Tag Archives: IMF

Afghanistan? Follow the Money, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on August 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Afghanistan is rife with poverty and corruption. It’s unclear how the new government will fund itself. From Pepe Escobar at The Asia Times via consortiumnews.com:

With the fall of Kabul, Pepe Escobar says it’s becoming clear that financial soft power tactics may be even more deadly than a NATO occupation.

Afghan money changer at the bazaar displays his currency wares. (Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion)

After 20 years and a staggering $2.23 trillion spent in a “forever war” persistently spun as promoting democracy and benefiting the “Afghan people,” it’s legitimate to ask what the Empire of Chaos has to show for it.

The numbers are dire. Afghanistan remains the world’s seventh poorest nation: 47 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, according to the Asian Development Bank. No less than 75 percent of the — dissolved — Kabul government’s budget was coming from international aid. According to the World Bank, that aid was responsible for the turnover of 43 percent of the economy — one that was mired in massive government corruption.

According to the terms of the Washington-Taliban agreement signed in Doha in February 2020, the U.S. should continue to fund Afghanistan during and after its withdrawal.

Now, with the Fall of Kabul and the imminent return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, it’s becoming clear that applying financial soft power tactics may be even more deadly than a mere NATO occupation.

Washington has frozen $9.5 billion in Afghan Central Bank reserves and the International Monetary Fund has canceled its lending to Afghanistan, including $460 million that’s part of a Covid-19 relief program.

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Cuba and Color Revolution: A Cautionary Tale of the Next Phase of Forever-War, by Joaquin Flores

Posted on July 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

The current Cuban unrest may well not be a purely indigenous phenomenon, rather it’s the outcome of a globalist design to destabilize many governments. From Joaquin Flores at strategic-culture.org:

Today, we are seeing only the start of a fresh wave of global destabilization efforts, never-ending wars, Joaquin Flores writes.

If one believes that the protests in Cuba can be explained within the rubric of 20th century economic systems, and then believes they can go on to extract some great truths about socialism vs. capitalism, then they are misinformed. No, this is about technocracy, color revolution, and forever-war.

The events in Cuba were caused by the staged economic collapse directed by the IMF under the advisement of the World Economic Forum, under the pretext of supply-line stoppages and economic closures to combat Covid-19. The socio-economic strife that such an imposed crisis is known to provoke, is then weaponised to destabilize ‘regimes’ so as to further the hegemonic agenda of the (admittedly divided) oligarchy ruling the global west. We saw this before in 2008 with the crash and crisis, and how this was weaponised to create a destabilization process known as the Arab Spring.

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The “Great Reset” Is Here, by James Rickards

Posted on June 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

Will the Great Reset replace the dollar with IMF Special Drawing Rights as the reserve currency? From James Rickards at dailyreckoning.com:

For years, currency analysts (myself included) have looked for signs of an international monetary “reset” that would diminish the dollar’s role as the leading reserve currency and replace it with a substitute, which would be agreed upon at some Bretton Woods-style monetary conference.

Now, it looks like the move towards the long-expected Great Reset is accelerating.

At the recent G7 summit in the UK, G7 leaders gave their blessings to a $100 billion allocation of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs) to help lower-income countries address the COVID-19 crisis.

President Biden fully supports the idea. The White House issued the following statement:

The United States and our G7 partners are actively considering a global effort to multiply the impact of the proposed Special Drawing Rights (SDR) allocation to the countries most in need…

At potentially up to $100 billion in size, the proposed effort would further support health needs – including vaccinations…

A separate press release from the same day continued the same sentiment, stating, “We strongly support the effort to recycle SDRs to further support health needs.”

In another development, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said last Wednesday that she expected the fund’s governors to approve a $650 billion allocation of SDRs in mid-August.

What exactly are SDRs? Basically, they’re world money.

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Economic War With China Is The Final Step Before The “Great Reset”, by Brandon Smith

Posted on September 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

Can a trade, currency, and debt eruption with China lead to the new world order? From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

With the pandemic dominating the news cycle, the general public has been completely distracted from a much more important crisis; namely, the economic crisis. To be sure, economic decay is not as swift or exciting, but I doubt that’s why the mainstream media mostly ignores the issue. From my experience, the media tends to omit coverage of the things they don’t want the population to notice or think about.

Right now, the only word spoken on the economy is “recovery”. Of course, if you’ve been reading my recent articles, you know that the recovery narrative is nonsense. With the small business sector on the verge of collapse, the U.S. economy has no means to recover unless we see a sudden resurgence in industrial production and domestic factories built, and with corporate debt at historic highs, there’s simply no money for that right now. Good luck trying to bankroll a manufacturing renaissance in the middle of a stagflationary environment.

