Gold World News Flash |
- President Donald Trump SHOCKS the World at Swearing In Ceremony of Justice Brett Kavanaugh
- Breaking News/Best Of The Web
- NAFTA 2.0: Free Trade or Central Planning?
- X ANON .. 1967 RARE RECORDING ON THE ROTHCHILDS
- A Bigger Picture On The China Threat To The U.S.
- Why Is This Happening?
- The Gold Standard: Protector of Individual Liberty and Economic Prosperity
- Barrick Randgold Deal Breathes New Life into Gold
- Mary Anastasia O'Grady: Why Central America stays poor
- Stock Market Sell Off, Dollar Rally Expected, Now What?
- The Chartology of Gold and Silver
- Top Ten Videos — October 8
- Best Factory Job Growth in 34 Years
- When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally End?
- “A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham”
| President Donald Trump SHOCKS the World at Swearing In Ceremony of Justice Brett Kavanaugh Posted: 08 Oct 2018 11:00 PM PDT LIVE: President Donald Trump Attends Swearing-In Ceremony of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh LIVE STREAM: President Donald Trump Attends Swearing-In Ceremony of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://financearmageddon.blogspot.com http://lindseywilliams101.blogspot.com http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| Posted: 08 Oct 2018 07:20 PM PDT Why Italy's “volcano of debt” is a global threat … Charles Hugh Smith on the “global distortions of doom” … John Hussman: $20 trillion to be wiped from stock markets … Gold and silver down on rising interest rates, stronger dollar as “central banks pile into gold.” Best Of The Web A roadmap for […] The post Breaking News/Best Of The Web appeared first on DollarCollapse.com. |
| NAFTA 2.0: Free Trade or Central Planning? Posted: 08 Oct 2018 07:00 PM PDT Trump's NAFTA 2.0 is even worse than the original. If you like free trade, you'll hate this "deal." The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://financearmageddon.blogspot.com http://lindseywilliams101.blogspot.com http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| X ANON .. 1967 RARE RECORDING ON THE ROTHCHILDS Posted: 08 Oct 2018 06:00 PM PDT The full version will be blow your mind even further. They are some very evil people. Real crazy, scary people. The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers ,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://financearmageddon.blogspot.com http://lindseywilliams101.blogspot.com http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| A Bigger Picture On The China Threat To The U.S. Posted: 08 Oct 2018 05:00 PM PDT In this video, Luke and Jason discuss the reports of a massive hardware hack by China. Is the China technology takeover already here, or is this more hype by the establishment to demonize China? The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts ,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://financearmageddon.blogspot.com http://lindseywilliams101.blogspot.com http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| Posted: 08 Oct 2018 01:55 PM PDT the American government have a satellite that can fire a microwave beam and cause earthquakes,turn building to dust and Cook people where they stand The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://financearmageddon.blogspot.com http://lindseywilliams101.blogspot.com http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| The Gold Standard: Protector of Individual Liberty and Economic Prosperity Posted: 08 Oct 2018 12:52 PM PDT Article posted at The Market Oracle http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article63295.html |
| Barrick Randgold Deal Breathes New Life into Gold Posted: 08 Oct 2018 12:27 PM PDT Article posted at The Market Oracle http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article63292.html |
| Mary Anastasia O'Grady: Why Central America stays poor Posted: 08 Oct 2018 11:40 AM PDT By Mary Anastasia O'Grady https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-central-america-stays-poor-1538950134 The July 2017 idling of the Escobal silver mine in southeastern Guatemala displaced more than 850 workers and endangered the livelihoods of thousands more whose jobs are indirectly supported by the project. The loss of family income has harmed communities in the municipality of San Rafael Las Flores and in some cases sent the unemployed north to look for work in the United States. Nature can be cruel in underdeveloped countries. Yet it wasn't fire, flood, mudslide or volcano that served this economic gut punch. This is a manmade travesty, courtesy of Guatemala's Constitutional Court. It is a saga worth recounting because it goes to the heart of the country's intransigent poverty. ... Dispatch continues below ... ADVERTISEMENT A Network of Bullion Dealers Who Bid for Your Business With a SmartMetals® account from the Hard Assets Alliance, you're always guaranteed the lowest prices for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. When you buy bullion through your account, the alliance's network of trusted precious metals dealers launches into action -- and you'll be shown the lowest price for your purchase. Also amazing is the low-cost storage available to you in six non-bank vaults around the world. Click here to learn more: http://www.hardassetsalliance.com/go/v34pm4/GAT The mine is owned by Minera San Rafael, or MSR, a Guatemalan subsidiary of Nevada-based Tahoe Resources. Tahoe spokesman Edie Hofmeister told me that since 2010 MSR has invested $1.7 billion in the "development and operation" of the mine. "This includes more than $136 million paid to the