Macleod: The Global Bank Credit Crisis

  This is a long and sometimes technical article. But to understand why we will have a reset sooner than later, it is a must read.

  The 2008 crisis was a warning shot which could have gone very bad. Somehow the system survived another decade until we reached the end of the line in 2019. In this respect, the Covid crisis was not an accident but the opportunity to flood the system with large scale financing and literally "buy" another few years.

  Now the flooding must become permanent although it can't for obvious reasons. By raising rates, the US Central Bank, the Federal Reserve is crashing the world economy. They hope / believe they can manage the crash. History proves you can't.

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Globally, further falls in consumer price inflation are now unlikely and there are yet further interest rate increases to come. Bond yields are already on the rise, and a new phase of a banking crisis will be triggered.

This article looks at the factors that have come together to drive interest rates higher, destabilising the entire global banking system. The contraction of bank credit is in its early stages, and that alone will push up interest costs for borrowers. We have an old fashioned credit crunch on our hands.

A new bout of price inflation, which more accurately is an acceleration of falling purchasing power for currencies, also leads to higher interest rates. Savage bear markets in financial and property values are bound to ensue, driving foreign investors to repatriate their funds. 

This will unwind much of the $32 trillion of foreign investment in the fiat dollar which has accumulated in the last fifty-two years. And BRICS’s deliberations for replacing the dollar as a trade settlement medium could not come at a worse time.

Global banking risks are increasing

Gradually, the alarm bells over credit are beginning to ring. Monetarist and Austrian School economists are hammering the point home about broad money, which almost everywhere is contracting. It is overwhelmingly comprised of deposits at the commercial banks. And this week, even China’s command economy has had credit problems exposed, with another large property developer, Country Garden Holdings missing bond payments.

A global cyclical downturn in bank credit is long overdue, and that is what we currently face. Empirical evidence of previous cycles, particularly 1929—1932, is that fear can spread though the banking cohort like wildfire as interbank credit lines are cut, loans are called in, and collateral liquidated. The question arising today is whether the current credit cycle downturn is more acute than any of those faced by our fiat currency world since the 1970s, or whether timely expansions of central bank liabilities can come to the rescue again.

The problem with using monetary policy to avert a financial crisis is that there is bound to come a time when it fails, particularly when it is driven by bureaucrats whose starting point is an assumption that banks are adequately capitalised for an economic downturn. This ignores unproductive debts from previous cycles which have simply accumulated into a potential tsunami of defaults. When it overwhelms the banks, the policy response can only be so destructive of the currency that the cure exacerbates the problem. And with bond yields rising again, there are good reasons to believe that a tipping point is now upon us.

Credit, which is synonymous with the towering mountains of debt is all about faith: faith in monetary policy, faith in the currency, and faith in a counterparty’s ability to deliver. Before we look at risks faced by the fiat currency cohort, it is worth listing some of the factors that can lead to the collapse of a credit system:

• Contracting bank credit. Contracting bank credit is the consequence of the bankers recognising that lending risks are escalating. It is an acute problem when bank balance sheet leverage is high, magnifying the potential wipe-out of shareholders’ capital arising from bad and doubtful debts. Consequently, both normal and overindebted borrowers whose cash flow has been hit by higher interest rates are denied loan facilities, or at the least they are rationed at a higher interest cost. Therefore, the early stages of a credit downturn see interest rates rising even further leading to business failures. Essentially, the central banks lose control over interest rates.

• Interbank counterparty risks. There is a long history of banks suspecting that one or more of their number has become overextended or mismanaged and is therefore a counterparty risk. Banks have analytical models in common to determine these risks, so there is a danger that the majority of banks will share the same opinion on a particular bank at the same time, leading to it being shut out of wholesale markets. When that happens, it cannot fund deposit outflows, is forced to turn to the central bank for support, or it suddenly collapses. Recently, this was the fate of Silicon Valley Bank. A downgrade by a credit agency, such as S&P or Fitch, could trigger an interbank lending crisis, either at a local or international level in the case of a country downgrade. These downgrades have now started.

• Rising bond yields. Banks usually stock up on government debt, redeploying their assets when they are cautious about lending to the private sector. Therefore, an increase in bond holdings tends to be countercyclical with reference to the credit cycle, with exposure limited to maturities of only a year or two. This pattern has been broken by central banks suppressing interest rates to or below the zero bound at a time of prolonged economic stagnation. Again, Silicon Valley Bank serves as an example of how this can go horribly wrong. It was able to fund bond purchases at close to zero per cent to buy Treasury and agency debt of longer maturities to enhance the credit spread. When interest rates began to rise, the bank’s profit and loss account took a hit, and at the same time, the market values of their bond investments fell substantially, wiping out its balance sheet equity. The Fed has taken on this risk by creating the Bank Term Funding Programme, whereby the Fed takes in Treasuries at their redemption value in return for cash in a one-year swap. Essentially, the problem in the US is covered up and accumulating on the Fed’s balance sheet instead — though this is not reflected in the Fed’s accounting practices. The draw-down in this facility is currently $107 billion and rising.

• Quantitative tightening. Collectively, the major central banks (the Fed, ECB, BoJ, and PBOC) have reduced their balance sheets by some $5 trillion since early-2022. This QT has been put into effect by not reinvesting the proceeds of maturing government debt. Nearly all of the reduction in the central banks’ balance sheets is reflected in commercial bank reserves, which are balances recorded in their accounts as assets. Accordingly, the commercial banking system as a whole comes under pressure to reinvest the released reserves into something else, or to reduce its combined liabilities to depositors, bondholders, and shareholders. Initially, the commercial banking system can only respond by increasing holdings of three and six months treasury bills, which is an unstable basis for government funding.

• Collateral liquidation. All the charts of national bond yields scream at us that they are continuing to rise, instead of stabilising and eventually going lower as the majority of market participants appear to beleive. Furthermore, with oil and other energy prices now rising strongly, the prospect of yet higher interest rates driven by contracting bank credit (as detailed above) along with a number of other factors discussed in this article point to significantly higher bond yields driving a bear market in financial assets and property values. Where banks hold collateral against loans, there will be increasing pressure on them to sell down financial assets before their values fall further.

• Property liabilities. Bank lending for residential and commercial property will have to absorb substantial write-offs from the consequences of interest rates driven higher by price inflation and contracting bank credit. The Lehman crisis was about lending and securitisation of mortgage debt. This time, higher interest rates will add commercial real estate into the equation.

• Shadow banks. Shadow banks are defined as institutions which recycle credit rather than create it for which a banking licence is required. It includes pension funds, insurance companies, brokers, investment management companies, and any other financial entity which lends and borrows stock or deals in derivatives and securities. All these entities present counterparty risks to banks and other shadow banks. Some of the risks can emerge from unexpected quarters, as was illustrated by the pension fund blow-up in the UK last September.

• Derivatives. Derivative liabilities come from global regulated markets, which are assessed by the Bank for International Settlements to have an open interest of about $38 trillion last March with a further $60 trillion notional exposure in options. Markets in unregulated over-the-counter derivatives are far larger, at an estimated $625 trillion at end-2022 comprised of foreign exchange contracts ($107.6 trillion) interest rate contracts ($491 trillion) equity linked ($7 trillion), commodities ($2.3 trillion), and credit including default swaps ($9.94). All derivatives have chains of counterparty risk. We saw how a simple position in US Treasuries undermined Silicon Valley Bank: a failure in the derivative markets would have far wider consequences, particularly with regulators being unaware of the true risk position in OTC derivatives because they are not in their regulatory brief.

• Repo markets. In all banking systems, some more than others, banks depend on repurchase agreements to ensure their liquidity. Low interest rates and the availability of required collateral feature in this form of funding. Particularly in Europe, repo quantities outstanding have built up in various currencies to over €10.4 trillion equivalent according to the International Capital Markets Association. Essentially, these amounts represent imbalances within the financial system, which being collateralised have become far larger than the traditional overnight imbalances settled in interbank markets. Even though repos are collateralised, the consequences of a counterparty failure are likely to be far more concerning to the stability of the banking sector as a whole. And with higher interest rates, a bear market in collateral values seems set to dry up this liquidity pool.

• Central bank balance sheets. Central banks which have implemented QE have done so in conjunction with interest rate suppression. The subsequent rise in interest rates has led to substantial mark to market losses, wiping out their equity many times over when realistically accounted for. Central banks claim that this is not relevant because they intend to hold their investments to maturity. However, in any rescue of commercial banks, their technical bankruptcy could become an impediment, undermining confidence in their currencies.

Looking at all these potential areas for systemic failure, it is remarkable that the sharp rise in interest rates so far has not triggered a wider banking crisis. The failures of Credit Suisse and a few regional banks in the US are probably just a warm-up before the main event. But when that time arrives, it becomes an open question as to whether central banks and their governments’ treasury ministries will pursue bail-in procedures mandated in G20 members’ laws in a knee-jerk response to the Lehman crisis. Or will they resort to bailouts as demanded by practicalities? Lack of coordination on this issue between G20 nations could jeopardise all banking rescue attempts.

Additionally, while technicians in central banks have some understanding of credit and the practicalities of banking, the same cannot be claimed of bank regulators. They rarely have hands-on experience of commercial banking. They devise stress tests, the starting assumption of which is that banks regulated by them will survive. Otherwise, they will be demonstrated to have failed in their duties as regulators. It is noticeable how the economic assumptions behind prospective banking stresses are almost always unrealistically mild.

When the muck hits the fan, the bureaucratic imperative is to deflect all blame of the failure to the commercial banks themselves, away from their own incompetence.

The US banking system’s weak points

As the reserve currency for the entire global fiat currency system, the dollar and all bank credit based upon it is likely to be the epicentre of a global banking crisis. If other currencies weaken or fail, there is likely to be a temporary capital flight towards the dollar before financial contagion takes over. But if the dollar fails first, all the rest fail as well.

