What really happened in 2020 with Corona virus?
The full understanding of this artificial crisis should be a scandal.
Interview of Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Listen carefully. This is important for the future of our society and it has nothing to do with the virus.
In 2020 the lie became the truth and since we have lived in an upside down world.
Difficult to present better our predicament than in the article below.
I believe that we will be at war sometimes in 2024. it is now unavoidable.
The catalyst is unknowable. Who will be our Archduke? Where will be our Sudetenland? Nobody knows. But conversely it is extremely predictable that they will emerge on schedule at the right or rather wrong time. It is unavoidable.
The debt in the US and Europe is about to explode, the dollar to implode and the real estate bubble in China to go pop. Soon enough war will look like a good, or rather less bad option to a lot of people.
Let's hope we still have some time before the cataclysm although the paroxysm of the crisis is now within sight. It is now that a brighter light-bulb in the White House would come handy!
Authored by Egon von Greyerz via GoldSwitzerland.com,
We are on the inevitable road to perdition for the world economy & financial system, ending in a potential global conflict of uncontrollable proportions.
Evil begets evil as The Cycle of Evil hits countries at the end of an uncontrollable debt expansion.
The pattern throughout history has always been the same – countries and empires, without fail, become victims of their own success -failure, whether it was the Mongols, Ottomans or the British.
As real growth ceases, a country starts to finance expansion with debt until it cannot even afford the interest on the debt, never mind the capital which it has no intention to repay.
At some point, the people, fearing a war or terrorist attack will approve of the leader’s fear mongering by supporting unlimited debt issuance. This is now happening in the US with regard to Ukraine and Israel.
Neither the US nor Europe is taking a single step to remedy the situation. Both are now in the Cycle of Evil of more deficits, more debt, higher interest costs, leading to more deficits, more debt higher interest costs, leading to ……………..
The Cycle of Evil is also accompanied by decadence and moral decline where leaders invent problems that are not real such as climate change, ESG (environmental, social and governance), forced vaccines and incarcerations, 25 new genders and other woke issues etc.
Few Americans understand that the next stage of the Cycle of Evil is about to hit them.
And even fewer Europeans have a clue that they will be dragged down into the same debt collapse quagmire.
The next stage will involve many banks failing, more than the FDIC or government can afford to save without destroying both the Currency and the Bond Market,
A collapsing currency and sovereign debt paper that no investor wants to touch with a bargepole is hardly the right climate for massive debt issuance.
Most sovereign investors have already realised that they don’t want US debt at any interest rate.
So that means even higher interest rates, more debt issuance as the Cycle of Evil eventually turns to a “Final Collapse” as von Mises described:
THE CYCLE OF EVIL CONTAINS MORE CATACLYSMIC COMPONENTS THAN ANY SIMILAR CYCLE IN HISTORY.
Let us summarise where the world is:
We have two wars both capable of leading to a major global conflict plus high risk of terrorism and jihads in the West. Just as with most global/world wars, there is no attempt at finding peace solutions.
To make things worse, there is not a single Statesman in the West capable of taking a lead in solving the conflicts.
We have a global debt burden of $330 trillion plus derivatives totalling $1.5-3 quadrillion with debt growing exponentially, especially in the US. This will very soon develop into a debt crisis and collapse of a heavily leveraged Western world plus Japan and China and also emerging markets.
The downturn and eventual collapse in the global economy will lead to poverty, famine and misery for a great number of people in the West and Emerging Markets.
This war started as a local conflict but with a US backed putsch in 2014, throwing out the democratically elected Russian friendly leader, this was the beginning of a war between Russia and the US and not a local war.
The Minsk agreement brokered by Germany and France was supposed to settle the matter but as Merkel recently admitted, the intent was never to create peace but to give enough time for Ukraine to arm with the help of the US.
The US forced Europe to take sides, in spite of Europe’s (especially Germany’s) dependence on Russian energy.
We can blame Russia for invading or we can blame the US for provoking Russia.
Rather than to go into all the arguments who is right and who is wrong, best to accept that we now have a global conflict stemming from the Ukraine situation. The US has a reluctant Europe on its side – a Europe which is militarily and economically weak. Russia has China, Iran, North Korea and a few others, most probably a militarily superior group.
A bankrupt USA just sends more money and weapons but has zero intent to send peacekeepers.
Thus there is no end in sight but the independent reporting tells us that Ukraine is unlikely to have a chance against the superior Russian war machine.
In the meantime an estimated 500,000 troops in total have died plus many more wounded and civilian casualties.
And still no peace attempt.
If the warring country’s leaders led from the front, which has been common in history, they would probably be less inclined to sacrifice more lives including their own.
This region has had ongoing conflicts throughout history. It was insoluble before 1948 and has become even more complex since 1948 when Israel was created.
Again, we have major powers involved with primarily the US and Europe supporting Israel and Iran, Turkey and major parts of the Arab-Muslim world supporting Palestine and also Russia.
The US is sending two aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean to assist Israel. But as a military expert pointed out, these are in modern warfare just two floating bathtubs which can be taken out easily by two missiles from for example Iran.
In this conflict there are also many casualties on both sides plus a massive number of Palestinians being homeless with little food or even medical help.
What makes this conflict even more serious is the major support in the West for the plight of the Palestinians. Massive protests in many countries can easily escalate to serious clashes or even civil war.
In addition, we can be certain that the massive migration from Muslim countries to the West will also contain many militant cells which could easily create havoc in the US and in many European countries.
Both Europe and the US basically has an open border policy for any migrant who wants to enter. But neither continent has the ability to properly take care of the migrants. This will risk both continents to be destabilised with both migrants and the native population not accepting the other side.
It is unlikely that China will abandon its claim that Taiwan rightfully belongs to them.
The US is already busy with two wars, assisting with an array of military equipment plus $100s of billions of financial aid. A third conflict with major US military involvement would be extremely unwelcome to the US government.
But that is exactly the right time to strike from China’s point of view.
China knows of course that seizing Taiwan, is likely to involve major US sanctions leading to reduced or no US imports from China leading to a major fall or collapse of global trade. It is doubtful that Europe or the rest of the world would comply with these sanctions.