Guatemalan government in taxes, royalties and voluntary payments" as well as "$66 million in salaries" and "$600 million spent on local suppliers," Ms. Hofmeister said last week. Tahoe put more than $10 million into "social investment and economic development programs," including "community education, health and nutrition, infrastructure, capacity development, entrepreneurship and local governance initiatives," Ms. Hofmeister said. One notable project was a vocational training center into which it invested more than $1 million. Then came a legal complaint filed against the government's Ministry of Energy and Mines at the Supreme Court by the Center for Legal, Environmental and Social Action, an antimining nongovernmental organization known in Guatemala by its Spanish acronym Calas. There was no charge of environmental or labor violations on MSR's part. Instead Calas said the Ministry of Mines hadn't adequately consulted a local indigenous people—known as Xinca—about the mine before granting MSR a license to extract silver in 2013. The mine isn't on Xinca communal lands. But the United Nations International Labor Organization's Convention No. 169 states that indigenous peoples living in the area of development projects need to be consulted. Guatemala is a signatory to the convention. Yet its Congress has never passed the implementing legislation that would spell out the process required for compliance. On July 5, 2017, Guatemala's Supreme Court sided with Calas in a preliminary injunction ordering the "provisional suspension" of the mine. The ministry of mines immediately appealed to the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the country. The high court upheld the lower court. The mine remained closed. Tahoe says this ignored a precedent set by the Constitutional Court only months before in a similar case involving a hydroelectric project. In that case the company was allowed to continue operations while consulting with local indigenous people. On Sept. 10, 2017, the Supreme Court issued a final ruling: The mine could be reopened while the government conducted indigenous consultations simultaneously. Calas appealed, and the mine remained closed while the Constitutional Court called a public hearing for Oct. 25, 2017. By law the high court should have ruled within five days after the public hearing. Instead it delayed for nearly a year. This Sept. 3 it issued a preliminary ruling in which it acknowledged a 2002 national census that found only two Xinca living in the municipality of San Rafael Las Flores, where the mine is located. Nevertheless it ordered that the mine remain closed and instructed the ministry of mines to investigate whether there are perhaps more. By law, the high court was obligated to issue a final ruling in 48 hours. The parties are still waiting. Despite the court order to halt operations, MSR maintained its staff through 2017 in the expectation that the mine could reopen. But by January the company began laying people off. It still has local personnel employed for maintenance, but direct salaries and benefits earned have fallen by nearly 40%. Indirect repercussions are far greater. MSR has had to shut down its vocational training center and curtail its many community programs. Ms. Hofmeister told me that "MSR has been subject to extortion attempts by individuals who have presented credible evidence that -- in return for bribes -- they could 'guarantee a favorable outcome' not only at the Constitutional Court but also at the Ministry of Energy and Mines and the tax authority." There were also threats of violence if such approaches were reported. She says it met with the U.N.'s International Commission against Corruption in Guatemala, known as CICIG, in late 2017 to report this and court irregularities. I asked CICIG if it had acted. It didn't respond to my query. The mine could easily be reopened while respecting the rights of the Xinca. Apparently the high court doesn't want to see that happen, no matter the cost to the Guatemalan people. Join GATA here: New Orleans Investment Conference * * * Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: |
| Stock Market Sell Off, Dollar Rally Expected, Now What? Posted: 08 Oct 2018 02:40 AM PDT Article posted at The Market Oracle http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article63291.html |
| The Chartology of Gold and Silver Posted: 08 Oct 2018 02:36 AM PDT Article posted at The Market Oracle http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article63290.html |
| Posted: 07 Oct 2018 05:15 PM PDT Rick Rule: “The gold mining industry is ripe for consolidation” … Peter Schiff: “Did rising interest rates just prick the bubble?” … Lynette Zang: “The economy just cracked” … McAlvany: Your pension fund now owns the “bad debt” that banks used to own … John Williams: The Fed could be gone in the coming financial […] The post Top Ten Videos — October 8 appeared first on DollarCollapse.com. |
| Best Factory Job Growth in 34 Years Posted: 07 Oct 2018 05:00 PM PDT By Kurt Kallaus – Trump's claim of bringing back American manufacturing jobs is boastful but does have some truth. Since the manufacturing halcyon days of the 1970s, the US dollar was allowed to depreciate and cheap labor abroad sent US... |
