Jamie Dimon Warns “Brace Yourself” for This “Economic Hurricane”

 We are now entering the storm of the 4th turning. None of us alive today will see the end of it. The reason is that unlike earlier ones we do not have the social, economic and technological (energy mostly) basis to rebuild our societies. So we will muddle through from bad to worse with mediocre politicians telling us that their policies are failing because we are not doing enough of what doesn't work. More green nonsense and woke policies is indeed what will save us... on the road to hell! This is why you can expect major dislocations and wars down this road. Was it unavoidable? Probably, unfortunately. But do we have the power to make it much worse than necessary? Most certainly!

Via Birch Gold Group

From Peter Reagan

We’ve suggested many times that an economic “storm could be brewing” so that you could start or continue preparing for it.

Well, if Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan) is correct, it looks like we might have underestimated how bad things could get. According to a recent report on CNBC, Dimon predicts that something much worse is barreling toward our economy:

“You know, I said there’s storm clouds but I’m going to change it … it’s a hurricane,” Dimon said Wednesday at a financial conference in New York. While conditions seem “fine” at the moment, nobody knows if the hurricane is “a minor one or Superstorm Sandy.”

He went on to describe part of the Fed’s game plan for addressing the rampant inflation of the moment, and how he thinks it backed the central banks into a corner:

“We’ve never had QT like this, so you’re looking at something you could be writing history books on for 50 years,” Dimon said. Several aspects of quantitative easing programs “backfired,” including negative rates, which he called a “huge mistake.”

“QT” here refers to quantitative tightening, basically the opposite of quantitative easing (QE). Where QE lowers borrowing costs and pumps money into the economy to encourage spending, QT raises borrowing costs and removes money from circulation. This effectively reduces the demand for loans and credit by making all sorts of loans more expensive for borrowers.

Dimon continued:

Central banks “don’t have a choice because there’s too much liquidity in the system,” Dimon said, referring to the tightening actions. “They have to remove some of the liquidity to stop the speculation, reduce home prices and stuff like that.”

Now, let’s be a little more explicit here…

When Dimon says “stop the speculation,” he’s referring to finally collapsing the “Everything Bubble” I’ve been writing about for months. He’s warning us that the Fed’s announced plans of raising interest rates and shrinking the money supply will make the stock market rout even worse than it’s already been (the S&P 500 is down about 14% year-to-date at the moment). Based on the CAPE or Shiller PE ratio, stocks have to fall another 50% to reach historically average valuations.

When Dimon says, “reduce home prices,” he’s referring to the absurd growth we’ve seen in home prices – up 20% in the last year alone! The astonishing pace at which home prices have outrun wages since 2000 makes it clear that housing is also in a bubble:

That’s right: home prices have risen 194% while wages have gone up 8% — home prices have risen 24 times faster than our ability to pay for them. The chart above also makes it clear how much more inflated home prices are right now than at the very peak of the housing bubble that led to the 2008-09 financial crisis.

That’s the scale of the problem the Fed’s trying to solve: both stocks and homes, the two investments most Americans rely on to build their savings, are astonishingly overvalued.

And that’s exactly why Dimon’s right that the Fed’s actions, and the economic consequences, will be exhaustively analyzed in economics textbooks half a century from now.

We’re spending a lot of time explaining this because Dimon talks like a multi-millionaire Wall Street elite who says things like “derivatives” and “gamma” without definitions.

The bottom line for everyday Americans is, Dimon’s hurricane warning is worth heeding. Because if he’s right, we’re looking at a Category 4 event…

What happened to the Fed’s “soft landing”?

The Fed is in a tough spot right now. In fact, Reuters reports that a “soft landing” isn’t likely:

The Fed is under pressure to decisively make a dent in an inflation rate that is running at more than three times its 2% goal and has caused a jump in the cost of living for Americans. It faces a difficult task in dampening demand enough to curb inflation while not causing a recession.

Major central banks, already plotting interest rate hikes in a fight against inflation, are also preparing a common pullback from key financial markets in a first-ever round of global quantitative tightening expected to restrict credit and add stress.

Here’s a translation:

The Fed must continue raising rates and shrinking the money supply in order to tackle inflation. That makes at least a recession virtually inevitable. Remember, Volcker’s Fed had to create two recessions in order to drag the nation out of the stagflationary 1970s, and one of those was so severe that some called it “the Little Depression.”

So if you take Fed Chair Jerome Powell at his word, that he’s really going to get inflation under control, logically, you should expect a recession. You should also expect inflated assets (stocks and housing included) to crash down to earth. And “major central banks” around the world are doing the same thing, at the same time. Don’t expect global investors to come riding the the rescue of the U.S. economy because they’re likely to have their own struggles at home.

It might be tough to take Powell’s commitment as an inflation-fighter seriously. After all, we’ve watched the Fed ride to the stock market’s rescue constantly for over two decades.

However, a different Reuters report explains that the Fed shifted its stance from “hope” to taking firm action on inflation (finally!):

The Fed hopes inflation will moderate on its own… But Powell has also made clear that the Fed is no longer counting on that, and will ratchet interest rates as high as needed.

“As high as needed” could mean up to 20% (that’s what it took Volcker’s Fed). Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard is backing Powell up, saying it’s “very hard to see the case” for any pause in rate hikes and QT until inflation is back to normal:

We’re certainly going to do what is necessary to bring inflation back down. That’s our No. 1 challenge right now.

Neither Fed official mentioned the stock market or the housing market. They’re trying to say, without actually scaring anyone, “Look out below!”

I’ll bet the 1970s equivalents of Jamie Dimon warned about incoming hurricanes, too – because it takes strong economic medicine to counteract 40-year-high inflation. Overpriced speculative markets simply can’t withstand high interest rates and quantitative tightening. You could think of these macroeconomic factors as a kind of financial chemotherapy, which works by poisoning everything but hopefully only killing off the most dangerous forms of speculation.

It seems like Dimon’s hurricane will take the form of a lengthy, borderline-catastrophic recession.

And that’s the good news.

Dimon also explained his concerns on how the conflict in Ukraine is making matters worse:

Dimon said he is also worried about the conflict in Ukraine and the impact it will have on oil prices, predicting on Wednesday that it’s in the cards for crude prices to eventually spike as high as $150 to $175 a barrel.

“Wars go bad. They go south. They have unintended consequences,” he said, adding that this conflict will continue to roil the commodity markets around the world, impacting the prices of oil, gas and wheat.

Remember, the Fed can’t control geopolitical conflicts. The Fed can’t sort out supply chain snarls, or force Xi Jinping to cancel Covid lockdowns crippling China’s manufacturing centers.

UFO investigation (Video 41')

 

 Can we actually do "science" about UFO?

 We have now so many credible report that I believe we can.

 First of all, let's limit our sample to pilots reports. Why pilots only? Because one of the skill you learn as a pilot is to observe the sky for obvious reasons and over time you learn to recognize planes and other flying objects, guess their distance and speed. The radio will tell you how far a plane is from you. You will then confirm that you have a visual and move on or change your speed and altitude as needed.

 Then let's forget about "lights in the sky". Everything you see at night however strange cannot be corroborated. Ordinary things can appear "strange" if you have too few clues which is usually the case at night.

 So what we end up with is hundreds of clear descriptions by professional people who can assess what they see and describe what is obviously "crafts" doing things we cannot understand based on physical laws.

What we know is the following:

1 - There are hundreds of different types of crafts with various shapes and aspects which move differently, slowly or very fast, with no obvious propulsion systems and no "shapes" we can understand like wings or engines.

First conclusion: We must be visited by many different beings with various technologies, all of them far superior to ours.

2 - They never ever interact directly with us, although there are some reports of interactions, but without actual proof, these are worth little. But conversely, they do not seem to care that we observe them. Not only visually but with radar and other instruments.

Second conclusion: The zoo hypothesis is the correct one! Never interact directly with a developing civilization. This rule is respected by all the crafts observing us so it must be an absolute rule. 

3 - Conversely, being observed does not seems to be a problem. Just as our planes taking pictures of isolated tribes in the Amazon. This too is interesting because it is likely that they could observe us without being seen but do no effort in this direction.

Third conclusion: They are actually showing us that they are not hostile. But also that they will not interfere with what we do. 

Based on these observations, what can we deduct and how could we proceed if we wanted to know more?

This I think is by far the most interesting part of the UFO phenomenon. 

The above observations tell us that almost everything we have imagined as science fiction concerning Aliens is incorrect.

