Von Greyerz: "The Dark Years Are Here"

 Our 50 years old bubble is on the verge of imploding. Russia will be the catalyst but not the cause. Whoever has seen the process in Argentina, Zimbabwe or... Russia, knows. It is not pretty, but not the end of the world either. Just the end of "a" world which happens to be the one in which we have been living during these last 75 years. Get ready!

Authored by Egon von Greyerz via GoldSwitzerland.com,

A GLOBAL MONETARY & COMMODITY INFERNO OF NUCLEAR PROPORTIONS

When the sh-t hits the global fan, it often does it at the optimal time for the maximum amount of damage and with the worst kind of sh-t to soil the world.

For years I have been clear that the world is reaching the end of an economic, financial and monetary era which will affect mankind catastrophically for decades. 

The world will obviously blame Putin for the catastrophe which will hit every corner of our planet. But we must remember that neither Putin nor Covid is the reason for the economic cataclysm that we are now approaching. 

These events are catalysts which will have a major effect because they are hitting a gigantic debt bubble of a magnitude that has never been seen before in history. And it obviously takes very little to prick this epic bubble.

What is unequivocal is that all currencies will finish the 100+ year fall to ZERO in the next few years. It is also crystal clear that all the asset bubbles – stocks, bonds and property – will implode at the same time leading to a long and deep depression.

We had the warning in 2006-9 but central banks ignored it and just added new worthless debt to existing worthless debt to create worthless debt squared – an obvious recipe for disaster.

So as is often typical for the end of an economic era, the catalyst is totally unexpected and worse than anyone could have forecast.

WAR CYCLES

Yes, I and a few others have pointed out that we are in a war cycle currently, and recent events have clearly confirmed this and hit the world with a vengeance.

Just as nobody paid any serious attention to the warning that the Great Financial Crisis in 2006-9 gave the world, few people have taken Putin’s warnings seriously since the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine.

When sh-t happens at the end of an excessive bubble era, it will always be the worst kind. And what can be worse than a major war that could develop into a nuclear and world war.

Sadly, wars are part of history and there is virtually no period in history without a war. Wikipedia lists around 40 ongoing wars and conflicts currently with most of them being relatively small and local. The majority are in the Middle East and Africa.

Wars are horrible at any level and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine certainly qualifies as another grim conflict that potentially could have been avoided. In the US backed Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, the Russian friendly Ukrainian President Yanukovych was pushed out. Since then, Putin has always made it clear that he could not accept being surrounded by a US and Western backed Ukraine as well as Nato members with missile systems pointing to Russia. The parallel with Cuba, Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1962 is obvious.

Whether anyone listened to Putin’s demands or not, he made it very clear that he could never let Russia be cornered in this manner. If the US and the West had focused more on critical diplomacy for the sake of global peace, things could have been different. But instead, all Western world leaders found nebulous and uncontroversial areas to agree on such as Covid, climate change, wokeism, rewriting history and creating unlimited genders.

Leaders also deliberately ignored the fact that the world was going towards an inevitable economic debt and asset collapse. Much easier to rearrange the deck chairs than to deal with real and emphatically catastrophic issues.

So Putin is now the number one enemy of the Western world since starting a war is always unacceptable whoever starts it. Lindsey Graham, a US Republican senator just suggested that Putin should be taken out! But Boris Johnson fortunately disagreed but  suggested instead that Putin should be held to account at the International (Criminal) Court. 

Fair enough, war crimes are always crimes and should therefore be punished.

But what is interesting to observe is that when the US with Allies start unprovoked wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya or Syria with hundreds of thousands of innocent victims, destroying the fabric of these societies and also leading to anarchy, no one calls for the US president or UK prime minister to be held to account.

Obviously, the world has never been a level playing field.

THE FED CAN NEVER GET INFLATION RIGHT

Inflation leading to hyperinflation was always guaranteed in the current debt infested era, although the Fed and other Western central banks have never understood what inflation is. Just as they didn’t understand that their fake and manipulated inflation figures couldn’t even reach the Fed target of 2%. Now with real US inflation exceeding 15% (see graph below), the Fed has a new dilemma that they are totally unprepared for.

The US government conveniently changed the calculation of inflation to suit their purpose. Had they stuck to the 1980s established method, official inflation would be over 15% today and rising.

For years, the US Fed unsuccessfully tried, with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, to get inflation up to 2%. In spite of throwing $ trillions at the problem and keeping interest rates at zero, they never understood why they failed.

In spite of printing unlimited amounts of counterfeit money, inflation for years stayed nearer 0% than 2%.

Now with official inflation at 7% and real at 15%, the Fed can’t understand what has hit them as we know from their laughable “transitory” language.

So now a quick volte face for the Fed to figure out how to reduce inflation by 5 percentage points and more likely by 13 to get inflation down to 2% instead of up to 2%.

Clearly the Fed can never get it right but many of us have known that for a very long time.

If the Fed studied and understood Austrian economics rather than defunct Keynesianism, they would know that the real inflation rate depends on growth in money supply rather than the obsolete consumer price model.

BASED ON THE GROWTH IN MONEY SUPPLY, US INFLATION IS NOW 19%

So let’s take a look at the growth in Money Supply. Since 1971, M2 has grown by 7% annually. A 7% growth means that prices double every 10 years. Thus 100% total inflation over 10 years rather than the 2% per annum that is the Fed target.

But as the chart above shows, the exponential phase started in March 2020 with M2 growing by 19% annually since then. That means a doubling of prices every 3.8 years.

Since money supply is growing at 19% annually, this means that inflation is also 19% based on our Austrian friends.

And this is what the US and the world was facing before the Ukraine crisis. But now there is a lot of explosive fuel being poured on the global inflation fire.

RUSSIA HAS THE BIGGEST GLOBAL NATURAL RESOURCE RESERVES

Russia has the biggest natural resource reserves in the world which include coal, natural gas, oil, gold, timber, rare earth metals etc. In Rubles these reserves will obviously appreciate substantially with the falling currency.

In total, the Russian natural resource reserves are estimated at $75 trillion. That is 66% higher than the second country USA and more than twice as much as Saudi Arabia and Canada.

Even if the total Russian supply is not lost to the world, it is clear that the West is determined to punish Russia to the furthest extent possible. Therefore, as we have already seen in the major escalation of oil and gas prices, the shortages will put insufferable pressure on the prices of natural resources.

The table below shows the countries in Europe that are dependent on Russian gas for more than 50% of their total consumption.

A COMMODITY BLACK SWAN IS COMING

The global market for grains, vegetable oil and fertilisers was already extremely tight before Russia’s attack.

What is happening now is a commodity black swan across both energy and agricultural resources.

The World Food Programme warned of a catastrophic scarcity for several hundred million people last November. What is happening now will make this exponentially worse.

“Everything is going up vertically. The whole production chain is under pressure from every side,” said UN’s ex-head of agricultural markets.

Energy and agricultural products are interlinked. Gas is feedstock for fertiliser production in Europe. Russia and Belarus together account for 1/3 of the world’s potash exports.

