The first indication came with Cypress and the “bail-in” of the depositors there, and Greece shutting it’s ATMs down and then only allowing small daily withdrawals of cash. In the last month, we’ve seen India declare all it’s old “large” denomination Rupee notes declared void, issuing out new Rupees to take their place. Ahead of us, we have the imminent failure of the Italian banks on the horizon along with the possible failure of Germany largest bank, Deutchbank. Coming at some point even IF somebody loans more money to the Italian Goobermint to bail out Monte dei Paschi di Siena over the weekend.
DEFINITION of ‘Bail-In’
A bail-in is rescuing a financial institution on the brink of failure by making its creditors and depositors take a loss on their holdings. A bail-in is the opposite of a bail-out, which involves the rescue of a financial institution by external parties, typically governments using taxpayers money. Typically, bail-outs have been far more common than bail-ins, but in recent years after massive bail-outs some governements now require the investors and depositors in the bank to take a loss before taxpayers.
Now, in the 2008 crisis in the aftermath of Lehman, the solution was a “bail-out” of the banks by pulling out Hank “the Skank” Paulson’s “Big Bazooka” and charging it all up to the Taxpayers, as opposed to bank depositors in a Bail-in. Of course, none of the taxpayers are too happy about that, so at least in Eurotrashland rules were set in place to do bail-ins.
Once you deposit your money in a bank, you have made an UNSECURED loan to the bank. They’re supposed to pay you back on demand, but of course if they go belly up and don’t have the money and can’t borrow it from someone else, your money essentially vanishes to the same place it came from, thin air. Obviously, depositors who have this occur to them will be even more pissed off than the taxpayers, since your tax bill is spread out incrementally over time. You don’t instantly lose everything overnight, you just go broke more or less gradually as your taxes keep going up.
What bail-ins also do though besides pissing off a lot of depositors is they take a whole lot of money out of circulation, which of course is highly deflationary. Similarly, the exchange of the Rupee notes also is highly deflationary, because Da Goobermint is planning on taxing or confiscating the money that is deemed “suspicious”. That means the Indian whose money was taken no longer has it to spend on goods and services in the economy.
So rather than the inflation so feared by folks like John Williams and Speedy Gonzalo Lira back in 2008, it now is looking more like an end game of deflation as both banks and goobermints confiscate money in order to try and balance their unbalanceable books. Even if they confiscated all the money in circulation and on deposit in digibits though, the whole system is still net negative due to the interest charges that have accrued and there are so many NPLs (non-performing loans) out there. Italy is in the worst shape there, with something like 20% NPLs, which is why their banking system is likely to topple first.
The problem after that becomes one of CONTAGION, because the Italian Banks are indebted to mainly the German banks, so if they go belly up the assets held by German banks are no longer assets, and they also become instantly insolvent. Well’they’re already insolvent, but at this point it becomes undisguisable with fraud and accounting rule changes.
If the ECB won’t print fresh Euros to recapitalize the Italian banks, where’s the money going to come from for this? “Investors” (aka other TBTF banks) aren’t going to buy $5B worth of equity and bonds, because they have already lost $BILLIONS$ down that rat hole. So will there be an 11th hour Stick Save by the ECB to bail OUT again these banks, which generally puts the bill for it on the backs of the German taxpayer? That’s not very politically acceptable in Germany these days, they’d rather see the Italians go down the toilet, not really grasping they will follow the Italians shortly thereafter, possibly within nano-seconds.
Anyhow, given this rather deflationary trend and the likelihood that “your” money currently in your checking and savings account will get confiscated in a bail-in, it’s pretty hard to see why any typical Italians right NOW at least are keeping any Euros in the banks in Italy. The Italians also currently have the very real threat that once Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star Movement (M5S) gets into power, they have vowed to return to the Lira. If you have Euros in an Italian bank, POOF, overnight they magically convert to Liras, and then quickly devalue against the Euro and Dollar, while those currencies are still standing anyhow. The ew Lira currency would be close to worthless for buying anything from outside of Italy, most importantly imported energy. I would bet on a 50% devaluation within a month, and maybe 10 cents on the Lira in a year.
So as logical as it seems to take your money and run now, this is not so EZ for the typical Italian. Setting up an account in another country is tough even if you are a Eurozone member, and then making your daily withdrawals and deposits not so EZ either. If you are a small biz owner and have payroll accounts and such, using a foreign bank is also impractical.
On a small enough level of savings, say a few 1000 Euros, for the individual stuffing this in your mattress seems like a safer idea than leaving it in the bank at this point, but as the Indian example shows your paper Euros could be made worthless overnight and you would need to exchange them for “New Euros”. However, you still have the issue that it is not practical to pay many of your monthly bills in cash, around here they won’t even TAKE cash at the power company. They also won’t take cash for my rent either. All these payments MUST be done through the banking system.
