Category Archives: Economy

On the Cusp of a Global Liquidity Crisis, by James Rickards

Posted on January 5, 2023 | Leave a comment

Recessions and liquidity crises are different animals, and you can have one without the other, although they often occur together. From James Rickards a dailyreckoning.com:

Is there a financial calamity worse than a severe recession in early 2023? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes” and it’s coming quickly.

That greater calamity is a global liquidity crisis. Before considering the dynamics of a global liquidity crisis, it’s critical to distinguish between a liquidity crisis and a recession. A recession is part of the business cycle.

It’s characterized by higher unemployment, declining GDP growth, inventory liquidation, business failures, reduced discretionary spending by consumers, reduced business investment, higher savings rates (for those still employed), larger loan losses, and declining asset prices in stocks and real estate.

The length and depth of a recession can vary widely. And although recessions have certain common characteristics, they also have diverse causes. Sometimes the Federal Reserve blunders in monetary policy and holds interest rates too high for too long (that seems to be happening now).

Sometimes an external supply shock occurs which causes a recessionary reaction. This happened after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, which caused a severe recession from November 1973 to March 1975. Recessions can also arise when asset bubbles pop such as the stock market crash in 1929 or the bursting of a real estate bubble caused by the Savings & Loan crisis in 1990.

Whatever the cause, the course of a recession is somewhat standard. Eventually asset prices bottom, those with cash go shopping for bargains in stocks, inventory liquidations end, and consumers resume some discretionary spending. These tentative steps eventually lead to a recovery and new expansion often with help from fiscal policy.

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Posted in Business, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Governments

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Pulling America Back from the Precipice, by Matthew Brouillette

Posted on January 5, 2023 | 1 comment

A rarity: a public company CEO who is both intellectually forthright and a capable writer. From Matthew Brouillette at realclearwire.com:

It’s not often than a CEO of a large, publicly traded company speaks bluntly in public about politics and political power. So, both “surprising” and “refreshing” describe energy executive Nick Deiuliis’s new book, Precipice: The Left’s Campaign to Destroy America (Republic Book Publishers).

Deiuliis, a chemical engineer and attorney by training, is director and chief executive officer of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based CNX Resources Corporation, one of the largest natural gas exploration, development, and production companies.

In addition to penning Precipice, Deiuliis is a prolific writer on topics ranging from the American Civil War to professional sports to the Federal Reserve to music. When he’s not writing, he hosts “The Far Middle,” a weekly podcast that tackles topics including energy, business, politics, culture, sports, and more.

In short, Deiuliis does not fit the stereotype of the CEO of a publicly traded company.

As an energy leader, Deiuliis is an unapologetic advocate for his industry, and he makes a strong case that abundant and affordable energy is indispensable for developing and prosperous civilizations.

But his book’s subtitle – “The Left’s Campaign to Destroy America” – best captures Precipice’s focus, which extends far beyond the energy industry. Deiuliis identifies four categories of members of modern society: “Creators,” “Enablers,” “Servers,” and “Leeches.”

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Posted in Business, Economy, Government, Labor, Morality, Nonfiction, Politics

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Money-Supply Growth Turns Negative for First Time in 28 Years, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on January 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

In a fiat-debt addicted economy, negative money supply inevitably precedes contraction. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

Money supply growth fell again in November, and this time it turned negative for the first time in 28 years. November’s drop continues a steep downward trend from the unprecedented highs experienced during much of the past two years. During the thirteen months between April 2020 and April 2021, money supply growth in the United States often climbed above 35 percent year over year, well above even the “high” levels experienced from 2009 to 2013.

Since then, the money supply growth has slowed quickly, and we’re now seeing the first time the money supply has actually contracted since the 1990s. The last time the year-over-year change in the money supply slipped into negative territory was in November of 1994. At that time, negative growth continued for 15 months, finally turning positive again in January of 1996.

During November 2022, year-over-year (YOY) growth in the money supply was at -0.28 percent. That’s down from October’s rate of 2.59 percent, and down from November 2021’s rate of 6.66 percent.

tms1

The money supply metric used here—the “true” or Rothbard-Salerno money supply measure (TMS)—is the metric developed by Murray Rothbard and Joseph Salerno, and is designed to provide a better measure of money supply fluctuations than M2. The Mises Institute now offers regular updates on this metric and its growth. This measure of the money supply differs from M2 in that it includes Treasury deposits at the Fed (and excludes short-time deposits and retail money funds).

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Rough Seas Ahead, by Bill Bonner

Posted on January 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

Falling stock and bond prices may set off a financial crisis this year. From Bill Bonner at bonnerprivateresearch.com:

A precarious Channel crossing and a look at the forecast for 2023…

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Youghal, Ireland…

We are on our way to France. Checking the maritime forecast, we expected the sea to be so rough. We didn’t want to be seasick for a 17-hour voyage. So, we’re taking the short route to Wales, thence across England to the southeast coast, where we will board the Eurotunnel and cross to Calais.

This leaves us little time to read or write. So, we begin with a quick market update…and tomorrow…leave you with our memoire of our first Christmas in Ireland.

