Economic pressures

[Danny B]

The State goes broke as we go broke

After the Latin American debt crisis, several big banks were insolvent. The FED told them to just pretend that everything was OK and, they could grow their way back to solvency.

"QUESTION: What mechanism prevents banks from creating fraudulent electronic deposits of currency?
As an IT systems admin, I have the ability to add / subtract / adjust ERP systems inventory / costing outside the normal users ability. I could add widgets to the system at will, but fraud can’t be sustained very long, as the physical widgets can’t be sold, they only exist in the system. Electronic currency, however, is only a ledger entry, and since new currency units are created as loans – What prevents any bank from just changing the numbers in their systems to create more currency units at will?"

"ANSWER: The creation of money electronically in the banking system is the degree of leverage. Reserve Requirement Ratio at the Federal Reserve was increased on January 18th, 2018. It required that all banks with more than $122.3 million on deposit maintain a reserve of 10% of deposits. Banks with $16 million to $122.3 million must reserve 3% of all deposits. They create money that is purely electronic and we do not see it. "
"They cannot create entries out of thin air. They are audited and the reserve ratio is strictly enforced in the USA."
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...nk-reserves-1/
This is an excellent article that goes into great detail at explaining reserve requirements. But the fact still remains; banks can fudge ALL the numbers when they are audited. They routinely borrow from the overnight window at the FED. Bribing an auditor is an old tradition.

Here is a long, detailed article on how the government causes inflation. Left out is the explanation of WHY the government causes inflation. The State is a non-producer that has the guns, printing press, lawbooks and, taxing authority. A concentration of power attracts a concentration of corruption. What else do you expect?
https://www.kelseywilliamsgold.com/h...ion/#more-2868

"Yesterday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell did a complete 180 on the Fed’s hawkishness."
Nope, he said that we were NEAR the neutral rate.
"Which is why his sudden decision to change course is not a good thing… in fact it’s very VERY bad.
Why?
Because this signals that something truly horrific is brewing in the financial system. "
https://gainspainscapital.com/2018/11/29/10386/
The truly horrific thing that is brewing is; sovereign debt,,, nothing new.

"Pump too much credit into the economy (created by central banking and fractional reserve banking) and mal-investments expand. A recession cleanses the excess. But in 2008 the Fed “papered over” the problems and didn’t allow liquidation of bad debts, insolvent big banks and weak businesses. Instead the Fed created dollars from nothing and gave loans to big banks, insiders and the politically connected. Loan examples:

Citigroup $2.513 trillion (Yes, $Trillions!)
Bank of America $1.344 trillion
Goldman Sachs $814 billion
"RETURN OF ZIRP AND QE: The central bank could allow banks to fail, tighten credit, increase interest rates and nurse the economy back to health over years, maybe decades. Will this happen? OF COURSE NOT! The Fed protects the big banks and treats the middle class as “milk cows” who feed banks and the political and financial elite. ZIRP and QE direct dollars to the big banks and create higher prices for everyone."

So, the economy is going to return to health. The birth rate is falling and automation is taking all the jobs.
https://deviantinvestor.com/10474/th...oaching-storm/

Armstrong, "They never seem to simply correlate this with economics. Now we have more than 47,000 Americans committed suicide in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
This is only the number of people who commit fast suicide. Millions more take drugs that they know will eventually kill them.
Do an image search for crocodile + drug.

11/30 ECB’s Draghi: QE will end in Dec. despite data –MarketWatch
Draghi and Salvini. Imagine to locomotives on the same track at high speed. This will blow out Italian debt and crash their bond market.

11/30 Norridge hikes property taxes by more than 35% to pay for pensions – IL Policy
AND
Progressives Zero In On Exit Tax On Illinois Wealth | Wirepoints
https://www.wirepoints.com/progressi...linois-wealth/
Nov 9, 2018 - They've figured out a way to tax wealthy folks trying to flee Illinois

11/30 Global economic perceptions are shifting, part 1 – Technical Traders
No kidding. $15 trillion lost in October alone.
11/30 Rising rates are killing the housing market – Real Investment Advice
11/30 30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin’s housing crisis – Guardian
The CBs pumped hot money into the banks. They converted this hot money into houses. Now, the working class can't compete with the speculative class.
11/30 Senators seeking to shoot down Yemen bill were paid by Saudi lobbyists – Zero Hedge
A ***** can't be particular. Moral collapse brings total collapse.

11/30 The insect apocalypse is here – New York Times
"Walmart has filed a patent for autonomous robotic bees, technically called pollination drones, that could potentially pollinate crops just like real bees. The drones would carry pollen from one plant to another, using sensors and cameras to detect the locations of the crops.Mar 14, 2018"

"As we reported last week, some 90% of all assets Deutsche Bank tracks are negative on the year.

In reminder, that is the highest percentage since 1901 — if you can believe it."
"Their calculations reveal that QT to date has lifted 10-year Treasury yields by some 17 basis points (a typical fed funds rate hike is 25 basis points).

Historically, they say, a 17-basis-point increase to the 10-year equals a 68-basis-point hike to the fed funds rate.
A 17-basis-point increase to the 10-year Treasury yield, in other words, equals nearly three Fed rate hikes.
In other words still:
The Fed has effectively worked (nearly) three additional rate hikes than officially listed."
https://dailyreckoning.com/we-are-li...m-uncertainty/

[Danny B]

Italy, Hopium & LIBOR

The next meeting of the FED is December 18-19.
The next meeting of the ECB is;
Governing Council of the ECB: monetary policy meeting in Frankfurt
13/12/2018
Press conference following the Governing Council meeting of the ECB in Frankfurt
Draghi, "The central bank has been treading a cautious path in recent months, seeking to start winding down its EUR2.6 trillion bond-buying program, known as quantitative easing or QE, without spooking international investors. "
"Speaking at the European Parliament in Brussels, Mr. Draghi confirmed that the ECB would likely phase out QE after next month. The decision is likely to be formalized at the ECB's next policy meeting on Dec. 13."
"Our policy had disastrous consequences? Yes, it created 9.5 million jobs in a few years," Mr. Draghi said."

Armstrong 2016 "Our models have been targeting 2018 for the last 30 years as the first potential year for a monetary crisis and reform."
"The most likely course of action has not changed. When confidence in government collapses among the GENERAL MASS PUBLIC, everything will breakout."
"The days of searching for some guru who is never wrong from an opinion perspective are gone and only fools seek such ideals. We are heading into the eye of a financial storm that will topple governments. The future is being constructed before our eyes if we wake up and just look. "
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/a...ting-a-future/

Italy wants to take the tried-and-true course of defaulting. Since they don't print their own currency, they have to default by way of the bond market. Investors will be reading the tea leaves leading up to the December meeting of the ECB. They are already starting to dump Italian debt.
AT THE SAME TIME, they must try to guess what the FED open market committee will do about U.S. interest rates. Powell said that we are close to the neutral rate, NOT, at the neutral rate. This is all hogwash anyway. A so-called neutral interest rate depends on dozens of outside factors.
I've already posted links showing that the interest rate is greatly affected by the birth rate. Armstrong already mentioned that December might bring some kind of big reversal.
So, how are the markets reacting to all this news?

London Inter Bank Overnight lending Rate. LIBOR
"While stocks, and with a notable delay bonds, were happy to run with Powell's dovish reversal on Wednesday, one key market - arguably the most important one for financial conditions when it comes to the broader economy - has refused to respond.

