Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

 

"...to the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

Edgar Allen Poe, To Helen


“Now all the Athenians as well as the foreigners residing there used their time for nothing else but telling or hearing something new.

Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said: 'You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.  For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’  What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything.

Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.  He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.  For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.  God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.'  When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, 'We should like to hear you on this some other time.'”

Acts 17:22-32


Empires rise, and rage for their time upon the stage of history, and fall, to be forgotten. 

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

Stocks did their usual intraday churn and burn, finishing largely unchanged.

Gold and silver were feeling a bit wobbly, but not overmuch.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

VIX has now fallen, considerably.

Wash cycle is almost done.

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.  It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped.  Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." 

Robert Kennedy, Day of Affirmation Speech, Cape Town, South Africa, 6 June 1966

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Managed Complacency - The Grand Equilibrium

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan


"Definite signs that business and industry have turned the corner from the temporary period of emergency that followed deflation of the speculative market were seen today by President Hoover. The President said the reports to the Cabinet showed the tide of employment had changed in the right direction." -

News dispatch from Washington, January 21, 1930


"The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the 'last thing standing' between us and the end of the world.It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability."

Thomas Frank, 2016

The markets want to see a 25 basis point cut from the Fed's FOMC meeting, which will announce its decision around 2 PM.

They are also going to be listening very carefully to Chairman Powell's press conference, and are expecting some kind of reassurance of the Fed's support for equities and the Banks.

Stocks were a bit wobbly today but managed to rally into the green in the late afternoon.

The Dollar was lower, while gold and silver edged higher. The VIX fell.

After the bell Fedex announced a miss in earnings. They also cut their outlook, citing global macro slowdown. The stock was being spanked rather thoroughly after hours.

Adobe also missed its results after hours.   Smells like teen spirit.

There will be the September stock market options expiration on Friday.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant evening.

Max Blumenthal: The Management of Savagery

"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men."

John Perkins


‘Whatever happens, the [1997 Asian currency] crisis probably signaled the beginning of the end of the American empire and a shift to a tripolar world in which the United States, Europe, and East Asia simultaneously share power and compete for it.’

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, 2004


"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."

Michael Parenti

Neoliberalism and the Rise of Corporate Globalism

Excerpted below is a recent book review of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, by Quinn Slobodian, Harvard University Press.

I have included a link to the entire article which I recommend reading if you wish to know more about how the rise of globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism may go hand in hand within a reasoned construct.

I could have included much more and still not done justice to the themes and thoughts that it contains.

I found it particularly helpful because it provides a plausible rationale for the continuation of the European Union, despite its malformed integration of a currency union without internal financial integration of debts and transfer payments.  Not to mention its odd admixture of a remote central bureaucracy trumping traditional policy areas within the domain of national sovereignty.

It also helps to understand the stubborn commitment to global 'trade treaties' by corporate Democrats that tend to elevate international  bureaucracies and rules bodies,  dominated by corporate lobbyists, over the inclinations of their own national electorates. 

Obama's determined slogging for the TPP, even as his intended Democratic successor was being electorally eviscerated for her perceived corporatist elitism, was otherwise inexplicable given his sophistication in managing perceptions.

In this perspective these seemingly obtuse things can be seen as 'features' rather than well-intentioned but naively crafted arrangements containing unintentional flaws.

This review also positions neoliberalism within the context of the development of economic and political thought in the 20th century.  The two are inexorably entwined because, as is well established throughout human history, money is power.

The Boston Review
The Market Police
J. W. Mason

"Globalism in this story is not only, or even primarily, an extension of contacts between people, trade, production. Rather, it is the creation of a set of property rights that, precisely because they span multiple sovereignties, cannot be touched by one government without inviting conflict with another. In this sense it is positively desirable for property claims to cross national borders. Foreign investment, regardless of its value or otherwise for financing production, performs a political function that domestic investment cannot...

Organizing property and production across borders—whether through free trade, protections for foreign investment, currency unions or other devices—does more than limit the power of governments. It also serves, Slobodian writes, “to dissolve the small, discrete collective of mutual identification...in a larger unity.” Hayek spent much of his life searching for “a political model that would undermine the ‘solidarity of interests’ that naturally cohered” among similarly-situated people. Open borders played a critical role here, ensuring that economic interests were never “lastingly identified with the inhabitants of a particular region...

