Category Archives: Collapse

Is The U.S. Banking System Safe – 15 Years Later, by Jim Quinn

Posted on March 15, 2023 | 1 comment

The more things change, the more they stay the same. From Jim Quinn at theburningplatform.com:

“We’ve got strong financial institutions…Our markets are the envy of the world. They’re resilient, they’re…innovative, they’re flexible. I think we move very quickly to address situations in this country, and, as I said, our financial institutions are strong.” – Henry Paulson – 3/16/08

The next financial crisis: Why it looks like history may repeat itself
Silicon Valley Bank is shut down by regulators in biggest bank failure since global financial crisis

“I have full confidence in banking regulators to take appropriate actions in response and noted that the banking system remains resilient and regulators have effective tools to address this type of event. Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out . . . and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again.” – Janet Yellen – 3/12/23

With the recent implosion of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the largest bank failures since 2008, I had an overwhelming feeling of deja vu. I wrote the article Is the U.S. Banking System Safe on August 3, 2008 for the Seeking Alpha website, one month before the collapse of the global financial system. It was this article, among others, that caught the attention of documentary filmmaker Steve Bannon and convinced him he needed my perspective on the financial crisis for his film Generation Zero. Of course he was pretty unknown in 2009 (not so much anymore) , and I continue to be unknown in 2023.

Continue reading

1 Comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Economy, Government, Media

Tagged

A Mile-High House of Cards… 3 Ways to Protect Yourself Before Your Bank Collapses, by Nick Giambruno

Posted on March 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

Cash, gold and silver, and Bitcoin are going to be salvation for a lot of people during the next financial crises. From Nick Giambruno at internationalman.com:

The Truth About Your Bank Deposits

It’s hard to think of a topic where following conventional wisdom is more dangerous than banking.

The general public and most financial experts accept as absolute truth that putting your money in a bank is safe and responsible. After all, the government insures your deposits, so if anything were to go wrong…

As a result, most people put more thought into the shoes they purchase than the bank they entrust with their life savings.

However, the banking system is a mile-high house of cards that could collapse anytime.

Here are three reasons why.

Reason #1: Government Deposit Insurance Is a False Sense of Security

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insures bank deposits in the US.

When a bank fails, the FDIC pays depositors up to $250,000. The FDIC has a reserve of around $126 billion for this purpose.

Now, $126 billion is a lot of money. But, considering there are around $9.8 trillion in insured deposits in the US, $126 billion is just a drop in the bucket, around 1.3%, to be exact.

In other words, the FDIC’s reserve has around one penny for every dollar of deposits it insures.

It wouldn’t take much to wipe out the FDIC’s reserves. One large bank failure and the FDIC itself could go bust.

For example, the recently failed Silicon Valley Bank—the largest bank failure since the 2008 crisis—had around $210 billion in customer deposits. That’s $84 billion more than the FDIC’s entire reserve.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Government

Tagged , , ,

The Sea Gypsy Tribe Encyclopedia

Posted on March 14, 2023 | 3 comments

Escaping the woes that beset humanity in a sailboat somewhere in the South Pacific doesn’t sound too bad. From Ray Jason at theseagypsyphilosopher.com:

For more than a decade I have been promoting a concept that I call The Sea Gypsy Tribe. The idea is that Humanity is living in an increasingly chaotic world with the possibility of extreme catastrophes looming just beyond the stormy horizon.

I firmly believe that the best way to escape from any type of emergency, is in a well-prepared, ocean-capable sailboat, along with a small group of like-minded sailors in their boats. During the last 10 years at my blog, in about a dozen essays, I have carefully described various disasters and then explained how sailing vessels can effectively respond to them.

My sincere hope is that none of us ever have to deal with such extreme situations. It would be terrific if none of us ever had to react to a currency collapse or a cyber attack or a balloon armed with an EMP! But a wise, old mariner once advised me to “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst!”

Since I receive inquiries from cruisers all around the world, I decided to collate together the many reasons that I believe the sea gypsy life is ideal in shielding one from natural or human-caused disasters.

Therefore, I am creating this Sea Gypsy Tribe Encyclopedia. It will be spread out across a few essays. Initially, I will randomly choose the topics for discussion, but eventually, they will all be alphabetized like an encyclopedia. But don’t be alarmed – it will not be some massive tome. Instead, it will be a longish essay divided into a few segments. Let’s begin!

Continue reading

3 Comments

Posted in Collapse, Governments

Tagged

If SVB is insolvent, so is everyone else, by Simon Black

Posted on March 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

Financial crises stem from too much debt and too much financial interconnection. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

On Sunday afternoon, September 14, 2008, hundreds of employees of the financial giant Lehman Brothers walked into the bank’s headquarters at 745 Seventh Avenue in New York City to clear out their offices and desks.

