The emperor will make a mockery of the future.
There is a Supreme Ruler of the world. During the early years of his reign he won accolades and devotion, showering his subjects with goods and services that were beyond their means. As he consolidated his rule, a few malcontents warned that there was less to his cornucopia than met the eye. However, his grip on power tightened and they were shunned. Once he had an iron chokehold, their warnings were forgotten or ignored.
Meet Emperor Debt. The first true globalist ruler, his dominion spans the planet. A cosmopolitan and multiculturalist, he reigns impartially over all races, nationalities, ethnicities, genders, creeds, and political persuasions. The little figures who supposedly run things think he’s their servant; they are actually his puppets. They promise and propose; he denies and disposes. Just the other night a puppet made a long speech full of promises and proposals. The Emperor smiled at the speech and the raucous reaction in the ownership-claims market the next day. “We’ll see about that,” he said to himself.
One of Emperor Debt’s minions once said, “In the long run we’re all dead.” A ninety-four-year long run later, we’re all in debt, and it would be an optimistic mischaracterization to say up to our eyeballs. We’re buried. The world’s debt is so stupendously huge it can only be estimated. Nominal debt is roughly $250 trillion dollars, or over three times what the world produces each year. Unfunded promises for old age pensions and medical care are another $500 trillion or so. Throw in financial derivatives of $1.5 quadrillion. Stated debt, unfunded liabilities, and derivatives sum to $2.25 quadrillion, or about $300,000 per person. Leave out the derivatives and per capita debt and unfunded liabilities are still $100,000 (figures from “March 2017: The End Of A 100 Year Global Debt Super Cycle Is Way Overdue”).
keep the deep state on the run!
US statistics are equally unsettling. Nominal personal, business, and government debt is $67 trillion (over 3.5 times the GDP), unfunded government pension and medical liabilities are estimated at $105 trillion (some estimates are up to two times higher), and derivatives held by US institutions at $612 trillion (all figures from US Debt Clock.org). That’s $2.412 million per person. Back out derivatives and it’s “only” $529,000 per person. The Debt Clock says we have $395,000 assets per person, so net debt is around $134,000. However, asset values are the Emperor’s sleight-of-hand. His debt blows up asset values, but sometimes the Emperor punctures the bubble and asset values deflate. Obligations to pay interest and principle on debt, on the other hand, do not deflate, absent rescheduling or bankruptcy.
“We’ve been hearing about debt from Cassandras, Nervous Nellies, and Chicken Littles for years; nothing’s happened!” cries the Chorus, and the Emperor smiles. The Chorus is dead wrong; plenty has happened, none of it good. The more you borrow from the future, the less future you’ll have. Debt has grown faster than production; the future has arrived and growth rates are falling. Unable to borrow its way to prosperity, Japan has been in a recession punctuated by interludes of anemic growth for 27 years. Growth in Europe has been virtually non-existent since the turn of the century, and debt crises loom in Greece and Italy. In the US, Barack Obama left office as the first president who did not have even one year of 3 percent real growth. His government needed to borrow over $9 trillion just to buy a feeble recovery. The Chinese “miracle” has sputtered as China struggles to carry its increasingly heavy debt load.
In the US, real incomes are lower now than at the turn of the century. The young see an increasingly bleak future—more debt, less opportunity—and forego marriage and procreation. Birth rates have fallen across the Emperor’s domain, well below replacement rates. Populations are aging and there are fewer workers supporting more of the elderly trying to collect on all those unfunded liabilities. Some day the young will rebel against debt slavery to the old and the Emperor will smile: divide and conquer.
Central bankers are the Emperor’s subalterns. They promote cheap debt, “magically” breaking the link between debt and the production or assets needed to pay it back. The Emperor’s propaganda ministers hail the “prosperity” that flows from central banks exchanging their debt for governments’ debt. Both sets of debt are collateralized by nothing and are claims on nothing; they can only be “redeemed” for more central bank or government debt. Yet this debt can be produced without limit or restraint—including the obligation to pay it back with real goods and services—and the Emperor’s subjects think of it as money and wealth. Constantly expanding debt and illusory prosperity promote a mirage economy.
