The following graph is from St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank:
Blue line: ‘Total Borrowings of Depository Institutions from the Federal Reserve’
Red line: ‘Non-Borrowed Reserves of Depository Institutions’
From the red line we concluded that US banks are insolvent, from the blue we concluded that the Fed (Federal Reserve) has assumed their liabilities. The result will be a terminal decline of the dollar (to zero) causing hyperinflation. (more…)
The English say ‘make hay while the sun shines’ meaning that one should take advantage of the circumstances before they change. I didn’t really understand this saying-the literal and figurative understanding that I like to have of sayings-until I saw a television program about life on an English farm circa 1620. The program explained that English farmers would cut the wild grass growing in the meadows near their farm and leave it in the sun to dry, and then they would gather the dry grass, i.e. hay, and store it in a weatherproof barn. The hay would sustain their animals-cow sheep goat-through the winter. The saying should really be ‘dry grass while the sun shines’, which makes sense by itself with no need of agricultural knowledge.
This method of providing feed is peculiar to the northern regions while those who live in lower altitudes move their animals to the valleys in the winter and to the hills and mountains in the summer, taking advantage of the different climate between high and low areas and mirroring the behaviour of wild goats.
Further south people are forced to travel hundreds of kilometres in search of pasture, adopting a nomadic lifestyle to sustain themselves in harsh arid conditions. The nomadic life is the one most like the natural state of grazing animals, who travel exceptionally long distances-whether in the savannah or the tundra-in search of their main diet: wild grass.
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The downward spiral in the German bund market widened the Euro’s interest rtate advantage over the US dollar, leaving the greenback on shaky ground and vulnerable to speculative attack. Bernanke would be under heavy pressure to match a second ECB rate hike to 4.50%, to defend the value of the dollar. In essence, the ECB could hijack US monetary policy, and force the Fed to guide the federal funds rate higher, in order to shake-out speculators in the crude oil and commodities markets.
Gary Dorsch, When Central Bankers Clash, Stock Markets can Crash
This an example of the nonsense that one has to endure when reading articles by people who are very knowledgeable about the economy and totally ignorant about everything else-the curse of over-specialisation and expert-ism-here, for example, the ECB (European Central Bank) and the Fed (Federal Reserve) are put head to head and measured as if they exist in a political/historical vacuum.
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Two important stories from the USA, the first is the flooding of the Mississippi; although only two dozens died because of the flooding and no major urban area has been effected, yet, the consequence of the flooding is much more widespread. This year is a year of high agricultural prices and supply shortages, the flood has destroyed a large amount of crops and delayed the shipment of supplies, causing prices to rise; the outlook for this summer’s harvest is bad.
The history of the world knows many past empires, some are still visible others quite forgotten, but only one has been to a successful degree concealed from history and a veil drawn on its existence and the role it played in the history of mankind; a role that still echoes in our present life.
Once we view the medieval age in Europe as the age of a specific empire then we can understand the reason behind many events and see them as parts of a whole pattern, rather than just a series of random events. As a modest contribution I list here some of the most important dates in the history of the Catholic Empire:
- 910: Great Benedictine monastery of Cluny rejuvenates western monasticism. Monasteries spread throughout the isolated regions of Western Europe.
History of the Roman Catholic Church, Wikipedia
These monasteries were to play the role of the incubator for the ideas and men who would later build the Catholic Empire.
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The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, with its 225,000 or more deaths in 11 countries, shocked the world; so, in recent weeks, has the devastation wrought by a powerful cyclone (and tidal surge) that hit the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar. It resulted in at least 78,000 deaths (with another 56,000 reported missing) and a display of recalcitrance on the part of a military junta focused on its own security while its people perish. Similarly, a devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province that hit 7.9 on the Richter scale and whose tremors were felt 1,000 miles away has swept into the news. Its casualty count has already reached 51,000 with unknown numbers of Chinese still buried in rubble or cut off in rural areas and so, as yet, untallied, and an estimated five million people homeless.
These are staggering natural disasters, hard even to take in, and yet it’s a reasonable question whether, in terms of damage, any of them measure up to the ongoing human-made (or rather Bush administration-made) disaster in Iraq. Worse yet, unlike a natural disaster, the Iraqi catastrophe seems to be without end. No one can even guess when it might be said of that country that an era of reconstruction or rebuilding is about to begin. Instead, the damage only grows week by miserable week and yet, as has often been true in the last year, Iraq continues to have trouble even cracking the top ten stories in U.S. news coverage.
