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Kunstler: Stranger Things
The hidden agenda in the so-called tax reform bill is to act as stop-gap quantitative easing to plug the “liquidity” hole that is opening up as the Federal Reserve (America’s central bank) makes a few gestures to winding down its balance sheet and “normalizing” interest rates. Thus, the aim of the tax bill is to prop up capital markets, and the apprehension of this lately is what keeps stocks making daily record highs. Okay, sorry, a lot to unpack there.
Primer: quantitative easing (QE) is a the Federal Reserve’s weasel phrase for its practice of just creating “money” out of thin air, which it uses to buy US Treasury bonds (and other stuff). The Fed buys this stuff through intermediary Too Big To Fail banks which allows them to cream off a cut and, theoretically, pump the “money” into the economy. This “money” is the “liquidity.” As it happens, most of that money ends up in the capital markets. Stocks go up and up and bond yields stay ultra low with bond prices ultra high. What remains on the balance sheets are a shit-load of IOUs.
The third round of QE was officially halted in 2014 in the USA. However, the world’s other main central banks acted in rotation — passing the baton of QE, like in a relay race — so that when the US slacked off, Japan, Britain, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of China, took over money-printing duties. And because money flies easily around the world via digital banking, a lot of that foreign money ended up in “sure-thing” US capital markets (as well as their own ). Mega-tons of “money” were created out of thin air around the world since the near-collapse of the system in 2008.
And magically, with no negative consequences! Yet. Now, Europe and Japan are making noises about dropping their batons. China’s banking system is so opaque and perverse — because it is unaccountable except to the ruling party with its own agenda — that it’s quite impossible to tell what they are really doing, though the signs of mal-investment are obvious and startling. And the UK’s finances are tied up in its messy divorce proceedings with the EU (with the British standard of living dropping markedly meanwhile). In short, the torrent of global “liquidity” looks to be slowing to a trickle.
The expectation is that this would make stock markets go down and bond interest rates to go up (fewer buyers), perhaps a lot. The dirty open secret here is that these central bank interventions are the only means for keeping the capital markets up, and that the markets are just a Potemkin false front for Western economies that are drying up and blowing away. That is certainly the experience here in the USA, where banking hocus-pocus now accounts for about 30 percent of GDP, and most of that activity is either out-and-out fraud or swindling, or collecting rents and dividends on past frauds and swindles.
Dem/Prog America in its Silicon Valley gourmet employee bistros and Hamptons lawn parties thinks that the flyover Trumpist Red State world of meth, joblessness, and anomie is some kind of a Netflix hallucination. But no, it’s for real. The center of the ole US of A is hollowed out. The bad news is that it probably has enough juice left in its disaffected youth, and certainly enough weaponry, to start a very serious insurrection if it continues to get dissed.
Enter the joker in the deck: Bitcoin. Though it pulled back a couple of thou overnight, this strange investment vehicle blasted through $18,000-per-Bitcoin in the past 24 hours, roughly tripling from $6000 in one month. It even endured the hacking of one of its exchanges, NiceHash, where $70 million was looted without so much as a stutter in the upward thrust of the chart. Whatever else Bitcoin is — and I would suggest a “Ponzie,” a “mania,” a “con” — this thing is a message. The message is that financial circulatory system of the global economy is in some kind of distress. Another take-away is that the rush into Bitcoin represents a loss of faith in matrix of rackets that world banking has become, and a flight to perceived safety in a putative financial instrument beyond the clutches and the lying propaganda of nervous, self-interested governments.
For the moment, Bitcoin is doing the job that gold used to do: indexing the loss of value in paper currencies and the things that affect to represent them. Except that Bitcoin has no material reality. It is a figment of mathematics. The vaunted blockchain “technology” is just a formula for packaging information and assigning it to live in various places. It appears to have some worth as a ledger system, for keeping track of accumulated value in an allegedly transparent and honest mode. But the thing it is toting up and sending chits around the world for — Bitcoin — has no value in and of itself.
If “money” can be said to represent a future claim on work, or energy, or things that they produce, then Bitcoin is not money at all because it only represents energy burned in the computer exertions necessary to “mine” the Bitcoins. In other words, it costs a lot of energy to create Bitcoins, and there’s no claim on future energy, or work — it’s already gone. That energy use is catching the world’s attention and is beginning to look pretty profligate. Like, if Bitcoin happened to shoot up over $100,000-per-unit, it would hog an unseemly portion of the worlds electric power.
