https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/the-controlled-demolition-of-the
The Controlled Demolition of the Economy
In case you haven't noticed, the wheels are falling off the global economy right now.
We've all started to feel the pinch of supply chain disruptions and rising energy costs and economic uncertainty and inflation—not to mention stagflation and shrinkflation and deflation—but this past week has really hammered home the extent of the crisis we are facing. It seems every single day brings with it the news of some fresh five-alarm financial fire.
The Dow is sinking. The loonie is falling. Japan is cracking. Global stocks are plunging. Eurozone inflation is spiking. The Fed is hiking. Builders are slashing. Crypto is crashing. Treasuries are tanking.
And that's just this week! As I'm sure you've seen, there have been many, many such stories circulating in the financial press in recent months, all touting similarly bleak numbers.
But it's important to keep in mind that these numbers are just that: numbers. The real question is what these numbers actually mean.
Today, let's answer that question by drilling down on the narrative behind the numbers and discover what that story tells us about the bars of the financial prison that are locking into place around us.
The Confidence Trick
As I have long argued, the global financial system (and the monetary order that system is predicated on) is a confidence trick in the most literal sense of that word. This has always been so in the age of fiat currency—witness, for example, the "full faith and credit" verbiage the US Treasury and others use to describe the dollar's "backing"—but it is especially so in the last couple of decades of central bank chicanery.
So, what does it mean to say that the financial system is a confidence trick?
To understand that, you have to go back to the birth of the modern monetary in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. As you'll recall from my podcast episode on Bretton Woods 2.0, the Bretton Woods Agreement required signatory countries to peg their currencies to the US dollar, which itself was convertible to gold bullion at $35/ounce. The idea was that in the post-war era, currencies would once again be backed by gold . . . by way of the dollar.
In short, the entire monetary order was to be based on the world's confidence in the US government's ability to keep its spending in check and not renege on its promise to pay its creditors in gold whenever they asked for it. But don't worry, everyone, Uncle Sam double-dog pinky swore that he wouldn't abuse the exorbitant privilege that comes with being the issuer of the world reserve currency!
Then along came the Cold War and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race and the rise of the military-industrial complex and the birth of the cradle-to-grave Great Society nanny state and a concomitant rise in public debt and a negative balance of payments and some countries began to wonder if maybe—just mayyyyybe—the US government didn't actually have enough gold in its vaults to cover all of its paper promises. But when French President Charles de Gaulle sent the French Navy across the Atlantic to politely ask Uncle Sam to convert France's dollar holdings to gold, President Nixon responded by closing the gold window and formally ending the Bretton Woods system.
From that point on, no one could pretend that the monetary order was anything but a confidence trick. In the floating exchange rate system that developed in the wake of Bretton Woods' destruction, fiat currency is measured against fiat currency in a house of cards that only remains standing because—like the deluded subjects of the emperor in Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale—people have been taught not to ask whether Emperor Dollar is really wearing any clothes.
It's no surprise, then, that the post-Bretton Woods era has been defined by a series of increasingly brazen attempts by the financial elite to cash in on the public's gullibility.
There was Kissinger's brokering of the petrodollar system, by which the Saudis price oil in dollars and launder those dollars back through the American financial system.
There was the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, which led to the creation of the Plunge Protection Team, a group of high-ranking banksters and government officials that admittedly works to rig the stock market at the behest of the oligarchs.
And there was Greenspan's housing bubble in the early 2000s, which led to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and which was in turn papered over with a "jobless recovery" and the normalization of central bank intervention in the markets.
And now here we are at the end of the Longest Bull Run in History!!! (What Could Go Wrong???) with the wage slaves still being asked to Worship the Stock Market and pretend that it isn't commonly understood that The Markets Are Manipulated, that The Financial Press Now Admits the Markets are a Sham and that The Central Banks Have Engineered This Collapse.
. . . But the tide of the last 80 years of monetary history is turning. People are finally waking up to the fact that the emperor is indeed naked, and many are finally questioning their confidence in the system that the central bankers have created.
The (Engineered) Crisis of Confidence
That the entire economic order is one giant confidence game will come as no surprise to my regular readers or anyone else who has been paying attention to such matters. What is surprising is that the mainstream financial press aren't even attempting to hide this fact anymore.
The Bezos Post frames their coverage of the inflation crisis as a matter of the public "losing faith" in the Fed. Famed billionaire investor Bill Ackman is calling for aggressive Fed rate hikes to "restore confidence" in the markets. Even Fed chair Jerome Powell himself admits that what's concerning to the banksters isn't price inflation itself, but people's belief in the system, noting that the "really critical question" is "making sure that the public does have confidence that we have the tools" to fight inflation.
Indeed, by this point no one can deny that the faith which sustained the global economic con game for so long is faltering. When the financial order was putting food on their families' table, few were inclined to question the status quo. Now that the cost of putting food on their table is skyrocketing, many have no choice but to question that status quo.