Today, the European Union offers the fullest realization of the neoliberal political vision. There is no sovereign people of Europe; the authority of European institutions rests on a body of law and treaties. The European Union is not a nation, but it is not simply an agreement among nations either. Unlike international agreements, European regulations are directly binding on individuals and not only on the government signing them. In many areas, European regulations and authorities don’t merely constrain, but actually replace, their national equivalents. (This is what makes Brexit so difficult.)

Europe’s incomplete integration—with its confusing mix of powers delegated to Brussels and powers retained by national governments—is often seen as a design flaw. But to Slobodian’s globalists, partial integration is precisely the goal—it means that neither the national nor the international body have the legitimacy and capacity to direct the economy. With no international entanglements, a government is sovereign; with complete integration, sovereignty moves to the higher level. What is wanted is a situation in which some powers but not others are delegated, leaving neither national nor super-national governments able to act outside of circumscribed role...

One might even call this the neoliberal paradox. State power is needed to enforce market relations and property rights, but when it rests on democratic politics, it can easily turn into a vehicle for a broader program of economic planning. So the site of power must be anonymized, hidden from politics—as in the opaque jurisdictional mazes of Europe...

From this point of view, the essential thing about the single European currency is not whatever dubious practical advantages come from having prices across the continent measured in the same units. Rather, it is the creation of the European Central Bank as an ostensibly technical decision-maker, more insulated from democratic politics than any national authority could be."

Read the entire book review at The Boston Review.

Cecil Rhodes and the Dream of a New World Order Presided Over by an Anglo-American Establishment

"The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes's seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire. And what does not seem to be known to anyone is that this secret society was created by Rhodes and his principal trustee, Lord Milner, and continues to exist to this day.

To be sure, this secret society is not a childish thing like the Ku Klux Klan, and it does not have any secret robes, secret handclasps, or secret passwords. It does not need any of these, since its members know each other intimately. It probably has no oaths of secrecy nor any formal procedure of initiation. It does, however, exist and holds secret meetings, over which the senior member present presides. At various times since 1891, these meetings have been presided over by Rhodes, Lord Milner, Lord Selborne, Sir Patrick Duncan, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Lord Lothian, and Lord Brand. They have been held in all the British Dominions, starting in South Africa about 1903; in various places in London, chiefly Piccadilly; at various colleges at Oxford, chiefly All Souls; and at many English country houses such as Tring Park, Blickling Hall, Cliveden, and others.

This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. All of these terms are unsatisfactory, for one reason or another, and I have chosen to call it the Milner Group. Those persons who have used the other terms, or heard them used, have not generally been aware that all these various terms referred to the same Group.

It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it. It should be done, for this Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century."

Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment

On September 19, 1877, Rhodes drafted his first will; at that time, he had an estate of only about £10,000.  Although he changed his will quite a number of times in years following, the objective remained the same. After his death, the directors of the Rhodes Trust set up the Rhodes Scholarships as the best way to achieve his objectives.) The first clause of the 1877 will bequeathed his wealth as follows:

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.

1877:  Cecil Rhodes, Confession of Faith

Rhodes originally wrote this on June 2, 1877, in Oxford. Later, that year in Kimberley, he made some additions and changes. What follows is that amended statement. The spelling and grammar errors were in the original.

It often strikes a man to inquire what is the chief good in life; to one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another great wealth, and as each seizes on his idea, for that he more or less works for the rest of his existence. To myself thinking over the same question the wish came to render myself useful to my country. I then asked myself how could I and after reviewing the various methods I have felt that at the present day we are actually limiting our children and perhaps bringing into the world half the human beings we might owing to the lack of country for them to inhabit that if we had retained America there would at this moment be millions more of English living.

I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives.

I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to this the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars, at this moment had we not lost America I believe we could have stopped the Russian-Turkish war by merely refusing money and supplies. Having these ideas what scheme could we think of to forward this object. I look into history and I read the story of the Jesuits I see what they were able to do in a bad cause and I might say under bad leaders.