Anyway, that’s only one interpretation of the Bitcoin rush. In the end, I believe it’s simply telling us that the global financial system is headed for some serious trouble. It is vectoring right smack into the same lane as the gathering political crisis in the US government, as a fight to death between Donald Trump and his adversaries comes darkly into view.
120 Comments on "Kunstler: Stranger Things"
Cloggie on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 3:58 am
@ Clogged
What took me so long? Apparently, you have not read my earlier posts. The information I post has always remained consistent. I seek the truth. Anecdotal information comes from my family members who lived through this. While you may not “believe” 55.000 ethnic Germans were killed by Poles, then you need to read German archival records. if you have credible information to the contrary, then I want to review the information; however, a “belief” does not constitute compelling evidence.
I regularly do read your posts (not all) and noticed your empathy with the plight of the German women during and shortly after WW2 and had little trouble connecting your empathy with your German nick. 😉 But I never heard you talking about the diplomatic side of the drama. Probably missed it.
Regarding these 55,000… I do have this (Kindle) book:
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Justification-World-War-Atrocities-ebook/dp/B005UNI3ZG/ref=sr_1_1
At location 631/6209 (11%) it says in the introduction: “More than 58,000 dead and missing were lost by the German minority during the days of their liberation from the Polish yoke, as far as can be ascertained at present”
Furthermore, the book refers to 12,857 positively identified Germans killed AFTER September 1, 1939. But that doesn’t really count as that was after the German invasion, not before.
But the refugee crisis was real. The Poles before september 1 wanted to throw the Germans out Poland, including Eastern Prussia, encouraged as they (wrongly) felt by alleged US, UK and French support. Here German newsreel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNEQbdXzZrw
[part 1]
Cloggie on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 4:01 am
part 2 doesn’t come through. perhaps later.
Cloggie on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 4:16 am
If we go to war with North Korea the Republicans will surely institute another draft..It would be a great way to get all those young people who are in dead end jobs or living with their parents into the labor force and could help increase our economic growth. And they could get rid of some of those useless eaters on welfare…Wall Street could be using that welfare money to invest… ( I bet someone is thinking this)
I can’t imagine Washington is so stupid to invade North-Korea unprovoked. China and Russia won’t allow that to happen without real resistance (launching missiles without war heads is not good enough). And North-Korea can mobilize a paramilitary of 5,889,000, the largest on earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People%27s_Army
It would be another North-Vietnam, probably worse.
Cloggie on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 4:18 am
In the past I have seen similar British newsreel, but I can’t find these back.
A good source is Major-General Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who wrote a book about “1939”:
https://www.amazon.com/1939-War-That-Many-Fathers/dp/144668623X/ref=sr_1_cc_1
He doesn’t refer to Polish mass killings of Germans before September 1. He would have if he could have documented that.
Here he is in a lecture in front of a conservative (but not neo-Nazi) German audience eplaining everything. Rhonhof is not a loner, but a respected high-ranking member of the Bundeswehr, integrated in NATO, until his retirement. He is a moderate revisionist, but he denies that Hitler wanted the war, but, correctly, does blame Hitler for grave mistakes, #1 the invasion of Prague, which cost him the good relationship he had with Chamberlain, after which the (((US-funded))) war party in Britain, spearheaded by the half-American Winston Churchill.
https://documents1940.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/wollte-adolf-hitler-den-krieg/
The other two German revisionist scholars Stefan Scheil and Walter Post in that video discuss Barbarossa (preemptive strike) and Pearl Harbor (entirely provoked) respectively.
“I am not trying to make you leave I am just curious what the hell peak oil and collapse have to do with WW2 and Nazi germany? And nobody here even listens to what you say or gives a rats ass..”
I never do that unprovoked, but if joey-boy insists that “Germany started the war because they wanted social security” (you can’t make this stuff up), I can’t resist the temptation to correct the little boy.
[part 2]
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 4:49 am
“Not all Americans agree with them Makati, and a few, at least, predicted the complete devision of American society quite some time ago. United we stand, divided we fall. Us, or we in this instance, against them. The idiots.”
The reason many Americans agree with me is they are not extremist engaged in hate peddling. Antifa types are like you and mad kat, grehg. These people are basically ideological terrorist. You two peddle agenda plain and simple. You are rarely on topic. Grehg, you say next to nothing. Most of what you do is stalk and prick and run cover for mad kat. You enable and flank his poor behavior and the reason you do this he sets and anti-American tone that is a magnet for other extremist. You are an extremist west coast hyper nationalistic Canadian. I have moderated and neutered this poor behavior hence your mental issues of late.
