized hike.
It was a unanimous vote.
There wasn’t even one dissenting voice.
Have they gone completely mad?
Wall Street certainly did not like this decision. The Dow plunged hundreds of points immediately after it was announced…
The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 522.45 points, or 1.7%, to close at 30,183.78. The S&P 500 shed 1.71% to 3,789.93, and the Nasdaq Composite slumped 1.79% to 11,220.19.
The S&P ended Wednesday’s session down more than 10% in the past month and 21% off its 52-week high. Even before the rate decision, stocks were pricing in an aggressive tightening campaign by the Fed that could tip the economy into a recession.
For ages, the Fed coddled the financial markets, but now it is almost as if they don’t even care anymore.
Personally, I am far more concerned about what will happen to ordinary hard working Americans in the months ahead. Even Jerome Powell is admitting that “an increase in unemployment” is likely because of what the Fed is doing…
“I think there’s a very high likelihood we will have a period of … much lower growth and it could give rise to an increase in unemployment,” he said.
Will that mean a recession?
“No one knows whether that process will lead to a recession or how significant a recession it will be,” Powell said. “I don’t know the odds.”
Actually, we are in a recession right now.
And Powell and his minions just made things a whole lot worse.
Even Democrats understand this. After the rate hike was announced, Senator Elizabeth Warren went on Twitter and warned that “millions of Americans” could soon lose their jobs…
.@federalreserve’s Chair Powell just announced another extreme interest rate hike while forecasting higher unemployment. I’ve been warning that Chair Powell’s Fed would throw millions of Americans out of work — and I fear he’s already on the path to doing so.
This is one of the rare occasions when Elizabeth Warren is right on target.
As I have been documenting on my website for weeks, large numbers of Americans have already been getting laid off.
As growth stalls and competition intensifies, Facebook parent Meta has begun quietly cutting staff by reorganizing departments, while giving ‘reorganized’ employees a narrow window to apply for other roles within the company, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing current and former managers familiar with the matter.
By shuffling people around, the company achieves staffing cuts “while forestalling the mass issuance of pink slips.”
So why would the Fed choose to raise rates when layoffs are already beginning to spike?
Higher rates are also having a devastating impact on the housing market.
Home sales declined for the seventh month in a row in August as higher mortgage rates and stubbornly high prices pushed prospective buyers out of the market.
Sales of existing homes — which include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops — were down 19.9% from a year ago and down 0.4% from July, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors.
Someone should start putting “Jerome Powell did this” stickers on for sale signs all over the nation.
Because this didn’t have to happen.
Now the housing market is already in a “deep recession”, and the Fed just keeps making things even worse…
The prolonged downturn in confidence shows the housing market has been “in a tailspin for the whole of this year,” according to Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson.
“Activity tracks mortgage applications with a lag, and the early September numbers are grim, even before the full hit from the rebound in mortgage rates in recent weeks works through,” Shepherdson said in a note to clients on Monday.
“In short, the housing market is in a deep recession, which is already hammering homebuilders and will soon depress housing-related retail sales,” he added.
The Fed seems determined to kill the economy.
But why?
Why would they do this?
One analyst that was just quoted by Fox Business is warning that “times are going to get tougher from here”…
“With the new rate projections, the Fed is engineering a hard landing — a soft landing is almost out of the question,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist of Principal Global Investors. “Powell’s admission that there will be below-trend growth for a period should be translated as central bank speak for ‘recession.’ Times are going to get tougher from here.”
Yes, times are definitely going to get tougher from here.
So, we are less than two weeks out from the election and the outcome, no matter who wins, will likely ignite a raging firestorm that will make the California wildfires look like a flickering matchstick. As we have supposedly made tremendous advancements in science and technology, reality proves we have merely achieved a more efficient means of going backwards.
The intoxication from earlier successes of science and technology have devolved into a gruesome morning after hangover of deteriorated outcomes, now threatening to imprison masked Americans in an electronic gulag of forced vaccinations and digital currency. The social media billionaire moguls, in conjunction with the Wall Street owned Federal Reserve, and sociopathic political operatives will mandate compliance regarding medical, financial and political decrees or you will be demonetized and cut-off from the ability to transact – essentially living in an electronic prison camp.
Based on the Fourth Turning generational theory, there is no doubt Donald Trump is the prophet generation Grey Champion. The term Grey Champion does not mean they are a great, noble, humane person. Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were not nice guys. They did whatever they thought necessary to achieve their means during our previous three Fourth Turnings. Millions of Americans hated Lincoln and Roosevelt, just as tens of millions hate Trump.
The Grey Champion’s appearance marks the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” as the violent turmoil climax of the Fourth Turning approaches. Trump and Pence are from the Prophet (Boomer) Generation, while Biden is from the Silent Generation and Harris is Generation X. At this stage of the Fourth Turning a transfer of power to a Silent generation leader would not make sense. Trump is the lightning rod for a clash that must take place to sweep away the existing corrupted social order and replace it with something new.
Every four years we hear the same pablum about this being the most important election of our lifetime. No matter who wins this election, the Deep State, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve, Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Media, Silicon Valley Titans, and Billionaires like Soros, Bloomberg and Gates will still be running the show. One man has extraordinarily little chance of confronting these wealthy power-hungry sociopaths and winning.