It would also lead to freezing of China’s assets in the US of $1.7 trillion, including treasuries of $850 billion offset by US direct investments in China.
But if China seizes Taiwan, they would control 60% of the world’s semiconductor production and more importantly 90% of advanced semiconductors. This would be a very serious blow to US strategic industries including military equipment.
It is intellectually fascinating but humanly depressing to watch how all the pieces fall into place for a global conflict of a magnitude greater than WW1 or WW2.
It is frightening to see how one component after the next falls into place in the Cycle of Evil.
Nobody realised that the shooting of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary Franz Ferdinand in 1914 would be the catalyst for WW1.
Nor did anyone understand that Germany’s invasion of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938-9 and of Poland on September 1, 1939 would lead to WW2.
The two major conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine today with Taiwan looming combined with no attempt of peacemaking plus a likely collapse of the global financial system and world economy is more than enough to create devastation for the world for the next decade or more.
Let us sincerely hope that all these events in the
Cycle of Evil will not develop into global havoc.But even if that were
to be avoided, it is absolutely certain that global risk today is higher than at any time since the 1930s.
Here's a very interesting question: How do you heal a society after a traumatic experience such as war? In a nutshell, you forgive people and move on. It is of course difficult to do but essential if you do not want to get into a vicious cycle of punishment and reprisals.
The examples below concern the US after the Civil war and today but it applies similarly to Israel and Ukraine where in both case accumulated hatred prevents a solution to be found. If people must be punished for their deeds then why should they compromise in the first place? And sure enough they won't. War until the last man standing. Are we really unable to learn as a society?
Authored by Josiah Lippincott via American Greatness,
This week, the left-wing organization Swords into Plowshares began the process of melting down the statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The images from the ordeal contain deep spiritual significance. A profound sense of foreboding washed over my heart when I saw the bronze face of the Southern hero, glowing red hot moments before annihilation.
What the Leftists did to the statue of Lee is a vision of what they want to do to the rest of the country. The destruction of a nation’s symbols, the elimination of the reminders of its past, is a key part of the process of the destruction of a nation and its people.
The Left is correct: symbols have power. The destruction of a symbol, too, is an act of power. The statue of Lee that stood outside the University of Virginia and became a cultural war flashpoint during the Unite the Right rally in 2017 was not simply a Southern icon.
The Leftists denouncing America’s Confederate monuments as legacies of racism and slavery are perpetuating a vicious lie. In reality, these statues are symbols of national reunification and of the forgiveness that comes with peace. The Confederate monuments were part of the American mythology that sprang out of the Civil War. That struggle had been, in the account of the post-war generations, a bloody tragedy from which the nation emerged, reunited and refined with new purpose.
The Southern cause might have been unjust but the Southern soldier was still courageous. He was, after all, still an American, still a Christian, still a warrior.
In the figure of Robert E. Lee, the South found the epitome of its strength and a noble symbol of dignity in the face of profound tragedy. The statue of Lee at Charlottesville was dedicated in 1924. Edwin A. Alderman, the President of the University of Virginia, gave the dedication address. That speech is not available online, but an earlier address by Alderman, entitled “The National Spirit” that he gave in 1911 on the occasion of George Washington’s birthday to the Washington Association of New Jersey, is public. There Alderman articulates the post-war consensus, North and South, regarding the memory of the war.
The speech is worth reading in full, but I will dwell only on a few of the most relevant passages. Alderman begins by honoring the three great Americans he sees as symbols of the nation’s greatness: George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham Lincoln. He argues that these three men give the same “distinction” to America as Pericles and Leonidas gave to Greece. He explains that “one day” the “whole people, north and south and east and west” will see them as, “superlatively great men, great moral fires burning on the level plain of our existence, giving light and warmth to our national conscience and to our national ideals.”
Alderman honors Washington as an “incarnation of the very genius of integrity,” Lincoln as the “soul of democracy,” and Lee as the epitome of “duty and unselfish love and stainlessness of life.”
Alderman, a Southerner, reforges the sectional heroes of North and South as heroes of the whole, now re-united, nation. Lee is not, in Alderman’s account, a traitor and racist who needed to be punished but a hero of the nation and a patriot. Alderman can praise Lee as a national hero because, for him, the war was over. The South had been reintegrated into the Union. Part of that national reunification required the intentional assimilation of the South’s symbols into the nation’s collective consciousness. A new and cohesive national mythology was needed to justify and explain the nation’s reborn unity.
Alderman explicitly connects his monumental history of Lee to this national reunification and peace:
“…in this hour of reunion, reconciliation, of absolute forgetfulness of old strife, we can all see how, in those five quiet years at Lexington, [Lee] symbolized and marked out the future for every Southern man as it has come to pass and bade us live in liberal and lofty fashion, with hearts unspoiled by hate and eyes clear to see the needs of a new and mightier day in a new and mightier land.”
Alderman connects peace and the honor given to Lee as part of the “absolute forgetfulness of old strife.” This is a crucial point: peace requires forgetting. A war can only truly end with amnesty. The word “amnesty” shares a root, in the Greek, with “amnesia” or forgetting. To have peace and forgiveness we must literally provide an “amnesty” or a “forgetting” to our enemies. The same linguistic phenomenon in found in Latin. The Latin word meaning “to pardon”—ignoscere—literally means “to not know.”
War unleashes titanic human passions. Left to itself, every war by nature is a total war of annihilation.
Every act of violence within a war is itself the source of new recriminations and new violence. Without a peace treaty and the forgetting that comes with it, every war would go on forever or until one side completely annihilated the other.
A peace treaty bounds the terror and horror of war. The amnesty that comes with it, however, cannot bring true justice. In ordinary human life, every murderer must face judgment. Not so in a war bracketed by a peace treaty. To have peace, the victor chooses not to hunt down every enemy soldier and bring him to justice for killing the victor’s own troops.