Earlier today, instead of reacting to what has been interpreted as the Fed Chair's "dovish repricing" of future rate hike expectations, 3 month USD Libor jumped over 3 basis points to 2.73813%, the highest level in more than ten years."
The banks have a good idea of what is going on with their competitors.
"The reason why rising Libor remains a major risk to financial conditions, is because as the table below shows, its footprint can be found everywhere, from OTC interest rate swaps, to leveraged loans - considered by many as the locus of the next credit crisis - to retail mortgages, to complex securitizations. According to the TBAC, just about $200 trillion in instruments are exposed to Libor's interest rate footprint."

"Most affected by this ongoing rise may be the bond market, which has also been hit with the double whammy of tumbling oil, which earlier today dipped below $50/barrel, a price widely seen as a "red-line" for junk bond investors, below which some may sell their exposure indiscriminately. And since energy is one of the largest components of the junk bond index, it is only a matter of time before contagion spread from oil, through highly leveraged energy producers to the rest of the market."

Putin calls for $60 oil. This pretty much puts a ceiling on price. Remember that oil hit $147 in 2008. That certainly put a whammy on the economy.

"In any case, the ongoing rise in Libor which absent a reversal soon will result in even tighter financial conditions and higher interest expense on trillions in floating rate debt, Bloomberg's Alex Harris notes that those traders who took the "dovish" Powell at his word, "
Powell said MAYBE.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...rillion-credit

So, the bankers refused to rev up the money machines. They aren't buying "hopium". Italian debt is 130% of GDP. The meeting is next month.

Central bank owns 18% of Italian government debt - Geotrendlines

https://geotrendlines.com/central-ba...vernment-debt/
Mar 11, 2018 - Back in 1990, about 70% of the Italian government debt was financed by private investors, today it is less than 10%.
France holds a LOT of Italian debt.
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service...rce=Alphaville
The planned collapse of Italian debt is going to take out quite a few banks around Europe.
Armstrong strongly recommended that Europeans get an American bank account.

[Danny B]

No money = no kids

Finance and the State are non-producers. They both must squeeze the producers to survive. The State does some redistribution so, it isn't quite as much of a direct drain as the bankers. The bankers do this just to raise their standard of living.
"The present global monetary regime is a collusive arrangement between politics and high finance. By monetizing their budget deficits, this system enables national governments to spend far more than their income from taxes and other sources, while granting banks the privilege of creating money in the form of debt, and then charging interest for its use. "

The federal government, (not the constitution) gave the Federal Reserve the right to create the U.S. money supply. The FED creates money out of thin air and uses this to buy treasury bonds. The FED is owned by private banks and, it pumps money into private banks. The private banks also buy Treasury debt. The U.S. FED GOV spends;
"Viewed from a GDP perspective, total government spending was steady at about 33 percent GDP in the mid 2000s and then jumped, in the Great Recession, to 41 percent GDP."
The State is the biggest borrower of all and, really needs those low interest rates, Interest rates are going up and, the State is paying $1.5 billion a day. Federal debt is rising exponentially.
The State sucks the money out of the working economy in the form of taxes. The bankers suck the money away from the working man in the form of the inflation tax. Effective wages haven't gone up in 40 years for the working man,,,, unless he works for the State. With 96 million Americans of working age NOT in the labor force, the State is running out of tax-donkeys. It has resorted to printing and borrowing the difference.

Quora, "
AT LEAST 22 million are reported to work for all the various U.S., state and local governments,"
51% of Americans receive a check from GOV. 96 million of working age are not in the labor force. In short, the "earning power" of the State is diminishing at the same time that it's payouts are rapidly rising.

"It’s a simple but often unrecognized fact that money is created by banks when they make loans, including loans to governments when banks purchase their bonds. "
"The current global monetary regime is ‘political’ in this sense. Based as it is on interest-bearing debt, the imperative for debt to grow continuously is inherent in the system. Since interest on bank loans accrues with the passage of time, total debt must be continually expanded in order to keep the system from collapsing. "
"This debt imperative leads to a growth imperative as individuals and corporations vie with each other in the market to acquire enough money to avoid defaulting on their debts. :"
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transf...wth-imperative

"THE FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF SHRINKING POPULATIONS
INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND
23
Appendix 1. The Impact of Population on Economic Growth The size of the labor force is one of the main determinants of economic output. For example, in the basic Solow Growth Model, output depends on the evolution of the capital stock (K), labor (L), and technological progress (E). The steady-state, long-run growth rate of output is directly proportional to the growth rate of the labor force (Box). "
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft...15/sdn1521.pdf

"But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business...h-rate/534291/

"There is no question but that the populations of most European countries will decline in the next generation, and in the cases of Germany and Russia, the decline will be dramatic. In fact, the entire global population explosion is ending. In virtually all societies, from the poorest to the wealthiest, the birthrate among women has been declining. In order to maintain population stability, the birthrate must remain at 2.1 births per woman. "
"The process is essentially irreversible. It is primarily a matter of urbanization. In agricultural and low-level industrial societies, children are a productive asset. Children can be put to work at the age of 6 doing agricultural work or simple workshop labor. Children become a source of income, and the more you have the better."
"In a mature urban society, the economic value of children declines. In fact, children turn from instruments of production into objects of massive consumption."
"Children cost a tremendous amount of money with limited return, if any, for parents. Thus, people have fewer children. Birth control merely provided the means for what was an economic necessity. "

"hat means that throughout the history of modern industrialism and capitalism, there has always been a surplus of labor. There has also been a shortage of capital in the sense that capital was more expensive than labor by equivalent quanta, and given the constant production of more humans, supply tended to depress the price of labor."
For the first time in 500 years, this situation is reversing itself.
"The argument I am making here is that population decline will significantly transform the functioning of economies"

"Perhaps the most important change will be that where for the past 500 years bankers and financiers have held the upper hand, in a labor-scarce society having pools of labor to broker will be the key. "
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfo.../#31af6490698e

https://qz.com/1187819/country-ranki...astern-europe/
"In 1995 only one country, Italy, had more people over 65 than under 15; today there are 30 and by 2020 that number will hit 35. "
Italy had / has the highest debt in Western Europe.
Bulgaria is the fastest shrinking population in Eastern Europe. In 1990, 56% of Bulgaria’s GDP went to debt service.

"Most world leaders are fixated on the unpredictable new administration in Washington in the short term, but they might do better to look at the more certain long-term impacts of diminishing populations on the world’s most important economies. Economists, including John Maynard Keynes, have connected low birth rates to economic declines. On the “devil” of overpopulation, Keynes wrote, “I only wish to warn you that the chaining up of the one devil may, if we are careless, only serve to loose another still fiercer and more intractable.”

"Japan’s long economic slowdown reflects, in part, the fact that its labor force has been declining since the 1990s and will be fully a third smaller by 2035."
Their lost decade commenced in 1992.
"At the same time the fertility rates of some immigrant groups, notably Latinos, have been dropping rapidly and approaching those of other Americans. This is despite the fact that as many as 40% of women would like to have more children; they simply lack the adequate housing, economic wherewithal and spousal support to make it happen."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkot.../#76fb39d5b83c

There really is no solution to the falling birth rate.
At the same time, there is no financial remedy to the falling birth rate that could possibly rescue the debt-money system.

[Danny B]

Parasites create money because they can't create wealth

I had to break it up.
"As we understand it, when a depositor makes a deposit he is, in essence, lending money to the bank. But what does the money represent? If the deposit is earned money, it represents something of equal value produced by the depositor’s labors. "
"For example, the deposit could represent a coffee table. In this regard, there are only a few things to do with a surplus coffee table. You could store it for your own future use. You could trade it with a neighbor for something of equal value.