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 4:57 am
“How do you know Russia and China will step in to protect North Korea?”
Mad kat, thinks he has a military mind because he ran a tank 50 years ago. Ask mad kat how many people are under arms on the Korean peninsula. lol. That says right there his depth of knowledge on the subject of military matters. He was spouting off 10MIL men. There is likely barely 10MIL soldiers under arms on the entire planet. Russia and China will be scrambling to contain the fallout of a war in that region. Neither has the stomach for going to war over NK. China is providing cover for a preemptive attack on NK sort of. Who knows how they would respond. They may even currently be working with the SK and the US on a plan. These are issues beyond people like mad kat that live in his little fantasy of an isolated old man. Yet, the old man acts like the expert.
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 5:01 am
“A smart person would explore all avenues before coming to any conclusions ,and would not simply believe what he was told. There is always more than one side to a story.”
Nope, what you are doing is supporting, flanking, and enabling another one of the worst extremist on the board who pushes anti-American hatred with history revisions and fantasy futures. This is just more of your agenda of keeping this board an extremist anti-American magnet.
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 5:20 am
“Polexit Threat: EU Increasingly Upset About Poland Ignoring Rules”
https://tinyurl.com/ybgkab2y
“The Polish government increasingly defies EU rules. Since Poland is the largest aid recipient, the EU is hopping mad. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are all in open defiance of EU migration rules. In addition, Poland’s Law & Justice party move to take control of the courts was condemned by the European Parliament and European Commission. The situation is now to the point where various countries want to shut off aid to Poland, but given the EU treaty makes penalizing countries extremely difficult.”
“What Can the EU Do? A fundamental problem in if EU treaty makes the situation difficult to address. It takes unanimous agreement to do practically anything. Trade treaties are especially difficult. And there is no way to kick a country out of the block. This problem was well understood from the outset, but Germany never wanted to be in a position where other countries could outvote it. So here we are. If the EU does find a way to punish Poland and cut off funds, it may drive Poland out of the block. The same applies to the Czech Republic and Hungary over migration rules. Eventually things are going to splinter, and likely at the worst possible time.”
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 5:26 am
“Welcome To The Hell Hole That Is Brussels”
https://tinyurl.com/y8h6n2fx
“Last month alone in Brussels, there were three separate outbreaks of rioting and looting on a major scale. If you penetrate the thick cloud of professional indignation to scrutinize the reality of the “capital of Europe”, what you see in many respects is actually a hell hole, one where socialism, Islamism, riots and looting are the new normal.”
“This lawlessness, with not even the remotest political justification, is the new normal in Brussels. Politicians may not like that fact, which is the result of their lamentable failure, but it is nonetheless a massive and unavoidable fact. The new Brussels is characterized by riots and looting by people of foreign origin, as well as the ongoing heavily-armed military presence in the streets of Brussels, in place since March 22, 2016, the day that European Islamists murdered 32 and wounded 340 people in the worst-ever terrorist attack in Belgium. One may wonder why these fine Belgian soldiers patrolling the streets do nothing to stop the rioters. For the simple reason that it is outside of their remit; should a soldier actually hurt a looter, he would probably be publicly chastised, pilloried by the media, put on trial and dishonorably discharged.”
“The picture would not be complete without mentioning that the very night that the first riot began, November 11, an association called MRAX (Mouvement contre le racisme, l’antisémitisme et la xénophobie) published on its Facebook page an appeal to report any case of “police provocation” or “police violence”. The results of the riot? 22 police officers hurt, zero arrests. MRAX is not only a bunch of leftist Islamist sympathizers, they are heavily financed by taxpayers. Are movements from the right also financed by taxpayers? Simply put: No. In Brussels, the unemployment rate is a staggering 16.9%, a mind-boggling 90% of those on welfare have foreign origins, and although taxes are among the highest in the world, the public coffers are nonetheless bleeding. A sad snapshot of yet another socialist failure.”
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 5:33 am
I posted the above two articles to show the anti-Americans here the dysfunction is elsewhere too. The US political stability is dissolving but the same is happening in Europe. Worse awaits China where it is kept in check by a pressure cooker of public repression and soothing economic bubbles to keep the sheeples content. China represents the focal point of a place that will erupt in protest once the huge Ponzi scheme that is an entire country’s economic system, fails. China is recognized as the most repressive of the major powers with a police state apparatus that would make the US and Europeans blush. Why do they have such extremes of repression? They must have it to allow the kind of wealth transfer and economic dysfunction that is allowing a country to grow like it is with the enrichment of very few. The US is going down the drain along with China and Europe. This is clear.