So where does this leave you with trying to protect “your” wealth in a serious banking crash and sovereign debt crisis? For this, many people believe Gold is the safest way to store your wealth, particularly “Possessible” gold like collectible coins and tiny 10 gram slips. “Paper Gold” is not looked on much better than Fiat Money since it is essentially the same kind of Ponzi scheme.
The problems this has are very similar to your paper money though. First off, it’s not very good for currently paying your bills. I couldn’t go over to the leasing office and pay my rent in Gold Coins any more than I could go in and pay in cash. If I was running a small business, I couldn’t pay my employees in Gold either. You then also have the problem that every time you exchange Gold for some cash to go buy food at Safeway, you first have to stop in at a coin dealer and you have to pay a transaction fee of some amount. Finally, your coin dealer himself actually has to have the cash to give you in return for the Maple Leaf or teensy-weensy Gold Chip.
There is a further critical problem with using gold as money, which is that over the millenia it has become highly centralized. It began as deposits sprinkled out all over the earth and was gradually mined up, for ornamental jewelry and then used for coinage. Over time, generally by some form of theft like the Spanish Conquistadores ripping off the Aztecs, all this gold got hoarded up and ended up going right back where it came from, in a hole in the ground. Now though, the gold was “owned” by a few people, in the olden days a few Monarchs and a few Banksters. Nowadays it’s Sovereign Wealth Funds, TBTF Banks and a few filthy rich Hedge Fund managers who are also Gold Bugs. Then you have another small cadre of people who have gold in the form of coin collections, and some with jewelry. Most of the population though has no gold whatsoever. So if you want to use it as money, what is the mechanism for getting it out of the hoarded piles and back into circulation for the population at large?
The answer to this dilemma often proposed is that the Banks then issue Notes on the gold, which would then be used as money. The problem there is that unless the gold is redeemable for the note, the note is not really “gold-backed”, thus you are right back to the fiat money problem. In such a system, banksters ALWAYS print more notes than they actually have in gold bars in the safe. That’s the principle behind fractional reserve lending and also modern rehypothecation, where the same pile of gold is used as collateral for layers of loans on top of it.
All in all, this makes a system utilizing gold proxied by paper notes no better than the fiat system. Unless you actually are using the coins themselves as currency, then all the same problems of bankster dishonesty remain. If you do hoard your own gold at home and carry it around as currency, then you are vulnerable to theft from the other end of the spectrum, the highwaymen.
This is just your issues at the consumer level though, the much bigger issues come at the wholesale level, because once the banking lockup hits, stores can’t pay their suppliers, suppliers can’t pay the shippers etc, so whether you have either Cash or Gold, the products simply don’t make it to the shelves to buy with money of any type. If the problem goes on for any length of time, people start to get desperate, as has occured already in India as people raid warehouses for food. That’s only a one time solution though, because once the warehouse is emptied, it won’t get resupplied until some new system is dropped into place. Anything more than a week long “Bank Holiday”, and you are in the Deep Doo-Doo..
Most places in the world still highly dependent on cash are hard pressed to get any kind of new currency regime going, again India is the Canary in the Coal Mine for this. To get a complete exchange done takes a month at least, and meanwhile tons of people have no money whatsoever to work with. Farmers can’t get seed, truckers can’t get diesel, electric companies can’t buy coal, etc.
Here in the FSoA where most exchange is all digital now and most people have some kind of plastic card, debit, credit or a SNAP card, as long as it was pre-planned and ready, an alternate regime could be dropped in place overnight. What this might entail would be a nation-wide bail-in of all depositors, taking 50% of everyone’s savings and then using that to recapitalize the banks. This of course is also highly deflationary. It also would be EXTREMELY unpopular and you would be sure to see the Pitchforks and Torches surrounding Trumpty-Dumpty at the White House.
Besides that though, it wouldn’t really solve the problem, because in fact even after doing this these banks would still be insolvent. Since the people just had half of their money stolen, now they don’t have this money to pay their car loan and mortgage which means more NPLs and less assets for the bank. Real Estate prices drop precipitously as people no longer have the money to buy the McMansions and more people go into foreclosure. Rinse and Repeat.
The only advantage to this type of solution is it might allow the economy to function a while longer without complete breakdown that a paper system has to deal with on a virtually immedite basis. So rather than complete havoc occuring within a week or two it might take a few months. Maybe.
Returning to the individual, what can you do here to in some way prepare for this eventuality to occur? Well, as always you should be Prepped up with enough food to last through what hopefully is a temporary disruption of a few weeks to a couple of months. You should have a reasonable amount of cash, again a couple of months worth of your bills, and hopefully they will take your cash at the gas company office if the banking system is down. If you have enough money left over after this and think Gold is a good store of your wealth, go ahead and buy some. Personally, I would not start buying Gold as a Hedge until I had at least 6 months in Cash and Food Preps, but 2 months is a minimum here.