Say what you want about the Emperor, he has a sense of humor. Amused by his subjects’ delusions, he plays with them like a cat plays with its prey. When financial asset prices drop, buy into the next debt-fueled upswing. Prosperity won’t end as long as credit standards fall and more credit is extended. Borrow two dollars for a dollar’s worth of growth. Credit is income. Creditors’ claims are wealth.
Sooner or later, both the Emperor and the cat tire of their games. Pouncing, they make waste of the best laid schemes of men and mice. The Emperor has stopped armies, brought down governments, sparked revolutions, opened countries to invasion, and left poverty, devastation, and misery in his wake. Only fools doubt that he is not once again readying a destructive masterstroke that will level welfare and warfare states alike. Given the paper and promises that litter the globe, encumbering every asset and income stream, this one will be his most terrifying.
The Emperor’s reign waxes and wanes, but as long as humans remain human it won’t end. Hubris, avarice, and folly are occasionally tempered, never vanquished. There will always be that wish for something for nothing, that desire to consume more than one produces, that hope that continued improvidence won’t lead to ruin. Events, not contemplation, end mass delusion. It takes little foresight to see what’s coming, and little wisdom to recognize that it can no longer be prevented, but the herd refuses to see or think. That is the ultimate default.
WHEN GENIUS, NOT DEBT,
POWERED THE ECONOMY
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
Pingback: SLL: The Ruler Of The World | Western Rifle Shooters Association
What a brilliant metaphor. I’m in my sixties and remember the pundits calling for a debt collapse as far back as the 80’s. What I and they didn’t realize is how easy it was for the money masters to kick the can down the road. And it helped that all the nations of the world participated in this.
I guess I can kiss my future pension goodbye as well as my SS and medicare benefits. Even without a global collapse, my Teamster pension fund is broke and many retirees are getting 50-70% haircuts. I’ll be lucky to get anything at all, as the PBGC is going broke as well.
Good thing I prepared for this years ago. I’ll survive for a while. I’ll try to help young people. I do not fear death.
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Helping people who need and deserve help will be a big part of how we get to the other side of all this.
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If in fact what you have laid out is true, and I believe that it is, then we are all doomed. When the economies of the world start to collapse there will be no stopping them. Total economic collapse will bring about the collapse of all governments and all laws.There will be anarchy in the streets. If you don’t have a plan on how to survive and a group of supporting members to band together with, you will be gone in the first wave of violence. It’s never too late to plan, but it’s better to plan before it’s too late.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself.
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Over and over You pack more wallop into one paragraph than most writers online fit into 5 pages.
The last two sentences may be the reason the Emperor hasn’t “Disappeared” You yet. The herd doesn’t believe you.
If one Googles Images of any mega city in India and then remove all the middle class housing I think that’s what the Emperor has in mind for us after that destructive masterstroke.
Keep up the good work.
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Thanks.
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Pretty tough to argue against the truth, but you can continue to come up with creative delay of payment due probably through Trump/Pence’s terms. I love Trump but after reading his ‘Art Of The Deal” I pretty much know what the plan is; Make America a bastion of capital inflow while the rest of the world sucks it. Wing it hiring the brightest minds to help you wing it at the highest level. See what happens and adjust. Can’t say I blame him for not having a more concrete plan but let’s face it, anybody who says they have the answer for a complete fix is just full of it. We already passed any opportunity for a normal fix when Reagan established deficit spending as being okay as long as we had growth. Bullshit then, bullshit now. I’m teaching my kids how to think for themselves and how to use firearms. I’m trying to be optimistic.
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It sounds like you and your family have something to be optimistic about.
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You have redefined the word “Emperor” and this one must have lots of clothes. What item of clothing = compounding interest? I’m guessing a big, bejeweled, punishing-as-needed sword.
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Exactly, and interestingly enough, this sword grows heavier over time.
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If anyone thinks we’re coming out of this mess unscathed, they’re dreaming. The debt goes hand in hand with a dependent class that will never willingly give up the largesse that enables their very existence. The former allows the feeding of the latter and latter demands the continuance of the former. Half this country is fed, clothed, and sheltered in some degree by the machinery of debt. Make no mistake, the deadliness of that synergy cannot be overestimated. When that debt-fueled largesse is even slightly interrupted, never mind cut off altogether, this country will explode!
