Zero Hour approaching

Pepe Escobar | Strategic Culture Foundation

The hour is getting late. Virtually all pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.

Even as his "massive armada" is being deployed, neo-Caligula social posts/vociferates to Iran: "MAKE A DEAL" (originally in caps). That's maximum pressure in effect. Not even the possibility of negotiation. It's Capitulation or War.

Neo-Caligula's Top Three demands:

Iran should ditch its - civilian - nuclear program, as in total cessation of uranium enrichment.

Iran must reduce its missile program to a minimum.

Iran must stop supporting "proxy forces" - as in Hezbollah, Yemen's Ansarallah and Iraqi militias.

There's absolutely no way that Ayatollah Khamenei, the IRGC and the Majlis - the Iranian Parliament - will agree to any item on this ultimatum, dictated, of course, by the Zionist axis. Hence no capitulation.

Cue to Tehran dramatically raising the stakes.

The Majlis has already approved the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The final decision is in the hands of the Iranian government/security apparatus. This is in fact binding for the government and the military, de facto authorizing the IRGC, under full constitutional cover, to seal the Strait of Hormuz.

I've extensively written about that on Asia Times during the past decade. At the time, Goldman Sachs derivative experts were adamant: if Hormuz is blocked, before or during a full-scale naval war in the Gulf, oil may reach $700.00 a barrel.

And this will only be temporary - because the entire global economy will collapse.

Most of all, the blocking of Hormuz would trigger the detonation of the TWO QUADRILLION (caps mine) dollars derivative market - updating the initial, misleading calculation by the BIS (Bank for International Settlements), placed at $700 trillion. Over the years, several Gulf traders, off the record, have agreed with the "quadrillion" numbers.

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Germany's economic collapse: A review of 2025 and what lies ahead

Thomas Kolbe | Zero Hedge

Germany's economy has endured a terrible 2025. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's government has set the course for further decline in the coming year.

If German politicians' salaries were linked to private sector growth, lawmakers would likely have to take out loans in the deeply recessive year of 2025 and compensate citizens for parliamentary inaction and ideological foolishness.

Although the term diät derives from the Latin dieta, loosely meaning "compensation," in the context of Germany's collapsing industry it more accurately reflects the German meaning: deserved frugality and material austerity. Economically, Germany is now facing the end of the illusion of prosperity, which follows the catastrophic policies of the government.

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Can the Dark Ages Return?

Victor Davis Hanson | American Greatness

Western civilization arose in the 8th century B.C. Greece. Some 1,500 city-states emerged from a murky, illiterate 400-year-old Dark Age. That chaos followed the utter collapse of the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece.

But what reemerged were constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets — what we know now as the foundation of a unique Western civilization.

The Roman Republic inherited and enhanced the Greek model.

For a millennium, the Republic and subsequent Empire spread Western culture, eventually to be inseparable from Christianity.

From the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf and from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara, there were a million square miles of safety, prosperity, progress, and science — until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.

What followed was a second European Dark Age, roughly from 500 to 1000 AD.

Populations declined. Cities eroded. Roman roads, aqueducts, and laws crumbled.

In place of the old Roman provinces arose tribal chieftains and fiefdoms.

Whereas once Roman law had protected even rural people in remote areas, during the Dark Ages, walls and stone were the only means of keeping safe.

Finally, at the end of the 11th century, the old values and know-how of the complex world of Graeco-Roman civilization gradually reemerged.

The slow rebirth was later energized by the humanists and scientists of the Renaissance, Reformation, and eventually the 200-year European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Contemporary Americans do not believe that our current civilization could self-destruct a third time in the West, followed by an impoverished and brutal Dark Age.

But what caused these prior returns to tribalism and loss of science, technology, and the rule of law?

Historians cite several causes of societal collapse — and today they are hauntingly familiar.

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France will soon be in trouble

Comment: Like most of Europe....Which is of course, the plan...

