Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Harvard Commencement, June 1978
"The US must win, since it has infinite ammunition: there is no limit to the dollars the Federal Reserve can create. What needs to be discussed is the terms of the world’s surrender: the needed changes in nominal exchange rates and domestic policies around the world."
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 12 Oct 2010
"The historical evidence is overwhelming. Many societies have done well for a while – until powerful people get out of hand. This is an easy pattern to see at a distance and in other cultures. It is typically much harder to recognize when your own society now has an elite less subject to effective constraints and more able to exert power in an abusive fashion."
Simon Johnson, Jamie Dimon and the Fall of Nations, May 31, 2012
“The eye of the commodities storm has not been oil, and peak oil, but rather a collapsing international trade system based on the US dollar. The heart of the problem is that trading increasingly worthless dollars for hard goods has been a nice protection racket with an amazingly long run under the Pax Americana. The non-G7 countries will stop accepting this arrangement, and the world will adjust.
The markets are searching for a replacement for the Bretton Woods II arrangement of dollars for oil and military protection. Increased demand and peaks in supply will merely accelerate and intensify the storm. The heightened sense of risk and volatility is because the world's markets do not yet see a viable, sustainable solution.
A new equilibrium that will underpin international trade will be discovered. But given the length and breadth of the status quo the seismic shocks of the adjustment may be quite convulsive, taking down more than a few major institutions."
Jesse, The Collapse of Bretton Woods and the Pax Americana, 25 August 2008
“When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain,’ and so it happens. And when you see the wind blowing from the south, you say, ‘It is going to be hot,’ and so it happens. You hypocrites. You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky. Why then do you not understand the signs of the present time?"
Luke 12:54-56
"The regal power of her consuls, the authority of her senate, and the majesty of her people, were now trampled under foot; for those divine laws and hallowed customs, that had been the essence of her constitution–were set at nought, and her best friends were lying exposed in their blood.
These were surely very dismal times to those who suffered; but I know not, why any one but a schoolboy, in his declamation, should whine over the commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt, and, in their corruption, sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another."
Samuel Johnson, Review of the Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, 1756
“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it gathers to itself such explosive power that on the day it bursts it will blow up everything in its way."
Émile François Zola, from Dreyfus: His Life and Letters, 1937
Oh all right, so you were correct in your analysis.
But so many very important people were saying something else.
So what do I need to do next?
'Learn to serve, and to pray.'