While this loss of confidence may or may not be surprising to Jerome Powell or the other mid-level functionaries of the con game, it is certainly not surprising to the string-pullers at the Bank for International Settlements—the central bank of central banks identified as the apex of financial control by Carroll Quigley in Tragedy & Hope—who have been "warning" of the inevitable result of this central bank-driven QE madness time and time again for years.
It would be the height of naiveté, however, to believe that the people at the very top of the pyramid of economic power could foresee the collapse of this system and yet do nothing to prepare for it. In truth, of course, the BIS and the other financial elite are not sitting on their hands wondering what to do about this crisis of confidence. Quite the contrary. They are egging it on.
The various "failures" that we are seeing in the markets right now are not mere happenstance; they are problems that are either being created or worsened by deliberate action.
Inflation isn't coming out of nowhere. It is the perfectly predictable result of central bank interventions.
The supply chain is not "breaking down" for no particular reason. It has been shut down by government order.
Food prices aren't rising because farmers are suddenly choosing to ask for more money. They're rising because governments are carefully crafting the conditions for a food apocalypse.
No, what we are experiencing is not a spontaneous economic collapse; it is the controlled demolition of the economy.
But why? What reason would the powers-that-shouldn't-be have for destroying the very confidence game that they have been running for the better part of a century?
Problem Reaction Solution
That the financial elitists who have worked so assiduously to build up a world order would then turn around and contribute to the destruction of that order is only puzzling if we think they are planning on continuing the current status quo forever. But they are not. So, in order to clear the way for the new economic world order, the old one must be destroyed.
Imagine that you signed a 99-year lease on some prime Lower Manhattan office towers. Now imagine that those towers were consistently under-occupied and they were going to require $200 million of asbestos removal work in order to bring them up to code. Finally, let's also imagine that you had the foresight to make sure that your insurance explicitly included the right to rebuild anything you want on that land in the unlikely event of the towers' complete destruction. In such a scenario, you might just make the calculation that it's in your interest to destroy the towers yourself and blame the act on some Muslim boogeymen. You know, hypothetically speaking.
Similarly, if you were in a position of power over the global monetary order and you wanted to completely rebuild that order from the ground up in order to give you and your cronies complete control over every transaction taking place on the face of the planet in real time, then there may come a time when you calculate that it's in your interest to begin a controlled demolition of the economy.
Not being part of that financial elite, I obviously can't say for certain whether or not that determination has been made. I don't know how much time we have before the current order collapses altogether or whether the controlled demolition of the economy has even started in earnest yet. After all, back during the Lehman collapse of 2008 I could hardly have conceived that the central banksters were going to be able to kick the can down the road for several more years with quantitative easing and negative interest rates and other transparent financial charlatanry. It's certainly possible that the con men who have been running this con game for so many decades have a few more tricks up their sleeves to keep the zombie economy limping along for some time.
But what I do know—because I covered it here in these pages just last month—is that just about every single central bank in the world is now actively pursuing the implementation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). I know that by the end of the decade—if not much sooner—we are going to see country after country adopting and foisting retail CBDCs on their citizens with the intent of tracking every transaction in the economy in real time. Finally, I know that an altogether new monetary instrument is unlikely to be adopted by the public absent some compelling reason, like a hyperinflationary crisis in the old monetary instrument.
Putting all of these facts together, it stands to reason that the financial order we have known our whole lives is slated for destruction and its days are numbered. It is in the light of this knowledge that I believe we should be interpreting the current economic crisis.
It's important to understand how nicely the pieces of the broader political/geopolitical/social/financial puzzle fit together, and how all of the events of the last two years bring those pieces together. The biosecurity roll-out necessitates the vaccine passports. The vaccine passports introduce the digital ID. The digital ID provides the infrastructure for the CBDCs. The CBDCs provide a mechanism for enforcement of a social credit system (and/or a carbon credit system). To see these events as separate events unfolding haphazardly and coincidentally is to miss the entire point. The demolition of the economy is just an excuse for the implementation of the next stage of the agenda, just as COVID-19 was an excuse for this stage of the agenda.
In short, the all-out economic assault being waged on the free peoples of the world right now is just another battlefield in the all-encompassing fifth-generation war we find ourselves fighting against the global elitists.
And, just as I noted in my recent Guide to Fifth-Generation Warfare, our ability to defend ourselves from this assault (let alone win the battle) is dependent on our knowledge that we are in a war at all. We must be able to lay the cards out on the table for our friends and family as clearly as possible: The economy is being destroyed on purpose. It is being done by the same con men that created the very system that is being destroyed. And it is being done to consolidate complete control over the economy, right down to our ability to buy and sell.
In effect, we're standing at Ground Zero of the global economy watching the squibs going off in the Twin Towers of the global financial system. We can either stand here, mesmerized by the pyrotechnics of the explosions, or we can fall back, regroup and take the necessary steps to lessen our dependence on this collapsing system and to expand and reinforce the counter-economy that will be our only lifeline as the bars of the new economic prison are closed around us.
Whatever the case, make your choice quickly. There is little time for deliberation.
....