The condition of the US banking system is therefore fundamental to the global economy. There are now signs that not only is US bank credit no longer growing but is contracting as well.

The chart above is the sum of all commercial bank deposits plus reverse repurchase agreements at the Fed. While the latter are technically not in public circulation, they have been an alternative form of deposits for large money market funds that otherwise would be reflected in bank deposits. Recently, having soared from nothing when the Fed permitted certain non-banks to open repo accounts with it in 2021, to a high of $2,334.3 billion last September, the facility has subsequently declined by $543 billion. Adding this change into the bank deposits figures shows the true contraction of bank credit to be $1,203 billion, which is 5.9% of the high point earlier this year. Some of the difference in bank liabilities has been taken up by an increase in loans to commercial banks ($556 billion) which is understandable when depositors earn virtually nothing on their deposits compared with fixed loans to a bank. 

When these factors are considered, total assets are not yet significantly below their peak, indicating that so far banks have been only rearranging their assets with a view to controlling risk. Therefore, the credit crisis it is still in its early stages, which the potential to increase significantly.

The chart below indicates why in a deteriorating lending environment banks are sure to contract their balance sheet totals.

Over the last three decades, the ratio of total assets to tier 1 risk capital has grown from just under eight times, which historically was considered as normal, to a recent fourteen times. It is this leverage ratio that threatens to wipe out shareholders’ capital if the combined level of non-performing loans and mark-to-market write-offs on financial investments increases from here.

A second weak point is the US’s dependency on foreign dollar short-term holdings including bank deposits, which according to the US Treasury totalled $7,122 billion last May. Of that total, $2,367 billion are bank deposits, being 13% of the total in the US banking system. But to the total of short-term holdings must be added long-term holdings of $24,788 billion for a grand total of short and long-term investments of almost $32 trillion. This is substantially in excess of US GDP and has accumulated as a result of two related factors. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, the dollar has been the reserve currency, and internationally commodity prices have always been quoted and dealt in with dollars.

Within living memory, accumulation of dollars in foreign hands became excessive once before. It led to dollars being redeemed for gold, reducing US gold reserves from 21,682 tonnes in 1948 to 9,070 tonnes in 1971, when the run on gold led President Nixon to suspend the Bretton Woods Agreement. Following the abandonment of Bretton Woods, to date the dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power measured in real, legal, international money which is gold. Due to its reserve currency status and persistent US trade deficits, the proportion of foreign ownership of dollars to US GDP has continued to grow. But recent geopolitical events are threatening to reverse that trend.

As dollar bond yields rise, undermining the capital values of the $32 trillion of foreign-owned financial assets and bank deposits, foreigners are bound to sell their dollar assets to avoid mounting losses. And already, we see many foreign nations which are not allied with America beginning to take evasive action. It is rumoured that next week there will be up to 60 nations attending the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, all seeking an alternative to the dollar’s hegemony. Russian state media has clearly stated that a new gold-backed trade settlement currency is on the summit’s agenda, calling an end to the dollar’s fiat currency regime.

Whatever comes out of the summit, it is clear that the fiat dollar regime has almost run its course. The withdrawal of credit from the US economy will undermine the currency, increase the rates of US producer and consumer price inflation, and therefore drive up bond yields. Financial asset and property values which have become dependent on cheap finance will take a massive hit, serving to encourage additional foreign selling of non-financial assets. The losses for banks, not just in the US, are set to rapidly escalate.

Undoubtedly, banks will come under pressure to bail out the US Government from a further deterioration of its finances at a time when foreigners are more interested in selling US Treasuries than buying them. To an extent, substituting dodgy loans to the private sector for government debt is attractive to the banks, but only with very short-term maturities. The consequence will be that government financing of maturing Treasuries and of new issues will be facilitated by 3-month and 6-month T-bills, which can be regarded as near-cash. The inflationary consequences are one thing, but the impact of rising interest rates due to the dollar being sold down by foreign agents will intensify the debt trap by rapidly increasing debt funding costs.

As if this is not enough, at the same time the collapse of bank credit is bound to act negatively on derivative obligations. The table below is a snapshot of OTC obligations for the top twelve US banks.[i]

For the reader losing count of all the noughts, it should be noted that for the top nine their exposure is in the trillions. While it is true that some OTC derivatives, such as credit and credit default swaps are not obligations for their notional amounts, others such as foreign exchange derivatives, commodity, and equity-linked contracts ($117 trillion) are extinguished for the full amount. But they are only recorded on bank balance sheets as insignificant contract values. 

For example, in the BIS derivative estimates quoted earlier in this article, the notional value of foreign exchange OTC contracts last December was $107.576 trillion with a gross market value of $4.846 trillion. It is the latter figure which is the basis recorded in bank balance sheets. But even that total is further reduced by being listed as a net balance of purchase and sold obligations, reducing apparent exposure to an even smaller figure. Essentially, over $107 trillion of assets and liabilities are made to disappear.

According to the BIS’s 2022 triennial OTC derivatives survey, the US dollar is a component of 88.5% of this FX position. Other than offshore trading between non-US banks in Eurodollars, which is a minor proportion of the total, all dollar contracts have US banks as counterparties. This gives rise to two systemic threats. The first and most obvious is counterparty failure with a foreign bank or shadow bank. Obviously, with rising interest rates and collapsing financial asset values in collateral, the risk of counterparty failure from outside the US banking system will increase. The second counterparty failure comes from contracts between two US banks or shadow banks.

We can be sure that central bankers (if not bank regulators) are fully aware of these risks, refusing to draw public attention to them. For confirmation, we saw the Fed rescue AIG in September 2008 in an $85 billion bailout. AIG was the world’s largest insurance company at that time, and an originator of credit default swaps and other derivative obligations. There were other factors involved, such as securities lending. But clearly, for the Fed to rescue an insurance company must have reflected the Fed’s concerns about AIG’s failure as a counterparty in the CDS market.

The new BRICS gold currency

Next week, we will know more about the proposal being presented at the BRICS summit in Johannesburg. All the indications are that this new settlement currency will be denominated in a quantity of gold, such as gold grammes. The return of gold backed credit is an important development for the growing BRICS family and all the member nations, dialog partners and associates of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation seeking a better alternative to the US dollar. Furthermore, it is now in Russia’s strong interest to undermine the US dollar, lifting oil and gas dollar prices to stabilise a falling rouble. 

The extent to which the plan for a new gold denominated currency is credible seems set to undermine the dollar’s value expressed in commodities, goods, and services externally in addition to the domestic economic and monetary factors mentioned above. The foreign exchanges will begin to anticipate that dollar reserves held by central banks in the growing BRICS camp will become increasingly redundant, to be replaced with the new gold trade settlement currency. Sovereign wealth funds are bound to follow by reducing their dollar balances, as will international commodity dealers and importers.

Not only will dollars be sold, but the need to recycle them into US Treasuries and other investments will fall away. Unless the US Government acts to radically cut its borrowing requirements, it will face a rapidly deteriorating funding situation. The dollar costs of commodities, raw materials and imported goods will rise due to the dollar’s weakness. Consequently, dollar interest rates are bound to rise to reflect the premium foreign holders will demand to retain their dollar balances. And even that is unlikely to be enough. The great unwind of the last fifty-two years of pure fiat dollars will surely threaten not only the dollar’s existence, but its highly leveraged banking system.

The discarding of the fiat currency past for a currency or currencies more closely allied to energy and commodities, which is actually what gold represents, is not limited to the destruction of fiat dollars, but of all other fiat currencies as well. For our current purposes, what also concerns us is the same threat faced by the other major currencies: the euro, yen, and sterling.

It has already been mentioned that an initial failure in the US banking system will be the likely course of events because it is the most over-owned of all the major fiat currencies. But if a banking crisis does break out elsewhere first, it could lead to the dollar being temporarily bought as a safe haven until financial contagion undermines all banking relationships. It behoves us to look at the position in these other major currencies. And the example we will take is of the issues which face banks in the Eurozone.

The euro system

In common with other major central banks, the ECB and its network of national central banks, together the euro system, have accumulated government and other bonds through quantitative easing. The extent to which it has boosted the size of the euro system balance sheet and subsequently declined is shown in the chart below.

Having hit a high point of €8,828 billion fifteen months ago, the ECB’s and national central banks’ combined assets have declined to €7,167 billion. Most of the increase from the last financial crisis to the peak had been through what the ECB calls asset purchase programmes, but otherwise known to us as quantitative easing. The decline in total assets has been achieved by allowing short-term assets to mature and for the funds to be not reinvested, leading to the liabilities to commercial banks being reduced.

Nevertheless, on the remaining securities holdings totalling €4,865 billion currently, there are significant losses on a mark-to-market basis. Assuming an average maturity of five years, and an average rise in yield from 0% to 3.2% on Eurozone government bonds, over the last year the losses in the euro system amount to about €700 billion. This is nearly six times the combined euro system’s equity. The valuation problem is concealed by euro system accounting, which values bonds on a straight line basis between purchase price and final redemption value.

To assume that this is not a problem because the ECB can always print euros is complacent. The only hope for the Eurosystem is for bond yields to decline, and therefore values to rise restoring balance sheet integrity. But for now, yields are rising, and it is becoming clear that they will continue to rise. At some stage, the assumption that inflation will return to target and that interest rates and bond yields will decline will be abandoned, and the recapitalisation of the entire euro system will then have to be contemplated.

It will not be easy. Undoubtedly, legislation at a national level in multiple jurisdictions will be required. It is one thing for the ECB to railroad its inflationary policies through despite protests from politicians in Germany and elsewhere, but begging for equity capital puts the ECB on the back foot. Questions are bound to be raised in political circles about monetary policy failures, and why the TARGET2 imbalances exist. The whole recapitalisation process could descend into a very public dispute, particularly since national central banks may need capital injections as well before they can recapitalise the ECB in proportion to their shareholder keys.

