Economic Pearl Harbor

Did you know they had some warning at Pearl Harbor?[1]

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He says, “The worst part of the decline is yet to come.   Bank failures and home foreclosures are yet to peak.  The commercial real estate bust is yet to hit.  The dollar crisis is building. When it hits, interest rates will rise dramatically as the US struggles to finance its massive budget and trade deficits while the rest of the world tries to escape a depreciating dollar.”

Once the majority of voters and special interests have
an interest in increasing spending – even by borrowing –
rather than in limiting taxes and debt, the game is practically over.
– Greg Kadajski

A second leg down in the U.S. economy is all but certain and we won’t have to wait long to see how things are going to shake out. There are many likely triggers for the next phase of the crisis and likely they will merge and rise up against us in a simultaneous assault on our present system and way of life. It may already be “dire” and “severe” out there but it’s going to get a whole lot worse. Now that the Dow has pierced the 10,000 level we are ripe for a steep ride down where a lot of people are going to lose a lot more money.

The U.S. has balanced its budget only five times in
the past 50 years. The four straight years of surpluses
starting with 1998 now look like a statistical error.
– David Pauly

Our next crisis, due sometime soon (any day, week or month now; for many millions it is already here), will likely be much more dangerous than what we saw in the fall of 2008; and its probably going to come on like an unannounced force five tornado but the government and the media have been sounding the all clear sirens for months. Jim Sinclair and others on the other hand are riding down the virtual streets like Paul Revere did on his horse shouting, “Everything we have discussed here for many years is NOW taking place. Everything we have suggested is coming is NOW on your doorstep.”

California is on the verge of becoming
the first failed state in America.[2]
– Professor Kevin Starr

Karl Denninger asks, “Is It Time to Recognize Reality?” We are at a rare moment in history and events will come on at dizzying speed. Denninger warns, “Every nation that has ignored the foundational principles of sound banking and credit for a sufficient period of time has suffered either severe economic depression or monetary collapse. There are no exceptions.” “The real threat to national security lies in the finance sector rooted in Wall Street. Almost all talk about foreign threat is a grand distraction from the internal threat, even as incredibly grand fraud is committed in the name of patriotism,” writes Jim Willie.[3]

Richard C. Cook says, “The U.S. is increasingly in a state of political, economic, and moral paralysis, caught as it were between the “rock” of protracted recession and the “hard place” of terminal government debt. The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century.”[4]

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur makes a compelling case
of a Financial Coup D’Etat. New York’s Wall Street is
stealing the rest of the country blind; California is going down
hard as the bankers ride home laughing in their limousines.

Richard C. Cook says, “Bankers, mainly those in the U.S., have so shattered the world economy by debt mounted on debt that there may be no reprieve except the creation of a slave society based on rule by the rich over the masses of whatever peons should happen to survive the downturn and its tragic effects on employment, health, the food and water supply, and even our ability to cope with climate change.”

Did you know that some people think the biggest bank
robbers are the banks themselves?[5] The real crooks are the
bankers and they hold top positions in the American government.

Jerome Celente’s audio gives a birds eye view into all of this.

Bankers are literally pillaging and raping everything around them, something they are good at because it is something they have always done. Humanity has been lead to slaughter (wars) for over two hundred years in a fashion that the banks have profited handsomely from; and the fractional reserve banking system, creating money from nothing and charging interest on it, the biggest crime scam in the history of our race, which few have the courage, intelligence or perspective to fight against even in their imaginations. Now Americans are having to face the unpleasant fact that its economy has nothing to show for all the bailout money borrowed and spent but we are supposed to be happy because at least the wealthy have been bailed out.

On 7 December 1941 the greatest disaster in United States history occurred but now we have certain banking interests that have surpassed the infamy of that attack through a financial attack on the entire nation. In the attack at Pearl Harbor less people were killed then at the World Trade Center. The present suffering and the tidal wave of pain that is arriving for uncountable millions is an infamy that will ring down through future ages but the bankers don’t really care and they really do love their limousines.

Many Americans do not see a threat from Russia.
They see a threat from greedy corporate interests
that allegedly own governments, like our own.
– Jeffrey R. Nyquist

Of course it is not the United States alone that is facing the financial hangman. The Baltic States are once again in the eye of the storm after leaked reports that Sweden is bracing for a full-blown economic and political “breakdown” in Latvia with financial markets elsewhere in the region are likely to be hit by contagion, with Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine most vulnerable. The Svenska Dagbladet newspaper said Sweden’s finance minister Anders Borg had told banks secretly that Latvia’s political order was unraveling, advising them to prepare for the collapse of Latvia’s rescue talks.[6]

Gov. Paterson will propose $2.5 billion in budget cuts today –
primarily in health and education – to close a mushrooming deficit
the controller says could hit $4.1 billion. Asked to describe the latest
round of proposed budget cuts, Paterson had a one-word answer:
“Pain.” “It’s going to be pretty grim,” Paterson told the Daily News.