In each of these instances, there is no increase in capital. The coffee table remains a coffee table. Nothing more. Nothing less. Alternatively, you could sell the coffee table for money. If you then stuff the money in your mattress, you have the equivalent of one coffee table. Again, there’s been no increase in capital.

But suppose you deposit the money at your bank and leave it there at interest. You would’ve loaned the bank your surplus labor in the value of a coffee table. And the interest paid represents the beginning of an increase in capital.

Now consider that after your deposit, an enterprising carpenter, who is without tools and materials, borrows your deposits from the bank to buy a table saw, doweling jigs, and red oak lumber. These tools and materials represent your coffee table.

But with these tools and materials, the carpenter gets to work and makes three coffee tables. One he keeps for himself. The other two he sells. With the earnings of one of the coffee tables he repays the bank the money he borrowed to buy the tools and materials. After that, he still has the proceeds of the third coffee table, which is profit."
"Then, instead of spending this profit, he saves it. He deposits it in the bank at interest. Now the bank has the capital of two coffee tables. "
"Through this process wealth has been produced and accumulated. And more wealth can be produced and accumulated in this manner, provided the labor is not lost."

"remember, the value in money is in what it represents. Every dollar of actual money should be derived from a dollar’s worth of wealth that has been produced. "
"Through policies of state sponsored wealth destruction, wealth is extracted from those who created it and then set on fire with systematic efficiency.

This is accomplished through fake money, deficit spending, and central bank manipulation of credit markets. The results are an unending assortment of gross distortions, misallocation, debt pileups and losses. Moreover, the average wage earner – those who work hard, save money, and pay their way in life – don’t stand an honest man’s chance."
"You see, within the system of fake money, big deficits, and central bank intervention, money is continually debased, That is, the relationship to the wealth that money represents is degraded. The money’s buying power is impaired. The labor that earned the money is diminished. The time it took to accumulate it is stolen."
Well, what else do you expect a parasite to do?
https://acting-man.com/?p=53838

Bill Gross Says Bond Bear Market Has Arrived After a 35-Year Run
U.S. Births Dip To 30-Year Low; Fertility Rate Sinks Further Below Replacement Level
15 drastic effects.
https://guff.com/15-drastic-effects-...lation-decline

[Danny B]

No blinking in the FED and Italy,,,French taxes,,,Corporate debt smoking

The cheerleaders are desperately trying to keep the party going.
They said that the FED "blinked". No such thing. He said "we'll see."
This isn't the first time for this kind of thing.
Paul Volcker fought 10 percent annual inflation rates with contractionary monetary policy. He courageously doubled the fed funds rate from 10.25 percent to 20 percent in March 1980. June 1983: Inflation falls to 2.5 percent, after peaking at 14.6 percent just three years earlier.

Italy, 12/03 Italy caves to EU demands on deficit – Bloomberg When you read the article, it is a different story.
"ready to back down on their hard-line deficit target demands, newspaper Il Messaggero reported"
So, some newspaper said that maybe they would back down.
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/a...egotiator-role
"Messaggero reported, without saying where it obtained the information"
They are trying to buy time for the hedge funds to dump Italian debt without starting a panic.
12/03 Mnuchin says China agrees to lower auto tariffs; Beijing silent – Bloomberg
Bloomberg again

Look at this graph. Enormous quantities mature in the next 2 years.
https://twitter.com/Schuldensuehner/...491137/photo/1
Yep, corporate debt is soon to start smoldering,,,,, soon to burst into flames.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...gile-narrative

Mises "It must come to an end sooner or later. For paper money and bank deposits are not a proper substitute for non-existing capital goods. Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis. It has happened again and again in the past, and it will happen in the future, too.”
"created by a feckless Fed captured by Wall Street banks and corrupt Washington politicians who took Dick Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter” mantra to obscene levels, will end in another financial crisis. Our Deep State controllers have “solved” a financial crisis caused by too much debt by tripling down on more debt."

"The current artificial boom would have ended in 2018, but Trump’s massive tax cut for corporations, who used their windfall to buy back their stock at all-time highs, and reckless government spending increases directly into the pockets of the military industrial complex, gave the GDP one final burst."
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2...2/tick-tock-4/

"It will take a fall in America’s economic power, specifically the loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which will ultimately bring down the empire. That is what has neocons like John Bolton concerned.
Day of Reckoning

Unfortunately, until that time, the US will continue its rampaging ways. The day of reckoning, however, appears to be fast approaching and instead of a defeat on the field of battle, the US Empire will collapse under a mountain of debt."
"The treaty, signed in 1987, was a landmark achievement of the Reagan Administration which deescalated tensions between the two super powers and kept a lid on a costly arms buildup that neither can afford."
YES, but the MIC doesn't want a lid on arms spending.

That caravan of illegals is on the road for a very good reason.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/w...ion-households

" technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them? What if America has hit peak jobs?"
"Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt.

If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs,"
https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/am...hit-peak-jobs/

Paris protests: Emmanuel Macron orders PM to hold talks with 'yellow ...
https://www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Europe
2 days ago
AND
"It’s also proving to be extremely tricky to defuse, as there’s no single protest leader to negotiate with.
. Demonstrators marched on Paris’s Avenue des Champs-Elysees two weeks later, triggering social unrest. Surprisingly, the protest is benefiting from a significant backing, with 84 percent of the French public calling it “justified,” according to Odoxa-Dentsu poll for Le Figaro."
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...rexit-or-italy
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...-it-beginning/

Parallels to 2008, http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-new...t-now_11302018

"The REAL problem, the one that is going to crash the markets, is occurring in the BOND/ debt space, NOT stocks.

The US Corporate bond market is larger, more leveraged, and lower quality than it has EVER been in history.

Today, over 34% of ALL corporate debt is high risk.. as in JUNK… as in there is a HIGH probability the corporation will default on it.

Put another way, over $1 out of every $3 in the corporate debt market is going to be defaulted/restructured during the next downturn.

By the way, that downturn is already here. The Junk Bond markets has taken out its bull market trendline AS WELL as support."
"Consider that 50% of the Investment Grade (IG) bond market is rated BBB, the lowest possible credit rating within the IG space. And there is considerable evidence that much of this stuff is actually JUNK."
"even the IMF expects 20% of corporates to default in the coming months, you’ve got the makings of another 2008… only this time in corporate debt, not mortgages."
https://gainspainscapital.com/2018/1...-its-bursting/

The ECB spent EUR 2.6 trillion and created 9.6 million jobs.
The FED created about 4.1 trillion for the State and, created several million jobs. $280 billion was lost to
"This Fed Policy Enabled the Fracking Industry's $280 Billion Loss"
China has been exporting unemployment but, this won't go on much longer.
Walmart will soon deploy hundreds of robot janitors to clean stores, the retailer announced on Monday.
Any questions?

[Danny B]

Financials slipping,,,Timing prognosis

Reportedly, bank stocks are going down hard.
"All 67 stocks in the S&P Financials Index declined on Tuesday,"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart...ail&soc_trk=ma
So, will the banks run out of money?
12/04 JPMorgan says cash better than stocks for first time in decade – Bloomberg
Bring your money here. We will take good care of it.
Macron the weenie is trying to prove how stupid he is.
Jean Claude Junker is trying to outdo him, https://capitalistexploits.at/2018/12/juncker-speaks/

"Long Pig" is back on the menu, https://rense.com/general96/evidence...annibalism.php
12/04 “Our clients are shifting from “end-of-cycle” to outright “recession” trades” – ZH
12/04 “Collapse of civilisation on the horizon,” Attenborough warns world leaders – Goldcore So, pass lots of new laws and fix it.
12/04 Ford’s restructuring could slash more jobs than GM’s, Morgan Stanley says – MW
Ford is trying to avoid a downgrade that would push investors OUT of Ford paper.