It remains to be seen whether the Grey Champion can ignite a civil uprising against the powerful forces of totalitarianism engulfing the country and the world. They will not be stopped through the ballot box. They had successfully convinced a willfully ignorant populace to love their servitude and acquiesce to allowing them unfettered control over their lives. But, the tyrannical lockdowns, martial law like mandates from bureaucrats, compulsory masking as a requirement to be accepted in society, and the dehumanizing of our daily lives has created a Resistance, peaceful thus far, who are enraged by what is happening.
These are the critical thinkers, non-maskers, no-lockdowners, no vacciners, unwilling to kneel before the altar of Fauci, Gates, WHO, CDC, MSM and tyrannical sociopathic politicians like Cuomo, Newsome and Whitmer. These dissidents and doubters are most certainly a minority, but it was only a minority who carried the load during the American Revolution.
They are heavily armed, but it will require stealth, guile and intelligence to defeat the entrenched establishment. The weakness of these sociopaths is their arrogance and hubris. When they make mistakes during the coming conflict, they must be made to pay heavily. Those with their eyes wide open know what is happening. But, as Huxley asked over sixty years ago, do enough people think it is worth the fight to stop our drift towards totalitarian control?
“Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worthwhile to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything?” – AldousHuxley
The last week of MSM hyperbolic vitriol towards Trump; censorship of all dissenters about the Covid narrative by the social media tyrants; the purposeful increase in testing to all-time highs in order to generate more cases; ignoring the plunge in Covid related deaths; seeing “neutral” journalists question Trump like he is on trial at Nuremberg while lobbing underhanded softballs to Biden like he’s a four year old (his dementia riddled brain tells him he is four years old); and seeing the MSM tout polls showing a Biden landslide just as they did in 2016, leads me to believe Trump is going to win re-election in November.
It may take weeks, there will be rampant fraud in trying to swing the vote to Biden, and it could end up in the Supreme Court, but I believe Trump will win. The deplorables are seething with an inner rage which will be released on November 3. While the election is being contested, shockingly, ANTIFA and BLM will again begin burning down cities. It was fascinating how it had all stopped when polls showed the riots having a negative impact on Biden and his Democrat cohorts. The time frame between November 3 and January 20, when the president is supposed to be sworn in, guarantees to be tumultuous, dangerous, and fraught with potential peril.
I do not believe either side will accept the outcome of the election and will treat the victor as illegitimate. Once that mindset gains control, only violent conflict can result. The myriad of potential outcomes is too vast to comprehend. What we do know is Fourth Turnings always accelerate and intensify towards a bloody finale, with clear winners and losers.
Unconditional surrender will be demanded by those maintaining the upper hand. Whether this coming conflict remains domestic or spreads internationally, the “advancements” in the technology of destruction will endanger every human being on the planet. You cannot escape the impact of Fourth Turnings, only survive and/or do your part in helping achieve a positive outcome. There is no predetermined ending.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
Investment advisor and former Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts says big change is ahead of the world, and “nothing will ever be the same.”
Fitts lays out the so-called “reset” you’ve been hearing about for the past few years and says,
“We are in the process that I would recall is a global reset. The entire financial system is being reset. There are two aspects of this: One is extending the old system, and the other is bringing in the new system. It’s very much being done on the fly by trial and error, but the new system is 100% digital.”
The new system, according to Fitts, will be a top down control system where “tyranny” will be the key feature. Fitts predicts,
“If you look at the tyranny they are working on delivering, I don’t think most people realize how hideous some of their plans are. So, the tyranny that’s coming and the printing that’s coming is greater than anything we have seen so far…
The Fed started a new round of QE in March, and if you look at the extent of that, it is extraordinarily inflationary. That’s because this time around, the Fed is not just doing $3 trillion in QE. What the Fed did in three or four months, what it took them to do in three to five years during the so-called financial crisis, that is an extraordinary amount. Then you combine it with fiscal stimulus because the Fed is now buying the Treasuries… and the Treasury is sending checks out to Main Street. We are seeing that money going into the economy that is extraordinarily inflationary.”
Fitts describes the overall situation, “We are basically entering into a war period, and it’s dangerous…”
“There are many different layers, but this is what World War III looks like.
The people running things and centralizing economic power and control are saying we don’t want to share the subsidy anymore with the general population…
This is a spiritual war between good and evil. Part of that war spreads out to invisible technology like mind control.”
Fitts says gold and silver will be assets to have in the future. Fitts explains,
“If you look at where they want to go, their vision is so dark that I think the more people recognize and see it, the more they are going to want simple assets they can control that are not digital and try to keep them outside the system. Globally . . . I think the pressure is going to be on to have precious metals.”
Fitts is basically predicting higher highs and higher lows for gold and silver prices for some time to come.
* * *
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with Catherine Austin Fitts, publisher of The Solari Report.
If you want to understand America’s dangerously deepening travails, you have to start at the Federal Reserve’s Eccles Building…
After a 30-year rolling coup d’etat, its occupants have imposed a regime of destructive falsification on America’s financial, economic, political, and social life.
It has become the heart of mushrooming darkness taking prosperity, liberty, and democracy down for the count.