Yet, Europeans rely upon the euro system to backstop the entire commercial banking network, whose global systemically important banks (GSIBs) are even more leveraged than the American banks. Furthermore, there are bound to be hidden Eurozone equivalents of Silicon Valley Bank, whose balance sheets have been undermined to the point of insolvency by the unexpected rise in interest rates and the collapse in bond values. The €10 trillion repo market also faces collapsing collateral values. Eurozone GSIBs have heavy exposure to derivative counterparty risks. Yet, the euro system itself is bankrupt, having paid top euros for bonds which have been sinking faster than a tropical sun at twilight. 

It is in the nature of a banking crisis that several factors come together in an unexpected perfect storm. We will all be wise after the event. But for now, we can only observe the disparate strands likely to come together and destroy the euro system, its commercial banks, and possibly the euro itself.

That is, if the US banking system doesn’t collapse first.

Will You Comply? (Covid 2.0)

  The first time was a test run. It worked beautifully with the media under control and the medical apparatus well financed for cooperating with the scam. 

  A completely manufactured crisis with an artificial virus, probably made in China but we'll never know for sure since the responsibilities are so widely shared. Hospitals being paid extra for sick people and encouraged to test dying patients whatever the cause to insure a high level of virus casualties which raised the numbers but could not be corroborated later with excess deaths in most countries.

  An no reckoning whatsoever later on. The policy lies, remember the 2 weeks to flatten the curve? The completely useless masks which did not prevent a single virus transmission? The high number of young athletes falling in front of cameras? The dislocation of countless lives and careers thanks to meaningless lockdowns?

  So sure enough, now is the time to make the emergency permanent! Health passports, contact tracing, social credit, CBDC, all these bad ideas are on the agenda. Not all will succeed. Sometimes people will resist but by and large we now know what's coming.

  So will you comply? Most people will. In any case, they don't really understand or care much about money, data, virus and other such complex information which require years of study to grasp even at a beginners level. They don't even understand the relation between cause and consequences. So who can blame them? Hopefully enough people will say NO but I am not very optimistic. History shows that periods like ours bring much hardship before the sun rises again. Let's hope the night is not too long!

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

There are new mask mandates in Southern California and talk of them coming back in various spots around the country, including a university in Atlanta. Contact tracing too is back, even though that never works for respiratory viruses. Rumors are swirling about new lockdowns for some new variant that is being touted by the World Health Organization (WHO). The predictable CNN is interviewing Pfizer employees about the glories of their new booster just rubber-stamped by the FDA.

And Fauci is out and about defending lockdowns and suggesting that we could have more.

The first time is tragedy, said Karl Marx, and the second time is farce.

We might be headed into the realm of farce, as masks that everyone knows don’t work are mandated and shots that everyone knows don’t work to stop the spread are widely encouraged. Mandates for them could easily be next. In fact, not one government policy from the entire pandemic period achieved anything but destruction.

Now we see the problem with the failure to have a real reckoning over the COVID response. It means that the whole panoply of failed and brutal policies could come back again.

As NPR reminds us on a daily basis, we now “have the tools” necessary to combat another pandemic or even the spread of seasonal viruses—and never mind that none of these tools actually work and all of them demoralize the population.

At the same time, the hashtag #donotcomply is trending. Many people swear that they will not go along this time. Maybe that’s right but I’m not prepared to predict mass refusal. There were many times during the last lockdowns and masking that I refused to comply but that can create awkward situations.

The store owner and I agreed that masks are dumb and we both went without. The next time I went in, he told me to put one on. I asked why. He said that passersby were looking through the windows and noticing we were not wearing masks and reported the store to the local government. The health inspectors arrived demanding answers.

That was enough to convince him. He was not going to risk the well-being of his shop in what he considered to be a trivial issue of mask compliance. He would not die on this hill.

I totally get it. I respect very much people who swear that they will not go along but I also understand those who comply. It’s a tragedy but not everyone wants to be a martyr for the cause of freedom. To be sure, if no one went along, all the lockdown regulations would effectively be null and void. There aren’t enough enforcers to bring about compliance if the whole population doesn’t go along.

But that’s not usually how it works. Typically in these cases, the government can always count on a portion of the population to do the work of coercion for them. That’s why it is called totalitarianism: the whole of society involves itself in its own self-destruction. We saw it under China’s Cultural Revolution where the Red Guard did most of the killing, and we saw it in the COVID lockdowns when average people felt moved to rat out their fellow citizens to the health police.

All of this takes me back to the writings of Étienne de la Boétie and his important essay “The Politics of Obedience.”

The author is a French aristocrat and the year of writing was 1552.

It’s as powerful then as it is now.

“I should like merely to understand,” he wrote, “how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they.”

Perhaps it is cowardice? Boétie answers:

“If a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? ... When a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth. ... What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough.”

Instead, he counsels mass non-compliance or civil disobedience. He says that even the most powerful government is rendered powerless by the mass refusal of the public to go along. If that happens, government simply ceases to have authority and power. All the guns and weaponry are rendered useless. The state lives off the people’s willingness to be bullied. If they stop being willing, the state simply falls.

“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”

That’s a powerful and brilliant vision, one that has inspired me for a very long time. In addition, the 20th century saw some powerful implementations, particularly those led by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

But how plausible is it that something like this can happen in our time? Government does everything in its power to make sure that it does not happen. The most important tool is propaganda. That can take many forms. It could be preachers yelling about eternal damnation of the refuseniks but it could also be fancy Pfizer executives calmly explaining how a new potion will protect the population against a pathogen. In both cases, the government is able to tap into the mortal fears of the public.

And to make sure that only one message gets out, censorship becomes an imperative.

This is why the CDC and NIH, along with the DHS and the CIA, involved themselves so heavily in social media and search engines to make sure that the public did not hear any voices of dissent. This way people will be discouraged from resisting.

Also important is restricting gatherings.

This was the real point of “social distancing” restrictions, not to protect you against viruses but rather to stop people from meeting others who were similarly incredulous. The goal was to isolate people so that they become demoralized and feel like crazy people.

A major problem for all of the non-compliers this time is that we are still very much in the minority. This is partly owing to the propaganda. Google and YouTube, which make up 90 percent of both search and video traffic, are heavily censored by government. YouTube has even stated that it will not allow any content that contradicts the World Health Organization, which is the entity that started all this lockdown stuff to begin with.

I commend everyone who swears they will not go along. But every circumstance is different.

It is not always so easy to refuse. Everyone has jobs and income needs. People also seek social approval and thus cave when it matters most. Like Étienne de la Boétie,

I long for a time of mass non-compliance. We are closer to that point now that we were three and a half years ago but I seriously doubt we are there just yet.

Wake Up!

  But don't hold your breath, most people will not wake up.

  You do not even need to. Just as in The Matrix, you take the blue pill and wake up in a world which is comfortably fake. No reckoning, no dissonance, never confront your errors. All is fine. Just move on to the next subject... The flu now is called "Covid". Masks and lock downs will be back as needed. No mistakes were made. This is the new normal. 

  If you do not believe that, then read on...

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

The last three and a half years have been times of enormous upheaval.

It has affected politics, economics, culture, media and technology. It’s not just about the spreading of economic, cultural and demographic decay. Millions and billions of lives have been wrecked, to be sure, but there is also a big impact on the way we see the world around us.

What we once trusted, we now doubt and even disbelieve as a matter of new habit. The simple categories of understanding that we once deployed to make sense of the world have been tested, challenged and even overthrown. Old forms of ideological commitments have opened their way to new.

This particularly pertains to intellectuals. Or should in any case.

If you have not shifted your thinking in some respect over these years, you are either a prophet, asleep or in denial.

The way social media works today, influencers are reluctant to admit it lest risk their followings built out of a prior cultural landscape. This is really too bad.

There is nothing wrong with changing, adapting, migrating and calling out truth even if that contradicts what you once said or how you used to believe.

There is no need to change your principles or ideals. What should change in light of evidence is your evaluation of the problems and threats, your outlook on the relative priorities of focus, your perceptions of the functionality of institutional structures, your awareness of issues and concerns about which you had limited prior knowledge, your political and cultural allegiances and so on.

These days, this intellectual migration seems mainly to have affected the left. Nearly daily I find myself having the same conversations with people in person, on the phone or online. It is from an Obama voter and someone with traditionally “liberal” allegiances.

The COVID era utterly shocked them in what they discovered about their own tribe. They aren’t liberal at all.

They supported universal quarantine, forced face coverings and then mandatory jabs pushed by a tax-funded corporate monopoly. Concerns about human rights, civil liberties and the common good suddenly evaporated. Then of course they turned to the most blunt instrument of all: censorship.

The trauma felt by principled people who imagined themselves to be “on the left” is palpable.

But the same is true of people “on the right” who were aghast to observe that it was Trump and his administration that greenlighted lockdowns, spent many trillions forcing COVID compliance and then threw public monies at Big Pharma to rush a shot by bypassing all standards of necessity, safety and effectiveness.

The promise to “make America great again” ended in wreckage coast-to-coast. For Trump partisans, this realization that it all happened under their hero is hard to take, a triangulating rope-a-dope.

Even more strangely, it was the “never Trumpers” on the right who most strongly supported lockdowns, masking and shot mandates.

The libertarians are another story entirely, one that nearly surpasses understanding. Among the higher echelons of this faction in academia and think tanks, the silence from the start and even years later was truly deafening.

Instead of standing up to totalitarianism, as the whole of the intellectual tradition had prepared them to do, they deployed their clever heuristics to justify outrages against core freedoms, even the freedom to associate.

