A Thought on the Zombie Economy (and crypto rambling)

When you have banks and mega corporations able to borrow for effectively zero, but the average Joe has to pay 3-25% for home mortgages and CC's, you have a recipe for economic inequality, which quickly translates into cultural inequality.

That has been the case since 2008, when "emergency" measures were taken to save the world...er...I mean, to save every large insolvent bank with enough juice to pose a "systemic risk" - and which "emergency" measures continue now, 12 years later.

There is a word for an economy that requires emergency measures for over a decade.

The word is fraud.

Fraud: Where you change the rules so the banks can pretend to be viable while the rank and file continue to face stark reality of declining buying power and rising prices and endless debt servitude. Where no lie is too obvious or egregious, and where nobody with clout ever goes to jail no matter how heinous their crime. Where an entire economy depends on fake news, fake data, fake earnings, fake booms, all driven by plentiful fake currency being printed whole cloth and doled out to the favored while the rest have to slave away to earn a pittance on the company plantation.

The U.S., and indeed the EU and Japan, are Ponzi/Enron economies. Where the demand for endless amounts of government paper is bought up by straw man banks in the Caribbean on behalf of the Fed, or with repo agreements wherein local mega-banks skim a nice vig by selling the paper back to the Fed after the headline value of "strong" demand has faded, and where the supposedly independant central banks play relay on money printing and interest rate control. Fed starts tightening, BOJ loosens. BOJ gives that a rest, ECB loosens. All basically controlled by the same hands, but kept separate in the minds of the masses to lend a false appearance of impartiality and sovereignity.

It's all fake. All of it. The problem being that the natural adversarial force of mutual mistrust between nations has been replaced by coordinated duplicity, since all the central banks are controlled by the privately owned Bank for International Settlements - so the Bank of Japan pretends that the US' paper is worth anything, as does the Bank of England, as does the EU Central Bank, and so on, with the world's population the losers in the con game. In the old days, pre-WW2, those banks were not controlled by a central entity whose interest was in flooding the world with garbage currency via its supposedly "independant" central bank members. But once the Allies had vanquished upstart Germany and Japan and Italy and replaced their governments with new vassal entities, the centralized control was possible. The EU formalized that control of the European nations, which is why the CIA came up with the idea - it was too messy to try to bribe 17 different countries to toe the line, and far more desirable to do so via one entity and one currency, backed by nothing, just as the dollar is backed by nothing. That's why everyone went along with the US abandoning Bretton Woods' agreement to back the dollar with gold in return for it being the world's reserve currency - because the natural distrust had been replaced by the reality that all the world's western governments got their financial marching orders via their central banks, which took orders from the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. That entity's owners now control all the central banks, so the work to exchange currency with real value (via gold-backing) with "full faith and credit" that could be tippy-tapped into existence, was complete, and a small handful of uber-rich dynastic banking family members could do the tapping while the rest of the planet had to work to get any of the tippy-tapped new paper IOUs.

It's an audacious scam. One that requires even the supposed "enemy" nations like Russia and China to treat the dollar and euro as though they have any value at all. Why? Because they're all in on it. It is a game of us vs. them, with the them being the world's bankers and the governments they hold hostage. But even that scam is now coming to an end as the US prints currency like toilet paper and the banks and their cronies (who are in reality owned by the same banking family members via cutout holding companies and straw man banks) use it to buy up everything worth owning. Once that is over they will crash the system, which they will be short by that time, and usher in yet another BS currency backed by nothing, although my hunch is it will require some percentage gold backing to start so it isn't viewed by "us" as the sham it is.

If you are experiencing cognitive dissonance about how the US can print endless amounts of currency without becoming Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic, that's how the fraud is controlled and propagated. But when the utility of using the dollar ends, which it pretty much has now that most of the nation's prosperity is "invested" in the stock market and real estate market (both of which can be easily crashed at the opportune time), it will be replaced for international trade, leaving the dollar basically the American Peso - and then look out below on its buying power. Between that massive devaluation, and the culling of millions of oldsters (via the vax) who would have been a "burden" on the entitlement and pension systems (from which all the cash was long ago stolen by the bankers), that's the obvious way to write down a tsunami of debt and pay it off in one cent dollars.

Which is the whole point to the fraud. The in crowd gets the virtually free money before the rubes have seen it devalue, which enables them to buy everything with their scrip before the mob figures out that currency is worthless, or rather its buying power is illusory. And it's all legal. Fraud is now the law of the land - only not for you or me; only the big boys. The law exists to subjugate and control you, nothing more. They don't have to obey it or even pay much attention to it, which is why they pay wrist slap fines for endless criminal fraud. You on the other hand better follow every order from your masters or spend hard time in their for-profit prisons.

