(04-01-2017 04:34 PM)Dusty Wrote:  

Huge if true. I'd like to wait more but the list of suspects pretty narrow.

My first guess was Brennan, then Lynch. Rice would make sense as a prime one too. Let's see how this turns out. Hopefully Gorsuch gets confirmed this week and tax reform can heat up. The problem is these cucks and incompetents in Congress right now.

Tax cuts should really not be implemented without concomitant spending cuts. More debt is immoral because it is consuming today at the expense of tomorrow(our kids and grandkids). We currently have the highest levels of non-wartime debt ever in this country. The baby boomers have run up the national credit card so much and our children will pay, the same way that we will pay the costs of social security without receiving the benefit.

^ To whom is the debt owed?

What are they going to do when the US tells them to go fuck themselves?

Wait, wait, wait... why am I just now finding out that the "FCC privacy law" that Congress is supposedly dismantling was only passed in October 2016 and hadn't even taken effect yet?

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39427026

Quote:The law, passed last October days before President Trump was elected, and due to take effect by the end of this year, would have forced ISPs to get clear permission from users to share personal data such as "precise geo-location, financial information, health information, children’s information, social security numbers, web browsing history, app usage history and the content of communications”.
Furthermore, ISPs would have been ordered to allow their customers the ability to opt out of the sharing of less sensitive information, like an email address.

So the story here is that Obama passed a pro-privacy law right before the elections, and that Trump is killing privacy by repealing a law that wasn't even in effect yet. Yes, that makes perfect sense.

No wonder the liberal media and the likes of Twitter were up in arms over this supposed "privacy disaster".

(04-02-2017 07:25 PM)n0000 Wrote:  Tax cuts should really not be implemented without concomitant spending cuts. More debt is immoral because it is consuming today at the expense of tomorrow(our kids and grandkids). We currently have the highest levels of non-wartime debt ever in this country. The baby boomers have run up the national credit card so much and our children will pay, the same way that we will pay the costs of social security without receiving the benefit.

We dont have a final plan - but the idea is to reduce loopholes to make up a lot of the lost revenue. The previous house proposal was pretty close to revenue neutral over 10 years.

Que Rosie O'Donnell and an army of twitter bots claiming Barron is autistic in 3....2....1...

(04-02-2017 07:55 PM)Enoch Wrote:  ^ To whom is the debt owed?

What are they going to do when the US tells them to go fuck themselves?

Great point. As J. Paul Getty infamously said, "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

Epic must see video:

James Rickards-Trump Didn’t Get a Honeymoon-He Got a Burning Bed
https://youtu.be/1nxdsabMYI0

Published on Apr 1, 2017

Financial expert James Rickards, who was one of the few that predicted a Trump Presidential win, says the new President has battles on many fronts. Rickards contends, “It’s one thing to say there is an opposition to a President. There is always some opposition to the President. It’s a two-party system. What we see now is extreme. Trump didn’t get a honeymoon, he got a burning bed. Trump is facing four pockets of resistance. There is the Deep State, the resistance, the media and even the Republican Party as we saw in the Obamacare repeal. I am not saying they are all in this together as some deep dark conspiracy, they don’t have to be. . . .

President Obama has set up an anti-White House about two miles from the real White House. It is a government in exile, or an opposition government. He’s operating through a front company called Organizing for Action (OFA). He’s not organizing for America, he’s organizing for action. This is the continuation of the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaign. . . . Trump is not up against normal political opposition. He’s up against the resistance and the Deep State . . . . They want one of two things. They want to impeach Trump and remove him from office, force him to resign or, at a minimum, make him so ineffective he is a place holder until the next election. They are not out to oppose the Trump Presidency, but to destroy the Trump Presidency. This is extraordinary, and I call it America’s New Civil War.”

With all the financial and political chaos on the horizon, Rickards strongly suggests “people have at least 10% of your financial wealth in physical gold and silver.” Rickards is also adamant that a financial shutdown and calamity is "coming sooner than later."

Join Greg Hunter as he sits down with four time, best-selling author James Rickards, with his newly updated paperback book “The Death of Money.”

All links can be found on USAWatchdog.com:
http://usawatchdog.com/money-riots-comin...-rickards/

In Rickards usual lucid fashion he points out that the USA is facing a full on civil war sooner than later - imagine if all of your electronic forms of money, savings, investments and wealth were put on a 6 month hiatus and suspended by the Globalists War against Trump and the Americanists that support him (most of us) ... this is getting real I went to my local collectibles dealer for silver and gold coins and all he had was one 1964 90% Silver half dollar and 5 old mercury dimes and only a few 2017 Silver Eagles (1 Oz Silver US Mint Silver Dollar Coins and with silver around $18.00+/- an OZ the Silver eagles were priced at $23.50 each including the dealer premiums - PHOCKING AAAAY! That is a $5.50 premium charge - looks like I will have to take one month's net pay and buy a silver cushion in bulk from a major player like Peter Schiff's Gold and Silver dealers.