Around 33% of world exports of barley come from Russia and Ukraine together, 30% of wheat, 20% of maize and 80% of sunflower oil.

The consequences are unforeseeable.

Goldman Sachs Commodity Index is up 3X since April 2020. The exponential phase of  the move has just started.

UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FOA) are reporting a 43% increase in food price since 2020. And remember, this was before the real problems had started.

A GLOBAL MONETARY AND COMMODITY INFERNO

I have for quite a few years warned about the coming inflation, leading to hyperinflation, based on unlimited money printing.

But the dynamite of a global commodity crisis and shortages thrown into the already catastrophic debt and global monetary fire will create an inferno of nuclear proportions.

If a miracle doesn’t stop this war very quickly (which is extremely unlikely), the world will soon be entering a hyperinflationary commodity explosion (think both energy, metals and food) combined with a cataclysmic deflationary asset implosion (think debt, stocks and property).

The world will be experiencing totally unknown consequences without the ability to solve any of them for a very long time.

All the above would most likely happen even without a global war. But if the war spreads outside Russia and Ukraine, then all bets are off. At this point I am not going to speculate about such an outcome since what is standing in front of us currently certainly is bad enough.

IS THERE ANY GOOD NEWS?

So is there any good news? Well, first of all as I often repeat, family and a small group of friends and colleagues will be invaluable in the coming crisis.

And since a commodity inflation is guaranteed, it is obvious that physical gold and some silver will be a life saver against the coming bubble-asset destruction (stocks, bonds, property.

As I have said many times:

“GOLD AND SILVER WILL REACH UNTHINKABLE HEIGHTS!”

In a crisis of this magnitude, I would stay away from paper assets including ETFs of any kind. It is clearly imperative to have physical metals stored outside the financial system.

And remember not to measure your wealth or your gold in worthless paper money. Instead measure your gold and silver in ounces or grammes.

Just look at what happens to gold when the currency collapses. The chart below shows gold in Rubles since 2000. Gold is up 38X in the last 21 years. Just in the last 12 months, gold is up 89% in Rubles and the problems have just began.

Russia was the world’s second largest gold producer in 2020 with 331 tonnes after China with 368 tonnes.

These two countries have officially accumulated 3,400 tonnes of gold since 2000 giving them a total of 4,200t.

Some insiders estimate that China’s gold reserves could be as high as 20,000t and Russia’s also considerably higher than the 2,300t.

So while Russia and China have increased their combined gold holdings 5X since 2000 The US allegedly has held 8,000 since 1980. But since there has been no official physical audit of the US gold since 1953, few believe that they hold this amount of unencumbered gold.

Remember: “He who holds the gold makes the rules”

In 2009 I wrote an article called “The Dark Years Are Here”. I have republished parts of it a couple of times and the last time in 2020 with an article called “The Dark Years & The Forth Turning”

Sadly it now looks like the Dark Years are starting in earnest.

Except for protecting your assets against collapsing currencies, I repeat that the circle of family and friends and helping others will be absolutely critical.

Why You Should Question The West's 'Madman' Narrative

Putin may be a lot of things but "madman" is not one of them. Conversely, the derangement  syndrome seems to be acute in the West. It bodes ill for what's coming next.

Authored by Jonathan Cook via the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

How convenient for western leaders that every time another country defies the West’s projection of power, the western media can agree on one thing: that the foreign government in question is led by a madman, a psychopath or a megalomaniac.

At a drop of a hat, western leaders are absolved of guilt or even responsibility for the terrible events that unfold. The West remains virtuous, simply a victim of the world’s madmen. Nothing the West did was a provocation. Nothing they could have done would have averted the disaster.

The US may be the most powerful state on the planet by far, but its hands are apparently always tied by a deranged, implacable foe like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Putin, we are told, is not advancing any rational – from his perspective – geopolitical or strategic interest by invading his neighbor, Ukraine. And so no concession could or should have been made because none would have prevented him from acting as he has.

The West, meaning foreign policy hawks in Washington, gets to decide when the timeline of events started, when the original sin occurred. The compliant western media give their blessing, and our hands are washed clean once again.

The subtext – always the subtext – is that something must be done to stop the “madman”. And because he is irrational and a megalomaniac, such action must never be framed in terms of concessions or compromise – that would be appeasement, after all. If every enemy is a new Hitler, no western leader will risk a comparison with Neville Chamberlain.

Instead, what is needed urgently, western politicians and media agree, is the projection – whether overtly or covertly – of yet more western power and force.

Unmitigated catastrophe

The US and British invasion of Iraq nearly two decades ago is a particularly pertinent and telling counterpoint to events in Ukraine.

Then, as now, the West was supposedly faced with a dangerous, irrational ruler who could not be made to see sense and was unwilling to compromise. Saddam Hussein, western leaders and their media insisted, had allied with his archenemies in al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the Twin Towers attack of 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction, and could launch them towards Europe in 45 minutes.

Except, none of that was true – not even the madman bit. Saddam was a hard, cold, calculating dictator who, like most dictators, kept himself in power through a reign of terror over his opponents.

Nonetheless, the western media faithfully amplified the tissue of evidence-free claims – and patent lies like that preposterous alliance with al-Qaeda – concocted in Washington and London to usher in the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.

United Nations inspectors could find no trace of stockpiles of Iraq’s former biological and chemical weapons arsenal. One, Scott Ritter, went unheard as he warned that any possessed by Saddam would have turned to “harmless goo” after many years of sanctions and inspections.

The improbable 45-minute claim, meanwhile, was not based on any kind of intelligence. It was lifted straight from a student’s speculations in a doctoral dissertation. Iraq’s invasion by the US and Britain was not only illegal, of course. It had horrifying consequences. It led to the likely deaths of around a million Iraqis, and spawned a terrifying new kind of nihilistic Islamism that destabilized much of the region.

Those interests, of course, were largely concealed because they were so ignoble, flagrantly violating the so-called “rules-based order” Washington claims to uphold. But despite being an unmitigated catastrophe, the US-led invasion of Iraq was no more “irrational” than Putin’s current invasion of Ukraine. Washington’s neoconservatives advanced what they regarded as US geopolitical interests and a strategic vision for the Middle East.

What the neoconservatives wanted was variously to control Iraq’s oil, to eliminate regional pockets of resistance to its own and its client Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East, and to expand the region as an economic market for US goods and weapons.

Saddam fell into the trap set for him because he was equally motivated by his own narrowly defined “rational” self-interest. He refused to admit he had no meaningful weapons systems left after the western sanctions and inspections regimes because he did not dare to look weak, either to his own population or to hostile neighbors like Iran.

The western media’s refusal to consider the real motivations on either side – the neoconservatives’ in Washington or Saddam’s in Iraq – made the 2003 invasion and the suffering that followed all the more inevitable.

Spheres of influence

The same predilection for the simple-minded “madman” narrative has once again pushed us squarely into another international crisis. And once again, it has served as a way to avoid examining the real background to, and reasons for, what is happening in Ukraine and wider eastern Europe.