"The economic implications of a contracting population, in particular a working-age population, is what interests me because it will be the fate of much of the core of our industrial civilisation within a decade."
"For those who have read their Greer books, they should not be surprised. In Greer’s book The Ecotechnic Future, he writes that the most isolated areas will be cut-off first from the benefits of industrial civilisation as rising costs lead to the gradual phasing out of services, goods and electric power to the most remote areas."
"In the longer term, the capitalist system as we know it will end given the “limits to growth” megatrends, something that the German military predicted in their peak oil report which I covered here. "
"So, to conclude, the coming end of economic growth, in part triggered by the demographic shifts going in in the cores of our industrial civilisation, will lead to a fundamental reset of economic relations within a generation. This is the biggest story going on and it is barely registered by our media, political and economic elites."
https://forecastingintelligence.org/...globalisation/
True, nobody is paying much attention to the contraction of both workers and population.

"What happens next?
Think of the past few months as the first act in a play that is performed in virtually every business cycle, with later acts following a predictable script. Here’s how it’s likely to go this time:"
"Words give way to modest action (early 2019). When the markets figure out that empty promises don’t change the underlying reality of slowing growth, falling corporate profits and rising loan defaults, they return to panic mode. Governments are then forced to actually do things to try to stop the bleeding. In the current US case, that means the Fed will announce that it’s done raising rates and will soon start cutting."
"This will be greeted with another few days of market euphoria, followed by the realization that, again, nothing substantive has changed. Stocks will resume their decline. Let’s call this “2008 revisited.”

"The action turns serious (mid-2019). Now Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington (i.e., the 1%) are in full-on panic mode, and ready to take radical steps to save themselves. "
"the government starts forgiving student loans and possibly auto mortgages. Tax cuts move through Congress, along with infrastructure spending that dwarfs any previous roads/bridges program.

Federal deficits exceed $2 trillion and will – Washington assures its citizens – stay that high for as long as it takes to restore “normal markets.”
https://www.dollarcollapse.com/empty...fail-timeline/

When China sneezes, Australia catches a cold, https://sorendreier.com/one-million-...heir-own-home/

France is the highest on public social spending.
https://3lrofj3556kl9zu0p27yma51-wpe...cd-longrun.png
France is the next-to-highest on taxes. The working class is fed up with this.
https://capitalistexploits.at/2018/1...astern-europe/

PRIVATE BLOG – The Fate of the US Share Market is Tied to Europe
Posted Dec 3, 2018 by Martin Armstrong

PRIVATE BLOG – The Fate of the US Share Market is Tied to Europe
Italy is getting ready to blow up European banks.

[Danny B]

Epigenetics, confidence,,,birth and death rates

In the very crowded populations, 20% of seagulls are lesbian.
If a girl lives in a home with poor economic conditions, she will start menstruation early.
If you cut way back on food intake, it can extend life span as much as 40%.
Wiki, "The life extension varies for each species, but on average there was a 30–40% increase in life span in both mice and rats. In late adulthood, acute caloric restriction partially or completely reverses age-related alterations of liver, brain and heart proteins"
These are all examples from research about epigenetics.

"For nearly a century after the term “epigenetics” first surfaced on the printed page, researchers, physicians, and others poked around in the dark crevices of the gene, trying to untangle the clues that suggested gene function could be altered by more than just changes in sequence. Today, a wide variety of illnesses, behaviors, and other health indicators already have some level of evidence linking them with epigenetic mechanisms, including cancers of almost all types, cognitive dysfunction, and respiratory, cardiovascular, reproductive, autoimmune, and neurobehavioral illnesses. Known or suspected drivers behind epigenetic processes include many agents, including heavy metals, pesticides, diesel exhaust, tobacco smoke, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, hormones, radioactivity, viruses, bacteria, and basic nutrients."

What does this have to do with the economy?
The Central Banks along with the private banks have impoverished a great mass of the people. Since we respond "genetically" to exterior stimulus, we have collectively reduced our birth rate.
Tokyo has an area population of 13.8 million. The Japanese government has started a dating service to get people to hook up and procreate. The girls are all looking for a "farm boy".
BBC Two - This World, No Sex Please, We're Japanese
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03fh0bg
As Japan faces a future which could see its population shrink by a third in just 40 years

Growing consumption and a growing population are a central necessity to our debt-money and credit system. As Japan clearly shows, there is no escaping from demographics.
mi·as·ma
/mīˈazmə,mēˈazmə/
an oppressive or unpleasant atmosphere that surrounds or emanates from something.
"a miasma of despair"

The Wall Street Journal on Twitter: "'Deaths of despair' are on the rise ...
https://twitter.com/wsj/status/984030863640932352
substance abuse, suicides and diabetes drove a rise in premature deaths in nearly half the country,

There is lots of speculation about the next recession on the net. There are lots of people talking about "post-scarcity" economics where everything will be free. The PTB don't have a chance of continuing the current system of looting the working class. Negative Epigenetic pressures will guarantee that the birth rate will fall and, the death rate will rise.
China is locking down the entire country under AI surveillance. Their fertility rate is only 1.5 People just don't want to bring children into a messed-up world.
Japanese sovereign debt is 260% of gdp. 80% is the death cross. As long as the Japanese GOV pumps in boatloads of money, things keep going,,, after a fashion. Almost all State are going to find themselves in a similar position. In December, we will find out of the ECB is going to shut off the printing press.
The FED has plans to do this too. Capital flight is temporarily holding up U.S. markets. This won't go on forever. As the demographic crash gets worse, the Central Banks will be under constant pressure to print and subsidise retirees. As we see in Japan, and now, Europe, this can only be done with freshly printed money. It becomes impossible to attract private bond buyers when the State has a runaway printing press.

A bid part of epigenetic pressure is related to confidence. Confidence is rapidly being lost.
"In late 2018, an increasing number of Americans believe that an economic downturn is coming, and they are taking actions consistent with that belief. As a result, they are actually helping to produce the result that they fear. "
The Psychological Bubble That Has Been Propping Up The U.S. Economy Is Starting To Implode
So, what will be the low point of this feedback loop?

[Danny B]

The speed-bumps are getting taller

2 articles, one from a wanker, one from a genius.
"Long-term readers of the Absolute Return Letter will know that I always distinguish between short-term debt cycles and debt super-cycles. Short-term debt cycles move more or less in parallel with the underlying economic cycles and last on average 7-8 years – in line with the average length of economic cycles.
Debt super-cycles are a different kettle of fish. They typically last 50-75 years"
"The growth in debt-to-GDP implies that little of the fancy stuff that have enriched our livelihoods in the last 30-40 years has actually paid for itself. Instead, it has been financed by under-investing, driving productivity growth lower and debt-to-GDP higher. Global under-investments in the past half century amount to no less than $400 trillion "
Maybe we should stop spending on wars.

"Here in the UK, an obvious way to default would be for the government to renege on its pension obligations. Total unfunded UK pension liabilities are about Ł11 trillion with the majority being the government’s. Ł11 trillion is more than 5 times UK GDP. Does that money exist? No, and the UK pension model will definitely have to be revamped at some point."
We can't reduce war spending

"Wealth-to-GDP is long-term stable and, as you can see in Exhibit 4 below, the US long-term mean value is around 380%; i.e. total US household wealth is on average about 3.8 times US GDP. The mean value varies somewhat from country to country, but it is long-term stable everywhere. Think of the ratio as a measure of capital efficiency"
"Wealth simply cannot outgrow GDP (or vice versa) in the long run. The two must grow hand-in-hand longer term. I have seen US data going back about 150 years, and every time wealth-to-GDP has deviated meaningfully from 380%, it has mean-reverted. Every single time!"