If the banks go on extended Bank Holiday while the IMF, Fed, Junkers Globalist NAZIs try to crush the USA banking and investment system and then try to deprecate the US Dollar and replace it with SDR's or worse amalgamated Amero Pesos... to control the riots or at least confine them to the Urban Ghettos - there will be a call-up of BFTs Bikers for Trump, Veterans and LEOs for Trump to rally around our president and Save our Union with the Same Marshall law Measures that President Lincoln was forced to use to fight the Confederacy and the European globalists at the time who conspired with the CSA against the UNION.

We all need to arm and ammo up now - buy up as much junk US Silver coins or Silver Eagles as you can (5% to 10%) as demand will skyrocket and you will be able to trade silver at $200 an OZ for food and Gold at $10,000 per ounce.

Of course, utility weapons - reliable handguns, shotguns and rifles and plenty of ammo will be in high demand for barter as well as self-defense...

More likely you will be able to buy serious steals on long term stores of useful value - late model Heavy Duty Trucks and equipment that people will be dumping to get out from under leases or severely over inflated homes that will crash far worse than 2008/09.

So Team Trump needs to get ready with a reverse COG surrounded by a core of loyal military and LEOs and a massive Armed Army and Auxilliary (Roman) Style Legions to execute citizens arrests of all the Globalists, Deep State Traitors and Embedded Obamunist Hold Overs and send them all to Rendition Camps just like Lincoln was Forced to DO to SAVE our Sacred Union all the while going on full Global Alert against any hostile Attacks by Junkers EU Globalists, the Red Communist Chinese Globalists or emboldened Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS Obama and Clinton funded and encouraged Radical Islamic Jihadist Terrorists.

Stand By and keep your Powder Dry Men and stock up on your Ammo just in case the Call to Arms for Trump Goes Out.

Keep an eye on Drudge Report, Breitbart and Infowars for updates or calls to action as the treasonous MSM staffs and on air liars will likely be rounded up and renditioned first to minimize the damage they can do.

We need to make a list of all Globalists Traitors (Starting with Soros and Company, The Obamunists and deeply embedded holdovers, the Clintonistas, the Clinton and Globalists MSM media, Wall Street and Hollywood Traitors so they can be renditioned ASAP when the time comes.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both used MARSHALL LAW, FIRING SQUADS and suspended Habeus Corpus to punish agitating traitors and spies in their day - so practice your marksmanship as you may be called up to help our Brothers In Arms save our Union, our Constitution, and our sacred Republic.

The only reliable defense is a swift, relentless and unforgiving offense... keep your plans as dark as night - let no outsiders know of your plans and when you move - move like lightning... General Sun Tsu.

Time for us all to become very offensive towards all enemies of President Trump the new Guardian in Chief of our Republic, and all enemies of our constitution both foreign and domestic.

I swear Deepdiver must be Alex Jones. This is just too epic.

It gets worse...

http://usawatchdog.com/money-riots-comin...-rickards/

Money Riots Coming in Next Financial Collapse-James Rickards

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com on April 2, 2017 In Market Analysis

Financial expert and four time, best-selling book author James Rickards says there is no avoiding another economic collapse. Every time the economy suffers a setback, such as recently hitting a $20 trillion debt ceiling in the United States Congress, things get a little worse. Rickards explains, “The point of my books, ‘The Death of Money’ and my more recent book ‘The Road to Ruin,’ is that these are like snowflakes building up to cause an avalanche. The avalanche is the instability of the financial system as a whole. The concentrations of assets among the banks, the interconnectedness of the system, and almost a $1 quadrillion, not $1 trillion, $1 quadrillion, that’s a $1,000 trillion of notional value of derivatives, all these things are unstable. What does it take to cause that avalanche? What does it take to cause a loss of confidence in the system? These are major body blows. When you say the government will shut down or you say the government can’t borrow, the Congress is really playing with fire here. We are going through some very dangerous periods. I am not saying the system is going to collapse in the next 30 days. I am saying the system is very vulnerable to collapse, and it will collapse sooner than later. These are the kind of things that can cause it. . . . We are really playing with fire here.”

So, could we be facing a “Mad Max” world if the financial system totally crashes? Rickards says, “In ‘Road to Ruin,’ I talk about what I call the money riots. There is a lot of reasons for rioting. When you start shutting banks and the stock exchange and they say you can’t get your money, it’s only temporary, trust us, people will go out and start to burn down banks. The government is ready for that also with emergency response and martial law. . . . Governments don’t go down without a fight. . . . You can see the shutdown coming because they will try to buy time until they come up with a solution, whether it’s gold, Special Drawing Rights (SDR), guarantees or whatever it might be. There are only two or three possibilities here, but all of them will take time, and they will have to shut down the system. . . . People will not sit for that. So, that means people will riot. They’ll burn down banks. They will smash windows, but what is the reaction to that? The answer is martial law, militarized police, actual military units and you get something that looks like fascism pretty quickly.”