If the victor were to choose the path of supposedly perfect justice then the peace treaty would be meaningless: the war and violence would continue until every last enemy soldier had been killed or punished. There is little incentive for the enemy to surrender in a total war; therefore, the conflict cannot end before extermination.
In order for there to be peace without annihilation, human beings must abandon a commitment to perfect justice. They must accept the tragic dimension to life. In this world we cannot have complete satisfaction. Whether we like it or not, we are beings bounded by mortality and by our own fundamental neediness.
The political utopian, however, refuses to accept reality. He cannot reconcile himself to the tragic dimension of life. A perfect world is possible if only we can rid ourselves of the manifestations of True Evil that hold back the springing forth of True Righteousness and Goodness.
Liberalism and communism, the twin revolutionary Leftist ideologies of the 20th century, are examples of this kind of political utopianism.
The destruction of the Lee monument reveals these movements’ insane moralism.
For the Leftist, communist and liberal alike, the symbols of our national reconciliation after the Civil War must be destroyed and our national reconciliation must be undone because the grounds of that peace were racist. The conclusion of the Civil War was not perfectly just. The South was still a bastion of intolerance and hatred. The Leftist condemns the North, too, for its willingness to reunite with vicious white supremacist demons.
The Civil War is not a tragedy in the liberal account but a morality play about the Oppressed fighting back against the Oppressors. The conflict is rich in theological significance for the liberal. In July of 2021, Nikuyah Walker, the first Black female mayor of Charlottesville argued that, “Taking down [the Lee] statue is one small step closer to the goal of helping Charlottesville, Virginia, and America, grapple with the sin of being willing to destroy Black people for economic gain.”
Liberals today are not relativists—far from it! They are in fact moral extremists willing to impose their beliefs by violence and cultural genocide if necessary. In their view, America is a land that has not yet grappled with its “sin” of racism. The revolutionary Left is here to bring about that moral reckoning.
There is no promise of forgiveness or mercy for the liberal, either. Reconstruction was not enough for the South just as de-Nazification was not enough for Germany. It can never be enough. The only way to deal with racists, Nazis, and deplorables, in the end, is to wipe them out.
This is why the Left, every time it comes into power in a country—be it the Soviets in Russia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the Red Guard in China—sets out on a campaign of exterminationist violence. In the Leftist mind, dedication to true justice requires the willingness to annihilate its enemies. In the communist account of the world, as in the liberal, there is an enemy (the capitalist/racist colonizer) who oppresses the downtrodden (the proletariat/non-Whites).
The solution to the problem is always the same: get rid of the oppressor.
By destroying the symbols of our national reconciliation the Left is symbolizing its willingness to restart the Civil War; it is throwing out the older peace and rejecting the forgetting that made it possible. I predict that, unless some great act of human prudence or fortune intervenes, the Left will perpetrate in the 21st century acts of violence and repression in America on the same scale as it carried them out in Europe and Asia in the 20th.
These last few years have already witnessed an attempt to turn the whole planet into an open-air prison camp in the name of medical science and “health.” That was not the end of the ideological insanity in our time but the beginning. The 21st century planetary Leftist consensus will find new outlets for its life-hating resentment. We can be sure of that. As our leaders become more delusional and ideological we can expect their appetite for violence and punishment to increase.
The forces of barbarism and a return to the crushing tyranny of the lowest common denominator of human life are growing in power. We cannot ignore this reality. The time may soon be coming when the defenders of the West must beat their plowshares back into swords.
We may pray that it will not come to this, but the revolutionaries have already ripped up the old foundations of peace and promise a new birth of war. The darkened eyes of the bronze hero stare at us from across the void, symbolizing the closing of the old order and foretelling a new crisis.
Do not look away.
Are electric vehicles the symbol of all what is wrong with our society?
A false solution to a false problem?
The Problem: Are temperatures rising? Yes they are, slightly. They have been rising about 1.5 C since 1880 which is nothing exceptional since at that time temperatures were historically low. Will they keep rising? Probably since we are still below the peaks of the Middle Age optimum and earlier, the Roman optimum.
To believe we have a problem, you have to make the assumption, as the IPCC does, that the rate of growth will increase substantially. But the fact is that these are only projections based on models which represent reality poorly. We simple do not know.
The solution: Electric Vehicles which are supposed to produce less CO2 and therefore less warming. But do they?
They are cleaner, that's for sure and therefore a good urban solution if you care about clean air but do they really reduce the amount of CO2 produced? It depends how you calculate. Electricity is not a primary energy and therefore its CO2 cost depends very much on how you produce it without forgetting that there is a significant loss just to produce the electricity.
And then of course there is the issue of batteries, full of expensive metals and minerals and then again, isn't it wasteful to transport hundreds of kilograms of batteries wherever you go?
So in the end, if you produce your electricity with gas, or worse coal, you are probably contributing nothing for the planet. What we are left with is the feel good factor!
And then we have the other concerns related to EV: Range anxiety, batteries burning easily, lack of electric stations, time to charge...
In the end, it may be that for many people EV are not an ideal solution to put it mildly. And if that's the case, we will probably see the growth rate of EV production plateau sooner than expected.
In the end, it is likely that in urban areas, EV will slowly become ubiquitous. But in the countryside, it is difficult to imagine that they can compete with older gas powered automobiles. As for transportation, forget about it. Short of a revolution concerning the batteries, a real competitive electric truck is a fanciful proposition, just as an electric plane. The density of energy in batteries is just not enough.
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Stephen Moore, senior economist at FreedomWorks and once a senior economic adviser to former President Donald Trump, has issued a grim prediction about America's electric vehicle (EV) market, saying EVs are poised to be automakers' "next big flop."
Mr. Moore's grim prediction for the EV market came in an interview on Fox News's "Varney & Co." program on Oct. 30 and an op-ed in The Daily Caller on Oct. 29, in which the economist compared the current EV push to the failed rollout of the Ford Edsel.
"One of the textbook marketing flops of all time was the Ford Edsel sedan, which was heralded as the hot new car in the late 1950s," he wrote in the op-ed.