How do we get 50 million unemployed… the stock market at record highs… companies trashing their balance sheets to buy back stock and do vastly overpriced M&A deals… doctors and politicians savaging the economy and the livelihoods of millions… and Washington going incontinent on the fiscal front?
The answer is simple:
the rapidly-spreading dysfunction is rooted in the giant financial fraud embedded in the Federal Reserve’s $7 trillion balance sheet.
The latter is blissfully taken for granted by the politicians and C-suites of corporate America and desperately insisted upon by the unhinged gamblers of Wall Street.
Even if you believe that a regular infusion of money is needed to catalyze the wheels of capitalist growth (we don’t), there is absolutely no economic logic that says the central bank’s balance sheet should grow by orders of magnitude faster than GDP over an extended period of time.
If the robustly growing GDP of 1987 needed $5 of central bank money per $100 of GDP, there is no reason why that ratio should have differed in 2008 or 2020.
But it did and does.
In June 1987, the nominal GDP was $4.8 trillion, and by all current estimates, it clocked in at $19.4 trillion in June 2020. That’s a 4.1X expansion over 33 years.
In contrast, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet stood at about $240 billion on the eve of Greenspan’s arrival at the Eccles Building in August 1987 and clocked in at $7.2 trillion at the end of Q2 2020. That’s a 30X gain.
Since the early 2000s and the dotcom crash, it has only gotten far worse. The chart below of the Fed’s balance sheet and GDP is indexed to 100 as of January 2003. It tells you all you need to know.
During the past 17 years, the Fed’s balance sheet (purple line) has risen to 983% of its starting value, even as GDP (red line) has risen to only 192%.
What was fostered in the vast area between the two lines above was excess liquidity, debt, speculation, and malinvestment. This was accompanied by a complete breakdown of financial discipline in all sectors of American society.
These long-term growth factors are not even in the same zip code or planet—and the massive excess of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet versus GDP did not happen like a tree falling silently in an empty forest.
On the contrary, it turned the financial and economic world upside down. That’s because the effect was to systematically suppress the cost of debt and speculation and drastically inflate the value of financial assets. As a result, everyone got false price signals and changed their behavior accordingly:
Wall Street investors became leveraged speculators;
Corporate business builders become financial engineers;
Middle-class households became debt slaves living hand-to-mouth on borrowed money; and
Washington’s politicians became free lunch spendthrifts piling on public debt like there was no tomorrow.
The tragedy is that the clueless speculators on Wall Street, and the politicians of Washington who are riding the most egregiously inflated financial bubble ever, don’t even get the joke.
So what happens next?
We’d say nothing very pleasant.
* * *
The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.
G. Edward Griffin re-tells the story of how and why the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 at a secret meeting on Jekyll Island. He explains how money is created and how the present system is destroying the purchasing power of money through a process called inflation. He explains why there is no hope of stopping this process until a significant segment of the population (perhaps 15%) understands the scam and pushes back politically. In the meantime, people will accept any insult to their liberties in order to survive, which is the reason why one crisis after another is scientifically engineered. Confusion and fear is the secret weapon of tyrants. -GEG
TRUMP: TIME TO MINE THE MOON WHILE OBSERVATORIES CLOSE
While we’re all sick of hearing about Covid19 and the daily propatainment ministry campaign to keep everyone indoors and cowered, there’s been a strange reaction going on “up there”, in space. In the last few weeks, for example, we’ve seen stories about (1) the European Space Agency cancelling a probe to Mars because of the virus, (2) strange videos of a “something” near the Sun looking for all the world like Ezekiel’s wheels-within-wheels, which Never A Straight Answer (NASA) once again reassured us was all a trick of light and shadow and an artifact of image processing, nothing to see here, move along, and (3) then, as if someone wanted to say “not so fast,” we’ve seen strange videos of “some things” flying around the Moon. More tricks of light and shadow and processing artifacts, perhaps.
Meanwhile, to reassure everyone that life goes on as abnormally as possible, the USSA has launched some satellites on Mr. Musk’s rockets, while astronomical observatories around the world are closing down for – you guessed it – the corona virus, according to this story shared by M.G.:
Ponder that one a moment. In all our previous “flu-demics” and medical emergencies from the HIV scare of the 1980s to SARS, we’ve never shut down observatories.
Ever.
It’s almost like Mr. Globaloney doesn’t want any pesky science-and-nerd-types seeing something “out there” that Mr. Globaloney doesn’t want them to see.
However, in the “you just can’t make up this soap-space-and-virus-opera” department, as all this propatainment ministry nonsense from “I’m-connected-to-Bill-Gates-who-wants-to-vaccinate-everyone-and-chloroquine-produced-by-Bayer-in-1934-is-not-a-cure-because-I-want-a-vaccine-so-I-can-make-lots-of-money-with-Mr.-Gates” Dr. Fauci in his daily White House sponsored fear-and-trembling updates goes on, President Trump found enough time to sneak away and sign an executive order.
The subject?