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Lorenzo Maria Pacini | Strategic Culture Foundation

 

Old European powers

In recent decades, Germany has been the economic engine of Europe, while France has been its political, cultural, and military heart. Political because of its balancing role and permanent seat on the UN Security Council; cultural because of its universalist vision; military because of its status as a nuclear power. Together with the United Kingdom, republican France has maintained and exercised power over the whole of Europe, in concert with US military power.

Today, however, France is increasingly seen as a cause for concern.

Let's take it step by step. First of all, the financial markets consider it fragile and unstable, with the focus on its 50-year-high debt and unpromising economic prospects. This crisis is also political: the French have lost confidence in both the government and the opposition, convinced that the ruling class has betrayed the fundamental interests of the nation, reducing itself to a mouthpiece for European and American financial interests.

Former Prime Minister François Bayrou, after consulting with the Élysée Palace, called for a vote of confidence on the 2026 budget law, which included cuts of €44 billion. The National Assembly rejected the proposal, causing the fall of his government and the rapid appointment of Sébastien Lecornu as the new prime minister. Emmanuel Macron's decision to reject the dissolution of the Assembly or a referendum allowed him to avoid a popular vote, an important choice for a president who enjoys only 17% approval ratings.

The 2024 legislative elections saw the New Popular Front win 182 seats, Ensemble (Macron's bloc) 168, and the National Rally 143. Turnout exceeded 67%, the highest level since 1981.

On the government front, Élisabeth Borne was prime minister for 20 months (May 2022-January 2024), followed by Gabriel Attal (January-September 2024), who remained in office for about eight months. After the early elections, the government led by Michel Barnier was short-lived, replaced first by Bayrou and then by Lecornu.

This instability reflects political fragmentation and the impossibility of building solid majorities.

Lecornu inherits a complex economic situation: $3.345 trillion in debt, high unemployment, bankrupt companies, and growing impoverishment of the working classes. Macron, in his two terms, exacerbated the problem by increasing debt and dismantling public services, replacing them with expensive private consultants such as McKinsey. 

 

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Jeffrey Epstein: The genie behind the 2008 crash?

Steve Brown
The Duran

So far, Jeffrey Epstein's case has largely been limited to allegations of sex trafficking, but when we consider persons of great financial power and influence possibly linked to Epstein, the scope is broadened. But what if that scope can be broadened to further encompass corruption of the global financial system itself...? 

Now there are two patterns to emerge so far with regard to Epstein's philanthropic activities, one relating to philanthropic donations to Israeli causes, and the other regarding scientific experiments for genetic research. Even so, why would such philanthropy be the basis for Epstein's obsessive secrecy? There must be a third track.

Epstein was recently revealed to be the director of Leon Black's Family Foundation until 2007, a very significant date. Black is the multi-billionaire chairman of Apollo Global Management, a private equity leveraged buyout financial firm. Black writes: "On a few occasions I donated money to certain charitable organizations with which Mr. Epstein was affiliated, and he made contributions to certain charitable organizations that are meaningful to me." 

The foregoing glosses over the fact that as director, Jeffrey Epstein donated millions on behalf of Leon Black to Charles Bronfman's Taglit-Birthright Israel charity which promotes Zionism and opposes Palestinian rights. Then, subsequent to Epstein's conviction in 2008, Black donated $10M USD to Epstein's charity 'Gratitude America' in 2015, via BV70 LLC, which is controlled by Leon Black. So why would Black donate such an amount to a convicted felon and registered sex offender? 

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The World Economic Forum wants to develop global rules for AI

MIT Tech Review

This week, AI experts, politicians, and CEOs will gather to ask an important question: Can the United States, China, or anyone else agree on how artificial intelligence should be used and controlled?

The World Economic Forum, the international organization that brings together the world’s rich and powerful to discuss global issues at Davos each year, will host the event in San Francisco.