At the time of the Edsel launch, automotive experts widely expressed the view that the sedan—named after Henry Ford's son—would be a sure thing. However, instead of sales in the hundreds of thousands, as experts generally predicted at the time, the Edsel sold a paltry 10,000 or so units and was discontinued.
A key factor behind the Edsel's flop is, according to Mr. Moore, that the car was pushed on a public that didn't want it.
"The obvious lesson for the industry: you can’t bribe Americans to buy cars they don’t want. Given the all-in approach mentality for EVs at Ford and GM, it’s clear that Detroit never got this message," he wrote.
Even though the Biden administration has been pushing EVs on the public, including an offer of a $7,500 subsidy, less than 10 percent of all new car sales over the past two years were electric, according to a study published in early September by GOBankingRates.
More recently, executives at General Motors, Ford, and Mercedes-Benz conceded that there's weakening demand for EVs, with some announcing they would pull back on their own EV targets.
Mr. Moore says that waning EV demand is a possible signal that, aside from a relatively small fraction of early adopters of new technologies, buyers on the whole are simply not that interested.
"The Edsel was one of the great flops of all time," Mr. Moore told Fox News in an interview. "I'm here to tell you, if these trends continue, we're going to see the EV market become the next big flop because car buyers don't want them."
Market research firm Canalys estimates that global sales of EVs rose 49 percent in the first half of this year, down from last year's 63 percent pace of growth.
Speaking at an auto show in Japan last week, Toyota chairman and former CEO Akio Toyoda told reporters that waning EV demand is a sign that people are waking up to the reality that EVs aren't the silver bullet against the supposed ills of carbon emissions they're often made out to be.
"People are finally seeing reality" about EV technology, Mr. Toyoda told reporters ahead of the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo last week, speaking in his capacity as the head of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, the organizer of the event.
Mr. Toyoda has been a long-time skeptic of a full-steam-ahead adoption of EVs. He stepped down from his role as CEO of Toyota this year amid criticism that he wasn't serious enough about pushing the company into a quick adoption of battery-powered cars.
Mr. Toyoda's response to journalists who asked for his thoughts about falling EV demand, suggests he feels vindicated in his reluctance.
"There are many ways to climb the mountain that is achieving carbon neutrality," he said while implying that consumers are finally waking up from a dreamscape pushed by climate change alarmists that puts EVs on a pedestal and overhypes their benefits while downplaying their drawbacks.
His remarks came as demand growth for EVs in various markets has slowed, leading some companies to dial back their electrification plans.
Honda and General Motors announced last week that they were scrapping a $5 billion plan to develop EVs together, while GM saidg that it was slowing its electrification strategy.
GM is "moderating the acceleration of EV production to protect our pricing, adjust to slower near-term growth in demand and implement engineering changes that will bolster profits," GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson said during an Oct. 24 earnings call with reporters in which he revealed that the weeks-long strike by unionized auto workers had already cost the company $800 million and counting.
Ford said earlier this month that it would temporarily cut one of three shifts at a plant that builds its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck after slowing its EV ramp-up in July.
More recently, Ford CEO Jim Farley said in an earnings call with investors last week that the situation with EVs has been "challenging."
"Matter of fact, our business is never short of challenges, especially right now with the evolution of the EV market and new global competitors from China, as well as the technology disruptions," he said. "A great product is not enough in the EV business anymore," he said, adding that "we have to be totally competitive on cost" because "affordability is an issue" for consumers.
As a result, Ford has suspended $12 billion in EV spending on manufacturing capacity.
"Given the dynamic EV environment, we are being judicious about our production and adjusting future capacity to better match market demand," said Ford CFO John Lawler on Thursday.
"All told, we have pushed about $12 billion of EV spend, which includes capex, direct investment, and expense," he added.
While Mr. Toyoda argued at the Japan auto show that people were becoming more clear-eyed about the drawbacks of EVs, the current Toyota CEO and president, Koji Sato, talked up their benefits.
Mr. Sato spoke at an Oct. 25 press briefing at the Japan Mobility Show, kicking off his presentation by hyping up EVs.
"The first story is our future life with battery EVs," he said, according to a transcript of his remarks. "They are not only eco-friendly. Electric cars also offer their own flavor of driving fun and automotive seasoning."
He talked up other apparent benefits of EVs, namely lower center of gravity and a more spacious interior, calling it "value that only battery EVs can offer."
"In these cars, the scenery looks completely different," he said.
But while lower center of gravity and more roomy interiors will likely be welcome by some drivers, unless automakers can figure out how to overcome "range anxiety," they may find EV adoption will wane further.
A major worry among Americans considering the wisdom of switching to an EV is range anxiety, which is the fear of driving an EV and running out of power without being able to find a charging port—and ending up stranded on the side of the road.
A recent study by the American Automobile Association (AAA) found that EV range can fall by up to a quarter when the vehicle is carrying heavy loads.
“Range anxiety remains a top reason consumers are hesitant to switch from gasoline-powered vehicles to EVs,” Adrienne Woodland, spokesperson for AAA, said in a statement.
Another recent study by consultancy Ernst & Young—in collaboration with European energy industry body Eurelectric—found that range anxiety is the second-most cited concern about switching to an EV, with a lack of public charging stations in the top spot.
The study points to an estimated need for 68.9 million chargers across the United States and Canada by 2035 to support the pace of the EV transformation.
President Joe Biden has set a goal of 50 percent of all new vehicles by 2030 being either EVs or plug-in hybrids.
Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
Japan will crash eventually. The only question is when!
Left on their own, the Japanese would probably manage to degrow for a long time as they did following the bursting of their real estate bubble in the 1990s. But this cannot happen this time because the Japanese economy is too closely integrated to the global supply chain so soon enough the pressure will become overwhelming.
This is the main reason why we can't have a recession these days. It would just collapse the immense castle of cards we have built. It is just a matter of time.
Japan is in the midst of a slow-motion train wreck. The country has a massive national debt and it is starting to feel the pressure of rising interest rates. In his podcast, Peter Schiff talked about the situation in Japan and pointed out some disturbing parallels to what’s happening in the US.