Putin’s actions – though potentially no less disastrous than the US-led invasion of Iraq, and certainly as illegal – are also rooted in his own “rational” assessment of Russian geopolitical interests.

But unlike Washington’s reasons for invading Iraq, Putin’s grounds for threatening and now invading Ukraine were not concealed. He has been quite open and consistent about the rationale for years, even if western leaders ignored his speeches, and western media rarely cited anything more than his most tub-thumping, jingoistic soundbites.

Russia has realistic objections to the behavior and bad faith of the US and NATO over the past three decades. NATO, we should remind ourselves, is primarily a creature of the Cold War, a vehicle for the West to project an aggressive military posture towards the former Soviet Union under the cover of a “defense” organization.

But following the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, the western military alliance was not disbanded. Quite the reverse. It grew to absorb almost all of the former east European states that had belonged to the Soviet bloc and it made a new bogeyman of Russia. Western military budgets climbed year by year.

Russia expects a so-called “sphere of influence“, in the same way that the US demands one. What’s been going on instead for the best part of 30 years is that the US, as the world’s sole superpower, has expanded its own sphere of influence right up to Russia’s doorstep. Like Washington, Putin has the nuclear arsenal to back up his demands. To ignore either his claim for a sphere of influence or Russia’s ability to impose it by force if necessary is either hypocrisy or foolishness.

That too paved the path to the current invasion.

Cold war mentality

But Putin has other reasons – from his perspective – to act. He also wants to show the US that there is a price to be paid for Washington’s repeated broken promises on security arrangements in Europe. Russia dissolved its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, after the fall of the Soviet Union in a sign both of its weakness and its willingness to reorder its relations with its neighbors.

The US and the European Union had a chance to welcome Russia into the fold, and make it a partner in Europe’s security. Instead the Cold War mentality persisted even more in western capitals than in Moscow. The West’s military bureaucracies that need war, or at least the threat of it to justify their jobs and budgets, lobbied to keep Russia at arm’s length.

Meanwhile, eastern Europe became a large, and profitable, new market for western arms makers. That paved the path to this crisis too.

And finally, Putin has every incentive to deal more decisively with the eight-year festering wound of a civil war between anti-Russian, Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russian fighters from the Donbas region, in Ukraine’s east. Even before the current invasion, many thousands had died.

Ukrainian nationalists want entry into NATO so it is sucked into the Donbas bloodbath on their side – fueling a war that could spiral out of control into a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. Putin wants to show NATO and militant Ukrainians that will be no simple matter.

The invasion is intended as a shot across the bows to dissuade NATO from moving its high-wire act into Ukraine.

Western leaders were warned of all this by their own officials way back in 2008, as a leaked US diplomatic cable reveals: “Strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene."

But even now, the West is undeterred. It is losing no time in pouring yet more weapons into Ukraine, further fueling the fire.

Dangerous caricatures

None of this, of course, means Putin’s actions are virtuous, or even wise. But for some his invasion of Ukraine looks no more irrational or dangerous than NATO’s decades of provocative moves against a nuclear-armed Russia.

And here we get to the nub of the matter. The West alone defines what “rational” means – and on that basis, its enemies can always be dismissed as deranged and evil.

Western media propaganda only serves to deepen these trends in humanizing, or otherwise, those caught up in events.

As the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association observed at the weekend, much of the coverage has been blatantly racist, with western commentators noting with sympathy that those fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unlike apparently those displaced by western invasions of the Middle East, are “like us”, “civilized” and don’t “look like refugees”.

Similarly, there is a stark contrast between the celebratory reporting of a Ukrainian “resistance” making improvised bombs against the advancing Russian army and the media’s routine denomination of Palestinians as “terrorists” for resisting Israel’s decades of occupation.

Equally, US global dominance means it dictates the military, political and diplomatic framework of international relations. Other countries, including potential rivals like Russia and China, have to operate within that framework.

That forces them to react more often than act. Which is why it is so critically important that the western media report on the events fully and honestly, not resort to easy tropes designed to turn foreign leaders into caricatures and their populations into heroes or villains.

If Putin is a madman, like Iraq’s Saddam, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders before him, then the only solution is the use of force to the bitter end.

In global power politics that potentially translates into a third European “World War”, the overthrow of Russia’s government, and Putin’s trial at The Hague or his execution. The “straitjacket” strategy. Which is precisely the catastrophic destination towards which western leaders, aided by the media, have been pushing the region over the past three decades.

There are far less dangerous ways of resolving international crises than that – but not so long as we keep peddling the myth of the “madman” enemy.

A discussion with DeSantis (Governor of Florida)

 Time for the Covid fanatics to apologize? Don't count on it! Worse, they will now double down about Russia and whatever comes next.

 Not doing your part for climate change? Not supportive enough for the latest government edict? Only pretending to be supportive? In 1997, when Deng Xiaoping said that China and Hong Kong would have the same system in 50 years, we all understood that China would become capitalist. Instead we are all in the process of becoming Chinese!

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Saturday night I received a message:

“The governor wants to invite you to a Monday event.”

Soon enough after that, I had received the details: Ron DeSantis was planning a roundtable discussion with medical professionals (which I myself am not) for the purpose of assessing the merits of various COVID policies, particularly regarding children.

The roundtable was also intended to keep these issues alive at a time when their proponents seem happy to let the news shift to other topics. We cannot forget what was done to us and to children, and the quacks who recommended these things need to be held to account.

A small number of influencers (including your host here) were invited to attend in person in order to report on and live Tweet the event to their followers. Those of you who follow me on Twitter — @ThomasEWoods — were treated to precisely that.

DeSantis himself, whom I got to chat with a bit after the event, struck me as informed, down to earth, and authentic. What you see on television is what you get in person, except in person he’s funnier and edgier.

The event itself featured such notables as Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Tracy Hoeg, Dr. Jill Ackerman, Dr. Christopher D’Adamo, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Harvey Risch, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta.

During the event an ER doctor named Joseph Fraiman offered a public apology to Professors Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta, whose anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration he had once considered dangerous. He was sure that places without harsh COVID lockdowns would experience worse outcomes.

“You were right,” he said to them. “I was wrong…. The scientist in me…had to acknowledge that my hypothesis had been falsified.”

Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya emphasized the various ways in which the people in that room had been correct from the start, and reminded people of his own work early on, in March and April 2020, showing how much more widespread the virus was than previously thought. That meant there was no way a lockdown strategy could possibly work, but it would severely harm the working class and ordinary people in general.

The event wrapped up with a striking announcement from Joseph Ladapo, the heroic Florida Surgeon General: Florida is now the first state to recommend against the vaccines for healthy children.

In short: we’ve got them on the run. (DeSantis even wondered recently whether Dr. Fauci, who seems to have disappeared, may have enrolled in the witness protection program.) But that’s not good enough. We have to make them answer for what they did.

And yet the COVID fanaticism is only one brand, if an especially destructive one, of the elites’ fanaticism.