The bottom line is this: No individual, no family, no business, no city, no state, no nation, not even this planet can live beyond its means forever. The wall will be hit. The only question is when.
Thanks for the post Robert. I always find your stuff thought provoking and interesting. I posted this comment in a slightly different form over on The Burning Platform.
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Thank you for both here at SLL and at TBP.
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Trump understands debt, and money, reveres Andrew Jackson… what if, he pulls The Lincoln-Jackson Option?
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What’s the Lincoln-Jackson Option?
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Just thinking outloud here, so bare with me, but isnt all the doom and gloom about the debt, really much to do about nothing. I mean really. I could no more pay my families share than the rest of you. Telling me that I owe this monstrous, incalculable amount of money, that was borrowed in my name without my permission, is ludicrous. How about we just say no! I get the ramifications of it, everything would grind to a halt, no pensions, no manufacturing , no girl scout cookies, nothing. But the wheels of progress would slowly start to roll again, we would figure it out. The herd would be culled and we we might be better people for it. But once again I am just thinking outloud. For some reason the story of the Gordian knot keeps going through my head……
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Mr. Gore,
For such a learned man, you and many other pundits have a limited understanding of the history, and the powers of the Presidency…
We think they are completely captured by the banks and corporations, but it is Congress who are the fools, presidents are only captured by their own level of confidence and popularity.
I called it the Lincoln-Jackson option, but it could rather be called, the Jackson-Lincoln-FDR-Nixon option. Andrew Jackson dissolved the 2nd US Bank of the US, aka central bank, because they were “manipulating the bread stuffs of the country”. Lincoln told the NY/Rothschild bankers to go to hell, when he needed money to fight a war and they were going to charge him 35% interest, so he, under good advice, printed what came to be known as “Greenbacks”… US Treasury Notes/Bills, and so they still are. There was never a greater prosperity in the country(at least in yankee land) until the Banks retook control over the currency in the 1870’s, that worked out real good… FDR took the peoples gold and forced fiat money down our throats, and so has it been ever since, to our great detriment. Lastly, Nixon “closed the gold window”, when DeGaule decided to exchange his dollars for gold. Thus, the international Bretton-Woods system was abolished.
Do you think President Trump will play footsies with these banker scumbags, or blame them for all the economic ills of the country and subsequently arrest them… and, members of congress, after he declares an economic emergency, and they try to blame it on him, and not their own shadow government ilk? Once this comes out in the open, do you think the Emperor will have him killed, knowing, that The People have now been awakened?
IF he must go to war against his enemies(who are now provoking CWII), do you not understand that he will do so with an army of millions at his back? IF ‘they’ “get him”, do you not know there will be a bloodbath in this country?
Everytime bankers take control of a nations currency, we are all held hostage to debt money, everything goes haywire, misery spreads, depressions and hyperinflations run in cycles, bloodshed always ensues. It is time to take control of currencies away from bankers, and in the words of John Wayne; “send ’em to hell”, even figuratively.
If we think about this, even a little bit… we will see that this would fix all the worlds money issues. Would it place control of money in the hands of psychopaths? Of course, but, tomato, tomahtoe… what’s the difference between fiat bank paper, and fiat government paper? A ‘bubble up’ economy then becomes necessary, and government would get to do what governments like to do; spend like drunken sailors. Would this affect inflation? Initially, but, since they would have control. I think that would be taken care of quickly with the Nixonian price controls, at the point of a gun.
In the end, I don’t think they would print money, I think we would instantly transition to electronic currency, aka bitcoin-like, and Bible prophecy would probably become real; aka The Mark of the Beast… I guess we have to simply stay alive long enough to wait and watch…
God Bless,
PIper
PS: I do love your writing…
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Piper,
Thanks, I’m glad you like my writing. I was aware of Jackson et. al.’s history with the banks and financial system, I just didn’t know what you were referring to. Thanks for the clarification.
Bob
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A couple decades back I heard a preacher state that the first sin to become acceptable and thus ignored as “sin” to essentially all of the West was the sin of covetousness.
Mr. Gore just pointed this out in fine style.
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