They are neither aggressive nor friendly. 70 years of observation have produced little progress beyond "observations" so if we postulate as it seems to be the case that their technological advance on us is huge, it is very likely that another 70 years of observations will change nothing. They will most probably be careful to remain just out of reach of our most advanced technologies. (Just like our planes are always out of reach of Amazonian Indians arrows.) 

Faced with such a challenge, this is where statistics can help us.

Let's start by recording all credible observations: What type of craft doing what, when and where. Slowly, we should see patterns emerging. Do they observe our military capabilities a lot? (As seems to be the case according to the above video.) What are they interested in? Where are they? For what reason? Is there anything specific at that location beside human activities? Do they observe us or the planet? How is their presence increasing or decreasing with time and location? Are some specific types of crafts present at some time then replaced by others which would indicate that they come, observe us then move on? Or is there some permanent monitoring by specific vehicles which are observed again and again over time?

I believe that such analysis would help tremendously understand the phenomenon and explain part of it. Which unfortunately is not the part we are most interested in.

Who are they? Where do they come from? What are their intentions? This is all beyond our reach so no need to focus on this at this stage.

But the part we can analyze should be. (Maybe it is!) We have cameras and radars looking at debris and satellites in close Earth orbit. They can see objects of less that 10cm across. Are there any UFO in space on their way to and from Earth or are they all inexplicably close to the surface where we see most of them?  

Are radar observations all monitored automatically to identify as UFO what is not identified as plane? (and recorded as such?) 

There are many other things we could do to progress and try to understand better the phenomenon. Calling it "Alien" is not tin-pot science. It is an hypothesis which as observation numbers increase should (will) be proved or disproved. 

We should do it because the cost of these observations and recordings is almost nothing compared with what we invest in potentially destroying other human beings and conversely, the knowledge that we are not alone is one of the most important confirmation we are expecting from science. 

We are currently spending billions of dollars looking for micro-organisms on Mars which are probably not there (although we are right to be looking for them.) Why not spend a little more in trying to understand something right here, on Earth, which could completely transform our understanding of the Universe and maybe, hopefully our future.

COVID Exposed The Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex

 Excellent article which summarizes perfectly the last 2 years.

 The conclusion is obvious: The medical industry has less and less to do with health and more and more with profits and justifying itself.  

Authored by Mark Oshinskie via The Brownstone Institute,

In college, I took a Latin American Politics and Development class. When discussing Latin American medical care, Professor Eldon Kenworthy presented a deeply countercultural idea. Echoing a journal article by the scholar, Robert Ayres, Kenworthy maintained that building hospitals there costs lives. If, instead of erecting, equipping and staffing gleaming medical centers, this same money and human effort were devoted to providing clean water, good food and sanitation, the public health yield would be much greater. 

United States medical history bears out Ayres’s paradox. The biggest increases in US life expectancy occurred early in the Twentieth Century, when people had increasing access to calories and protein, better water and sanitation. Lives lengthened sharply decades before vaccines, antibiotics or nearly any drugs were available, and a century before hospitals merged into corporate Systems.

Incremental American life span increases during the past fifty years reflect far less smoking, safer cars and jobs, cleaner air and less lethal wars more than they reflect medical advances. Books like Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and Daniel Callahan’s Taming the Beloved Beast echo Ayres’s critique. But PBS, CNN, B & N, the NYT, et al. censor such views.

The American medical landscape has changed radically in the forty years since I learned of Ayres’ observation.

America spends three times as much, as a percentage of GDP, on medical treatments as it did in the 1960s. 

By 2020, America devoted 18% of its GDP to medicine. (By comparison, about 5% goes to the military). Adding the mega-costs of mass testing and vaccines etc., medical expenditures might now approach 20%. Although the US spends more than twice per capita what any other nation spends on medical care, American ranks 46th in life expectancy. US life expectancy has flatlined, despite growing medical spending and broadened medical access via the vaunted Affordable Care Act. 

Though medicine’s high-cost and relatively low yield are right in front of anyone who thinks about their medical experiences and those of people they know, most never connect the dots; more medical treatments and spending are continually advocated and applauded. There’s a regressive “if it saves—or even slightly extends—one life” medical zeitgeist/ethic.

As most medical insurance is employer-based, most people don’t notice annual premium increases. Nor do they see the growing slice of tax revenues used to subsidize Med/Pharma. Thus, they continually demand more stuff, like IVF, extremely high-cost drugs, sex changes or psychotherapy, as if these were their right, and free. To say nothing of these treatments’ limited effectiveness. 

As all are required to medically insure and to pay taxes, one can’t simply opt out or buy only those medical services that one thinks justify their costs. With massive, guaranteed funding sources, aggregate medical revenues will continue to climb. 

Thus, Medical-Industrial-Government Complex has become a Black Hole for today’s wealth. With great money comes great power. The Med/Pharma juggernaut rules the airwaves. Nonexistent until the 1990s, hospital System and drug ads now dominate advertising. By being such big advertisers, Med/Pharma dictates news content. Analysts who point out that lavish medical expenditures don’t yield commensurate public health benefit have small audiences. Med/Pharma critics can’t afford ads. 

Medicine has fed Coronamania. The TV news I’ve seen during the past 27 months painted a very skewed picture of reality. The virus has been misrepresented—by the media and government, and by MDs, like Fauci, often posing in white jackets— as a runaway train that’s indiscriminately decimating the American populace. Instead of putting into perspective the virus’s clear demographic risk profile and the very favorable survival odds—even without treatment, at all ages, or promoting various forms of contra-Covid self-care, including weight loss—the media and medical establishment incited universal panic, and promoted counterproductive mass isolation, mass masking, mass testing, and treatment with ventilators and expensive, often harmful anti-virals. 

Later, mass injections were added to the “Covid-crushing” armamentarium. While the shots created many billionaires, and greatly enriched other Pfizer and Moderna stockholders, they failed, as Biden and many others had promised, to stop either infection or the spread. All of the many whom I know who have been infected in the past six months were vaxxed. 

Many—whose voices are suppressed by mainstream media—observe that the shots have worsened outcomes, by driving the development of variants, weakening or confusing immune systems, and causing serious near-term injuries. 

Further, people blindly, ardently believed in the shots simply because they were marketed as “vaccines” by bureaucrats wearing medical garb. Despite the shots’ failure and the failure of other “mitigation” measures like lockdowns, masking and testing, many refuse to concede that Med/Pharma has had much—overwhelmingly negative— influence over the society and economy and public health during Coronamania. Nonetheless, many billions of dollars have been—and are still being—spent to advertise shots that most people don’t want. 

The Covid overreaction has to some extent also piggy-backed on TV programs that have, for decades, glorified medicine in TV shows like Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, M.D., Medical Center, MASH, Gray’s Anatomy and House. Wearing white coats connotes virtue, just as did wearing white hats in Western movies. 

Given the cumulative PR onslaught of the ads and shows, medicine is widely seen as more effective than it is in real life. A few years ago, I heard some woman-in-the-street say, during a TV news clip, “If they make me change my doctor, it will be like losing my right arm.” 

Many hold such polar views. Medicine is the new American religion. Given such fervent belief in medicine’s importance and the sense of entitlement regarding expanding medical treatments, government and insurance money is relentlessly overallocated to medicine. 

Do these expenditures improve human outcomes? During the first Scrubs episode, resident J.D. complains to his mentor that being a doctor was different than he had envisioned; most of his patients were “old and kind of checked out.” His mentor responds, “That’s Modern Medicine: advances that keep people alive who should have died a long time ago, back when they lost what made them human.”

This largely describes those said to have died with Covid. Most people have disregarded that nearly all who died during the pandemic were old and/or in poor health. Most deaths have always occurred among the old and ill. Occasionally, sitcoms keep it realer than real people do.

Aside from not helping much and misspending resources, and extending misery, medicine can be iatrogenic, i.e., it can cause illness or death. Hospital errors are said to cause from 250,000 to 400,000 American deaths annually. Perhaps medical personnel try to do a good job. but when the bodies of old, sick people are cut open or dosed with strong medicine, stuff happens. Even well-executed surgeries and many medications can worsen health. 

Further, though few know it, a brew of excreted medications and diagnostic radionuclides daily pours down drains across the US and world and ends up in streams and rivers. For example, the hormones in widely-prescribed birth control pills feminize and disrupt aquatic creatures’ reproduction. There are books about all of this, too, though such authors never appear on Good Morning America. 