The Japanese yen against the dollar has fallen to the lowest level in more than 20 years. The yen is tanking because of the ongoing money creation program by the Japanese central bank. It is still running quantitative easing in order to support its bond market.
The national debt in Japan is around $9 trillion. That is well over 200% of the country’s GDP. Interest payments on the debt make up about a quarter of the country’s government expenditures. But that’s with extremely low bond yields. If yields were to increase to 4%, the debt payment would grow larger than the current expenditures for the entire government. Peter called it a “slow-motion train wreck.”
Obviously, this is a disaster not just waiting to happen, but it is guaranteed to happen.”
The Japanese central bank carefully controls bond yields. It is currently targeted at 100 basis points. While still a low yield in the big scheme of things, it is high for Japanese bonds. Peter said the problem is that 100 basis points aren’t going to work any better than 50.
Nobody in their right mind is going to lend the Japanese government money for 10 years for 1% when inflation is already 3% based on the way they measure. it.”
Ironically, the Japanese government and central bank view this higher inflation as a victory over “too low” inflation.
They’ve already lost. They’re not victorious over anything. Because, remember, low inflation was never the problem that Japan had. They had problems, but low inflation wasn’t one of them. But now they have a high inflation problem. This is a real problem, especially when you have as much debt as the Japanese government does, and the market is starting to adjust because interest payments are going to skyrocket.”
The Japanese central bank is in a predicament because if it stops buying bonds, yields will spike even more. That means the Japanese government either has to raise taxes or cut spending, or the central bank just has to keep printing money and buying bonds.
It becomes a self-perpetuating spiral because the more bonds the Bank of Japan buys to keep rates from going up, the more upward pressure is on rates because they have to create inflation and drive down the value of the yen in order to prop up the price of these bonds and keep the interest expense artificially low for the government.”
The Bank of Japan currently owns about 45% of the country’s outstanding debt. That’s about double the percentage of US national debt the Federal Reserve owns.
Imagine what would happen if the Bank of Japan switched to quantitative tightening and tried to shrink its balance sheet.
And yet people still think the US can get away with a massive national debt because Japan has. As Peter said in a previous podcast, the US is more like Argentina than Japan.
There are other things that enabled Japan to get away with this much debt for as long as it has. But they didn’t get away with it in the sense that they’re not going to have to suffer the consequences. They’re going to suffer the consequences. They’re just going to be worse, but they’re going to be felt later.”
But in one sense, the US is similar to Japan. Its national debt is also a ticking time bomb. America is also buried in debt and it’s about to see its own interest payments go through the roof.
In the 1990s, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin began borrowing using low-interest, short-term debt. Since interest rates were artificially low, this lowered the federal government’s interest payments even further. It was a short-sighted policy that worked as long as rates remained low. But rates aren’t low anymore. Over the next three years, 50% of the debt matures. It will have to be refinanced at much higher interest rates. That means Uncle Sam’s interest payments are poised to go through the roof.
Syria is the next key to the expanding conflict in the Middle East.
If Syria falls, the US can maintain its hegemony a little longer.
If not, we enter a multi-polar world.
We are currently in a logic of war. Israel wants war with Hezbollah and Iran and the US is supporting such a move without giving it much thought. Russia would quickly be dragged in as well as China eventually. The 3rd World War may be just weeks away!
I do not believe a CBDC system is workable but it doesn't mean Central Banks will not try to implement it.
12 years ago, the great Tohoku earthquake of magnitude 9,0 struck Japan. Following severe shaking, in many areas electricity was gone. I started walking around 4pm, in a cold early March evening and soon enough it was getting dark around me. After 5 or 6 km I found a bicycle shop still open. Another 60 km to walk. I wasn't going to be able to do it on foot.
I entered to ask if they still had bicycles for sale and sure enough, although the guy had already sold all the cheaper models, he offered a very good price on a better one. I said OK but there was a catch: Cash only! The credit card machine wasn't working. Luckily I had just been to the bank to take some cash that day at lunch time just before the quake. The next 7 hours were long, very cold, first in the city with sand on the road due to soil liquefaction then in a pitch dark countryside, but I finally made it home that night around 1am exhausted but safe.
Without the cash in my wallet, I would have walked for hours without a snowball chance in hell to make it before the following afternoon, if at all. I learned two things on that day: You must stay fit and having some cash with you is a great idea in case of emergency.
The problem is that in most developed countries, we have been on a roll with plush lives where inconvenience consists in a bad signal on your mobile. But what if this changes suddenly for reasons like weather, war, catastrophes? How long can we stay without food? How far can you go? How fast will they repair electricity if the system breaks down? If you never had the experience, it sounds implausible. But when you do, you look at things differently. CBDC is all very nice and neat in a perfect world but we live in a very in-perfect one. Don't let life reminds you, the lesson can be a harsh one and the path from individual to statistics a short one!
Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,
Where were you on March 9, 2022, when President Biden signed the death warrant on American freedom?
On that day, in a hushed ceremony at the White House without the approval of Congress, the states or the American people, Biden signed into law Executive Order 14067.
Buried in his order are a few paragraphs, titled Section 4. The language in Section 4 makes Order 14067 the most treacherous act by a sitting president in the history of our republic.
That’s because Section 4 sets the stage for legal government surveillance of all U.S. citizens, total control over your bank accounts and purchases and the ability to silence all dissenting voices for good.
In this new war on freedom, they aren’t coming for your guns. No, they’re thinking much bigger than that.
They’re coming for your money.
And it’s already started. These efforts are stepping up and taking on a nefarious tone that also involves surveillance and loss of our freedoms under the guise of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), or Biden Bucks as I call them.
If you had asked me about this two years ago, I would have said the U.S. is taking a rather studious approach to it. It was too important to not be involved in, but the U.S. did not seem to be in any hurry to actually implement it.
There were studies, and I would have said my estimate at the time would have been, “OK, China has it. Europe, maybe another year. The U.S. might be three or four years down the road because the dollar’s too important. They don’t want to race into it. They want to get it right. There are a lot of ways to mess it up.”
But that’s changed under Joe Biden.
Biden has now fast-tracked this thing.