Lehman was hours away from declaring bankruptcy. And its collapse the next day triggered the worst economic and financial devastation since the Great Depression.

The S&P 500 fell by roughly 50%. Unemployment soared. And more than 100 other banks failed over the subsequent 12 months. It was a total disaster.

These bank, it turned out, had been using their depositors’ money to buy up special mortgage bonds. But these bonds were so risky that they eventually became known as “toxic securities” or “toxic assets”.

These toxic assets were bundles of risky, no-money-down mortgages given to sub-prime “NINJAs”, i.e. borrowers with No Income, No Job, no Assets who had a history of NOT paying their bills.

When the economy was doing well in 2006 and 2007, banks earned record profits from their toxic assets.

But when economic conditions started to worsen in 2008, those toxic assets plunged in value… and dozens of banks got wiped out.

Now here we go again.

Fifteen years later… after countless investigations, hearings, “stress test” rules, and new banking regulations to prevent another financial meltdown, we have just witnessed two large banks collapse in the United States of America– Signature Bank, and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Debt, Economy, Financial markets, Government

Tagged ,

Bank Runs. The First Sign The Fed “Broke Something.” By Lance Roberts

Posted on March 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

Bank runs are an ever lurking possibility in a fractional reserve banking system. From Lance Roberts at realinvestmentadvice.com:

With the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, questions of potential “bank runs” spread among regional banks.

“Bank runs” are problematic in today’s financial system due to fractional reserve banking. Under this system, only a fraction of a bank’s deposits must be available for withdrawal. In this system, banks only keep a specific amount of cash on hand and create loans from deposits it receives.

Reserve banking is not problematic as long as everyone remains calm. As I noted in the “Stability Instability Paradox:”

The “stability/instability paradox” assumes that all players are rational and such rationality implies an avoidance of complete destruction. In other words, all players will act rationally, and no one will push “the big red button.“

In this case, the “big red button” is a “bank run.”

Banks have a continual inflow of deposits which it then creates loans against. The bank monitors its assets, deposits, and liabilities closely to maintain solvency and meet Federal capital and reserve requirements. Banks have minimal risk of insolvency in a normal environment as there are always enough deposit flows to cover withdrawal requests.

However, in a “bank run,” many customers of a bank or other financial institution withdraw their deposits simultaneously over concerns about the bank’s solvency. As more people withdraw their funds, the probability of default increases, prompting a further withdrawal of deposits. Eventually, the bank’s reserves are insufficient to cover the withdrawals leading to failure.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Debt, Economy, Financial markets, Government

Tagged ,

SHTF Survival: 10 Disturbing Threats That You’re Probably Not Ready For. (When the power lines go down, and the radio stations stop transmitting, there’s one line of communication that will still be alive and well.) By Klark Barnes

Posted on March 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

You can’t do too much research and you can’t be too prepared in a SHTF situation. From Klark Barnes at earlking56.family.blog:

When planning for a SHTF Survival situation, there is really only one thing that you can be absolutely sure of: Survival is going to be a much bigger and tougher challenge than you ever thought possible. While there are some things you can do to prepare yourself for the chaos ahead, the reality of the situation is that when things go bad, there are going to be things happening that none of us prepared for or could have ever imagined.

What is SHTF?

SHTF has multiple survival meanings, but the acronym itself means Shit Hits The Fan. The meaning is pretty straight forward, but basically, it’s just a prepper/survivalist’s way of saying that during a long term survival crisis or collapse of society things are going to get bad, real bad! How bad none of us really know, and what dangers we will face is only speculation at this point, but one thing we do know for sure is that most people have no real clue to the dangers they will face during a collapse scenario.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Government

Tagged

Betting All on Hegemony; Risking All, To Stave Off Ruin, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on March 13, 2023 | 1 comment

Western governments are as distrusted at home as they are abroad, maybe more so. From Alasdair Macleod at strategic-culture.org:

The West is too dysfunctional and weak now to fight on all fronts. Yet there can be no retreat without some de-legitimising humiliation of the West.

Just occasionally, a window is opened onto the truth of how the ‘system’ works. Momentarily, it stands naked in its degeneracy. We avert our eyes, yet, it is a revelation (though it shouldn’t be). For, we see clearly how tawdry has been the attire which clothed it. ‘Liberalism’s’ seeming success – almost wholly an ephemeral PR production – serves only to make its underlying internal contradictions more obvious; more ‘in your face’ – much less credible.

This unravelling speaks to a failure to satisfactorily resolve liberal modernity’s inherent contradictions. Or, rather its unravelling derives from the choice to resolve a waning legitimacy, through an ever more totalistic and ideological reaching for hegemony.

One such window has been the sordid affair of the UK pandemic lockdowns – as revealed by a paper trail leak of 100,000 ministerial WhatsApp messages, managing the lockdown project.