At the present day I become a member of the Masonic order I see the wealth and power they possess the influence they hold and I think over their ceremonies and I wonder that a large body of men can devote themselves to what at times appear the most ridiculous and absurd rites without an object and without an end.  The idea gleaming and dancing before ones eyes like a will-of-the-wisp at last frames itself into a plan.

Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. What a dream, but yet it is probable, it is possible. I once heard it argued by a fellow in my own college, I am sorry to own it by an Englishman, that it was good thing for us that we have lost the United States. There are some subjects on which there can be no arguments, and to an Englishman this is one of them, but even from an American’s point of view just picture what they have lost, look at their government, are not the frauds that yearly come before the public view a disgrace to any country and especially their’s which is the finest in the world.

Would they have occurred had they remained under English rule great as they have become how infinitely greater they would have been with the softening and elevating influences of English rule, think of those countless 000’s of Englishmen that during the last 100 years would have crossed the Atlantic and settled and populated the United States. Would they have not made without any prejudice a finer country of it than the low class Irish and German emigrants? All this we have lost and that country loses owing to whom? Owing to two or three ignorant pig-headed statesmen of the last century, at their door lies the blame.

Do you ever feel mad? do you ever feel murderous. I think I do with those men. I bring facts to prove my assertion. Does an English father when his sons wish to emigrate ever think of suggesting emigration to a country under another flag, never—it would seem a disgrace to suggest such a thing I think that we all think that poverty is better under our own flag than wealth under a foreign one.

Put your mind into another train of thought. Fancy Australia discovered and colonised under the French flag, what would it mean merely several millions of English unborn that at present exist we learn from the past and to form our future. We learn from having lost to cling to what we possess. We know the size of the world we know the total extent.

Africa is still lying ready for us it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.

To forward such a scheme what a splendid help a secret society would be a society not openly acknowledged but who would work in secret for such an object.

I contend that there are at the present moment numbers of the ablest men in the world who would devote their whole lives to it. I often think what a loss to the English nation in some respects the abolition of the Rotten Borough System has been. What thought strikes a man entering the house of commons, the assembly that rule the whole world? I think it is the mediocrity of the men but what is the cause.

It is simply—an assembly of wealth of men whose lives have been spent in the accumulation of money and whose time has been too much engaged to be able to spare any for the study of past history. And yet in hands of such men rest our destinies. Do men like the great Pitt, and Burke and Sheridan not now to exist. I contend they do. There are men now living with I know no other term the [Greek term] of Aristotle but there are not ways for enabling them to serve their Country. They live and die unused unemployed. What has the main cause of the success of the Romish Church? The fact that every enthusiast, call it if you like every madman finds employment in it.

Let us form the same kind of society a Church for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should have members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his County. He should then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to that part of the Empire where it was felt he was needed.

Take another case, let us fancy a man who finds himself his own master with ample means of attaining his majority whether he puts the question directly to himself or not, still like the old story of virtue and vice in the Memorabilia a fight goes on in him as to what he should do. Take if he plunges into dissipation there is nothing too reckless he does not attempt but after a time his life palls on him, he mentally says this is not good enough, he changes his life, he reforms, he travels, he thinks now I have found the chief good in life, the novelty wears off, and he tires, to change again, he goes into the far interior after the wild game he thinks at last I’ve found that in life of which I cannot tire, again he is disappointed. He returns he thinks is there nothing I can do in life? Here I am with means, with a good house, with everything that is to be envied and yet I am not happy I am tired of life he possesses within him a portion of the [Greek term] of Aristotle but he knows it not, to such a man the Society should go, should test, and should finally show him the greatness of the scheme and list him as a member.

Take one more case of the younger son with high thoughts, high aspirations, endowed by nature with all the faculties to make a great man, and with the sole wish in life to serve his Country but he lacks two things the means and the opportunity, ever troubled by a sort of inward deity urging him on to high and noble deeds, he is compelled to pass his time in some occupation which furnishes him with mere existence, he lives unhappily and dies miserably. Such men as these the Society should search out and use for the furtherance of their object.