Faith in medical interventions also lessens individual and institutional efforts to maintain or improve health. If people didn’t abuse substances, ate better and moved their bodies more, there would be much less demand for medical interventions. And if people spent less time working to pay for medical insurance, they could spend more time taking care of themselves and others. Overall, America could spend a fraction of what it spends on allopathic medicine and yet, be much healthier. There are also plenty of books about this. 

Given its place at the center of American life for 27 months, and counting, Covid has been—and will be—used to further intensify the medicalization of individual lives, the economy, and society. By exploiting and building an irrational fear of death, the Medical Industrial Complex will promote the notion that we should double—or triple—down on medical and social interventions and investments that might marginally extend the lives of a small slice of the population. Or, in many instances, shorten lives. 

But most people who live sensibly are intrinsically healthy for many years. Given enough nutritious food, clean water and a decent place to sleep, most people will live a long time, with little or no medical treatment. While intensive medical interventions can marginally extend the lives of some old, sick people, medicine can’t reverse aging and it seldom restores vitality. 

If the media were honest brokers, the Covid mania would never have taken hold. The media should have repeatedly pointed out that the virus only threatened a small, identifiable segment of a very large population. Instead, captive to its Med/Pharma sponsors, the media went full-frontal fearmonger and promoted intensive, society-wide intervention. Social, psychological and economic catastrophe ensued.

Additionally, many doctors who could have spoken against the Covid craziness stayed silent so as not to jeopardize their licenses, hospital privileges or favored status with Pharma, or just because they were schooled in allopathic orthodoxy and hold fast to that faith. Props to those courageous few who broke ranks. 

The Med/Pharma/Gov establishment, including the NIH and CDC, hasn’t saved America during 2020-22. To the contrary, Covid interventions have worsened overall societal outcomes. These net harms should have inflicted—and, depending on longer-term vaxx effects, may yet inflict—a big black eye on the Medical Industrial Complex. 

If so, Med/Pharma will spend tens of billions of PR money to distort what’s happened for the past 27 months, and to portray well-paid medical personnel, administrators and bureaucrats as selfless heroes. Many gullible Americans will buy this slick revisionism, including its portrayals of healthy-looking people walking in slow motion on beaches or across meadows in golden light, accompanied by a contemplative solo piano soundtrack.

Ukraine Parliament Passes New Laws Seeking To Purge Russian Culture

 Interesting how European Media will report this... or just ignore it?

Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

Ukraine’s Parliament passed two bills that will restrict Russian music and books. If President Volodymyr Zelensky signs the legislation, it will be a significant step forward in Kiev's attempt to purge the Russian culture.

The first bill will place heavy restrictions on any author who held Russian citizenship after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The law will ban the printing of books by Russian citizens, forbid importing the commercial import of any book printed in Russia, Belarus, or "occupied Ukrainian territory," and requires special permission to import any book in Russian.

Image source: FP via Sopa Images/Lightrocket

In the future, books in Ukraine can only be published in Ukrainian and official European Union languages. Russian is not one of the EU’s official 24 languages. Books in other languages can only be printed in the original language or translated into one of the 25 allowable languages.

The law provides an exemption for Russian authors who renounce their Russian passports and obtain Ukrainian citizenship. The bills make up the latest steps in the process of "derussification."

The second law bars the playing of any Russian music on media or on public transportation. The legislation also increases quotas for Ukrainian language music and speech on television and radio.

Indications are Zelensky will sign the bills into law. Ukraine’s Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko – a member of Zelensky’s Servent of the People party – welcomed the bills.

"The laws are designed to help Ukrainian authors share quality content with the widest possible audience, which after the Russian invasion do not accept any Russian creative product on a physical level," he said.

The bills are not Kiev’s first effort to stifle the Russian culture in Ukraine. After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the US-backed government passed several restrictions on the Russian language. In 2018, a movie starring Zelensky – Love in the Big City 2 – was banned because it was produced in Russian.

As president, Zelensky has advanced the culture war. After the Russian invasion, Zelensky removed members of parliament from parties that were deemed "pro-Russian." He also nationalized Ukraine’s media, giving him further control over the narrative in Ukraine.

The Great Reset or WW3?

 This is an excellent article from The Saker which explains very well what we are seeing now. A MUST READ!

SOURCE:  The Saker

WORLD WAR 3 FOR DUMMIES

Some knowledgeable people, apparently including the Pope, are beginning to suspect that there may be more going on in the world than just the war in the Ukraine. They say that World War 3 has already started and things will get worse from now on. This can be difficult to determine while we are participating in the unfolding events and do not have the benefit of the historical perspective. It is doubtful that people back in 1939 realized that they were looking at the start of a major worldwide conflict, although some may have suspected it.

The current global situation is in many ways like a giant jigsaw puzzle where the general public only sees a tiny part of the complete picture. Most don’t even realize that there may be more pieces and don’t even ask these simple questions: Why is all this happening and why is it happening now?

Things are more complicated than most people realize. What they see is the evil wizard Vladimir Saruman Putin invading innocent Ukraine with his orc army – for absolutely no reason. This is a simplistic view, to say the least because nothing happens without a reason. Let’s put things in perspective and see what is really going on – and why the world is going crazy before our eyes. Let’s see what World War 3 is all about.

The pressure cooker

The West (which we can define here as the US and the EU and a few more) has been maintaining pressure on the entire world for decades. This does not only apply to countries outside the West, but also to Western countries which strayed from the diktats of the West’s rulers. This pressure has been discussed widely and attributed to all kinds of motives, including neocolonialism, forced financial hegemony, and so forth. What is interesting, particularly during the last 20 years, is which countries have been pressured and what they do not have in common.

Among the pressured countries we find Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Thailand, and Iran to mention a few. There have also been recent additions, including India and Hungary. In order to understand why they have been pressured, we need to find out what they have in common. That’s not easy since they are extremely different in most ways. There are democracies and non-democracies, conservative and communist governments, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist countries, and so on. Still, many of them are very clearly allied. One must ask why conservative and religious countries such as Russia or Iran would ally themselves with Godless communists in Cuba and Venezuela.

What all these countries have in common is their desire to run their own affairs; to be independent countries. This is unforgivable in the eyes of the West and must be tackled by any means necessary, including economic sanctions, color revolutions, and outright military aggression.

The West and its NATO military arm had surrounded Russia with hostile countries and military bases, armed and manipulated Ukraine to be used as a hammer against it, and employed sanctions and threats. The same thing was and is happening in Asia where China is being surrounded by all means available. The same applies to all the Independents mentioned above to some extent. In the past 10 years or so the pressure has increased massively on the Independents and it reached almost a fever pitch in the year before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

During the year before the Ukraine war, the US sent its diplomats around the world to tune up the pressure. They were like a traveling circus or a rock band on a tour, but instead of entertainment, they delivered threats: buy this from us and do what we tell you or there will be consequences. The urgency was absolute and palpable, but then came the Ukraine war and the pressure went up to 11. During the first month of the war, the entire West’s diplomatic corps was fully engaged in threats against the ‘rest of the world’ to engineer the isolation of Russia. This didn’t work, which resulted in panic in political and diplomatic circles in the US and Europe.

All this pressure through the years, and all the fear and panic when it didn’t work, are clearly related to the events in the Ukraine. They are a part of the same ‘syndrome’ and have the same cause.

The debt dimension

There have been many explanations for what is going on and the most common is the fight between two possible futures; a multipolar world where there are several power centers in the world, and a unipolar world where the West governs the world. This is correct as far as it goes, but there is another reason which explains why this is happening now and all the urgency and panic in the West.

Recently the New Zealand tech guru Kim Dotcom tweeted a thread about the debt situation in the US. According to him all debt and unfunded liabilities of the US exceed the total value of the entire country, including the land. This situation is not unique to the US. Most countries in the West have debt that can only be paid back by selling the entire country and everything it contains. On top of that, most non-western countries are buried in dollar-denominated debt and are practically owned by the same financiers who own the West.

During the last few decades, the economy of the US and Europe has been falsified on a level that is difficult to believe. We in the West have been living far beyond our means and our currencies have been massively overvalued. We have been able to do this through two mechanisms:

1. The first one is the reserve status of the dollar and the semi-reserve status of the euro which have enabled the West to export digital money and receive goods in return. This has created enormous financial power for the West and enabled it to function as a parasite on the world economy. We have been getting a lot of goods for free, to put it mildly.
2. The second falsification mechanism is the increase in debt to a level where we have essentially pawned everything we own, including our houses and lands, to keep up our living standards. We own nothing now when the debt has been subtracted. The debt has long since become unserviceable – far beyond our ability to pay interests on – which explains why the interest rates in the West are in the neighborhood of zero. Any increase would make the debt unserviceable and we would all go formally bankrupt in a day.