(04-02-2017 10:11 PM)Deepdiver Wrote:  It gets worse...

http://usawatchdog.com/money-riots-comin...-rickards/

Money Riots Coming in Next Financial Collapse-James Rickards

I don't understand why people always cheer for a financial collapse. Most of you will end up dying prematurely if it happens. It will plunge the entire world into chaos and democracy will not be what rises from the ashes. Probably some type of militaristic authoritarian dictator. It is literally the worst case scenario to drain the swamp and achieve our desired outcome. It causes way too much collateral damage and lasting negative effects.

And doesn't matter if you have gold, supplies, clean water, and food if other people find out. Unless you have a network of armed security to protect you in advance, you'll be a dead man.

On a lighter note, I couldn't stop laughing when I saw this Trump tweet, a classic from 2011:

(04-02-2017 10:44 PM)Razor Beast Wrote:  

(04-02-2017 10:11 PM)Deepdiver Wrote:  It gets worse...

http://usawatchdog.com/money-riots-comin...-rickards/

Money Riots Coming in Next Financial Collapse-James Rickards

I don't understand why people always cheer for a financial collapse. Most of you will end up dying prematurely if it happens. It will plunge the entire world into chaos and democracy will not be what rises from the ashes. Probably some type of militaristic authoritarian dictator. It is literally the worst case scenario to drain the swamp and achieve our desired outcome. It causes way too much collateral damage and lasting negative effects.

And doesn't matter if you have gold, supplies, clean water, and food if other people find out. Unless you have a network of armed security to protect you in advance, you'll be a dead man.

What the financial collapse in the US will most look like will be Venezuela. We'll get to why in a minute.

Understand first that assholes predicting a financial collapse don't actually want to solve the problem. Many are making money off it, either directly by selling books on the subject or (I suspect) using the Al Gore approach: have shares in "green" companies when you're predicting disaster. For any author who's currently pronouncing financial doom for the US, the first thing you need to look for is whether that person is investing or spruiking gold. Gold will not save your ass in hyperinflation any more than fiat currency will, but you can make other people a lot of money panic buying the yellow metal that drives white men mad.

Understand second that, Zerohedge notwithstanding, the US dollar is not collapsing until one event takes place: the institution of a credible currency alternative to the US dollar that people are willing to trust in sufficient volumes to draw business away from US bonds. Volume matters here: there is more US currency flying around the world than any other currency in existence, and it means in very real terms that world businesses can't operate without it.

In passing, Russia and China are apparently linking arms to come up with a gold-backed currency. Good luck with that. The main reason they're doing that and using gold is because there is no other way they can convince anyone to invest with them: their fiat currencies are bullshit, not backed by believable or real value. You literally cannot trust their governments' promises to repay the money you loan them in the form of bonds, they have to promise you'll get physical gold back in order to entice you there. Even if they did, they don't have sufficient volume of currency to challenge the US dollar. And a gold standard is also no magic cure-all, either: adoption of a gold standard around the world guarantees almost instantaneous deflation and a worldwide depression, because all of that phantom growth and phantom wealth disappears overnight as everything suddenly gets coldly and impersonally valued against an ounce of gold. You can't expand the money supply either without finding more of it, something that's a bit tricky since in all human history there's only been about 180,000 metric tons of it ever mined if I remember right.

Bitcoin and similar also will not solve this problem: I'd have thought the fact the CIA is in everything down to fucking doorbells demonstrates pretty significantly exactly how insecure that "currency" is and why it's never going to be credible as a storer of value unless in a radically different, uncrackable (Hah!) form.

Anyway, as said, when the economic collapse comes, it will basically be Venezuela to a greater or lesser extent. I used to think that conservatism would win out if it happened to be the Left in power at the time of the collapse, kind of a reverse to the 20-year domination of government that happened after the Great Depression and FDR. Now I don't think it will. Too much has been given to people by way of socialism for them to abandon it. Most of the US is utterly dependent on US government handouts to survive, whether directly or indirectly. The network by which socialism is sustained in the US is too massive in scope to change: it ranges from thousands of government regulations to even support in the Republican congress.

