Tag: economics

Drawing Lines in the Sand

Xi makes it abundantly clear that China stands with Palestine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed dissatisfaction Friday with the injustices suffered by Palestinians and affirmed China’s support for an independent Palestinian state. “It is not possible to continue the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinians,” the Chinese president said at the opening of the Riyadh-Gulf-Chinese Summit for Cooperation and Development in Saudi Arabia.

Xi emphasized the necessity for granting Palestine “full membership in the United Nations” and said Beijing “supports the two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He said he considered the Chinese-Arab summit a “defining event in the history of Chinese-Arab relations.”

Relations between the two “are based on mutual interest in peace and harmony,” he said. “The Chinese and Arab sides should strengthen solidarity and cooperation and build a community for a closer future,” he said as he welcomed Arab participation in the global security initiative.

If Israel is the USA’s “greatest ally’, then it stands to reason that China, which has been engaged in unrestricted warfare against the United States for two decades, would eventually find common cause with that greatest ally’s greatest enemy.

It also explains why Soros and the other architects of Clown World fear Xi even more than they do Putin.

The intriguing question is when the Israelis will abandon the USA and the imperialist neocons in an attempt to appease the Chinese. Because that is probably the right strategic move in the long term; the Israelis are obviously aware that the Diaspora won’t hesitate to sell them out if necessary. And it’s not going to be possible to be the financial masters of both sides of The Great Bifurcation.

Beijing will work to make energy purchases in yuan instead of US dollar signalling another step towards shifting further away from the greenback, China’s President Xi Jinping told Gulf Arab leaders as cited by Reuters.

China’s leader highlighted the necessity of the move while speaking at a Chinese-Arab summit that was hosted by Saudi Arabia earlier this week. Xi had held separate talks with the heads of the Persian Gulf states at the summit that reportedly brought together 30 leaders from across the region.

The world’s biggest crude importer, China in November ramped up purchases of oil by 12% year-on-year, marking the 10-month high despite the severe pandemic-related restrictions.

As the world’s biggest buyer, China now has the ability to dictate how it pays for oil. And it has already begun paying for Arab goods in its own currency, as evidenced by this interview with a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry:

The Paper: We noted that the first RMB cross-border payment transaction between Saudi Arabia and China’s Yiwu city, known as “the world’s supermarket”, was completed ahead of the first China-Arab States Summit. Do you have any comment?

Mao Ning: I also noted this good news. The cross-border RMB payment has played an important role in boosting trade between China and Arab states. This is also a telling snapshot of trade and investment facilitation between both sides. Over the past decade, China-Arab states economic and trade cooperation has scaled new heights. China is Arab states’ biggest trading partner. In 2021, China’s FDI stock in Arab states hit $23 billion, a 2.6 times increase over 10 years. The trade volume topped $330.3 billion, 1.5 times more than 10 years ago. In the first three quarters of 2022, China-Arab states trade reached $319.295 billion, up 35.28 percent year on year and close to the total of the whole year of 2021.

This is precisely what the US invaded Iraq and Libya to prevent. But it’s not going to invade Saudi Arabia and it can’t invade China. It is safe to expect that other countries, particularly Russia and Venezuala, will follow suit in short order.

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Free Trade is Dead

In amidst the economic pain and disruption incumbent in the fall of Clown World, there are some significant silver linings:

The founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Morris Chang, says geopolitics is having profound effects on the semiconductor industry.

Speaking at an event in Phoenix Arizona, where his firm was debuting an ambitious $40 billion upgrade and expansion of its new manufacturing facility in the state, he explained the new constraints being placed on the sector by the changing geopolitical scene.

Speaking of the new facility, which is TSMC’s first advanced chip plant built in the United States in over two decades, Chang said there remained a lot of hard work ahead, if it was to be a success.

The upgrades for the facility will enable the phoenix plant to manufacture the chips for Apple’s iPhone, which can perform almost 17 trillion specialized calculations per second. TMSC is planning an even newer facility in the state which will house even more advanced production technology, capable of producing the microchips for future smartphones, computers, and other smart electronics.

