My standard disclaimer, first off:
“If you’re afraid to write something that might offend someone, why write anything at all?”
So said the most widely respected Western monk of the past century, and one of my heroes, Thomas Merton. And he was right: no matter what you write, you can be assured that somebody, somewhere, or many somebodies, are bound to be offended. I trust the truth - because it is true: the truth shall set you free. If that makes some people uncomfortable, that’s too bad; but the truth must be spoken, in any case.
As to the coming financial/economic collapse, I think it is the elephant in the room, or one of them, that nobody wants to admit is now staring us in the face.
(See Gerald Celente and Max Keiser, for a healthy dose of reality-check.)
Note also, I predicted the 2008 crash, when everyone was saying things are just rosy, and were going to stay that way. Only two others on the planet made that prediction, to my knowledge.
So you may want to take my warnings seriously.
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Both the global fiat money system and the stock market no longer have any connection to the real world. To say that both are a hyper-inflated bubble, set to burst, would be the greatest of understatements.
Nobody can say with certainty when the fiat paper money will collapse, but we can be 99% certain that it will.
Look at the Weimar Republic of Germany. The German Mark went from a value of one to one with gold, to a trillion to one. It became worthless pieces of paper. People literally had to bring a wheelbarrow full of money to the store to buy a loaf of bread. And it was said that if you left a wheelbarrow full of money on the street while you went into the store, people might steel the wheelbarrow. They wouldn't steel the money, because the money was worthless. People were literally using it as wall paper.
Why did the German Mark collapse? Frantic money printing, to paper over debts that could not be paid. That led to hyper-inflation and radical devaluation of the currency, until the bottom fell out, and did so very quickly once the inevitable hyper-inflation kicked in.
What are the central banks doing now, since 2008? Exactly the same thing. (The US Fed, ECB, China….they’re all doing it.) The total is now $49 trillion that has been printed out of thin air, to give to the Wall St. and the other criminal, international corporate elites.
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Just for perspective, what could we have done with $49 trillion?
Eliminate global poverty - 3/4 of a trillion dollars
Pay off all US household and student debt - $20 trillion
Invest $28 trillion in a global Green New Deal, renewable energy and transportation infrastructure build, along with creating millions of new, regenerative organic farms, greening the deserts, creating full employment and prosperity in the process, building beautiful, tiny green homes for the one billion (and fast rising) homeless in the world, and restoring the Earth to near paradisal conditions.
Instead, we lined the pockets of the billionaire class, and further cemented the drive to global neo-feudal corporate fascism.
Smart move!
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What can we say about the historically unprecedented, massive money printing that is going on now, with no end in sight?
A, It is mass theft and corruption on an unimaginable scale. Profits and wealth go to the top 0.01%, while debt and costs are pushed onto the plebes, the bottom 99.99%. This, of course, is not accidental. This is by design.
B, It is causing a stock market bubble and artificial inflation of corporate stock prices that are unprecedented in history.
C, The artificially inflated stock prices are generating trillions of dollars in additional wealth for the already stratospherically wealthy 0.01%.
D, The helicopter loads of cheap money being dumped on the corporate elite is allowing them to buy back their own shares, thereby taking the big corporations private, and furthmore enabling them to buy up real world assets, such as farms, land, factories, office buildings, homes, real estate, businesses and infrastructure, energy and water systems, along with politicians, political parties, journalists, scientists, colleges, universities, “scientific journals”, religious leaders, the culture industry, the remainder of the major media, most of the "alternative media”, government agencies, international bodies (eg. the WHO), and entire governments - and to effectively privatize, take over, and own the world. Welcome to the Brave New World of the Roman Empire 2.0 - bigger, meaner, more Orwellian, and global. (Daniel would understand.)
E, It is hyper-accelerating the move to global neo-feudalism, which is the natural outgrowth of unchecked hyper-concentration of wealth and power in a capitalist economy.
F, It is causing inflation (15% in reality, because the government numbers are lies), meaning the cost of living is skyrocketing, while salaries and wages remain flat, causing the final destruction of the middle class, and the creation of a two tiered society, based on the Third World model.
And G, It is a radical devaluation of fiat paper currency ("money") which guarantees that a collapse of all paper money, and the global economy with it, is coming soon.