It's a parallel to the more direct and horrifying example of Venezuela: there, Maduro controls an unholy trinity of the ports, the food distribution network, and the army. In the US the parallel will not be exact, but given how much of people's lives are wired into the government now, how little they can fend for themselves anymore, and especially given the growing Mexican (socialist-leaning, conformist, government-compliant) population of the US is, I really think that when the shit does finally hit the fan the average American would rather suck the tit of an oppressive government that still feeds them than dare to raise a middle finger and wildcat out to the prairies to look after themselves again.

I evidence that from the fact that as a group, Americans by their actions give more of a shit about health insurance than they do about the government peering into every aspect of their lives. Wikileaks' Vault 7 revelations should have been the impetus for mass fucking rioting, mass exodus from Ogle, Fakebook, and Twatter, and burning down buildings near Langley. Nothing happened. The Right is content to stand guard at Trump's rallies and the Left just wants to cosplay ninjas and complain about microaggressions. The MSM is not pushing Trump to drop the surveillance state, and nobody on the Right seems too keen on holding him to account on the subject. That to me tells me exactly what the average American's priorities are: he won't bite the hand that overwhelmingly feeds him, he is content to live a life of available porn plus government benefit plus social media and believe the government when it says it's here to help you.

Basically, the decades-long battle to grind people into acceptance of socialism has succeeded. As Venezuela is showing us, hyperinflation can be survived by the government that created it, so long as that government is so entrenched into basic necessities that escaping it is essentially impossible. The US has hit that point already. To paraphrase John Reed: fuck Trump's wall, there is a financial, cultural, and social wall going up around the United States already - and you are on the wrong side of it. Even if Trump has the best intentions, he simply cannot fix this, because it requires a basic attitudinal change in the US citizenry. That change is not coming anytime in the next 8 years. I am pretty confirmed in my view that Trump at best holds off the Left's final destruction of the US for 8 more years, and I would heartily suggest you use that less-than-a-decade-and-counting to get your shit in order, gentlemen, because you're going to be living in interesting times.

(04-03-2017 12:07 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  I evidence that from the fact that as a group, Americans by their actions give more of a shit about health insurance than they do about the government peering into every aspect of their lives.

So, basically, Americans became Canadians.

Wow. I actually just got tired of winning.

Rand Paul ‘Very Optimistic’ About Repealing Obamacare After Golfing with Trump

Quote:President Donald Trump golfed with Sen. Rand Paul this afternoon, together with White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.

“We had a great day with the president. Played some golf, and we talked and we talked about a little bit of health care,” Paul told reporters after the game. “I continue to be very optimistic that we are getting closer and closer to an agreement on repealing Obamacare.”

The group golfed at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virgina, not far from Washington, D.C.

Paul remains one of the toughest opponents of the House drafted bill to replace Obamacare, asserting that it doesn’t sufficiently repeal the bill. Earlier in the week, Paul met with journalist Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report to discuss the future of the country.

“Intriguing lunch in hill office of America’s best senator, Rand Paul,” Drudge wrote afterwards on Twitter. “He’s bold, brave and has somehow kept his heart in such a corrupt city.”

I like it that they seem to get along and Trump apparently is open to hear what Paul has to say. He can be a nice counterweight to the Ryan-Priebus connection, it fits Trump's management style to give everyone a chance to state his opinion about what should be done, weigh his options and then make an executive decision.

Also, Trump often goes golfing, as did Obama.
But how many times did Obama take foreign leaders of state or other dignitaries to the golf course, senators or other power brokers?
Trump is a businessman, he takes people golfing to make deals and build relationships. He's always done that, that's how he works and what he's good at.
Trump goes to the golf course to work. Obama went golfing to get away from work.

Also, it is probably much more difficult for the deep state to listen in on him when he's out at the course. Just another reason to hit a few balls.

(04-02-2017 11:48 PM)durangotang Wrote:  On a lighter note, I couldn't stop laughing when I saw this Trump tweet, a classic from 2011:

I literally:

(04-03-2017 12:07 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(04-02-2017 10:44 PM)Razor Beast Wrote:  

(04-02-2017 10:11 PM)Deepdiver Wrote:  It gets worse...

http://usawatchdog.com/money-riots-comin...-rickards/

Money Riots Coming in Next Financial Collapse-James Rickards

I don't understand why people always cheer for a financial collapse. Most of you will end up dying prematurely if it happens. It will plunge the entire world into chaos and democracy will not be what rises from the ashes. Probably some type of militaristic authoritarian dictator. It is literally the worst case scenario to drain the swamp and achieve our desired outcome. It causes way too much collateral damage and lasting negative effects.

And doesn't matter if you have gold, supplies, clean water, and food if other people find out. Unless you have a network of armed security to protect you in advance, you'll be a dead man.

What the financial collapse in the US will most look like will be Venezuela. We'll get to why in a minute.

Understand first that assholes predicting a financial collapse don't actually want to solve the problem. Many are making money off it, either directly by selling books on the subject or (I suspect) using the Al Gore approach: have shares in "green" companies when you're predicting disaster. For any author who's currently pronouncing financial doom for the US, the first thing you need to look for is whether that person is investing or spruiking gold. Gold will not save your ass in hyperinflation any more than fiat currency will, but you can make other people a lot of money panic buying the yellow metal that drives white men mad.

Understand second that, Zerohedge notwithstanding, the US dollar is not collapsing until one event takes place: the institution of a credible currency alternative to the US dollar that people are willing to trust in sufficient volumes to draw business away from US bonds. Volume matters here: there is more US currency flying around the world than any other currency in existence, and it means in very real terms that world businesses can't operate without it.

In passing, Russia and China are apparently linking arms to come up with a gold-backed currency. Good luck with that. The main reason they're doing that and using gold is because there is no other way they can convince anyone to invest with them: their fiat currencies are bullshit, not backed by believable or real value. You literally cannot trust their governments' promises to repay the money you loan them in the form of bonds, they have to promise you'll get physical gold back in order to entice you there. Even if they did, they don't have sufficient volume of currency to challenge the US dollar. And a gold standard is also no magic cure-all, either: adoption of a gold standard around the world guarantees almost instantaneous deflation and a worldwide depression, because all of that phantom growth and phantom wealth disappears overnight as everything suddenly gets coldly and impersonally valued against an ounce of gold. You can't expand the money supply either without finding more of it, something that's a bit tricky since in all human history there's only been about 180,000 metric tons of it ever mined if I remember right.

Bitcoin and similar also will not solve this problem: I'd have thought the fact the CIA is in everything down to fucking doorbells demonstrates pretty significantly exactly how insecure that "currency" is and why it's never going to be credible as a storer of value unless in a radically different, uncrackable (Hah!) form.

Anyway, as said, when the economic collapse comes, it will basically be Venezuela to a greater or lesser extent. I used to think that conservatism would win out if it happened to be the Left in power at the time of the collapse, kind of a reverse to the 20-year domination of government that happened after the Great Depression and FDR. Now I don't think it will. Too much has been given to people by way of socialism for them to abandon it. Most of the US is utterly dependent on US government handouts to survive, whether directly or indirectly. The network by which socialism is sustained in the US is too massive in scope to change: it ranges from thousands of government regulations to even support in the Republican congress.

It's a parallel to the more direct and horrifying example of Venezuela: there, Maduro controls an unholy trinity of the ports, the food distribution network, and the army. In the US the parallel will not be exact, but given how much of people's lives are wired into the government now, how little they can fend for themselves anymore, and especially given the growing Mexican (socialist-leaning, conformist, government-compliant) population of the US is, I really think that when the shit does finally hit the fan the average American would rather suck the tit of an oppressive government that still feeds them than dare to raise a middle finger and wildcat out to the prairies to look after themselves again.

I evidence that from the fact that as a group, Americans by their actions give more of a shit about health insurance than they do about the government peering into every aspect of their lives. Wikileaks' Vault 7 revelations should have been the impetus for mass fucking rioting, mass exodus from Ogle, Fakebook, and Twatter, and burning down buildings near Langley. Nothing happened. The Right is content to stand guard at Trump's rallies and the Left just wants to cosplay ninjas and complain about microaggressions. The MSM is not pushing Trump to drop the surveillance state, and nobody on the Right seems too keen on holding him to account on the subject. That to me tells me exactly what the average American's priorities are: he won't bite the hand that overwhelmingly feeds him, he is content to live a life of available porn plus government benefit plus social media and believe the government when it says it's here to help you.

Basically, the decades-long battle to grind people into acceptance of socialism has succeeded. As Venezuela is showing us, hyperinflation can be survived by the government that created it, so long as that government is so entrenched into basic necessities that escaping it is essentially impossible. The US has hit that point already. To paraphrase John Reed: fuck Trump's wall, there is a financial, cultural, and social wall going up around the United States already - and you are on the wrong side of it. Even if Trump has the best intentions, he simply cannot fix this, because it requires a basic attitudinal change in the US citizenry. That change is not coming anytime in the next 8 years. I am pretty confirmed in my view that Trump at best holds off the Left's final destruction of the US for 8 more years, and I would heartily suggest you use that less-than-a-decade-and-counting to get your shit in order, gentlemen, because you're going to be living in interesting times.

Hi Paracelsus, I'm one of those assholes predicting financial collapse. Why? Because it's one of the easiest calls to make. Whether we cheer for it or not is irrelevant - it's inevitable. Financial systems age and die just like living organisms do. They accumulate debt like an animal or plant accumulates harmful mutations. Financial collapses have regularly occurred throughout world history.

I agree that the collapse in the US will maybe look something like Venezuela. You point out that the government in Caracas has survived it. To which I would say 'so far'.