So yes, observing one’s own tribe collapse into craven careerism and coercion is disorienting. But the problem goes even deeper. The most striking alliance of our time has been to observe the lockstep of the elites in government, media, tech and academia.

The reality blows apart the traditional binary of public vs. private that has dominated ideological discussion for centuries.

This binary is nicely represented by the sculpture in front of the Federal Trade Commission.

It shows a man holding back a horse. It’s man vs. beast, completely different species and totally different interests, one demanding to move forward and the other holding it back.

The point of the sculpture is to celebrate the role of government (man) in controlling trade (industry). The contrary position would condemn government for controlling industry.

But what if the sculpture is pure fantasy even at its very structure?

In reality, the horse is either carrying the man or pulling a cart that carries the man. Are they cooperating together in a partnership that is allied against consumers, stockholders, small businesses, the working classes and people more generally?

That realization — the very essence of what was revealed to us in the course of the COVID response — utterly shatters core presumptions behind the dominant ideologies of our times and going far back in time.

That realization requires a recalibration from honest thinkers.

I had to reevaluate my own cherished beliefs about markets and politics, which was painful in many ways. But it was necessary.

Below, I take you on that journey — and show you why we must adjust our thinking to adapt to new realities. Read on.

The Scales Fell From My Eyes

I was going through an archive of writings from the 2010s in search of some insight or possibly something to reprint. I found many hundreds of articles. None of them jumped out at me as necessarily wrong but I found myself rather bored with their superficiality. Yes, they are entertaining and fascinating in their way but what precisely did they reveal?

There was no consumer product unworthy of rhapsodic celebration, no pop tune or movie that didn’t reinforce my biases, no new technology or company undeserving of my highest praise, no trend in the land that was contrary to my conception of progress all around us.

It’s exceedingly difficult to recreate an older state of mind but let me try. I saw myself as a composer of hymns to material progress all around us, a cheerleader of the glories of all market forces. I lived with this public-private binary.

All that was good in the world came from the private sector and all that was evil came from the public sector. That easily became for me a simplistic, good vs. evil conception of the great struggle, and also blinded me to the ways that these two ideal types play together in real life.

Armed with this ideological weaponry, I was ready to take on the world.

And so Big Tech came in for massive celebration from me, even to the point that I completely ignored warnings of capture and surveillance. I had a model in mind — migration to the digital realm was emancipatory while attachment to the physical world was mired in stagnation — and nothing could shake me from it.

I had also implicitly adopted an “end-of-history” style of triumphalist thinking that befits the generation that saw freedom win the great Cold War struggle.

And so the final victory of liberty was always at hand, at least in my fevered imagination.

This is why the lockdowns came as such a shock to me. It flew in the face of the linear structure of historical narrative that I had constructed for myself in order to make sense of the world.

This is why the best comparison of the COVID years might be to the Great War, the global calamity that was simply not supposed to happen based on the wild optimism cultivated during the Gilded and Victorian epochs of decades earlier.

The very foundations of peace and progress had gradually eroded, and prepared the way for terrible war, but that generation of observers did not see it happening simply because they were not looking for it.

To be sure, and uniquely so far as I can tell, I had been writing about the prospect of pandemic lockdowns for the previous 15 years. I read their research, knew of their plans and followed their germ games. I drummed up awareness and called for hard limits on what the state could do during a pandemic.

At the same time, I had become accustomed to treating the academic and intellectual worlds as something external to the social order. In other words, I never once believed that these cockamamie ideas would ever leak into our own lived realities.

Like so many others, I had come to regard intellectual discussion and debate as a challenging and most enjoyable parlor game that had little impact on the world. I knew for sure that there were crazy people extant who dreamed of universal human separation and the conquering of the microbial planet by force.

But I had presumed that the structures of society and the trajectory of history embedded too much intelligence to actually implement such delusions. The foundations of civilization were too strong to be eroded by gibberish, or so I had believed.

What I had overlooked were several factors.

• First, I didn’t understand the extent of the rise, independence and power of the administrative state and the impossibility of controlling its authority through elective representatives. I simply did not anticipate the fullness of its reach.

• Second, I had not understood the extent to which private industry had developed a full working relationship with the structures of power in its own industrial interests.

• Third, I had overlooked the way consolidation and cooperation had developed between pharmaceutical companies, public health, digital enterprises and media organs.

• Fourth, I had failed to appreciate the tendency of the public mind to drop knowledge accumulated from past wisdom. For example, who would have believed that people would forget what they once knew, even from thousands of years of experience, about exposure and natural immunity?

• Fifth, I did not anticipate the extent to which high-end professionals would give up all principles and curry favor with the new policy priorities of the government/media/tech/industry hegemon. Who knew that nothing about the main themes of patriotic songs and movies would have stuck when it most mattered?

• Sixth, and this is perhaps my greatest intellectual failing, I had not seen how rigid class structures would feed conflicting interests between the professional class of laptop workers and the working classes who still need the physical world to accomplish their goals.

On March 16, 2020, the laptop class conspired in a forced digitalization of the world in the name of pathogenic control, and this came at the expense of some two-thirds of the population who depended on physical interactions for their livelihood and psychological well-being.

This aspect of class conflict — which I had always chalked up to be a Marxian delusion — became the defining feature of the whole of our political lives. Instead, the lack of empathy from the professional class was evident everywhere, from academic opinion to media reporting. It was a society of serfs and lords.

For those who are researchers, writers, academics or just curious people who want to understand the world better — even improve it — to have one’s intellectual operating system so profoundly disturbed is an occasion of profound disorientation. It is also a time to embrace the adventure, recalibrate and set about correcting and finding a new path.

When your ideological system and political allegiances fail to provide the explanatory power we are seeking, it is time to improve them or give them up entirely.

Not everyone is up to the task. Indeed, this is a major reason why so many want to forget about the past three and a half years. They would rather close their eyes to the new realities and default back to their intellectual comfort zones.

For any writer or thinker of integrity, this should not be an option. As painful as it might be, it is best just to admit where we went wrong and set out to discover a better path. This is why so many of us have adopted a paradigm called the “COVID test.” Few pass. Most fail. They failed in shockingly public and inexcusable ways: left, right and libertarian.

The influencers who flopped so badly in these years and have yet to own up to it deserve neither attention nor respect. Their attempt to pretend they were never wrong and then move on as if nothing much has happened is embarrassing and disreputable.

But those who come to terms with the wreckage all around us and seek to understand its causes and the way forward deserve a listen and appreciation. For it is these people who are doing their best to save the world from another round of disaster.

As for the rest, they are taking up air space and should, in a just world, be tutoring the children with learning losses and delivering meals to the vaccine-injured.

MacGregor Tells Tucker Why The Ukraine War Must End Now

 If you want to understand what's going on in Ukraine, this is the most important interview you can watch. A great journalist interviewing an insightful strategist.

 The interview is resumed below. To listen to the full one hour video (well worth it), follow the link to X / Twitter in the Zero Hedge article here:

"If We Press This With Russia, It Will Reach Us Here In The US" - Col. MacGregor Tells Tucker Why The Ukraine War Must End Now

Tucker Carlson on Monday published an interview with former Trump administration official Col. Douglas Macgregor (Ret.), who explained why the war in Ukraine has put the United States on the brink of a 'catastrophic war that could easily destroy us.'

Carlson begins with a bold statement: "pretty much everything that NBC and The NYTimes have told you about the war in Ukraine is a lie."

"'The Russian army is incompetent' - they claim. 'Ukraine is a Democracy!' 'Vladimir Putin is Hitler and he's trying to take over the world!' 'Thankfully, the Ukrainians are winning.'

"Every claim is false, the last one especially," said Carlson, adding "the Ukrainian army is not winning - in fact, it's losing badly. Ukraine is being destroyed. Its population is being slaughtered."

"Most American know nothing about Ukraine," Macgregor continued, adding that "if they knew anything about the history of Eastern Europe, they would all say 'get out!'... because the wars and the blood and the hatred that's been fought over for centuries is something we can't sort out."

Macgregor's comments grow more ominous in their tone as the discussion continues.

He notes that President Biden has enabled 'combat pay' which implies there are American forces on the ground in Ukraine.

"It would be a mistake to think that the Russian forces do not know where they are," the retired colonel explains, pointing out that the Russians are sending a message with recent precision missile strikes near the borders of Poland and Moldova:

"if you think you can hide from us, if you come in here, if you cross these borders, we will annihilate you." 

We need to come to terms with these realities because we can't defeat it," he remarked reflecting on the fact that people have called him 'unpatriotic' for his comments.

He summed the situation in Ukraine up rather succinctly:

"if we press this war with Russia in Central East Europe, it will reach us here in the United States."

According to Macgregor, "The smartest thing we can do is end this war now," adding "The Russians will never tolerate NATO forces on Ukrainian soil."

"Ukrainian forces are in piecemeal fashion, surrendering to the Russians, not because they don't want to fight; it's because they can't fight anymore, they have so many wounded they can't evacuate them ...  we're going to see this army that we have spent so heavily on, melt away."

When it comes to the equipment being used to fight, MacGregor said that "a lot of the equipment we sent over there is quite frankly, obsolete... its very old, it's not new."

"Integrated air defenses will knock virtually everything that flies out of the sky," he said, adding "We will then fall back on a nuclear deterrent - a tactical nuclear weapon that says 'if you keep advancing, we'll have to use a nuclear weapon.' We don't want to go there, because the notion that there are so-called tactical nukes 'oh, it's just a little nuke, so that won't precipitate a nuclear war' - the use of any nuclear weapon is going to precipitate an escalation very rapidly," he said.

Carlson ends by asking Macgregor about the "leftist American man dressed as a woman" that is now the mouthpiece of Ukraine who claimed "Vlad Putin is a vampire bathing in the blood of Ukrainian children."