"As you can see from Exhibit 4, US wealth-to-GDP now exceeds 500%; i.e. it must drop 25-30% to re-establish the long-term mean value. That can happen in two ways. Either GDP grows faster than wealth for an extended period of time, or 25-30% of all US household wealth is destroyed."
"The three most important contributors to wealth in society are property, bonds and equities (in that order)."
Feces-for-brains doesn't list a single thing that produces tangible wealth
"but the fact that populism is on the rise worldwide does worry me. What is that going to lead to?"
We can't possibly have the creators of tangible wealth actually receiving the benefits.
"For now, my favourite to mark the end of this debt super-cycle is a complete meltdown - and subsequent revamp - of the defined benefit (“DB”) pension system,"
"The problem is quite simple. In many countries around the world, large amounts of pension savings are still managed per the DB model; i.e. the risk is still overwhelmingly the employers’ (including the government). With falling interest rates and risk assets only delivering modestly positive returns, particularly outside the US, liabilities have grown much faster than assets in many pension funds in recent years."
The rescue of the banks is what killed the pension plans.

“Either we all take a haircut and convert to defined contribution plans [aka DC plans where the risk is transferred to plan members], or our country will go bankrupt, and you will get nothing at all. Which of the two outcomes would you prefer?”
https://www.arpinvestments.com/arl/t...-of-defaulting

Now for the genius;
"Of all the delusions that have infected the minds of economists, central bankers, and the investing public in recent years, perhaps none is as short-sighted and pernicious as the idea that aggressively low interest rates are “good” for the economy and the financial markets.

There is, of course, a certain truth to that idea, roughly equivalent to proposing that snorting amphetamine-laced cocaine is “good” for one’s energy"
"Back in 2003, Alan Greenspan mixed the soap of what would become the housing bubble by holding interest rates to just 1%. Investors responded to the uncomfortably low yields on Treasury bills by looking for alternatives that offered a seemingly safe “pickup” in yield. They found that alternative in mortgage securities. Wall Street was more than happy to satisfy the demand for more “product,” as they called it, by creating more mortgage bonds. But see, creating a mortgage bond requires you to actually make a mortgage loan to someone, which is how we got zero-down, no-doc, interest-only loans. "

"In my 2003 piece outlining that developing bubble, I began, “T.S. Eliot once wrote ‘Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.’ It seems that the U.S. financial system is bound and determined to find out… the real question is this: why is anybody willing to hold this low interest rate paper if the borrowers issuing it are so vulnerable to default risk? That’s the secret. The borrowers don’t actually issue it directly. Instead, much of the worst credit risk in the U.S. financial system is actually swapped into instruments that end up being partially backed by the U.S. government. These are held by investors precisely because they piggyback on the good faith and credit of Uncle Sam.”"
About that upcoming sovereign bond default,,,

"In the Federal Reserve’s attempt to bring the U.S. out of the crisis of its own making, the Fed has produced conditions that make another collapse inevitable. Unfortunately, the scale of the present bubble is far grander, and the consequences are likely to be more severe. By the completion of this cycle, I continue to expect the S&P 500 to lose roughly two-thirds of the market capitalization it reached at its September 20 peak. Mountains of covenant-lite debt and leveraged loans, this cycle’s version of “sub-prime” mortgages, will go into default."

"so my sense is that a major price collapse like 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 is the most likely way this bubble will be resolved. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that it would not even take a decline to historically run-of-the-mill valuations to wipe out every bit of S&P 500 total return that the index has enjoyed since 2000."
"quantitative easing and zero interest rates have not been “good” except in the myopic sense of encouraging a short-term burst of very bad choices and misallocations of capital."
"With the total capitalization of U.S. corporate equities recently pushing $40 trillion, I continue to expect that $20 trillion or more of what investors count as “wealth” will vanish over the completion of this cycle."

FRED, 96 million Americans are not in the labor force.
"That leaves cyclical growth as the only remaining component. Yet with the U.S. unemployment rate already down to 3.7%, the likelihood of substantial further declines is limited. Even pushing the unemployment rate down to 1% over the coming 4 year period would add just 0.7% annually to economic growth."
Everybody keeps harping on the unemployment rate as if it were a gold-plated enumeration of all the people not being productive.,

The Phillips curve is an economic concept developed by A. W. Phillips stating that inflation and unemployment have a stable and inverse relationship. The theory claims that with economic growth comes inflation, which in turn should lead to more jobs and less unemployment.

"I’ve regularly argued elsewhere that the “Phillips Curve” is actually properly viewed as a relationship between unemployment and real wage inflation, but it bears repeating that there is no meaningful relationship between general price inflation and unemployment, nor will you find a strong, reliable relationship between inflation and government debt, the outstanding quantity of base money, the output gap, or virtually anything else."
How can he be smart and stupid at the same time?
https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc181128/
Both these articles have some good information,,, and some ripe BS also.

Armstrong, "Today, governments wage war more often for the private benefit of select groups rather than the state. The invasion of Iraq made billionaires out of Cheney’s friends and left the American people with endless trillions in debt that will last collecting interest to constantly roll indefinitely until the crash and burn."
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/a...-of-our-times/
Everybody in the financial community has worked hard to transfer all risk to the state.

Armstrong, "f we throw in all the economic problems we see coming with pensions and a monetary crisis on top of all of that, I would not count on 2020 being a normal presidential election. It may be the most violent event in American political history. The last major riots during a presidential election were August 1968 at the Democratic National Convention – 1968.652. If we add 51.6 years we arrive right on schedule – 2020.252. So get ready. 2020 is not going to be very civilized"
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...rican-history/

More bumps in the road.
12/06 Market sell-off set to continue as Dow futures get hit – CNBC
12/06 Global sell-off hits Asia as Hong Kong stocks drop 2% – CNBC
12/06 The market doesn’t care how “fantastic” your stocks are – Real Investment Advice
12/06 Illinois’ other debt disaster: $73 billion unfunded retiree health benefits – Wirepoints
12/06 A flattening yield curve has investors spooked – what happens next – CNBC
12/06 Competition Is dying as the biggest corporations gobble up everything – EOTAD
12/06 Multi-strategy hedge funds suffer “one of worst months ever” – ZH
12/06 Citi warns Q4 market revenue will unexpectedly shrink from last year – ZH

12/05 An eye-scanning lie dectector is forging a dystopian future – Wired
Use it on the politicians.