On top of all this, the falsification has created artificially strong currencies in the West which has boosted their purchasing power for goods priced in non-western currencies. These mechanisms have also enabled the West to run bloated and dysfunctional service economies where inefficiencies are beyond belief. We have giant groups of people in our economies that not only create no value but destroy value systematically. What maintains the West’s standard of living now is a small minority of productive people, constant debt increase, and parasitism of the rest of the world.

The people who own all this debt actually own everything we think we own. We in the West own nothing at this point – we only think we do. But who are our real owners? We know more or less who they are because they meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos along with the western political elites who they also happen to own.

It is clear that our owners have been getting increasingly worried, and their worries have been increasing in sync with the increased pressure applied by the West on the rest of the world, particularly the Independents. During the last Davos meeting, the mood was bleak and panicked at the same time, much like the panic among the western political elites when the isolation of Russia failed.

What is about to happen

The panic of our owners and their politicians is understandable because we have come to the end of the line. We can no longer keep up our living standards by debt increase and parasitism. The debt is reaching beyond what we own as collateral and our currencies are about to become worthless. We will no longer be able to get free stuff from the rest of the world, or pay back our debt – let alone pay interest on it. The entire West is about to go bankrupt and our standard of living is about to go down by a massive percentage. This is what has our owners panicked and they see only two scenarios:

1. In the first scenario most countries in the West, and everything and everyone within them, declare bankruptcy and erase the debt by diktat – which sovereign states are able to do. This will also erase the wealth and political power of our owners.
2. In the second scenario, our owners take over the collateral during the bankruptcy. The collateral is us and everything we own.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which scenario was chosen. The plan for the second scenario is ready and being implemented as we speak. It is called ‘The Great Reset’ and was constructed by the people behind the World Economic Forum. This plan is not a secret and can be examined to a certain degree on the WEF website.

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The Great Reset is a mechanism for the seizing of all debt collateral which includes your assets, the assets of your city or municipality, the assets of your state, and most corporate assets not already held by our owners.

This asset seizure mechanism has several components, but the most important are the following four:

1. Abolishment of sovereignty: A sovereign (independent) country is a dangerous country because it can choose to default on its debt. The decrease in sovereignty has been a priority for our owners and various schemes have been attempted such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The most successful scheme is undoubtedly the European Union itself.
2. The down-tuning of the economy: The western economy (and indeed the global economy) must be tuned down by a very significant percentage. This down-tuning is necessary because the western economy is massively falsified now and must be taken down to its real level – which may be as low as half of what it is now – or more. The slow takedown has also the purpose of avoiding a sudden crash that would cause massive social unrest which would be a threat to our owners. A controlled takedown is therefore preferable to an uncontrolled crash. This controlled takedown is already happening and has been going on for quite some time. Many examples can be mentioned of this takedown, including the EU and US energy policy which is designed to sabotage the western economy, and the obvious attempts at demand destruction during and after the epidemic, including the fairly bizarre logistical problems which suddenly came out of nowhere.
3. Asset harvesting (you will own nothing and be ‘happy’): All assets that can be considered to be collateral to our private and collective/public debt will be taken over. This is a clearly stated aim of the Great Reset but it is less clear how this would be carried out. Total control of western governments (and indeed all governments) would seem to be necessary for this. That precondition is closer than one might think because most western governments seem to be beholden to Davos at this point. The process will be sold as necessary social restructuring because of an economic crisis and global warming and will result in a massive decrease in living standards for regular people, although not the elites.
4. Oppression: A great many people will not like this and an uprising is a likely response, even if the takedown is done gradually. To prevent this from happening, a social control mechanism is being implemented which will erase personal freedom, the freedom of speech, and privacy. It will also create absolute dependence of the individual on the state. This must be done before the economic takedown can be completed or there will be a revolution. This mechanism is already being implemented enthusiastically in the West as anybody with eyes and ears can see.

Russia, China, and other Independents

How do Russia and China, and the war in Ukraine, factor into all of this? Why all the pressure from the West throughout the years and why all this panic now? Part of the reason for the pressure on the Independents, particularly Russia and China, is simply that they have resisted western hegemony. That is enough for getting on the West’s naughty list. But why the increased pressure in recent years?

The reason is that Russia and China cannot be subjugated through bankruptcy and their assets harvested. They do not have much debt in western currencies which means that the people who own the West through debt do not currently own Russia and China (like they own the West and the indebted ‘third world’) and cannot acquire them through debt. The only way to acquire them is through regime change. Their governments must be weakened by any means, including economic sanctions and military means if necessary -thus the use of Ukraine as a battering ram for Russia and Taiwan for China.

Subjugating Russia and China is an existential issue for our Davos owners because when they take the western economy down, everything else must go down too. If the western economy is taken down and a large economic block doesn’t participate in the downfall, it will be a disaster for the West. The new block will gain massive economic power, and possibly unipolar hegemony of sorts, while the West descends into a feudal Dark Age and irrelevance. Therefore the entire world must go down for the Great Reset to work. Russia and China must be subjugated by any means, as well as India and other stubborn nations.

This is what has fueled the situation we now find ourselves in and will fuel the continuation of World War 3. The western owner-elites are going to war to keep their wealth and power. Everyone who resists must be subjugated so they can follow the West into the planned Great Reset Dark Age.

The reason for the current panic among western elites is that the Ukraine project isn’t going as planned. Instead of Russia being bled on the battlefield, it is Ukraine and the West that bleed. Instead of the Russian economy crashing resulting in Putin’s replacement by a Davos-compatible leader, it is the West’s economy that is crashing. Instead of Russia being isolated, it is the West that is being increasingly isolated. Noting is working, and to top it all off, Europe has given the Russians the means and motive to destroy the European economy by partly shutting down its industry. Without Russian resources, there is no European industry, and without industry, there are no taxes for paying for unemployment benefits, pensions, all the refugees, and pretty much everything else which holds European societies together. The Russians now have the ability to engineer an uncontrolled crash in Europe which is not what Davos planned. An uncontrolled crash might see Davos’s heads roll, literally, and that is causing fear and panic in elite circles. The only solution for them is to move on with World War 3 and hope for the best.

What to do

The Great Reset of the world economy is the direct cause of World War 3 – assuming that is what is going on. What can be done about this? From inside the West, little can be done. The only way is to somehow remove Davos from the equation, but that is most likely not going to happen for two reasons: The first one is that the Davos great resetters are too entwined in the western economy and politics. Davos is like an octopus with its arms and suckers inside every country’s elite circles, media, and government. They are too entrenched to be easily removed. The second reason is that the western population is too brainwashed and ignorant. The level of their brainwashing is such that a large part of them actually want to become poor – although they use the word ‘green’ for ‘poor’ because it sounds better. There are, however, some indications that there may be divisions within western elites. Some of them, particularly within the US, may be resisting the primarily Europe-designed Great Reset – but whether this opposition is real or effective remains to be seen.

However, outside the West, there are certain measures that can be taken and must be taken. Some of those measures are drastic and some of them are being done as we speak. Among the measures are the following:

1. The Independents, led by Russia, China, and India, must create a block to isolate themselves from the radioactive West. This isolation must not only be economic, but also political and social. Their economic systems must be divorced from the West and made autonomous. Their cultures and history must be defended against western influences and revisionism. This process appears to be underway.
2. The Independents must immediately ban all western sponsored institutions and NGOs in their countries, regardless of whether they are sponsored by western states or individuals. Furthermore, they must ban all media receiving western sponsorship and strip every school and university of western sponsorship and influence.
3. They must leave all international institutions up to and possibly including the United Nations because all international bodies are controlled by the West. They must then replace them with new institutions within their block.
4. They must, at some point, declare the dollar and the euro currencies non grata. That means that they should declare default on all debts denominated in these currencies, but not other debts. This will most likely come at a later stage but is inevitable.

This will create a situation where the West will descend into darkness without pulling others down with it – if we manage to escape the nuclear fire.

Our Economy In A Nutshell

 Charles Hugh Smith often states obvious points. This is one of them: Our full social construct is based on cheap energy and the belief that cheap money will fetch more energy...

 The reality is that deep oil is too expensive to bring to the surface, nuclear reactors are not cheap either and require 10 years+ to build, as for wind and solar, they are intermittent, not resilient and require fossil fuels as back-ups. In other words: We have no short term solutions to our energy predicament!