The WEF will also announce the creation of an “AI Council” designed to find common ground on policy between nations that increasingly seem at odds over the power and the potential of AI and other emerging technologies (see “Trump’s feud with Huawei and China could lead to the Balkanization of tech”).

The issue is of paramount importance given the current geopolitical winds. AI is widely viewed as critical to national competitiveness and geopolitical advantage. The effort to find common ground is also important considering the way technology is driving a wedge between countries, especially the United States and its big economic rival, China.

“Many see AI through the lens of economic and geopolitical competition,” says Michael Sellitto, deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. “[They] tend to create barriers that preserve their perceived strategic advantages, in access to data or research, for example.”

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German far-right training for CIVIL WAR & collapse of state, intel warns

RT 

German ultra-nationalists believe a civil war and an eventual demise of the state will come about, and are preparing for it by training to use firearms and explosives, a local security service has warned.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, sounded the alarm over the rise of the underground far-right, according to Die Welt. An intelligence report seen by the paper calls for increased surveillance of so-called “preppers” – a loose network of ultra-nationalists who prepare for apocalyptic scenarios.

Those people are collecting firearms and other supplies in preparation for “a civil war” or “a feared collapse of public order” in Germany, the BfV revealed. The preppers movement, which first emerged in the US, has long been rooted in survivalism – which sees far-right militias making stockpiles of food, ammunition and medicine that they would use in the event of a doomsday scenario.

Separately, there is an alarming number of extremists who could plot attacks involving improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and small arms. Notably, many of those on the far-right were indoctrinated “a few months or years” ago, but were not known to the agency before joining extremist groups. 

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See also:  Far Reich: Terrorist cell aiming to bring back German Empire raided by cops

Here Are 14 Very Alarming Numbers That Reveal The Current State Of The Economy

Activist Post

The economic numbers just continue to get worse and worse, and at this point it has become exceedingly clear that an economic slowdown is happening.  In fact, even the chair of the Federal Reserve is using the term “slowdown” to describe what is taking place.  But of course many are still hoping that the U.S. economy can pull out of this slump and avoid the sort of crippling recession that we experienced in 2008.  Unfortunately, that may be really tough because the entire global economy is slowing down right now.

Our world is more interconnected than ever before, and what happens on one side of the planet is invariably going to affect the other side of the planet.  Some parts of the globe are already mired in deep economic problems, and the U.S. appears to be following down the same path.

 

If you still think that the economy is in “good shape”, please read over the following list very carefully.
The following are 14 very alarming numbers that reveal the true state of the economy…
#1 Continuing jobless claims are rising at the fastest pace in 10 years.
#2 U.S. businesses are adding jobs at the slowest pace in 18 months.
#3 General Motors, Ford, Nissan and Fiat Chrysler all reported sales declines of at least 5 percent on a year over year basis in March.
#4 Tesla vehicle deliveries were down a whopping 31 percent during the first quarter of 2019.
#5 U.S. consumer confidence fell more than 7 points in March.
#6 Manhattan real estate sales have now fallen for six straight quarters.  That is the longest losing streak in 30 years.
#7 London real estate sales just dropped by the most we have seen in 10 years.
#8 The owner of Kay, Zales and Jared jewelers just announced that they will be closing 150 stores.
#9 Retail layoffs are 92 percent higher than they were at this time last year.
#10 U.S. freight shipment volume has fallen for three months in a row.
#11 The inventory to sales ratio in the United States has risen sharply for five months in a row.
#12 At this point, almost half of all renters in America spend more than 30 percent of their incomeson rent.
#13 The real median net income for Minnesota farmers was only $26,055 in 2018, and that was before many of them were absolutely devastated by the recent flooding.
#14 Overall, U.S. economic numbers are off to their worst start for a year since 2008.

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Studying the demise of historic civilizations

"Collapse may be a normal phenomenon for civilisations, regardless of their size and technological stage"

Luke Kemp
Attack The System


Studying the demise of historic civilisations can tell us how much risk we face today, says collapse expert Luke Kemp. Worryingly, the signs are worsening.

Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.

DEEP CIVILISATION

This article is part of a new BBC Future series about the long view of humanity, which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote.

That’s why the Deep Civilisation season will explore what really matters in the broader arc of human history and what it means for us and our descendants.

So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations.


He was right in some respects: civilisations are often responsible for their own decline. However, their self-destruction is usually assisted.

The Roman Empire, for example, was the victim of many ills including overexpansion, climatic change, environmental degradation and poor leadership. But it was also brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the Vandals in 455.

Collapse is often quick and greatness provides no immunity. The Roman Empire covered 4.4 million sq km (1.9 million sq miles) in 390. Five years later, it had plummeted to 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles). By 476, the empire’s reach was zero.

Our deep past is marked by recurring failure. As part of my research at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, I am attempting to find out why collapse occurs through a historical autopsy. What can the rise and fall of historic civilisations tell us about our own? What are the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse? And do we see similar patterns today?

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The US economy is falling apart: 18 big signs

Comment: Michael seems to have spent the last ten years saying that collapse is imminent only to proven wrong every time. But he's bound to be right eventually.

One thing is for sure, the longer this global bubble of toxic derivative debt and various other debilitating factors continue to inflate, the bigger the next crash will be. 

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Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog

Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically. Many of the pundits have been warning that we could officially enter recession territory later this year or next year, but these numbers seem to indicate that it could happen a whole lot sooner than that. But the stock market has been surging over the last two months, and at this point stocks are off to their best start to a year since 1987, and as long as stock prices are rising a lot of people are simply not going to pay much attention to the economic alarm bells that are ringing. But everyone should be paying attention, because things are really starting to get bad out there. The following are 18 really big numbers that show that the U.S. economy is starting to fall apart very rapidly... 

#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years. 

#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December. 

#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores. 

#4 Victoria's Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores. 

#5 On Thursday, Gap announced that it will be closing 230 stores over the next two years. 

#6 Payless ShoeSource has declared bankruptcy and is closing all 2,100 stores. 

#7 Tesla is also closing all of their physical sales locations and will now only sell vehicles online. 

#8 PepsiCo has started laying off workers and has committed to "millions of dollars in severance pay". 

#9 The Baltic Dry Index has dropped to the lowest level in more than two years.

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The Doomsday Scenario for the Stock and Housing Bubbles

Charles Hugh-Smith
Washington's Blog

The Doomsday Scenario for the stock and housing bubbles is simple: the Fed’s magic fails. When dropping interest rates to zero and flooding the financial sector with loose money fail to ignite the economy and reflate the deflating bubbles, punters will realize the Fed’s magic only worked the first three times: three bubbles and the game is over.

So what happens when punters realize there won’t be a fourth bubble? They sell. Bids disappear because who’s dumb enough to bet (with Japan and Europe as lessons) that more liquidity and negative interest rates will magically work when zero interest rates didn’t move the needle?

Who’s foolish enough to catch the falling knife (i.e. buying plummeting assets on the way down) on the unsupported assumption that the next dose of Fed magic will reverse a bidless market?

And should the Fed start buying stocks, mortgages, housing and bonds to prop up those bidless markets, what’s the message it will be sending? Desperation.If the only buyer is the money-printing central bank, that’s pretty good evidence that your economy and markets are in free-fall.

The loss of faith in central bank magic will be gradual at first, as magical thinking dies hard. It’s oh so comforting to believe the central bank will rescue every overleveraged mal-investment and bail out every high-risk speculation, but the funny thing about the Fed’s magic is it only works in liquidity crises–in every other condition, it only makes matters worse.

Does making it cheap to borrow improve the productivity of capital investments? You must be joking. The poster child of Fed magic is corporate buybacks, which 1) create no goods 2) create no services 3) do nothing to improve real wealth creation, i.e. higher productivity and 4) burden the company with higher debt loads, inhibiting future capital investment in actual productive capacity.