In an interview with Nikkei Asia at the event, Chang likened the plant to the first plant TSMC ever built in the US, in 1995 in Carnas, Washington.

Chang said, “Twenty-seven years have passed and [the semiconductor industry] witnessed a big change in the world, a big geopolitical situation change in the world. Globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead. A lot of people still wish they would come back, but I don’t think they will be back.”

The death of globalization and free trade is not only a good thing, it is absolutely necessary if Mankind is going to survive, and eventually, thrive. We’ve seen the best that globalism has to offer, and it is nothing more than idiocracy, debt slavery, and a relentlessly ugly monoculture.

It only took 30 years for 300 years of economic theory to be conclusively disproven by reality. But it was always false and totally incompatible with the existence of nations, as my critique of free trade on mathematical grounds demonstrated.

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Excess Deaths Among the Educated

Karl Denninger reviews the unemployment statistics:

The “employment by educational attainment” figures were interesting as well — they showed that degree holders got hammered. One has to wonder if the Twitter firings were in there, but that wasn’t that large and there was a drop of 348,000 in that category and, more-ominously, 316,000 people disappeared out of that bucket entirely. Since you can’t “lose” educational status once you get into that top bucket, that of a Bachelor’s or better, the only way out of that bucket is to die.

I can confirm one of those 316,000 missing degree holders. My late brother was a duly employed individual with a bachelor’s degree when he died. He was also vaccinated and boosted.

And while we don’t know it was the vaxx… it was the vaxx.

UPDATE: The numbers add up. The percentage of the population 25 years and older with at least a bachelor’s degree is 32.1 percent.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has quietly confirmed that at least 1.1 million Americans have “died suddenly” ever since Covid-19 “vaccines” were introduced under Operation Warp Speed.

UPDATE: And this rejection of the vaxx among the most highly educated may explain the 4 percent delta.

People with a PhD are the most hesitant when it comes to getting the Covid-19 vaccine, according to a paper by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The report showed a surprising U-shaped correlation between willingness to get a Covid vaccine and education level – with the highest hesitancy among those least and most educated. Of those surveyed, 20.8 per cent with a high school education were reluctant to get the shot, and 23.9 per cent with a PhD were against it. But the least skeptical of the shot had a Master’s degree – with only 8.3 per cent of that group being vaccine hesitant.

Translation: Midwits gonna midwit. Literally no one trusts authority more than midwits with credentials.

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EVs Are Not the Answer

Switzerland contemplates banning electric vehicles this winter.

Switzerland may become the first country to limit the use of electric vehicles (EVs) in a bid to ensure energy security this winter, German daily Der Spiegel reported on Thursday. Under the proposed action plan, which is yet to be adopted, the use of EVs in the country could be banned except in cases of “absolutely necessary journeys.” The government also plans a stricter speed limit on the highways. The harsh restrictions are being discussed as the government fears a power shortage in the coming months, due to the country’s high dependence on imports.

And for good reason. Electric vehicles already cost more to operate than internal combustion engines, even though gasoline is heavily taxed in Europe and electric vehicles are subsidized.

“Due to rising energy prices, in some cases, refueling an electric car is more expensive than a traditional one. And if you are recharging not at home but at a public rapid station, the prices would be even higher,” the report stated.

Experts have calculated that the previous cost of charging an electric car in the country was 50-70% lower than for refueling gasoline or diesel models. Now, a full battery of a ‘green car’ can cost more than a full tank of petrol.

The study highlighted that, for small B-segment cars, gasoline for a mileage of 1,000 kilometers would cost the owner €83 ($83). For a diesel car, the cost would be €71 ($71). Meanwhile, with an electric motor, it would cost €85 ($85) to drive the same distance, even though it was only €33 ($33) just a year ago.

It’s time for Europe to surrender to Russia. This is an economic war the EU cannot win.

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A War of Economic Systems

An excellent interview with Michael Hudson that explains the primary material aspect of the war between global satanry and the free nations.