(In every Colonial legislature the Society should attempt to have its members prepared at all times to vote or speak and advocate the closer union of England and the colonies, to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire. The Society should inspire and even own portions of the press for the press rules the mind of the people. The Society should always be searching for members who might by their position in the world by their energies or character forward the object but the ballot and test for admittance should be severe)

Once make it common and it fails. Take a man of great wealth who is bereft of his children perhaps having his mind soured by some bitter disappointment who shuts himself up separate from his neighbours and makes up his mind to a miserable existence. To such men as these the society should go gradually disclose the greatness of their scheme and entreat him to throw in his life and property with them for this object. I think that there are thousands now existing who would eagerly grasp at the opportunity. Such are the heads of my scheme.

For fear that death might cut me off before the time for attempting its development I leave all my worldly goods in trust to S. G. Shippard and the Secretary for the Colonies at the time of my death to try to form such a Society with such an object.

The European Union, Greece, the Will To Power, and the Viceroys of Monetary Repression

"Talk to IMF people and they will go on about the impossibility of dealing with Syriza, their annoyance at the grandstanding, and so on. But we’re not in high school here. And right now it’s the creditors, much more than the Greeks, who keep moving the goalposts. So what is happening? Is the goal to break Syriza? Is it to force Greece into a presumably disastrous default, to encourage the others?

At this point it’s time to stop talking about 'Graccident'; if Grexit happens it will be because the creditors, or at least the IMF, wanted it to happen."

Paul Krugman, 'Breaking Greece.'

"Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax."

Even more than she thinks about all those now struggling to survive without jobs or public services? "I think of them equally. And I think they should also help themselves collectively."

How?

"By all paying their tax. Yeah."

Christine Lagarde, Can the Head of the IMF Save the Eurozone 

 

This is no longer about the Greek debt. This is now about a small group of technocrats dictating domestic policy, and alas, enforced 'obedience' from a distant a central authority, using the power of monetary rather than military control.   It is painfully obvious.

So where are the economists?  Where are the analysts who pretend to authority on monetary matters, but who in fact blow with the wind from one incompatible position and crackpot theory to another, wherever their advantage may be?

Why are they not pointing out that monetary and public policy union over a large and diverse geographic area without 'fiscal transfers' between local economies, as exists in the US between the states for example, is inherently unstable, if not barking mad?  

You cannot have one distinct part of a region setting monetary and fiscal policy to suit their own needs, and expect the rest of a vast area with varying economic situations, demographics, and cycles to dance to their indifferent tune.   We know this.

This is not some theory.  This is hard experience, and one of the great issues of the 19th century in the US where New York Banks set monetary policy and drove the economies of the rest of the nation, particularly the agricultural areas of the West, into near rebellion through their callous disregard.

What are these people thinking?  This is not a political and economic union. This is neo-colonialism.  This is degenerating into a despicable parody of the white man's burden.  And they know this. 

So what is the purpose of their experiment?  What are they trying to prove?  That they are superior, apart from the power that they obtain solely from their privileged positions?

I was just listening to Larry Summers, speaking condescendingly (in his mind I am sure it was compassionately) about not trying to change the Greeks and countries like them culturally, but instead bringing them along gradually while offering 'competent administrative assistance.'  

Are you kidding me?  From the serial destroyers of wealth at the EU and the Fed?  What do these fellows imagine themselves to be, the new Viceroys of India?

Are they trying to show that if the world moved to a single currency that the different regions around the globe would still be able to maintain their national sovereignty while operating under a centralized monetary control in the City of London and Wall Street?   Well, if so, they have failed. 

They have shown such a notion to be ludicrous, a mere pretext for the eventual tyranny of an aloof central authority of self-defining and self-deluding 'superior beings,' whose burden it is to bring order and self-control to the weak minded inferior races.  

Inferior races!  This is Greece, the cradle of Western civilization.  This is the country that stood against the onslaught of the fascists, and bought time for the Allies.   This is the nation that was placed under a series of authoritarian puppet regimes by the Truman Doctrine as their thanks.  How convenient are our memories.  

And this is a nation that has been brought very low, into the spiral of a depression, by the monetary chicanery and neo-colonial vendor financing of Brussels and Berlin, through the puppet governments and Western economic hitmen under which they have suffered for far too long.