Here’s the headline from the Financial Times:

Markets lose more than $30 trillion in worst year since financial crisis

“The end of cheap money,” begins an editorial.

The BBC adds more bad news:

A third of the global economy will be in recession this year, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned.

Kristalina Georgieva said 2023 will be “tougher” than last year as the US, EU and China see their economies slow .

“Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people,” she added.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets

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COVID-19: A Global Financial Operation, by Michael Bryant

Posted on January 3, 2023 | 2 comments

Was Covid-19 launched to divert attention away from the global financial system blowing up? From Michael Bryant at off-guardian.org:

The COVID phenomenon cannot be understood without understanding the un-televised 2019-2020 unprecedented financial collapse threatening the entire global financial system.

The Covid-19 Pandemic story makes little sense when viewed through the lens of health, safety and science. Viewed through the lens of money, power, control, and wealth transfer, however, then all of it makes perfect sense.

The lockdowns, mandatory muzzles, anti-social distancing and the plethora of additional measures did nothing to protect or improve public health- they were never designed to do so.

The numerous mandates birthed by the onset of the Covid-19 scenario were all designed to deliberately break the global economy and crush small businesses as well as break people’s minds, will and the social fabric, in order to “build back a better society” that conforms to the dystopian visions of the psychopaths waging this class war.

The desired result is a billionaire’s utopia, in which they will own and control the planet in the form of a techno-feudal fiefdom where digitally branded humanity is regulated like cattle in a super-surveilled technocracy.

What this manufactured crisis conveniently camouflages is that we are in the midst of a planned total economic collapse- a collapse which was inevitable.

The timing of the COVID fraud became necessary as world markets were faced with an emergency debt crisis in Fall of 2019 which popped up in formerly mostly liquid markets: Repo Markets, Money Markets and Foreign Exchange Markets.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, Medicine

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Systems Dynamics Follow Their Own Rules – and Not Groupthink, by Alasdair Crooke

Posted on January 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

What happens when reality refuses to follow the rules. The decline and fall of the American empire is offering a concrete demonstration. From Alasdair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

While America’s cultural and economic ascendency is portrayed as an End of History ‘normal’, it represents an obvious anomaly, Alastair Crooke writes.

Toward the end of his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), “[Yale Historian] Paul Kennedy expressed the then-controversial belief that great power wars were not a thing of the past. One of the main themes of Kennedy’s history was the concept of overstretch – that is to say, that the relative decline of great powers often resulted from an imbalance between a nation’s resources and its commitments”, writes Professor Francis Sempa.

Few in the western Ruling Class even accept that we have reached such a point of inflection. Like it or not, however, great power combinations are fast rising across the globe. U.S. influence already is shrinking back to its Atlanticist core. This shrinkage is not simply a matter of resources vs commitments; that is too simplistic as an explanation.

Metamorphosis is occurring both as the result of the exhaustion of the political and cultural dynamics which powered the previous era, as much as is energised by the vitality of new dynamics. And by ‘dynamics’ is meant too, the exhaustion and coming demise of underlying mechanical financial and cultural structures which in, and of, themselves are moulding the new politics and culture.

Systems follow their own rules – the rules of physical mechanics too – as in, what happens when a further grain of sand is added to a complex, unstable sand pile. Thus, unlike in politics, neither human opinion, nor election outcomes in Washington, will necessarily have the capacity to mould the next era – any more than the opinion of Congress alone can reverse a cascade in a financial sand pile – if big enough – by pouring more sand grains on its top.

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Posted in Collapse, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Government, Imperialism, Propaganda, War

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Why it isn’t mad to oppose the World Economic Forum, by Samuel Gregg

Posted on January 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

It isn’t mad to oppose an organization that wants to destroy what’s left of your freedom and ruin your life. From Samuel Gregg at spectator.co.uk:

Klaus Schwab (photo: Getty)

The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its long-serving founder and Executive Chairman, Professor Klaus Schwab, are the subjects of many insane conspiracy theories. This NGO, which again this January will bring together politicians, business leaders, journalists, academics, and assorted celebrities in Davos, has been accused, among other things, of being a secret cabal of paedophiles who used the Covid-19 pandemic to harvest children’s blood so as to hasten in a Satanic New World Order.

It isn’t mad, however, to regard the WEF as a dangerous force in global politics. The WEF is a dangerous force in global politics. To adapt Joseph Heller, just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean the WEF isn’t after you. A shared distrust of the WEF brings together anti-capitalists on the left and culture-warriors on the right. But that distrust is based on a misunderstanding of what the WEF is these days really all about.

For many WEF critics, the vileness of the organisation can be encapsulated in one word: ‘neoliberalism.’ It’s a term that conjures up images of plutocrats and untrammelled markets ravaging the planet and exploiting blue-collar folk in the name of profit. Funnily enough, Chairman Schwab agrees with that assessment of the world’s ills. Once upon a time, the WEF prioritised the necessity and benefits of economic globalisation. That has not been the case for many years, however. In October 2020, Schwab stated that:

[S]hibboleths of our global economic system will need to be re-evaluated with an open mind. Chief among these is the neoliberal ideology. Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition.