It’s touching every issue now.

If you’re not with the establishment you’re a terrible extremist who should be shunned.

I used to say: my group, the Tom Woods Show Elite, is a particularly nice haven for people who want to stay sane during COVID.

But with every issue taking on an air of fanaticism and intolerance of dissident voices, it’s now a place for those of us with independent minds to band together.

See you inside, my friend:

http://www.SupportingListeners.com

Putin's Invasion of Ukraine - Discussion (Video)

 To understand what's going on in Ukraine right now, listen to this discussion.

 Ukraine will be wrecked by design. It could have been otherwise.

 

'Forget About COVID', They Say..

 Yes Covid is over. The right path, as advocated below would be to pause and reflect on what went wrong. Then change the system. We won't. Of course, we won't. And so we will trudge from bad to worse, from crisis to crisis, until the system crashes.  

 In-between Covid will rank with the witch hunt and Mccarthyism among the mistakes and dead ends explorations of mankind. Nothing to see there!   

And just like that, this may be our last post about Covid! What lies? What social engineering? What virus?

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Earlier this year, a phrase was trending because Bari Weiss used it on a talk show: “I’m done with Covid.” Many people cheered simply because the subject has been the source of vast oppression for billions of people for two years. 

There are two ways to be over Covid. 

One way is to do what the memo from the consultants of the Democratic National Committee suggested: declare the war won and move on. For political reasons. 

Deaths attributed to Covid nationally are higher now than they were in the summer of 2020 when the whole country was locked down. They are also higher now than during the election of November the same year.

But today we are just supposed to treat it for what it is: a seasonal virus with a disparate impact on the aged and frail. 

Rationality is back! In that sense, it’s good to forget about Covid if it means living life normally and behaving with clarity about what does and does not work to mitigate a virus. The Democrats decided that the hyper-restrictionist ways were risking political fortunes. Hence, the line and the talking points needed to change. 

Another way to get over Covid is to forget completely about the last two years, especially the astonishing failures of compulsory pandemic controls.

Forget about the school closures that cost a generation two years of learning.

Forget that the hospitals were largely closed to people without a Covid-related malady.

Forget about the preventable nursing-home deaths.

Forget that dentistry was practically abolished for a few months, or that one could not even get a haircut. 

Forget the stay-at-home orders, the church and business closures, the playground and gym closures, the bankruptcies, the travel restrictions, the firings, the crazed advice for everyone to mask up and physically separate, the record drug-related deaths, the mass depression, the segregation, the brutalization of small business, the labor-force dropouts, the forced stoppages of art and culture, and the capacity limits on venues that forced weddings and funerals to be on Zoom. 

Forget about a closer look at the bogus mathematical models, vaccine trials, the circumstances behind the Emergency Use Authorizations, the adverse effects, the inaccuracies of the PCR test, and misclassification of deaths, the billions and trillions of misdirected funds, the division of all workers between essential and nonessential, and the millions who were forced to get jabs they did not want. 

Forget about the possibility of a lab leak, the role of China, the deadly use of ventilators, the neglect of therapeutics, the near-banning of all talk of natural immunity, the overselling of the vaccine, the lost religious holidays, the lonely deaths due to the blocking of loved ones from hospitals, the censorship of science, the manipulated and hidden CDC data, the payments to the major media, the symbiotic relationship between government and Big Tech, the demonization of dissent, and the abuse of emergency powers. 

Forget how health bureaucracies headed by political appointees took over the task of regulating nearly the whole of life, while messaging the country that freedom just doesn’t matter much anymore! 

Who precisely benefits from this method of being “over Covid?”

The unrepentant hegemon that gave us this disaster to begin with. They want to be in the clear. They don’t just desire to be exonerated; they don’t want to be judged at all. They want to be unaccountable. The best path toward that end is to foster public amnesia. 

I don’t just mean the Democrats. This calamity all began under a Republican president who still retains folk-hero status. Plus all Republican governors except one (Kristi Noem of South Dakota) bought into the initial lockdowns. They don’t want to talk about it either. 

There is a vast machine extant that desperately wants everyone to forget. Not even forgive, just forget. Don’t think about the old thing. Think about the new thing instead. Don’t learn lessons. Don’t change the system. Don’t uproot the bureaucracies or examine why the court system failed us so miserably until it was too late. Don’t seek more information. Don’t seek reforms. Don’t take away powers from the CDC and NIH, much less Homeland Security. 

Meanwhile, we live amidst a crisis without precedent. It affects health, economics, law, culture, education, and science. Nothing has been left untouched. The end of travel augmented every preexisting international tension. The wild government spending and the monetary accommodation of the ballooning debt, in addition to supply chain breakages, are all directly responsible for record levels of inflation. It’s much easier to blame Putin than it is to look at the failed policies of the US and many other governments in the world. 

There are so many remaining questions. My own estimate is that we know about 5% of what we need to know to make sense of this whole disaster. What precisely were Fauci, Collins, Farrar, Birx, and the whole gang doing in February 2020 when they weren’t looking for early treatments? 

Why did so many prominent epidemiologists completely reverse their stated views on lockdowns? They flipped from being largely skeptical of coercive measures on March 2, 2020, to fully embracing the most egregious measures only a few weeks later. Moreover, there was clearly a conspiracy emanating from the top to smear dissenting scientists who later said that the lockdowns were causing vastly more harm than good. The people behind the Great Barrington Declaration were targeted by government and media for professional ruin. 

When did the vaccine companies get rolled into the mix and under what terms? We need to know the when and why of the questioning and denial of natural immunity. Who was involved in this egregious and wholly inaccurate attempt to stigmatize those who rejected the vaccine? Where were the trials for generic therapeutics that the NIH is supposed to fund? 

Why in general did an entire establishment choose panic, lockdown, and mandate over calm and the traditional practice of public health? 

I have my own questions.

What were the conditions and the messages that led the New York Times to use its podcasts and printed pages (February 27 and 28, 2020) to spread absolute panic?

This institution had never done this before in any previous pandemic. Why did it choose this path even weeks before Fauci and Birx started lobbying Trump to pull the trigger? 

To put a fine point on it: how much money was involved? 

What we need is a full timeline with every detail for two years. We need reparations for the victims. We need to take powers away from hundreds and thousands of leading politicians, scientists, public health officials and media executives. 

What changed pandemic panic to a new calm is the force of public opinion. God bless the protestors, polls, and truckers. That is a great improvement but there is a long way to go to rekindle the love of liberty that can protect us next time. It’s not about left and right. We need a new understanding of public health, bodily autonomy, and essential liberties. 

Some people want global amnesia and otherwise no change in the regime, no follow-up, no investigations, no connecting dots, no justice, no answers to burning questions. 

And consider this.

If we are so over Covid, why are people still being fired for not being vaccinated, including people with superior natural immunity? Why have the fired not been rehired? Why the masks on planes, trains, and buses? Why the continued quarantine rules? Why the restrictions on international travel? Why are children still forced to cover their faces? Why must everyone who wants to see a Broadway play be forced to cover up their smiles? 