| When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally End? Posted: 06 Oct 2018 08:05 AM PDT This post When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally End? appeared first on Daily Reckoning. Credit bubbles are not engines of sustainable employment, they are only engines of malinvestment and wealth destruction on a grand scale. We all know the Status Quo’s response to the global financial meltdown of 2008 has been a travesty of a mockery of a sham. Smoke and mirrors, flimsy facades of “recovery,” fake “reforms,” serial bubble-blowing and politically expedient can-kicking, all based on borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, yen, euros and yuan, quatloos, etc. So when will the travesty of a mockery of a sham finally come to an end? Probably around 2022-25, with a few global crises and “saves” along the way to break up the monotony of devolution. The foundation of this forecast is this chart I prepared back in 2008 (below). This is of course only a selection of cycles; many more may be active but these four give us a flavor of the confluence of crises ahead. Cycles are not laws of Nature, of course; they are only records of previous periods of growth/excess/depletion/collapse, not predictions per se. Nonetheless their repetition reflects the systemic dynamic of growth, crisis and collapse, and so the study of cycles is instructive even though we stipulate they are not predictive. What is predictable is the way systems tend to follow an S-curve of rapid growth with then tops out in excess, stagnates in depletion and then devolves or implodes. We can see all sorts of things topping out and entering depletion/collapse: financialization, the Savior State, Chinese credit expansion, oil production, student loan debt and so on.
Since each mechanism that burns out or implodes tends to be replaced with some other mechanism, this creates the recurring cycle of expansion/excess/depletion/collapse. I plotted four long-wave cycles in the first chart. I know it may look a bit complicated, but stick with me:
1. The credit expansion/renunciation cycle. a.k.a. the Kondratieff cycle. Credit expands when credit is costly and invested in productive assets. Credit reaches excess when it is cheap and it’s malinvested in speculation and stock buybacks, and as collateral vanishes then credit is renunciated/written off. This is inexact, but obviously the organic postwar cycle of expansion has been extended by the central bank money-printing/credit orgy. 2. The generational cycle of four generations/80 years described in the seminal book The Fourth Turning. American history uncannily tracks an 80-year cycle of crises and profound transformation: 1860 (Civil War), 1940 (world war and global Empire) and next up to bat, 2020, the implosion of the debt-based Savior State and the financialized economy. 3. The 100-year cycle of inflation-deflation described in the masterful book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. The price of bread remained almost constant in Britain throughout the 19th century. In contrast, the 20th century has been characterized by inflation — the U.S. dollar has lost approximately 96% of its value since the early 20th century. Another characteristic of this cycle is wage stagnation: people earn less even as costs of essentials rise, a dynamic that inevitably leads to political crisis and upheaval. The end-game for inflation is destruction of fiat currencies, i.e. rising inflation or complete loss of faith in paper money. This is of course “impossible,” just like World War I, the Titanic sinking, the global meltdown of 2008, etc. Impossible things happen with alarming regularity. 4. Peak oil, which does not mean the world runs out of oil, it simply means oil production no longer rises to meet demand and eventually declines even as new fields are brought online. It can also mean that the price of energy rises to the point that consumers can either buy energy or they can keep the consumer economy afloat, but they are no longer able to do both. Many observers are confident that fracking and other technologies will enable current energy profligacy to continue unabated as the U.S. production of oil and natural gas soars. All this surplus energy in North America sounds wonderful, but that doesn’t mean the world as a whole has escaped Peak Oil. Even if fracked wells didn’t deplete in a year or two (they do), that expansion of production will not replace the loss of production as supergiant fields in Mexico, the North Sea and the Mideast enter the depletion phase. Yes, technology can extract more oil, but technology is costly. The days of cheap natural gas may have arrived, but the days of cheap oil are numbered. How all this plays out is unknown, but even raising U.S. production might not be enough to maintain current production levels. Since several billion more people desire the U.S.-type lifestyle of energy profligacy, then what are the consequences of the mismatch between global demand and supply? We can also posit that “good-paying jobs” in developed economies are also tracking an S-curve. The post-industrial decline in labor has many causes. But the Internet is a key factor going forward as the Web, AI, Big Data and mobile telephony leverage all sorts of productivity gains without the pesky overhead, costs and trouble of employees. This reality was masked by the initial boom in Web infrastructure that topped out in 2000, and again by the credit-fueled global malinvestment in real estate that topped out in 2007 and soon by the topping out of the social media/mobile app tech boom, the third stock market bubble and Housing Bubble #2. Once these bubbles have popped, the reality of long-term employment stagnation can no longer be masked. Credit bubbles are not engines of sustainable employment, they are only engines of malinvestment and wealth destruction on a grand scale. A number of other questions arise as we ponder these dynamics. How “cheap” will all that energy be to those without full-time jobs? How will 100 million workers support 100 million retirees, welfare recipients and parasitic Elites, plus Universal Basic Income as costs rise, taxes soar and wages stagnate? The Status Quo is unsustainable on a number of fundamental fronts. How long it can maintain the facade of stability and sustainability is unknown. But the global willingness to squander additional years on artifice and propaganda suggests that another four years will fly by and the end-game will be at hand whether we approve of it or not. Regards, Charles Hugh Smith The post When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally End? appeared first on Daily Reckoning. |