Precisely how and where ‘free-market fundamentalism’ has run amuck remains a mystery. After all, we live in a world in which most governments in developed nations routinely control 40 per cent or more of their nation’s GDP.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economics, Economy, Education, Energy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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How an Occupied Twitter Ruined Countless Lives, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on December 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Covid and vaccine dissidents who were shut out or suppressed by Twitter and other social media were mostly right, far more right than the official narratives. And that brings up the monstrous question: how many lives were ruined or lost because of the suppression of scientific inquiry and accurate information? From Jeffrey Tucker at brownstone.org:

Twitter files

From the beginning of the Covid panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights.

What made it more bizarre was how alone those of us who objected felt until very recently when Elon Musk finally bought the platform Twitter, fired all the embedded federal agents, and has started to release the files.

As Elon said, every conspiracy theory about Twitter was true and then some. And what applies at Twitter pertains equally to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all platforms associated with those companies (YouTube, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp).

The proof is all there. These platforms colluded with the federal government’s administrative arm to craft a particular Covid narrative, throttling and censoring dissidents and boosting any credentialled expert who was willing to toe the line.

At this point, it is wise to trust no one and nothing but those who fought against this nonsense. As the crisis began, I was blessed with an unusually large reach on most platforms. But I sat by and watched it dwindle to nothingness as the months went on. Yes, I had posts pulled but I was never banned. It’s just that my channels of communication shrunk dramatically by the months and weeks.

This was tragic for me simply because I watched the population gradually fall into a medieval-style disease panic that tore families apart, kept loved ones from traveling, wrecked businesses and churches, and even violated the sanctity of the homes. This “invisible enemy” about which everyone in government was going on about shredded the whole social fabric.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Economy, Governments, History, Media, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Science

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Ron Paul: Ben Bernanke Wrecked the U.S. Economy and Won a Nobel Prize

Posted on December 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

Ron Paul is a pretty fair armchair economist and would have been a far more suitable recipient of the Nobel Prize than Ben Bernanke. From Paul at theburningplatform.com:

Ron Paul: Ben Bernanke Wrecked the U.S. Economy and Won a Nobel Prize

Recently, the Nobel Foundation awarded Ben Bernanke (along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig) the 2022 Nobel Prize in economic sciences because they “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises.”

I already knew that Ben Bernanke was a student of the Great Depression. I wasn’t aware of his exact perspective, though, or his claim that bank failures were the cause of that brutal decade. The Nobel Prize committee explains:

…the [Great Depression] became so deep and so protracted in large part because bank failures destroyed valuable banking relationships, and the resulting credit supply contraction left significant scars in the real economy.

Now, at least, we can gain some understanding of his actions during the Great Financial Crisis. That understanding comes at a price, though – the cost is 40-year record-high inflation, and both you and I, along with every other American, are paying for it.

Here’s a real quick lesson in recent economic history, courtesy of Christopher Leonard’s masterful work, The Lords of Easy Money.

Between 1913 and 2008, the Fed gradually increased the money supply from about $5 billion to $847 billion. This increase in the monetary base happened slowly, in a gently uprising slope. Then, between late 2008 and early 2010, the Fed printed $1.2 trillion. It printed a hundred years’ worth of money, in other words, in little over a year, more than doubling what economists call the monetary base.

And:

The amount of excess money in the banking system swelled from $200 billion in 2008 to $1.2 trillion in 2010, an increase of 52,000 percent.

Keep in mind, this is what Bernanke’s Federal Reserve did. (We aren’t even talking about Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term.)

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Posted in Banking, Business, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, History, Horseshit

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Forecast 2023 — Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on December 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

James Howard Kunstler surveys the economy, finance, Covid, Ukraine, Russia, China, and the Deep State. You won’t be surprised to learn that he doesn’t see a whole lot of cause for optimism. From Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” —Miranda Devine

“It’s all just snake oil. We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meijer

“2023 could be a pivotal year for the USA if the pervasive lying can be exposed, digested, and believed. All that exposure has to happen amidst continuing boondoggles toward the Great Reset agenda.” – Truman Verdun

“More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger economy in the future.  All economic expansion is based on energy.  Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” —  Chris Martenson

“To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” — Henry Kissinger

It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat. But it is an inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils, and candied violets.

2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political, and cultural collapse — a hat-trick of calamity — and he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest — cheered on by a thinking class that had obviously lost its consensual mind.

Was the governing strategy simply to do the opposite of what the loathed and detested Mr. Trump would do? Could it be that simple or that automatic? The thinking class’s eyes have a zombified glaze these days. It’s obvious, you might agree, that “Joe Biden” is not in charge of anything, really. He’s an animatronic figure programmed to read a teleprompter and not much else. Half the time, he can’t even find his way off-stage after doing that one trick. The claque pulling his strings just may be the crew you see around him (you know, WYSIWYG): Susan Rice, Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and company. Ms. Rice has kept herself completely hidden backstage at the White House for two years. Nobody ever hears about her or sees her. Weird, a little bit, for the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.

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