The remnants of restrictions, mandates, and impositions are there to serve as a reminder of the prevailing ruling-class attitude toward their policy choices. There are no regrets. They have done everything right. And they still have their thumb on you. 

That is intolerable. By all means, forget about Covid and live life as normally as possible in defiance of those who live to foster fear. But, never forget the disastrous Covid restrictions that created such destruction. We cannot let anyone off the hook, much less pretend that the policy disaster that created billions of personal tragedies never happened. 

The world we live in today – with worse health, economic dislocations, demoralized and undereducated children and youth, segregations and censorships, the unquestioned ubiquity of rules manufactured by the undemocratic administrative state, the instability and fear that comes with no longer trusting the system – is a far cry from the one that existed only a few years ago. We need to know why, how, and who. There are millions of questions that cry out for answers. We must have them. And we need to work to recover, rebuild, and insure it will never happen again.

SWIFT or the Weaponization Of Money

 Far more important than Ukraine at this stage, is the total transformation, or should we say disintegration, of markets taking place right now. By weaponizing SWIFT, the US Government had just started a rush away from the US dollar which will decimate trade and stop globalization on its tracks. Do these people understand what they are doing?

Link to Capitalist Exploits (Signing Up >>)

Can you do this: removing Russia’s central bank and a number of other commercial banks from the SWIFT payment messaging system. That’s what just happened.

This is the weaponisation of money on this scale we’ve never seen before.

Why do I say this?

Because the second-order effects are that the whole world sees this. Pray tell, what China thinks of this now? I’ll tell you what. They will make it a priority to NOT need the US dollar going forward. They were already well on that path, but expect this to ramp up significantly now. Particularly before they invade Taiwan. I don’t want to sound bombastic, but this is a turning point in monetary history. When the US left American soldiers stranded in Afghanistan and rescinded all its promises to Afghans, it effectively told the rest of the world that it couldn’t be trusted as a military ally. I wrote about it at the time and suggested that they were waving a giant flag showing weakness. Now I’m not the first person to say I don’t think the US should have been poking about in all these far flung corners of the earth in the first instance. I’m just pointing out that there would be consequences. And here we are.

 

Russian Ruble

Now, by canceling Russian banks and hence millions of Russian citizens and businesses from trading globally (via SWIFT) they just announced that the US monetary system could not be trusted. Unless you abide by whatever it is the West wants you to abide by, you’re out.

This paves the way to the end of USD hegemony and the acceleration towards a bipolar monetary order. It presents a huge problem. Think it through. China’s PBOC and Russia’s central bank all hold paper with other central and commercial banks, and they will draw those or call them. That in itself would reduce funding at those banks as swap lines would be canceled (we had a precursor in 2008 to this) as it would involve massive amounts of funding problems. Think of all the overnight paper that won’t now roll.

What may happen?

Firstly, a dollar short squeeze. And eurodollar spreads blow out and a dash for USD to begin.

Other thoughts…

The below I copied from a chat with Lucas and Brad because though it’s unedited (NSFW warning) it allows me to get this out to you faster and well, I’m running out of time so…

​Chris: “This is way bigger than just SWIFT, it’s the dollar based system.”

⁨Brad: “Well, we get back to the payment of oil in non USDs (isn’t that what got Saddam in trouble?”

Chris: “Not just oil. Who increasingly controls materials, energy, and supply chains?

China and Russia. Sucks but shit that’s the reality. Thugs all round.

By using SWIFT as a weapon they just accelerated the demise of the dollar based system. You see now this action HAS to bring everyone to heel and if it doesn’t you’ve set off something you can’t control or finish. You’re done if it fails. And guess what. It’s gonna fail.”

⁨Lucas: “I wonder if the people in power understand what they’re doing. They’re either fucking dumb or fucking evil. Or both I guess.”

Chris: “It all comes back to fundamentals though. The Bretton Woods monetary order which gave way to the post 1971 petrodollar system with the USD as the world’s reserve currency was based on the arrangement that the US military would police the global trade routes, principally shipping (one very very good reason to own shipping now) and that the US government would run trade deficits in exchange for creditor nations reinvesting that capital back into US debt markets. Basically the ROW funded US growth. That was early days until US growth became US consumption and manufacturing began being exported to EM. Still, it provided them with the most liquid credit markets to both finance business but also sadly the deep state….which ironically gets us into the shitshow we are now in today, where the deep state has grown into such a massive cancer. US manufacturing is no longer competitive and their main export is dollars. In any event that’s been the status quo. The rest of the world is tired of the US using this privilege by running up debts and enforcing not democracy but deep state corruption on them. But for ROW there was no real alternative because….well the US military.

but Afghanistan changed that.”

⁨Lucas: “Yeah”

Chris: “The US military is in retreat, a trend that started under Obama, accelerated with Trump but has continued under Biden with the catastrophically badly managed withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Question is. If the US military is in retreat, can the petrodollar monetary reserve system still be enforced? Why would countries voluntarily settle transactions in USD if they felt that the value of their goods being sold was continually being debased? Only if the military pose sufficient threat? That’s now being tested in Ukraine.”

⁨Lucas: “I wonder what BTC is going to do in the next little bit”

Chris: “Tentatively bullish with the caveat the govt’s of the world (all of them) won’t want to cede power to it. With regards to the US being able to do anything…now with inflation running in the US, the appetite for sending military to far flung places such as Ukraine is pretty slim. So Biden etc can’t enforce foreign policy any longer. They are increasingly neutered.

Think of Europe. Biden admin wants them to NOT use Russian energy

Fine, OK. Is the US gonna send them natty at the same prices?

That would be politically difficult. Due simply to logistical costs they’d have to subsidize EU energy. Send it to them while taking the hit in order to keep the political dynamics and power in their favour. But when Joe Sixpack in the US and his missus are paying 2x at the pump they aint gonna be impressed they’re paying for Heinz in Berlin to heat his sauerkraut. And elections are looming in November. So sleepy Joe, or more accurately his handlers and are faced with choosing between political suicide domestically or ceding ground internationally. I mean what are they realistically gonna do? Send that tranny Admiral Levine over in a pink humvee to wallop Putin with a giant dildo?

Did you see the head of M16? Here:

Brad: “Fark”

Chris: “Two things happen now.

1. China gets aggressive on RMB settlement on goods. Moving away from USD. This they do with existing trading partners. Tons of leverage there. What I spoke about with OBOR before.
2. New alliances form on both settlement ex USD and ex SWIFT in the non western world. Already in motion, this goes into hyperdrive.

The critical point is that by using SWIFT they just signaled that any country that isn’t friendly to the west MUST do. And that is to rapidly move away from SWIFT and the USD. And like YESTERDAY!”

Brad: “Well China has got many African and South East Asia countries wrapped up. India?
Also think about countries like Afghanistan which the Chinese have wrapped up….and those countries along the belt and road thing and Iran.”