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling.

Our economy is in a crisis that's been brewing for decades. The Chinese characters for the English word crisis are famously--and incorrectly--translated as danger and opportunity. The more accurate translation is precarious plus critical juncture or inflection point.

Beneath its surface stability, our economy is precarious because the foundation of the global economy-- cheap energy--has reached an inflection point: from now on, energy will become more expensive.

The cost will be too low for energy producers to make enough money to invest in future energy production, and too high for consumers to have enough money left after paying for the essentials of energy, food, shelter, etc., to spend freely.

For the hundred years that resources were cheap and abundant, we could waste everything and call it growth: when an appliance went to the landfill because it was designed to fail (planned obsolescence) so a new one would have to be purchased, that waste was called growth because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up when the replacement was purchased.

A million vehicles idling in a traffic jam was also called growth because more gasoline was consumed, even though the gasoline was wasted.

This is why the global economy is a "waste is growth" Landfill Economy. The faster something ends up in the landfill, the higher the growth.

Now that we've consumed all the easy-to-get resources, all that's left is hard to get and expensive. For example, minerals buried in mountains hundreds of miles from paved roads and harbors require enormous investments in infrastructure just to reach the deposits, extract, process and ship them to distant mills and refineries. Oil deposits that are deep beneath the ocean floor are not cheap to get.

Does it really make sense to expect that the human population can triple and our consumption of energy increase ten-fold and there will always be enough resources to keep supplies abundant and prices low? No, it doesn't.

Many people believe that nuclear power (fusion, thorium reactors, mini-reactors, etc.) will provide cheap, safe electricity that will replace hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas). But nuclear power is inherently costly, and there are presently no full-scale fusion or thorium reactors providing cheap electricity to thousands of households.

Reactors take many years to construct and are costly to build and maintain. Cost over-runs are common. A new reactor in Finland, for example, is nine years behind schedule and costs have tripled.

The U.S. has built only two new reactors in the past 25 years.

The world's 440 reactors supply about 10% of global electricity. There are currently 55 new reactors under construction in 19 countries, but it will take many years before they produce electricity. We would have to build a new reactor a week for many years to replace hydrocarbon-generated electricity. This scale of construction simply isn't practical.

Supplying all energy consumption globally--for all transportation, heating of buildings, etc.) would require over 10,000 reactors by some estimates--over 20 times the current number of reactors in service.

Many believe so-called renewable energy such as solar and wind will replace hydrocarbons. But as analysts Nate Hagens has explained, these sources are not truly renewable, they are replaceable; all solar panels and wind turbines must be replaced at great expense every 20 to 25 years. These sources are less than 5% of all energy we consume, and it will take many decades of expansion to replace even half of the hydrocarbon fuels we currently consume.

To double the energy generated by wind/solar in 25 years, we’ll need to build three for each one in service today: one to replace the existing one and two more to double the energy being produced.

All these replacements for hydrocarbons require vast amounts of resources: diesel fuel for transport, materials for fabricating turbines, panels, concrete foundations, and so on.

Humans are wired to want to believe that whatever we have now will still be ours in the future. We don't like being told we'll have less of anything in the future.

The current solution is to create more money out of thin air in the belief that if we create more money, then more oil, copper, iron, etc. will be found and extracted.

But this isn't really a solution. What happens if we add a zero to all our currency? If we add a zero to a $10 bill so it becomes $100, do we suddenly get ten times more food, gasoline, etc. with the new bill? No.

Prices quickly rise ten-fold so the new $100 bill buys the same amount as the old $10.

Adding zeroes to our money (hyper-financialization) doesn’t make everything that's scarce, expensive and hard to get suddenly cheap. It's still scarce, expensive and hard to get no matter how many zeroes we add to our money.

Many people feel good about recycling a small part of what we consume. But recycling is not cost-free, and the majority of what we consume is not recycled.

The percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, for example, is very low, less than 5%. We have to mine vast quantities of lithium because we dump 95% of lithium-ion batteries in the landfill. There are many reasons for this, one being that the batteries aren't designed to be recycled because this would cost more money.

The majority of all manufactured goods--goods that required immense amounts of hydrocarbons to make--are tossed in the landfill.

Goods and services are commoditized and sourced from all over the world in long dependency chains (hyper-globalization): if one link breaks, the entire supply chain breaks.

Our economy is precarious because it's in a lose-lose dilemma: resource prices can't stay high enough for producers to make a profit without impoverishing consumers. Prices can't stay low enough to allow consumers to spend freely without producers losing money and shutting down, depriving the economy of essential resources.

Playing hyper-financialized games--creating money out of thin air, borrowing from tomorrow to spend more today and inflating speculative bubbles in stocks, housing, etc.--won't actually create more of what's scarce. All these games make wealth inequality worse (hyper-inequality), undermining social stability.

The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling. Each of these systems is dependent on all the other systems (what we call a tightly bound system), so when one critical system unravels, the crisis quickly spreads to the entire economic system: one domino falling knocks down all the dominoes snaking through the global economy.

Those who understand how tightly interconnected, unsustainable systems are basically designed to unravel can prepare themselves by becoming antifragile: flexible, adaptable and open to the opportunities that arise when things are disorderly and unpredictable.

ascading Liquidations Send Bitcoin Below $18,000 As Daisy-Chained Margin Call Contagion Sparks Record Selling

 While you were sleeping! That's right: On a Saturday!

 All is not well on the hyper-leveraged crypto world...

 Plenty of funny quotes making this article a good read but the reality is not funny.

Cascading Liquidations Send Bitcoin Below $18,000 As Daisy-Chained Margin Call Contagion Sparks Record Selling

For crypto investors, June is the cruelest month ever and the pain just won't go away.

Bitcoin, and the broader crypto sector, are getting crushed - again - for a record 12th day in a row...

... with the largest token tumbling below $20,000, below $19,000 and even below $18,000, tumbling as low as $17,629 on Saturday afternoon, having lost nearly 50% of all its value in just the past two weeks and plunging 75% from an all time high of $67,734 in November, taking out support after support, even the most important of all: the $19,511 high from the previous bull cycle (throughout its brief, 12-year trading history, Bitcoin has never dropped below previous cycle peaks... until today).

... as cascading liquidations become self-reinforcing and prompt wholesale deleveraging of the entire crypto sector, pushing Bitcoin to the most oversold weekly level in history!

Bitcoin's closest peer, Ethereum, broke below $1,000 for the first time since January 2021 and tumbled 19%, to a low of $884 before modestly reversing losses. According to data from Coinglass, total liquidations in the crypto market were $435 million in the past 24 hours, with Bitcoin and Ether at around $202 million and $144.5 million respectively. Altcoins also suffered the brunt of soured investor appetite, with every token on Bloomberg’s cryptocurrency monitor trading in the red. Cardano, Solana, Dogecoin and Polkadot recorded falls of between 12% and 14%, while privacy tokens such as Monero and Zcash lost as much as 16%.

The selloff which started in earnest about a month ago, when the collapse of the the Luna currency which was used to back up the value of Terra’s UST stablecoin, wiped out $60 billion in market cap and launched an unprecedented deleveraging shockwave within the crypto DeFi sector, accelerated last Sunday when the crypto shadow bank Celsius Network suspended withdrawals from depositors who had been drawn by the company's ridiculously high interest rates which, as always when someone offers double digit rates in a time of ZIRP, were too good to be true. By Friday, Hong Kong digital-asset lender Babel Finance also froze withdrawals; more are sure to follow.

.@CelsiusNetwork is pausing all withdrawals, Swap, and transfers between accounts. Acting in the interest of our community is our top priority. Our operations continue and we will continue to share information with the community. More here: https://t.co/CvjORUICs2

— Celsius (@CelsiusNetwork) June 13, 2022

And while both firms have scrambled to reassure clients, they are also quietly working with restructuring advisors to avoid a complete collapse and getting margin called into oblivion: according to research firm Kaiko Celsius is drowning in what research firm Kaiko called a “Lehman-esque” position. As Bloomberg's Michael Regan notes, just like Lehman Brothers 14 years ago, Celsius’s woes showed how interconnected big players in this financial system are and how fast contagioncan spread, making this week’s drama the sequel to last week’s and the prequel to next week’s.

The crypto drama only ramped up last Wednesday with an alarming tweet that confirmed speculation which had been swirling around one of the most influential hedge funds in the crypto space, Three Arrows Capital. “We are in the process of communicating with relevant parties and fully committed to working this out,” one of the firm’s co-founders wrote, without revealing any details about what exactly the “this” was that it was working out.