Far as your digibit money in the banks is concerned, Credit Unions are probably somewhat safer than banks, but not by much. Definitely keep the money in Federally Insured account and don’t have more in any account than the insurance limit, which I think is around $250,000. That’s a lot and most people do not have near so much, in fact most people are lucky if they have one month of bills in savings. Also, splitting up your savings to a couple of different banks might be a wise precaution. How well the FDIC progam will work in a systemic crash is open to question of course, but it’s better than nothing.
The other digimoney many people support as a way to store your wealth are the Crypto-Currencies like bitcoin. I don’t recommend those at all. In a systemic banking crisis I think those digibits will be worthless and not exchangeable for whatever the new currency regime is in your neghborhood. Besides that, in all likelihood after a month of disruption, the Internet will go Dark and none of your cryptomoney will be available.
Now, if you are really loaded, there are only 3 other places you might try to preserve your hoarded wealth, the traditional investment vehicles of Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate. In this type of deflationary crash, it’s hard to imagine how any of the paper investments would hold much value, and they also generally suffer from the problem of being extremely illiquid. It would be hard to sell them to get any new cash being offered up by Da Goobermint, certainly you could not unload them fast enough to use the proceeds for hopping at Walmart for more Preps..
Real Estate presents probably the best of these investments for the well-to-do, but you definitely don’t want to be buying it with credit on a mortgage. In a deflationary crash, it’s likely to be underwater rapidly and you probably will lose your job and be unable to pay the mortgage. So you need to have enough money to buy the property in cash, and few people have enough to do that, at least no more than a few acres of raw land in a cheap area of the country anyhow.
To wrap it up here, there aren’t any real fullproof solutions to preserving all that much wealth in a systemic monetary crash, particularly one which goes global. This crash will come at some point, the system has been patched together with spit, duct tape and bailing wire for almost a decade and it is teetering on the edge of the precipice. Keep your fingers crossed that the “Smartest Guys in the Room” have a Plan B here to keep things running a while. If not, we’ll see the End of Industrial Civilization occur over a very short period of time.
Finally, why do you think this problem devolves FIRST to Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the OLDEST bank there is in this system, chartered even before Columbus discovered invaded Amerika in 1492? Monte dei Paschi start date 20 yers earlier. Buehler?
If nobody comes up with a good rationale on this, I will pitch mine out. To me, it is obvious, but do not know how others see this. So I ask for some speculation here.
One Response to Roadmap to Currency Collapse
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Mike H says:
Re The notion of a Bailin is a simple bureaucratic-legal conceptual manouevre, that is it removes the sanctity of deposters deposits from theoretical loss that was previously partially stabilised by the requirement to keep a portion of deposits in cash and prudential oversight (sensible lending practices, fraud management etc.). By placing a depositor back in the position of loss you move banks back to the point in time where you as a depositor carried the risk of folly and imprudent investments or loans by the institution. The last time they crashed created the Great Depression and the reforms after that were to require banks to proctect depositors and impose prudential controls on lending and mangement. Once upon a time you could only lend what you had and no more and therfore you needed to keep cash to meet the ups and downs of general societies need to put in and take out money or cash. This all changed with the creation of fractional reserve banking which allowed creative accounting to be used to multiply limited deposits into larger outgoings based on two key criteria, the loan would be repayed or repayed regularly and insufficient time for the bank to smooth out the day to day needs of its depositors to access their money, generally not that often so the system worked. It begins to come unstuck when the outgoing loans or lending is not returned and equally the asset valuations relied upon to keep the books balanced do not match. Theoretically and in reality the asset base of the bank as cash is the value of those deposits and the liabilities are the loans but the assets are inflated up by the value of the assets loaned against so the books all tally. The bailin suggest therefore that by this manouevre the bank can reduce the value of the assets and liabilities by reducing the deposits in line with losses on the loans (the bailin). The bailout means governments loan money to the institution at interest rates sufficiently low to keep the margin shaving operating and to keep the bank solvent, that is inflate the bottom line so the deposits or cash match the liabilities again, the notional outcome being the bank deals with the problems and trades its way out of the difficulties. The banking and hence government problem is when the growth and profit or reclaiming of assets and sellling them to return cash to the bank diminishes and the banks trading position begins to deteriorate again. Central banks also have to have cash, generally obtained from Government by means of them being the bankers to the Government and the bankers. The Bailin is therefore a means of removing the Government guarantees via legislation of protection to depositors and making depositors wear the cost of having imprudently lent their cash to the bank. It means the Government does not have to create or deposit more money into the Central Bank via bond sales or other means and is to relieve the pressure on Central Banks and Government to stump up the cash to keep the system solvent at a book keeping level. The cash restriction process is simply to restrict holders of government bank notes (note that term) from redeeming their money via using it because after all any bank note is a promissory note which has been printed up in unbelievable quantities and has become the means by which the private issuance of promissory notes by Banks or other institutions with real wealth either in Gold or other goods, redeemable or tradable was made redundant and gave Governments and hence Banks complete control of the transactional transfers and holdings of material wealth. The morass is simple, how to ascribe value to the promissory note? is it a metal such as Gold, is it land? is it some other commodity? in a time when the sheer volume of promissary notes booked is such that it is no longer possible for them to be redeemed because in reality they never had anything but a fractional value to start with maybe as low in some cases as a 10% real asset backing that was redeemable. This situation is compounded by the restrictions on the creation of this promissary money by institutions other than banks, the so called commercial banks (Remember when banks were classed as Savings Banks and Commercial banks to differentiate their prudential requirements and deposit protection, one conservative the other risky?) now slice and dice that money creation across the globe to nearly every country on the planet and you have an appreciation of the predicament, you cant break even and you cant quit! Either way it is a bust because it was not a Ponzi scheme but a confidence trick scheme that relied on stability and order and growth to keep in balance and keep functioning and all three factors are now in short supply across the globe because resources are depleting, equity and access is depeleting, the land is depleting and energy is depleting and because of the way the bank note became the only real wealth holding that a lot of people had or have access to they are screwed because what is the alternative when land and capital is a bust, you need a commodity that somebody will trade or barter and the acceptance of the notion of agreed value for that exchange so you either have something land will produce or labour. That to my mind is what it boils down to I call it modern slavery.