⁨Brad: “This is way bigger than Russia and Swift.”

Lastly, before I leave you on this particular topic. Take a look at Chinese-Russian trade settlements over the last 5 years.

In 2015, 90% of their bilateral transactions were conducted in dollars. By Q1 2020 only 46% of their bilateral transactions were conducted in dollars. This de-dollarization results in a de-facto alliance.

I always say follow the money.

Sanctions began this process and now eliminating them from SWIFT will accelerate it. You see, the thing with sanctions is that they’re like a gym workout. In the beginning they’re painful but by the end you just build tolerance to them as you grow stronger. Russia has had sanctions for years. They’ve built resistance to them.

Yuan-Ruble Payment System ‘Can Counter US Hegemony’

In the political world. A world littered with sociopaths and thugs, Putin is arguably the most experienced thug. In fact, if you listen to his speech it was anything but the rantings of a mad man. Excerpted below are the thoughts from Gavekal research.

What is Vladimir Putin really trying to achieve? And how far is the West willing to go to try and stop him? In thinking about these issues, it is worth trying to imagine a world in which both Russia and the West behave rationally, while recognizing that this assumption may well turn out to be wrong.

A good place to start in this exercise is with the hour-long speech on Monday evening in which Putin effectively declared war on Ukraine.

On reading his speech—and then listening to it again in the original Russian —it struck me as the opposite of a rambling diatribe by a senile madman, which is how it was described by the Western media. It struck me as a coherent, logical argument which proceeded with almost mathematical clarity from axiomatic premises of history and military strategy which Putin set out in the first 40 or 50 minutes to the belligerent conclusions he announced at the very end.

While Putin’s axioms—about Ukraine’s borders, Russia’s historic destiny and the West’s aggressive intentions—could be attacked as morally evil or historically questionable, there was nothing deranged or illogical about the thought process that led him from these assumptions to the military actions that are unfolding now. It therefore seems worth seriously considering Putin’s thought process and motivations, instead of just dismissing everything he says as the ravings of a paranoid madman. This is not to endorse his conclusions, but to understand what is likely to happen next.

It is hard to imagine much of this hasn’t been war-gamed in Moscow and Beijing well beforehand. So what may Putin do?

Well, he could turn to anyone that wants Russian wheat, gas, oil, coal, steel, lead, zinc, copper, nickel, aluminum, and yes, enriched uranium (of which Russia produces a whopping 50% of global supply) and say, “Pay us with this shiny new ruble/yuan system.” He can legitimately say, “Sorry, we can’t use SWIFT, and we don’t want USD.” Now I’m not saying he’ll do it, but what is clear is that both China and Russia have been working towards alternatives aggressively since 2014.

From our standpoint. This is a currency war now going on. It has been in play for years, but now has burst out into the open. We don’t think we need to figure out the currency war itself (though we’ve alluded to what we think can transpire in this week’s issue), but rather to focus on the fact that we’re heading smack bang into a solvency issue and in that sort of crisis we can’t think of anything better to own that real tangibles.

A Surprising Explanation Of Russia's Invasion From A Former Top-Level CIA Officia

 There were a few voices of reason in Western countries. Too bad we didn't listen to them...

From Zero hedge by Tyler Durden

Tuesday, Mar 08, 2022

A surprising op-ed in MSNBC arguing that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was likely "preventable" if the US and NATO had merely tried to take a path of muscular diplomacy and potential compromise appears to have slipped passed the mainstream media censors and gate-keepers. 

Since the start of the Thursday Feb.24 invasion, the prevailing narrative concerning Russia's motives has been largely limited to an ultra-simplistic hollywoodwesque story that goes something like this: one day a big bully and monster named Putin decided he wanted to invade and kill people in a neighboring country, and that he further wants to "resurrect the old Soviet Union". 

But in a refreshingly realist op-ed piece, MSNBC political columnist Zeeshan Aleem exposed the self-serving Washington narrative which was intended more for the consumption of masses as false. Aleem points to a much more complex and nuanced reality, reminding the public of what should be obvious to any student of history - that the top diplomats and US officials who over saw post-Soviet negotiations with Russia over Europe's security order the 1990's knew full well that if NATO ever got expanded up to Russia's borders, it would be suicide. It was predicted decades ago that war would be triggered in such a scenario.

AFP via Getty Images

As the political relations professor and scholar John Mearsheimer put it in 2015, "What’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked."

Relying on some of these past scholars and US statesmen, the recent MSNBC piece describes a war that could have easily been avoided: 

The fact that the NATO status question was not put on the table as Putin signaled that he was serious about an invasion — so plainly that the U.S. government was spelling it out with day-by-day updates — was an error, and potentially a catastrophic one. It may sound cruel to suggest that Ukraine could be barred, either temporarily or permanently, from entering a military alliance it wants to be in. But what’s more cruel is that Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

After all, the columnist points out, it was hugely unlikely that Ukraine would have ever become a NATO member for many years to come anyway, given that Article 5 necessitates that any potential member must have control over their own borders. Of course, given the Donbass conflict which has raged since 2014, this alone would preclude Kiev's entry.

But neither Brussels nor Washington was interested in "losing face" or making any level of concessions to Moscow, and now Ukrainians are suffering immensely after for years they were promised a "path" to NATO:

But for the West to offer to compromise on Ukraine’s future entry into NATO would have required admitting the limitations of Western power.

"It was the desire of Western governments not to lose face by compromising with Russia," Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry,” told me. "But it was also the moral cowardice of so many Western commentators and officials and ex-officials who would not come out in public and admit that this was no longer a viable project."

..."Cowardice" which was no doubt linked to the climate of accusations of "everyone's a Russian agent!" if they don't fall in line to the dominant narrative of the past five years since the Trump-Russiagate claims.

The MSNC op-ed further includes some stunning commentary from a former top level CIA analyst: 

"The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield," said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Below: the full University of Chicago John J. Mearsheimer lecture, which is now going viral...

The CIA's Beebe follows with this almost unbelievable line: 

"And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail."

Again this illustrates perfectly Mearsheimer's prior prediction: "...the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked."

The MSNBC peice further cites Peter Beinart:

George Kennan, the living legend who had fathered America’s policy of containment against the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.” John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of America’s Cold War historians, noted that, “historians—normally so contentious—are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”

 And now tragically the world is witnessing the blowback, suffered most intensely and immediately by the very Ukrainian people that NATO powers claimed to have wanted to protect.

 

On The Cusp Of An Economic Singularity

 Do people realize the size of the asteroid coming our way?

 Already in March 2020 with the Covid restrictions in place, we knew the world would never be the same. But nobody then could foresee the day after tomorrow waiting for us. And here we are, exactly 2 years later staring at the abyss. 

The global elites wanted a great reset? The devil granted their wish!

Looking at what is currently taking place for Russia, who in his right mind will invest one more dollar in London or New York? It cannot be anything but the beginning of the end for the dollar based international monetary system.

We will also discover another basic truth concerning commodities: What counts is not the maximum number of people the earth can feed but the minimum. Try spending a month without food! With or without global warming, the Summer will be hot!