You seem to take a dim view of many of those predicting the collapse because they apparently make money off of it by writing books and selling gold etc. Hey dude, that's how capitalism works. People do the work, try to work out what the future's going to be like and produce something while figuring out how to monetize it. These guys are helping individuals to prepare themselves.

You criticize the doomsayers for providing no solutions. Paracelsus, there are no painless solutions to the problem of this huge global debtberg and it's accompanying flotilla of unfunded obligations. Actions have consequences and all debts have to be paid off in some form or other by somebody. The debt/credit system is a mechanism by which we take resources from the future in order to mobilize them in the here and now. If these resources are invested to produce a rate of return greater than the market interest rate, then great. If these resources are consumed or the investment is a failure, then living standards in the future will be lower than would otherwise have been the case. If we look at history, then we see that such debts are never paid off in real terms. The solution is always: war, revolution, hyperinflation, currency reform etc. or some combination thereof.

One of the problems - perhaps the central problem - of the current system is that dollars and euros etc. try to be both a medium of exchange as well as a store of value. In 2010 Robert Zoellick of the World Bank proposed using gold as a reference point in the financial system, pointing to a future where gold will assume the role of store of value, freeing up: dollars, euros, yuan etc. to play the role of medium of exchange. There will be no gold standard or gold-backed currency because these lead - as history shows us - to the undervaluation of gold. Instead, gold will be free to float, mostly upward, because human nature being what it is too much currency will always be printed. Therefore I do not believe that China and Russia are preparing to roll out a gold-backed currency. We've been there and we know it doesn't work. They are however preparing for the acceleration in the ongoing failure of paper currency as a store of value. Some combination of currencies - or perhaps the SDR - will then be brought out to serve as a medium of exchange. They'll probably chop a few zeroes off the dollar, euro, pound and the others and just carry on.

There is an assumption many people make that the collapse is yet to begin. However, the absurdity of negative interest rates - already present in many countries, shows that the system is irretrievably broken. This site here is looking at some of the tremors in the US public pension system preceding the main earthquake.

http://www.pensiontsunami.com/

I think you are too pessimistic regarding people being brainwashed by socialism. First of all let's not forget that socialism does not work and would not work even if everybody believed in it. Secondly, I have visited several countries - behind the Iron Curtain in the 80s for example - where many people, although quite able to mouth socialist platitudes when it suited them, were often resolutely entrepreneurial in their personal behaviour. When the incentives change, people will change.

Any response from Trump about the bombing in Russia or will that anger the anti-Trumpers even more?

(04-03-2017 08:35 AM)Turnus Wrote:  Any response from Trump about the bombing in Russia or will that anger the anti-Trumpers even more?

I'm sure there'll be a statement today. It hasn't been that long.

(04-02-2017 07:25 PM)n0000 Wrote:  Tax cuts should not be implemented without concomitant spending cuts. More debt is immoral because it is consuming today at the expense of tomorrow(our kids and grandkids). We currently have the highest levels of non-wartime debt ever in this country. The baby boomers have run up the national credit card so much, and our children will pay, the same way that we will pay the costs of social security without receiving the benefit.

This is the next trap currently set. I sit and wonder now if Ryan was an idiot or a slick willy in now setting up Trump for an uneasy tax reform push. The truth is that Trump needed the Obamacare overhaul to open up breathing room so he could then put in tax cuts without digging into new debt. The gaping hole of Obamacare disbanded would offer room to work with but with Obamacare still on the books now Trump has next to no wiggle room.

Ryan pushed for Obamacare fix first when Trump wanted to go after taxes. Technically Ryan was right, but I wonder now if the tax reforms could have been passed with stipulations that they rest on Obamacare being routed so they can take action.

This Susan Rice story, if verified, is going to be really, really embarrassing to the Washington Post, because just last week they allowed her to publish in their newspaper a column calling Trump's administration a bunch of liars. I don't suggest giving the Post any traffic, but since her role was revealed yesterday, the comments section for that column has suddenly gotten very funny.

(04-03-2017 08:32 AM)rockoman Wrote:  

(04-03-2017 12:07 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(04-02-2017 10:44 PM)Razor Beast Wrote:  

(04-02-2017 10:11 PM)Deepdiver Wrote:  It gets worse...

http://usawatchdog.com/money-riots-comin...-rickards/

Money Riots Coming in Next Financial Collapse-James Rickards

I don't understand why people always cheer for a financial collapse. Most of you will end up dying prematurely if it happens. It will plunge the entire world into chaos and democracy will not be what rises from the ashes. Probably some type of militaristic authoritarian dictator. It is literally the worst case scenario to drain the swamp and achieve our desired outcome. It causes way too much collateral damage and lasting negative effects.