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National Debt Passes $21 Trillion: A Crisis In The Making

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

The national debt should be a huge concern for every single American, as the government is essentially stealing from people not yet born to pay for things now.  As debt increases, so does volatility and interest rates; and at some point, the government will have to admit they cannot pay that money back.

“Reaching this unfortunate milestone so rapidly is the latest sign that our fiscal situation is not only unsustainable but accelerating,” said Michael A. Peterson, chief executive officer of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization working to address the country’s long-term fiscal challenges.  According to Yahoo, the problem is that our taxes are too low, not the government’s frivolous spending.

According to Yahoo, a big national debt can also make it harder for the government to increase spending to combat the next recession or devote more money to retraining workers and helping the poor, among other programs.  It seems that the media is more concerned about making sure money is funneled through incompetent bureaucrats than anything else.  If government programs designed to help the poor with stolen funds (taxes) were effective, there wouldn’t be a skyrocketing homeless epidemic infecting socialist cities in California.

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Collapse Is Already Here

Chris Martenson
Peak Prosperity 

It's a process, not an event

Many people are expecting some degree of approaching collapse — be it economic, environmental and/or societal — thinking that they’ll recognize the danger signs in time. 

As if it will be completely obvious, like a Hollywood blockbuster. Complete with clear warnings from scientists, politicians and the media.  And everyone can then get busy either panicking or becoming the plucky heroes. 

That’s not how collapse works.

Collapse is a process, not an event.

And it’s already underway, all around us. 

Collapse is already here.

However, unlike Hollywood’s vision, the early stages of collapse cause people to cling even tighter to the status quo. Instead of panic in the streets, we simply see more of the same — as those in power do all they can to remain so, while the majority of the public attempts to ignore the growing…

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Placing the USA on a Collapse Continuum With Dmitry Orlov

The Saker 
unz.com

The West is rotting!
Yes, maybe, but what a nice smell…

Old Soviet joke

The word ‘catastrophe‘ has several meanings, but in its original meaning in Greek the word means a “sudden downturn” (in Greek katastrophē ‘overturning, sudden turn,’ from kata- ‘down’ + strophē ‘turning’). As for the word “superpower” it also has several possible definitions, but my preferred one is this one “Superpower is a term used to describe a state with a dominant position, which is characterized by its extensive ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined-means of economic, military, technological and cultural strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence.

Traditionally, superpowers are preeminent among the great powers” this one, “an extremely powerful nation, especially one capable of influencing international events and the acts and policies of less powerful nations” or this one “an international governing body able to enforce its will upon the most powerful states“.

I have mentioned the very visible decline of the US and its associated Empire in many of my articles already, so I won’t repeat it here other than to say that the “ability to exert influence and impose its will” is probably the best criteria to measure the magnitude of the fall of the US since Trump came to power (the process was already started by Dubya and Obama, but it sure accelerated with The Donald). But I do want to use a metaphor to revisit the concept of catastrophe.

If you place an object in the middle of a table and then push it right to the edge, you will exert some amount of energy we can call “E1”. Then, if the edge of the table is smooth and you just push the object over the edge, you exercise a much smaller amount of energy we can call “E2”. And, in most cases (if the table is big enough), you will also find that E1 is much bigger than E2 yet E2, coming after E1 took place, triggered a much more dramatic event: instead of smoothly gliding over the table top, the object suddenly falls down and shatters. That sudden fall can also be called a “catastrophe”. This is also something which happens in history, take the example of the Soviet Union.

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Survival of the Richest

Douglas Rushkoff
Medium

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future.

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down. 

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"The Global Bond Curve Just Inverted": Why JPM Thinks A Market Crash May Be Imminent

Comment: Yeah, well, we've heard similar things before...And yet, it all lumbers on...

