Gunning for the Dollar

Russia is openly advocating for other nations to follow the lead of itself and China in abandoning the dollar standard for international trade:

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in a statement, that it is very important for all the BRICS member states that they develop sustainable financial relations and settlements within the organization. He made the statement while speaking on Monday at the Russia-China Financial Dialog in Beijing, where he was conducting meetings with Lan Foan, his Chinese counterpart.

The BRICS alliance of developing nations, made up currently of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been hashing out ways for member countries to make payments in local currencies. The bloc wants to accelerate its growth by reducing its reliance on the US dollar and the euro.

Siluanov said, “We need to further develop financial cooperation within the BRICS countries. Here we see opportunities … to develop a payments system that would be independent of the infrastructure, which does not always fully fulfill the goals of individual countries. Therefore, the sustainable development of financial relations and settlements on the BRICS platform is important for us, and we believe that it is necessary to work out such issues, and today we will consider a number of them.”

We have the rare historical privilege to witness the decline and fall of an empire. While we tend to think of such things as being sudden and catastrophic events, they actually tend to take place over such an extended period of time that most of the empire’s inhabitants don’t even realize anything is changing until well after the changes have taken place and they have become accustomed to the consequences.

The events of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire take place over century. The decline of the US empire is only measured in decades at this point, but even at this accelerated rate, it is taking place too slowly for the average individual to comprehend, even if he is sufficiently acute to notice some of the changes.

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Taxing Imaginary Money

Now, money is largely an illusion anyhow, so it’s not actually the stretch it might appear to be as the US Supreme Court contemplates giving the IRS the ability to tax theoretical gains that don’t actually exist yet.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the government, and allows it to redefine income to include any unrealized appreciation in any asset, then it will grant the Federal Government a new power to nationalize the entire asset stock of the nation. In hyperinflation, the only refuge people have is the ability to hold real assets and never sell them. But if the Federal Government can claim unrealized inflationary gains as being taxable income, then almost all Americans will be forced to sell their assets just to pay their tax liabilities. But with all assets up for sale at once, the most likely buyer will be the Federal Government itself, which will pay in near worthless paper. In one decision, the Supreme Court would have rendered the Constitution meaningless, effectively illuminated private property rights, and provided the Federal Government with the legal mechanism to pull off a communist revolution without having to fire a single shot.

This would be absolutely and utterly absurd, as well as rendering all taxation perfectly subjective, but then, so much of Clown World is that one can’t simply assume that the US Supreme Court will not find some emanation or penumbra that permits it to invent a new federal power.

I mean, why not simply allow people to book theoretical profits while they’re at it? Sure, you might have held on to the stock too long, but if we simply imagine that you had sold it when it was at its peak, then you’d have made a lot more money, which, if properly recognized, will permit you to stimulate the economy with your imputed profits.

Everybody wins!

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Stumbling Toward 2033

Simplicius explains his perspective on the decline and fall of Clown World:

The general gist though of what’s happening now is that the world is hurtling toward a nexus point, a sort of singularity moment, because the entire 20th century’s worth of hyper-financialized “capitalism” has reached a near-breaking point.

The type of system in the West relies on parasitism and labor theft to keep its own luxurious standards afloat, as well as mediate the endless debt expansion and ever-ballooning inflation. They needed globalism to do this, as globalism allowed a new form of parasitizing the rest of the world by smudging out economic borders between countries and creating a predatory pipeline enabling the “too big to fail” corporations and banks in the West to keep themselves afloat by increasingly robbing the rest of the world via offshoring and other globalist techniques.

The problem is, that too has come to its end, as most developing nations like China have reached a level where it’s no longer profitable to use them for slave labor, and infact they’re in turn becoming so powerful that they threaten to form new economic blocs that could entirely usurp the Western money cabal’s rule of the globe.

One of the ways the West has been kept afloat is via the anchor of the U.S. dollar, which was made possible by secret coercive deals with all vassals to prop it up by way of purchasing U.S. government treasuries and bonds—in short, financing all U.S. debt.