We are in the process of communicating with relevant parties and fully committed to working this out

— Zhu Su 🔺 (@zhusu) June 15, 2022

On Friday, the WSJ reported that 3AC was considering asset sales and a bailout among its options. However, without a Fed to bailout out insolvent shadow banks and brokers, we wouldn't hold our breath.

What is notable is that behind all three recent implosions appears to be exposure to staked Ethereum.

As Bloomberg notes, analysts have pointed to problems that Celsius was having with an Ethereum-linked token called staked ETH, or stETH - a coin designed to be a tradable proxy for Ether that’s widely used in decentralized finance. The derivative token is designed to provide liquidity for those who put their Ether holdings in Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake protocol for high yields but still want to be able to sell their tokens before the network’s transition is complete and the lock-in period expires. However, sharp Ether price declines and a rout in the broader crypto market have prompted stETH holders to sell and send the token’s price lower than Ether.

Research firm Nansen also identified Celsius as one of the parties involved when the UST stablecoin lost its peg to the dollar in May. The episode with that token, which was driven largely by algorithms and untenable yields of 19.5% for depositors in the Anchor Protocol, triggered the loss of tens of billions dollars in the spectacular implosion of the Terra blockchain.

Nansen’s analysis confirmed that Terra’s Anchor program had been an important source of yield for Celsius, according to commentary from crypto exchange Coinbase. “In our view, this likely begged the question of how Celsius could fulfill its obligations without that 19.5% yield,” wrote the institutional team at Coinbase. That firm, by the way, said this week it will lay off 18% of its previously fast-growing workforce, joining other pink-slip-issuing crypto startups such as Gemini and BlockFi that are struggling amid a relentless plunge in asset prices.

Three Arrows, too, was a casualty of both the stETH woes and Terra’s collapse. The fund had bought about $200 million in the Luna currency used to back up the value of Terra’s UST stablecoin, according to the Journal. Luna, which sold for more than $119 in April, is now worth about $0.000059.  

Then, over the weekend, more bad news sent Ethereum tumbling well below $1000 amid speculation of another margin call liquidation. According to Axios, over the last few days, crypto watchers have been captivated by two large linked wallets - positions which supposedly are owned by a major Chinese entrepreneur transacting on the app Meitu- that contain $181 million in ether (ETH). They also have collateral in loans that are right on the edge of solvency. Most of the debts are on the money market Aave (152,098.98 ETH worth $166 million at the time of writing, but the rest is on Compound (14,316.90 ETH). This matters because as the price of ether falls further, the odds are rising that these debts will be liquidated, unleashing a fresh flood of ether onto the market, which will drive the price of ether down even further.

The wallets in question are 0x493F and 0x7160. For the first wallet, scroll down to Aave v2 and see the largest loan. Furthermore, these wallets appear to be related, because they can be seen making larger transfers of ether, from the former to the latter, here and here, prior to topping up collateral on Compound loans

But can't those traders just close out the loans? Well, no, because the wallets are levered long: the owner has deposited ETH, borrowed stablecoins, bought more ETH, and deposited that to borrow more stablecoins to do it again. And so on. ZoomerAnon of the team at DeFi analytics company Uniwhales, explained that you can see the wallet repeatedly taking stablecoins liked USDT and USDC, sending it to Binance, and withdrawing thousands of ethers. Early January, multiple transactions like this could be seen using Etherscan.

Of course, such leveraged transactions are nothing new and traders lever long when they believe an asset's price will go higher. If it does, they can withdraw enough to repay their loan, withdraw their collateral and come out of the trade with more of the underlying asset. Of course, all of that only works if the asset's price goes up. Which it no longer is... meanwhile the wallets were making bets that ether would go up further back in January, when it was trading at over $3,300. Today it's barely holding $1,000. "He borrowed 96,040 ETH prior to borrowing any money," ZoomerAnon told Axios.

Surely at some point the pain will end, and yes it will - one researcher calculated that the largest position, on Aave, will be liquidated at a $982 ETH price. Uniwhales put the liquidation price at $870. With ETH having plunged to that level, crashing as much as 20% on Saturday alone, it is safe to say that the entire position has been margined out and liquidated, and the selling pressure will finally ease, if only for the time being.

Alas, as this problem found its terminal solution, a new one emerged: Bloomberg reports that MakerDAO, a long-established decentralized autonomous organization that supports the stablecoin DAI, has suspended the token from being deposited and minted in Aave’s crypto lending platform, in what may be a response to the abovementioned liquidation.

The organization cast the vote to disable the DAI Direct Deposit Module on Aave, which effectively prevents traders from borrowing the stablecoin against stETH (there's that staked ether again), citing adverse market conditions in a post Friday.  

“The reason we believe this is risky is because out of 200 million DAI borrowed on Aave Ethereum v2, 100 million DAI is being borrowed by Celsius and collateralized mostly by stETH.” Primoz, a member of the Risk Core Unit Team at MakerDAO said in the Maker Forum.

According to Bloomberg, Aave, which has a decentralized lending platform where traders can use arbitrage in transactions while borrowing or lending in the protocol, earlier proposed a different measure to MakerDAO. The proposal suggested to freeze the stETH market and increase the token’s liquidation threshold from 81% to 90% to mitigate the risks from stETH. However, MakerDAO described the measure as “unacceptable risk” and came up with its own plan to disable DAI’s deposit on Aave.

Due to market conditions, the Maker Governance voted to disable the @AaveAave D3M.

According to the Urgent Signal Request posted on the recommendation of the Risk Core Unit, this is a preventive measure against potentially unacceptable risks to the Maker Protocol.

— Maker (@MakerDAO) June 17, 2022

In any case, just as Bear Stearns’s hedge funds were among the first to reveal problems from the subprime mortgage crisis, Three Arrows is likely not alone. The “cockroach theory” springs to mind: If you see one of those nasty bugs scurrying across the floor, chances are there are plenty more roaches are behind the fridge or under the sink.

Many in the space would welcome such a cleansing: “What we’re seeing is more liquidations driving prices and sentiment lower, which triggers more liquidations and negative sentiment - some flushing-out needed still, but this will at some stage exhaust itself,” said Noelle Acheson, head of market insights at Genesis. However, before we get to the full liquidation phase, there is more deleveraging ahead. According to some, the hot trade in crypto now is no longer pumping coins “to the moon” with tweets full of rocket-ship emojis, but trying to find where those "roaches" are hiding. Some crafty traders have dispatched bots to prowl blockchains in search of highly leveraged positions in danger of forced liquidation because the value of their collateral is no longer enough to back up their loans. If successful, they get a 10% to 15% cut of the collateral sale -- incentives paid out by automated protocols that are meant to protect them from insolvency.

Of course, the Fed's recent "surprise" decision to hike by 75bps (instead of 50bps as Powell initially said), has not helped sentiment, eased funding stress, or slowed the margin call onslaught slamming the crypto space.

And while some are quick to declare bitcoin's time of death (it won't be the first time, as 99 Bitcoins calculates there have been hundreds of bitcoin obits in the past decade), others see the upside beyond the current deleveraging episode. In a note published on Friday, Alkesh Shah, head of crypto and digital assets strategy at Bank of America, said that "investors are continuing to position defensively following last year’s liquidity-driven digital asset bull market. Although painful, removing the sector’s froth is likely healthy as investors shift focus to projects with clear road maps to cash flow and profitability versus purely revenue growth."

He goes on to note that "the digital asset ecosystem is an emerging high-growth speculative asset class with tokens that are exposed to similar risks as tech stocks" and as such, "upside is likely capped until risks associated with rising rates, inflation and recession are fully discounted." Which is correct: the next catalyst will be the Fed admitting it screwed up again and unleashing another massive easing cycle some time in late 2022/early 2023 which will send cryptos to new all time highs, in line with Shah's laconic summary of the bitcoin lifecycle: "Declines bring out the skeptics. Critics are quick to claim bitcoin’s demise has arrived."

Somewhat unexpectedly, it is none other than JPMorgan quant Nick Panagirtzoglou who has turned surprisingly bullish on the crypto space. In his latest "Flows and Liquidity" note published late last week, he looks at the recent action in the crypto space, where he finds that even bitcoin futures are now pointing towards extremely oversold territory...