Out of this mess, the most scarce resource in 2022 will be "order" as Western countries discover that it is much more difficult to build countries than disorganize them. Think Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria...

I often take some flak for my doom and gloom predictions but as discussed earlier complex systems necessarily devolve at some point to a simpler level of organization. And although with perspective it is possible to observe the corkscrew path of evolution, from our linear point of view, it will be difficult to see anything but a crash of civilization. It can be benign if the current order is quickly replaced by a new one, but what could be this new order? In-between too much constructive destruction may quickly look like Armageddon!

The article below documents how it all started on the market...

Submitted by Doomberg

“One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.” – Gustave Flaubert

In 1988, Stephen Hawking published one of the best-selling science books of all time. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking made the impossibly complex topics of astronomy and modern physics accessible to a lay audience, inspiring countless young students (and at least one green chicken) to pursue a career in the sciences. It is estimated that the book has sold an incredible 25 million copies worldwide.

A Brief History of Time | photo credit: BBC

In Chapter 3 of the book, Hawking introduces the reader to the Big Bang Theory and the concept of a gravitational singularity, which Wikipedia describes as “a condition in which gravity is so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically.” Essentially, since the laws of physics are eviscerated at a singularity, what happened before it is both irrelevant and unknowable, and one could consider such an event as having reset the universe’s clock. Here's how Hawking describes it in his book (emphasis added throughout):

“This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang. Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang. Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.”

The simple truth of a singularity applies whether it occurred in the past or will in the future: what transpires on the other side is unknowable from here.

Given the horrific and still-unfolding events of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s collective response to it, one can’t help but wonder whether we are on the cusp of an economic singularity in which the laws and bedrock beliefs that formed the foundation of international economic order for decades break down. The consequences are similarly unknowable, but we suspect a great reset may indeed be upon us. Even if a ceasefire is announced moments after we publish this piece, shocking damage to the global economic system has undoubtedly already been done and certain genies won’t easily be put back into their bottles.

Before proceeding, we should state clearly that what follows is not a critique of the Western response to the invasion but rather an assessment of the potential first- and second-order consequences of these historic moves, as well as speculation on where some of the harshest economic crises might manifest in the near future. While we join in the hope that these measures achieve their desired direct effect, there’s no denying these are truly unprecedented times.

The most stunning move by the US and its allies was cutting off the Russian central bank’s access to most of its $630 billion of foreign reserves. Without access, one wonders if these funds are really “its” reserves at all? What is ownership without access? No matter how justified that move might seem today, there’s no escaping that this action will reverberate for years to come. In a blunt opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock,” reporter Jon Sindreu had this to say about how central banks everywhere must now view their reserves:

“Many economists have long equated this money to savings in a piggy bank, which in turn correspond to investments made abroad in the real economy. Recent events highlight the error in this thinking: Barring gold, these assets are someone else’s liability—someone who can just decide they are worth nothing. Last year, the IMF suspended Taliban-controlled Afghanistan’s access to funds and SDR. Sanctions on Iran have confirmed that holding reserves offshore doesn’t stop the U.S. Treasury from taking action. As New England Law Professor Christine Abely points out, the 2017 settlement with Singapore’s CSE TransTel shows that the mere use of the dollar abroad can violate sanctions on the premise that some payment clearing ultimately happens on U.S. soil.”

Photo credit: Bloomberg

In for a shock, indeed. In essence, Sindreu’s piece argues that this move substantially increases the risk that the US dollar loses its privileged status as the global reserve currency and, at a minimum, likely ensures a polarization of the global economy into at least two camps – the West in one and Russia/China/Iran/Saudi Arabia plus other targeted or aligned countries in the other. If $20-30 trillion or more of global GDP spurns the preexisting reserve currency, is it still the reserve currency? If reserves can be negated overnight, are they even reserves? How many other countries must hedge against the possibility of similar sanctions? Should we add India to the list?

“The Biden administration is weighing whether to impose sanctions against India over its stockpile of and reliance on Russian military equipment as part of the wide-ranging consequences the West is seeking to impose on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. 

Donald Lu, the assistant secretary of State for South Asian affairs, on Thursday told lawmakers in a hearing that the administration is weighing how threatening India's historically close military relationship with Russia is to U.S. security.”

Another eyebrow-raising development is the US Department of Justice’s establishment of the ominously-named Task Force KleptoCapture, which has the stated intent of seizing (not freezing) the assets of Russian oligarchs. Here’s how the New York Times describes it:

“The creation of the task force reflects the harsh scrutiny cast on Russian oligarchs, many of whom built their fortunes because of their ties to Mr. Putin. Even though they may not be directly involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they enable Mr. Putin by helping him conceal his own assets and remain in power.

Russia’s oligarchs have invested their fortunes in assets around the world, and their ties to Mr. Putin have helped them gain influence and connections in the worlds of fine art, real estate, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.”

Oligarch’s not-yacht | photo credit: Forbes

We are the first to admit that “Russian oligarch” is a less sympathetic faction than “Canadian trucker,” and perpetrating a war on another sovereign nation is way more serious than honking horns in downtown Ottawa, but many of the same questions we raised about the consequences of Justin Trudeau’s impulses seem apropos here. Who gets to define oligarch? What qualifies as enabling? Do the accused have any recourse? If assets in the West are subject to swift confiscation without due process for even indirectly enabling a currently unpopular-with-us national political leader – no matter how justified that unpopularity might be – what sane foreign asset owner wouldn’t at least consider liquidating assets now and onshoring what wealth they can preserve? Have we thought through the dominos that fall by fundamentally rewriting property laws?

Further down in the same New York Times article, we find another interesting passage. We’ve long argued that a crackdown on cryptocurrencies is imminent. Will the US use the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a pretext for doing so? It sure seems like it:

“The task force will target people and companies that are trying to evade anti-money laundering laws, hide their identities from financial institutions and use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions and launder money. The Justice Department said that it would use civil and criminal asset forfeiture to seize assets belonging to people subject to sanctions.

The department said that its work would complement that of a trans-Atlantic task force announced this past weekend to identify and seize the assets of penalized Russian individuals and companies around the world.”

Yet another meaningful development is the move by multinational corporations to self-sanction all aspects of their business activity tied to Russia, undoubtedly motivated by the disturbing images coming out of Ukraine and pressured by their stakeholders to do something about it. This is not the first time corporations have been called to action after certain political events – Western governments have a long history of trying to implement controversial policies by leaning on business leaders to do their dirty work for them – but these recent developments likely cause concern even among Western leaders. Perhaps naïvely, the US and its NATO allies specifically tried to carve out Russian oil and gas from the reach of sanctions, recognizing our critical need for these essential supplies (a weakness we’ve been writing about for many months). But as the Financial Times describes in a recent report, if the zeitgeist uniformly labels an entity toxic – even an entire G20 country – there can be no carve-outs:

“In reality, however, many western banks, refineries and shipowners are in effect ‘self-sanctioning’ — behaving as if Russian oil has already been placed under sanctions. ‘Russia’s oil has effectively become toxic,’ said one banker.