makati1 on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 6:41 am
In today’s world, you have NO safe options except the goods you hold in your hand, or have stashed in your paid-off dwelling. If you live in a country that taxes real estate, you need some way to pay that or lose everything. Maybe gold, unless they confiscate that too.
Simply put, “THE MAN” has you by the delicate parts. Better pick a nice spot for your Trumpville Shack before the rush.
Davy on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 7:03 am
Better a Trumpville shack than white meat stew with the natives.
Cloggie on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 7:32 am
Cash is no longer king. Real things of value:
– paid off real estate
– some land for farming
– paid off real estate for renting to others
– gold or silver (latter is easier to trade)
Had long discussions with my accountant on the subject of pension strategy. Told him that my strategy is to skip the paper-based pension almost completely and rely on paid-off real estate, a vegetable garden behind the house (100% coverage of yearly needs), solar panels on the roof that also neatly covers my needs for the rest of my life (in cooperation with the grid folks). And finally need to do something about heat generation like a heat pump and/or glazed solar air collectors in a simple casing in the winter placed flat on the garden soil and pump the warm air directly into the living room.
Keep on working every now and then until it no longer is possible; than sell everything and park yourself in a nursing home.
https://www.amazon.com/Die-Broke-Radical-Four-Part-Financial/dp/0887309429/ref=sr_1_1
Boat on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 7:51 am
Clog,
So you have nursing homes in your doom picture. Thanks, I had forgotten to add those. Note to self, buy stock in adult diapers because the old survive after all.
Boat on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 7:59 am
mak,
Note to self. The starving natives will respect a piece of paper claiming ownership of land and housing. When harvest time comes those 20 million from the city will form a peaceful line and pay mak in silver for food. Now mak, do you supply the containers or do the starving
masses with silver need their own.
Davy on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 8:07 am
We often forget the elites are in the same trap as everyone else. They do not have a get out of jail free card. They have some options but not many. Their money and connections will buy some time but little more. They have too much abstract wealth which is the problem and there are limits to the logistics of conversion of that wealth to physical wealth. Physical wealth must be managed physically. If you are going to have lots of land you will need a security apparatus and so forth. Life is a tradeoff and increasingly bad tradeoffs not good ones.
Continued repression and Stagflation are ahead. More control with less benefits. More emphasis on a cashless society for more control. It will be mayhem if there is a disturbance to our electronic medium without good “cash able economy”. This is a danger the elites fail to see. Maybe they will learn from India. The repression will continue with less effectiveness as each new policy is exhausted. Gimmicks will continue. Extend and pretend and the magic of “debt poof” and it is gone. Interest rates will have to be kept low and those who suffer from this will get accounting rule changes. The public who saves will be told that policy will normalize eventually but it won’t because it can’t. Lies will continue about the dismal real physical economy where ever possible. Hollow talk about a great future will continue but with ever less effectiveness. Big talk about fiscal policy of lower taxes and infrastructure spending will be the next silver bullet but there is no money for it so that too will fail. China made it happen but there will be no more China’s anywhere including China.
This is a Ponzi and Ponzi always end in tears. The difference is there is nowhere to hide. This is good and bad. The good side of it is the repression of fear. Risk is dispersed throughout the global system. This prevents any major change from occurring. It is very similar to a climax ecosystem where all niches are filled and brittle to change. What can’t be controlled is chaos and random decay. I read somewhere yesterday “Loss of faith is one of mankind’s greatest non-linear phenomena.” If we do have a panic it will hockey stick quickly because of this repression and the nature of globalism as a human climax ecosystem.