River of Resistance, by Michael Schwartz and Tom Engelhardt
This piece sums up an idea that was on mind for some time. The ability to disassociate to this extent is really astonishing, even Tom Engelhardt is disassociating himself from what is happening in Iraq, blaming instead the Bush administration. (more…)
This post was supposed to be the last section in a post about usury (interest-paying debt), but it developed and expanded beyond the limits of a section; so I decided to go ahead and finish it as a stand-alone post. The last section, the current post, was to discuss the thesis of using state usury in the form of sovereign credit to develop the internal market of a country. In particular it discusses Henry C. K. Liu’s article Nazism and the German Economic Miracle, which advocates using sovereign credit to develop the internal market as the Germans had done in the thirties of the last century.
Nazi Germany provided another example of successful inter-war economic planning.
Henry C. K. Liu, Nazism and the German Economic Miracle
Due to the particular history of this post it will be helpful to sum up the conclusions of the original post, which this one takes as given; it is enough to state the following points: (more…)
When engineers were developing the jet engine they encountered a very strange phenomenon: while holding the fuel level, the input to their system, constant the engine at some point starts to turn faster, the output to their system; to avoid an explosion they would lower the fuel level, but the engine would keep on turning faster. At that point the engineers would stop the flow of fuel and still the engine would keep on going faster for a while and then power down.
This strange phenomenon was not only a violation of physical laws (conservation of energy, etc) but was in stark contrast to what engineers have been doing since the first steam engine: engineers usually work on getting output from their input and not the other way around. After much testing they had no other choice but to take the engine apart and see what was happening inside; tests, finally, showed the problem was in the flow of the fuel inside the fire chamber.
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There are certain actions that have a short-term gain but a long-term loss such actions are attractive but deadly. When a person commits a sin he usually does it to attain a short-term pleasure, but all sins have a long-term pain and that’s what makes them sins.
Social sins are not the sum of people’s sins, they are sins on the social scale and not the individual scale, of course all social phenomena must manifest themselves on the individual scale, each individual participates in every social phenomena.
The time scale for social phenomena is not the scale of the individual, usually actions that are committed by one generation have results that manifest themselves in the next generation, so that social sins might not function as a sin for a single individual who enjoys the pleasure and leaves the pain for others; those who live too long will view their age as a curse when they suffer for the deeds of their youth.
If we would rise from the individual level to the social level and view society not as the sum of all its individuals but rather as a living organism with a life of its own, then we can view the actions taken by society, as a whole, and the consequences of these actions on society and its well-being. When the actions of society have a short-term pleasure and long-term pain then we can call them social sins.
Here are the seven deadly sins of society:
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There was a time when there were millions upon millions of passenger pigeons in North America, now there is none. Hunters shot them in the second half of the nineteenth centaury. It seems crazy that people kept on hunting them to extension.
One wonders how they could keep on hunting them while their numbers declined? It seems as if people had a personal grudge against these pigeons, but reality is rather different:
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With the eminent collapse of the fiat currencies system in a hyperinflationary burst, the talk of securing wealth in gold is rising; the qualities of gold, as a store of wealth and a measure of value, are exalted by countless internet sites and economic blogs.
The superiority of gold compared to fiat currency is beyond dispute, what irks me is that the benefits of gold might be slightly exaggerated. Hyperinflation is possible with gold currency and history is full of instances when a purse of gold was paid for a loaf of bread or a cask of water, examples of such inflation could be found in any account of medieval siege and lesser inflation was associated with bad weather, war or epidemics.
As for gold as a store of wealth that is 100% true, gold will store wealth long after the owner, and the owner’s heirs, are dead. When archaeologists find hordes of gold in a specific layer they concluded that there were disasters and calamities in this time causing people to horde gold; what is interesting is that a large number don’t come back for their gold!!
Prologue: Germination, ×1 Generation [40 years]
From: 1452-Pope Nicholas V issues the bull Dum Diversas, legitimising the colonial slave trade.
To: 1492-Fall of Granada.
Chapter One: Growth, ×4 G. [160 years]
From: 1492-Discovery of America.
To: 1652-End of Spanish hegemony.
Chapter Two: Glory, ×4 G.
From: 1652-First Anglo-Dutch War.
To: 1812-End of Napoleon’s power.
Chapter Three: Decline, ×4 G.
From: 1812-British-American War.
To: 1972-America leaves Vietnam.
Epilogue: Degradation, ×1 G.
From: 1972-Bankruptcy of the American national economy.
To: 2012-Famine, epidemic and war.
[The word 'supremacy' here donates actual material supremacy and not inherent superiority.]
One could find a multitude of similarities between Napoleon’s attack on Russia in 1812 and Germany’s attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in 1941. The similarities range from advances and victories on Russian soil to retreat in bitter cold and eventual defeat for the attacker.
But to understand the world one has to look beneath the surface of a phenomenon and penetrate to its essential truth. A historical study of the two military actions will reveal differences that outweigh the similarities by several magnitudes.
In this essay I will give a short (and condensed) history behind Napoleon’s attack on Russia, then I will show the essential differences with the German attempt, finally I will outline a short and preliminary strategy to successfully attack and conquer Russia (in the winter no less).
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