Macgregor asks "is that a transgender man?" To which Carlson replies, "yes, that's a guy with fake breasts."

Macgregor retorts: "well I think everything else is fake too... this war is a catastrophe... the people bathing blood are in Kiev and Washington."

 

 

 

America Is Now A Zombie State

  Forget about politics and look at what you see in American politics: Two geriatric men, one full of himself, the other senile competing to head a deeply corrupt system mostly on autopilot, focusing almost systematically on the wrong issues. 

  The last time we saw something similar was 30 years ago with Andropov and the decaying USSR. It didn't end well. Much earlier, the Roman Empire crumbled similarly with bread & circus... and a money worth nothing. 

  An inefficient army of mercenaries was fighting on the frontier to salvage a system rotting from the inside. In the end there was nothing left to save. First the institutions then the monuments turned to ruins. 

  The process then, took almost 200 years and this alone speaks volume about the greatness of Rome. The Greeks earlier had managed to do the same in a couple of generations. On the current trajectory, it seems that America is more closely following the tracks of the Greeks than the Romans. Then as now, no specific event except maybe the sack of Rome in 410 gave any indication that the Empire was dying. Charlemagne 300 years later still considered himself a Roman Emperor!

  Today, it is more and more difficult to deny that we have entered such a period of accelerated decline once again. Strauss and Howe in the Fourth Turning predicted accurately in the mid 1990s that this would be the case before 2020. Let's hope we avoid a full fledged collapse starting in 2024 but even if we do, it will be a close call!

Authored by Jacob Howland via UnHerd,

“Every nation gets the government it deserves,” wrote the philosopher Joseph de Maistre, and some are getting it good and hard right now. De Maistre’s moral interpretation of politics admits of exceptions, but the United States in 2023 is not one of them. A wasting tide of bad education and corruption is rotting the cultural and constitutional piers that, since the Civil War, have kept the US above the waters of chaos.

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

This drama of political decadence defies easy categorisation. Aristotle wrote that tragedy depicts people who are better, and comedy worse, than us spectators. Biden and Trump are certainly worse than those who voted them into office, but they are not remotely funny. Their antics are repellent and their goofiness unlovable. Observing them and the choral leaders that follow in their train — jerky puppets like Rudy Giuliani sweating hair-dye, or Anthony Fauci claiming to be science itself — Americans feel only shame and dread, without the cathartic release of laughter or tears.

These trapped emotions spring from the same source. They are visceral responses to the approaching death by senescence of the American experiment in ordered liberty. The problem goes well beyond presidential dementia. The US Senate (from the Latin senex, “old”) looks more like the waiting room of a geriatric neurologist than a council of wise elders. There’s Mitch McConnell, prone to falls and freeze-ups; wheelchair-bound and confused Dianne Feinstein; and John Fetterman, who at only 53 is less fit for public service than any other member of that formerly august body. It’s as if C-SPAN, a network that televises congressional hearings, decided instead to air absurdist, post-apocalyptic horror films.

The zombification of the Capitol — not to mention our city streets, which have become permanent encampments of the dazed and disturbed — is merely a symptom of the underlying disease. Like all institutions, politics falls apart without regular infusions of constructive energy. A modern democracy is healthy only if its major parties grow organically from their voters, representing their interests by habit and inclination even more than conscious effort.

But the grassroots politics Tocqueville admired when he visited the US in the 1830s gave way long ago to the top-down astroturfing of technocratic managerialism. Our governing elites represent no one but themselves and their cronies, and they don’t welcome shocks to the system. Insurgent candidates such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose public elevation of the concerns of many Americans aims to revitalise national politics, are censored and met with active resistance, even by their own parties.

It’s not just in politics that the wellsprings of individual and social vitality have dried up. Americans are marrying less and later, and having too few children, to reproduce themselves and the families that nurtured them. What is more, our public schools have largely ceased to transmit the accumulated knowledge and civilisational wisdom of the past to the children we do have. A taste for historical repudiation has taken hold across the culture, leading curators to “contextualise” art, city governments to take down statues, colleges to rename buildings, and publishers to censor or rewrite books. But creativity withers when it ceases to be nourished by the oxygenated blood of the tradition. Little wonder that Hollywood increasingly cannibalises its legacy by pouring old films into new plastic scripts.

Technology has exacerbated our national enervation. We have become charging-stations for our smartphones, which drain psychic energy with insistent distractions and overloads of information-babble. Video calls and work-from-home limit in-person interactions with actual existing individuals, who would otherwise be together for most of their weekly waking hours. Targeted advertising, fine-tuned algorithms, and politically stratified social media sharply decrease our exposure to new ideas. We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.

AI language-learning models offer a cautionary parable of these larger cultural developments. Programs such as ChatGPT, whose writing remains formulaic and prone to errors, learn by sifting through a sea of digitalised text, a growing share of which consists of AI-generated content. The predictable result of this feedback loop is the kind of levelling we’ve seen across our institutions. Like newspapers that drink their own ink — and which ones don’t, these days? — their product can only get worse.

Cultural exhaustion, social withdrawal, and the general enfeeblement of life forces are the practical expression of a will to nothing. There is a name for this spiritual and intellectual condition, and it is nihilism. Nihilism is demonic to the extent that the will to nothing is still a will, a life force. That it is only a negative one is by no means reassuring, because it is easier and more economical to tear down than to build up. Destruction is dramatic and accomplishes the illusion of vitality with relatively little energy. And who in this apocalyptic time, including the nihilist, doesn’t want to feel even a little alive?

 

Central Banks Aren’t Ready to Feel the Impact of Years of Poor Decision Making

  The analogy between waist line and Central Banks is interesting although the consequences will be strikingly different. Inflating money away has always been the demise of Empires in History. Think Denarius, the Roman coin, but with no silver whatsoever inside! The Euro and Dollar won't escape this fate. It is technically impossible. But Central Banks will delay, burn more furniture in the castle until the rooms are bare. A look at Union Square in San Francisco these days, a city which used to be one of the most magnificent and nice to live in America is a snapshot of what is in store for the rest of us.

Central Banks Aren’t Ready to Feel the Impact of Years of Poor Decision Making

Since 1975 worldwide obesity has nearly tripled and it is now one of the leading causes of death. Despite this, rarely does someone have ‘obesity’ recorded as the cause of death on their death certificate. Instead, it might read ‘complications from Type 2 Diabetes’ or ‘cardiovascular disease’: conditions that obesity has led to. 

The rise in obesity is thanks to changing diets and the ready availability of ultra processed foods, as well as changing lifestyles. Despite knowing such diets and lifestyle changes can be deadly, people still consume such foodstuffs and choose not to exercise because the negative impact of doing so is not immediate. 

In fact, the immediate feedback one gets from living an unhealthy lifestyle is very often positive. Your taste buds signal to your brain that the Snickers bar is really good, or choosing to watch your favourite show rather than go for a run gives you pleasure faster than going for a run does.

 

To see the positive results of a healthy lifestyle is one that takes time. To see the negative results of an unhealthy lifestyle is also one that takes time. It’s not like you eat some deep fried chicken and wham! You’re struck down by a heart attack. No, that takes years of solid, poor choices. 

It’s only when you find yourself unable to run around with your grandkids or walking around with an oxygen canister do you wish you’d taken better, incremental decisions that would have led to a different outcome. It is only after years of poor decisions that you really feel the true impact. 

Central Banks and the Expanding Waistline

This is basically how it works for central banks. The economy starts to look a bit shaky, or governments make promises they can’t afford or ‘peacekeeping’ missions are declared and the likes of the FOMC decide that rather than save and budget within their means,  a big hit of ultra processed credit is what’s needed to help things along. 

Of course, they do this and everything starts to feel pretty good. Employment rates pick up, consumer spending rallies, startups are turning into unicorns, the S&P 500 is smashing through records and the housing market is booming. Everyone loves this approach to money that costs them very little and as a result they get addicted to it. 

The problem is the economy no longer knows how to function and stay energised without it. None of the economic policies that seemingly 'helped' the economy keep going have added to its overall long-term health. 

Central banks, recognizing that they have created an inflationary environment on purpose, willing the waistband of the economy to expand so that everyone ‘feels good’, then tries to tell everyone that these health issues are just ‘transitory’. But the truth is the expanding waistband is a fraud. Inflation is theft of wealth from the economy’s future. 

What’s the Excuse Now?

Pretty soon food prices become difficult to manage, people can’t afford to heat their homes, the cost of materials climb and people are struggling to make ends meet.

But, in the same way, we justify our weight to ourselves (it’s in my genes, I had a big meal last night), and the central bankers try to justify inflation to us. And they strip out the key components to measure inflation as if they can be easily ignored - we’re talking about food and energy prices here, i.e. two of the biggest costs to the household budget. 

Only in the last year have the likes of FOMC started to realise there is a big cost to all of this unhealthy economic policy of the last fifteen plus years. They tried to make amends for this by coming down hard on interest rates, and getting the economy to work harder to shift some of this inflation. 

But actually, how much has changed? ‘Core’ inflation is coming down ever so slightly- but that’s easy to do when food and energy prices aren’t included and costs for services continue to rise faster than anyone would like. As ZeroHedge pointed out, the US unemployment rate is exactly where it was when the FOMC started hiking rates, so is the S&P 500.

Very little has improved. All that seems to have been achieved is a near-collapse of the US banking system (more on that shortly) and unsustainable debt levels. 

 “...arguably the most significant consequence of this relentless creep higher in rates is that the annual payment on US Federal debt is about to hit $1 trillion, surpassing how much the US pays every year on defence!” ZeroHedge. 

The only tool left: words

Yesterday Jay Powell announced that the Federal Reserve was raising rates to a 22-year high of a target range of between 5.25 and 5.5 per cent. Markets are assuming that this is the final rate rise this cycle. Bless him, Powell did try in the press conference to wag his finger at the economy and declare that if it didn’t pipe down he’d be back in there to raise rates some more, but no one was really listening. 