What can you do? That depends on what you have. If you have something I would have some cash, gold, and a bank account for flexibility. I would have land and the ability to live on it and ideally make some money or food with it. I would learn skills that will serve you in a different world. I would be healthy and strong physically because the weak are going to suffer and die. I would stock pile food. I would have tools, supplies, and equipment for a different world. Most of all I would have an attitude that is ready to face adversity with the humility to know every man has his limit. Know your breaking point and manage your way around it as best you can. Surround yourself with good people. The right location is the foundation for all this.
You can get all hot and bothered by this article because it is dealing with money and that gets our attention. What is wrong with this article is the complexity of it all leaves one in paralysis. Do something and if nothing else simplify. The other option is just be a sheeple in the herd until it falls off the cliff. We are all heading off that cliff so does it really matter. Personally I enjoy the “here and now” of finding ways to have a little more time. I would like to watch the shit storm unfold from behind the line just to see how it will unfold. Collapse fascinates me as a researcher. I don’t expect to do much better than some of you who do nothing. Luck is going to play such a large role in this. I am doing this because it is my passion but I have no illusions of safety only safety in a relative sense. If we are lucky enough to see a slow unwind I will be ahead of many. A quick one is another story.
Davy on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 8:11 am
Boat, makati has a fantasy farm he is never at so is that a fantasy question?
Revi on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 10:56 am
Hard to tell what makes sense. I am going to try to have it both ways. I have a small piece of productive land, and am also getting a sailboat ready, in case we need to bug out.
Simon on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 11:08 am
Davy
I believe that is called a ‘fermette’
Made famous by Marie Antoinette
We all know what happened to her
Simon
Apneaman on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 3:18 pm
$300 Trillion Time Bomb: The Total Amount Of Debt In The World Is About Three Times The Global GDP Which Means Every Bit Of Potential Collateral Is Pledged To Someone, Somewhere In Some Fashion.
https://investmentwatchblog.com/the-total-amount-of-debt-in-the-world-currently-sits-at-around-300-trillion-which-is-about-three-times-the-global-gdp-it-is-an-important-thing-to-understand-about-the-world-of-modern-finance-it-is/
Apneaman on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 3:41 pm
Here’s how the US empire will devolve into fascism and then collapse — according to science
“A sociologist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 attacks warns that American global power will collapse under Donald Trump.”
“His predictions are based on a model comparing the rise and fall of 10 historical empires, and decades ago Galtung developed a theory of decline based on “synchronizing and mutually reinforcing contradictions.”
“American fascism would spring from its capacity for global violence, a vision of exceptionalism, a belief in an inevitable and final war between good and evil, the cult of a strong state leading that battle, and a cult of the “strong leader.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/heres-how-the-us-empire-will-devolve-into-fascism-and-then-collapse-according-to-science/
bug on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 3:47 pm
Revi, Bug’s plan is to bug out on my sailboat. That is only after my small farm , woods and house (paid off) get over run.
Cloggie on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 4:20 pm
Here’s how the US empire will devolve into fascism and then collapse — according to science
There we go again, just throw the word “fascism” around without having a clue of what that actually means. It is basically a smear word to designate a person dressed in black, who beats up random people for no apparent reason whatsoever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
Fascism /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism[1][2] that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe, influenced by national syndicalism. Fascism originated in Italy during World War I and spread to other European countries. Fascism opposes liberalism, Marxism and anarchism and is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum.
Fascism rose under the communist threat and was engaged in a battle between white Italians among themselves, that is nationalists, communists and liberal bourgeois.
Nothing of that is going to happen in the West in the coming years, so please spare me this fascism drivel.
What we ARE going to see in both Europe and America is a battle between right-wing Europeans (“populists” or “nationalists”) against left-wing Europeans (“multiculturalists”) and their third world allies.
The agenda is very simple and doesn’t really involve a battle over economic systems but over demography only.
The nationalists want a country of their own; the white multiculturalists want to push their co-racial right-wing opponents into minority status, using their third world “allies” via the voting booth.
How is this going to be played out?
The difference between the Soviet and US empires is that you can abolish a useless leftist economic system like central planning overnight. Granted, you are going to have a difficult decade, but afterwards things will improve quickly, as we have seen in Russia. The downfall of the Western empire will be far more painful and potentially bloody, since it is impossible to abolish migrants. You can’t beam them up. They aren’t going anywhere voluntarily.
In America this will lead to ever stronger white nationalism, with the Republican party changing from a big business party into the white party, what it latently always has been anyway, but soon explicitly. Expect separatism and secession.
Europeans in contrast have never seen themselves as a collection of “nation of immigrants” and will develop a sentiment of “defending the homeland”; no secession here, but likely expulsion. It is going to be very messy.
makati1 on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 5:59 pm
Clod… “There we go again, just throw the word “fascism” around without having a clue of what that actually means. It is basically a smear word to designate a person dressed in black, who beats up random people for no apparent reason whatsoever.”