The world economy is now fracturing between two parts, the United States and Europe is the dollarized part. And this Western neoliberal unit is driving Eurasia and most of the Global South into a separate group. The conflict really is between finance capitalism in the United States and Europe against other countries – China, Russia, Iran, India – that are following the more traditional ethic and strategy of industrial capitalism.

The question is: how are countries going to be economically planned? Because every economy is planned by somebody. In the United States, the central planning has been taken out of the hands of government and put in Wall Street. In the City of London. A very rightwing philosophy. In other countries, there is a mixed economy – China and the rest of Eurasia – and their objective of planning and money creation and credit is to create industrial capital to create the means of production.

Obviously, also environmental cleanup now, not merely the means of production but an overall economic system, not simply to make fictitious capital, finance capital, without any reference to the industrial capital base, the earning of labor and industry together.

So there are two economic philosophies and I began the book by contrasting the dynamics of industrial capitalism with finance capitalism. And industrial capitalism in the United States, Germany, England, and every country where it took off, was to promote a public investment in basic infrastructure monopolies in transportation, communication, education, healthcare.

The idea is that if the government would provide these basic services and basic human rights at subsidized rates – or freely, as in the case of education and healthcare – then employers would not have to pay labor a high enough basic wage to make labor pay for healthcare – as in the United States where 18% of GDP is for healthcare – or to pay for education, the 1.7 trillion that goes for student debt in the United States, not mentioning the education that is not debt-financed.

Finance capitalism basically sought to break away all of the public infrastructure. Most financial fortunes and financial fortunes in history were made just in the way that Zola had described, by prying thefts from the public domain.

But the financial capitalism doesn’t say… You don’t have to steal it; you actually make it your policy, giving away the financial domain in the way that President Yeltsin gave away all of Russia’s natural resources, public utilities, electric companies, anything that yields an economic rent that can be just easy income without any investment. And you financialize it.

You’ve had, for the last – really since the 1980s, but even since World War 1 – this movement to prevent industrial economies from being low cost. But the objective of finance capitalism, contrary to what’s taught in the textbooks, is to make economies high cost, to raise the cost every year.

That actually is the explicit policy of the Federal Reserve in the United States. Turn over the central planning to the banking system to essentially inflate the price of housing, with government guaranteed mortgages, up to the point where buying a home is federally guaranteed up to absorbing 43% of the borrower’s income.

Well, you take that 43%, you take the wage withholding for social security and healthcare, you take the taxes; the domestic market shrinks and shrinks. And the finance capital strategy is exactly what it is in the United States today, in Europe. Shift all of the money away from the profits of industrial capital that are reinvested in making new means of production. To expand capital into a shrinking economy where the financial sector intrudes more and more into the economy of production and consumption and shrinks the economy.

The rest of the book all spells out how this transformation from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism occurred and how the fight between the United States and Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, and India – it’s really a conflict of economic systems. There’s no rivalry because they’re not trying to do the same thing. The objectives of the U.S. and Europe are completely different from the economic objectives of Eurasia. It’s a war of economic systems. And that’s why the United States is trying to prevent other countries from following the same path to industrial prosperity that made the United States, Germany and other countries originally rich.

Read the whole thing. Chances are, you’ll find it highly educational and deeply informative. But the global economy is merely one front and it may not even be the most important one. And ignore the labels of “left’ and “right”. They are outdated and irrelevant.

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Germany Braces for Deflation

German leaders fear the German public running out of cash this winter:

On Tuesday, Reuters reported German authorities are moving to acquire emergency cash deliveries to keep their economy running in the event power outages take down electronics-dependent methods of payment.

People familiar with the government plans reported that the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, had begun hoarding extra billions in the event there is a surge in demand for cash, or limits placed on withdrawals.

Government officials and bank authorities are also looking to secure the distribution mechanisms for the cash, giving priority fuel access to cash transporters, according to the sources. The planning sessions have also reportedly included multiple financial industry associations as well as financial market regulator BaFin.

The Reuters article noted, “Although German authorities have publicly played down the likelihood of a blackout, the discussions show both how seriously they take the threat and how they struggle to prepare for potential crippling power outages caused by soaring energy costs or even sabotage.”