This is nothing more than the high water mark of a long trend to the will to power, that is as old as Babylon, and evil as hell.

Social change happens slowly at first, and then all in a rush. We have seen this recently in the States, and the rate of change, when it comes, can be breath taking. 

And the things that these hypocrites fear most are being brought about by their clumsy and incompetent pretensions.  There is no irony sweeter than the course of history, and human nature.

 

Debt, War and Empire By Other Means

This video below may help one to understand some of the seemingly obtuse demands from the Troika with regard to Greece.

The video is a bit dated, but the debt scheme it describes remains largely unchanged. The primary development has been the creation of an experiment called the European Union and the character of the targets.   One might also look to the wars of 'preventative intervention' and 'colour revolutions' that raise up puppet regimes for examples of more contemporary economic spoliation.

From largely small and Third World countries, the candidates for debt peonage have become the smaller amongst the developed Western countries, the most vulnerable on the periphery.  

And even the domestic populations of the monetary powers, the US, Germany, and the UK, are now feeling the sting of financialisation, debt imposition through crises, and austerity.   What used to only take place in South America and Africa has now taken place in Jefferson County Alabama.  Corrupt officials burden taxpayers with unsustainable amounts of debt for unproductive, grossly overpriced projects. 

It would be wrong in these instances to blame the whole country,  the whole government, or all corporations, except perhaps for sleepwalking, and sometimes willfully, towards the abyss.  For the most part a relatively small band of scheming and devious fellows abuse and corrupt every form of government and organization and law in order to achieve their private ambitions, often using various forms of intimidation and reward.  It is an old, old story.

And then there is the mass looting enabled by the most recent financial crisis and Bank bailouts.  If the people will not take on the chains of debt willingly, you impose them indirectly, while giving the funds to your cronies who use them against the very people who are bearing the burdens, while lecturing them on moral values and thrift.  It is an exceptionally diabolical con game.

The TPP and TTIP are integral initiatives in this effort of extending financial obligations, debt, and control.  You might ask yourself why the House Republicans, who have fought the current President at every turn, blocking nominees and repeatedly staging mock votes to denounce a healthcare plan that originated in their own think tank and was first implemented by their own presidential candidate, are suddenly championing that President's highest profile legislation, and against the opposition of his own party?  Where did that come from?

The next step, after Greece is subdued, will be to extend that model to other, larger countries.  And to redouble the austerity at home under cover of the next financial crisis by eliminating cash as a safe haven, and to begin the steady stream of digital 'bailing-in.'   They will not even have to ask, as if it mattered.

This is why these corporatists and statists hate gold and silver.  And why it is at the focal point of a currency war.  It provides a counterweight to their monetary power.  It speaks unpleasant truths. It is a safe haven and alternative, along with other attempts to supplant the IMF and the World Bank, for the rest of the world.

So when you say, the Philippines deserved it, Iceland deserved it, Ireland deserved it, Africa deserves it, Jefferson County deserved it, Detroit deserved it, and now Greece deserves it, just keep in mind that some day soon they will be saying that you deserve it, because you stood by and did nothing.

When they are done with all the others, for whom do you think they come next?   If you wish to see injustice stopped, if you wish to live up to the pledge of 'never again,' then you must stand for your fellows who are more vulnerable first.

The economic hitmen have honed their skills amongst the poor and relatively defenseless, and have been coming closer to home in search of new hunting grounds and fatter spoils.  There is nothing 'new' or 'modern' about this.  The only thing that changes are the names for it.

This is as old as Babylon, and evil as sin.  It is the power of darkness of the world, and of spiritual wickedness in high places.   The difference is that it is not happening in the past, or in a book, it is happening here and now.

"Economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain. As a result, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of the deified market, which becomes the only rule."

Francis I, Laudato Si

You may also find some information about the contemporary applications of these methods in The IMF's 'Tough Choices' On Greece by Jamie Galbraith which I highly recommend.

"Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas. The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola

Pictures From a Currency War, With Narrative

I have noticed lately that the spinmeisters are now latching on to the term 'currency war,' but are trying to deflect it merely to an intensification of the beggar thy neighbor strategy of devaluing your currency to subsidize exports and penalize imports.