Cloggie on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 6:42 am
“Welcome To The Hell Hole That Is Brussels”
The western European vassals of the US, supporting US multicult and responsible for the migration disaster, will be crushed like the eastern European vassals of Moscow were crushed in 1989. Communism doesn’t work, multiculturalism doesn’t work.
And like the USSR, the USA will fall apart, in this case in three or four countries. One Mexican in the SW, a white country in the Heartland strongly tied to Europe, an African-American country in the SE around Atlanta and perhaps a mixed race country in the NE around New York, still led by jews and 6 million jews from Israel added to the mix.
The EU and its super state ambitions (“United States of Europe”)…
http://www.france24.com/en/20171207-germanys-schulz-wants-united-states-europe-2025
(rejected by a great majority of the Germans)
…will be abolished and replaced by a lighter framework of cooperating nations (including Russia), a confederation “Europe of the Fatherlands”, without president and parliament and a la carte cooperation on several fronts, with opting out possibilities. Like in the EEC days.
The offices of the EU in Brussels can be used as “refugee” bunkers and European institutions can be moved to “Old Europe” Prague, to accommodate for a greater role of 100% white Eastern Europe, including Russia.
No more US style high rise soulless modernist buildings, but beautiful old European architecture for European institutions.
Brussels, burn it down. Cities like London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam were ruined because of decades enforced membership in the US empire and can be written off, like all major US cities.
End good, all good.
Cloggie on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 6:51 am
This is Prague, perhaps the most beautiful city in Europe and precisely in the middle:
https://tinyurl.com/ycevjvl7
Probably acceptable for Moscow, certainly for Berlin and probably for France as well, as they will be member of the inner circle Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, controlling the nukes, punching above their military and economic weight.
Cloggie on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 7:50 am
New Silk Road passing through my home town:
https://www.portofrotterdam.com/en/news-and-press-releases/chengdu-tilburg-rotterdam-express-stepped-up-to-5-times-a-week
A new train schedule between Rotterdam and Chengdu in western China, will be passing 2 miles from where I live, 5 times a week.
Travel time 15 days. 75% cheaper than air freight. For the Chinese this route to Rotterdam makes sense for goods heading to the UK and Spain and even the eastern US seaboard. Trains won’t return empty to China: “cars, medicine, and lately a lot of Hoegaarden beer and machinery for the cotton industry in the Chengdu region.”
GregT on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 11:10 am
“The reason many Americans agree with me is they are not extremist engaged in hate peddling. Antifa types are like you and mad kat, grehg. These people are basically ideological terrorist.”
I don’t agree with the antifa types delusionalist. I would consider them to be extremists. I do however, agree with Cloggie. Multiculturalism will never work, especially when the youth in a society find themselves facing an uncertain future. I have also read enough to understand that the US has been divided on purpose, in order to bring her to her knees. The same as what is being done in other parts of the world, especially lately in Europe.
What is your answer delusionalist? How would you solve the growing division in the USA? The EU? Canada? Etc.?
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 11:37 am
Extremist, you monitor enough of my comments to know my position so quit wasting my time.
GregT on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 12:05 pm
I am asking you for your position, because it is not clear, at least not to me.
The problem isn’t going away delusionalist. Other than a repressive police state like the Chinese are already accustomed to, how do you see this problem being addressed. Thanks for your time.
fmr-paultard on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 12:19 pm
SENTAPBs extremism is like islamic extremism and I’ve known SENTAPBs recommend conversion to Islam to achive their goals.
GregT on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 12:35 pm
paultard,
Would you mind speaking in a language that others can understand.
Thanks
Davy on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 12:59 pm
The US is a large place with varying degrees of multi-cut issues. Some areas will not be saved but the reasons are far greater than only social issues. I am for sticky boarder meaning harder to get through. I am for less interference in the 3rd world by the 1st world. Most of all I am calling for people to embrace lifeboats and prepare hospices for a coming paradigm shift to less affluence and less population. This will be a nonnegotiable process that will not be fair and in many caeses random meaning luck will play a part in who survives and who parishes.
GregT on Mon, 11th Dec 2017 1:47 pm
Completely agree on all points.