Another illustration of how digital currency is a complete non-starter in any scenario that involves interrupted electricity flows. Which also goes for electric cars and the digital economy in general. If the power goes out anywhere along the way, you’re not going to be watching YouTube videos or streaming Netflix.

And yes, the inability to spend credit money is extremely deflationary. As with generals, economists always prepare to fight the last banking crisis.

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Worse Than Unbelievers

Some Boomers reacted angrily to the idea that their wicked generation is evil because they are disinclined to curtail their spending in order to leave anything to their descendants. But the facts that one of them demanded I cite are even more damning of their generation than I had imagined.

With the older generation seemingly richer than ever thanks to generous pension provisions and rapidly rising house prices, it’s no surprise to find so many of them ticking off their ‘bucket list’ by travelling abroad, taking up new hobbies or treating themselves to expensive luxuries. In fact, the spending patterns of these golden oldies have become so widespread, they have even gained a name of their own. SKI-ing – or Spending the Kids’ Inheritance – has become the new normal for the over 50s, replacing the desire of previous generations to leave a legacy for their children and grandchildren.

According to a study by SAGA, in 2016 Britain’s over 50s owned almost 70% of the country’s household wealth, amounting to a staggering £6.2trn. What’s more, that figure had risen rapidly, climbing by £660bn in five years. Of the headline figure, pension wealth accounted for £2.52trn and property wealth a further £2.29trn. However, the days where their children could simply sit back and wait to inherit their share of this wealth are fading fast. These days, more and more older people are deciding to enjoy their money themselves rather than leave it behind for their family.

Having grown up in relative austerity in the post war years, many of the so-called baby-boomer generation are reluctant to go without in later life just so they can pass on their hard earned savings to their children. In fact, a study of Attitudes to Inheritance in Britain by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showed that as many as two-thirds of over 50s would rather enjoy their life than worry about leaving an inheritance, with just a quarter saying they would budget their spending in order to leave something behind.

The study found that while most respondents liked the idea of leaving an inheritance, they did not think they should have to be careful with their cash, or cramp their lifestyle, in order to do so. It is a similar story down-under, where the Challenger National Seniors Australia report found just 3% of Australians over 50 plan to preserve their savings as an inheritance and only 25% said leaving their family anything was a top priority.

US Boomers are no better than their foreign counterparts. Notice that they are spending 57 percent more annually than Generation X, despite the fact that a) they don’t have families to raise and b) most of them are not financially assisting their children and grandchildren.

Separating out net worth along generational lines, it’s Baby Boomers who possess more than half (54%) of all of US household wealth. These Baby Boomers are also spending more than the other generations, with Epsilon reporting that Boomers spend $548.1 billion annually, a figure nearly $200 billion more than the next highest spending generation (Gen X).

Proverbs 13:22: A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, but the sinner’s wealth is laid up for the righteous.

1 Timothy 5:8: Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

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They Never Said He Was Wrong

Isaiah Jackson: Look up the religious affiliation of everyone involved in the FTX collapse. Kanye was right.

CoinDesk: In response to a tweet from Isaiah Jackson that made an anti-Semitic, hurtful statement, CoinDesk is immediately terminating his contract for his weekly Community Crypto show on CoinDesk TV. Isaiah Jackson’s profoundly inflammatory comments are unacceptable and violate our values of mutual respect, diversity and inclusion. CoinDesk does not tolerate antisemitism and any other form of hate speech.

The Great Noticing continues apace. And as with the collapsing Second West’s economic war on the BRICSIA nations, the ADL and its corporate servitors are in the early stages of discovering that all of their sanctions and denunciations and terminations are going to leave them trying to survive alone, left to their own resources, outside of civilized society.

I mean, “since you hurt our feelings, we won’t let you use our fraudulent, worthless electric currency anymore” isn’t exactly an effective threat these days. Go ahead, take your punctured, deflated ball and go home.

It will be incredibly amusing when Kanye comes back strong with a Chinese or Qatari record deal.