And how would you describe a country that kills for no good reason, around the world, dressed in the black shroud of Death and Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and on and on? I would call it a Fascist country lead by a Fascist leader. There are some in Europe also …hint… you live in one.
BTW: America has it’s Storm Troopers, but they call them ‘SWAT Teams’ that break into your home at 3 am, terrorize your family, kill your pet and then realize it is the wrong house. Or the Gestapo, called the police, that stop you and confiscate your money under the false pretense that it is illegal and you are a crook, until you prove yourself innocent. Or the surveillance state where you cannot shit without being watched and recorded. Does that meet your definition of “Fascist”?
Cloggie on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 7:08 pm
And how would you describe a country that kills for no good reason, around the world, dressed in the black shroud of Death and Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and on and on?
“American” would be an adequate description.
Don’t fall for the US deep state propaganda.
makati1 on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 8:03 pm
Cloggie, who else is bombing Syria right now? The Netherlands. Don’t point the finger of blame without seeing where the others point.
Apneaman on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 9:15 pm
old dutch who is throwing things around more than you? An anonymous retard with contradictory and ridiculous predictions based on 1000 youtube links (cause reading is fer smart people).
The man who made the prediction has a track record and is not hiding behind anonymity.
US Power Will Decline Under Trump, Says Futurist Who Predicted Soviet Collapse
“Johan Galtung, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated sociologist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, warned that US global power will collapse under the Donald Trump administration.”
“Galtung has also accurately predicted the 1978 Iranian revolution; the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 in China; the economic crises of 1987, 2008 and 2011; and even the 9/11 attacks—among other events, according to the late Dietrich Fischer, academic director of the European University Center for Peace Studies.”
“Might Trump help revitalize the American republic?
Galtung’s answer is, perhaps, revealing: “If he manages to apologize deeply to all the groups he has insulted. And turn foreign policy from US interventions—soon 250 after Jefferson in Libya 1801—and not use wars (killing more than 20 million in 37 countries after 1945)”
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/us-power-will-decline-under-trump-says-futurist-who-predicted-soviet-collapse
Cloggie on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 4:21 am
US Power Will Decline Under Trump, Says Futurist Who Predicted Soviet Collapse
Friday seems to think that we in Europe are eager to live yet another century in the shadow of America and continue the somewhat embarrassing situation of the Mother Civilization being colonized by a former colony.lol
The only reason why the US will decline is not because of Trump, but because of the US gradually sliding into third world status. The consequence of that is that the European Americans of the deplorable variety will begin to panic (they already did) and instinctively will try to save what can be saved from white America. Trump=whitelash=white revolt. This will lead to further internal strife and division and eventually a likely breakup or in the best case a sort of American equivalent of the post-Soviet CIS or Switzerland or Canada: happily living together… separately.
Galtung’s answer is, perhaps, revealing: “If he manages to apologize deeply to all the groups he has insulted.
Galtung is a Norwegian leftist as only Scandinavia can produce ‘m…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Galtung
[part 1]
Cloggie on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 4:21 am
…especially Sweden and Norway (Finland and Denmark much less so). Trump or European America aren’t going to apologize for anything. In the end they will say: “we don’t need you, you need us” and pull the plug on the joint and the last “George Soros country” will vanish from the face of this earth. And we in Europe with unbearable arrogance and a little Schadenfreude will smilingly say to the white folks of the Mississippi basin (“Amerika”): “welcome home folks”.
https://s17.postimg.org/6wwnomfpb/worldmap.jpg
And when that happens we should pause for a moment and carry out an audit of 2000 years of Christianity and acknowledge that the religion responsible for the downfall of the Roman empire no longer serves us well, if it ever did. Christianity, Marxism and cultural Marxism/Frankfurter Schule are all movements originating from the same kosher source, designed to hurt our interests. What we should do is reorient ourselves on Antiquity, when we were truly great. The Germans of the end of the 19th century made a start with that, but were brutally interrupted by the envious English (WW1). That conflict went in the second round (WW2), giving Soviet and American outsiders (and their kosher overlords) the chance to get a foot between the European door. Soviet power meanwhile has been rolled back and Russia has become a normal European country, eager to join European main stream. The Americans will soon become a normal European country also and then we can begin to write a new chapter in the illustrious history of the white race after the end of the…
https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Century-Yuri-Slezkine/dp/0691127603/ref=sr_1_1
[part 2]
Davy on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 5:28 am
Demonetization brings up an interesting situation for you and the collapse process. Cash money is vital to a downturn if severe enough. If we see economic activity drop off quickly and the normal electronic economic pathways are not functioning properly we may see a serious further decline in activity. Cash is essential for resilience of an economy to shocks. It is also a way for citizens to avoid the effects of financial (negative rates) and fiscal (taxes) repression. Policies by governments can be mitigated and avoided through a cash economy or cash savings. This points to the likelihood that cash will be a target of governments.