We’ve moved pretty quickly from what I would call a research phase to an implementation phase. So I give it the name Biden Bucks, because Joe Biden will prove to have been responsible for actually implementing this at a very quick tempo in the United States.
CBDCs are digital money, not cryptocurrencies. The differences between CBDCs and crypto are important.
Cryptocurrencies are recorded on a blockchain, which is a particular type of ledger that shows every transaction ever made in each currency.
Cryptos also claim to offer anonymity and decentralization, which are said to be virtues but are actually fatal flaws because the “anonymity” is a greater cover for crime and fraud.
I worked with the U.S. Strategic Command to unravel crypto ownership when Isis was using digital tokens to finance its caliphate in 2015–2016. It’s not easy to pierce the veil, but it can be done.
By contrast, CBDCs do not use blockchain; they have a digital ledger accounting system, but it’s not a blockchain. They’re the opposite of decentralized; they are highly centralized under the control of a single issuer, usually a central bank.
There’s no anonymity. The issuer knows every account holder and every transaction — that’s the whole idea.
CBDCs are promoted on the idea that transactions are faster, cheaper and more secure when all money is digital and controlled by a government.
Compared with credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers, Venmo and PayPal, that may be true. Those systems have multiple intermediaries and layers of fees, so CBDCs may actually be able to streamline payments and make the payment system more efficient.
But while the government positions CBDCs as a benefit to consumers in performing transactions, including faster settlements, better security, ease of use and transaction costs that are lower than with cash, it’s also crucial to think through the implications of the technology and how it could negatively affect the economy and our individual rights.
The first part of the hidden agenda is to eliminate cash. If you’re the government and you want the central bank digital currency to succeed, you have to eliminate cash because it’s your competition.
Cash is anonymous. If you pay for something with cash, the purchase can’t be directly tied to you. That’s not true of Biden Bucks.
The government knows exactly what you’re buying, to whom you’re making donations and (by extension) what you’re reading based on which books you buy, etc.
That means we’ve come very far down the road toward thought control, censorship and selective law enforcement against political enemies.
It’s a government that looks like the state ruled by Big Brother in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The government might want to freeze your account, they might want to seize your assets, they might want to put an expiration date on your money.
Imagine you get paid and the government says, “OK, you got the money. Nice job, but that money is going to evaporate or disappear if you don’t spend it in the next six months.” How’s that for a stimulus program?
None of these things is possible if there’s cash around. But if you get rid of cash and force everyone into a digital system, then you can do these kinds of things.
That means fiscal policy can actually be dictated by Biden Bucks. With total control of your money, the government can conduct fiscal policy at will.
What if the government wanted to stimulate the economy and increase the amount of consumer spending? They could simply send you a letter that states, for example, “You must spend $200 in the next 30 days or we will take $100 out of your account as a penalty.”
As most citizens will not want to risk losing $100, they will spend the amount requested and create stimulus in the economy as the government had wanted.
This could also work in the opposite direction. Say the government wanted to cool down the economy and not have as much money in circulation. They could encourage savings by requesting a certain balance in your account be kept and not spent.
If you went under that set balance, a penalty would be triggered.
All that being said, the digital takeover of the financial system is not an all-or-nothing event, and it will happen in stages and not all at once. When the CBDCs are finally rolled out, it may be a bit of an anticlimax if private companies have already eliminated cash and invaded privacy on their own.
For example, the Italian bank Intesa SanPaolo has begun forcing customers to use an all-digital mobile phone service with no ability for customers to visit a branch or interact with a human bank official.
This is exactly what the world of CBDCs will be like except that a private bank will be doing the dirty work and not waiting for a government mandate. The CBDC effort in Europe will inevitably involve the European Central Bank (ECB) since they are the issuer of the euro and will be in charge of the digital ledger of transactions.
Still, private banks are not waiting for the ECB and are laying the groundwork today for a world without cash or human bankers.
All that’s left is a digital ledger and total surveillance of everything you do.
Again, the endgame for CBDCs would closely resemble George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four. It would be a world of negative interest rates, forced tax collection, government confiscation, account freezes and constant surveillance.
You might not be able to fight back easily in the world of Biden Bucks, but it can be done.
There is one nondigital, nonhackable, nontraceable form of money you can still use.
It’s called gold (and silver). I urge you to get your hands on some while you still can.
EV are fantastic toys for rich people who have everything else and need to feel good "saving the planet" while staying put in their comfortable lifestyles.
For everybody else they are too expensive, have a limited use and range, cost a fortune to repair and belong to a dystopian future of smart cities where your every move is monitored.
How could we get so much so wrong so fast?
Authored by Mark P. Mills via RealClear Wire,
This essay is based on the opening remarks delivered at a recent SOHO Forum Debate on electric vehicles.
If we could imagine a time machine bringing to New York City, an American citizen from the 19th century, odds are the one thing that would seem the most amazing about our time would be the proliferation of the personal automobile. Big buildings, big cities, roads, nighttime illumination would all be imaginable, even if different looking and greater in scale. But the one thing radically different about modern daily life is the convenience and freedoms that come from a car.
Yes, that 19th century citizen would probably be puzzled by people staring at glowing rectangles in their hands. In fact, the personal computer and the personal car are co-equal in their transformative impacts. MIT historian Leo Marx put it well when he wrote that: “To speak . . . of the ‘impact’ of ... the automobile upon society makes little more sense . . .than to speak of the impact of the bone structure on the human body.”
The centrality of the car in the social and economic structure of society is evidenced by how citizens have voted with their pocketbook. A car is the single most expensive product that 98% of consumers ever purchase. Over 90% of American households own or have access to a car. Average household spending on personal mobility is the second biggest expense after mortgage or rent.
And there’s nothing to the trope that the rising generations will abandon automobiles. A recent MIT analysis found Millennials exhibit no difference in “preferences for vehicle ownership” and in fact drive more miles per year than Boomers. As for Gen Zs, the share of cars bought by that cohort has increased five-fold in the past five years.