And doesn't matter if you have gold, supplies, clean water, and food if other people find out. Unless you have a network of armed security to protect you in advance, you'll be a dead man.

What the financial collapse in the US will most look like will be Venezuela. We'll get to why in a minute.

Understand first that assholes predicting a financial collapse don't actually want to solve the problem. Many are making money off it, either directly by selling books on the subject or (I suspect) using the Al Gore approach: have shares in "green" companies when you're predicting disaster. For any author who's currently pronouncing financial doom for the US, the first thing you need to look for is whether that person is investing or spruiking gold. Gold will not save your ass in hyperinflation any more than fiat currency will, but you can make other people a lot of money panic buying the yellow metal that drives white men mad.

Understand second that, Zerohedge notwithstanding, the US dollar is not collapsing until one event takes place: the institution of a credible currency alternative to the US dollar that people are willing to trust in sufficient volumes to draw business away from US bonds. Volume matters here: there is more US currency flying around the world than any other currency in existence, and it means in very real terms that world businesses can't operate without it.

In passing, Russia and China are apparently linking arms to come up with a gold-backed currency. Good luck with that. The main reason they're doing that and using gold is because there is no other way they can convince anyone to invest with them: their fiat currencies are bullshit, not backed by believable or real value. You literally cannot trust their governments' promises to repay the money you loan them in the form of bonds, they have to promise you'll get physical gold back in order to entice you there. Even if they did, they don't have sufficient volume of currency to challenge the US dollar. And a gold standard is also no magic cure-all, either: adoption of a gold standard around the world guarantees almost instantaneous deflation and a worldwide depression, because all of that phantom growth and phantom wealth disappears overnight as everything suddenly gets coldly and impersonally valued against an ounce of gold. You can't expand the money supply either without finding more of it, something that's a bit tricky since in all human history there's only been about 180,000 metric tons of it ever mined if I remember right.

Bitcoin and similar also will not solve this problem: I'd have thought the fact the CIA is in everything down to fucking doorbells demonstrates pretty significantly exactly how insecure that "currency" is and why it's never going to be credible as a storer of value unless in a radically different, uncrackable (Hah!) form.

Anyway, as said, when the economic collapse comes, it will basically be Venezuela to a greater or lesser extent. I used to think that conservatism would win out if it happened to be the Left in power at the time of the collapse, kind of a reverse to the 20-year domination of government that happened after the Great Depression and FDR. Now I don't think it will. Too much has been given to people by way of socialism for them to abandon it. Most of the US is utterly dependent on US government handouts to survive, whether directly or indirectly. The network by which socialism is sustained in the US is too massive in scope to change: it ranges from thousands of government regulations to even support in the Republican congress.

It's a parallel to the more direct and horrifying example of Venezuela: there, Maduro controls an unholy trinity of the ports, the food distribution network, and the army. In the US the parallel will not be exact, but given how much of people's lives are wired into the government now, how little they can fend for themselves anymore, and especially given the growing Mexican (socialist-leaning, conformist, government-compliant) population of the US is, I really think that when the shit does finally hit the fan the average American would rather suck the tit of an oppressive government that still feeds them than dare to raise a middle finger and wildcat out to the prairies to look after themselves again.

I evidence that from the fact that as a group, Americans by their actions give more of a shit about health insurance than they do about the government peering into every aspect of their lives. Wikileaks' Vault 7 revelations should have been the impetus for mass fucking rioting, mass exodus from Ogle, Fakebook, and Twatter, and burning down buildings near Langley. Nothing happened. The Right is content to stand guard at Trump's rallies and the Left just wants to cosplay ninjas and complain about microaggressions. The MSM is not pushing Trump to drop the surveillance state, and nobody on the Right seems too keen on holding him to account on the subject. That to me tells me exactly what the average American's priorities are: he won't bite the hand that overwhelmingly feeds him, he is content to live a life of available porn plus government benefit plus social media and believe the government when it says it's here to help you.

Basically, the decades-long battle to grind people into acceptance of socialism has succeeded. As Venezuela is showing us, hyperinflation can be survived by the government that created it, so long as that government is so entrenched into basic necessities that escaping it is essentially impossible. The US has hit that point already. To paraphrase John Reed: fuck Trump's wall, there is a financial, cultural, and social wall going up around the United States already - and you are on the wrong side of it. Even if Trump has the best intentions, he simply cannot fix this, because it requires a basic attitudinal change in the US citizenry. That change is not coming anytime in the next 8 years. I am pretty confirmed in my view that Trump at best holds off the Left's final destruction of the US for 8 more years, and I would heartily suggest you use that less-than-a-decade-and-counting to get your shit in order, gentlemen, because you're going to be living in interesting times.

