Category Archives: Financial markets

How Inflation Destroys Civilization… and What You Can Do About It, by Nick Giambruno

It’s hard to see how a society survives when its people know the government is ripping them off through currency debasement. From Nick Giambruno at internationalman.com:

Thanks to rampant inflation, socialism could soon become irreversibly entrenched in the US—just as it is in Argentina, Venezuela, and other countries.

Rapidly rising food, housing, medical, and tuition prices are squeezing Americans—many of whom do not understand the true cause of their falling living standards.

The explosion in the cost of living is a predictable consequence of money printing.

Since the outbreak of the Covid hysteria, the Federal Reserve has printed more money than it has for the entire existence of the US.

From the founding of the US, it took over 227 years to print its first $6 trillion. But in just a matter of months recently, the US government printed more than $6 trillion.

For further perspective, the daily economic output of all 331 million people in the US is about $58 billion. At the push of a button, the Fed was creating more dollars out of thin air than the economic output of the entire country.

In short, the Fed’s actions amounted to the biggest monetary explosion that has ever occurred in the US.

Initially, the Fed and its apologists in the media assured the American people its actions wouldn’t cause severe price increases. But unfortunately, it didn’t take long to prove that absurd assertion false.

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Five Warning Signs the End of Dollar Hegemony Is Near… Here’s What Happens Next, by Nick Giambruno

The dollar may lose its place, giving way to the ultimate money: gold. From Nick Giambruno at internationalman.com:

It’s no secret that China and Russia have been stashing away as much gold as possible for many years.

China is the world’s largest producer and buyer of gold. Russia is number two. Most of that gold finds its way into the Russian and Chinese governments’ treasuries.

Russia has over 2,300 tonnes—or nearly 74 million troy ounces—of gold, one of the largest stashes in the world. Nobody knows the exact amount of gold China has, but most observers believe it is even larger than Russia’s stash.

Russia and China’s gold gives them access to an apolitical neutral form of money with no counterparty risk.

Remember, gold has been mankind’s most enduring form of money for over 2,500 years because of unique characteristics that make it suitable to store and exchange value.

Gold is durable, divisible, consistent, convenient, scarce, and most importantly, the “hardest” of all physical commodities.

In other words, gold is the one physical commodity that is the “hardest to produce” (relative to existing stockpiles) and, therefore, the most resistant to inflation. That’s what gives gold its superior monetary properties.

Russia and China can use their gold to engage in international trade and perhaps back the currencies.

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From Currency Resets to Limiting Infinite Growth, by Tom Luongo

The Malthusians’ and Thanos’ fundamental premise is terribly wrong, and is an ideological Trojan Horse for the globalists. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Doug Casey on Whether the “Everything Bubble” Has Finally Found Its Pin

Sneak peak: it has. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

International Man: Recently, large tech stocks lost over $1 trillion in value in just a few days. Many of these companies have been trading at insane earnings multiples for a long time.

Has the bubble finally popped?

Doug Casey: It actually started popping about a year ago—but now people are starting to notice that lots of these stocks are down not just down 50%, but 75%, and 90%.

Several classes of stocks are getting hurt particularly badly. One is the zombie companies that took advantage of low-interest rates and overleveraged. They borrowed a lot of money in order to pay dividends and buy back shares. The borrowing had little to do with growing the actual business. Now they can’t pay back the debt they’ve taken on since interest rates have gone up.

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Doug Casey on the Rise of BlackRock and Fascism in the US

BlackRock is an apex predator in the world of financial facism. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Rise of BlackRock

International Man: With nearly $10 trillion in assets under management (AUM), BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager.

The company exploded in size after the 2008 financial crisis, and that’s no coincidence.

Central banks around the world have printed scores of trillions since then. A significant portion of that freshly created money eventually found its way into the stock market, specifically BlackRock’s exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

BlackRock was also responsible for helping the Federal Reserve manage its massive debt portfolio after 2008. It’s another indication of BlackRock’s cozy relationship with the government.

BlackRock is a good illustration of the Cantillon Effect—those closest to the money printing benefiting.

What do you make of the rise of BlackRock?

Doug Casey: In a way, BlackRock mystifies and amazes me. It came from ground zero in the late ’80s, started by Larry Fink and a few of his friends. How did they manage to garner $10 trillion and become the biggest financial management entity in the world? Are they super competent, or just super well wired with the Fed? They’re certainly competent at garnering funds. But they’re absolutely “connected.” In today’s world, where governments, directly and indirectly, control everything, rest assured that the top guys in BlackRock are charter members of the Deep State.

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Powell’s “Soft Landing” Is Impossible, by Daniel Lacalle

Assume crash positions, because we are sure not headed for a soft landing. From Daniel Lacalle at dlacalle.com:

After more than a decade of chained stimulus packages and extremely low rates, with trillions of dollars of monetary stimulus fuelling elevated asset valuations and incentivising an enormous leveraged bet on risk, the idea of a controlled explosion or a “soft landing” is impossible.

In an interview with Marketplace, Federal Reserve chairman admitted that “a soft landing is really just getting back to 2% inflation while keeping the labor market strong. And it’s quite challenging to accomplish that right now”. He went on to say that “nonetheless, we think there are pathways … for us to get there.”