That’s not to say that the rest of the world is much better off, but the U.S. suffers from the added weight of its past financial and monetary “success”. Let me explain…

Recent generations have grown up conditioned to believe that, through the power of central bank fiat currency, all problems can be solved. There has even been a concerted effort within the media to support this lie. Remember when propaganda rags like The Atlantic claimed that central bankers like Ben Bernanke were “the real heroes” saving the economy?

That’s the narrative young adults and investors today have grown up with. Now, whether they believe it is another matter, but as we can see in the world of Robinhood stock trading, there has been little concern for the concept of “bubble markets”. These kids think that the party is eternal because they are backstopped by the Fed, and there’s a lot of shoe-shine boys in the media telling them they are right. However, what they are not being told is that we are in the middle of a collapse dynamic, and the structures they view as reliable are now crumbling.

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Plans for a global Dystopia, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on November 9, 2019 | Leave a comment

The globalist financial powers intend to use what’s not working on a national level on a global scale. What could go wrong? An excellent article from Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Global policy planners intend to deliver replacements for both dollar hegemony and fossil fuels. Plans may appear uncoordinated and in their early stages, but these issues are becoming increasingly linked.

A monetary reset incorporating state-sponsored cryptocurrencies will enable exchange controls to be introduced between nations by separating cross-border trade payments from domestic money circulation. The purpose will be to gain greater control over money and to direct its investment into green projects.

The OECD will build on current tax disclosures to make everyone’s income and capital known to governments and therefore readily taxable, money destined to kick-start economic growth. Under the guidance of supranational organisations, governments will redirect investment into green technology. The objective, particularly for Europeans, is to neutralise Russia’s increasing dominance of the global energy market by becoming carbon neutral by 2030.

But perhaps as Robert Burns put it, “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”. They are based on Keynesian fallacies, but cannot be ignored.

Introduction

There appear to be policy areas being driven by statist responses to events, encouraging global institutions to take on a coordinating role. It means deeper levels of centralised planning by unaccountable bureaucrats. Assuming their plans continue to gain credence, we could end up with a dystopian world where supranational bodies direct individual governments to conform. We are already on this road to perdition. The OECD has coordinated attempts by governments to restrict the freedom of their citizens to avoid taxes by forcing over a hundred jurisdictions to automatically supply information on the financial affairs of every citizen, irrespective of nationality and where they reside.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Cronyism, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Geopolitics, Governments, Money

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Hidden Amongst the Furore: Synchronised Warnings From the BIS and the IMF, by Steven Guinness

Posted on December 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

The world is not paying enough attention to central bankers and it should be, according to Steven Guinness, who sounds a lot like Brandon Smith. From Guinness at stevenguinness2.wordpress.com:

It has become a disconcerting trend that as geopolitical events intensify and keep a majority of people engaged in the latest outbreak of political theatre, the words of central bankers fall on increasingly deaf ears.

At a seminar of the European Stability Mechanism this month, Bank for International Settlements General Manager Agustin Carstens delivered a speech called, ‘Shelter from the Storm‘.

The speech can be summarised as follows:

  • The IMF may not have enough resources to manage a future financial crisis
  • The post 2008 ‘recovery’ was nurtured by central banks
  • Central bank intervention has coincided with the increased accumulation of debt in both major and emerging economies
  • The challenge for central banks is to meet their inflation target
  • Governments must quickly implement ‘growth-friendly structural reforms’ as monetary policy is ‘normalised’

The latter bullet point refers to Basel III, the regulatory reforms that were devised through the BIS in response to the financial crisis triggered in 2008. The BIS have been pushing the line in recent communications that without these reforms being fully implemented by national administrations, the financial system will remain vulnerable to a renewed downturn. Full adoption of the reforms is not due to occur until 2022.

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IMF Reveals That Cryptocurrency Is The New World Order End Game, by Brandon Smith

Posted on November 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

Brandon Smith is probably right on this one. From Smith at alt-market.com:

There are two kinds of globalist schemes: First, there are the schemes they spring on the public out of nowhere haphazardly in the hopes that the speed of the event along with some shock and awe will confuse the masses and make them psychologically pliable. This strategy loses effectiveness quickly, though; the longer the plan takes to implement, the more time the people have to reconsider what is actually happening and why.

Second, there are schemes they slowly implant in the collective psyche of the citizenry over many years, much like subliminal messaging or hypnosis. This strategy is designed to make the public embrace certain destructive ideologies or ideas as if these ideas were their own.

The cryptocurrency scam is of the second variety.

I have been suspicious of the cryptocurrency narrative of a “decentralized and anonymous monetary revolution” since 2009, when I was first approached by people claiming to be “representatives” of bitcoin and asked to become a promoter of the technology. After posing a few very simple questions and receiving no satisfactory answers, I declined to join the bandwagon or act as a frontman.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Politics

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The World Is Quietly Decoupling From the U.S. – And No One Is Paying Attention, by Brandon Smith

Posted on October 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

The world is finding ways to get around the US’s currency and its payment mechanisms. From Brandon Smith at birchgold.com:

Blind faith in the U.S. dollar is perhaps one of the most crippling disabilities economists have in gauging our economic future. Historically speaking, fiat currencies are essentially animals with very short lives, and world reserve currencies are even more prone to an early death. But, for some reason, the notion that the dollar is vulnerable at all to the same fate is deemed ridiculous by the mainstream.