Hi Paracelsus, I'm one of those assholes predicting financial collapse. Why? Because it's one of the easiest calls to make. Whether we cheer for it or not is irrelevant - it's inevitable. Financial systems age and die just like living organisms do. They accumulate debt like an animal or plant accumulates harmful mutations. Financial collapses have regularly occurred throughout world history.

I agree that the collapse in the US will maybe look something like Venezuela. You point out that the government in Caracas has survived it. To which I would say 'so far'.

You seem to take a dim view of many of those predicting the collapse because they apparently make money off of it by writing books and selling gold etc. Hey dude, that's how capitalism works. People do the work, try to work out what the future's going to be like and produce something while figuring out how to monetize it. These guys are helping individuals to prepare themselves.

You criticize the doomsayers for providing no solutions. Paracelsus, there are no painless solutions to the problem of this huge global debtberg and it's accompanying flotilla of unfunded obligations. Actions have consequences and all debts have to be paid off in some form or other by somebody. The debt/credit system is a mechanism by which we take resources from the future in order to mobilize them in the here and now. If these resources are invested to produce a rate of return greater than the market interest rate, then great. If these resources are consumed or the investment is a failure, then living standards in the future will be lower than would otherwise have been the case. If we look at history, then we see that such debts are never paid off in real terms. The solution is always: war, revolution, hyperinflation, currency reform etc. or some combination thereof.

One of the problems - perhaps the central problem - of the current system is that dollars and euros etc. try to be both a medium of exchange as well as a store of value. In 2010 Robert Zoellick of the World Bank proposed using gold as a reference point in the financial system, pointing to a future where gold will assume the role of store of value, freeing up: dollars, euros, yuan etc. to play the role of medium of exchange. There will be no gold standard or gold-backed currency because these lead - as history shows us - to the undervaluation of gold. Instead, gold will be free to float, mostly upward, because human nature being what it is too much currency will always be printed. Therefore I do not believe that China and Russia are preparing to roll out a gold-backed currency. We've been there and we know it doesn't work. They are however preparing for the acceleration in the ongoing failure of paper currency as a store of value. Some combination of currencies - or perhaps the SDR - will then be brought out to serve as a medium of exchange. They'll probably chop a few zeroes off the dollar, euro, pound and the others and just carry on.

There is an assumption many people make that the collapse is yet to begin. However, the absurdity of negative interest rates - already present in many countries, shows that the system is irretrievably broken. This site here is looking at some of the tremors in the US public pension system preceding the main earthquake.

http://www.pensiontsunami.com/

I think you are too pessimistic regarding people being brainwashed by socialism. First of all let's not forget that socialism does not work and would not work even if everybody believed in it. Secondly, I have visited several countries - behind the Iron Curtain in the 80s for example - where many people, although quite able to mouth socialist platitudes when it suited them, were often resolutely entrepreneurial in their personal behaviour. When the incentives change, people will change.

Sigh, here we go again. Have you ever heard the adage, "A broken clock is right twice a day?"

There will always be economic downturns. They were there before with a gold standard and they will continue to be there with fiat.

Here's my prediction: we are all going to die. But don't ask me when to time it.

It's one of the easiest and sure fire calls to make guys! /sarcasm

Do you know who is affected most by a pension system collapse? Retirees and those living on a fixed income. Do you seriously think a bunch of geriatrics are going to riot and shoot up the place?

I'm frankly getting tired of all of the doom porn metal bugs and their spouting off the same tired talking points. ZH was at one point a great blog with serious financial information. It has now become a great reposter of some of the worst chicken little blog reposts out there.

Even Martin Armstrong can't resist the urge to call for collapse. It's just too juicy to loop in the true paranoid patriots who bury their heads in the sand instead of fixing the problems. This is all while the elites are laughing themselves to their banks in New York and Geneva.

America isn't going anywhere and the dollar will be the reserve currency for a good extra couple hundred of years. Why? Because might makes right and the US is the cleanest shirt in the dirty basket of "trust" . Do you really think the debt actually matters when you can project your military might all over the world?

Even better, do you seriously think if China or Russia default on their promises that they would actually pony up that gold to pay you back?



When the going gets tough, Russia and China will renege on their promises. No one is getting any gold for a failed deal.

Ever see this graph before? Of course you have, because it's one of the most popular doom fap graphs out there.


One of these is not like that other. i'll give you a hint: which one of these were colonial powers and which ones aren't? Because that will give you a reason why there will be staying power for American influence.

America is Rome and just like Rome, America will descend into an autocratic empire for another 250 years before its influence disappears in the world.

The only "doom" we should be preparing ourselves for is the inevitable Muslim uprisings. That is where the true disaster will occur when we finally end our dependence on Arab oil.

Have fun stacking excessive amounts of gold and silver while other financial instruments exceed the rate of inflation.