This has been going on for a long time, most notably by the Asian Tigers, led by Japan and then perfected by China.  But make no mistake, the real heart of this process is in an Anglo-American banking/industrial cartel that intends to beggar everybody.

The multinational corporations went along with it.  They were its great lobbyists, and their wealthy scions the founders of think tanks to provide it a rationale and respectability. 

 

Walmart wrote a chapter in the new gospel of greed as a means of undermining wages and the American working class by insisting, as far back as the 1990's and the Clinton era, that suppliers start offshoring to China. And servile politicians opened the doors wide, and turned a blind eye to abuses that are still coming home to roost.

Part of the arrangement was a quid pro quo. The multinationals, who successfully staged a financial coup d'état in the States and Western Europe, were to extend the reach of their strong dollar policy and europression via foreign direct investments in resources rich overseas nations and foreign markets in order to consolidate their power into the non-democratic world.

But China and Russia balked at their end of the presumed bargain. They realized that opening their own doors to dollar exploitation, and allowing the economic hitmen to come in and pick up assets on the cheap, would lead to eventual political unrest, encirclement, and their own loss of power.

'Color revolutions' were becoming popular, as one country after another was falling into chaos, the kind that produces fire sales in productive assets and the elimination of inconvenient local rivals to power.  And in Europe, the powers that be created a Eurozone structure that any decent economist would know was unsustainable, and destined to create an unstable situation of few winners and many big losers.

And so a consortium of nations began to resist.  Some called them the BRICS.   They became alarmed, and then convinced, that allowing a single nation or group of multinationals to control the world's reserve currency was like a Ponzi scheme that could only continue on until its acquired the whip hand of power everywhere.

They started to speak up in international monetary organizations, long dominated by the Anglo-American banking and industrial cartels. They demanded the establishment of a new monetary standard for international trade that was broadly based, to replace the failed Bretton Woods Agreement that had continuing on as the ad hoc dollar hegemony known as Bretton Woods II after Nixon arbitrarily broke the formal agreement with the closing of the gold window in 1971.

And so we see a new phenomenon today, in which the long term selling of gold to control its price, resulting in the post-Bretton Woods bear market that lasted over twenty years, has given way to net gold buying by the world's central banks, and in increasing size.  And the creation of a paper gold market in parallel, through which the West seeks to control the price and supply of gold, to maintain their financial operation while they more aggressively pursue nation recycling and repurposing, draconian trade deals that supplant domestic governance, and when that fails, through internal insurgencies and at times, overt military action.

Simultaneously, there are a proliferation of bilateral trade deals in which currency arrangements are being made between countries, and even among small regional groups of nations, to conduct their business outside of the US Dollar system.  They are even building up their own financial networks and infrastructure in response to increasingly aggressive use of sanctions and other forms of economic pressure.

The US and UK, like China and Russia, are not immune to concerns about domestic unrest. A strong dollar policy and the support for a policy of offshoring to increase corporate profits are wreaking havoc on one of the world's greatest popular economic achievements: the US middle class.

 

Increasingly concerned, the governments are cracking down on any sparks of domestic dissent, targeting leaders, vilifying and suppressing minorities, and increasing the surveillance of its own people.  They are weaponizing the domestic police forces, and establishing the 'legal means' by which control can be maintained in the face of increasing misery and discontent at home.

It is not a pretty picture. It is an old story of greed and deceit, of empire and world conquest, of the desolating sacrilege of betraying those who have fought for freedom and civil rights to cash in for their own selfish gains. 

 

Will this end in a new gold standard, as this article A New Gold Standard in the Making, which is the source of these graphs suggests?  I surely do not know, and still do not think so.  

 

If you have been following the thought process here, going back before even the establishment of this blog to 2000, I have felt that the most likely course will be the establishment of a new unit of international currency, similar to but not the same as the SDR, with a far broader composition of currencies and commodities included, so that no single group would be able to control it for their own purposes.