Nice work if you can get it. Sucks to be us.

Oh well.

On a related note, I've been asked about crypto currencies like bitcoin, and whether or not they don't pose a mechanism to break out of the banker fraud economy. The short answer is they do conceptually, but don't in reality. Why? Because, for example, the price of Bitcoin can largely be kept volatile by the derivative futures market, and by Tether, which from what I can tell has never been audited and might well be engaging in its own money printing of tether, which is then used to buy up crypto, creating an artificial valuation via "counterfeit" demand creation. And as long as a currency is volatile, it isn't useful as a currency, but rather as a speculation, which is fine, but is the antithesis of a stable store of value that can be used to denominate long term contracts. I believe Bitcoin has received so much attention to pave the way in the public's mind for the ultimate "official" one world crypto that will be issued by the usual suspects once the dollar has crashed and burned. And of course, there is the control imposed by the "exchanges" that have to report to their various governments, which invariably regulate based on what their bankers prefer.

If you think about the utility of a blockchain, it is really its immutable nature that lends it any value. I find it hogwash that the amount of energy required for Bitcoin's "proof of work" verification/mining is some sort of a justification of its value. Nobody values other assets in that manner - you don't value an iron by the cost to manufacture it, you value it by its utility in ironing clothes. If it gets too expensive to use, you'll switch to something else. And if it is a scarcity argument, well, that is really just an elegant rationalization for why the next fool might pay more than the last. But it has been used to firmly plant in the public's mind that currency doesn't have to have any innate value, just be agreed upon by a buyer and seller as having value for whatever reason they decide, and poof, currency! Which is philosophically true. Shells, beads, sticks, metals have all been used as currency over time, and one could argue that none of them have any particular utility (with the exception of metals, which have industrial and commercial applications). So why not just bits and bytes floating in the aether? Fine by me.

To my eye, the real utility of blockchain is in its utility for smart contracts - immutable agreements that are forever memorialized on the blockchain. Imagine the value of every title document being easily verified in that manner. Or wills. Or corporate elections. Or medical records. Or legal documents. Or IOUs (which are really currency so long as both parties honor them as such). I could go on for hours. I see the value there. Not so much in scarcity with a massive energy footprint that is useless for commercial applications due to its volatility. But I could well be wrong about that. What I don't think I'm wrong about is that the status quo has afforded so much energy on Bitcoin because the end game is to condition folks to abandon every aspect of freedom, including that of being able to have privacy in their commercial transactions, and to embrace the idea of the immutable, easily verifiable and trackable blockchain.

Which makes for interesting debate, including the question of "what is money?" My take is that it is any immutable, scarce medium of exchange parties agree have a fixed value. Gold and Silver have been treated as money for thousands of years because they fulfill that criteria - they are costly to get out of the ground, there are limited quantities available from mines in any given period and in circulation, and they don't degrade with time. Bankers have long worked to convince the masses that their IOUs for gold and silver actually contain the value, via a sleight of hand. The origin of paper money was with banking families vaulting gold in Paris and London, and issuing an IOU for your vaulted gold which you could turn in for the physical metal, eliminating the travel risk of getting your gold from Paris to London, and vice versa. Over time, folks used those IOUs in place of the metal itself because it was easier. And the banking families quickly figured out ways to game that system, by issuing more IOUs than gold they actually had, banking on the idea that not everyone would claim their gold at the same time - the dishonest invention of fractional reserve banking that was embraced by the privately owned Federal Reserve.

Americans have been inculcated in the belief that the paper IOUs that were once redeemable for gold or silver (but for 50 years have been backed by nothing but talk) are the stores of value. The only reason that works is because the US will invade and destroy any country that doesn't play ball on the scam. If you think of the US military as the mercenary army of the bankers and their corporate creations, you have it right. But even the threat of being nuked eventually fades as a legitimate claim on value, and the currency loses buying power as more of it is printed. Since Nixon "temporarily" suspended gold backing of the dollar, it has lost about 98% of its buying power even with the military might of the US as its backing. And there is literally not a single reason it won't lose another 99% - the only question is over what time frame.

My sense is the IMF's call for a new Bretton Woods this year is the start of that reset in the dollar's value. If so, Americans are in for a rude awakening, just as were Brits when the pound ceased to be the world's reserve currency, and the French before that when the franc stopped being the world's reserve, and the Portuguese before them, and the Dutch, all the way back to Roman times. Quality of life for the populations always got eviscerated, but those in charge of the monetary system wound up with all the marbles.

That's obviously the plan this time around too. Prepare accordingly.