Finally, to finish framing why cars matter, let’s consider what used to be called telecommuting, Zooming and remote working, especially following the epic exodus caused by the destructive Lockdowns of 2020. Surveys show the lockdowns accelerated a trend that was already underway, one of a huge swath of Americans moving to suburbs or rural areas. It’s a trend that invariably leads to a greater need for cars and distances driven.
Now come politicians in a dozen states—and the EPA via a creative exercise of regulatory authority—with plans to to ban the right to purchase a car with an internal combustion engine, the kind of car that 98% of Americans own, and the kind of car that 98% of average-incomed Americans still buy. The goal of the bans is not, we’re told, to deny any citizen the ability to own or afford a useful car. Instead, as everyone knows, it is in service of the goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions by mandating the use of so-called zero-emission electric vehicles. EVs for all. The process of “transitioning” to EVs for everyone, everywhere, we’re also told will be painless because EVs are inevitably taking over the entire automobile market because they are—it is said—simpler, better, and easier to use, and “cleaner.”
And now the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises a gusher of money to induce that transition. Let’s stipulate the obvious – one doesn’t need subsidies and mandates to convince people and businesses to buy products that are inherently radically better and cheaper.
But, assuming that the inflationary legislation isn’t reversed by a future Congress, the IRA’s push for an energy transition will deploy $2 to $3 trillion, (when it’s fully ‘costed’ to include unfunded mandates and in-perpetuity subsidies), half of which will be for EVs and related infrastructures. You can buy a lot of obeisance with that kind of money. With so much money combined with political mandates and PR momentum, we should not be surprised to find no auto maker dare avoid genuflecting to the grand vision of an all-EV future. But money can’t buy a change in the laws of physics and underlying engineering realities.
The ostensible inevitability, the enthusiasm, the subsidies, and the mandates for EVs are anchored in three claims:
All three of these claims are simply wrong.
Start with the core claim that “they’re simpler.” Yes, conventional cars have complex thermo-mechanical systems. Engines and automatic transmissions are made from hundreds of components, although mated with a very simple fuel system, a tank holding a liquid with a one-moving-part pump. EVs, inversely, have a simple motor made from a few parts. However, the EV fuel tank is a complex electrochemical system made from hundreds, sometimes thousands of parts including a cooling system, sensors, safety systems, and a boatload of power electronics. EVs aren’t simpler, they’re just differently complex.
The illusion of EV simplicity has relevance to the strike underway by the United Autoworkers Union. EVs do not entail less labor to build, but instead shift where the labor takes place. The data show that, overall, while about 80 people are employed per 1,000 conventional cars produced, Tesla, the world’s biggest EV maker—for now—employs about 90 people per 1,000 cars produced per year.
Seem strange? Consider just the labor to make the two different drive trains. Again, take Tesla and specifically its trend-setting Nevada “gigafactory” where public data shows about 8 people are employed per 1,000 EV drivetrains produced – that’s electric motor plus battery. The combined employment at conventional engine and transmission factories is just 4 people per 1,000 drivetrains. That’s the inverse of the EV labor argument. And there’s more to the labor story, realities that have implications for emissions and costs.
Look upstream at the primary materials sent to the factories to fabricate the vehicles. Steel and iron make up about 85% of the weight of a conventional car. That upstream supply chain requires less than one person per 1,000 vehicles produced. Meanwhile, most of the weight of an EV is found in more exotic, so-called energy minerals, from copper and aluminum to, obviously, lithium, and also nickel, cobalt, manganese, and rare earths like neodymium. That upstream supply chain employs roughly 30 people for every 1,000 EVs. Of course, all that labor is elsewhere since the mines and refineries are not in America.
But before turning to cost and emissions implications of the upstream realities, we need to address the claim that EVs are simpler to fuel.
It’s obvious that the imagined all-EV future requires on-road fast-charging. First, the total labor to deliver the same energy to EV fueling stations is greater than it is for the gasoline infrastructure… something that will necessarily, ultimately impact costs. But setting that aside (and that’s a lot to set aside), the lie of the simpler-to-fuel is in the nature of electrical engineering for fast-charging batteries. The so-called superchargers offer, instead of overnight fueling, 80% charge in 30 to 40 minutes. This is only fast if it’s not compared to the 3 to 4 minutes it takes to fill up a gasoline tank. Long refueling times will translate into long lines at EV fueling stations as well as the need for five to 10 times more charging ports than fuel pumps.
That won’t be convenient, simple, or cheap. Each supercharger costs two to three times more than a gasoline pump. And, because superchargers necessarily operate at 100 times the power level of an overnight home-charger, that translates into staggering requirements for grid infrastructure upgrades. Today roadside fuel stations have the electric demand of a 7-Eleven; but convert those to EV fueling station and every one of them will have the electric demand of a steel mill – and highways will need thousands of them.
Enthusiasts are either unaware of or profoundly naïve about the time and cost challenges of all that. The naivety extends in particular regarding the materials demands for the quantities of copper needed for all the wires and transformers that will be required to replace cheap steel pipes and tanks. And the metal demands of the electric infrastructure will necessarily be piled on top of an unprecedented increase in demand for metals and minerals to fabricate the EVs.
While copper is the long pole in the tent, it is only one of the mineral challenges. The realities of costs and emissions for EVs is dominated by a simple fact: a typical EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds to replace the fuel, and the tank weighing together under 100 pounds. That half-ton battery is made from a wide range of minerals including copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, cobalt, manganese, and of course, lithium. And to get the materials to fabricate that half-ton battery requires digging up and processing some 250 tons of the earth somewhere on the planet. Those numbers, it’s important understand, are roughly the same no matter what the specific battery chemical formulation is, whether it’s lithium nickel manganese, or the popularly cited lithium iron phosphate.
And yes, that EV tonnage should be compared to the combined tonnage of metals and the weight of the oil used to produce and fuel a conventional car. Even if you compare those numbers, over a 10-year lifespan of both kinds of cars the EV still entails a ten-fold greater extraction and handling of materials from the earth, and far, far more acreage of land disturbed and, unfortunately, often polluted.