State tax collections are continuing to take a dive and this is a huge blade beginning to further gut the American economy. Our financial system and fiat money will soon be toast so I am sounding the emergency horn and am pushing hard on the button. But “Exuberant markets and slap-happy finance ministers, combined with record profits at the investment banks of Mordor/Wall Street, are supposed to convince us that the worst is over, calamity has been averted, and with sober and moist eyes we roll up our sleeves to prevent the ghosts in the machine from re-emerging. A more masterful symphony of optical delusion has never been conducted, and the invisible puppeteers manipulating the strings of marionettes Ben Bernanke and Timmy Geithner are smug in their continued anonymity,” writes James West, who says we better “prepare for the next leg down.”[7] West also reminds us that, “The long term deterioration of the U.S. Dollar has been underway for decades.” The only thing preventing a dollar collapse it seems is an international race to the bottom in terms of paper currencies; meaning if the Americans are doing it everyone feels compelled to play the currency debasement game.

If this recovery continues long enough there won’t
be a single person left in America who still has a job.
– Bill Bonner

The economy is growing weaker not stronger and central banks are already in a panic over the severe backwardation of gold, meaning to cover short positions certain banks are offering up to 1,250 dollars an ounce in paper currency instead of having to deliver on physical gold that they don’t have but legally should.[8] “Indeed, the disposition of Western central bank gold reserves is a secret more closely guarded than the blueprints for the manufacture of nuclear weapons,” writes Chris Powell.

“There is a headline that has been all over the media ever since September 2008,” Amerman continues: “Bank Bailout Will Soak Taxpayers. As obviously true as this headline appears to be, it is in fact, dangerously misleading. Indeed, as we will cover in this article, the idea that taxes will pay for the bailout is ludicrous, an insult to both your intelligence – and your net worth. Instead, the real source of the bailout monies will not be the taxes you pay, but the value of your savings. The value of your checking account, the value of your IRA or Keogh, and the value of all your investments are the true source of payment for Wall Street’s reckless mistakes. When we combine the bailout with the trouble the US was already in, the result could be a 95% reduction in value for all of our savings, retirement and otherwise, as we will illustrate step by step in this article.“[9]What is certainly coming is a collapse of entitlement programs and pension plans and this will hit hard. Real money, real value is being sucked out of the masses but there is only so long this funny money con came can last before the dealer steps up and says game over, collect your chips, but then you find out at the cashiers window those chips are worth nothing.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth,
they can be depended upon to meet any national
crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
– Abraham Lincoln

Financial analyst Max Wolff says, “We have done almost nothing to solve any of our structural economic problems. In our ‘recovery’ of the last six months, we have seen the lives of the bottom 80% of Americans get harder every day.” The long-running positive mood that has prevailed these past few decades is on its last legs and we should have compassion for the resistance people put up to seeing what is laying ahead. It is not going to be a joyous time as modern civilization passes through its zenith to face a hard downturn and entrance into what can only be described as the most treacherous moments ever for humankind

The data confirms that government stimuli are worsening the
structural imbalances underlying our economy. The recent
‘rebound’ in GDP is not resulting from increased economic output,
but merely from the fact that we are borrowing more than ever.
– Peter Schiff

Though hyper inflation/currency collapse is still a future possibility the short term has credit and debt collapse on the table. The debts are simply too overwhelming so stand for all hell to break loose. Most officials are still counting on a recovery proving human penchant for fantasy. “To claim that the system can be put on proper stable footing is lunatic. To expect that the nation can be recalibrated so as to return to the Good Ole Days of US global dominance and leadership is lunatic. To urge that the economic signposts, megaphones, and billboards be once again guided by policies best described as Bubbly Economic Mythology is lunatic. Yet delusional Americans actually believe the dominant ship at sea can lead as flagship, when it has taken on more water than the Titanic,” writes Jim Willie.[10]

The World Bank in October warned the global
economy was on unsteady legs, saying that 2010
would be “a highly uncertain economic year.”

Talking about the federal budget deficit, which tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year[11] that ended at the end of September, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said “This new CBO data makes it clear that our children and grandchildren will end up buried under a mountain of debt if we continue taxing, spending and borrowing at these dangerous levels. How many alarm bells have to be set off before Washington Democrats get serious about tackling dangerous budget deficits?”

A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is
about 32 years. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years.
– John Allen Paulos
– Mathematician

It is no small thing that the United States government fiscal deficit is running at a trillion and a half dollars a year. There are other big threats that could trigger a 180-degree change in the trajectory of our lives though. Collectively we are living in the shadow of some terrible bombs besides the nuclear ones, any of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly catastrophic change in the human collective. There is the debt bomb, the climate bomb[12] and an agricultural bomb ticking away and of course there is the medical bomb with the pharmaceutical companies keeping up the race with the banks to suck the life blood out of the public.

Instead of a recovery it seems that
the misery is just getting started.

We have flooding conditions (central banks around the world are creating fiat money) yet most people today are suffering from monetary dehydration. What is beyond our imagination or courage to imagine is right around the corner so expect to receive the blow of a two by four right on the nuke of your neck unless you prepare. The changes that are coming will be difficult ones, the kinds that “just drain the heart right out of you,” said the son of a ninety two year old woman forced from her nursing home.[13] We have reached the end of our rocket like ride to riches and have passed the apex of our financial and economic trajectory. The wealth of the entire world is still contracting forcibly with the next leg downward destined to be especially hard.

Read the second part