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Zero Hedge

At the beginning of April, JPMorgan's Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou pointed out something unexpected: in a time when everyone was stressing out over the upcoming inversion in the Treasury yield curve, the JPM analyst showed that the forward curve for the 1-month US OIS rate, a proxy for the Fed policy rate, had already inverted after the two-year forward point. In other words, while cash instruments had yet to officially invert, the market had already priced this move in.

One way of visualizing this inversion was by charting the front end between the 2-year and 3-year forward points of the 1-month OIS. Here, as JPM showed two months ago, a curve inversion had arisen for the first time during the first week of January, but it only lasted for two days at the time and the curve re-steepened significantly in the beginning of April.

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Sweden Warns Every Single Household to Prep for WAR

Daisy Luther 
The Organic Prepper 

The government of Sweden has produced a 20-page pamphlet which they’ll be sending to each of the 4.8 million households in the country urging them to get prepared for…WAR.
Although they haven’t been at war for over 200 years, for some reason, right now, they want their citizens to get prepped – and fast. This goes along with an article I wrote in January of 2018 when the government urged their people to be ready to cope “without help” for at least a week.

Shortly before Christmas, the Swedish government quietly published a paper called “Resilience.” Initially, the requirement had been for people to be prepared for 3 days without help, but it seems like that was a baby step. The government itself wants to be prepared for a 3-month long civil emergency and they’re urging citizens to take responsibility, too.
It really makes you wonder what is looming ahead, doesn’t it? (source)

This, however, is a direct approach, with the preparedness instructions delivered to their doors.

Here’s what the government of Sweden is recommending.

The booklet, titled, If Crisis or War Comes, is an updated version of one distributed in the 1980s. It was compiled by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) and references several potential crises that could occur, according to the Swedish media:

• disruptions to IT systems
• incidents occurring in the rest of the world
• climate change
•  increased tension in the Baltic region

The brochure warns Swedes of things that every prepper knows. “In the event of a societal emergency, help will be provided first to those who need it most. The majority must be prepared to cope on their own for some time.” Here’s what Swedish website The Local has to say about the warnings.

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Argentina Is Suddenly on the Verge of ANOTHER Economic Collapse

Daisy Luther
Activist Post

The economic collapse of Argentina in 2001 is the stuff of prepper legends. For years, it was the example that we pointed to when trying to convince others that, yes, it really can happen. (Now, of course, that example has been replaced by the dramatic fall of Venezuela.) There’s even a fantastic book about the Argentinian collapse with survival lessons that has fueled many a prepper to get stocked up, in which Fernando Aguirre, also known as FerFal, shared the inside story.

And now, sadly, it looks like just as hopeful Argentinians believed the country was getting back on its feet, another collapse could be imminent.

President Mauricio Macri, a business tycoon who vowed to reincorporate Argentina into the global economy, has asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a hefty credit line of at least $19.7 billion to see the country through the rest of his term, which ends in 2019.

When the IMF gets involved, it tends to be the beginning of the end, as we saw in Greece, whose crisis was at its peak between 2009 and 2016.

What happened during the previous Argentinian collapse

Back in the late 1990s, Argentina was suffering. Wages were decreasing, unemployment was increasing, and the government was getting deeper and deeper into debt. This all came to a head in 2001 when the Argentinian government defaulted on a whopping 100 billion dollars of that debt.

Overnight, interest rates skyrocketed and there was a run on the banks. The government froze all the accounts and allowed patrons a small trickle of money only once per week. The banks converted all dollar accounts into pesos at the previous exchange rate (pre-default) and suddenly everyone with a deposit account lost 3/4s of their wealth, just like that.

This, of course, resulted in social unrest, riots, and rage against the government and the banking system. What followed was several years of extreme poverty and desperation for the Argentinian people.

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A Central Banking Insider Just Revealed the Blueprint For When the Next Crisis Hits

Zero Hedge

If you’re looking for insights into what Central Banks have planned when The Everything Bubble bursts, on Monday one of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) top bankers provided a blueprint.