But now that too has reached its limit as China and other traditional purchasers are no longer buying, and are in fact dumping, the treasuries. This is leading to a point of no return, where the entire Western financial system has no way out, no further quick “saves” like before.

In the past, they used several emergency stopgap measures to buy themselves a few more years of time. The financial crash of 2008 was the first crack heralding the end of the system. They pumped trillions upon trillions to keep the system afloat, but by the 2020s it was obvious time was running out and final collapse was again close. So they panicked and rolled out the Covid hoax to save the system one final time. Under cover of the Covid falseflag, they managed to sneak another few massive trillions into the system to get a last few precious years.

But now they’ve run out of options. Only the final tried and true method could save them: instigate some type of global war/conflict, which is mostly why they provoked the Ukrainian conflict at the time they did, after years of it being frozen.

As you said, things are now moving at breakneck speeds and the power elite are hanging by a thread, as they’re being assailed and losing on almost every front: from social media, where they’ve failed to stop the onslaught of ‘truth’ destroying most of their fake “Fact-Checking” fronts and Ministry of Truth attempts (Nina Jankowicz, etc.); to the global geopolitical flashpoints where they’re besieged, from Ukraine to the MidEast; to the Covid and “Climate Change” hoaxes, which are taking a beating in the public forum; the ‘paradigms’ are crashing all around.

Now I believe hyperinflation has truly begun in the U.S. Forget Biden’s cooked numbers, everyone who’s paying attention can see the prices for everything are skyrocketing YoY.

So where is it all leading? I believe the turmoil is only just beginning. Sure, there’s potential for a major culmination to happen by election time, or 2025, but I personally think it will drag out a bit longer both in U.S. and Europe as well.

Large new movements are growing in Europe, we’ve seen the wave of conservative and ‘right wing’ candidates sweeping many countries. The citizens are up in arms and angrier than ever, with major protests getting steadily more violent in France, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and everywhere in between. Insanely totalitarian new laws are being rolled out everywhere, from the new proposed clampdowns in Ireland, to the crazy anti-free-speech laws in Germany and the EU at large with their DSA.

There’s still far more “room for growth” in terms of the degradation and disaffectation in society. I believe this trajectory will continue for another few years, with A.I. developments adding the final ‘unpredictable’ black swan momentum which could veer everything into untold and unforeseen directions.

That’s why I don’t see a final collapse or major historic ‘events’ happening until closer toward 2030, but it’s very possible it can happen sooner.

What I find fascinating is the way in which what was deemed impossible and borderline insane when I first pointed out the observable trajectory back in 2004 gradually became conceivable in the late 2010s and is now increasingly becoming seen to be inevitable in the early 2020s. That doesn’t mean I was correct, of course, as even the seemingly inevitable is only a probability, but it is rather fascinating to see the way public opinion has shifted so massively over the last two decades.

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The Global Economy is Dead

And the Great Bifurcation is now in place. Russia and China are no longer using the US dollar for trade between their countries:

Western currencies have been almost completely phased out in Russia-China trade, as nearly all payments between the countries are now carried out in rubles and yuan, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov announced on Monday.

Since the introduction of Western sanctions on Moscow, Russia and China have accelerated the use of their own currencies in trade. According to Belousov, 95% of all transactions between Russia and China are now carried out in one of the countries’ national currencies, and given the rapid expansion of mutual trade and cooperation, this percentage is likely to grow.

Speaking at a meeting of the Russia-China intergovernmental commission in Beijing, the deputy prime minister said bilateral trade between the two countries will exceed the target of $200 billion this year, and may reach $300 billion by 2030.

World War III largely remains unfought, and yet its economic victors are already apparent. For decades, the USA has bombed, staged coups, invaded, and occupied in order to defend the primacy of the US dollar. In less than two years, inspired by what has to be the dumbest, least well-considered economic siege in recorded history, the USA has lost its ability to exert currency influence over the biggest economy on the planet and the foremost military power on Earth.

It’s only a matter of time now before all the BRICS countries stop using the dollar for trade outside the Western bloc. The ramifications of this are massive, and may well serve to mark the precise moment that the USA ceased to be a global power and became a regional one again.