Mining the Moon (thanks to S.R., B.H. and many many others who shared versions of this story):
It makes me wonder, with some “things” flying around close to the Moon, and observatories shut down, just what the heck is going on. Now on the one hand, talk about Moon and asteroid mining has been going on for a while, and I’ve blogged about the topic repeatedly. Back in 2014 at the Secret Space Program conference in San Mateo, Nuttyfornia, I talked about some of those bearer bonds scandals, and how some of those “fake” bonds had space messages going on all over the place. On the front of some of these bonds, which the federal goobernment (which has given us some of the nuttiest explanations for things on record, from magic bullets to airplane fuel melting buildings which collapse in a pancake at freefall speed) assured us were fakes, you had on the front of said bonds the picture of the president who fell victim to said magic bullet, while on the back of the “bond” you had pictures of the Moon, the Lunar Excursion Module from Apollo days, and the space shuttle. I began to think that space assets were the way that Mr. Globaloney would attempt to write off all that bad paper he had created in the financial system, when – lo and behold – we were told that all that bad paper amounted to a mere 14- to 17,000,000,000,000,000 dollars, several times the amount of the gross domestic product of the entire planet. But what a coincidence, articles then began to appear that some rocky asteroid X,Y,Z out there was worth (you guessed it) about 14- to 17,000,000,000,000,000 dollars in titanium, platinum, gold and all sorts of other stuff, all we had to do was go out and mine it. (Isn’t that nice? We could actually have a gold standard and back all that bad paper with something other than Christine LaGarde’s numerology.)
Now, if you’ve been following along during all this propatainment ministry narrative, you’ll have noticed a raft of strange financial stories that somehow manage to evade mention by Dr. I-want-to-vaccinate-everyone-and-make-lots-of-money Fauci. Stories like the Fed taking reserve requirements to zero (yes, I said ZERO), and the German state-owned bank Kreditanstalt furWiederaufbau thumbing its nose at the EU, the European Central Bank and all the Brusselsprouts and telling German businesses and no one else’s businesses that it was prepared to prop them up with virtually unlimited credit until the Fauci crisis… er… I mean, the corona crisis was over. (How does that song go? Deutschland uber alles?) Interestingly enough, while Kreditanstalt was promising lines of credit and liquidity as high as the Moon (patience, we’re getting back to that), its headquarters was nonetheless located down here on Earth in Frankfurt in the German state of Hesse, which headquarters other financially sound institutions like the European Central Bank, and that pillar of financial responsibility, Deutsche Bank, which was caught red-handed shorting stocks before two buildings collapsed of airplane fuel fires and pancaked into lower Manhattan a few years ago. Then, lo and behold, in Yet Another Amazing Coincidence, the finance minister for the German state of Hesse decided to walk in front of a train and ended up smeared all over railroad tracks just a few days after Kreditanstalt made its generous announcement because (we were told, but not by Dr. Fauci!) that he was depressed over the corona virus.
Now, to put a fine point to all this Amazing Coincidence, it looks like Mr. Globaloney created the Fauci crisis as a crisis of opportunity to achieve several objectives, one of which is some sort of financial reset, and with that, we’re back to Mr. Trump and the Moon mining executive order. It’s one thing to talk about mining the Moon, but quite another to order it, by an executive order no less, and that during a Fauci crisis that looks like a financial reset.
To put it country simple: it looks like Mr. Globaloney is in a big hurry to get out there and mine those space assets… and to be extra sure no one keeps an independent eye on what he’s actually doing (or not doing but claiming to do), best to shut down those observatories.
Yea… I know… that’s really really off-the-end-of-the-high-octane-speculation-twig. But with everything else so crazy, why not?
TOPEKA, Kan. (May 22, 2019) – Last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed a bill exempting gold and silver bullion, and other precious metals, from the state sales tax. Passage of this legislation eliminates one barrier to using gold and silver in everyday transactions, a foundational step for people to undermine the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money.
Rep. Jim Kelly (R-Independence) introduced House Bill 2140 (HB2140) on Feb. 5. The new law exempts the sale of gold or silver coins and gold, silver, platinum, or palladium bullion from the state sales tax. Under the law, “bullion” means bars, ingots or commemorative medallions of gold, silver, platinum, palladium, or a combination thereof, for which the value of the metal depends on its content and not the form.
The sales tax exemption on gold and silver was amended into a bill authorizing various county sales tax increases. It was the one positive provision in a bill otherwise unfriendly to Kansas taxpayers. With Gov. Kelly’s signature, the law will go into effect July 1.
IN PRACTICE
With the passage of HB2140, Kansas takes a step toward treating gold, silver, platinum and palladium as money instead of commodities. As Sound Money Defense League Policy Director Jp Cortez testified during a committee hearing on a similar bill in Wyoming last year, charging taxes on money itself is beyond the pale.
In effect, states that collect taxes on purchases of precious metals are inherently saying gold and silver are not money at all.
Imagine if you asked a grocery clerk to break a $5 bill and he charged you a 35 cent tax. Silly, right? After all, you were only exchanging one form of money for another. But that’s essentially what Kansas’ sales tax on gold and silver bullion did. By removing the sales tax on the exchange of gold and silver, Kansas will treat specie as money instead of a commodity. This represents a small step toward reestablishing gold and silver as legal tender and breaking down the Fed’s monopoly on money.
“We ought not to tax money – and that’s a good idea. It makes no sense to tax money,” former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul said during testimony in support an Arizona bill that repealed capital gains taxes on gold and silver in that state. “Paper is not money, it’s fraud,” he continued.