What is soon? Soon in historical terms. That could be 20 years, though it is unlikely it will take that long, or it could be this year.
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What can be done? What should be done? What must be done, better said?
I had an interesting, brief chat with a dear friend, whom I respect very much, who is doing graduate studies in economics, and who respectfully urged me not to give in to the “weaponization of macro-economics” for use against the people. I’ve not followed up on that brief chat yet, to find out what he meant by that (in response to an earlier essay), but I will say this. Macro-economics was weaponized for use against the 99% of the people, seven and a half thousand years ago, by the first empire, in Sumer. Nothing has substantially changed since then. The elite have simply invented more complex chicanery, with which to fleece (or slaughter) the people.
What must be done, is to rescue the professions of economics and politics, from their current role as prostitutes to the ruling power elite - and to rescue science, academia, culture, and spiritual and intellectual life, from the same general, current status.
But on to the further details, or at least, a few of the major ones:
On a macro-scale, we must remove the billionaire oligarchs from the bottomless feeding trough they have created for themselves, then remove them entirely from power: end QE, corporate subsidies and bailouts; put the corporate fraud artists in prison for life, without parole - and the politicians and bureaucrats who aided and abetted them; ban all private “donations” (more honestly termed “bribes”) to elections, politicians and political parties; legally ban any and all moves from government office into the corporate world, or the “consulting” world - with life sentences in prison for violators; impose serious taxes on the incomes, profits and wealth of the Fortune 1,000 biggest corporations, where we do not break them up entirely, as we should (if, that is, any of them are still alive, after the life-support IV of liquid cash is removed), and a 90% wealth and income tax on the top 1% richest families; make all central banks public and democratically controlled; admit that orthodox neoclassical economics is divorced from reality as well as morally and intellectually bankrupt; focus on a Quality of Life Index and Gross Domestic Happiness, and stop obsessing so excessively over GDP, profits and “growth” (only cancer cells grow without limits, and in the real world, there are no “externalities” - see Daly & Cobb, For The Common Good, David C. Korten, The Great Turning, and Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs The 1%); return money to some form of real-world, solid backing, and end the fiat money system; put a tax on all financial speculation, including currency speculation, above all; abrogate all “trade deals” - which are more honestly called corporate rights deals - which surrender the democratic powers of sovereign nations, to transnational corporations and the global business elite who control them - which means nearly all of the “trade deals” that are currently in existence; set an upper limit on interest charged on money loaned, set perhaps at 1.5% to a maximum of 3% above the real rate of inflation - banning all credit card companies and payday loan sharks if they fail to comply, dissolving those corporations entirely; de-fund and abolish the IMF and the World Bank; impose strict constitutional limits on any and all forms of excessively large concentrations of economic or financial powers - for example, you can own one newspaper, not thousands, or one cable TV network, not a media empire, or one bank, not a global chain of banks; establish a global debt jubilee, and a cancellation of all debts (see Michael Hudson, And Forgive Them Their Debts). That would be a good start. And that will require nothing short of a revolution, make no mistake.
On the micro-scale, at the level of the individual and the family:
Smart people will respond as I described and advised above.
In short: slash your debt, and your expenses, cut up your credit cards, and don’t spend a cent on non-essentials - other than books, which I would say are essentials, because knowledge, wisdom and understanding are more precious than gold; buy gold and silver coins, and a small stake in Bitcoin; and most importantly, build community, go off-grid, and plant a garden.
Remember, you can’t eat gold, bullets, or Bitcoins.
Mutual aid, community, and a small piece of land, however - these three things represent real security; or at least, the greatest security there can be, in a cosmos where change is virtually the only constant.
See my recent Substack article, Real Security, for further details. And listen very carefully to everything that Gerald Celente, Gregory Mannarino and Max Keiser have to say.
Remember, foresight is infinitely more valuable than hindsight.
Remember also, as Virgil said,
“Fortune favours the bold.”
J. Todd Ring,
January 4, 2022
This 29 minutes with Michael Hudson is worth more than 99% of economics textbooks, or tens of thousands of hours spent reading or listening to so-called professors, pundits and analysts of finance and economics. As he says, economics is a PR industry for the business elite.