Tag: economics

We Made It Happen

So why can’t you, Zoomer? Why can’t you?

I am not responsible for your student debt. I grew up in poverty in the mountians of NC. Ate from a garden, name was on community Angel tree for Christmas, bought clothes from yard sales & if I was lucky, on a rare occasion Sky City.

I joined the Air Force then went to college. I made it happen.

What a great response to the student debt crisis that is engulfing three generations of Americans! I agreed so much that I added my two cents.

I am not responsible for your student debt. I grew up in wealth, with large family homes in Minnesota and Florida. Ate Sunday brunches at the country club, name was on the donor list at the private academy, bought designer clothes, drove a Porsche in the summer and an Audi in the winter.

I was offered full scholarships from dozens of universities that I didn’t need because my parents were rich enough to pay full tuition to an elite liberal arts college with a beautiful campus and pretty sorority girls.

I made it happen without lifting a finger.

See, I didn’t need any student loans, so obviously neither does anyone else. And who cares if the younger generation can’t afford to buy homes or start families, we’ll just import more Colombians or Kenyans with the gumption and grit to do what those lazy, indebted, good-for-nothing Americans won’t.

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How Donald Trump Saved the World

The Russians understand that President Trump saved the world, although he failed to free Americans or save the United States from the globalists.

The first scenario, which I have already talked about, is calm and prosperous. It consists in overcoming the US monopoly. In order to do this in the financial sector, you need to abandon the dollar. In order to overcome the monopoly in the information and cognitive sphere, it is necessary to isolate our information space from the American one and switch to our own information technologies. Creating their own contours of the reproduction of the economy, but without the US dollar and the euro and relying on their information technologies for managing money, the countries of the new world economic order ensure high rates of economic development, while the Western world is collapsing. There they have a situation of collapse of financial pyramids, disorganization and a growing economic crisis, aggravated by growing inflation due to the uncontrolled issue of money over the past 12 years.

The second scenario of a possible development of events is similar to the one that Hitler wanted to realize during the period of the change of previous world economic structures. This is an attempt to create a world government with a superhuman ideology. If Hitler conceived the German nation as superhumans, then the current ideologists of world domination impose on humanity the transition to a post-humanoid state. In contrast to the post-humanism of the West, the core countries of the new world economic order are characterized by a socialist ideology, albeit with respect for private interests, protection of private property and the use of market mechanisms. In China, India, Japan, and Korea, socialist ideology dominates – or rather, a mixture of socialist ideology, national interests, and market competition. It is this mixture that forms a fundamentally new power-political elite, focused on economic development and the growth of the well-being of nations.

It is different for Western politicians, intellectuals and businessmen. What we see today is an attempt to form a certain image of a new world order with a world government at the head, where people are driven into an electronic concentration camp. You can see by the example of restrictions during the pandemic how it happened: all people are given tags, access to public goods is regulated through QR codes, everyone is forced to walk in formation. By the way, in the scenario of the Rockefeller Foundation back in 2009, the pandemic and, in fact, everything that happened in connection with it, was amazingly sorted into pieces – they actually predicted the future. This scenario was called Lock Step, that is, “Walk in formation”, and the Western world followed it. Sacrificing their own democratic values, they try to force people to obey commands. International organizations, including the World Health Organization, are used as a kind of stronghold for assembling a world government that would be subordinate to private capital.

But, I must say, Donald Trump greatly interfered with these plans, because he stopped the signing of agreements on Transatlantic and Trans-Pacific partnerships, where all countries participating in the agreements sacrificed national sovereignty in all disputes with big business. And you need to understand that today any transnational corporation can act as a foreign investor, including in the United States. According to these agreements, if there is foreign capital in the business, then in a dispute with the national government, some kind of international arbitration court is formed, it is not clear how and by whom it was drawn up. And these unelected judges, appointed, in fact, by big international business, these disputes are resolved. In fact, it was about the fact that the state was losing all sovereignty in regulating relations with big business. However, Trump stopped the agreement – the United States never signed it. Thus, the process of forming a world government was stopped. This is the second alternative, and it is now in crisis due to the collapse of the idea of globalization and the gradual abandonment of ‘pandemic’ restrictions.