| “A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham” Posted: 06 Oct 2018 08:02 AM PDT This post "A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham" appeared first on Daily Reckoning. The dynamics of decadence are easy to understand: As affluence becomes the norm that is widely assumed to be permanent, shared purpose and sacrifice for the common good are replaced by self-absorbed decadence and an ethos of maximizing personal gain. In his seminal essay "The Fate of Empires," Sir John Glubb lists these core dynamics of imperial decline: (a) A growing love of money as an end in itself. (b) A lengthy period of wealth and ease, which makes people complacent. They lose their edge; they forget the traits (confidence, energy, hard work) that built their civilization. (c) Selfishness and self-absorption. (d) Loss of any sense of duty to the common good. Glubb includes the following in his list of the characteristics of decadence: – An increase in frivolity, hedonism, materialism and the worship of unproductive celebrity – A loss of social cohesion – The willingness of an increasing number to live at the expense of a bloated bureaucratic state. Glubb's list may at first glance be largely psychological — self-aggrandizement and a focus on hedonistic pursuits — but the dynamics of decadence have economic, political and social ramifications. First and foremost, the aristocratic financial and political elites secured their position at the expense of social mobility by erecting barriers that protect them from competition and accountability. In effect, they eliminated the risk posed by change by rigging the system to their benefit. To fund their extravagant lifestyles, they took more of the earnings of those below them, widening the inequality between the aristocracy and commoners to extremes. Historian Peter Turchin reports that where the patricians of the Roman Republic had 10 or 20 times the wealth of an average Roman citizen, by the late Empire the elites possessed up to 200,000 times the wealth of the average commoner. The heavier burdens on the productive class and the decay of social mobility divested commoners of a financial stake in the system, and the concentration of political power in an oligarchy disenfranchised them of political influence. When social mobility and shared purpose are lost, there is little motivation to contribute to a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. People respond by reducing their productive participation and becoming dependents of the state, a phase captured by the phrase bread and circuses in the late Roman era, when a significant percentage of Rome's populace received free bread and access to costly entertainments in exchange for their political compliance. Disenfranchised commoners with few prospects for advancement form a volatile political class; a small event can trigger a nonlinear explosion that threatens the stability of a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many. To counter this threat, the elites bought the compliance and complicity of the masses with bread and circuses. As Glubb notes, the willingness to live off the state is a reflection of general decadence; if there is no other hedonistic pursuit within financial reach, then bread and circuses will do. As the eventual collapse of decadent empires attests, bread and circuses are no substitute for social mobility, low barriers to accumulating capital and a political stake in the system. In the present era of decadence, universal basic income (UBI), where citizens are handed money whether they work or not — or even look for work — is the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. But buying off the disenfranchised doesn't transform an unstable system into a stable system; it merely masks the instability for a time. The core belief of decadent eras is that the status quo is so powerful and permanent that it can withstand the predations of the few and the bread and circuses lavished on the many. This is of course a false confidence. Every status quo is a social construct that is inherently nonlinear. The decline of productive sectors, the divestiture of commoners from ownership of productive assets and the political disenfranchisement of commoners hollow out the economy and the society. These dynamics of decadence weaken the social and economic order, creating conditions that favor a loss of faith in the status quo and the failure of key institutions. Rising discord can be quantified in a political stress index. Do we find evidence of Turchin's disintegrative forces in the present era?:
Regards, Charles Hugh Smith The post "A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham" appeared first on Daily Reckoning. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Save Your ASSets First. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment