Japan On Verge Of Systemic Collapse With "Dramatic, Unpredictable Non-Linearities" In Financial Markets, DB Warns

 

 How long now before the Yen collapse?

Less than a week ago, we wrote that "As Yen Crash Accelerates, It Puts Catastrophic End Of MMT Experiment In The Spotlight" a less than cheerful assessment echoed this morning by Bloomberg, which writes that "Japan Starting to Crack as Yen Tumbles With Stocks and Bonds" noting that despite the yen crashing to a 24-year low (for the same reasons we have repeated again and again, namely you can't keep your 10Y yield at 0.25% and avoid a currency collapse in a scorching inflationary environment), Tokyo stocks were down the most since March.

But there was another major development, and one which suggests that days of fiat, and MMT are numbered: with Japanese yields surging, the Bank of Japan today bought more than 1.5 trillion yen of government bonds to defend its yield curve control target as the 10Y JGB rose above 0.25%, the upper end of the BOJ's YCC corridor.

As Deutsche Bank's George Saravelos shockingly calculates in a post this morning titled "The printer is on overdrive", and available to professional ZH subscribers, if the current pace of buying persists, the bank will have bought approximately 10 trillion yen in June. To put that number in context, it is roughly equivalent to the Fed doing more than $300bn of QE per month when adjusting for GDP!

This is a "truly extreme" level of money printing given that every other central bank in the world is tightening policy. It is one of the reasons why we have been bearish on the yen. And as so many have argued, currency intervention in this environment is simply not credible given it is the BoJ itself that is the cause of yen weakness.

More broadly, Saravelos echoes what we said in our preview of the end of MMT, writing that he worries that "the currency and Japanese financial markets are in the process of losing any sort of fundamental-based valuation anchor."

The more global inflation picks up, the more the BoJ prints. But the more easing accelerates, the higher the need to press hard on the brake when the (inflation) cliff approaches and the more dangerous it becomes. As a result, we will soon enter a phase where dramatic and unpredictable non-linearities in Japanese financial markets would kick in, according to the DB strategist, who also notes that "if it becomes obvious to the market that the clearing level of JGB yields is above the BoJ's 25 basis point target, what is the incentive to hold bonds any more?"

This leave us with a few exploding questions:

• Is the BoJ willing to absorb the entirety of the Japanese government bond stock?

• Where is the fair value of the yen on this scenario and what happens if the BoJ changes its mind?

• The BoJ may want to generate inflation, but how does it get there with triggering a complete systemic collapse?

Finally, what happens if and when the yen careens off the fiat cliff, and domestic holders of yen-denominated savings flee into either dollars or cryptos? We will find out very soon.

Greens unlikely to survive the coming winter

 The end of green policies? Let's hope so. But it's already too late for the economy. The crash is now certain.

Via Consciousness of Sheep

For as long as climate change was off in the distant future, governments have been able to trade warm words for concrete action.  In a similar vein, a certain kind of green politician has been able to trade on the pretence that ending fossil fuel use would come at no cost.  Meanwhile, the diesel fuel kept the arteries of the global supply chains flowing even as ever more coal and gas supplied the heat and power for the technological engines of economic growth.  At the same time, the rest of us could signal our impotent virtue by recycling our glass, plastic and used clothes, happy in the pretence that they weren’t being shipped off to Asia to be incinerated or just dumped in the sea.

It all began to fall apart a couple of decades ago when western oligarchs, celebrities and the corporate technocracy started to drink the “green energy” Kool-Aid.  Governments began taking climate change just seriously enough to provide lavish corporate welfare subsidies to the energy industry to deploy large-scale wind and solar farms in the pretence that these would achieve something more than lining the pockets of corporate CEOs.  Soon enough, green politicians were sharing platforms with corporate technocrats to talk about “green growth,” while environmental activists gathered outside – not to challenge this blatant abuse of corporate welfare, but to call for even more… at any cost.

By 2017, real-life James Bond Villain Klaus Schwab was inviting celebrities, representatives of the technocracy, the godzillionaires and the political class to fly their carbon-belching private jets to Switzerland to learn about The Fourth Industrial Revolution, and to discuss how they could get the little people to cut their carbon footprints.  By 2020, this had morphed in to the Green New Great Reset in which we – but not they, of course – would own nothing, and allegedly be happy as we ate our insects, spent our central bank digital basic incomes, and were driven around in a new fleet of corporate-owned, hydrogen-powered self-driving cars.

There was – to paraphrase Captain Blackadder – just one teensy-weensy problem with the Great Plan adopted by the Davos crowd… it was bollocks!  Only by ignoring the physicists, engineers and technicians who were expected to make it happen, and by listening instead to the siren voices of climate NGOs, bankers and economists, could the technocracy convince itself that the world could seamlessly transition to the proposed bright green future.  And to our cost, politicians of all stripes who bought into this nonsense are now grappling with the inevitable economic consequences.

The problem, at is simplest, is that much of what was considered “green” was largely a conjuring trick.  States like Britain and Germany, which claim to be world leaders simply offshored their most polluting industries (and a large part of the waste) to less prosperous parts of the world where governments were happy to load the environmental costs onto the indigenous population in exchange for tradable foreign currency.  This was the only politically-acceptable means of hiding the fact that there is simply no way of maintaining even a fraction of the western standard of living in the event that anyone were foolish enough to remove the fossil fuels which make up some 80 percent of the energy mix in the UK, and 85 percent of the global economy:

Even this is a simplification of the problem because each fuel source has its uses in specific niches of the global economy and so is not interchangeable.  Wind and solar, for example, cannot generate the heat required to manufacture steel (although they can recycle it) or, ironically, to produce the silicon wafers and high-grade glass required in solar panels.

Things get even more complicated when we consider that the broad categories of fossil fuels can be sub-divided into different grades.  Coal, for example, can vary from the high-quality anthracite used in the steel industry all the way to the lignite (brown coal) that Germany still uses to keep its lights on.  Oil comes with different degrees of sulphur content – sweet to sour – and in a range of specific gravities – light to heavy.  And each of the refineries around the world is set up to process a particular grade of oil.  The same goes for the oil products, of course – as anyone who ever made the mistake of putting diesel in a petrol car can tell you.  Everything from the ultra-light butane to the chemical sludge at the bottom of a barrel of oil has some use to the economy, if not as a fuel, then as a lubricant or as the chemical base for everything from paint to toothpaste and from plastic to pharmaceuticals.

The economists behind the Great New Green Reset will tell you that there is nothing to worry about because of the “law” of infinite substitutability – the idea that if we run out of an input to the economy, we will simply find an alternative.  Nor is this the only thing that the economists are simply wrong about.  More worryingly, most economists believe that the economy operates independently of energy.  Among other things, this is why they fail to understand that the current, accelerating stagflation is largely a consequence of their own past actions.

Not only is the economy an energy system (onto which we have imposed a system of monetary claims) but it requires growing surplus energy to avoid collapse.  Before we can use energy, we must first obtain it.  And obtaining energy has an energy cost of its own.  And so, the more energy required to obtain energy, the less surplus energy is available to power the wider economy, unless we keep growing the amount of energy produced.

So why might surplus energy fall?  Three key reasons are important to us today.  The first is the simple process by which we work our way from the cheap and easy energy through to the expensive and difficult.  Nobody dug deep coal mines out beneath the North Sea when there were still seams of coal jutting out of the sides of Welsh hills, just as nobody spent a fortune hydraulically fracturing a shale deposit when they could knock a pipe a few feet into the ground to unleash a gusher of sweet crude.  Second, we have been burning fossil fuels at a far faster rate than we have been discovering new deposits.  As a result, we have already passed peak oil, and are rapidly approaching peak gas and coal too.  Third, for green policy purposes, we have been disinvesting from further fossil fuel development while adding energy-expensive and difficult to incorporate energy-harvesting technologies into the energy mix.

By making the energy cost of energy grow in this way, we strip the wider economy of the means to prevent a rapid and potentially catastrophic collapse as we approach a “net energy cliff:”

The sleight of hand used by the purveyors of the Great Green New Reset is achieved by measuring the energy returned from a non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technology (NRREHT) running at capacity at the point of entry to the system – e.g., at the base of the wind turbine.  This allows proponents to claim energy returns of 15:1 or more.  But the real energy cost of any form of energy to the economy is at the point of use – e.g., the energy cost of petrol at the filling station or electricity at the wall socket.  So that once the system balancing costs have been taken into account, the energy returns are more modest.

It is in this respect that the true energy costs of NRREHTs have their consequences.  As energy economist Dieter Helm – a prominent supporter of a managed transition to NRREHTs by the way – argued last January:

“The current crisis was very predictable, and its causes run deep. A series of simple myths have been spun out to the wider population, which simply are not true. It is not yet true that renewables are cheaper than the main fossil fuels once intermittency is taken into account. Simply ignoring the need for back-up in claims about renewables costs will not make them go away. It is not true that the electrification of transport is going to be costless and painless after a short ‘transition’. It is not true that electric cars have zero emissions, at least not until we have all low-carbon electricity generation, and it is not true that cars and car batteries involve near-zero emissions to make and run. It is not true that heat pumps will pay for themselves in the near future once all the costs are considered, and it is not true that they are at least as good as gas, especially in old houses and in winter, even if the electricity they use is all zero carbon (which it is not). It is not true that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is cheap, tried and tested, and without risks. It is not true that we have a solution to nuclear waste. It is not true that biomass is generally carbon-neutral, nor is growing maize for anaerobic digestors, and that there is lots of ‘waste wood’ to turn into pellets. And so on…

“Wind and solar farms do not pay for the costs of the intermittency they cause. They therefore have little incentive to minimise them. It is a nonsense to compare the costs of wind with the costs of, say, gas or nuclear without including the back-up costs for wind necessitated by the intermittency…

“In the current energy crisis, it is this intermittency that has been a major factor in shaping the huge impact of a gas price spike. Low wind has to be taken into account. 2021 was a year with exceptionally low wind. The worry comes in winter, with low wind, high pressure, and cold air over Northern Europe.”

Helm is wrong only in his claim that last winter’s price hikes were “The first net zero energy crisis.”  That accolade surely goes to the national blackout on 9 August 2019, when the pitfalls of adding too much intermittent supply to the system was brought home to anyone caught up in the chaos.  The point stands though, the true energy – and thus economic – cost of NRREHTs is far higher than has been claimed.  And the consequences of this additional cost are the inflation – as energy cost increases drive up the cost of every product and service which uses energy – and the stagnation – as ever more of us are obliged to switch spending away from discretionary purchases in order to manage the rising cost of essentials – which is set to plunge the western economies into a depression worse than the 1930s.

This process of decline has been gathering pace ever since the peak of conventional oil production was reached in 2005.  Two acts of insanity, however, on the part of the western technocracy have dramatically accelerated the collapse in the past couple of years.  Shutting down the global economy in the face of a relatively mild pandemic, for example, would prove to be a huge blow to the western economies.  On the one hand this is because the breakdown of just-in-time supply is not easily overcome.  Less obviously though, investment was pulled from commodity extraction – including fossil fuels – while the economic indicators on which investment is usually determined went haywire.  This is one reason why energy and commodity prices spiked upward as economies opened up in the summer and autumn of 2021.

Notably, various “green” leaning technocrats, politicians and activists wrongly used the example of lockdowns, furlough payments and stimulus cheques to claim that this provided the basis for a new, green, sustainable economy.  Suddenly they all claimed they wanted to “build back better.”  For much the same reason, the same people – led by German Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck – have used the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity for green disaster capitalism, with a view to ending Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas, and Kazak coal in a matter of months rather than the decades that any sane transition away from fossil fuels would require.

Slightly less deranged members of the political class at least imagine that Russian oil and gas can be replaced with expanded output from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Venezuela and the USA.  In practice though, output from these states is already at or close to maximum.  Moreover, the manner in which anti-Russian sanctions have been applied has resulted in most of the world’s commodity-producing states regarding Europe and the USA as unreliable trading partners and potentially dangerous places to park wealth.  As such, there is little incentive for them to ramp up production just to bail out western states – especially given that rising demand and prices mean more income for them.

This is of little concern to the green-leaning technocrats, NGOs and politicians who have faith in the ability of their part of a highly advanced industrial global economy to operate without energy.  For them, as with pandemic lockdowns, oil and gas sanctions are an experiment – in which you and I are mere guinea pigs – in forcing people to accept forms of eco-austerity that would otherwise be impossible to impose.  Not, of course, that Europe will be entirely foregoing the Russian oil that accounts for some 30 percent of its oil imports.  Instead, we are about to be treated to a process of oil laundering, in which tanker owners will move Russian oil to a third country – such as India or Turkey – where it will be unloaded and then re-loaded and provided with new paperwork to prove that it is not Russian.  European consumers will still be using the products of Russian oil, they will just be paying a huge premium for the privilege.

Gas is even more problematic because of the absence of a sufficient tanker fleet or the required terminal facilities.  As a result, as Europe cuts itself off from Russian gas, it has little possibility of an alternative supply, and so must either find an alternative energy source or lower its economic activity accordingly – a process made all the harder because of the dependence of NRREHTs electricity generators on gas as the only viable back-up for the intermittency of renewable energy.

While Green Party politicians and climate NGOs and activists are not entirely to blame for the unfolding crisis, their dishonesty may well cost them dear anyway.  Privately, most have been prepared to concede that a transition away from fossil fuels was always going to come at an unpalatable price for most people, and crucially within the grossly unequal western economies there was a high risk of eco-austerity for the majority.  Publicly though, they avoided mentioning this because they knew that only fools would vote for it.  The hope was that various “environmentally friendly” policies could be smuggled in by stealth.  And for a long time, it didn’t seem to matter because it was all a long way in the future, by which time it would be someone else’s problem.

Well, that future has arrived, and the eco-austerity is only just beginning.  Nevertheless, it is already creating big political waves.  We might, for a while, get away with the myth that what is happening is all the fault of “Madman Putin” – but that narrative gets very old very quickly for households forced to choose between food and warmth in the depths of winter.  And as Helm points out:

“All of this matters because it means that the current price shock is not temporary, even if the gas price falls back. We are not going to get out of gas anytime soon. Indeed with the extra demand for electricity for transport, the digital technologies and heating too, the problem will get a lot worse before it gets better. The cost of energy will keep going up, and the energy strategy and other net zero problems will contribute to this rise in costs. Whilst the public have been led to believe that net zero is a free lunch (or at least a manageable 1% of GDP or less), it is very much not so. Important and worth doing, but a much bigger cost of living rise than our leaders, and the campaigners against climate change generally, would like us to believe. They fear scaring the horses, but they cannot stop us being confronted with the cost.”

Having burned our bridges with Russia – and increasingly with the 75 percent of the world’s states that have not benefited from the dollar currency system – there is no law that says we have to go back to an abundant and relatively cheap supply of fossil fuels anytime soon (or, indeed, at all).  Nor is there any reason for any sane investor to throw good money after bad on energy investments – particularly in deposits which have not been economically viable below today’s high prices – while the energy market is so volatile, and it is far from clear that businesses and households can afford the increased prices.  And even if investment does begin to flow toward new projects, nothing is going to change before the coming winter.  Even if gas prices have fallen from last year’s peak, they remain too high for too many people.  Petrol prices, meanwhile, can only go up as the cost of oil laundering arrives at the pumps – £3.00 per litre ($15 per US gallon) petrol may arrive sooner than anyone would have wanted.

To make matters worse, high prices may well be accompanied by actual shortages this winter. Energy and financial media have been tracking a UK diesel fuel shortage for several months, although this has yet to break through to the establishment media.  John Kemp at Reuters, for example, recently wrote that:

“Britain was experiencing a severe shortage of distillate fuel oil even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sanctions now threaten to make much worse.

“UK diesel and gas oil inventories had fallen to 1.57 million tonnes by the end of February, down from 2.23 million at the same point a year earlier, and the lowest seasonal level since 2014/15 and before that 2008.”

As with so much else of Britain’s economic base, diesel refining was offshored by successive neoliberal governments, with the result that we now depend upon imports for 40 percent of the fuel which keeps our transport, industry and agriculture operating.  And where, pray, did we offshore that diesel production to?

“Russia was the single largest source, accounting for 33% of all distillate imports and 17% of total consumption.”

Kemp claims that Russian diesel can be replaced by supplies from other oil states, but also concedes that sanctions will raise global demand considerably.  And so, once again, we will experience rationing by price for an essential fuel which is already trading higher than the wider economy can afford.

Electricity is going to be in short supply this winter too, as we will no longer have sufficient gas to balance the intermittency of wind.  As Kirsten Robertson at Metro reported last Monday:

“As a result of further supply issues, ministers in the UK have reportedly been warned of potential power cuts to as many as six million households this winter.

“Limits could be imposed on industrial use of gas, including to gas-fired power stations, causing electricity shortages… As a result, six million homes could see their electricity rationed, primarily during morning and evening peaks, in curbs that may last more than a month.

“Worse modelling is reported for a scenario in which Russia cuts off all supplies to the EU.”

In fact, given the EU technocracy’s decision to embargo their own states, and given the gas shortages and price increases this will cause, the number of homes and businesses brought within the UK’s long-standing energy rationing plans will likely be much higher.  And even if households escape enforced rationing by the state, prices are going to be so high that most households will be self-rationing anyway… even to the point of staying cold during the long winter evenings.  Older Europeans will be at higher risk of dying from hypothermia this winter than at any time since the late 1940s.

The UK Government will likely be forced into providing more financial support – similar to the most recent package – as energy becomes increasingly unaffordable.  But blame will be placed upon green politicians, NGOs and activists whose siren voices have led us to the very eco-austerity that they swore could never happen.  By the Spring of 2023, it may well be impossible for a Green Party politician to ever again be elected, while the likely winners – absent the emergence of a sane left-leaning opposition – are nationalist populists like the UK’s Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and his supporters in the USA, and Queensland’s Stephen Andrew, who will seek to deny the need to address climate change entirely…  evidence of Roger Pielke’s “Iron Laws of climate policy” in action:

“While people are often willing to pay some price for achieving environmental objectives, that willingness has its limits.”

And:

“When policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emission reduction, it is economic growth that will win out every time.”

Not only have those limits been reached, but they have also been exceeded to such an extent that a stagflationary economic depression is inevitable.  And one of its many casualties will be that a long-duped public will never support so-called “green” policies again.

Pitchforks Soon In Europe?

 As we have discussed many times, this is slow motion suicide for Europe and it looks like they will double down accelerating the crash!

Pitchforks Soon In Europe?

by Jorge Vilches for the Saker Blog

Dear Europeans...

For your own children´s sake - on my knees and with my saddened eyes humbly looking downwards - I beg of you to please stop the current self-destructive nonsense dead in its tracks by immediately demanding from your political class to import the bloody Russian oil normally once again as Europe had been doing for dozens of years. The impact that the ban on Russian oil has upon your daily lives now and for years yonder is such that at the very least a Referendum should have been held. But it was not, and without consultation, the EU leadership acted on their own.

Please be advised that the EU un-elected brass simply does not represent you or your needs. They were all voted amongst themselves into their positions like members of a committee in a private country club. If left unchecked, EU politicians will now continue misrepresenting you and, on your behalf — with your hard-earned assets and livelihoods – will keep on picking a most unnecessary and prolonged armed conflict with Russia, eventually forcing upon you a total war scenario where chances play out all very strongly against you, with Russia probably resulting unscathed.

their war

European leaders crave for their war, so they can´t think of a better way to provoke it than by applying ever larger and ´meaner´ sanctions on Russia as if (a) sanctions were effective and (b) as if Europe could win such war (not).

Accordingly, we now have yet another set of spanking new EU “sanctions” in package No. 6 that will eventually backfire flat on Europe´s face – like all the others — such as banning the insurance and financing of oil tankers that carry Russian oil. Accordingly, the EU is now trying its very best to

(1) bankrupt the successful Western oil tanker insurance business by reducing the number of participants

(2) induce higher shipping and insurance costs worldwide by reducing the number of participants

(3) foster the development of yet another Russian import substitution service namely oil tanker insurance & financing

(4) seriously hinder the world´s economy by not allowing deliveries of any oil tankers carrying Russian oil anywhere (EU or non-EU) thus cutting off some 15% of the world´s oil supply from the world market and necessarily sending its price yet higher with yet more EU-induced inflation as if we had not had enough already, please brace for it.

(5) force the construction of a new Russian-Chinese-Indian oil tanker fleet leaving idle part of today´s fleet

(6) tempt Russia to embargo strategic value-chain upstream items with captive consumers cascading into multiple failures thru lack of nat-gas, rare earths, inert gases, potash, sulfur, uranium, palladium, vanadium, cobalt, coke, etc.

Ref #1 https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Insurance-Ban-Is-The-EUs-Biggest-Blow-Yet-To-Russian-Oil-Exports.html

Ref #2 https://www.rt.com/business/556904-us-russia-energy-revenue-sanctions/

Ref #3 https://www.rt.com/news/556894-russian-energy-resources-stagflation-difficulties/

Ref #4 https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/global-supply-chains-rattled-by-winds-of-war.html

lost war

Russia does not need to fire a single shot or land a single missile on European territories to win such a total war. Think tanks in Europe and elsewhere know this but say nothing. It´d be plenty enough for Russia to just shut off your nat-gas supply, period. And not even to the whole of Europe. It could possibly be to only, say, some limited area in Germany.