Stock Market Crash: The Dow Has Fallen Nearly 2,500 Points And FAANG Stocks Have Lost A TRILLION Dollars In Value
Predictions from Saxo Bank.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...edictions-2019

[Danny B]

Market crash,,, climate crash

Since everything is connected, I have to veer off to the climate.
Armstrong, "Furthermore, couldn't it be that the promoters of global warming (IPCC et al) actually know that CO2 is NOT the problem but by feeding us the propaganda, they actually catch two flies in one blow: increased taxes and reduction of the population because the majority will not be prepared for the upcoming cold/famine."
"I was at the White House dinner and was seated at a table of ten with the heads of environmental groups. I cannot get my head around how these people think. They openly admitted that this was all about reducing population growth and how to frustrate it with wetlands to Global Warming these days. They DO NOT believe in Global Warming or CO2. They are using this to reduce the population. "
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...ctor-analysis/

More from Armstrong, https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/c...-news/climate/

OK, the warmers actually want to drastically reduce population AND make a buck while doing so.
Climate change: $4 trillion carbon tax is needed to save humanity from ...
https://www.independent.co.uk/.../cl...-save-humanity...
We fork over $4 trillion and,,,,,, the windbag politicians suck up all the CO2. I would pay that if the politicians promised to hold their breath until they died.
Armstrong believes that the PTB are working on a big depopulation program.
"In Greer’s book The Ecotechnic Future, he writes that the most isolated areas will be cut-off first from the benefits of industrial civilisation as rising costs lead to the gradual phasing out of services, goods and electric power to the most remote areas."
That's nice but, when the sovereign bond market crashes, the cities will be most affected. The free $hit army will run wild. I'll cast my lot with the rural people who are used to dealing with weather problems. Look what happened in a 1977 storm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9wxpLnd30&t=56s

What happens in the cities when the food supply shrinks? In South Africa, hail destroyed a forest and killed livestock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLAdgO4obSE
Here is an incomplete map of crop losses.
http://iceagefarmer.com/map/
About 10 years ago, True News warned that we would see the first signs of an Ice Age in the winter of 2018--2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbVtDa3DqRQ&t=116s
The old weather patterns have changed so much that it is hard to quantify global warming / cooling.

Crippled Atlantic currents triggered ice age climate change | Science ...
http://www.sciencemag.org/.../crippl...climate-change
Jun 30, 2016 - Now, scientists have implicated the culprit behind those seesaws—changes to a conveyor belt of ocean currents known as the Atlantic ...

Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say ...
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...urity-shortage
Dec 2, 2015
Climate change is going to radically shift weather patterns. Anthropogenic global warming is just a scam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ&t=49s

So, what happens when the sovereign bond markets crashes,,, fracking blows up,,,crop losses get worse? How bad will the depression be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNSXWkApxU8&t=100s
Remember, we blew up the Manmade River Project that was going to irrigate huge areas of north Africa. Slick Willie is responsible for the destruction of the huge food producing capacity of Rhodesia. Looks like Africa gets the axe. This isn't surprising considering that they are the only area that has a rising population.

Meanwhile, the Central banks are setting us up for a total financial crash.
Well, millions of economists have been trained in theories that don't actually work. According to the FED, "The Federal Reserve Board employs over 300 Ph.D. economists,"
Sprott, "In a recent survey not a single major central bank could provide an example of an accurate “a priori” recession forecast."

So, read the information and, make your own conclusions.

[Danny B]

Ice age,, solar flares,,oil vs banks

Fossil fuel burning 'postponing next ice age' | Environment | The ...
https://www.theguardian.com/.../2016...g-next-ice-age
Ice age delayed by humans... by 100,000 years - CNN - CNN.com
https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/14/world...ned/index.html
The average length of a inter-glacial period is about 11,000 years. We are in the Holocene and, it has been warm for about 13,000 years.
Volcanic event caused ice age during Jurassic Period -- ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...1211124428.htm

Well, volcanism is definitely on the rise. Suspicious Observers say that we are statistically due for a very large eruption. Dunno.
In addition to that, Earth is due for a X-45 flare (Carrington) We are close to due for a X-60 flare also.
Then, there are super-flares X-100,000.
"Surprisingly, we (they) found 365 superflares on 148 solar type stars (G-type main sequence stars)"
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/defa...a_SWW_2015.pdf
Buy more popcorn, the sun will cook it for you.

Jim Willie, "the high risk to Wall Street banks from the declining crude oil price whereby the big banks have credit exposure to the suicidal shale sector,"
12/06 Oil dives 4% as OPEC meeting ends with no details on production cuts – CNBC
The deep state had made enemies of Iran and Russia. Saudi is pumping out record amounts. They can keep pumping until the banks choke. THAT is why Pox Americana keeps talking about cutting Irani oil exports to zero. Iran said that; if they can't export oil, nobody in the area will export oil. Demonizing Russia to get them to cut oil exports.
The banks would like to drive the price of oil way up. That doesn't work out very well.
"Throughout the first half of 2008, oil regularly reached record high prices" $146
"The stock market crash of 2008 occurred on September 29, 2008"

"The Prognostications of Ben Bernanke

We now have the diametrical opposite of the famous "Peter Schiff Was Right" video (a compilation of 2006 and 2007 clips in which Schiff, a financial expert who subscribes to Austrian economics, predicted the deep recession that would follow the bursting of the housing bubble).

The new, opposite video is a compilation of the 2005–2007 prognostications of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In it, Bernanke is shown to have been just as embarrassingly wrong as Schiff was uncannily right."
"Bernanke said that the housing boom was fine because it was supported by, among other things, growth in jobs, incomes, and in the economy in general. But that very growth itself was supported by the housing boom! For example, most of the job growth was in the housing sector. Witness Bernanke's amazing levitating economy: its housing sector is held up by economic growth, which is held up by its housing sector. And it's just as ridiculous that he denied the existence of a housing bubble by pointing to low mortgage rates. The low rates were a chief cause of the housing bubble, and were a direct result of his actions as Federal Reserve chairman."
https://mises.org/library/ben-bernan...ncannily-wrong

[Danny B]

Taxes and corruption

12/07 France overtakes Denmark for top spot in most taxes as percent of GDP – Talk Markets
12/07 France fears more riots; museums, Eiffel Tower to close – Philly Tribune
"The French rebellion over taxes on fuel is a Global Warming Tax. So Macron backed off of the fuel tax. To show this is just an excuse for Global Warming and the real objective is to grab more money, "
"There is something seriously wrong with these people. They claim that not even having a car contributes to only 2.4% reduction in CO2. The biggest decrease in CO2 is to stop having children which would reduce it by 58.6%."
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...cause-of-58-6/

California has the highest personal tax rate in the country. Now, they want to tax space travel by the mile AND texting.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...om-your-phone/
12/06 Stocks rebound on word that Fed may pause rate hikes – CNBC
That's called , "grasping at straws".

2 kinds of debt;
"The poster child for all this lately is GE, who spent $40 billion on stock buybacks between 2015 through 2017 on shares that have declined in value 75% since. The company is now has a tangible net worth at negative $48 Billion."
https://medium.com/@markjeftovic/the...t-85c4fbf3f2bb

China lockdown, "The Chinese government appears to be stepping up its efforts to fully control all Chinese companies through either arrest or restriction of movement for their leaders."
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...rested-one-one

May seems to think that she is a reincarnation of Thatcher, "May is reportedly still insisting that the only options on the table are "no deal", "her deal" or "no Brexit".
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...certain-defeat

Netanyahooo is under investigation for corruption and, there have been calls for his resignation. NO problem,,, he'll just start a war with Lebanon to distract people.
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/2...non-territory/

"In France we’ve been seeing uncontrollable protesters from across the political spectrum writing “We’ve chopped off heads for less than this” in graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe, which you may be certain has widened plutocratic eyes all around the world.