The new law’s impact would go beyond mere tax policy. During an event after his Senate committee testimony, Paul pointed out that it’s really about the size and scope of government.
If you’re for less government, you want sound money. The people who want big government, they don’t want sound money. They want to deceive you and commit fraud. They want to print the money. They want a monopoly. They want to get you conditioned, as our schools have conditioned us, to the point where deficits don’t matter.
Practically speaking, eliminating taxes on the sale of gold and silver cracks open the door for people to begin using specie in regular business transactions. This marks an important small step toward currency competition. If sound money gains a foothold in the marketplace against Federal Reserve notes, the people will be able to choose the time-tested stability of gold and silver over the central bank’s rapidly-depreciating paper currency.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The United States Constitution states in Article I, Section 10, “No State shall…make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” States have simply ignored this constitutional provision for years. It’s impossible for a state to return to a constitutional sound money system when it taxes gold and silver as a commodity.
HB2140 takes a step toward establishing gold and silver as legal tender in the state and that constitutional requirement, ignored for decades in every state. This sets the stage to undermine the monopoly of the Federal Reserve by introducing competition into the monetary system.
Constitutional tender expert Professor William Greene said when people in multiple states actually start using gold and silver instead of Federal Reserve Notes, it could create a “reverse Gresham’s effect,” drive out bad money, effectively nullify the Federal Reserve, and end the federal government’s monopoly on money.
Over time, as residents of the state use both Federal Reserve notes and silver and gold coins, the fact that the coins hold their value more than Federal Reserve notes do will lead to a “reverse Gresham’s Law” effect, where good money (gold and silver coins) will drive out bad money (Federal Reserve notes). As this happens, a cascade of events can begin to occur, including the flow of real wealth toward the state’s treasury, an influx of banking business from outside of the state – as people in other states carry out their desire to bank with sound money – and an eventual outcry against the use of Federal Reserve notes for any transactions.
Once things get to that point, Federal Reserve notes would become largely unwanted and irrelevant for ordinary people. Nullifying the Fed on a state by state level is what will get us there.
The Federal Reserve is apparently very worried about bitcoin disrupting the monetary system.
According to an alleged whistleblower’s post on Reddit, Fed governors were “highly alarmed” by internal economic modeling that showed Bitcoin has the potential to completely displace the dollar by as early as 2021 (which they called “worst case”).
The whistleblower, who currently remains anonymous, claims to work for the Federal Reserve as a researcher who was tasked with doing “econometrics and related modeling” for Bitcoin.
He writes:
The Dirty: We were directed to upgrade our modeling of bitcoin from developing currency to a major currency. In addition to all of the common modeling and forecasting that task entails, we were instructed to do full simulations of money flows, interest rates, multi currency derivative baskets, risk metrics, and their effects on global macro monetary policy and trade agreements. What we found was shocking. Even with a mediocre adoption rate and variable growth rate, bitcoin severely disrupts how we model, forecast, and ultimately understand currency interactions to make monetary policy decisions. This is a huge technological, monetary, and policy disruption which leaves the Fed, the US govt, and other entities with much less control.
Our best case scenarios are modeled upon current bitcoin adoption rates which have simulated a tipping point for the year 2026 (worst case 2021); this time frame projects the Fed (via the dollar) to lose its dominant global monetary policy maker status – instead everything will superseded by bitcoin.
I presented this updated report along with all of our modeling work and simulation outputs which were statistically and independently verified to the Board of Governors. The Board was highly alarmed and interrogated me and my fellow researchers in a 3 day session trying to understand every point of our research. It must be remembered that unlike politicians, the Board of Governors is a very well educated and empirical group with an ability to conceptually grasp complicated research.
The ramifications of this internal analysis could be huge. Pressed by the Reddit community to verify his claims, he is said to be working with journalists to release proof or his employment and of the report itself
“While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to control the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system, we havenationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.”
– Horace Greeley
Have you ever wondered why the vast majority of hard working people on this planet does not make enough earnings to have a reasonable standard of living without being in debt? Our personal debt is modern version of slavery*.
* Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation. Historically, slavery was institutionally recognized by many societies; in more recent times slavery has been outlawed in most societies but continues through the practices of debt bondage, indentured servitude, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, certain adoptions in which children are forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, and forced marriage. [ Wikipedia ]
For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
Some famous quotes regarding money and central banking:
“Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” — Thomas Jefferson
“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.” – James Madison
“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is, perhaps, the most, astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint, and un-mint the modern ledger-entry currency.” — Major L.L.B. Angus
“Banking was conceived in iniquity, and was born in sin. The Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen, they will create enough deposits, to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain slaves of Bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.” — Sir Josiah Stamp, (President of the Bank of England in the 1920′s, the second richest man in Britain)
“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” — President James A. Garfield
“Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.” — Sir. Reginald McKenna, former President of the Midland Bank of England
“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value— zero.” — Voltair (1694 – 1778)
“Give me the power to issue a nation’s money, then I do not care who makes the law.” – Anselm Rothschild
“Money confers social and political power, naturally. Those who have more of it than others use their wealth to dominate or control other human beings who have little or none. But money also gives power to a secret self, enabling it to pursue its own self-gratification in a singular fashion… “Money, therefore, contains a continuous illusion of immortal power – the psychic vehicle for defeating time itself by controlling the future. It is only an illusion; no mortal ever conquers time… “Thus, on a psychic plane, the Wall Street investor accomplishes what the alchemist could not – creating gold from dross, real wealth from mere paper, a living organism from raw numbers… To demystify the Federal Reserve, one first had to understand that money did not require religious faith or buried fantasies or impenetrable technicalities. Money was, above all, a political question – a matter of deliberate choices made by the state.” — William Greider,Secrets of the Temple, pp. 235, 236, 238, 242
The Money is an Illusion
By Dene McGriff
Over the centuries man has used many things for money – cattle, seashells, camels, coffee, jewels and precious metals. Before money, there was Barter – two people trading something the other wanted. Commodities and finally metals in the form of coins were introduced. Paper money originated with the goldsmith who gave receipts to wealthy citizens for storage and safekeeping. The goldsmiths realized that the receipt could be used in commerce since it could be redeemed in gold from the goldsmith. Thus, modern banking was born. Then they realized that the demands for redemption were relatively small so long as they kept a minimum in reserve. Thus fractional-reserve banking was born. If they kept ten or fifteen percent on hand, they would have enough to redeem any demands on the bank. For centuries, European privately owned banks would issue paper bank notes backed by gold reserves. The system was transferred to America. Gradually, the value was transferred to the demand deposits which were redeemable by personal drafts or checks and gold was all but forgotten.
During the 18th, 19th and early 20thCenturies, periodic failures plagued the banking industry. Experiments with fiat (paper) money always ended in inflation and devaluation of the currency. After the Civil War, the National Bank Act tried to regulate bank notes issued by state banks but the public at large had little confidence in this chaotic banking system. Then along comes the Federal Reserve Act in 1912 to restore order and public confidence in the monetary system.
Now when the Federal Reserve began, the paper money was backed by gold or silver up to a small portion of the face amount. The problem is that the fractional reserve tends to become smaller and smaller until it is reduced to nothing. And even to this day, fiat money is the way governments create money without taxation. It has nothing of tangible value to offset it so let the printing presses roll
The Alchemy of the Federal Reserve
Money is created out of absolutely nothing. Most texts teach that money is created first by someone making a deposit and then the bank waits for someone to come along and borrow it. That is not true. Money is created the instant it is borrowed. In other words, debt creates money. The government creates bonds (debt), gives them to the Fed which uses that debt to create money. There is no other value attached to it. It is the act of borrowing which causes it to spring into existence. “Banks are creating money based on a borrower’s promise to pay (the IOU)….Banks create money by ‘monetizing’ the private debts of businesses and individuals.” (I Bet You Thought, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, p. 19). Now I am going to quote from Griffin’s book to explain how the process works. Money creation is a circular concept and hard to grasp so please stay with me. Once you get it, it is absolutely shocking!
“The entire function of this machine is to convert debt into money. It’s just that simple. First, the Fed takes all the government bonds which the public does not buy and writes a check to Congress in exchange for them. (It acquires other debt obligations as well, but government bonds comprise most of its inventory.) There is no money to back up this check. These fiat dollars are created on the spot for that purpose. By calling those bonds “reserves,” the Fed then uses them as the base for creating 9 additional dollars for every dollar created for the bonds themselves. The money created for the bonds is spent by the government, whereas the money created on top of those bonds is the source of all the bank loans made to the nation’s businesses and individuals. The result of this process is the same as creating money on a printing press, but the illusion is based on an accounting trick rather than a printing trick. The bottom line is that Congress and the banking cartel have entered into a partnership in which the cartel has the privilege of collecting interest on money which it creates out of nothing, a perpetual override on money which it creates out of nothing, a perpetual override on every American dollar that exists in the world. Congress, on the other hand, has access to unlimited funding without having to tell the voters their taxes are being raised through the process of inflation. If you understand this paragraph, you understand the Federal Reserve System. (Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 193)
“The federal government adds ink to a piece of paper, creates impressive designs around the edges, and calls it a bond or Treasury note. It is merely a promise to pay a specified sum at a specified interest on a specific date…this debt eventually becomes the foundation for almost the entire nation’s money supply. In reality, the government has created cash, but it doesn’t yet look like cash. To convert these IOUs into paper bills and checkbook money is the function of the Federal Reserve System.
An instrument of government debt is considered an asset because it is assumed the government will keep its promise to pay…so the Federal Reserve now has an ‘asset’ which can be used to offset a liability. It then creates liability by adding ink to yet another piece of paper…the “Federal Reserve Check”…
There is no money in any account to cover this check. Anyone else doing that would be sent to prison. It is legal for the Fed, however, because Congress wants the money, and this is the easiest way to get it…The process is mysteriously wrapped up in the banking system…The Federal Reserve check is then deposited in one of the Federal Reserve Banks…
These checks become the means by which the first wave of fiat money floods into the economy. (For detail, please see Griffin, pp195-197)
These Federal Reserve Checks become commercial bank deposits.
On Aug 10th, 2011, the stock market dropped over 500 points again after having gone up 450 the day before and down 640 the day before that. What is this all about? Why so much confusion? Where is it going? Is America on that long slide down to “third world-dom”? Is China taking over as top dog?
