I think they can pull it off for a while, but then what. Like has been said on here many times before, the farther we kick the can, the greater the ensuing impact is going to be. It will be some interesting times, for sure.
Hey, I have to say thank you for a thought you posted some time back. I don’t recall exactly what you said, but what I heard was, “The best use for your money is to get you closer to not needing money.” While that has always been in the back of my mind, you saying it really made me realize the importance of that. No matter what the future holds, inflation, deflation, disinflation, resilience is one of the keys to a life well lived.
Thanks for the heads up on the date. Sad that I feel the need to actually put it on my calendar.
At this point, we are all clapping for Tinkerbell. The end game is two choices: Nothing or cents on the dollar. We have been in perpetual check for 12 years but someone is going to get tired of playing, do something foolish, and we’ll move to Zugzwang…
@brushhog wrote
Nobody will buy bonds that pay 0% when inflation is sky rocketing, its a guaranteed loss.Not directly buy, but the Fed will bail out bondholders (they're mostly .01%ers after all) from the public treasury. That's you and me, via taxes. So, you and I will buy bonds at any scandalous price the Fed determines. Taxes go up. Max Keiser says - I increasingly think correctly - that we should stop thinking in terms of inflation and deflation. The point is (he says) we've moved into neo-feudalism. We'll own nothing, and we'll like it. Guest Rick Ackerman (market analyst, former market maker) argues that if you think about the SoCal housing market - where you can buy an 1100 sq. ft. home for $800,000 that you know is overpriced, and that you'll only ever be making payments on and will never own outright, many Americans are already just leasing -- from the Davos crowd's local managers. Link The good news, such as it is, is that things never go according to plan. The bad news is that the FUBAR outcome might be worse rather than better than planned.
Brushhog and VTGothic discussed
B: Nobody will buy bonds that pay 0% when inflation is sky rocketing, its a guaranteed loss. VT: Not directly buy, but the Fed will bail out bondholders (they're mostly .01%ers after all) from the public treasury. That's you and me, via taxes. So, you and I will buy bonds at any scandalous price the Fed determines. Taxes go up.Please correct me if my understanding is wrong. But my understanding of the FED buying bonds is that the price the citizens pay is:
1) higher taxes, and 2) the destruction of our currency through money printing.Eventually the destruction of our shared money will make commerce impossible. I go to the hardware store to buy a hammer and the number of fiat notes in my pocket are not enough to make the purchase and I leave the store without the hammer. This stage is where alternative currencies come in. Junk silver, all PMs, cryptos and barter.
…about alot of things. As it applies to the inflation situation, as prices rise I find ways to spend less. I think everybody does [ or will eventually by necessity ].
My goal has been to make my property tax bill my only expense. Realistically, I dont think I’ll ever quite get there. It would imply almost total self reliance. I do believe I’ll get close.
What I have learned by trying is that the smaller I make the role of money in my life, the freer, more relaxed, and ultimately happier I become. Thoreau got that. He lived in a cabin in the woods, spent his time hoeing beans and taking strolls through the forest. He wondered why people struggled so much when the necessities are fairly easy to obtain and the joys of life are absolutely free.
@brushhog I am SO with you on these sentiments! This is why we need to get together this summer: we’re pursuing the same objective (altho you’re getting more done).
But I’m done messing around with small business startups (thanks Covid!), and I’m back to building out the homestead this summer. No more sidetracks; time’s too short.
Same here, I recently made a big change to simplify my life. Even without covid and the host of issues facing society, life is too short to waste on nonessentials.
Looking forward to meeting up.
Please correct me if my understanding is wrong. But my understanding of the FED buying bonds is that the price the citizens pay is:
1) higher taxes, and 2) the destruction of our currency through money printing.Thats absolutely the way I understand it. I think what VT was referring to by "bailing out" the bond holders is that they will continue to borrow/print and buy bonds to support the bond market. Ultimately, we pay the price through taxes/currency debasement. In fact it might be even worse than that. In Greece during their debt crisis, the Greek government bailed out the "institutional bond investors" and left the individuals to take a "hair cut". So if you were a greek citizen who bought bonds, you bought the same bonds as the banks/pension funds/hedge funds etc, you bought the same bond, at the same auction. But the government decided to make your bonds unredeemable at the full value, while they magically transformed the bank's bonds into "special bonds" that were 100% redeemable.
It is a ponzi scheme with the Fed being the lender of last resort.