 

Stagflation is no natural phenomenon.  It is the act of man in a policy intervention or policy error par excellence.  Until OPEC was able to trigger a stagflation through their use of an oil embargo and price cartel in the 1970's in the favorable conditions created by economic rot introduced by years of discretionary, aggressive war in Southeast Asia and the ensuing debts, most economists thought it to be impossible, and certainly not a 'natural' outcome.

 

I think that domestic reform will be coming, and this is necessary because no new monetary standard is going to repair a system that has failed from within due to corruption and systemic injustice.  

 

Old systems, even when they finally turn to visible abuse as they decline, can fail for a very long time, seemingly unbeatable, until they finally collapse from within.  This is how it was for the fall of the old Soviet Union, and this is how it may be for the Anglo-American cartel and their attendant nations like Germany and Japan.

 

It is still possible that Russia and China could make a deal with the Anglo-Americans and establish a tri-partite world government, with their own spheres of control and interest.  As you may recall this was the way George Orwell saw it in 1984.  I have been watching for that possible development based on my own research on the growth of international capital markets and flows since 1990 at least. 

 

People bring this up and so I wish to address it now, once and for all.  I am aware of the possible deeper significance of these developments from an eschatological perspective.  But recall that even the great apostle, who was 'lifted up to the third heaven,' was mistaken in his estimation of it, thinking it a phenomenon of his own time.  It is a mistake of vanity to go too far in such arcane and difficult subjects, in pursuit of sick thrills that only serve to distract us from our call to the work of the day, and the practical task of finding sanctity and salvation in the world. 

 

How we will react to this individually is critical for our own long term survival as spiritual beings regardless, since we all face our own ends individually.  Of this we can be sure.   We are told that most will give in, despairing at the increase in wickedness, and seek for power and riches of their own beyond all reason and grace.   And it requires no end time to see this happening through all ages. 

 

Change is coming.  It may be a new arrangement that brings with it the blessing of reform, transparency and justice through peaceful evolution.  It may be delayed and more difficult.  What cannot be sustained will not continue. 

 

This will end.  But perhaps not very well.  To a great extent that is up to us, unless we stand by and do nothing.  "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."  But what shall I to do?   Begin with yourself, despising only the fear and the evil in you.  Do as you have been instructed by the two great commandments, which have been implanted as a seed in your heart. 

 

You are called.  You choose the answer.

 

 

The Japanese Economic Dilemma in a Nutshell

Here is a note from a friend in Japan:

In today's Nikkei (Japanese version), on page 5, tucked behind all the hype about the government's decision to lower corporate taxes, in hopes that major companies will raise wages, was a short article on "three miscalculations about the economy" this year.

1. Tax revenues increased with the increase in the sales tax but consumer spending fell. Tax revenues expected to increase by about 5 trillion yen.

2. Weaker yen and higher stock market improved family assets for some I would say, but exports did not improve, and were about 8% lower than 4 years ago.

3. CPI (excluding fresh food) increased, resulting in a real wage decline. Rreal wages have been falling since mid 2013 and are now around 4% lower year over year.

Over the past few days I have been reading about the so-called lost decade of the 1990s and the government's policy decisions to try to kick-start the economy.

In 1990 the government had about 60 trillion in tax revenues and 69 trillion in general account total expenditures.

Now, the government estimates 52 trillion in tax revenues for fiscal 2014 but has more than 95 trillion in expenditures.

Even a second grade student can see that something is not working.

As you know, I think that there are three things that must be done.

Reform, reform, reform.

The Japanese economy is burdened with an unusually bad demographic problem, made much worse by the burdens of insider dealing, crony capitalism, and zombie banks and their corporations.

And its greatest burden of all is an elite that serves itself and its friends first and foremost, and that finds a greater kinship with its global counterparts than with the people whose interests it purports to represent.

 

"The conflict between the East and West was designed to scare the people of the world into accepting a convergence of these two monopoly systems of authoritarian power. The end result was to be a new Imperial Order and a New World Empire run by an elite self-perpetuating oligarchies from the leading nations of the earth."

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 860

 

Related:

Princes of the Yen: Central Banks and the Transformation of an Economy

Why the (Global) Kleptocrats Do Not Want a Recovery

The Pursuit of Global Corporatism