... before turning his attention to stablecoins. Reminding readers that in a previous note he pointed to the high share, of almost 10% at the time, of stablecoins in total crypto market cap as a catalyst for further upside for crypto markets at the time, he next asks given the recent TerraUSD collapse, by how much has the share of stablecoins changed, and answers "Figure 19 updates the share of stablecoins for the most recent days. This share currently rose to above 14%, a new historical high which brings it to well above its trend since 2020." In other words, the JPM quant concludes, "the share of stablecoins in total crypto market cap looks excessively high pointing to oversold conditions and significant upside for crypto markets from here" (the full note is available to ZH professional subs).

While it remains to be seen if the JPM strategist is correct and this is the bottom, the pain for crypto investors is compounded by the fact that unlike traders in "traditional finance", or TradFi, who at least get to enjoy the weekend ahead of another turbulent week, and get to turn their machines off on Saturday and Sunday to get some sleep, as the crypto winter descends upon a three-day holiday weekend with forecasts for sunny skies in New York, those with heavy exposure to digital assets will remain glued to their screens, where crypto winter’s deadly blizzard shows little sign of letting up.

Here, one final comparison between TradFi and crypto traders: in the past decade, even a modest drop in stocks has always, without fail triggered the Fed to bail out markets and coddle an entire generation of bulls described aptly by Rabobank's Michael Every as currently being "in a ball hugging their knees in the corner, shaking their heads and staring into space." On the other hand, so far in its brief history bitcoin has survived three 70% drawdowns in its history - this will be the fourth one - and it has always come out stronger  on the other side without the Fed's help (in fact quite the contrary, as the Fed has traditionally done everything it can to terminally crush fiat alternatives). This time won't be any different, and once the dust settles, Powell capitulates and the liquidity firehose goes into overdrive again, a few years from today everyone will again be asking why they did not take advantage of today's buying opportunity...

The Great Reset: Turning Back The Clock On Civilization

 The good thing about the great reset is that it is not socially sustainable. We are only in the early phase and already societies a cracking at the joints. And it will get worse from there. They, the WEF, expect people to be silenced by their strategy of "shock and awe" but to this you must add, cold and dark as electricity fails, poor and hungry as the supply chain stutter. A lot of goodwill has been wasted with Covid. We are now entering a recession which risks becoming a depression, followed by social breakdown. Different countries will follow different paths. Japan has been shrinking steadily for over 30 years now with little tension but a critical mass of debt can easily implode the yen at any time in the coming months. This is when  non linear disturbances appear. We are getting very close to this point in many countries. Let's see how it goes but I expect very few predictions to be accurate as complex systems breakdown and impact each others.

Authored by Birsen Filip via The Mises Institute,

The covid-19 pandemic featured an unprecedented fusion of the interests of large and powerful corporations with the power of the state. Democratically elected politicians in many countries failed to represent the interests of their own citizens and uphold their own constitutions and charters of rights. Specifically, they supported lockdown measures, vaccine mandates, the suppression of a variety of early treatment options, the censorship of dissenting views, propaganda, interference in the private spheres of individuals, and the suspension of various forms of freedom. All of these policies and measures were centrally designed by the social engineers of the pandemic.

Globalists, who are obsessed with societal control, decided to take advantage of the pandemic in order to increase their authoritarian power. Prominent among them was, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of World Economic Forum (WEF). In June 2020, he stated that “the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” According to him, “every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”

It is no secret that the WEF has focused on accelerating the implementation of central planning for the entire global population since the early days of pandemic. This plan to establish a new world order, known as the Great Reset, was a key theme at the recent annual meeting of the WEF, which was held during May 22–26 in Davos, Switzerland.

Drastic changes to the world order like the Great Reset do not happen spontaneously; rather, they are designed by global policy makers, including influential billionaires, politicians, celebrities, biased academics, wealthy philanthropists, and the bureaucrats of international organizations and institutions. These types of people support social engineering, because it will enable them to acquire control over the world’s wealth and natural resources, and strengthen their ability to shape society as they see fit.

Like their predecessors across history, the social engineers of the WEF believe that “there must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide. It might produce something new, undreamt of in the philosophy of the planner.”

Based on the WEF agenda, the successful completion of the current industrial transformation will require redesigning and controlling every minuscule aspect of human life and behavior, including the private spheres of individuals, the economy, politics, and societal organizations, without the possibility of voluntary and spontaneous cooperation between individuals based on their will, values, thoughts, and beliefs. We were warned almost two centuries ago that when this type of tyrannical power succeeds, it will be “busy with a multitude of small” tasks penetrating “into private life,” governing families, and dictating the “actions” and “tastes of individuals.”

In fact, some of the most ridiculous controls proposed by the WEF included limiting the washing of jeans to no “more than once a month” and “pyjamas once a week.” The WEF also advocates for transforming entire food systems by encouraging people to consume insects, arguing that “insect protein has high-quality properties and can be used as an alternative source of protein throughout the food chain, from feed for aquaculture to ingredients for nutritional supplements for humans and pets.” Reforming the food system would also involve eating “cultured meat,” referring to “meat product created by cultivating animal cells in a controlled lab environment.”

The WEF also supports the elimination of “car ownership,” as “paying for a ride or delivery is as easy as tapping a smart phone app,” and “renting a vehicle” means that “car loans and insurance payments shrink or disappear.” Ultimately, the Great Reset aims to create a world where “you will own nothing, and will be happy” by 2030, as people will not possess any private property and rent everything they “need in life.”

However, this premise ignores the fact that private property ownership is associated with the advancement of civilizations, higher stages of material and moral development, and the development of modern family life. The WEF scenario would also diminish the sense of security, which is strengthened by the possession of private property.

Once the Great Reset is complete, individuals will essentially have their thinking and decision-making “done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name.” Such a “desire to force upon the people a creed which is regarded as salutary for them is … not a thing that is new or peculiar to our time.” However, as various totalitarian regimes throughout history have demonstrated, the oppressive central planning of social engineers leads to the masses' losing their sense of autonomy, freedom, dignity, creativity, and strength. Also lost is the incentive to improve one’s own condition and contribute to the progress of society.

If the social engineering of the WEF is successful, then, by 2030, one will not be able to rely on oneself, family members, relatives, friends, or the community. This is because the supporters any absolutist regime want traditions and customs to be corrupted, “memories obliterated, habits destroyed, … liberty, chased from the laws.”

In other words, they want to design a societal order where sympathy and mutual assistance will be rendered obsolete and where every citizen of the world is equally powerless, poor, and isolated, so that people will be unable to oppose the organized strength of global governance and become dependent on governments and their allies for their survival. Eventually, nothing will protect citizens any longer, and citizens will no longer protect themselves.

Social engineers of the WEF are essentially advocating for natural freedom, which would allow the strong to exercise their power while subjugating the weak. In doing so, they are basically calling for the world to move backward in the development of human history toward the reinstitution of feudalism and slavery. It is important to remember that economic freedom, positive freedom, political freedom, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are not attributes of primitive man or serfdom; rather, they are products of the most advanced stages of society.

To be more precise, these types of freedom are outcomes of the efforts of countless thinkers, social movements, revolutions, and wars throughout human history. However, social engineers are not interested in the history and struggles of our civilization, as they believe that they possess expertise in all areas, which is the line of thought at the heart of all dictatorial regimes. They do not think that social engineering is alien to the true nature of human beings, even though it is based on “mechanical exactness” and does not “spring from a man’s free choice.” Furthermore, advocates of social engineering ignore the fact that “the progress of mankind, in powers of mind and heart, in well-being and in technique, in law and morality, necessarily involves the participation of the lower classes.”

Anyone who believes that the social engineers of the WEF have noble intentions at heart as they design and implement the Great Reset should heed the warning of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1935), who (ironically) declared:

The doctrine of regulation and legislation by “master minds” in whose judgment and will all the people may gladly and quietly acquiesce, has been too glaringly apparent at Washington during these last 10 years. Were it possible to find “master minds” so unselfish, so willing to decide unhesitatingly against their own personal interests or private prejudices, men almost godlike in their ability hold the scales of justice with an even hand, such a government might be to the interests of the country; but there are no such on our political horizon, and we cannot expect a complete reversal of all the teachings of history.

