Tag: economics

The Great Taking

A short book warns of the sinister, but desperate plan that underlies all of Clown World’s various projects, from the World Economic Forum and the Covid vaxxes to Global Warming, the invasion of Gaza, and Operation Prosperity Guardian.

The Great Taking puts forth a warning that a virtually unknown entity called “The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation” (DTCC) is effectively the “owner” of all the publicly traded companies in the world, and in fact all debt-based assets of any kind:

“It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass.

Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt.”

Over the course of the book, the author describes a 50-year process by which ownership of shares in public companies, and all debt collateral has been “dematerialized”.

In the olden days, you invested in a company – they gave you physical share certificates – and you were now part owner of the company. This is still how many value investors including me think of stock ownership.

We’re not invested in all of these companies in The Bitcoin Capitalist Portfolio simply because we’re trying to time the oscillations in the price movements. We think of ourselves as partial owners of these businesses.

Michael Saylor, Brian Armstrong, Mike Novogratz, Frank Holmes, Jamie Leverton et al, aren’t just celebrity CEOs in this space (Bitcoin)… they’re our partners. Granted, we’re the minority partners, silent ones, betting the jockeys and just along for the ride; but we don’t think of these positions as just stock charts and price gyrations – we think of them as businesses in which we are part owners.

At least I do.

According to The Great Taking, author David Rogers Webb, this is not true. We don’t own small pieces of these companies, we own claims on those pieces, because – over the course of decades, through the exigencies of ever-increasing trading volumes, combined with the machinations behind the scenes of diabolical manipulators – stock ownership has been supplanted by “security entitlements”.

Webb posits that when the debt super-cycle culminates in its ultimate blow up; the trap will be sprung, and actual ownership over all these companies and assets will be subsumed by the clearing houses. An infinitesimal cadre of elites will effectively own everything, and the masses of the world will be reduced to serfdom.

It’s not actually that difficult to postulate; I always considered it a patently obvious risk. This is precisely why I have always warned everyone to stay COMPLETELY out of debt. You can look it up. It’s been obvious since 2002 that there is far more debt, and claims of ownership to that debt, than there is of physical collateral for the debt, and that’s before we even take into account any of the conspiracy theories that HUMAN BEINGS or their lifetime economic potential are somehow being utilized as collateral for state currency debt.

As long ago as 2008, it was already estimated that there were $100 of debt claims on every actual $1 of collateral value. That figure is almost certainly higher today.

The global credit economy rests entirely upon the idea that the foundation of debts upon which it rests will never be called in. As Paul Samuelson wrote in what is quite literally the system’s textbook, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, “what difference does it make if Paul owes Peter or Peter owes Paul?”

Well, it makes a tremendous difference if everyone on the planet owes one person, or one small group of people, particularly if the ultimate holder of all debt in the world is an evil, sociopathic devil worshiper with an endless hatred of the human race.

Now, it’s not quite as bad as most of these dire economic conspiracy theorists make things out to be, because as we have been learning since 2015, the Lords of Debt are discovering the limits of money power, as are the nationalist resistance. There is a very good reason that first Iran, then China, and then Russia, all of whom were locked out of the Clown World economy, have gone from seeking to participate in the system to actively waging war against it.

The book’s author appears to have noticed the same thing:

“The “control system” has entered collapse. Their power has been based on deception. Their two great powers of deception, money and media, have been extremely energy-efficient means of control. But these powers are now in rampant collapse. This is why they have moved urgently to institute physical control measures. However, physical control is difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive. And so, they are risking all. They are risking being seen. Is this not a sign of desperation?“

I suspect that reason for the rise of BRICS and The Great Bifurcation of the global economy is that important and influential individuals in the relevant nations did the math and realized that debt is, at best, a good way to lose everything you own, and at worst, a form of legal slavery. Debt can take down even the largest, oldest companies literally overnight; imagine what it can do to entire nations that find themselves awash in it and vulnerable to physical foreclosures.

Anyhow, read the book, and then focus on what you can do to ensure that when the credit system crashes, either naturally of its own weight or as a result of economic warfare, you do not find yourself stripped of everything you need to survive. And don’t forget that money in the bank is not savings, but rather, debt that the bank owes to you, and which will not be repaid in the event of a bank failure.