UPDATE: As I said, the ADL is beginning to discover that in the post-Boomer era, no one they don’t actively control even pretends to believe anything they say anymore. The tweet is particularly ironic in light of the fact that the ADL was founded in 1913 to frame a black man for a Jewish man’s crimes.

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Twitter Flirts with Bankruptcy

The rapid decline of Twitter is the result of a false foundation on free money and fake advertisers rather than user-subscriptions.

At least six executives have reportedly resigned from Twitter this week. The social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, called an all-hands meeting on Thursday, announcing a return to office hours and mentioning the possibility of bankruptcy unless the company can find a way to become profitable.

Among the departures was the head of safety and moderation, Yoel Roth, Bloomberg reported, citing insider sources. Musk had kept Roth on despite complaints from conservatives that he had been responsible for much of the political censorship on the platform – one of the reasons the Tesla and SpaceX CEO cited for buying the company.

“The economic picture ahead is dire,” Musk wrote in an email calling the meeting, according to the New York Times. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn.”

Unless Twitter can generate profits from its $8 monthly Blue program, bankruptcy is a very real possibility, Musk reportedly said, adding that the platform is currently too dependent on advertising.

All of the social media giants are, to greater and lesser degrees, fraudulent corporate structures. They are not actually real businesses as one learns about business in business school or Econ 101. Their nominal customers are not their customers, but rather, their “advertisers”, who are not actually advertisers as one is taught in Marketing 101, but Clown World conduits for free money provided to ticket-takers. They are totally – and I mean TOTALLY – dependent upon a constant flow of external “investment” money. In most cases, the total “investment” into them far exceeds their actual revenue.

For example, Patreon’s peak monthly payout, in July 2022, is $26 million. Since they take an average of 6 percent, this means their average monthly revenue is around $1.6 million. Ergo, their peak annual revenue is around $20 million and their total lifetime revenue from 2013 is around $60 million, while as of one year ago, Patreon had received $413.3 million in funding over 10 rounds. This strongly suggets that Patreon is not, and never will be, a viable business under its current revenue model. The same is true of Twitter and other public companies propped up by various forms of “investment”; rising interest rates and falling stock prices mean that the flow of money these corporations require to operate is beginning to dry up.

This is why UATV and Arktoons have been subscription-based from the start. And this is why it is so important to subscribe to at least one service, because it is the only foundation that is real and capable of keeping things going over an extended period of time.

As a community, we have an amazing opportunity here. The corporate fakes and frauds that have siphoned up all of the public awareness by providing “free” services are beginning to crumble. As with the Great Depression, the giants of the 2060s and beyond will be the agile and determined operations that survived and thrived during the Great Collapse.

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USA: 1776 – 2032

Financial analyst Martin Armstrong calculates an even earlier end to the political entity described as the United States of America as a result of all major elections being fraudulent and the collapse of the international dollar system:

Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil is proof that all major elections are now being stolen, according to Armstrong, in a bid to eliminate any world leader who stands against the regime agenda.

“This is a worldwide effort,” he said. “They had to get rid of Trump. The other one who stood in their way is Bolsonaro. Then there is Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China). I think you are going to have historians look back at this 50 years from now, and they will call this period ‘The Climate Change Wars’… They are trying to take down as much oil energy capacity as possible.”

Armstrong says his computer modeling is showing huge domestic unrest in the United States next year, and that conditions are ripe for “a rocket launch for volatility and civil unrest.”

“The United States will not exist after 2032. After 2028 and 2029, we are going to have to redesign a government from scratch. America is being destroyed,” he explicitly warned.

On the financial front, Armstrong asserts, “The whole monetary system as we know it is collapsing. That was what the bond crisis in the UK was about.”

Just to forestall the inevitable question, I’ll stick by my 2033 estimate. But I do think it is informative to note that the perceptions of that 2004 prediction have gone from a) thinking that I’m totally insane to b) thinking that I’m pessimistic, but maybe onto something to c) thinking that I’m optimistic to d) professionals producing concrete estimates of an even earlier timeframe for the collapse.

To paraphrase an old chestnut, the United States of America are no longer united, nor sovereign, nor American.

DISCUSSON SG