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The Inflation is Real

Karl Denninger observes that the government’s CPI numbers simply do not reflect the reality at the grocery store:

When I go to the grocery store the register tape — and my Quicken — says I’m spending a lot more money there. Not a couple of percent over the last 12 months, an obscene increase. Shelf prices are one thing, but actual paid prices are truth — and those involve discounts, coupons, BOGOs and similar. I, like most people, buy pretty much the same things to eat. Spending over the last 12 months is in fact up more than 30%, not 2%.

Car insurance is claimed to be up about 20% — and it is. That’s real, and everyone with a car has had to pay it. But the government also claims that health insurance has been down in price by roughly 30%. That’s nonsense, and we all know it, but there it is.

There are some who think the answer is “higher wages!” But its not; you can’t keep up any more than you can with a “roaring” stock market.

The simple reality is that you cannot have Congress emit eight percent, more or less, of the economy in newly emitted credit and not have prices go up by about 8% unless there is somewhere that absorbs it which you do not have to cover. For roughly two decades there was — the increase in global trade, most of which is settled in dollars, buffers that by temporarily capturing the money while goods are in transit.

Note however that a permanent change in trade doesn’t result in this remaining captured; it is the change in level of global trade that does that, and only while the change is taking place. We’ve offshored basically everything we can offshore at this point and thus the available increase has dwindled to essentially zero.

The problem is that during that 20 year period of time we “trained” Congress (and both political parties) that they can run 30% deficits and not have it show up as 8% inflation on a permanent basis. That’s flat-out false.

This in turn means that either we’re going to absorb about 8% inflation (no matter what the government claims), spending must come down by about 30% at the federal level and that is only to stabilize prices, not return them lower, or taxes must go up by about 40% which of course is another expense in the household and reduces disposable income. The latter is politically impossible.

How does this resolve?

Revolution and civil war cometh, if Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics are to be believed. A perfect storm is approaching for the United States, as all four structural drivers of societal instability are not only present, but appear to be at, or at least near, record historical levels.

Focus on what is important, focus on what is going to last. It’s not an accident that Castalia has shifted from ephemeral ebooks to leather books that are capable of lasting for centuries and have been assembling machinery for everything from sewing machines to leather bindings.

It’s going to be difficult. But our community is not only going to survive, it is going to thrive. Because unlike most, we have been repeatedly tested by adversity, and we are hard enough for the hard times.

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Live By the Big Two

Die by the Big Two. My sympathies for the self-reported decline of the Comicstorian are rather limited:

In a bombshell video this weekend, Ben Potter revealed that his channel has been losing money for some time now, which might come as a shock to viewers who have been watching his content, which highlights the best of Marvel and DC’s major events over the years and distills the books in easy ways for viewers to catch up on storylines…

Comicstorian caught lightning in a bottle as these superhero movies propelled interest to new cultural heights. His high production value offerings gave casual fans the background they needed on the characters to have a deeper understanding of Marvel and DC.

That all changed in 2020, according to Potter’s new video. COVID hitting slowed the production of films and ground the comic industry to a halt. It made the content harder to produce, and the offerings of Marvel and DC garnered fewer clicks than the previous content. He said the channel hoped to ride out the slowness of content and was kept alive by an angel investor who believed in his work.

But those funds eventually dried up, and as Marvel and DC began to push more woke content with their films and comics, interest in the Comicstorian content began to drop along with the companies’ properties.

Now, why would anyone involved with independent comics give a damn about this channel? When has he ever paid any attention to the considerable amount of content being produced by anyone outside the Big Two?

It’s really rather remarkable how the comics media would observably prefer to go down with the Marvel-DC ship than actually devote any attention to the space where all the action is. And I’m not just talking about the industry’s staunch refusal to pay any attention to Arkhaven Comics or Arktoons, because they also refuse to devote any to the successful products developed by independent creators like Razorfist, Eric July, Ethan van Sciver, and most of all, the massive Webtoons platform.