But you need not put up with any of this. Europe should already have learned from history books and its generals not to underestimate or discriminate against Russia. Let alone cheat on it repeatedly as Europe has done since the downfall of the former Soviet Union. Yet again, history will not be kind to anyone directly or indirectly involved, including yourselves. Equivalent events took place in Europe not that long ago and winter will not care what was said where or why or by whom. It will just freeze and starve Europeans to death with no mercy. Just ask the Germans: they should remember, or the French, they like history a lot. Russian attrition warfare is most efficient in any territory.

Please do not waste any more precious time with forever failed attempts to find substitutes of any kind. Quite simply it is very easy to prove in a matter of minutes ( see plenty of references below ) that God Almighty has no adequate oil available for you in large enough quantities anywhere on planet Earth other than Russia, let alone deliverable at refineries and processing plants per your own needs and capabilities. You simply cannot dismiss one full third of your oil supplies in one sudden stroke of a pen and assume that nothing important will happen including a very negative direct impact upon the price YOU pay. It´s market dynamics 101 that only a fool would dare to ignore, so innocent masses of humans should not pay for the stupid decisions of some few unelected groupie politicians that know jack about basic technical requirements. This is a live & kicking very tough field engineering for dirty-fingernails folks that don´t talk much, not yadda BS at a Brussels cocktail party with laughs, plenty of drinks, hot air, and photo ops.

bid forms AWOL

And not a single one yet making the scene, go figure… The current EU course of action necessarily calls for the 2022 execution of at least 100 projects related to the Russian oil ban thus allowing for non-Russian oil imports. Probably many more than 100 projects need to be executed if all refineries, processing plants, ports, pipelines, logistics infrastructure, etc., etc. are taken into account. But let´s keep it simple and in round figures. The Schwedt refinery alone will require 11 major projects at the very least already described in a previous article. As Schwedt can no longer export anywhere, large areas of nearby Western Poland will be left without fuels now having to urgently find an equivalent Polish supplier close by (???) if any. Same for Slovakia´s Slovnaft which will now also have to quit exporting – but unlike Schwedt — making it unviable although possibly still operational for domestic markets albeit with a huge new deficit to be paid by …?…?… (!!!). Who or how will Slovnaft export markets be supplied now is a dangerous mystery because of rough geography and unexistent logistics plus a newly required distribution infrastructure. All in all, we are talking hundreds of billions of euros that Europe does not have — and should not print — to be paid back in 40 to 50 years’ time long after (supposedly) fossil fuels have been phased out of the EU. This in and of itself does not make any sense whatsoever, but it does blend in perfectly well with other nonsensical stuff of this surreal non-Russian oil sourcing idea. Banks should logically reject approving any financing of dead-on-arrival projects such as these. Still, be it as it may, pre-feasibility and feasibility studies should right now already be underway “puffing smoke” as engineers say amongst themselves in such circumstances. Yet no headlines announced on anything, no bid forms issued or trans-European call for bids, no joint-ventures, no engineering firms, plans or specs guidelines, no bidding documents, no tentative schedules, no consultants, no commissions or committees, no bid opening and contract award dates: nothing. Of course, one very serious possibility is that the effective EU plan is to keep on buying Russian oil as always but now from third parties instead at a MUCH higher price with kick-backs here and there no? So all of what´s missing would actually be another European fake as the Maastricht Treaty acceptance criteria just to name one. This would at least make EU “sense” no? Can´t make this stuff up…

no diesel so freeze

Europeans: even in theory, there are no viable oil-field reservoirs able to expand their production for the enormous quantity and type of oil blends you need even if they wished to or if geopolitics allowed them. So what would happen then without massive amounts of high-quality diesel fuel that European transportation and industries require?

There is no viable tanker fleet afloat either for such an unexpected and suddenly imposed massive supply-switch project, with complex geo-climatological access and serious sea lanes issues plus seasonal requirements with dedicated facilities yet to be designed, built, permitted, and commissioned, and with terribly limited installed infrastructure at key unloading ports from heavy-duty/heavy traffic roads to cranes and dedicated storage facilities. The same goes for nonexistent in-land logistics for delivery of such yet unknown boutique oil blends with still-to-be-seen minimum quality specs and anywhere near the enormous un-findable quantities as Europe requires no matter how you dice it or slice it or pray for it. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Just maybe some “fly-by-night” un-vetted headache providers. You are thus running around in circles with the very serious and certain risk of freezing and starving millions of Europeans to death very soon which Russian oil has solved for you for decades. And whichever narrative you choose, it will always be your own stupid needless fault, not Vladimir Putin´s for Heaven´s sake who is still willing to sell Russia´s oil to you with very important discounts, something which you should not ever take for granted despite Europe´s recent shameless robbery of legitimate Russian savings deposited at Western banks, including personal individual accounts and assets.

So for your own benefit please stop the Russophobia right now, reverse the current unwarranted course 180 degrees, return the money robbed, by your own doing change your leadership ASAP, accept Russia´s territorial claims, accept the decline of Europe and the Western world at large, drop the Anglo-Saxon Brexitology superiority philosophy, guarantee Russia´s existential security and stop the shameful European nonsense now exposed for the world to see.

Otherwise, enter your very own European angry pitchforks with lit torches that will fix this fast. Are you ready?

Ref #5 http://thesaker.is/europes-mad-ban-on-russian-oil/

Ref #6 http://thesaker.is/why-russias-oil-ban-is-impossible/

Ref #7 http://thesaker.is/germans-schwedt-hard-for-russian-oil/

Ref #8 http://thesaker.is/dear-ursula-you-are-dead-wrong/

Ref #9 http://thesaker.is/europe-now-cheats-or-suffers/

Ref #10 http://thesaker.is/for-europe-from-russia-with-love/

Ref #11 https://www.rt.com/business/556870-good-times-over-for-europeans/

pitchforks ready

Not that long ago, the French Revolution was planned and led by the middle classes. And in the very near short term that will be the new game of the game throughout Europe if the EU leadership insists on fighting a-la Don Quixote its inevitable dependency on Russia. Besides, in case you didn´t notice, Russia is winning on all fronts, militarily, geopolitically, logistically, socially, economically, and financially. The Ruble is as strong as it cares to be and Russia is the only world power able to self-sustain independently from what happens in the rest of the world. After many years of trying to accommodate your requirements, Russia simply does not care anymore what the West thinks, does, or threatens to do. It can now beat you at any of the three at any time. Your sanctions work against Europe, not Russia. You must see and feel that for sure, so why do you fake being blind? Or are you “brain-dead” per President Macron?

Russia´s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov nailed it for history: the West is simply not “agreement-capable” with the post-Brexit US-led Anglo-Saxon leadership in charge. Did you not have enough with Victoria Nuland´s loud and clear “ fuck the EU ” audio recording? What else would you need to accept what´s really going on? Maybe having a character such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy ruling the Ukraine? He already is… Why has European leadership now turned so unwarrantedly Russophobic? You do not need to be their friend, but why should you make Russia your enemy even proposing an anti-Russian coalition cartel?

Ref #12 https://www.rt.com/news/556913-yellen-coalition-russian-sanctions/

European infighting

A network is only as strong as its weakest link. As initially explained in the “their war” paragraph, just-in-time fragility will trigger cascading failures throughout Europe in a matter of days, if not hours. So what´s the European game plan for the 21st. century without energy security? Fighting even more yet again amongst yourselves? What will become of Europe without Russia as a business associate and energy provider? Are you aware of how weak European economies and fragile finances currently stand? Did you know that 85% of the world´s population does not belong to NATO?

Hungary et al will continue to receive cheap and excellent Russian Urals blend through the Druzbha South pipeline for a yet undefined period of time. This would mean a wholly unfair competitive environment with tremendous advantages for some few over those fed with new unknown expensive non-Russian oils plus the costs for the corresponding retro-fitting / reconversion downtime (or plain non-performance) kicking them outright out of the market for an unknown period of time possibly bankrupting them and creating extraordinary logistics problems to consumers throughout Europe. Allowing for the Druzbha South pipeline to continue feeding 15% of Europe with excellent Russian oils will provide the perfect comparison standard of practice. And it would reveal the fallacy that Russian oils can be substituted easily and without enormous great pains per Ursula von der Leyden´s historical bad joke: “the EU will make sure to phase out Russian oil in an orderly fashion to allow us and our partners to secure alternative supply routes minimizing the impact on global markets”. It´d be like trying to change your car´s engine oil while cruising at 150 km/hr on a German autobahn.

quantities & qualities

By any means, there are definitely not enough adequate oil blends around to satisfy European requirements without continuous Russian high-quality Urals supply. And also please understand and accept once and for all that a specific oil blend is not just “an oil blend” to be plugged & played anywhere anytime. A very specific refinery or processing plant tune-up needs to be specifically matched with an always constant high-quality oil blend in large enough quantities and for a given desired output such as diesel. No “open architecture” is possible here, that´s just for IT nerds, not for chemical engineering realities. And definetly there are no vendors all lined up happily willing and able to sell you their oil blend in unlimited quantities already fully adapted to whatever plant you may have for whichever desired production output you may need. And also any door-to-door pipeline performs infinitely better than the best batch-delivery system, let alone with un-prepared ports thousands of kilometers away from “beach-front bazaar” vendors.

Should ´climate change´ already agreed goals reduce or further increase worldwide oil production? Which is it, please make up your mind. Furthermore, oil-field production will be very hard to maintain into the near future because of constant shale reservoir depletion, fracking prohibition, ever-increasing labor shortages, rising drilling costs due to worldwide inflation, and temporary or permanent lack of missing components caused by supply chain disruptions.

Ref #13 https://www.rt.com/business/556816-eu-buying-russian-oil/

Ref #14 https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Biggest-Reshuffle-Of-Oil-Flows-Since-The-1970s.html

no people no project

For decades Europe has streamlined supplies and specifically matched its processing capabilities for the Russian Urals blend which means that now Europeans cannot just suddenly switch to whatever little and bad oil blends are found elsewhere. It just does not work that way. If any of that is attempted, the result will be absolutely disqualifying higher prices and costs plus un-thinkable risks for the whole European economy. Furthermore, Europe will spend a FORTUNE it does not have while simultaneously risking project non-performance of the trouble full reconversion projects required ending up with many half-finished facilities that will not be anywhere ready on time, or ever. And as 95% compliance is not enough to produce a single drop of a processed product (diesel or whatever) this means that under current circumstances and 2022 established deadlines until Europe has 100% modified and retrofitted facilities up and running you really have NOTHING. Additionally, the human resource challenge related to all of the above is insurmountable and probably un-compliable.

Ref #15 https://www.rt.com/business/556600-analysts-warning-russian-oil-embargo/

500th Post!

 500th post!

 

 I started this blog in March 2019. Originally, I had planned a technical, personal blog to discuss marketing, data, AI and other issues I was interested in. The idea was to share knowledge and exchange information with like-minded specialists. 

 This lasted about 6 months. My most interesting and popular post at the time, was an older post from LinkedIn where I presented the new dystopian project of Social Credit in China and explained how it could be used to literally enslave the population. It was supposed to be activated in 2020, It was and the results were exactly as expected... and worse!  

 Should we care about our citizen Score?

 Then Covid happened. As I was on a trip to Europe, I found myself locked down in France for over 6 months until Japan reopened its doors to residents and I could finally return home. 

 But during those 6 months something terrible happened. Together with over the top, unneeded political and economic measures which devastated the lives and mental health of many people, a dark cloud of censorship fell over the Western world. There had of course been a limited amount of censorship before, even in the most liberal countries, but you could still argue, present different points of view and discuss issues. With Covid, suddenly, you could not even scientifically discuss issues. Events would be followed by almost immediate Media announcements stating an official truth from which they would not move whatever inconvenient facts were uncovered later. Nay-Sayers would be ridiculed and more significant people have their carrier destroyed for stating facts which were not in line with the official truth. 

 And so I started researching the subject to try to understand and form my own opinion, free from the prevalent and often inconsistent official version.

 The first question was about the origin of the Corona Virus. We were told as an absolute truth that it could not come from the Wuhan bio-research laboratory and that it's origin was in the "Wuhan" wet market. This was suspect from the beginning as Chinese people do not eat bats although the virus was clearly coming from bats. (The only place in the world were people actually eat bats is in Palau, in the Pacific. Picture below.) The WHO being largely financed by China, it made sense that they would take some "freedom" with the truth. But why would Western governments follow suit?

 Then came the lock-downs. "Two weeks to flatten the curve" we were told which were extended again and again. Then the masks, "utterly useless" according to scientists at the time, but hey, people needed to "feel" this was an emergency so they were made mandatory in country after country with absolutely no effect whatsoever on the epidemic which went on from place to place with or without masks. 

Then came trash statistics to justify all the inept political and economic measures. In almost every country the age of death from the virus was higher that the normal average age of death in the country. This should have been enough to prove that the Corona virus was having an overwhelming effect on the old and frail which were the ones in need of protection, not the rest of the population. Finally, when the data came at the end of 2020, in most countries, there was no excess death for the entire year! Usually, a few months above average followed by a rapid return to normal. This was consistent with a slightly above average flu year...

 But while we were hammered with Covid propaganda, warning us about the risk of explosion (based on the discredited model of Pr Ferguson in the UK), a new campaign of vaccination with the new untested mRNA vaccines was started. Many immunology scientists warned us that the technology was experimental and potentially more dangerous that the virus itself due to the possible interference with the immune system. They too were silenced... and colossal profits were generated with almost no dissenting voices.  

 Thankfully, after two full years of this ordeal, we could at last look forward to 2022 as "the year after". If only! As the economies around the world reopened and the price of oil exploded back up to 90 dollar per barrel. Russia, tickled by the war preparations of Ukraine initiated a full invasion of the country, followed by immediate war-like sanctions showing the real intentions in Western circles. And the propaganda which had been fierce for Covid became almost totalitarian for Ukraine and was joined by censorship of "pro-Putin" information. More or less anything not towing the line of pro-Ukraine propaganda, however outlandish. 

 In-between, I ignored the bending of language, mostly in the US, as well as the political shenanigan, clearly engineered to disorient and confuse the population. But not the economic and financial stress just as clearly indicating the risks ahead. 

 And as mentioned in my previous blog, here we are now in mid-2022 on the edge of the precipice. The necessary tightening of interest rates in the US will play amok with Europe and Japan which run the risk of a full fledged implosion of their respective money before the end of the year. 

 What to expect?

 The Covid crisis came suspiciously two months after the Repo crisis in October 2019. The Ukraine crisis followed suspiciously the Covid crisis as it was losing steam in early 2022. Now, Ukraine is slowly being flattened by Russia with little scope for an upturn on the front. So what's next? Will the financial crisis be left to follow its course? Or will "something" happen? 

 I would bet for "something" following the two earlier occurrences. Ukraine? Taiwan? Iran? The flash points are numerous but probably look more palatable than admitting that you ran the economy into the ground with "free" money. So, will "Putin-oil-prices" be followed by "Xi-flation"? Hard to tell but I will keep trying to understand what is really happening and look at our macro-reality with articles on cycles, the economy, science, and yes from time to time, marketing, data and AI as I intended originally.

 PS: I welcome dissenting, argumented opinions although this blog is to some extent a personal effort to document key ideas and keep a repository of important articles.

Research on Corona / HIV Virus from 2004

 One of the very first analysis about the new Corona virus made by Indian scientists in 2020, mentioned that the virus included sequences from HIV. Professor Montagnier, the discoverer of HIV said the same a little later. I covered both news as they were ridiculed in the Media. 

 Now, someone has uncovered this article from 2004, a little after the first wave of Corona, which shows how already scientists were experimenting on both virus. Wouldn't 16 years of research be enough to weaponize the Corona Virus by including sequences of HIV and making the spike protein more human friendly?

 Let's ask this question differently: If you are a scientist working on such virus, trying to weaponize them, wouldn't such studies be the most obvious?

 Corona has a high level of transmission. HIV has a high ability to hide from our immune system and the S-protein is the key to making the virus more infectious.

https://t.co/vTCQPJ9U4h

  Abstract of the research document:

 Studies of SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV)—the causative agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—have been hampered by its high transmission rate and the pathogenicity of this virus. To permit analysis of the host range and entry mechanism of SARS-CoV, we incorporated the humanized SARS-CoV spike (S) glycoprotein into HIV particles to generate a highly infectious SARS-CoV pseudotyped virus. The infection on Vero E6—a permissive cell line to SARS-CoV—could be neutralized by sera from convalescent SARS patients, and the entry was a pH-dependent process. With these highly infectious SARS-CoV pseudotypes, several cell lines derived from various tissues were revealed as susceptible to SARS-CoV, which were highly corresponding to the expression pattern of virus’s receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). In addition, we also demonstrated angiotensin 1 converting enzyme (ACE)—the homologue of ACE2 could not function as a receptor for SARS-CoV.

World War III around the Corner?

 It is becoming more and more difficult not to understand that the US will not fade gracefully into the shadow and is readying for war as the end of the dollar hegemony gets closer. 

 As Ukraine is proving little more than a proxy war between the West and Russia, the UK and US are sending all they can to the front in Eastern Ukraine with little hope for now beyond delaying the inevitable. The risk and what Ukraine is trying to do is embroil Western countries in the conflict by sending more and more potent weapons until eventually Russia has no other option than retaliate directly on weapons being readied for war in Eastern Europe. Russia won't do it in the short term, but if these weapons are effective and create a stalemate in the East, how long can they standby, doing nothing? How many soldiers can they lose while the economy shrivel under the weight of economic sanctions? Nobody knows.

 In between, the pain in Europe is becoming more acute. This was without doubt the strategy of Russia from the beginning: Giving a year, until Winter 2022, to the Europeans to think very hard how the can or rather cannot survive without Russian energy and resources and come to their senses. Will they? More specifically: Will they have the time before things escalate?

 And escalate they will.

 In Ukraine, it is likely that more "long range" weapons will be sent with the assurance from Ukraine that they won't be used against Russian territory. A promise from a drunkard that he won't touch a wine bottle would have more value! As the Russian army moves forward in Ukraine, the temptation will soon be irresistible.   

 In Asia, the US is pushing for closer and closer military links with Taiwan. China has stated clearly that this was a red line for them and that they would be ready to go to war "whatever the consequences" for them. Consequences which for now would be dreadful as China can easily be blockaded. The country would suffer immensely but then again, does the new version of Mao, Xi Jinping really cares? China has very little historic reasons to claim Taiwan but it does not matter what other countries think. It is the privilege of big countries to make their rules and ignore other people's concerns, as the US has shown again and again for over 70 years. Now, it's China's turn.  

 North Korea is strategically insignificant. They are little more than a gadfly representing a risk for... Seoul and Inchon, mostly. Although they have been used as a bogeyman by Japan and South Korea for the last 20 years to rearm against China. And by the US to keep troops in both countries also against China. This is all kabuki but nobody is a dupe as everyone understand perfectly where are the real military risks. They are not the vintage Mig 19 and 21 the North Koreans are still flying.

 The Middle East is another powder keg. Iran may or may not be developing nuclear weapons. They probably are not since it would be suicide for them. But then again, the examples of North Korea and Libya show clearly that having the weapons is better in the long term as your enemies need to think twice before invading. So who knows? What is certain is that since no agreement is possible in the short or even medium term, with the pressure of sanctions adding to the exploding price of commodities, Iran will need to do "something" less the country explodes under the strain. We are talking months, not years. 

 Likewise, the reprieve of Covid in the West is almost over and the financial system is again on the brink. The Central Banks can't raise rates due to excessive outstanding debt while inflation is raging. This means that purchasing power is being eroded while the economy sputter. Central Bankers are talking about 1970s style stagflation while they know very well that their predicament is far worse. They have almost no weapons left to fight this bout of inflation while governments can't stop showering money on their respective populations less they lose legitimacy. The dream of "Global Reset" is little but that: A dream. Without access to natural resources, Europe in particular cannot do any "global" or local reset. The crash in living standard will be astounding and not survivable for the system. 

 So here we are, mid-2022 with many governments all over the world having painted themselves into a corner, looking for the solutions to an 8th degree polynomial equation. There are none! Which is exactly the kind of circumstances under which, historically, countries have gone to war. 

 The only difference nowadays is that in many respects a total war has become unthinkable. It would be short and brutal, most certainly involving nuclear weapons as well as a huge level of disorganization at the global and local level. While tens of millions of people would die instantly, hundreds of  millions would follow within a rather short time.

 Unthinkable? Let's hope so. Although maybe not as it looks more and more likely that the fear of a nuclear winter may have been wildly exaggerated. It was based on early calculations that 10 megaton bombs would throw a large amount of dust in the stratosphere where it would stay for months, maybe years. But what if the calculations are not only wrong but actually fanciful? The last time we had a "nuclear winter" was in 1992 following the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines, North of Manila. Yes, the temperature dropped a few degrees in the Northern hemisphere and we had a miserable rainy Winter in London. But a year later, everything was back to normal. The biggest eruption before that was the Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883. 10 times bigger than the Pinatubo. The effect on the climate was slightly worse with the extraordinary sunsets painted by Munch a year later. To get a real Nuclear Winter, you have to go back to 1816 and the eruption of the Tambora, also in Indonesia. This one was again 10 times larger than the Krakatoa and the following year was indeed called the year without a Summer with famines around the globe. But we are now talking about explosions a magnitude larger the largest nuclear bombs we have. And even in that case, the atmosphere was quickly back to normal.

 Likewise, we are being told that the ground directly below a nuclear bomb would be inhabitable for centuries. Everybody who has been to Hiroshima or Nagasaki knows that this is false. Unlike a nuclear reactor which when it explodes, showers a large area with nucleotide, a bomb does not because most of the dangerous uranium or plutonium atoms are transformed instantly in much smaller atoms with a much shorter half-life, releasing a huge amount of energy. A month or so later, you can walk back to the area and start rebuilding as the Japanese did in 1945. The number of cancer will increase dramatically but for people just out of a war, these are secondary problems compared to the more immediate problem of finding food on a daily basis.

 So the reality is that even in the case of a full blown nuclear war, many people will survive. In fact, so many that some governments such as in the US for example, not only believe that they can survive a nuclear war but can actually win one. Meaning that they will retain enough military power to actually destroy what is left of their enemies after a nuclear exchange. This view seems to be prevalent in Washington, which may be one reason behind the rise of tensions with Russia and China. When you stop being afraid then every scenario becomes possible.

 Which is why, I agree with many pundits that we are probably closer to war than we have even been since the Cuba Crisis in 1962, and maybe worse.

 So let's hope for the best, although preparing for the worst looks more and more like a good idea.  

 

How to Destroy Western Europe

 Two years ago, I predicted a second Middle Ages for Europe. Some of my contacts ridiculed the idea as unthinkable. I explained that it was only due to their misunderstanding of what the Middle Ages really were. An age of disorganization and fall to a more simple, local form of government and economy, certainly but history and progress actually kept moving forward. In the early Middle Ages, people still believed that the Roman Empire was just behind ready to be resurrected any time. Charlemagne was called "Emperor" and saw himself as successor to the Romans. We now understand that this was not the case and that the hiatus would last almost 1,000 years. 

 How long will it be this time and how deep will the fall be until we find a new equilibrium that works? Nobody can answer this question of course. But already, we can see that our world is not the same as the one before Covid and clearly heading South, as energy, food and other resources are more and more scarce and expensive. Green energy is a scam. As we have discussed many times in several articles, it will cost a fortune and because, unlike fossil fuels, most of the costs are upfront, we will not be able to afford it once our financial system based on leveraged credit crashes. The choice for Europe is stark: Russian oil and gas and continued muddle through from crisis to crisis until the continent restructures drastically. Very unlikely now. Or doubling down on failed policies, and heralding a depression so deep that 1929 will look like a picnic stroll through the 1930s and leads to further disorganization and down-sliding. The two articles below highlight the beginning of this second scenario.

Guest post by Ugo Bardi

US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., (1891-1967). He was the proposer of the “Morgenthau Plan” that would have turned post-war Germany into a purely agricultural region, exterminating tens of millions of Germans in the process. Initially approved by President Roosevelt, fortunately, the plan was never put into practice. 

After that Germany surrendered, in 1945, the general attitude of the Allies was that the Germans deserved to be punished. One of the results was that the Allies deliberately limited the supply of food to Germany. Among other things, in the book titled The Death and Life of Germany,” (1959) Eugene Davidson reports how the US military authorities explicitly ordered the American servicemen in Germany, and their wives, to destroy the leftovers of their meals. They wanted to be sure that nothing would be left for their German maids and their families.

This attitude of the Allies predated the German defeat. In 1944, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, had proposed the plan that would take his name, the “Morgenthau Plan.” The plan called for the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure and the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a medieval technology level. As a consequence, Germany wouldn’t have been able to import food from abroad and that would have resulted in the death of tens of millions of Germans.

The Morgenthau Plan was initially approved by President Roosevelt, and it was even publicly diffused in the press. Fortunately for the Germans, it was later abandoned by President Truman, but it remained active as a practical set of guidelines for the allied policies in Germany until 1948. As a result, untold numbers of Germans died as the consequence of starvation. Some people speak of at least one million victims (or even several million) of famine during the period from 1945 to 1948, but we’ll never know the exact number.

As we all know, the Germans were far from being innocent in this worldwide extermination game. In addition to the Shoah, they engaged in the extermination of other ethnic groups, including German citizens judged to be a burden for society. In 1942, the German government developed the “Generalplan Ost” (General Plan for the East) that foresaw the extermination of tens of millions of Slavs in Eastern Europe. The survivors would be used as servants and laborers for the German “master race” (Herrenvolk).

It is impressive for us to remember how, less than a century ago, there were Western governments happily engaged in planning exterminations involving tens of millions of Europeans. Could these dark times return? It is said that society is just three hot meals away from barbarism, and we could rephrase this old saying as “society is just one defeat away from extermination.”

Indeed, the events of the past few months saw Western Europe close to inflicting a terminal defeat on itself by abandoning its main source of energy: Russian oil and gas. Fortunately, it seems that, after all, Europe won’t commit economic suicide as it seemed to be poised to do. For the time being, Russian gas keeps flowing into Europe and the lights are still on in Europe, although it cannot be said for how long.

Yet, Europe continues planning for its own defeat itself, as we can read in the recently published “REpowerEU” plan. The plan is mostly greenwashing, recommending such things as hydrogen and similar useless stuff. But the substance of the plan is in its calling for huge investments in new regasification facilities that will allow importing large amounts of liquefied gas from the US. The EU plans to switch to sources that will be much more expensive (and also more polluting) than Russian gas.

If applied, the REpowerEU plan could lead Western Europe to a situation similar to what the Morgenthau Plan foresaw for Germany in 1945: de-industrialization. For this to happen, it is not necessary for Europe to go dark. It is sufficient to increase the cost of energy to such a level to make European industrial products not any more competitive in the world market. That would generate a spiral of decline that would rapidly strangle the European economy. Eventually, Europe would become unable to import a sufficient amount of food for its population. Famines would necessarily follow. A new Morgenthau plan, this time Europe-wide.

Is that possible? As usual, history does not really repeat, but it rhymes. The events of World War II are not so remote from us that we can exclude that they would be repeated in some forms — including widespread famines and exterminations in Europe. Below, you can find an interpretation of the current situation by Michael McGarrity — who comments on the Facebook group “The Seneca Effect.” This text is reproduced with his kind permission.

Medieval EU: Plant Oats, Raise Goats.

By Michael McGarrity 23 May 2022

How many years will it take for Russia to adapt and stabilize to a new level of sanctions? Probably not long, but in the meantime, I believe that Europe will deindustrialize as plentiful, reasonably priced, Russian energy and food now sanctioned must be substituted by some yet to be identified source. Today, the German Prime Minister was “hopeful” that in 2023 Energy Production in Senegal may be ramped up to provide additional energy for Germany. This is highly irrational. Siemens, a great German technology company that requires large quantities of energy to produce its products, is now scrambling to find new sources.

It is likely that many countries will be buying Russian energy through third-party countries such as India. Germany may now buy Russian energy from India at greatly increased prices, it will be rebranded as Indian not Russian energy while companies such as Siemens lose competitive advantage in the world markets due to greatly increased energy production costs. Over the long term, a general reduction in global energy supplies will harm those who have to pay the highest prices. By this winter, the EU faces significant risks of energy and food Shortages. The domino effect on energy will have lag times in the EU. They are not yet evident, but they are already operating.

As European energy and food stores deplete, likely by this winter, the EU economy will become medieval. Russia is self-sufficient in terms of energy and food, but there is not a sufficient supply of energy and food in the world to replace the sanctioned Russian sources in the coming years. The die is cast. The EU is due for a minimum of two years of deindustrialization. Russian Arctic natural gas facilities can’t be switched on and off like a light switch. Grain that is not planted can’t be harvested. Fertilizer that doesn’t exist can’t fertilize crops. Some yet to be implemented substitute energy sources such as Senegal will take years to be realized. China, India, and Mexico will quickly take over markets held by great German companies like Siemens. The cake is baked for the EU in terms of rapid deindustrialization, which may be permanent.