And that, I believe, is why the mass media have been behaving so strangely. For two years they have been reaching and leaning all over the place trying to regain control of the narrative like a novice ice skater trying to regain balance, and they are only getting closer to falling. Which probably makes the present moment the perfect time to give them a good shove."
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/m...y-3b220ea0bb97

[Danny B]

Armstrong and Malthus

Merkel is out but, her ideological (and ugly) doppelgänger is in.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...places-merkel/
Keep in mind that Germany has a $1 trillion account surplus. The rest of the EU group has a $1 trillion account deficit. Call me suspicious but, when the crash & burn comes, I suspect that Germany will get the shaft. Versailles Deux

Armstrong pooh-poohs the idea of a Malthusian future. There is no need to reduce population.
I have never seen him mention; resource depletion, forced extinction of animals, pollution (China spends 15% of their GDP to counter pollution), stagnant wages for 40 years, habitat loss for everything except humans. "31 million acres for farmland has been developed since 1982."
"Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say "

Ocean Fish Stocks on “Verge of Collapse,” Says IRIN Report
Ocean Fish Numbers Cut in Half Since 1970 - Scientific American
All seafood will run out in 2050, say scientists
Nearly half marine population lost in last 40 years

Stocks and bonds are not wealth. They are calls on wealth. Tangible wealth comes out of the air, water and ground. The sun gives us usable energy.
List of 17 Scarce Resources the World Is Running Out of - Ranker
None of this matter to Armstrong. He looks at history and sees,, cycles and markets. How could he possibly have a baseline for a society that has widely available birth control? Same for digital currency. Same for runaway automation. He has no baseline for an economy that has instant transfer of capital but, very little mobility of labor. He has no baseline for a world that can bring total destruction on itself.
He has no baseline for an economy that depends on oil. He has no baseline for an economy that depends HEAVILY on electricity for everything but, is headed into a time of violent solar flux with a weakening and flipping magnetosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTaNoiC-buI

[Danny B]

European austerity,,,Why Civilizations Fail

Well, Macron is really a master of bad timing. Public strikes are a national past time in France but, this one is growing and spreading.
12/08 EU support for austerity opens door to far right, Corbyn says – Guardian
With austerity, ALL bets are off.
German Police Shut Down Concert Due to Mass Nazi Salute - Sputnik
The protests are spreading to other countries. Austerity will definitely make it worse.
"The 80 million or so people of Germany de facto rule the 500 million of the Union, or you know, the three handfuls that rule Germany. No important decision can or will ever be taken that Berlin does not agree with. Angela Merkel has been the CEO of Europe Inc. since November 22 2005,"
"The Union appears fatally wounded, and that’s even before the next financial crisis has materialized. Speaking of which, the Fed has been hiking rates and can lower them again a little if it wants, but much of Europe ‘works’ on negative rates already."
"Can Macron allow for French people to be killed in the streets? Almost certainly not. There’ll be pitchforks and guillotines. The only way out for him, the only way to calm things down, may be to announce his resignation. "
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/20...-of-the-union/

Here is a chart of the 30 year treasury bond. It has definitely broken out.
https://3lrofj3556kl9zu0p27yma51-wpe...ut_chart-2.png
ALL markets have rolled over.
"Returning to our truism “it’s never different this time”. Something else that’s equally “never different this time” is that governments never pay off unsustainable debt. Nevaaahhh!
Which brings up a question:
How much more debt can the world’s sovereigns add to their balance sheets before something falls over?"
"Much like Brexit, the French peasants are saying “non, Monsieur” to the globalists.
They’re saying non to the destruction of their culture. They’re saying non to the eye watering taxes. They’re saying non to what has by stealth been imposed on them. A political union run by a bunch of unelected foie-gras eating pointy shoes in Brussels."
https://capitalistexploits.at/2018/1...-is-happening/
The article talks a lot about what is happening in Europe. It’s other focus is; while everyone is watching the stock market, the far more important bond market is headed down fast.

"The cartel (especially the ECB and the Fed) is hoping it can gently deflate these bubbles it created, but that's a fantasy. Bubbles always burst badly; it's their nature to do so. Economic suffering and misery always accompany their termination."
"Attempting To Replace The Business Cycle With A Credit Cycle

In their quest for power and glory (and accompanied by a dead-flat learning curve), the world’s central banks are now pursuing their third, largest, and most ill-considered attempt to defeat the business cycle by replacing it with a credit cycle. The fact that the prior two credit cycles blew up spectacularly doesn't seem to be deterring them in the slightest."
"So Greenspan and Bernanke created the Housing Bubble 1.0 by offering the world’s credit markets a price of money so low it couldn't be refused. Housing was the story, and the Fed supplied the credit. As predicted by a scant few of us, that all blew up spectacularly in 2008. And no constructive lessons were drawn from that experience, either."
"Paying attention or not, here we all are; stuck together in a world awash with credit. $250 trillion in debt. 4 times that amount in unfunded liabilities. And a mind-bogglingly massive amount of tangled financial derivatives roughly the same size as both those debts and liabilities put together."

"And to add insult to injury, recession indicators are piling up faster and faster now. 2019 is looking primed to be The Year That Mass Layoffs Returned"
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/...ble-search-pin

"In 2014, a study partly funded by NASA warned that global industrial civilization could implode in the near future."
"Excess resource extraction and unequal wealth distribution were crucial to every civilizational collapse of the past 5,000 years."
"Morris Berman’s trilogy on the American Empire and William Ophuls’ Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail offer astute analyses on why America’s problems are irreparable and reminiscent of past empires."
"Simply put, the current monetary system allows America to pay for goods and services with printed dollars."
"All of the “Made in _______” goods being sold at American retailers, as well as American made products using imported materials, should be 2–5x more expensive than they are now. "
"The federal government will downsize drastically. "
"When we can no longer pay our deficits with printed dollars, the 1 in 5 Americans who receive federal aid will see giant reductions in their benefits.
Government employees will be fired en masse."
"Since 2008, they have printed over 12 trillion dollars to prop up the financial system."
https://medium.com/vandal-press/3-re...d-138b1e18bcf4

12/08 A death cross for the S&P 500 highlights a stock market in tatters – MarketWatch
12/08 This is the end of trump’s economic sugar high – Forbes Maybe
12/08 Russia ready to switch off Visa & Mastercard ahead of tougher US sanctions – RT Putin can't get Russians to make a clean break with the dollar. Trump is helping out.
12/08 Central banks fear they might not rule the world forever – GATA We can always hope.
12/08 Italy adopts hardline immigration law – Gatestone
RIGHT, but they're going to back down on the budget.

Compensation of employees as a percentage of the GDP.
https://www.oftwominds.com/photos201...oyees12-18.jpg
So, we had wage deflation at the same time that we had price inflation. We just couldn't afford to keep the economy going. The State stepped in to buy up enough stuff to make up the difference. The State has too much debt and bond buyers are backing off. Wages had their steepest decline after the dotcom crash when the FED inflated everything out of reach. As purchasing power diminished, the CB had to pump in ever-increasing amounts of liquidity to hold back the defaults. Powell has turned that spigot down or off. He wants to wring some of the excesses out of the system. He also wants to raise rates so that he can lower them in the next crisis. He wants ammunition to fight the recession that he will eventually cause.

[Danny B]

People = the economy,,,, bubble inflating

"High income nations saw peak total energy consumption in 2007 and are still below that peak almost decade later."
"Annual 0 to 64yr/old population growth among the consumer nations double peaked at +38 million. That was annually 38 million more potential employees, homebuyers, consumers, tax payers, etc. By 2008, annual growth was down to 20 million, and as of 2018 annual population growth of those aged 0 to 64 is just 5 million."
The banks (effectively) cut back our earnings by front-running everything we buy,,,,using our savings OR, wet-ink money. There is no possibility of growing the economy while the population is shrinking. Maybe the Greens want population reduction but, the finance system can't survive it.

"Note the potential workforce is growing at just one quarter the peak. But worse still, the pace is now less than half that of 2008...and by mid 2020's, the potential workforce will begin outright shrinking (and yes, the UN data includes and relies upon ongoing immigration just to maintain the below curves...absent that, the falloff is much sooner and steeper)."
The mantra is that; we need immigration. Bringing in 3rd world garbage with no skills means that they won't be productive and must be supported by the State for their whole lives. This implies a belief that the sovereign bond market will grow forever. It is already growing faster than exponentially. So, the State will have to support them cradle-to-grave.

