This is What Deflation Looks Like

The failure of Credit Suisse vaporized $17 billion in corporate bonds and another $31 billion in market cap in the last year. That means the Swiss government would have to find nearly $50 billion in new debtors just to stay even:

Credit Suisse said 16 billion Swiss francs ($17.24 billion) of its Additional Tier 1 debt will be written down to zero on the orders of the Swiss regulator as part of its rescue merger with UBS (UBSG.S), angering bondholders on Sunday.

FINMA, the Swiss regulator, said the decision would bolster the bank’s capital. The move reflects authorities’ desire to see private investors share the pain from Credit Suisse’s troubles.

Chair Marlene Amstad said FINMA had stuck to the country’s “too-big-to-fail” banking framework in making the decision.

It means AT1 bondholders appear to be left with nothing while shareholders, who sit below bonds in the priority ladder for repayment in a bankruptcy process, will receive $3.23 billion under the UBS deal.

Engineered in the wake of the global financial crisis, AT1 bonds are a form of junior debt that counts towards banks’ regulatory capital. They were designed as a way to transfer risks to investors and away from taxpayers if a bank gets into trouble.

This is why “printing money” doesn’t work in a credit economy. Yes, it’s easier to generate the meaningless digits on a balance sheet than it is to print paper, but it’s not so easy to produce new borrowers. And mass immigration has completely failed to provide the answer it was intended to be, because the immigrants are far less inclined to service their debts.

Now do you see why the failure of the Clown World economy was always inevitable?

DISCUSS ON SG



Vaccine Denial

I said it was probably going to take at least three, and more likely five people dropping dead around them for the vaccinated to recognize that it is the Covid-19 “vaccine” that is killing them. It turns out that I was optimistic. People have turned out to be even more retarded, and even more in denial, than I had hitherto believed possible.

SINGAPORE — In the last two years, five people I knew died from sudden cardiac arrest. They were young and seemingly healthy people whose untimely demise came as a shock to their family and friends.

They ranged in age from about 25 to 35.

The grief hit me pretty hard, as I felt a lot of guilt and regret about my relationship with some of them. It got me to thinking — are more young people dying from sudden cardiac arrest? And should I be worried?

Cardiologists from the National University Heart Centre Singapore told me that the risk of sudden deaths in young people remains exceedingly low. While uncommon, there are underlying conditions among young adults that can lead to sudden deaths, such as hypertrophic cardiomypathy (abnormal thickening of heart muscles) or arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythm of genetic causes), another cardiologist said.

It’s the vaxx, you literal retards. This really isn’t that hard? How do people this blind manage to successfully cross the street without getting run over? Maybe they’ll finally make the connection when ten of their vaccinated acquaintances die of Suddenly.

Then again, maybe not.

DISCUSS ON SG


Do Your Part

Everyone can’t afford the Library, which is why we’re working on getting paperback and free ebook editions going. But if we all attempt to preserve human knowledge, just maybe some of it will be saved somehow. Here is how to quickly and easily obtain a current backup of Project Gutenberg. If you want to help preserve the store of human knowledge, you can back up the entirety of the Project Gutenberg collection here. You don’t need to download all the .zim files, just the most recent one in the language you want.

You’ll need to download Kiwix to read the file, which will provide you with the ability to export any epub or text file from it.

DISCUSS ON SG



Bank Contagion

Booster Patrol may need to do another remake here soon, because it’s not looking good for Credit Suisse or for Santander in Spain.

Just got fired from this awful bank. There is literally no money. They’ve made awful investments in at least six countries and want to downsize to an online banking service should they get a bailout. They
are cutting credit card limits so people can’t withdraw money.

This is actually big. Unlike the banks that crashed already, Santander is an international bank that works with middle to lower class private citizens much more than business and rich people. The mood is awful. There is already talks of a massive recession all across the west. It is all but confirmed.

When even people who know nothing about economics are talking about a massive recession, you know you’re already in a serious depression. We have been since 2008, of course, but the declining economic activity been disguised by the combination of zero percent interest rates, government spending, and mass immigration.

Remember, GDP measures economic activity in the form of spending, so every time a Guatemalan enters the USA, receives $30,000 in state and federal assistance, and spends it at McDonald’s and wherever people buy cheap clothes these days, the economy grows!