This delusion has also recently bled into parts of the alternative economic movement, with some analysts hoping that the Trump Administration will somehow reverse several decades of central bank sabotage in only four to eight years. However, this thinking requires a person to completely ignore the prevailing trend.

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, Money, Politics, Trade

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Genocide of the Greek Nation, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on August 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

The Greek “rescue” was never about rescuing Greece, but rather rescuing Greece’s bank creditors. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

The political and media coverup of the genocide of the Greek Nation began yesterday (August 20) with European Union and other political statements announcing that the Greek Crisis is over. What they mean is that Greece is over, dead, and done with. It has been exploited to the limit, and the carcas has been thrown to the dogs.

350,000 Greeks, mainly the young and professionals, have fled dead Greece. The birth rate is far below the rate necessary to sustain the remaining population. The austerity imposed on the Greek people by the EU, the IMF, and the Greek government has resulted in the contraction of the Greek economy by 25%. The decline is the equivalent of America’s Great Depression, but in Greece the effects were worst. President Franklin D. Roosevelt softened the impact of massive unemployment with the Social Security Act other elements of a social safety net such as deposit insurance, and public works programs, whereas the Greek government following the orders from the IMF and EU worsened the impact of massive unemployment by stripping away the social safety net.

Traditionally, when a sovereign country, whether by corruption, mismanagement, bad luck, or unexpected events, found itself unable to repay its debts, the country’s creditors wrote down the debts to the level that the indebted country could service.

With Greece there was a game change. The European Central Bank, led by Jean-Claude Trichet, and the International Monetary Fund ruled that Greece had to pay the full amount of interest and principal on its government bonds held by German, Dutch, French, and Italian banks.

How was this to be achieved?

In two ways, both of which greatly worsened the crisis, leaving Greece today in a far worst position that it was in at the beginning of the crisis almost a decade ago.

At the beginning of the “crisis,” which would have easily been resolved by writing down part of the debt, the Greek debt was 129% of Greek Gross Domestic Product. Today Greek debt is 180% of GDP.

Why?

Greece was lent more money to pay interest to Greece’s creditors, so that they would not have to lose one cent. The additonal lending, called a “bailout” by the presstitute financial media, was not a bailout of Greece. It was a bailout of Greece’s creditors.

To continue reading: Genocide of the Greek Nation

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US Dollar Hegemony Tripped Up by Chinese Renminbi? by Wolf Richter

Posted on July 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

The world’s central banks aren’t shedding their dollars for the Chinese currency just yet. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Um, no. Central banks not enthusiastic about the renminbi.

Global central banks are not dumping US-dollar-denominated assets from their foreign exchange reserves. They’re not dumping euro-denominated assets either. And they remain leery of the Chinese renminbi – despite China’s place as the second largest economy in the world and despite all the hoopla of turning the renminbi into a major global reserve currency.

This is clear from the IMF’s just released “Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves” (COFER) data for the first quarter 2018. The IMF is very stingy with what it discloses. The COFER data for each individual country – each country’s specific holdings of reserve currencies – is “strictly confidential.” But it does disclose the global allocation of each major currency.

In Q1 2018, total global foreign exchange reserves, including all currencies, rose 6.3% year-over-year, or by $878 billion, to $11.59 trillion, within the upper range of the past three years (from $10.7 trillion in Q4 2016 to $11.8 trillion in Q3, 2014). For reporting purposes, the IMF converts all currency balances into US dollars. This data was for Q1. The dollar bottomed out in the middle of the quarter and has since been rising.

US-dollar-denominated assets among foreign exchange reserves continued to dominate in Q1 at $6.5 trillion, or 62.5% of “allocated” reserves (more on this “allocated” in a moment).

Over the decades, there have been major efforts to undermine the dollar’s hegemony as a global reserve currency, which it has maintained since World War II. The creation of the euro was the most successful such effort. The plan was that the euro would eventually reach “parity” with the dollar on the hegemony scale. Before the euro, global exchange reserves included the individual currencies of today’s Eurozone members, particularly the Deutsche mark. After the euro came about, it replaced all those. And its share edged up for a while until the euro debt crisis spooked central banks and derailed those dreams.

And now there are efforts underway to elevate the Chinese renminbi to a global reserve currency. This became official on October 1, 2016, when the IMF added it to its currency basket, the Special Drawing Rights. But watching grass grow is breathtakingly exciting compared to watching the RMB gain status as a reserve currency.

To continue reading: US Dollar Hegemony Tripped Up by Chinese Renminbi?

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