I have been writing on the economy for quite a few years now. I called the housing bubble back in 2004, the derivatives problem which led to the crash in 2008 and the continuing deflation (depression) the entire world is experiencing. So what is the problem? Is it the US debt? Does it have anything to do with the US? Will America be destroyed? I would use the analogy of attacking a Chihuahua with a baseball bat – one swipe and he’s a goner. Ever try and attack an elephant with a baseball bat? The elephant will probably survive just fine but the attacker may not. America may have problems but they are nothing compared to the rest of the world. Bottom line is that we are much more able to absorb the blows than they are.
What is the Problem?
Let’s start with today. Is the problem the credit downgrade of the U.S. by Standard and Poor’s? No, in fact Treasury sales are better than ever (the markets aren’t that stupid) and long term interest rates continue to drop. No, it is Europe and specifically France. France has been supporting Greece and there isn’t enough money there to save them. The stronger nations of Europe have been trying to save the weaker PIGIES (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) but France and England are not far behind. Does this floundering European Union sound like the burgeoning power that will rule the world one day as some Christians think? They can hardly agree on anything. The EEC is a joke and it is disintegrating before our eyes.
So, you say, China holds all the cards and yes they have a pretty good hand. But I have news for you, China has 1.5 billion problems: an aging population with fewer women (since baby girls were often eliminated), not to mention the logistics of providing fresh food and water, housing and other services for huge population. Corruption and cronyism, demography and regional inequities will overwhelm and destabilize the new Asian miracle. The same might be said to a slightly lesser extent for India.
So who does that leave on top? You guessed it. As we have said in the past, there is only one nation known as prophetic Babylon which matches this picture: apostate Christian, the great consumer nation, the greatest military power, and a friend of Israel (at least for now). So the economic demise of America/Babylon may be greatly exaggerated. Let’s look at the facts as to why America is nowhere near falling into oblivion.
There is a tremendous amount of debt all over the planet – corporate debt, government debt, local debt, personal debt, bank debt, not to mention the so-called unfunded liabilities (also an international problem) of retirement, medical care for the poor and elderly, unfunded pensions, etc. Nearly every country in the world is having the same problems that we are but it is much worse. The government “solution” is to print money (increase the money supply), both in cash and credit markets and just spend, spend, spend. Debt is parlayed and expanded in the form of derivatives. One would think that since the 2008 meltdown fiasco we learned our lesson, but we haven’t and the derivative debts continue to grow exponentially. The world is awash in funny money – fiat currency with no backing, but rather than causing hyperinflation, we see deflation which is the financial enema solution to excess liquidity. Dead broke businesses, banks and factories go out of business and local governments and countries default (just don’t pay their debt). The irony is that the world knows that America will never default and that is why the dollar is golden – even if they have to tax and take away nearly every dollar earned. Nations flock to buy US Treasuries. They can’t get enough even when they make nothing on them. Those are the facts.
So in this article, we want to look at the debt ceiling crisis, why there isn’t enough money in the world to bail out the PIGIES, what will be the result of this failure and where we are headed as individuals.
From a prophetic point of view, we see that America will not decline commercially. Up until the very end America will be the leading economic and military power. However this doesn’t mean all goes well for you and me. All of the crashes and bailouts have been at our expense. More on that in a minute – the $16 trillion heist! The long term trend is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer and the middle income will continue to slip into poverty. Right now, I am making one sixth of what I made twenty years ago. I have three grown children and all are struggling to keep their heads above water.
The middle class is shrinking and here are stats to prove it.
83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.
So what are the prospects for your future? Not very good. I know you don’t like to hear this but all of the bailouts have occurred at your expense. Let’s talk about the bailouts and stimulus. Who caused the crisis to begin with? We all now know that it was the banks and their reckless derivatives. Who got bailed out? How much money did you receive? Nothing? I didn’t either. Imagine that. But read on. It gets much worse for us little peeps even though America will continue to prosper.
The Bailout and Dismantling of Europe
Look at Europe. Greece already received $153 billion and now the Eurozone and IMF are providing another $152 billion. Where does that money come from and who benefits? It comes from tax payers. The bailout doesn’t go to the Greek government. It is just passing through to pay the banks to pay the 14% interest they already owe on their $476 billion in original debt! This guarantees another default which will filter back through the banking system in Europe, the US and other countries. Greece is very small potatoes. It is 38th in size, $318 billion in 2010, whereas Italy is 10th and Spain 13th in size with a total economy of nearly $3 trillion. Looking at it another way, the chart on the right shows the size of country debt by GDP. We hear about the PIGIES all the time (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), but look at the other countries that are in equally bad condition. Countries like the UK, France and Germany are the ones providing the loans to the PIGIES, but when the PIGIES default, who will cover those countries? One guess is allowed. Guess who will be left to save them all?