I recommend a cash stash. Keep it in a secure location like a bank box until you sense trouble then have a safe place at your home to put it. Personally I do almost all my business electronically but with some of my savings with cash and metals. My biggest savings effort is in land and equipment to utilize that land. I have a significant investment in a grazing system and animals. I have no money in the markets.
This is an important issue for you and the coming advanced steps of financial repression coming and the continued advancement of the collapse process at some point. Anyone completely reliant on the electronic funds system is dangerously exposed to many risks ahead.
“India Confiscates Gold, Even Jewelry, In Raids On Hidden Money”
http://tinyurl.com/gujlost
The chaos accompanying “demonetization” hasn’t eased up noticeably. It seems likely the disruption to the economy, especially in cash-centric rural India, will hit growth sharply for at least a few quarters. It’s tough to say for how long and by how much; we are in uncharted territory here and guesses have varied widely. But many analysts agree with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who’s predicting the new policy will knock 2 percentage points off that world-beating GDP growth rate. Demonetization was originally sold as a “surgical strike on black money” — the illicit piles of cash many rich Indians have accumulated out of sight of the taxman. It’s now clear the policy has been anything but surgical. Worse, uncomfortable questions are being asked about whether the complicated rules and exemptions that have accompanied demonetization have allowed black-money holders to launder most of their cash. Of late, Modi’s chosen to focus instead on demonetization as means of advancing a cashless economy.
Davy on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 5:39 am
“Here’s What Happens When A Currency Completely Breaks Down”
http://tinyurl.com/zc73jko
“In Venezuela, hyperinflation has become so pitiful that shopkeepers are no longer bothering to actually count money. Instead, they’re weighing it…”
“Today we use physical pieces of paper and electronic digits in a bank account. Large financial institutions and governments use bonds. Each of these is (or was) a form of money. But regardless of the form, money is only credible as long as everyone agrees that it has value, i.e. there’s a large enough market size of people willing to use it. This fundamentally comes down to trust and confidence. But Venezuela’s example shows how quickly that very thin veneer of trust and confidence can shatter, plunging a country into chaotic hyperinflation.”
“Physical cash eliminates a LOT of counterparty risk. There’s no more middleman banker standing in between you and your savings….So holding some physical cash ensures that you still have a way to put food on the table for your family. There are so many reasons to keep some savings in cash. But it’s important to remember as well that cash has limitations. Venezuela is the prime example: cash can lose value VERY quickly.”
“So here’s the bottom line– definitely hold some cash, as in physical currency. Keep some in your safe. Cash remains a great short-term hedge against problems in the banking system, and provides a number of other advantages including some minor asset protection benefit. But think about keeping at least a portion of your savings outside of this bizarre system altogether. Consider owning REAL assets, which could be anything from a private business to productive real estate to gold and silver.”
Davy on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 5:56 am
I am posting this referenced article to show the increasingly likelihood of renewed volatility coming from a new force in the markets of “Trumpflation”. We really don’t know where this is going or if it will materialize but it is an economic force. Markets have been essential to the central banks effort to repress and control the economies. They represent the all-important effort of the wealth effect and confidence. They will likely be the focal point of the coming financial trouble ahead. Repression has limits and these limits are increasingly evident as more tools are used and exhausted. Increasingly desperate central banks will have no choice but to up the ante with new and more radical measures. Trump is further adding to this tension. In some ways trump will benefit US central bank policy by allowing a December rate hike but beyond that there are storm clouds because of the inconsistencies of nationalism with globalism and inflation with poor growth. Inflation in a deflationary environment of stagflation is tricky for confidence. It will take time for Trump to do anything but once he does I would fasten your “assbelt”.
BofA Warns Trumpflation Might Break The “Buy The Dip” Trade
http://tinyurl.com/hf3jbrb
“One of the most important aspects of central banks’ policy control of volatility has been their unprecedented sensitivity to financial market conditions, with promises for support even during minor shocks to markets. This has completely changed market dynamics in US equities, for example, by teaching investors that the safest trade is to buy the equity dip or even fade the volatility spike. As a result, volatility spikes have been crushed at record speed and equities have traded in ultra-tight trading ranges which have significantly depressed US equity volatility. In a market where traditional investing methods are generating their poorest performance in years, investors have been increasingly incentivized to adopt “buy-the dip” as a core alpha strategy. It has become even more attractive since 2014 as equity market returns have stalled.”
Cloggie on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 5:59 am
Makati says: Cloggie, who else is bombing Syria right now? The Netherlands. Don’t point the finger of blame without seeing where the others point.
http://nos.nl/artikel/2087310-nederlandse-f-16-s-bombarderen-in-syrie.html
Oops, I indeed was not aware of that.