It’s true that a lot of economic pessimists, including me, have missed out on tremendous opportunities over the last forty years. However, it is very healthy to live modestly and below one’s potential means, and the probabilities that the Clown World system is coming to an end have never been higher.

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They Know They Lost, Right?

It’s no wonder that NATO has been demolished in Ukraine with military leadership of this intellectual calibre and historical knowledge:

The Ukrainian government needs to look at what Germany did in WWII to stand a chance against Russia, according to Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army forces stationed in Europe. Hodges, who retired as a lieutenant-general in 2017, has long been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine. In an interview with the Australian YouTuber Perun, published over the weekend, he repeatedly cited examples from the Second World War to argue that Kiev can defeat Moscow on the battlefield. “They are gonna have to increase production of ammunition and weapons in Ukraine,” Hodges said. “Some of these things are already happening, but it is possible when you are at war to increase production, even with Russian missiles raining down on your cities.” “I mean, think about what Germany did in 1944. Aircraft production for the Luftwaffe peaked in 1944. That’s after more than two years of steady bombing by the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Corps bombing the hell out of German cities. But yet German aircraft production increased. So I think Ukraine can do that with some improving efficiency. Some Western companies are already there helping,” he concluded.

On the one hand, he’s right. Germany did increase its aircraft production in 1944. And so did Japan, which not only increased its shipping tonnage produced in 1944, but even managed to build more aircraft in 1945 than it did in 1942.

  • 1942: 8,900
  • 1943: 16,700
  • 1944: 28,200
  • 1945: 11,100

On the other hand—–and I would argue this is the more salient point—–both Germany and Japan were not only defeated militarily, but were defeated so comprehensively that they were forced to surrender unconditionally and are still under military occupation nearly 80 years after their respective surrenders.

Forget the Kiev regime. Forget Ukraine. And forget NATO. Anyone who knows anything about military history recognizes that both of them are already finished, they simply haven’t stopped quivering yet. The USA is now facing global military defeat on every single front, even as it is prostrate before the biggest invasion in all of human history.

At this point there appears to be nothing that can stop the All Nations Alliance from defeating Clown World. And for those who would cite the US and Israeli nuclear arsenals as a possible emergency measure, I repeat: there is nothing. I didn’t understand it when I first read the book as a child, but in retrospect, Jeff Sutton was telling us what the programming was back in 1968.

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Paperbacks Unlimited

Just to put it on the record, here is where I think Amazon is headed over the next three years, and the effect its actions will have on the publishing industry over the next decade. I could well be wrong. I very much hope that I will be wrong, but as it stands, please note that I wasn’t pessimistic enough about the long-term effects of Kindle Unlimited when it was introduced in 2014.

2024: Audible Unlimited. Like Kindle Unlimited, but for audio. Authors get paid by the listened hour from a collective pot that is funded by Amazon’s additional $7.99 charge on top of the $11.99 paid by KU subscribers.

2025: Paperbacks Unlimited. Subscribers can pay $19.99 per month and receive any three KDP paperbacks of their choice. Authors are paid $0.99 per paperback shipped. A hardcover option will follow the next year, which will be available at a lower price point, but the subscriber will only receive one book per month, with the ability to pay more to get two or three. Hardcover compensation pays authors $2 per book shipped. It’s essentially the old book club model, writ very, very large.

The introduction of Virtua Voice makes the former viable. The purchase of print-on-demand facilities in the USA and the UK make the latter viable. And most of the bestselling KAP Unlimited authors will either be a) AI-assisted independents cranking out a new series book every month or b) fake authors created by Amazon.

If you’re an author or a publisher, you had better prepare accordingly. Because these programs are coming, and they will have the same effect on audiobook and print sales as KU has had on ebook revenues. I estimate that KAP Unlimited will have the potential to shrink total US consumer books sales from $17.4 billion to under $5 billion by 2035.

UPDATE: Apparently Audible Unlimited already exists, in the form of Audible Plus. What has changed is the ability of Amazon to inexpensively convert all of its KDP ebooks to Audible Plus audiobooks using Virtua Voice.

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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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