Analysts know that Italy and Spain are close to default and will soon be followed by England and France. It isn’t a matter of the amount of debt. Japan and the U.S. have shown that they can and will pay it back. It is whether they can finance the debt and at what price. The U.S. and Germany finance their debt for practically nothing (in the 2 percent range) whereas the PIGIES are paying all time highs of 14 to 30 percent. These are holes they can’t dig out of and as one country after another defaults, Europe will be torn apart. But will the Euro die? Probably not. Once the PIGIES drop out of the EU, then the EU will survive. The PIGIES however are doomed because they won’t be able to finance their debt. I would like to emphasize at this point that Europe and the rest of the world will look, perhaps grudgingly, to America to save them and establish order.
America and the Debt Crisis – Smoke and Mirrors!
America has a debt problem, no doubt about that and neither party faced it. The so-called $4 trillion in cuts are not cuts at all. It is not a cut in spending but a cut in the increase. The deficit was slated to double from $14 to $28 trillion over a ten year period. The agreement was to cut that increase in debt back to only $10 trillion. The graph on the left shows the growth in the national debt through 2020 at that rate.
It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that this is not sustainable. One lesson we should have all learned from the recent debt ceiling debate, is that if the rating agencies downgrade the US economy, we pay a higher interest rate on our debt. Let’s look at some round numbers for a moment. If we say that our national debt is $14 trillion and we pay 2 percent on that debt that makes our debt payment a mere $280 billion and everyone agrees that is okay. That represents about 8 percent of the total Federal budget. Historically, we paid 8 percent on our national debt. That would quadruple the amount spent on debt. You do the math. What would the debt payment be at 8 percent on a $24 trillion deficit? The more you tax, the more you grow government, the more of the GDP allocated to government, the smaller the productive economy and the higher the tax rate to pay for this massive debt. This is why some legislators are screaming about debt and wanting a balanced budget! The “compromise” reached by Democrats and Republicans did not limit spending but merely the size of the increase in deficit spending.
So what does this mean? Bottom line it means massive tax increases if the administration has its way or massive cuts in government programs such as the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Education.
The question you all may have is how did we get into this situation?Where has all the money gone? What about the stimulus and bailouts? According to Bloomberg News in 2008, the total bank bailout amounted to $8.5 trillion. According to the first audit ever done in the 99 year history of the Federal Reserve, they loaned over $16 trillion to US and foreign banks. Now think about it, the federal banking system is run by a private banking cartel called “The Federal Reserve” which oversees our financial system made up of dollars – those little greenbacks that are backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States of America.” We’ve heard those words before but what do they really mean? “We the people” are the ones backing these huge loans. Please read this article about the “Greatest Bank Robbery”. For more information on the Federal Reserve, please see the article I wrote some years ago [ Modern Alchemy: The Money Illusion ].
Some of you may think that I am contradicting myself. How can I say America is strong when it is destroying itself? There are two answers to this question. First, America is still golden to the rest of the world. In spite of the downgrade in the credit rating, interest rates have gone down rather than up and the world is flocking to buy our debt. Second, it would appear that the long term plan is to destroy all fiat currency and come up with some kind of digital world currency in order to help establish the New World Order. It is also impoverishing those of us in the middle while the rich seem to grow richer.
Where do We Go from Here?
I would remind Christians that the book of Revelation clearly indicates that there will be an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, a subject I explored in great detail in the chapter on the four horses of the apocalypse. Please see the section on the black horse. Most Christians are also familiar with the absolute control the Antichrist establishes by requiring everyone to take the Mark of the Beast in order to buy or sell (Revelation 13:13-17) so the end of the age will have not only a one world government but a one world economy – talk about going global!
There is some truth to the debt crisis, but like most crisis in America this is manufactured, apparently designed to rob from the tax payers. We are not a PIGIE. We do not have the tremendous population pressure experienced by China or India, pressures that will eventually tear them apart and stall their miracle economies. America still has tremendous natural resources and a population that is being molded into a patriotic frenzy that highlights America’s “Manifest Destiny” to save the world (whether they want saving or not). There will soon be another Middle East war in Israel, a defense treaty with Israel, followed by a more massive civilization conflict between the Islamic and post-Christian worlds and the ultimate rise again of China and the powers to the East as armies mass for the final conflict in the battle of Armageddon. We know the sequence of events.
Meanwhile, don’t trust in your 401K’s, your IRAs, pensions, investment or even gold. The world is having birth pangs and a new era is about to begin. Unfortunately, the Laodicean Church will be found Lukewarm and asleep in their “blessed rapture hope” of escape. We are closer than we think and it is no coincidence that the year 2012 finds prominence throughout the world, and, as you will soon see, even in the sacred Scriptures. Doug is about to present some earth shattering revelations. Now is the time to not look to Mammon or anything in this world for our salvation, but to get out of the little box that has programmed our minds and open our hearts and minds to fresh revelation that God desperately wants to share with us – that generation spoken of in Daniel 12 that has a “need to know” what is coming down and why. This is the generation of destiny, of sacrifice and of glory. We need to humble ourselves before Him and present ourselves a holy sacrifice and let Him speak to us and reveal His purposes to us.
During the 18th, 19th and early 20thCenturies, periodic failures plagued the banking industry. Experiments with fiat (paper) money always ended in inflation and devaluation of the currency. After the Civil War, the National Bank Act tried to regulate bank notes issued by state banks but the public at large had little confidence in this chaotic banking system. Then along comes the Federal Reserve Act in 1912 to restore order and public confidence in the monetary system.