“We have to be ready to follow the data…And given how far we’ve come, we can afford to be a little patient as well as resolute as we let this unfold.”

Well, that’s a relief that the FOMC are now looking at the data to guide the way. Interestingly enough Christine Lagarde used near-exact the same phrasing earlier today during the ECB press conference. 

We’re not convinced that they hope data will drive the way as so far it seems to us that most central bankers now try to influence inflation expectations rather than inflation itself. Jay Powell uses his press conferences and FOMC reports as an inflation-reduction tool more than they seem to use monetary policy tools. 

As a result, the market is mostly playing along, now pricing this to be the last FOMC hike in the current cycle of hikes with rates being cut as early as 2024.

A slow-down in hikes and ultimately a fall in official rates is good for gold, a non-interest bearing asset, as it reduces the opportunity cost of holding it. 

But, this isn’t mainstream financial media here. Nothing is ever as simple as “this metric went one way, so this commodity will go that way”. This also isn't’ the last 15 years where the world has become accustomed to low inflation rates and near-zero interest rates. 

As investors read the headlines that the Fed is likely to start cutting rates as early as 2024, there will be two expectations - one is that they will gradually cut back down to zero, the other is that inflation really was merely transitory. In other words, the Fed was right all along. 

Spoiler alert - neither of these things are correct. But what these assumptions do show is how addicted the market has come to low rates and the assumption that central banks really are the puppet master to the economy’s marionette. 

The truth of the matter is that inflation really isn’t going anywhere. Damage has been wreaked on the health of the economy. The drip, drip, drip of cheap credit and overheating has left us with a situation that sees negative real rates at best and financial turmoil at worst. 

Nothing, nothing repeat nothing that central banks around the world are doing should be giving anyone any confidence that they are on the right track to reducing our dependence on cheap credit. Therefore no one should have any expectations that real value will be returned to their currencies and savings in the mid to long-term future. 

Interest rates might be up again, but like an expensive diet plan, the promises are better than the results. 

Furthermore: high interest payments are clearly not just affecting US Fed’s annual payments. Remember that US banking crisis that arrived with a bang at the beginning of the year? Oddly enough it hasn’t gone away, although you wouldn’t think it looking at the news.

Earlier this week US regional banks PacWest and Bank of California agreed to a merger. More deals between the 4,000 banks are expected, as increasing numbers struggle under unsustainable deposit outflows. One has to ask why this wasn’t bigger news.

Granted the merger (unlike others this year) didn’t happen under regulator supervision, but it is clearly a sign that the embers of a banking crisis continue to burn.

The BRICS Won't Kill The Dollar, US Policy Will

  The fall of the dollar will not be an event but a protracted process. 

  It could be long as the Author outlines below, or much more sudden if there is a strategic incident with China or Russia.

  The real tragedy is that we are now at the mercy of events nobody controls...

Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via GoldSwitzerland.com,

Below we separate the hype from the sad reality of the USD in the face of a new “BRICS currency.”

Net conclusion: The real death of the USD will be domestic not foreign.

The Bell Has Been Tolling for Years

When it comes to the “bell tolling for fiat,” we can all hear its loud chimes, but that bell has been tolling since 1971 (or frankly 1968), when the US leadership decoupled the world reserve currency from its golden chaperone.

Like any teenager throwing a house party, the lack of a parental chaperone leads to lots of crazy events and lots of broken furniture.

The same is true of post-71 politicians and central bankers suddenly freed of a gold-backed chaperone and thus suddenly loaded with drunken power to mouse-click currencies and expand deficits.

And since then, all kinds of things have been breaking, from banks to bonds to currencies.

And now, with all the extreme hype (and, yes, some genuine reality) behind the headlines of a revolutionary gold-backed BRICS trade currency, many are making sensational claims that the World Reserve Currency (i.e., USD) is nearing its end and that fiat money from DC to Tokyo is effectively toast.

Hmmm…

Don’t Bury the Dollar Just Yet

Before we start tossing red roses over the shallow grave of an admittedly grotesque US Greenback in general, or fiat fantasy money in general, let’s all take a deep breath.

That is, let’s re-think through this inevitable funeral with a bit more, well, realism, mathematics and even geopolitical common sense before we turn our backs on the USD, and this is coming from an author who has never thought highly of that Dollar, be it fiat, politicized and now weaponized.

So, let’s take a deep breath and engage open, informed and critical minds when it comes to debating many of the still open, un-known and critical issues surrounding the so-called “game changer” event when the BRICS+ nations convene this August in S. Africa.

Needed Context for the “BRICS New Currency” Debate

As made clear literally from Day 1 of the Western sanctions against Putin, the West may have been aiming for Putin’s (or the Ruble’s) chest, but it then shot itself in the foot.

After decades of DC exporting USD inflation from Argentina to Moscow, a large swath of the developing countries of the world who owe greater than $14T in USD-denominated debt were already reeling under the pain of rate-hike gyrations which made their own debt and currency markets flip and flop like a dying fish on the dock.

Needless to say, a 500-basis-point spike in the cost of that debt under Powell didn’t help. In fact, it did little good (or goodwill) for USD friends and enemies alike, from the gilt markets in London to the fruit markets in Santiago.

Adding insult to injury, DC coupled this strong-Dollar policy with a now weaponized-Dollar policy in which a nuclear and economic power like Russia had its FX reserves frozen and access to SDRs and SWIFT transactions blocked.

Like Napoleon at Moscow, this was going a step too far…

The net result was an obvious and immediate distrust of that once neutral world reserve currency, an outcome which economists like Robert Triffin warned our congress against in 1960, and even John Maynard Keyes warned the world against long before.

Heck, even Obama warned against such weaponization of a reserve currency as recently as 2015.

Thus, and as I (and many others) warned from Day 1 of the sanctions, the distrust for the USD unleashed by the sanctions in early 2022 was “a genie that can never go back in the bottle.”

Or more simply stated, the trend toward de-dollarization was now going to come at greater speed and with greater force.

This force, of course, is now being seen, as well as debated, under the highly symbolic as well as substantive example of the BRICS+ nations seeking to usher in a gold-backed trade currency to move openly away from the USD, a move which some maintain will soon de-throne the USD as a world reserve currency and send its value immediately to the ocean floor.

The Trend Away from the USD Is Clear, But It’s Pace Is Not

For me, the trajectory of this de-dollarization trend is fairly obvious; but the speed and knowable magnitude of these changes are where I take a more realistic (i.e., less sensational) stance.

But before I argue why, let’s agree on what we do know.

The BRICS New Currency Is Very Real

We know, for example, that Russian finance experts like Sergei Glasyev have real motives and sound reasons for planning a new (anti-Dollar) financial system which not only seeks a Eurasian Economic Union for cross boarder trade settlements backed by local currencies and commodities, but to which gold will likely be added as a “backer” to the same.

Glasyev has also made headlines with plans regarding the Moscow World Standard as a far more fair-playing and fair-priced gold exchange alternative to the Western LBMA exchange.

If we take his gold backing plans seriously, we must also take seriously the plan to expand such gold-backed trade currency plans into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which would make the final tally of BRICS+ nations “going gold” as high as 41 country codes.

This could ostensibly mean greater than 50% of the world’s population and GDP would be trading in a gold-backed settlement currency outside of the USD, and that, well, matters to both the demand and strength of that Dollar…

China’s Motives Are Also Anti-Dollar

China, moreover, has invested heavily in the Belt & Road Initiative (152 countries) as well as in massive infrastructure projects in Africa and South America, areas of the world that are all too familiar with America’s intentional (or at least cyclical) modus operandi of developing nations enjoying low US rates and cheaper Dollars to create local credit booms which later crash and burn into a local debt crisis whenever those US rates and Dollars rise.

China therefore has a vested interest in protecting its EM investments as well as EM export markets in a currency outside of a USD monopoly.

Meanwhile, as the US is making less and less friends with EM markets, Crown Princes, French Presidents and EU and UK bond markets, China has been busy brokering peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as building a literal bridge between the latter and Iraq while simultaneously making Yuan-trade deals with Argentina.

Other Reasons to Take the BRICS+ Currency Seriously

Tag on the fact that Brazil, China and Iran are trading outside the USD-denominated SWIFT payment system, and it seems fairly clear that much of the world is leaning toward what Zoltan Poszar described as a “commodity rather that debt-based trade settlement currency” for which Charles Gave (and the BRICS+ nations) see gold as an “essential element” to that global new trend.

Finally, with a strong Greenback making USD energy and other commodity prices painfully (if not fatally) too expensive for large swaths of the globe, it’s no secret to those same large swaths of the globe (including petrodollar nations…) that gold holds its value far better than a USD.

Given this fact, it’s easy to see why BRICS+ nations wish to settle trades in a gold-backed local currency in order to ease the pressure on commodity prices. This gives them the opportunity, as Luke Gromen reminds, to buy time to pay down their other USD-denominated debt obligations.

In addition to the foregoing arguments, the fact that the BRICS+ nations are cloning IMF and World Bank swing loan and “contingency reserve asset” infrastructure programs under their own Asian Monetary Fund and New Development Bank, it becomes more than clear that a new BRICS+ world, trade currency and institutionalized infrastructure is as real as the trend away from a monopolar hegemony of the USD.

In short, and to repeat: There are many, many reasons to both see and trust the obvious and current trend/trajectory away from the USD as warned over a year ago, all of which, no matter what the slope and degree, will be good, very good for gold (see below).

But here’s the rub: The speed, scope, efficiency and ramifications of this trend in general, and the “BRICS August Game Changer” in particular, are far too complex, fluid and unknown to make any immediate (or “sensational”) funeral plans for the USD today.