Benoît Cœuré, has been a member of the Executive Board of the ECB since 2011. As such is one of SIX individuals who have dictated ECB policy during that time.
This means he’s been involved in:

• The second and third Greek bailouts.
• The Spain bailout.
• The Portugal bailout.
• The second and third Romania bailouts.
• The Cyprus bail-ins.

Cœuré has operated at the highest level of monetary/ financial policy during a period in which numerous financial/banking systems were experiencing systemic risk.
Put simply, there are fewer than 100 people on the planet who are as familiar with how Central Banks perceive the risks in today’s financial system as well as the policies said Central Banks will unleash when the next crisis hits.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what he had to say regarding both in the speech he gave titled The Future of Central Bank Money at the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies in Geneva yesterday.

In my remarks this evening I would like to share some more general thoughts on the role of the central bank’s balance sheet in the economy. My focus will be on central bank liabilities – that is, money created by central banks to be used as a means of payment and store of value…
What distinguishes the discussion today from previous discussions, however, are three new facts: 
The first is that we are seeing a dramatic decline in the demand for cash in some countries, in particular Sweden and Norway.
The second is that central banks today could make use of new technologies that would enable the introduction of what is widely referred to as a “token-based” currency – one based on a distributed ledger technology (DLT) or comparable cryptographic technology.
And the third “new” fact, at least from a long-term perspective, relates to the role of central banks in setting monetary policy, and more recently to the emergence of negative rates as a policy instrument and the consequences for the transmission of monetary policy.
Source: ECB

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Nomi Prins: Collusion! How central bankers rigged the world

Adam Taggert
Peak Prosperity

Nomi Prins, Wall Street veteran turned financial industry reformist returns to the podcast this week to explain the findings within her new book Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged The World. 

Nomi has put together a timeline of exactly when and how the central banks have plundered the wealth of the masses since 2008, either directly or indirectly through the loss of purchasing power of the currencies they control:

The relationship between the Central Banks, the major ones — the Fed, Europe Central Bank, Bank of Japan — all the larger Central Banks in the world and their private banks was effectively, and is effectively, kept secret. The relationships they have with each other, a lot of it is secret; so you have to really dig in to it to find out what’s really going on.

What I did was dig into the documents that I could find and create a timeline. That’s why each chapter in each region starts in 2008. It works with Mexico, Brazil, Japan, China and Europe and juxtaposes that with what the Fed was doing at that time to see how that collusive behavior wound up happening. The secret-ness is in the relationships of the banks, where that money that was fabricated by these institutions actually went, and when — or if — it’s coming back.

The ‘cheat and deceiving’ part of that definition is also apparent: people have been cheated out of their futures from the standpoint of the central banks’ strategies. So when the Feds creates cheap money, companies and banks and countries borrow more from the future because it is so cheap and easy. This deceives many people into thinking that the economy is somehow therefore being helped by this strategy, which is in acutality an emergency strategy. It’s an emergency that’s gone on now for ten years.

Yes there have been some tweaks here and there — interest rates have gone up a little bit in the United States — but all in all, rates are still pretty much 0% on average globally and quantitative easing still exists. The books of the major Central Banks are as big as they were at their heights through this last ten-year period…and they’re still growing. Just look at Europe and Japan.

Look at the stock market. The stock market is really high right now in a lot of different places. Why is it so high? Because a lot of this money went into debt which was borrowed to buy corporate stock, to buy the stock of banks, or to buy the banks themselves. That’s a major form of manipulation and deception as well.

Why is JP Morgan’s stock going up? Is it just because JP Morgan is such a great bank and so helping? Well, no. It’s because it received a lot of help from the Federal Reserve. It funneled that help into its own shares, and it has continued to pay settlements and be fined on egregious activity against its own clients, which are many because it’s the largest bank in the United States among the largest banks in the world.

There are multiple points of cheating and deception that have been enabled or that occur because of Central Banks policies. Some of those policies are secret; but a lot of them are public. You just have to piece the documents and the timelines together.

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