What did they show (in the words here of pro-government leading political commentators)? An ugly picture of how a western Establishment interacts in adolescent sniping at each other, and in its utter disdain for the populace.

Continue reading

1 Comment

Posted in Collapse, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics

Money Troubles, by James Howard Kunster

Posted on March 13, 2023 | Leave a comment

Two from James Howard Kunstler tonight. From Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“As for the evil: It lurks in the interstices of our bureaucratic institutions, which, as they have grown in size and complexity since the nineteenth century, behave in ways that are increasingly impossible to understand and contrary to human flourishing.” — Eugyppius on Substack

       Money is all theoretical… until it’s not. Paper money is bad enough, as France learned under the tutelage of the rascal John Law in the early 1700s. The nation was broke, exhausted by foolish wars, and heaped under unbearable debt. Monsieur Law, a Scottish genius-wizard (the Jerry Lewis of political economy), landed in Paris, cast a spell on the regent Duc d’Orléans, set up a magic credit engine fueled by dreams of untold riches-to-come burgeoning out of the vast, new-found lands called Louisiana up the Mississippi River, and modern finance was born!

       The stock-and-money schemes known as the Mississippi Bubble soon ruined France and put finance in such a bad odor that the word “banque” could not be used in polite society there for a century to come. Monetary inflation became a thing for the first time since Roman days — a much easier trick with printed paper banknotes than with silver coins — but the effect was the same: the evaporation of “wealth” (which is what money supposedly represents). At the height of the crisis, trading in gold was criminalized, though that was so easily worked-around due to sheer custom and habit that the Crown had to re-legalize it. The frenzy from start to finish lasted only a few years, but the nation was set on the path that would eventually lead to revolution. Law ended his days dolefully running card games in Venice.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Government

Tagged

Stop Making Trouble! By James Howard Kunstler

Posted on March 13, 2023 | 1 comment

America’s ruling class is pushing a chaos agenda. From James Howard Kunstler at dailyreckoning.com:

If you think about it at all, can you come up with any good reasons why our country has involved itself in the Ukraine war? To defend democracy, many say? An emptier platitude does not exist in the vast slippery lexicon of spin.

To thwart Russia’s imperial overreach? You apparently have no clue about Ukraine’s history, ancient or modern. To incite an overthrow of the wicked Putin by his own people? The Russian president is more popular there now than even John F. Kennedy was here in 1962.

Oh, I know, I’m just parroting Russian propaganda by saying that. Isn’t that what they always say when you confront them with an uncomfortable truth about the war in Ukraine?

Meanwhile, Western “intelligence” sources and their mainstream media mouthpieces have been saying for about a year now that Russia was running out of ammunition. Well, they still have plenty of it, as the Ukrainians can painfully attest.

It’s actually the Ukrainians who are running out of ammo, which is why the U.S. and its NATO allies are looking under the couch cushions for any spare ammo they can find to send them.

Continue reading

1 Comment

Posted in Collapse, Economics, Government, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

Tagged

Jan 6: The End of the Rule of Law, by Gregory Hood

Posted on March 12, 2023 | 2 comments

When it takes over two years for exculpatory evidence to see the light of day, and even with its release there are no assurances that the railroaded defendants will see their unjust convictions reversed, then yes, we’ve seen the end of the rule of law. From Gregory Hood at unz.com:

January 6, 2021, was a disaster for the American Right. Despite the emotional satisfaction some felt, the riot at the Capitol discredited President Donald Trump, allowed the Left to call conservatives rioters, justified yet more repression, and forced Republicans who had been investigating the 2020 election into full retreat.

It would have been far better if the activists had done nothing, and if President had Trump urged demonstrators — unequivocally — to be peaceful. In the chaos that did follow, what was the rioters’ plan? There probably wasn’t one.

Congress impeached the President for supposedly starting an insurrection, but if he had wanted a coup, he could have called on the crowd to take the Capitol. Instead, in addition to warning them, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told them to “please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” “stay peaceful,” and then, finally, “go home with love & in peace.” Social media banned him, convicting him of the very charges for which the Senate acquitted him.

Was this an insurrection? We have prosecutions and even a few convictions for “seditious conspiracy,” but no level-headed person can possibly believe that the rioters who broke into the Capitol were part of plan to overthrow the United States government.

The seeming desperation of government officials, journalists, and politicians to make the January 6 riot seem like a fundamental threat to the republic have led some to suggest the entire thing was a hoax — an inside job by intelligence services. The truth is much more banal: It was a protest that got out of control. But no one seems to want to know what really happened and understand what went wrong: Why was there such poor security? Did the Capitol Police handle the crowd badly? What were the intent and motives of the people in the crowd? Were federal agents involved in any way?

Continue reading

2 Comments

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Law

Tagged , ,