In fact, the comics media barely pays any attention to the long-established Japanese manga industry, even though it is bigger than Marvel and DC combined. It is essentially a collection of parasites that refuse to adapt, therefore they will die alongside their hosts.

UPDATE: In related news, the Dark Herald reports that Comixology is dead.

Amazon has finally and officially pulled the plug on the Comixology app.

ComiXology used to be something halfway decent back when the Big Two were halfway decent. It started life as an online community that would spot interesting upcoming releases and build pull lists for the brick-and-mortar comic book shops back when they existed.

It also had some tools for the aforementioned brick-and-mortar comic book shops to help raise their online presence. Then around 2009 ComiXology went one step better and launched a digital comic book reader and a digital comic book store. For a while it was looking like this was the future of comic books.

Project Asteroid strikes again. Arktoons is inevitable.

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The Defunding and Decline of the Media

We’ve already reached the point that mainstream media organs require sugar daddies like Jeff Bezos, Carlos Slim Helú, and the US federal government just to operate on a reduced scale. And now that the era of free money is over, the decline is going to accelerate as more mainstream and mainstream-supported organizations fail.

​​Nearly 20,000 jobs have been eliminated across the media industry this year as premium outlets struggle to combat declining rates in ad revenue, according to Axios estimates. The report found that media companies can no longer rely on short-term capital to insulate them from ad declines because of “high interest rates and investor skepticism.” Thus, the cuts were industry-wide in 2023.

The Washington Post announced plans to offer voluntary buyouts in an attempt to cut 240 jobs. The Post has roughly 2.5 million subscribers, down from 3 million at the end of 2020. The Post is set to lose $100 million this year.

CNBC Digital cut around 20 editorial staffers last week. Vice Media Group laid off about 100 staffers this year and consolidated its businesses from five to two. G/O Media suspended Jezebel and laid off some 23 staffers.

Elsewhere, ad revenue for BuzzFeed declined 35% year-over-year. Ad revenue for Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, decreased 3%. Linear ads for television networks like CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery declined “12% on average,” per the report.

And this doesn’t even begin to account for media organizations using AI to replace hack journalists and editors. The situation presents a massive opportunity for alternative media companies that operate on a subscription model, but the challenge is to figure out what subscribers actually want/need and for which products they are willing to pay. The advertising model was always fake, it simply allowed the favored organizations to subsidize all the free viewers and thereby massively expand their influence.

It was also malinformative, as it permitted those running the propped-up organizations to believe that their businesses were sound and their products were hugely popular. But, as is so often the case with Clown World, most of that “succcess” was a manufactured and debt-inflated illusion.

So, the playing field is being levelled, to some degree, but that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily wise for any alternative organization to attempt to play on it. We’re not going to do anything right now, as we have our hands sufficiently occupied with delivering on our current projects. But it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out for future ones.

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The End of The Escapist

The collapse of The Escapist is an object lesson in when SJWs and financial interests take over a previously successful company:

When people ask me how to get into games journalism these days, my main piece of advice is “don’t.” I’m really not kidding, as while I am privileged to be where I am, it’s an almost impossible path to walk given the state of the industry and the instability found within.

Case in point, a wild scene unfolded last night as long-time gaming site The Escapist fired some of its team members, including EIC Nick Calandra, for reportedly not meeting goals set by its parent company Gamurs.

After Calandra was fired, Escapist staff members, contributors and producers all took to Twitter to announce they were also leaving the site, with many of them indicating they would be working on some new project with Calandra directly.

The departures and firings essentially cleaned out the entirety of The Escapist’s video department, including most significantly at all, the departure of Yahtzee Croshaw, the voice of Zero Punctuation, one of the oldest and most famous game criticism video series, and one I grew up watching long before I started doing this for a living. Croshaw resigned, but he does not own the rights to Zero Punctuation itself, so whatever he does next, it will be without that branding. Though it’s obvious the branding can’t survive without him, even if The Escapist retains it.

By all accounts Calandra was a great EIC, and clearly inspired a lot of loyalty in those working for him, given the events of last night. Gamurs feels like yet another company trying to squeeze blood from a stone with likely unreasonable growth targets in an industry where large increases are more or less impossible.

‘The Escapist’ Faces Mass Resignations After EIC Firing, 7 November 2023

Nor is The Escapist the only place where some major shakeups in entertainment journalism are coming. It’s going to be intriguing to see how things develop going forward, as some of our competitors – who shall go unnamed – are similarly structured and are facing similar pressures, which suggests that it may not be too much longer before experiencing similar disruptions forced by the financial interests.

As to why this is suddenly happening among companies that were acquired in the last ten years, the answer is economic: the acquisitions were made with debt that was obtained at historically low interest rates. Now that the interest rates on that debt is rising, the acquisitions are no longer as profitable as the acquiring company expected them to be, thereby leading the acquirers to put pressure on the acquired companies to produce more and more money.

Once these debt finance-driven demands start cutting into the resources required to perform basic functions, and once key personnel start leaving instead of subjecting themselves to the ever-increasing demands of the new owners, the death spiral has begun and the fate of the organization is sealed.

Which, of course, is a very good thing for its stronger, more conservative competitors.

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That Will Show China

A US response meant to mitigate a Chinese boycott inadvertently demonstrates China’s economic might:

The United States has for the first time begun buying Japanese seafood to supply its military there, a response to China’s ban on such products imposed after Tokyo released treated water from its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.

Unveiling the initiative in a Reuters interview on Monday, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said Washington should also look more broadly into how it could help offset China’s ban that he said was part of its “economic wars.”

China, which had been the biggest buyer of Japanese seafood, says its ban is due to food safety fears.

The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog vouched for the safety of the water release that began in August from the plant wrecked by a 2011 tsunami. G7 trade ministers on Sunday called for the immediate repeal of bans on Japanese food.

“It’s going to be a long-term contract between the U.S. armed forces and the fisheries and co-ops here in Japan,” Emanuel said. “The best way we have proven in all the instances to kind of wear out China’s economic coercion is come to the aid and assistance of the targeted country or industry,” he said.

The first purchase of seafood by the U.S. under the scheme involves just shy of a metric ton of scallops, a tiny fraction of more than 100,000 tons of scallops that Japan exported to mainland China last year.

I’m sure the Japanese seafood industry appreciates the gesture. But one can’t help but ask two questions:

  1. Why hasn’t the USA been buying Japanese seafood to supply its troops occupying Japan until now?
  2. How, exactly, is replacing less than 1/100,000th of the lost business, or .001 percent, going to keep the Japanese seafood industry solvent?

As with seafood, so with artillery shells…

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The Red Terror of Free Trade

French wine terrorists are attacking and destroying Spanish wine trucks.

French winemakers quite literally painted the town red today when they intercepted trucks carrying cheap Spanish booze and smashed crate-loads of it all over the road. 

Le Boulou tollbooth, just ten miles from France’s border with Spain, was turned into a battleground this morning when dozens of protesting winemakers halted lorries and tore into their contents. They destroyed several wine shipments, smashing the bottles and pouring the red booze all over the tarmac in a vintage demonstration of the French public’s penchant for demonstrating against perceived injustices.

In videos posted on X, protesters can be seen tumbling over a mountain of crates carrying Freixenet wine. Many of the crates had been upended so their valued contents spilled out across the road. Bottles upon bottles of bubbly were seen rolling around amid a sea of broken glass and wasted booze.

What sort of world are we living in, that outrages such as these are allowed to happen! I blame teetotal immigrants and beer-swilling peasants. Thank Bacchus that they didn’t interrupt the Torres trucks!

Figures from the European Commission say wine consumption for the current year is estimated to have fallen 15 per cent in France, 7 per cent in Italy, 10 per cent in Spain, and a staggering 34 per cent in Portugal. However, production in the EU has risen by 4 per cent.

There is the real problem. Now do your patriotic duty, Frenchmen! Stand by your vines, Spaniards! Have a second glass at lunch, all you Portuguese! European civilization depends upon you!

I will do my part.

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