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.htmlOur Economy In a Nutshell
Our economy is in a crisis that's been brewing for decades. The Chinese characters for the English word crisis are famously--and incorrectly--translated as danger and opportunity. The more accurate translation is precarious plus critical juncture or inflection point.
Beneath its surface stability, our economy is precarious because the foundation of the global economy-- cheap energy--has reached an inflection point: from now on, energy will become more expensive.
The cost will be too low for energy producers to make enough money to invest in future energy production, and too high for consumers to have enough money left after paying for the essentials of energy, food, shelter, etc., to spend freely.
For the hundred years that resources were cheap and abundant, we could waste everything and call it growth: when an appliance went to the landfill because it was designed to fail (planned obsolescence) so a new one would have to be purchased, that waste was called growth because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up when the replacement was purchased.
A million vehicles idling in a traffic jam was also called growth because more gasoline was consumed, even though the gasoline was wasted.
This is why the global economy is a "waste is growth" Landfill Economy. The faster something ends up in the landfill, the higher the growth.
Now that we've consumed all the easy-to-get resources, all that's left is hard to get and expensive. For example, minerals buried in mountains hundreds of miles from paved roads and harbors require enormous investments in infrastructure just to reach the deposits, extract, process and ship them to distant mills and refineries. Oil deposits that are deep beneath the ocean floor are not cheap to get.
Does it really make sense to expect that the human population can triple and our consumption of energy increase ten-fold and there will always be enough resources to keep supplies abundant and prices low? No, it doesn't.
Many people believe that nuclear power (fusion, thorium reactors, mini-reactors, etc.) will provide cheap, safe electricity that will replace hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas). But nuclear power is inherently costly, and there are presently no full-scale fusion or thorium reactors providing cheap electricity to thousands of households.
Reactors take many years to construct and are costly to build and maintain. Cost over-runs are common. A new reactor in Finland, for example, is nine years behind schedule and costs have tripled.
The U.S. has built only two new reactors in the past 25 years.
The world's 440 reactors supply about 10% of global electricity. There are currently 55 new reactors under construction in 19 countries, but it will take many years before they produce electricity. We would have to build a new reactor a week for many years to replace hydrocarbon-generated electricity. This scale of construction simply isn't practical.
Supplying all energy consumption globally--for all transportation, heating of buildings, etc.) would require over 10,000 reactors by some estimates--over 20 times the current number of reactors in service.
Many believe so-called renewable energy such as solar and wind will replace hydrocarbons. But as analysts Nate Hagens has explained, these sources are not truly renewable, they are replaceable; all solar panels and wind turbines must be replaced at great expense every 20 to 25 years. These sources are less than 5% of all energy we consume, and it will take many decades of expansion to replace even half of the hydrocarbon fuels we currently consume.
To double the energy generated by wind/solar in 25 years, we’ll need to build three for each one in service today: one to replace the existing one and two more to double the energy being produced.
All these replacements for hydrocarbons require vast amounts of resources: diesel fuel for transport, materials for fabricating turbines, panels, concrete foundations, and so on.
Humans are wired to want to believe that whatever we have now will still be ours in the future. We don't like being told we'll have less of anything in the future.
The current solution is to create more money out of thin air in the belief that if we create more money, then more oil, copper, iron, etc. will be found and extracted.
But this isn't really a solution. What happens if we add a zero to all our currency? If we add a zero to a $10 bill so it becomes $100, do we suddenly get ten times more food, gasoline, etc. with the new bill? No.
Prices quickly rise ten-fold so the new $100 bill buys the same amount as the old $10.
Adding zeroes to our money (hyper-financialization) doesn’t make everything that's scarce, expensive and hard to get suddenly cheap. It's still scarce, expensive and hard to get no matter how many zeroes we add to our money.
Many people feel good about recycling a small part of what we consume. But recycling is not cost-free, and the majority of what we consume is not recycled.
The percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, for example, is very low, less than 5%. We have to mine vast quantities of lithium because we dump 95% of lithium-ion batteries in the landfill. There are many reasons for this, one being that the batteries aren't designed to be recycled because this would cost more money.
The majority of all manufactured goods--goods that required immense amounts of hydrocarbons to make--are tossed in the landfill.
Goods and services are commoditized and sourced from all over the world in long dependency chains (hyper-globalization): if one link breaks, the entire supply chain breaks.
Our economy is precarious because it's in a lose-lose dilemma: resource prices can't stay high enough for producers to make a profit without impoverishing consumers. Prices can't stay low enough to allow consumers to spend freely without producers losing money and shutting down, depriving the economy of essential resources.
Playing hyper-financialized games--creating money out of thin air, borrowing from tomorrow to spend more today and inflating speculative bubbles in stocks, housing, etc.--won't actually create more of what's scarce. All these games make wealth inequality worse (hyper-inequality), undermining social stability.
The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling. Each of these systems is dependent on all the other systems (what we call a tightly bound system), so when one critical system unravels, the crisis quickly spreads to the entire economic system: one domino falling knocks down all the dominoes snaking through the global economy....
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