Notice how it’s the international banks that are particularly struggling now, due to foreign investments that were absolutely unnecessary from the start. Because, as the investment bankers like to say, bears make money and bulls make money, but pigs get slaughtered.

UPDATE: UBS has offered to buy Credit Suisse for up to $1bn, with Swiss authorities planning to change the country’s laws to bypass a shareholder vote on the transaction as they rush to finalise a deal before Monday. The Swiss National Bank and regulator Finma have told international counterparts that they regard a deal with UBS as the only option to arrest a collapse in confidence in Credit Suisse and were working to reach regulatory agreement by Saturday night.

So the biggest banks get even bigger, and banking becomes more centralized and intrinsically more fragile. This is not a fix, this is just buying time until the next failure. Remember, it was UBS that had to be bailed out in 2008.

And notice how the rules are completely ignored. It would normally require a six-week period for UBS shareholders to consider the acquisition.

UPDATE: It looks as if the merger is off as the offer from UBS was rejected, probably because it was for about one-eight the market cap. Now the Federal Council is looking at nationalizing Credit Suisse, which is probably the right way to go. It’s certainly better than handing bankers a windfall while increasing the fragility of the system.

UPDATE: UBS is doubling the size of its offer, to CHF 2 billion, and it appears the offer will be accepted. $6 billion in market cap just vanished. This is what deflation looks like.

DISCUSS ON SG


Boomer Shock

A Boomer is astonished to hear his own Boomer brother’s lack of concern for his own children. As seen on Gab.

As a repentant boomer, I agree with what @voxday says about my generation.

So it wasn’t a total surprise when this morning, during a conversation about our children’s inheritance, my unrepentant, vaccinated boomer brother said, “Why would you want to leave them anything?”

Exact words, and even though it wasn’t a surprise because Vox has said this over and over, it was shocking to hear the complete lack of loyalty to his own children’s future.

My parents, now in their 90s, once had seven rental properties in Perth. They sold them all – one by one – in the 1980s so they “could see the world”. They now own their own downsized home and get the pension.

I’m not making anything up because I hate Boomers. I hate Boomers because I have paid attention to what they have said and what they have done for nearly 50 years, and because we are instructed to hate wickedness.

Boomers are not, on average, good people as the Bible defines the concept.

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.
— Proverbs 13:22

DISCUSS ON SG


That Will Not Shock the World

It’s being reported that Donald Trump will be arrested next week.

Fox News reports that New York City D.A. Alvin Bragg is preparing to arrest Donald Trump complete with fingerprinting and “normal processing” all under a felony charge federal prosecutors refused to pursue.

That won’t shock anyone. What would shock everyone at this point is if Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden were arrested. Wait, strike that, it would be even more shocking if Vladimir Putin were arrested on the basis of the ICC warrant.

But it’s no wonder they’re suddenly determined to try to shut him up, as if that were possible. If only he’d been perceptive enough, and courageous enough, to speak like this in 2016.

“There must also be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neo-con establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third-world country and a third-world dictatorship right here at home,” Trump said. “The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters and put America First. The greatest threat to Western Civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us. It’s the abolition of our national borders. It’s the failure to police our own cities. It’s the destruction of the rule of law from within.”

That’s getting pretty… specific. But if you read between the lines, it’s very clear that President Trump is now fully aware that the USA is ruled by an imperialist foreign elite that does not have American interests at heart.

UPDATE: Trump himself confirms the coming arrest.

Donald Trump says he will be arrested on TUESDAY, as New York prosecutors move to indict him over $130,000 hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels

His statement is more than a little interesting in light of this observation from September 2022:

In any event, we’ll know this particular hopium is nonsense if Donald Trump is not arrested and China does not invade Taiwan before the end of March 2023.

DISCUSS ON SG



Checkmate, Putin

The ICC has issued a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin.

The Pre-trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued warrants on Friday for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children’s rights. The ICC alleged that Putin and Lvova-Belova engaged in the “unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

This is a perfect example of how Clown World’s inability to understand the difference between influence and power is leading directly to its destruction. Unless, of course, we’re entirely wrong about this. In which case, it’s terrible to think of how many lives could have been spared if only a judge had issued a warrant for the arrest of Adolf Hitler.

DISCUSS ON SG