Ok, will amend my remark and replace “American” with “Western” (American empire really).
But I still have issues with your words “fascist”, “stormtroopers” or “gestapo” as if the USSR had no ruthless police apparatus doing the same thing at a far larger scale. And the western world has more resemblance with the USSR than with the European ultra-nationalists you refer to with your choice of words. Nationalists (like fascists or national-socialists) per definition do NOT want to conquer the world, they just want to put “their kind” into a single territorial entity (“Heim ins Reich”) and next from this basis compete with the rest of the world. What the West and the USSR have in common is that they both want(ed) to set up a world empire:
http://www.the-symbols.net/flags/_img_nations1/ussremblem2.png
But I understand very well why you use these words: you are a leftist, albeit of the anti-imperialist variety (that’s why you had a preference for Trump over Clinton). You have flirted in the past with communism (by rhetorically asking “what is wrong with communism”), so it is natural that you pick these words. But they make no sense, the US empire hates nationalism and wants to stamp it out worldwide. So if you want to smear the Western empire use terms like Cheka, KGB or Gulag, not Gestapo, storm-troopers or fascist. The latter were the opponents of the US, remember. It’s a matter of historic hygiene.
Cloud9 on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 7:22 am
Whatever the root causes whether it be a lost war and reparations, seizing productive farms from white farmers or failed oil revenues, the end result is the same. The existing tax base cannot pay the cost of running the system. All governments do the same thing. They print. It is evident that smaller countries collapse their currencies in a few years. A country the size of the United States can apparently run this scam for more than a century. The end result is always the same, currency collapse, social unrest and regime change.
Simon on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 7:51 am
If Christianity Caused the fall of the western roman empire. How do you rationalise the persistence of the eastern roman empire.
or Charles Martell
Cloggie on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 8:29 am
If Christianity Caused the fall of the western roman empire. How do you rationalise the persistence of the eastern roman empire.
The Western Roman Empire was overrun by the Jerries, a little tougher material than what was dwelling in Turkey and the Middle East. That would be my explanation.
The Romans were defeated by their own blood brothers, who were not yet Christianized (=pussified). The Romans never managed to overrun the Germanics north of the Rhine, not even when they weren’t weakened by this Christianity in their bones; the non-Germanic “English” in contrast were a piece of cake, subjugated until the very end; the Scots not so much.
http://www.unz.com/article/what-race-were-the-greeks-and-romans/
Charles Martel was indeed a Christian but he had merely second tier desert material as opponents. The white race + Christianity is like a Porsche trying to drive on lemonade, but it is still a Porsche.
Simon on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 11:00 am
If the Jerries were Tougher than the Romans and the romans were Tougher than the Middle Easterns and the ancient (Pre-Christian) Romans were Tougher than the Christian Brethren.
How do you account for the Rout of the Pre-Christian roman army when trying to invade Parthia, and yet the 1000 year success of the Eastern (Christian) Romans holding their (admittedly reduced) empire against essentially the same people
Apneaman on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 11:09 am
old dutch in your rabid bid to hang labels on everyone, you contradict yourself daily.
“(insert name) you are a marxists, leftist, fascist, left handed, centrist, brown eyed liberal”.
I recall you labeling me: marxist, liberal, nihilistic, misanthrope and a communist. There are probably more but those are the ones I easily remember. See the glaring contradictions? Well for starters, nihilist and/or misanthrope cancel all belief systems out. Liberals do not want communism, they want a hybrid system – the best of both worlds. Something like Sweden or the Netherlands. You really need to slow down with the label hanging or maybe make some notes or google definitions or adjust your meds or something. All the labels are just more meaningless pathetic human constructs. Another futile bid by the humans to control something by labeling or counting it. Another tribal naming game. Fear the other little humans. I like retard, it’s a catchall and fits the entire species.
Cloggie on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 12:21 pm
If the Jerries were Tougher than the Romans and the romans were Tougher than the Middle Easterns and the ancient (Pre-Christian) Romans were Tougher than the Christian Brethren.
To get the story and hierarchy straight:
Pre-Christian Rome > Pre-Christian Germanics > Christian Rome > Christian Germanics > desert dwellers
Now to answer your question:
How do you account for the Rout of the Pre-Christian roman army when trying to invade Parthia, and yet the 1000 year success of the Eastern (Christian) Romans holding their (admittedly reduced) empire against essentially the same people
Easy, the answer can be derived from Google Maps:
Rome-Parthia:
http://tinyurl.com/h5go4od
Rome-Colonia:
http://tinyurl.com/zohzy7z
That’s a case of spreading forces thin and logistics. Look, the pre-Christian Romans were Gods, but still had to walk all these distances. Somewhere the buck stops. It’s like Napoleon & Hitler & Moscow. They were both tough cookies but even they had their limits. The Byzantines were much closer to the Parthian hood, so it was much easier to discipline them than for the Wessies.