The first problem of a soft landing is the evidence of the weak economic data. While headline unemployment rate appears robust, both the labor participation and employment rate show a different picture, as they have been stagnant for almost a year. Both the labor force participation rate, at 62.2 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.0 percent remain each 1.2 percentage points below their February 2020 values, as the April Jobs Report shows. Real wages are down, as inflation completely eats away the nominal wage increase. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real average hourly earnings decreased 2.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from April 2021 to April 2022. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.9 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 3.4-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

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Third World Problems, Coming Your Way, by Eamon McKinney

Endemic poverty may be coming to the West, sooner rather than later. From Eamon McKinney at strategic-culture.org:

The West is facing a systematic crisis both economically and socially and it appears to have no solutions but more money printing and war. Neither of which will help.

While most of the world’s attention is focused on the Ukraine, there are events happening in Sri Lanka that should alarm everyone. Sri Lanka is a small independent island nation off the southern tip of India. Relatively insignificant in the global context it may prove to be the “canary in the coal mine” that portends a wider global and economic crisis. A long corrupted and badly run country, it has announced that it can no longer meet its international debt obligations. Like so many others, Sri Lanka was devastated by Covid, without tourism and trade its lacks the foreign currency essential to pay its debt. With some $56 billion in foreign debt it has been forced to return to the IMF to seek further loans to pay for imports of food, energy and medicines.

Chaos and riots are widespread throughout the country and on Monday Prime Minister Majinda Rajapaska stepped down. The resignation failed to quell the riots and protestors are also demanding the President, Gotabaya Rajapaska, the former P.M.’s brother also step down. On Tuesday 10th, the Government ordered troops to shoot anyone looting public property. The Government also ordered thousands of Army, Navy and Air Force to patrol the streets of Colombo, the capital. Eight people are reported dead and more than two hundred wounded. Houses belonging to the Rajapaskas and other Ministers were torched. It is not the country’s first economic crisis, but is by far its worst and the long beleaguered people have reached breaking point. There are shortages of everything, inflation is rampant and the healthcare system has broken down. Enter the IMF.

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The Culture of Devaluation, Destruction, and Devolution, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Inflation messes with people’s heads, and not in a good way. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:

This has been a week of spin, with every regime apologist assuring the public that inflation is getting better. Just look at the wonderful trend line! In the footnotes, you find the truth: it was a tiny drop and mostly for technical reasons and the main reason for the drop has already disappeared from the price trends.

The new claim: inflation will vex us for a bit more time but will settle down in a few months. It’s all Putin’s fault, plus the virus. In any case, the president is working to fix this.

Has any political propaganda on this topic ever been this ineffective?

The producer price index that came out yesterday paints a clearer picture. It’s grim. It reveals no softening at all. In fact, it shows that there are plenty of price increases in the waiting. Here is the year-over-year change in the PPI by commodities 2013 to the present.

Remember how last year many people finally came to the conclusion that we had to learn to live with covid? That was a smart choice because there was no way that the China-style suppression method could work.

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Crypto is Now Less So, by Eric Peters

A lot of the wind has gone out of crypto enthusiasts’ sails. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

While we’re awaiting the collapse of the dollar, let’s have a look at the collapse of crypto – aptly named because it’s so difficult to understand, the almost-axiomatic clue that  a scam’s afoot.

The value of a Bitcoin has melted away like a mid-May frost. In fact, it has almost no value left anymore – relative to the value it had just a couple of weeks ago. The crash was on par with that of the Stock Market in 1929 and probably for the same or very similar reasons.

Both being the result of speculation and other variants of flim-flammery.

The actual value of Bitcoin was . . . what, exactly?

Here we had – in a purely abstract sense – a unit of money without physical existence, based on a fictitious “coin” that was divvied up into obscure denominations – e.g., “.00000345 Bitcoin” – whose value derived from the willingness of people to accept that it had value. People were told that, unlike the physical (and digital) money printed (or conjured) at will – i.e., dollars – the value of these Bitcoins was secure from inflation – that is, from devaluation – because the supply of them was strictly limited.

Supposedly, by “miners” who had a self-interest in ensuring too many weren’t “mined” – though in fact no one ever “mined” anything, in the way that word is generally understood. Nothing was dug up out of the earth, refined and minted. Various calculations – or some such – were performed.

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Massive Stock Market Leverage Unwinds amid Brutal Bloodletting, by Wolf Richter

Losing borrowed money in the stock market is guaranteed to amplify your pain. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Margin debt started dropping a month before the Nasdaq went south, and it’s still dropping.

The total amount of leverage in the stock market is unknown and takes many forms. The only form that is tracked and reported on a monthly basis is margin debt. The other forms, such as Securities Based Lending (SBL) and hedge funds leveraged at the institutional level are not tracked. Not even banks and brokers that fund this leverage know how much total leverage their client has from all brokers combined, which became clear when the family office Archegos imploded in March 2021 and wiped out billions of dollars in capital at the prime brokers that had provided the leverage.

But margin debt – the tip of the iceberg and indicator of the direction of the overall stock market leverage – dropped by $27 billion in April from March, to $773 billion, according to Finra, which gets this data from its member brokers. Margin debt peaked in October last year at $936 billion and started falling in November. Over those six months, it has dropped by $163 billion, or by 17%. But leverage is still massive, and the unwind has a long way to go:

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