Some of the biggest buyers of Russian crude have cancelled shipments and orders as companies from banks to insurers and shippers retreat from Russian business.

Roughly 70 per cent of Russian crude was ‘struggling to find buyers,’ according to consultancy Energy Aspects. As proof, Russia’s flagship Urals crude, a staple for refiners in north-west Europe and the Mediterranean, was quoted at a record discount of more than $18 a barrel on Wednesday.”

Here are just some of the potentially catastrophic economic consequences to ponder if these events continue to snowball down a steepening slope. The obvious place to start is in the energy sector, where European natural gas prices have been trading like a crypto scam coin, rising and plunging by unthinkable amounts on a daily basis. The economic impact of both the elevated price and the volatility of energy on Europe’s manufacturing sector will be revealed in the coming weeks and months – we suspect the results will stun many.

Similarly, Russia and Ukraine are among the most prolific producers and exporters of critical foodstuffs in the world, and prices of agricultural goods are flashing red. In a piece we wrote all the way back in October of last year called Starvation Diet, we predicted a global mass starvation event was nearly inevitable, and that was before war broke out in Ukraine. Here’s how the piece opened:

“We are on the cusp of a significant mass starvation event of our own making. Soon, tens of millions of the world’s most impoverished people will die from an inability to feed themselves, while many of those comfortably getting by now – especially in the Western World – are in for a shock.”

Unsurprisingly, wheat has traded limit up for several days in a row and prices are reaching levels that condemn vast swaths of the global population to the fate we reluctantly described above. Food inflation is the catalyst for many popular uprisings, and the path from empty shelves to the guillotine has historically been a direct one. Now consider further that the West has outsourced the production of energy and critical mining materials to impoverished countries. What happens when those governments get overthrown and the production assets get nationalized?

There are countless other alarming consequences which we could document here – ahem, Russia produces 40% of global Palladium supplies and, ahem, Ukraine is responsible for the majority of global Neon gas exports (critical for the production of lasers used to make microchips, which are already in chronically short supply) – but even we are losing the capacity to ponder the totality of the economic doom that awaits.

Recent statements by US political leaders don’t inspire much confidence in our ability to navigate this crisis without substantial further economic and political escalation. In a single 24-hour period, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for a ban on Russian oil imports while simultaneously stating her opposition to the development of US oil to replace them. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham went on live television and flippantly called for the assassination of the President of Russia. To drive his reckless point home, he then took to Twitter and amplified his message.

Putin: Crazy Like A Fox

 According to Sun Tzu (孫子) in the Art of War (兵法) written 2500 years ago, one of the rules of war is to never underestimate the enemy which is more or less exactly what the Occidental elites are doing right now.

No, Putin is not mad. Neither is he an imbecile. He has a complex strategy which he is implementing step by step. It is nothing less than restructuring the world, strategically, economically and financially. The risks are high but the odds of success are high too. China is of course 100% behind him since their interest coincide... for now. Yes Russia is falling but a judoka often has to fall first...

Authored by Scott Ritter via Consortium News,

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine goes on, the world wonders what the reason was behind such a precipitous act. The pro-Ukraine crowd has put forth a narrative constructed around the self-supporting themes of irrationality on the part of a Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his post-Cold War fantasies of resurrecting the former Soviet Union.

This narrative ignores that, far from acting on a whim, the Russian president is working from a playbook that he initiated as far back as 2007, when he addressed the Munich Security Conference and warned the assembled leadership of Europe of the need for a new security framework to replace existing unitary system currently in place, built as it was around a trans-Atlantic alliance (NATO) led by the United States.

Vladimir Putin with Russia’s long-serving minister of defense, Army General Sergey Shoygu, in 2013. Wikimedia Commons

Moreover, far from seeking the reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, Putin is simply pursuing a post-Cold War system which protects the interests and security of the Russian people, including those who, through no fault of their own, found themselves residing outside the borders of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In this age of politicized narrative shaping, which conforms to the demands of domestic political imperatives as opposed to geopolitical reality, fact-based logic is not in vogue. For decades now, the Russian leadership has been confronting a difficult phenomenon where Western democracies, struggling to deal with serious fractures derived from their own internal weakness, produce political leadership lacking in continuity of focus and purpose in foreign and national security relations.

Consistent Leadership

Whereas Russia has had the luxury of having consistent leadership for the past two decades, and can look to another decade or more of the same, Western leadership is transient in nature. One need only reflect on the fact that Putin has, in his time in office, dealt with five U.S. presidents who, because of the alternating nature of the political parties occupying the White House, have produced policies of an inconsistent and contradictory nature.

The White House is held hostage to the political constraints imposed by the reality of domestic partisan politics. "It’s the economy, stupid" resonates far more than any fact-based discussion about the relevance of post-Cold War NATO. What passes for a national discussion on the important issues of foreign and national security are, more often than not, reduced to pithy phrases. The complexities of a balanced dialogue are replaced by a good-versus-evil simplicity more readily digested by an electorate where potholes and tax rates matter more than geopolitics.

Rather than try to explain to the American people the historical roots of Putin’s concerns with an expanding NATO membership, or the impracticalities associated with any theoretical reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. political elite instead define Putin as an autocratic dictator (he is not) possessing grandiose dreams of a Russian-led global empire (no such dreams exist).

It is impossible to reason with a political counterpart whose policy formulations need to conform with ignorance-based narratives. Russia, confronted with the reality that neither the U.S. nor NATO were willing to engage in a responsible discussion about the need for a European security framework which transcended the inherent instability of an expansive NATO seeking to encroach directly on Russia’s borders, took measures to change the framework in which such discussions would take place.

Russia had been seeking to create a neutral buffer between it and NATO through agreements which would preclude NATO membership for Ukraine and distance NATO combat power from its borders by insisting the alliance’s military-technical capabilities be withdrawn behind NATO’s boundaries as they existed in 1997. The U.S. and NATO rejected the very premise of such a dialogue.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine must be evaluated within this context. By invading Ukraine, Russia is creating a new geopolitical reality which revolves around the creation of a buffer of allied Slavic states (Belarus and Ukraine) that abuts NATO in a manner like the Cold War-era frontier represented by the border separating East and West Germany.

West Germany joined NATO in 1955, which led to the formation of the rival Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Via Wikimedia Commons

Russia has, by redeploying the 1^st Guards Tank Army onto the territory of Belarus, militarized this buffer, creating the conditions for the kind of standoff that existed during the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO will have to adjust to this new reality, spending billions to resurrect a military capability that has atrophied since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Here’s the punchline — the likelihood that Europe balks at a resumption of the Cold War is high. And when it does, Russia will be able to exchange the withdrawal of its forces from Belarus and Ukraine in return for its demands regarding NATO’s return to the 1997 boundaries.

Vladimir Putin may, in fact, be crazy — crazy like a fox.

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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD

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