All this is part of the delusional thinking underlying the sanctions on Russia, yet to be realized in terms of impact. The reality is that 440 Million EU Citizens are on a fast track to a dystopian Medieval life and there is no turning back due to the scale of the problem, which is related to physical, not ideological constraints. The Russian economy might be destroyed by the sanctions, but no Russian will go hungry or cold. Russia may evolve a self-sufficient standard of living similar to that of the mid-1990s, while Europe goes back to the 1400s: goat carts and bearskin clothes.I’m no expert in Geopolitics or Finance. I’m an expert in large-scale disaster recovery testing. Nothing theoretical, all practical exercises timed to the minute of what it takes to restore systems, supply chains and such. Politicians such as the German Prime Minister, touting notions of instant natural gas production in Senegal are delusional. It’s time for EU citizens to start planting oats and raising goats.

It's "Worse Than Many Can Imagine" - Kim Dotcom Fears "Controlled Demolition" Enabling A "New Dystopian Future"

  No, it's not. We'll have talk of a recession approaching all Summer then risks of a depression in the fall. Exactly as expected and on schedule. It could have happened 2 years ago when the financial authorities lost control of the Repo market. Covid saved the day then. We'll need another such "miracle" during the Summer. Ukraine or Taiwan? Hard to tell, but expect huge efforts to destabilize both places in the coming weeks...

Authored by Alexandra Bruce via ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.net,

New Zealand tech CEO, Kim Dotcom did the math on the United States’ sovereign debt and he tweeted a thread about it, saying it may the most important thread that he may ever make.

Kim explains that US spending and debt have spiraled out of control and the Government can only raise the money it needs by printing more of it, which means that hyperinflation is guaranteed.

He says this has been going on for decades and there’s no way to fix it and that the US got away with this for so long, because US dollar is the world’s reserve currency.

When the US Government prints trillions, it is thereby robbing Americans and the entire world in what he calls the biggest theft in history.

He says the total US debt is at $90 trillion, which together with $169 trillion in US unfunded liabilities totals $259 trillion, which is $778,000 per US citizen or $2,067,000 per US Taxpayer.

Now, the value of all US assets combined: every piece of land, real estate, all savings, all companies, everything that all citizens, businesses, entities and the state own is worth $193 trillion.

Our total debt, $259 trillion minus our total net worth, $193 trillion equals negative $66 trillion of debt and liabilities after every asset in the US has been sold off.

So even if the US could sell all assets at the current value, which is impossible, it would still be broke.

This is where the ‘Great Reset’ comes in and he asks, “Is it a controlled demolition of the global markets, economies and the world as we know it? A shift into a new dystopian future where the elites are the masters of the slaves without the cosmetics of democracy?”

He notes how the world has changed so much in recent years and how nothing seems to make sense anymore.

He sees the blatant corruption and the obvious gaslighting propaganda media and the erosion of our rights but he doesn’t know where it’s all going and he finishes the thread asking, “What’s the end game?”

As Harrison Smith from the American Journal says, “It’s a pyramid scheme. The people perpetrating the pyramid scheme are in charge of everything…they’re going to sacrifice humanity in order to maintain their system…

“The world economy is being collapsed, the food supply system is being destroyed, the energy that we rely on to maintain civilization is being curtailed and eliminated and we’ll be forced into the Great Reset where we will own nothing.”

Former BlackRock stockpicker, Ed Dowd believes that the entire COVID sham was created as a cover for the financial collapse and that new lockdowns are coming, to try mitigate the inevitable violence and chaos that we can expect to be witnessing in the streets.

We also saw how Dr Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer VP also believes that COVID and the death shot are an elaborate hoax to engineer a collapse of sovereign currencies to bring in the Great Reset and the introduction of programmable central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), for a wholly-controlled population, in which people will not be able to buy food, etc. unless the algorithms permit and the undesirables can basically be starved to death via artificial intelligence.

Kim Dotcom June 5, 2022 Thread

(emphasis ours)

This may be the most important thread I ever make. Big picture stuff about the major global collapse that is coming.

I will try to help you understand why the future is not what we’re hoping for. It’s worse than most can imagine.

Our leaders know.
But what are they planning?

The United States did not have a surplus or a balanced budget since 2001. In the last 50 years the US only had 4 years of profit. In fact all the profit the US had would not be enough to pay for 6 months of the current yearly deficit. So how did the US pay for things?

US spending and debt have spiraled out of control and the Govt can only raise the money it needs by printing it. That causes inflation. It’s like taxing you extra because you pay more for the things you need and all your assets decline in value.

See the US money printing frenzy:

The reason why the US got away with it for so long is because USD is the worlds reserve currency. Nations everywhere hold USD as a secure asset. So when the US Govt prints trillions it’s robbing Americans and the entire world. The biggest theft in history.

The reason why the US got away with it for so long is because USD is the worlds reserve currency. Nations everywhere hold USD as a secure asset. So when the US Govt prints trillions it's robbing Americans and the entire world. The biggest theft in history. pic.twitter.com/K1UKC7tWf0

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) June 5, 2022

The problem is that this has been going for decades and there’s now no way to fix it. The reality is that the US has been bankrupt for some time and what’s coming is a nightmare: Mass poverty and a new system of control. Let me explain why this isn’t just doom and gloom talk.

Total US debt is at $90 trillion. US unfunded liabilities are at $169 trillion. Combined that’s $778,000 per US citizen or $2,067,000 per US tax payer 

Remember, the only way the US Government can operate now is by printing more money. Which means hyperinflation is inevitable.

The total value of ALL companies listed on the US stock market is $53 trillion. The real value is much lower because the US has been printing trillions to provide interest free loans to investment banks to pump up the stock market. It’s a scam.

Most of the $53 trillion is air.

The value of all US assets combined, every piece of land, real estate, all savings, all companies, everything that all citizens, businesses, entities and the state own is worth $193 trillion.

That number is also full of air just like the US stock market.

US total debt: $90 trillion

US unfunded liabilities: $169 trillion

Total: $259 trillion

Minus all US assets: $193 trillion

Balance: – $66 trillion

That’s $66 trillion of debt and liabilities after every asset in the US has been sold off.

Do you understand?

So even if the US could sell all assets at the current value, which is impossible, it would still be broke.

The US is beyond bankrupt.
This patient is already dead.
This patient is now a zombie.

You probably wonder why are things still going? Why didn’t everything collapse yet.

It’s all perception, denial and dependency.

The perception is that the US has the largest economy and the strongest military in the world. But in reality the US is broke and can’t afford its army.

The denial is that all nations depend on a strong USD or global markets collapse.

The reason why the US zombie keeps going is because the end of the US is the end of western prosperity and an admission that the current system failed as a model for the world. It doesn’t change the reality. The collapse is inevitable and coming.

What are our leaders planning?

You may have heard about the ‘great reset’ or the ‘new world order’. Is it a controlled demolition of the global markets, economies and the world as we know it?

A shift into a new dystopian future where the elites are the masters of the slaves without the cosmetics of democracy?

Without a controlled demolition the world will collapse for all, including the elites. The world has changed so much and nothing seems to make sense anymore, the blatant corruption is out in the open, the obvious propaganda media, the erosion of our rights.

What’s the end game?