And here’s a few reasons as to why.

Why the BRICS New Currency Is No Immediate Threat to the USD

First, we have to ask the very preliminary question as to whether the August BRICS summit will even involve an actual announcement of a new, gold-backed trading currency.

So far, all we have to go on is a leak from a Russian embassy in Kenya, not an official communication from the Kremlin or CCP.

Meanwhile, India, a key BRICS member, has openly denied such a new trade currency as a fixed agenda item for this August.

But notwithstanding such media noise, we must also look a bit deeper into the mechanics, economics and politics of a sudden “game-changer” new currency.

The BRICS New Currency: Many Operational Questions Still Open

Mechanically speaking, for example, who will indeed be the issuing entity of this new currency?

The new BRICS Bank?

What will be the actual gold coverage ratio? 10% 15% 20%?

Will BRICS+ member nations/central banks need to deposit their physical gold in a central depository, or will they enjoy (most likely) the flexibility of pledging their domestically-held gold as an accounting-only-unit?

Cohesion Among the Distrusting?

As important, just how much trust and cohesion is there among the BRICS+ nations?

Sure, this collection of nations may trust gold more than they trust each other or the US (which is why such a gold-backed trade currency may work, as it can’t be “inflated away”), but if a BRICS member country wishes to redeem its gold from say, Russia, years down the road, can it realistically assume it will happen?

What if Russia (or any other trade partner) is in a nastier mood tomorrow than they are today?

Basic Math

In addition, there are certain economic/mathematical issues to consider.

We know, for example, that the collective BRICS+ gold reserve (as of Q1 2023) is just over 5452 tones, valued today at approximately $350B.

Enough, yes to stake a new currency.

But measured against a net global amount of $13T in total physical gold, are the BRICS+ gold reserves enough to make a sizable dent (even at a partial coverage ratio) to tilt the world away from the USD overnight, when the USA, at least officially, has much, much more gold than the BRICS+?

That said, we can’t deny that the actual gold stores in places like Russia and China are far, far higher than officially reported by the World Gold Council.

Additionally, the historically unprecedented rate of central bank gold stacking in 2022-23 seems to suggest that the enemies of the USD are indeed “loading their guns” for a reason.

Expecting, however, all of the BRICS+ members to maintain the discipline to continue to purchase and store more physical gold despite the political temptations to redeem the same for later or unexpected domestic spending needs may be a naive assumption in a real world of ever-shifting national behaviors.

Geopolitical Considerations & the BRICS New Currency

Speaking of such shifting behaviors, we also can’t ignore the various pro and con forces within a geopolitical backdrop wherein much of the world, whether it loves or hates the US, still needs its USDs and USTs.

China, for example, may be letting maturities run and even dumping the USTs it now owns at a fast pace (only years away from total UST liquidation), but for now, China needs to keep the USD from growing too weak to buy all the Chinese exports of those American products made, in well…China.

That said, if the trend is indeed a new world of currency wars, rather than currency cooperation, which is a more than fair assumption, then all such liberal economic cooperation/trade arguments fall to the floor.

Nevertheless, with over $30T worth of USDs held by non-US parties in the form of bonds, stocks, and checking accounts, the collective desire (common interest) to keep those USDs alive and at least relatively strong is a major counter-force to the notion that the world and USD are coming to a sudden change this August.

Furthermore, in such an uncertain world of competing currencies as well as national and individual self-interests, the trillions and trillions of off-shored USTs/USDs tangled up within the foreign as well as US banking and derivative markets is important.

Why?

Because any massive dislocation in risk asset (and even currency) markets emanating from South Africa or elsewhere, in August or much later, would more than likely (and ironically) cause a disruption in foreign markets so dramatic that we could easily see a flow into, rather than away from, USDs for the simple (and again ironic) reason that the mean and ugly Greenback is still the best/most-demanded horse in the global fiat slaughter house.

In other words, even if all the BRICS+ plans for a gold-backed trading currency go flawlessly, the time gap between the accepted rise of such a settlement currency and the open fall of the USD is likely to be long, wide and unknown enough to see the USD actually get stronger rather than weaker before we experience any final fall in the USD as a global reserve currency.

The USD: Supremacy (Still) vs. Hegemony (Gone)

So, no, I don’t think that the USD will fall entirely from grace or even supremacy in August of 2023, even if the trend away from its prior hegemony is becoming increasingly undeniable.

It will take more than sensational BRICS headlines to make such a rapid change, but yes, and as the Sam Cooke song says, “change is gonna come.”

My only point is that for now, and for all the reasons cited above, the trajectory and speed of those changes are likely not as sensational as the trajectory and speed of the current headlines.

No Matter What: Gold Wins

The case for gold, of course, does not change just because the debate about the speed and scope of the new BRICS+ trade currency rages today.

No matter what, the very fact that such a gold-backed trade settlement unit will inevitably come to play will be an equally inevitable tailwind for global gold demand and hence global gold pricing in all currencies, including the USD.

The Dollar Will Die from Within, Not from Without

Furthermore, and despite all the hype as well as substance behind the BRICS headlines, I see the evolution of such a gold-backed trade currency as a reaction to, rather than attack upon, the USD, whose real and ultimate threat comes from within, rather than outside, its borders.

The world is losing trust in the USD because US policy makers killed it from within.

Ever since Nixon took the gold chaperone away, politicians and central bankers have been deficit spending like drunken high school seniors in a room filled with beer but absent of parental consent.

The entire world has long known what many Americans are finally seeing from inside their own walls, namely: The US will never, ever be able to put its fiscal house in order.

Uncle Sam is simply too far in debt and there’s simply no way out as it approaches a wall of open and obvious fiscal dominance in which fighting inflation will only (and again, ironically) cause more inflation.

Or stated simply, Uncle Sam can’t afford his own ever-increasing and entirely unpayable deficit spending habits without having to resort to trillions and trillions of more mouse-clicked Dollars to keep yields in check and IOUs from defaulting.

And that, far more than a BRICS new currency, is what will put the final rose on a fiat system (and Dollar) that is already openly but slowly dying—first slowly, then all at once.

But I don’t think that day will be August 22.

The Four Stages of the AI Learning Curve

Here is my latest AI article fully corrected by ChatGPT.

The Four Stages of the AI Learning Curve

"In the fast evolving world of AI, we are witnessing a transformative learning curve that encompasses four distinct stages. From simplistic Google-like queries to seamlessly integrated AI systems, this journey delves into the intriguing realm of human-machine collaboration, which will revolutionize our lives first and society as we know it soon after." (A skillful resume of my article, written by AI)

The key to the article is that instead of speculating on the AI itself and looking far ahead to conscious super-intelligent machines (There are already many such articles on the Internet.), it focus on the immediate human interface and the consequences over the next few years. For illustration purpose, I have posted both my take on the subject and the correction from AI. ChatGPT starts great with perfect and improved version of my text but then as the concepts become more complex and abstract, ends up with colorless generalities. so from very good to close to useless... and this in itself is part of the answer.   

 1 - The Google Stage

(AI version) "The Google Stage marks the initial foray into AI, where users pose simple questions and receive similarly straightforward responses, akin to using a search engine like Google. While single-answer questions pose no issue, the frustration arises when AI fails to address more complex queries, leading users to perceive it as a limitation. In reality, the key lies in crafting precise questions and providing contextual clarity. AI's understanding of human language demands meticulous interaction, as it lacks the ability to interpret non-verbal cues, unlike humans. Regrettably, many become entangled at this stage, erroneously attributing communication failures to AI's shortcomings rather than acknowledging their role in the exchange." (Here, I asked for a shorter version of the text below.)

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(My version) The Google stage is the first stepping stone to AI where you ask simple questions and get likewise simple answers, Google-like. If the question has only one answer, it is fine but most questions do not and we have seen that people get easily frustrated, interpreting the inaccuracies of the answer as a limitation of AI.

This is most often not the case but rather based on the fact that the question was not asked the right way or that the context was not properly defined. The fact that AI understands human language instead of computer language does not reduce the need for accuracy. People understand context and get non-verbal cues from their interlocutors. AI does not and the interaction therefore needs to be more precisely circumscribed to be productive. 

Unfortunately, this stage also tends to be the tar sands of AI where many people gets bogged down, not understanding and assessing the obstacle properly as they interpret wrongly an erroneous answer as a AI failure (the machine's fault) instead of a communication failure (their fault).  

2 - The Prompt Stage

(AI version) "At this stage, you become aware that you're interacting with a machine, and to achieve optimal results, you must learn how to interface effectively using prompts.

Prompts bear resemblance to programming, but with human language replacing traditional computer code like Python or Java. The key lies in formulating questions precisely, avoiding approximate or inaccurate language that might hinder the machine's performance.

A prompt typically comprises a meticulously crafted question, followed by all the necessary elements for generating the desired answer. For instance, to translate a text from English to Chinese, you would input the content of the text, followed by the translation request. Additionally, clear instructions on the purpose and style of a letter for example are crucial to avoid generic responses.

By following this process correctly, you unlock the true power of AI. The internet already boasts extensive lists of prompts, catering to a myriad of requests, with even more specific and intricate prompts on the horizon. Leveraging the vast database behind the AI interface, we witness the emergence of awe-inspiring answers, often combining several prompts to address complex questions.

At this juncture, the AI's ability to seamlessly integrate various elements of a question showcases its intelligence, a true measure of its capabilities. It is vital to recognize that AI's intelligence does not equate to consciousness. While lacking purpose or original thoughts, AI systems are remarkably proficient at solving intricate problems, often rivaling or surpassing human intelligence." (Here, I asked for a more accurate version.)

 - - -

(My version) At this stage, you realize that you are talking to a machine and that in order to get optimum answers, you need to learn how to interface with it by using prompts. 