But, the way that automation is growing, there will be many more millions of native born who will join them. Finance is focused on; a continuing supply of warm bodies to grow consumption.
Side note, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...-visa-workers/
"the childbearing population peaked about 2010 and is now falling. "
"Again, despite all the debt, central bank "support", and interest rate cuts...energy consumption (and more broadly consumption, period) is tracking the changing population...down."
The CBs are "pushing on a string"
https://econimica.blogspot.com/2018/...nergy-and.html

"2011 to present is the period with the greatest wealth creation growth in the nations history, yet during this period of economic strength, growth in federal tax receipts has been consistently decelerating...and even prior to the Trump tax cuts had already turned negative. Since the tax cuts, tax receipts are collapsing while federal spending is surging...hallmarks of what typically takes place during a recession, not the greatest wealth creation in this nations history. "
That was debt creation, NOT wealth creation.
"The already swollen issuance of public (marketable) debt since 2007 is about to move from a steep angle to an exploding vertical upward trajectory"
https://econimica.blogspot.com/2018/...ollapsing.html

"Yet percentage growth rates don’t do justice late in a Credit Cycle. Outstanding Treasuries expanded $1.187 TN over the past four quarters (7.3%) "
"It’s also worth noting that Federal borrowings this year have accounted for in excess of half of Total Non-Financial Debt growth (Q3 SAAR $1.180 TN of SAAR $2.228 TN)."
The bubble has a lot of leaks and, needs constant pumping. Trump and Powell are trying to make a soft landing. It's never been done before.
" Total Treasuries and Agency Securities ended the quarter at a record $26.439 TN (up $1.450TN y-o-y), or 128% of GDP."
80% is the death cross.
"Debt Securities ended Q3 at 215% of GDP, up from 200% and 157% to end 2007 and 1999. Equities Securities increased nominal $2.269 TN during Q3 to a record $50.602 TN (one-year growth $5.493TN). Equities Securities ended the quarter at a record 245% of GDP versus 172% at the end of 2007"
None dare call it a bubble.
" Total Securities ended the quarter at a record 460% of GDP. This compares to previous cycle peaks 379% (Q3 ’07) and 359% (Q1 ’00)."
"Household Liabilities gained $167 billion during the quarter ($539bn y-o-y) to a record $15.895 TN. "
"Household Net Worth ended the quarter at a record 528% of GDP, up from the year ago 514% and Q3 2016’s 498%. Household Net Worth to GDP set previous cycle peaks at 484% (Q1 ‘07) and 435% (Q4 ‘99)."
https://creditbubblebulletin.blogspo...and-cycle.html

11 companies that control everything that you buy, https://wikibuy.com/blog/11-companie...g-904b28425120
The British are out to prove that American politicians don't have a lock on stupidity.
https://sputniknews.com/europe/20181...n-fein-famine/
Business Insider Magazine, Future of Fintech: How Fintech Is Taking Over The World and What Comes Next.
Finance produces not a single tangible thing out side of paper bills. In their hermetically sealed little minds, tangible objects don't matter.
Japan is shrinking and has a head start on America.
https://www.sciencealert.com/million...-away-for-free

Congress is a big part of the deep state. Evidently, there is a problem with that arrangement.
https://theantimedia.com/rand-paul-d...g-run-congress
Then, we get word from Berzezinski on how things are supposed to be.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...lclearpolitics

[Danny B]

Political wars bringing down the economy

Trump has a long way to go. Know they enemy.
https://www.rt.com/usa/445807-us-sta...hanistan-9-11/
https://www.globalresearch.ca/heroin...heroin/5502813
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2...n-cfief-claims

China's economic model ignores profit in the quest for market share and growth. This makes them particularly vulnerable to upsets and declines. Trump got a tax reduction here to buy some time for his attack on China. Capital outflows from the R.O.W. are inflows to America. Everyone knows that the effects of the tax decline will wear off going into 2019. As long as America looks more stable than other markets, that will buy some time. These inflows are raising all boats.

The Chinese boat is sinking.
"With that in mind, take a look at the chart for China’s banking sector. Not only is the bull market trendline broken, (blue line) but the chart has crashed an incredible 33%."
https://gainspainscapital.com/wp-con...GPC1023181.png

Europe is doing equally bad.
https://gainspainscapital.com/wp-con...GPC1023182.png
"The US bond market is over $20 trillion in size. And if you include junior debt instruments, it’s over $60 TRILLION in size.

And this whole mess is beginning to blow up as the yield on the 10-Year US Treasury, the single most important bond in the world, has broken out above its multi-decade trendline."
That is this graph, https://gainspainscapital.com/wp-con...GPC1023183.png
If you compare the breakouts and reversals, the U.S. is doing much better. That is all it takes to attract capital.
Europe is too socialist and China is too exuberant (gambling). China knew that their export economy model would come to an end. They wanted to change to a domestic consumption model. China's EXCESS steel production capacity is equal to the total capacity of Europe and America combined. How are they ever going to absorb all their productivity into domestic consumption when their workforce shrinks by 1 million a year?
https://gainspainscapital.com/2018/1...ble-has-burst/

Teresa May figured that she would just shove a bad Brexit down the throats of Parliament and the people. Armstrong's model did NOT show any changes for Dec. 11. Sure enough, the votes is postponed. Here is a great Pic of May with a "Brexit" gun in her mouth.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...ote-postponed/
So, while Britain doesn't share the Euro currency, the Pound is going down also, due to the Brexit turmoil. The British banks want unfettered access to European capital markets and May is too stupid to avoid painting herself into a corner.

As China goes down, OZ falls apart.
"Growth had been looking good recently. Economists were optimistic. But when the ABS put out the official figures they were shocked. This matters to all of us. It puts Australia deeper and deeper into our emergency footing.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/econ...662cec0a24711d
The article reflects an exercise in hopium.
Armstrong, "As I have warned, the next two years are going to be an outright political siege warfare. Far more damage will be done to the United States and the world economy in this desperate attempt for the Democrats to retake the White House in 2020."
This is a good article on a possible impeachment.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...rfare-of-2019/

Here is a good article on the Clinton Foundation by Armstrong. Keep in mind that a full-on war between the House and Senate will be very bad for the economy.
"The Clinton Foundation is the poster-child for political corruption and tax fraud. What we are about to witness is the start of a political war in the House before the handover to the Democrats in January.
If we look back on April 23, 2015, just two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a message on the strategy to manipulate the Republicans into selecting the worse candidate.
Trump was absolutely certain to lose.
“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”
She ignore the deplorables.

"Jennifer Palmieri, in the hacked emails revealed that Palmieri and other Clinton allies’ hold very low opinions of Catholics. Hillary’s staff said Catholics are “severely backwards”
Jerry Oppenheimer reported in his book State of the Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000), that the night Bill unexpectedly lost his 1974 Arkansas congressional seat bid, Hillary shrieked at his campaign manager, “you ****ing Jew bastard.”
"Hillary was so shattered by the loss of her life’s dream to be the first woman president rather than what she could actually do for the country. Hillary refused to appear before her supporters. That was the most devastating thing any candidate had ever done in history."
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...gated-at-last/
Armstrong did 7+ years of hard time in prison. You can't scare him or shut him up. He knows that everybody important in finance reads him.

The dirt that comes out of the Clinton investigation will essentially will essentially make the Dems pathologically toxic. The Dems will control the House of Representatives. The HOUSE is responsible for originating all spending bills. So, while America presently attracts a lot of capital inflows, will this continue during the siege of Washington D.C ?