The astronomical quantity of materials needed for EVs has led proponents to claim that there are, after all, enough minerals on the planet and there’s nothing to worry about. And anyway, they say, we can recycle to reduce the monumental materials requirements. But recycling will be irrelevant for a long time since manufacturers claim EV batteries will last a decade. That means there won’t be anything significant available to begin recycling until the early 2030s, long after the world has had to face up to the biggest expansion of global mining in history.
As for the underlying geological resources to supply the suite of energy minerals: Of course there are enough of all those on planet Earth, and even in America. That’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the data show that, overall, the mines operating and planned can’t supply even a small fraction of the 400% to 7000% increase in demand for minerals that will be needed within a decade to meet the ban-the-engine goals. What’s relevant is that the IEA has told us we’ll need hundreds of new mega-mines, and that it takes 10 to 16 years to find, plan and open a new mine. You can, as they say, do the math on that.
The need to supply astonishing quantities of battery materials is also where we find the core problem with the claims for big EV emissions and cost savings.
Since over 70% of the price of an EV battery comes from the costs of just buying the basic materials needed – that means the future price of EVs is dominated by the future costs of those basic materials and is dependent on guesses about the future of foreign mining and minerals industries, not the labor and automation prowess at domestic assembly plants. Over the past half-dozen years, the often-cited long-run, rapid decline in battery costs has slowed dramatically. And now prices have increased some 20% since 2021. So far, that’s with EVs still under 10% of total vehicle production. We’re still in early days of minerals demands.
And it’s with the acquisition of key materials where we find flaws with the core claims for emissions. The energy used and thus emissions from producing a pound of copper, nickel, and aluminum, for example, is two to three times greater than for steel. The numbers are higher for the other minerals. Importantly, as researchers at the Argonne National Labs have pointed out, relevant data for all the battery materials “remain meager to nonexistent, forcing researchers to resort to engineering calculations or approximations.”
That means every emissions claim is a rough estimate or an outright guess based on averages, approximations, assumptions, or aspirations. There are huge variables and uncertainties in the emissions from energy-intensive mining and the processing of minerals used to make EV batteries. The simple fact is that no one knows how much CO2 emissions will decline as materials production rises to build more EVs. And all of the key variables point to higher, not lower, emissions in the future.
The energy used to obtain a pound of metal depends on the size, nature, and location of the mine. For copper, that number can vary at least two-fold, and for nickel by three-fold. Getting accurate information is complicated by the fact that 80%–90% of relevant minerals are mined and refined outside the U.S. and E.U. and will be for a long time regardless of subsidies. And, since China refines 50%–90% of the world’s suite of energy minerals for EVs, it’s relevant that its grid is two-thirds coal-fired—and will be for a long time.
There is a dishonesty at the center of all the facile claims about big EV emissions reductions. In fact, nearly all studies making emissions claims are worse than guesses, the estimates frequently cherry-pick low numbers for what’s really happening upstream. A meta-study of 50 different technical studies found the estimates of emissions varied by over 300%. And, worse, that analysis exposed the fact that most emissions claims were based on assuming use of a small 30 kWh battery. That’s one-third the size of batteries actually used in most EVs. Triple the battery size and you triple the upstream emissions – and you triple the demand and thus price-pressure for the minerals.
Upstream minerals emissions not only offset the savings from not burning gasoline but, as the demand for battery minerals explodes, the net emissions savings shrink and could even vanish. Reasonable, even likely scenarios will lead to EVs causing a net increase in global emissions. Geologists have long documented that ore grades have been and will continue declining. That’s because global ore grades are declining – for the non-cognoscenti, that means for each new ton of mineral there’s a steady and unavoidable increase in the quantity of rock dug up and processed. A decrease of just 0.4% in copper ore grade will require seven times more energy to access the copper.
Unlike cars with internal combustion engines, it’s impossible to measure an EV’s CO2 emissions. And, unlike cars where those emissions are the same wherever or whenever the car is made or used, EV emissions vary wildly depending on how it’s made and where it’s used. While, self-evidently, there are no emissions while driving an EV, emissions occur elsewhere—not only upstream before the first mile is ever driven, but also when the vehicle is parked to refuel. The latter, emissions from the grid, is also far more complex than simplistic forecasts assume. Real-world emissions from charging depend on precisely where and exactly when it’s done. The refuel emissions can vary from near zero on a sunny day in some states and, in other states and times, to the same or more than would have come from burning gasoline.
None of this means that the lithium battery doesn’t deserve a pivotal place in history. Its invention was consequential for many reasons, nearly all of which have little to do with EVs. Nor do the inconvenient complexities of mining and grids mean there won’t be many more EVs in the future. Today’s fleet of nearly 20 million EVs globally—notably half of which are in coal-burning China—will doubtless balloon to hundreds of millions of EVs on global roads in the coming couple of decades. But even such dramatic growth would mean that EVs would by then account for barely 15% of all consumer vehicles, and far tinier share of industrial and commercial vehicles.
By way of analogy, the future of EVs in land transportation ecosystems will end up echoing, in market share terms and for similar operational reasons, the role of helicopters in aviation. Helicopters offer very different and, in many applications, far more useful even essential features compared to conventional fixed-wing aircraft. That’s why there’s a very significant $60 billion a year global market for helicopters. Even so, helicopters are only 15% of the overall global aircraft market. While helicopters, like EVs, are useful for a large number of applications, one would no more expect all aviation to use helicopters than for all drivers to use EVs.
The realities of physics and engineering mean that politicians pushing for an all-EV future run a high risk. Quite aside from the eventual discovery that EVs will disappoint with only a tiny impact on global CO2 emissions, the bigger impacts will come as consumers find vehicle ownership costs and inconveniences both escalating. That will lead to unhappy voters motivated by the key underlying reality: A car is the single most expensive and critical product used by the overwhelming majority of citizens.
Mark P. Mills is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, author of the 2023 report, Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, and author of the 2021 book (Encounter Books), The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Mark is also part of RealClearEnergy‘s BrainTrust.
Here's another WW3 is unavoidable article. The world has no use for such a war but the elites in the West want it. Understanding thi...