I just recently revisited Damon Vrabel’s Debunking Money and in it he said, “Fascism is the foreclosure process.” He laid out how the Financial Empire has basically served as interim world government for the last hundred-odd years. Capitalism is the system used for high-growth districts (nations). Communism, et al. are used to keep a district in a “holding pattern” or steady-state economy. Fascism is the system employed to take a formerly Capitalist system through its debt repayments process.
The Financial Empire (former)…
Kept the “West” up:
- United States
- Canada
- Britain
- Japan
- Australia/NZ
- Singapore/Hong Kong
Kept the “East” down:
- Russia
- China
- India
- Africa
- South/Central America
He had concluded that most of the wealth would have been transferred out of the West financial centers to the rising East financial centers (or would be soon). He also concluded that the Davos class was likely not all on the same team. Ergo, some want to just move on to the new system of empire and some want to maintain the West’s foothold of power. I shudder to think that Catherine Austin Fitts believes that “they” made the decision to switch to a new empire system in the mid 1990s. I mean, Pax Americana was only 12 years (11-9-1989 to 9-11-2001).
My guess is that it’s the other thing that he said.
You can watch Schindler’s List. When they confiscate all of their possessions they stick to a strict accounting of valuables. This is the foreclosure process in the most dehumanizing of terms.
So now, the donor class has to foreclose on a maxed-out society that has more firearms than people. I expect cosmic levels of dystopian repression for this reason alone.
It seems like a lot of folks around here are confusing the stimulus as modern monetary theory.
Modern Monetary Theory requires a sovereign, asset-based currency.
USD is a debt-based currency that is an asset to the banks (actually an asset to the multigenerational capital pools that control the system).
Just because they print/code more USD doesn’t make it MMT.
TL;DR
As long as bond market exists, modern monetary theory isn’t being practiced_
Sand,
The real danger is money velocity, when the price of the hammer zooms higher from the time you enter the store and just get to the counter. Did the Weimar TPTB have control of the situation to plan what would be best for them and the elite? Nope, and they won’t this time either.
Before getting too fixed on Thoreau and his minimalist needs, read ‘pond scum’ by Catherine Schultz
https://longform.org/posts/pond-scum
A juvenile hit piece printed in “The New Yorker”, no less. Ive studied Thoreau and his life. He was the real deal and his thoughts echo through time because they have depth. Unfortunately, his philosophy of individualism, self reliance, and freedom runs in direct opposition to that espoused by the leftwing writers at “The New Yorker”.
I’ll stick with Thoreau.
Cost of labor has to be figured in, when it comes to measuring the ability to pay off debt. The build up of government debt will be offset by governments imposing a global minimum tax regime on corporations who benefit from reduced labor costs. And that is a feature of automation.
I have a sense that Canada, for example, is looking at the future and seeing very clearly that we are going to have massive numbers of unemployed people. Stimulus spending, universal basic income and other measures to deal with the effects of automation are a base requirement for a civilized society.
<spam>
Gouvernment debt will not be payed off by taxation. Never. Which politician will propose that? Paying off debt will be done by borrowing money. As it has always been the case. Nobody will spend their hard-earned existing money on this ponzi scheme anymore, so the Fed will just create new. Easy as that. This will go on and on until the end if time. Where the end of time will be the moment that this money will actually circulate.
There is no way out of this. This will go on, until people no longer have faith in the currency anymore and spend it as soon as the get it.
Even when gouvernment introduces a new fiat currency, people will recognize this as just a replacement and they will continue to spend this new currency in the same hurry as the old one. It does not matter if that is crypto or paper money. People will see that this new currency also has no value at all and hyperinflate that away as well.
What is needed at that moment is something that is NOT backed by gouvernment. That could be a foreign currency, a non-gouvernmental crypto, or silver and gold. When the gouvernment introduces a currency that is backed by gold, I guarantee you that people will exchange it to the real stuff as soon as they get the paper-currency. Only when faith is restored that the paper currency is really, really as good as gold, the crisis will be over and the new currency will be accepted.
For proof, look at the number of people lining up to get vaccinated by an experimental, gene altering drug, just because the government tells them to. Look at the people walking around outside with masks on…driving in their cars… alone… wearing a mask.
The dollar is in no danger, and if the government made up a new currency to replace it…and told the people it has value, they will grab it up. They will absolutely invest their hard earned money on this ponzi scheme. In fact they’ll spend their entire lives hording it.
Even when government introduces a new fiat currency, people will recognize this as just a replacement and they will continue to spend this new currency in the same hurry as the old one. It does not matter if that is crypto or paper money. People will see that this new currency also has no value at all and hyperinflate that away as well.I see no sign of this type of critical thinking amongst the general public, so we have a long way to go.