The Engineered Stagflationary Collapse Has Arrived – Here's What Happens Next

 Slowly a possible future is emerging from the fog and it is not glorious. Market crash, stagflation, price controls followed by rationing. Covid and the war in Ukraine are just the rationals justifying policies which are in fact the consequences of earlier economic decisions. At this stage, a monetary crash is unavoidable. 10 or 100 trillion dollars away is almost the same with an exponential curve!  The convergence of crisis: food, energy, finance, ecology will only exacerbate the upheaval.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

In my 16 years as an alternative economist and political writer I have spent around half that time warning that the ultimate outcome of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus model would be a stagflationary collapse. Not a deflationary collapse, or an inflationary collapse, but a stagflationary collapse. The reasons for this were very specific – Mass debt creation was being countered with MORE debt creation while many central banks have been simultaneously devaluing their currencies through QE measures. On top of that, the US is in the unique position of relying on the world reserve status of the dollar and that status is diminishing.

It was only a matter of time before the to forces of deflation and inflation met in the middle to create stagflation. In my article ‘Infrastructure Bills Do Not Lead To Recovery, Only Increased Federal Control’, published in April of 2021, I stated that:

“Production of fiat money is not the same as real production within the economy… Trillions of dollars in public works programs might create more jobs, but it will also inflate prices as the dollar goes into decline. So, unless wages are adjusted constantly according to price increases, people will have jobs, but still won’t be able to afford a comfortable standard of living. This leads to stagflation, in which prices continue to rise while wages and consumption stagnate.

Another Catch-22 to consider is that if inflation becomes rampant, the Federal Reserve may be compelled (or claim they are compelled) to raise interest rates significantly in a short span of time. This means an immediate slowdown in the flow of overnight loans to major banks, an immediate slowdown in loans to large and small businesses, an immediate crash in credit options for consumers, and an overall crash in consumer spending. You might recognize this as the recipe that created the 1981-1982 recession, the third-worst in the 20th century.

In other words, the choice is stagflation, or deflationary depression.”

It’s clear today what the Fed has chosen. It’s important to remember that throughout 2020 and 2021 the mainstream media, the central bank and most government officials were telling the public that inflation was “transitory.” Suddenly in the past few months this has changed and now even Janet Yellen has admitted that she was “wrong” on inflation. This is a misdirection, however, because the Fed knows exactly what it is doing and always has. Yellen denied reality, but she knew she was denying reality. In other words, she was not mistaken about the economic crisis, she lied about it.

As I outlined last December in my article ‘The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error’:

‘First and foremost, no, the Fed is not motivated by profits, at least not primarily. The Fed is able to print wealth at will, they don’t care about profits – They care about power and centralization. Would they sacrifice “the golden goose” of US markets in order to gain more power and full bore globalism? Absolutely. Would central bankers sacrifice the dollar and blow up the Fed as an institution in order to force a global currency system on the masses? There is no doubt; they’ve put the US economy at risk in the past in order to get more centralization.’

The Fed has known for years that the current path would lead to inflation and then market destruction, and here’s the proof – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell actually warned about this exact outcome in October of 2012:

“I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.First, the question, why stop at $4 trillion? The market in most cases will cheer us for doing more. It will never be enough for the market. Our models will always tell us that we are helping the economy, and I will probably always feel that those benefits are overestimated. And we will be able to tell ourselves that market function is not impaired and that inflation expectations are under control. What is to stop us, other than much faster economic growth, which it is probably not in our power to produce?

When it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response. So there are a couple of ways to look at it. It is about $1.2 trillion in sales; you take 60 months, you get about $20 billion a month. That is a very doable thing, it sounds like, in a market where the norm by the middle of next year is $80 billion a month. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position.”

As we all now know, the Fed waited until their balance sheet was far larger and until the economy was MUCH weaker than it was in 2012 to unleash tightening measures. They KNEW the whole time exactly what was going to happen.

It is no coincidence that the culmination of the Fed’s stimulus bonanza has arrived right after the incredible damage done to the economy and the global supply chain by the covid lockdowns. It is no coincidence that these two events work together to create the perfect stagflationary scenario. And, it’s no coincidence that the only people who benefit from these conditions are proponents of the “Great Reset” ideology at the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions. This is an engineered collapse that has been in the works for many years.

The goal is to “reset” the world, to erase what’s left of free market systems, and to establish what they call the “Shared Economy” system. This system is one in which the people who survive the crash will be made utterly dependent on government through Universal Basic Income and one that will restrict all resource usage in the name of “carbon reduction.” According to the WEF, you will own nothing and you will like it.

The collapse is engineered to create crisis conditions so frightening that they expect the majority of the public to submit to a collectivist hive mind lifestyle with greatly reduced standards. This would be accomplished through UBI, digital currency models, carbon taxation, population reduction, rationing of all commodities and a social credit system. The goal, in other words, is complete control through technocratic authoritarianism.

All of this is dependent on the exploitation of crisis events to create fear in the population. Now that economic destabilization has arrived, what happens next? Here are my predictions…

The Fed Will Hike Interest Rates More Than Expected, But Not Enough To Stop Inflation

Today, we are witnessing the poisonous fruits of a decade-plus of massive fiat money creation and we are now at the stage where the Fed will reveal its true plan. Hiking interest rates fast, or hiking them slow. Fast hikes will mean an almost immediate crash in markets (beyond what we have already seen), slow hikes will mean a drawn out process of price inflation and general uncertainty.

I believe the Fed will hike more than expected, but not enough to actually slow inflation in necessities. There will be an overall decline in luxury items, recreation commerce and non-essentials, but most other goods will continue to climb in cost. It is to the advantage of globalists to keep the inflation train running for another year or longer.

In the end, though, the central bank WILL declare that the pace of interest rates is not enough to stop inflation and they will revert to a Volcker-like strategy, pushing rates up so high that the economy simply stops functioning altogether.

Markets Will Crash And Unemployment Will Abruptly Spike

Stock markets are utterly dependent on Fed stimulus and easy money through low interest rate loans – This is a fact. Without low rates and QE, corporations cannot engage in stock buybacks. Meaning, the tools for artificially inflating equities are disappearing. We are already seeing the effects of this now with markets dropping 20% or more.

The Fed will not capitulate. They will continue to hike regardless of the market reaction.

As far as jobs are concerned, Biden and many mainstream economists constantly applaud the low unemployment rate as proof that the American economy is “strong,” but this is an illusion. Covid stimulus measures temporarily created a dynamic in which businesses needed increased staff to deal with excess retail spending. Now, the covid checks have stopped and Americans have maxed out their credit cards. There is nothing left to keep the system afloat.

Businesses will start making large job cuts throughout the last half of 2022.

Price Controls

I have no doubt that Joe Biden and Democrats will seek to enforce price controls on many goods as inflation continues, and there will be a handful of Republicans that will support the tactic. Price controls actually lead to a reduction in supply because they remove all profits and thus all incentive for manufacturers to keep producing goods. What usually happens at that point is government steps in to nationalize manufacturing, but this will be substandard production and at a much lower yield.

In the end, supplies are reduced even further and prices go even higher on the black market because no one can get their hands on most goods anyway.

Rationing

Yes, rationing at the manufacturing and distribution level is going to happen, so be sure to buy what you need now before it does. Rationing occurs in the wake of price controls or supply chain disruptions, and usually this coincides with a government propaganda campaign against “hoarders.”

They will hold up a few exaggerated examples of people who buy truckloads of merchandise to scalp prices on the black market. Then, not long after, they will accuse preppers and anyone who bought goods BEFORE the crisis of “hoarding” simply because they planned ahead.

Rationing is not only about controlling the supply of necessities and thus controlling the population by proxy; it is also about creating an atmosphere of blame and suspicion within the public and getting them to snitch on or attack anyone that is prepared. Prepared people represent a threat to the establishment, so expect to be demonized in the media and organize with other prepared people to protect yourself.

Be Ready, It Only Gets Worse From Here On

It might sound like I am predicting success of the Great Reset program, but I actually believe the globalists will fail in the end. That’s not going to stop them from making the attempt. Also, the above scenarios are only predictions for the near term (within the next couple of years). There will be many other problems that stem from these situations.

Naturally, food riots and other mob actions will become more commonplace, perhaps not this year, but by the end of 2023 they will definitely be a problem. This will coincide with the return of political unrest in the US as leftist factions, encouraged by globalist foundations, demand more government intervention in poverty. At the same time, conservatives will demand less government interference and less tyranny.

At bottom, the people who are prepared might be called a lot of mean names, but as long as we organize and work together, we will survive. Many unprepared people will NOT survive. Understand that the economic conditions ahead of us are historically destructive; there is no way that serious consequences can be avoided for a large part of the population, if only because they refuse to listen and to take proper steps to protect themselves.

The denial is over. The crash is here. Time to take action if you have not done so already.