Prompts are in fact quite similar to programming but using human language instead of a computer code such as Python or Java. The machine will simply perform much better if the question is formulated the right way instead of using approximate, inaccurate language which we naturally tend to do. 

More practically, a prompt is a question formulated in a very precise way, followed by all the elements necessary to answer the question. At the most simple level, to translate a text from English to Chinese, you will need to input the content of the text followed by the request. But there can also be several steps necessary to get the answer and these steps needs to be explained clearly. The purpose and style of a letter, for example, must also be defined to avoid a generic answer. 

Only by going through this process the right way can you start leveraging the power of AI. This is why, we can already find long lists of prompts on the internet to answer all kinds of requests as illustrated bellow.

Soon, the number of prompts will become much larger, more specific and far more complex to answer all kind of questions, optimizing the incredibly large database hiding behind the AI interface we are currently using. 

We are already starting to see all kind of complex questions where several prompts are combined together to generate truly amazing answers. (insert SIO example later)

It is at this stage that we can start being amazed by the true power of AI. The machine has to truly understand the purpose of what it is doing in order to combine the different elements of the question seamlessly and the fact that it actually can do this, is to my opinion the true measure of the intelligence of the system. 

Most people tend to conflate intelligence and consciousness. These AI systems are of course not conscious, in the sense that they do not have a purpose or have their own original thoughts, yet... But, as for intelligence, defined as the ability to solve a complex problem, they are now in many cases on par with human intelligence and sometimes already performing better. 

3 - The Personal Assistant Stage

(AI version) "This pivotal stage marks a groundbreaking revelation: mastering the art of efficient prompts unlocks a realm of fascinating and original answers from AI. Some are anticipated, while others surprise us entirely, opening new horizons of thought.

At this juncture, AI metamorphoses into an indispensable ally, akin to an ever-available, knowledgeable friend. Seeking a second opinion from AI becomes second nature, ensuring no stone is left unturned. Like how machines amplified our physical capabilities centuries ago, AI now expands our mental faculties, honing our focus on core matters.

Language barriers crumble as you effortlessly write in any dialect, while the addition of computer code elevates your abilities to create web pages and automate mundane tasks, lightening the burden of monotonous chores. The once-costly services of mobile applications become increasingly flexible and nearly free, prompting a choice between integrating AI into apps (likely) or building more customizable AI platforms (a better but time-consuming option).

The implications of this seamless merger between human and artificial intelligence remain enigmatic. The allure of AI becomes irresistible, bordering on addiction, and its indispensability grows ever clearer. Those resisting its allure will suffer a significant disadvantage, vanishing from the competitive landscape. Yet, a delicate balance must be struck, for overreliance on AI risks rendering individuals incapable of functioning independently.

In this juncture, trust and confidence take center stage. We must scrutinize those who build AI code and retain control, ensuring it genuinely serves our best interests. The handling of confidential information by AI demands trustworthiness, and the potential for leakage of original solutions warrants careful consideration. Addressing these issues is imperative before AI earns its role as a trusted personal assistant in our lives. " (Here, I asked for a very accurate version.)

- - -

(My version) Once you learn how to use prompts efficiently, you realize that by reformulating and submitting all kind of questions to AI, you will reliably get interesting and original answers. Some you already thought about, others you didn't.

At this stage, the AI slowly becomes indispensable. It becomes a reflex to always look for a second opinion, just in case you missed something. It is similar to having a friend, always available, always in a good mood who will answer all your questions however trivial and offer valuable insight on an almost infinite array of subjects. What the machine did to our muscles two centuries ago, the AI does to our brain: A seamless expansion to our thinking ability which allows us to focus on the core issues. 

You now can write in any language, add computer code to any task allowing you, for example, to design a Web page using the http protocol, automatize simple tasks such as answering e-mails and in many ways make your life much easier by getting rid of most boring and time consuming cores. The service that some mobile applications offered becomes more flexible and almost completely free. We will see if the mobile environment can adapt to this change by integrating AI in its applications (likely) or if people go directly to AI platforms to build more flexible solutions. (A better but more time consuming option)  

It is difficult to understand the implications of such a merger of human and artificial intelligence but it is likely to become very quickly addictive and indispensable. Those people who resist the tend will find themselves at such a disadvantage that their number, in business first, will quickly tumble and disappear. The risk is that with too many tasks becoming automatic, people will become dependent and unable to function without AI.   

A crucial issue at this stage will be trust and confidence. Who is building the AI code and who controls it? Is it really working in your best interest? Can you trust the AI with confidential information? Will original solutions be leaked as soon as they are generated? All these important issues must be answered before AI becomes a trusted personal assistant.

4 - The Integration Stage

(AI version) "As individuals seamlessly incorporate AI prompts into their daily routines, companies must also strive for comparable efficiency in their processes and operations. However, achieving this level of integration presents a formidable challenge. Unlike a simple add-on, AI represents a profound transformation, reshaping everything it touches—meetings, client interactions, and various activities—into streamlined, highly adaptable processes. The potential of AI appears limitless, leading to a substantial divide between AI-powered companies and those lagging behind.

Amidst this AI revolution, companies face the pressing need to establish AI policies, outlining its uses, goals, and limitations. Crafting such policies will prove arduous, as experience with AI is still developing, and mistakes are inevitable. The race to stay competitive drives companies to experiment with AI projects, all the while grappling with concerns over trade secrets and data protection. Striking a delicate balance between harnessing AI's benefits and controlling its potential risks will be a step-by-step process, learning from each misstep along the way."

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(My version) People using seamlessly hundreds of prompts a day will obviously become extremely efficient but they will likewise require a similar effectiveness from companies process and activities. This by definition will be a challenge of a higher order since AI will have to be integrated and inbeded in countless systems, similar in many way to moving sales and other activities from mortar to the internet..

The difficulty here is that AI is not a simple process that you add to existing ones but a thinking process which must come on top and completely transform the nature of what existed before. Meetings, client interface, almost every activity will be completely streamlined and made more flexible. The sky will literally be the limit and the gap between AI-powered companies and those that are not will quickly become very large. 

But this also means that companies will need to define the uses, the goals and the limits of AI, and therefore set up their AI policies, while experimenting with actual projects thanks to extreme pressure from competitors. 

We are already seeing the first premises of such a trend with companies being worried that trade secrets will leak to the AI and therefore to competitors and consequently wondering how the system can be controlled while keeping the benefits. The answer to this question is far from trivial and will have to be discovered step by step, one mistake at a time...

5 - The Social Stage (conclusion)

(AI version) "AI, with its dynamic and boundless capabilities, serves as a harbinger of a profound societal shift. As we explore its current transformative stages, we must recognize that the journey does not culminate here. Undeniably, more unfathomed phases lie ahead, reshaping our world in ways beyond our current comprehension.

While I refrain from delving into speculative subjects like the singularity, (I asked the AI not to talk about the singularity, not to say that I didn't want to talk about it. My mistake!)  the evolving landscape demands a forward-thinking approach. As AI continues to unfold, staying competitive necessitates keeping pace with the curve, remaining agile to adapt to the unforeseen. Embracing the unknown's potential risks while maintaining a cautious balance will be key in navigating this uncharted learning curve.

The horizon stretches before us, inviting new possibilities, and while we cannot predict with certainty what the future holds, it is vital to foster a culture of innovation and adaptability. As AI's impact reverberates across industries and human endeavors, we must embrace the journey with a spirit of exploration, curiosity, and ethical contemplation. Together, we embark on a transformation that will shape the course of humanity's future." (In this paragraph, I asked the AI to complete the article and it got carried away with generic junk. Which is exactly what good prompts are supposed to avoid!)

 - - -

(My version) AI being by definition a dynamic tool with unlimited potential, the transformation cannot stop there. Other phases we cannot fathom yet will come as the consequences of what we have just discussed to transform even further our society beyond what can be thought or understood now. 

To stay competitive in such an environment will require not being too far behind the curve while avoiding the risks of the unknown. Still, the learning curve will be extremely steep.

Here is the final advice from the AI:  (Mostly generalities but useful ones nevertheless.)

You're welcome! I'm glad I could assist you with the suggestions. It seems you have covered the key concepts and ideas related to the stages of AI learning, the significance of prompts, the integration of AI in companies, and the future implications. However, I'll mention a few aspects that you might want to consider while revising your article: (PS: If this is not understanding, then what is?)

1. Ethical Considerations: You briefly touched on trust and control in the context of AI policies, but it might be beneficial to delve deeper into the ethical implications of AI adoption. Topics like data privacy, bias, transparency, and accountability are crucial when discussing the widespread use of AI in various domains.

2. Impact on Jobs and Workforce: While you've highlighted the efficiency AI can bring to tasks, it's essential to address the potential impact on jobs and the workforce. The automation of certain jobs might lead to job displacement and require a transition to new skill sets.

3. AI in Various Industries: Consider providing examples of how AI is being utilized in different industries, such as healthcare, finance, education, and manufacturing. This will illustrate the broad applicability of AI and its potential benefits in various sectors.

4. Responsible AI Development: Mention the importance of responsible AI development, including the need to avoid biased data, ensuring fairness, and safeguarding against unintended consequences.

5. AI and Creativity: Discuss the intersection of AI and creativity, showcasing how AI-generated content or AI-assisted creative processes are reshaping industries like art, music, and content creation.

6. Public Perception and Education: Address the role of public perception and awareness in AI adoption. Promote the importance of educating people about AI's capabilities and limitations to dispel myths and fears surrounding the technology.

7. Government Regulation: Consider mentioning the role of governments in establishing AI regulations and policies to ensure responsible and ethical AI deployment.

Remember that these are just suggestions, and you can focus on the aspects that align with your article's main theme and scope. Good luck with your revisions, and if you have any further questions or need additional assistance, feel free to reach out!