It must be understood that the option of a world government is incompatible with sovereign Russia, with our independence and role in the world. Within the framework of the globalist scenario, the Russian Federation is viewed as a territory that is intended for exploitation by Western transnational corporations. The “indigenous population” must serve their interests. Under such a scenario, Russia disappears as an independent entity, just like China, by the way. The Western world government may incorporate some of our oligarchs into its version of the future, but only in second and third-rate roles.

The third scenario is catastrophic. The destruction of humanity.

The fact that socialism without the world democratic revolution is actually preferable to globalist capitalism and rule by international foreign-owned corporations – VASTLY preferable – is still almost impossible for most people on the Right to grasp. The satanic posthuman corporate evil of massive, immortal artificial persons, erected on a foundation of individualism, capitalism, and free trade, is simply beyond their ability to comprehend.

But, as it is said, woe to those who call evil good.

So we are fortunate that The Empire That Never Ended is failing again in its quest to build its Tower of Babel, and that the Great Bifurcation is now taking place. Whether Westerners can find a place for themselves in the economic order that is replacing the neo-liberal, rules-based NWO is not yet known, but what is certain is that they will not dominate it, much less rule over it, as they did over its predecessor and current rival.

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The Five Fronts of Imperial Collapse

A fascinating interview with Sergey Glazyev, who points out that events of the sort we are witnessing “only happen once a century”.

Among the Russian elite there are many opponents of an alliance with China. At least, before the special operation in Ukraine, it seemed to these people that American and Western culture is more understandable and closer to us than hieroglyphic Chinese wisdom, and that we will always find a common language with our “Western partners”.

– You know, back in 2015 I wrote the book The Last World War. The USA is Starting and Losing, which you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation – everything was thought out and justified there. The United States embarked on a worldwide hybrid war – started with the Orange Revolutions to disrupt regions of the world it did not control – in order to strengthen its position and weaken the position of geopolitical rivals. After the famous Munich speech of President Putin in February 2007, they realized that they had lost control over Yeltsin’s Russia, and this seriously worried them. In 2008, the financial crisis broke out and it became clear that the transition to a new technological order was beginning, and the old world economic order and the previous management system no longer ensured sustainable economic development. China was now leading the way. Well, then afterwards the logic of deploying of a world war happens, only not in the forms that existed 100 years ago, but on three conditional fronts – monetary-financial (where the United States still dominates the world), trade-economic (where they have already lost superiority to China) and information-cognitive (where the Americans also have technologies that are superior to ours). They use all three of these fronts in an attempt to keep the initiative and maintain the hegemony of their corporations.

Well and finally, the fourth front is the biological one, which opened with the advent of the coronavirus from the US-Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. Today we see that a whole network of biological laboratories existed in Ukraine. So the United States has long been preparing to open the biological front of the world war.

The fifth, and most obvious, front is, in fact, the front of combat fighting – as the last tool for forcing the states that they control into unquestioning obedience. Today, the situation on this front is also escalating. That is, active operations are underway on all five fronts of the world hybrid war, and the result can be predicted. The Americans will not be able to win, just as the British did not succeed in their time. Although Britain formally won World War II, they lost politically and economically. The British lost their entire empire, losing more than 90 percent of the territory and 95 percent of the population. Two years after World War II, where they were the winners, their empire collapsed like a house of cards, because the other two winners – the USSR and the USA – did not need this empire and viewed it as an anachronism. Also, the world will not need American transnational corporations, the American dollar, American monetary and financial technologies and financial pyramids. All this will be a thing of the past in the near future. Southeast Asia will become the obvious leader in world economic development, and a new world economic order will be formed before our very eyes.

God blessed America, and Americans threw away that blessing in favor of hedonism, sin, tolerance, and world domination. Now Americans are ruled by women and foreigners, and the world is passing it by, just as it has always forgotten the past hosts of The Empire That Never Ended.

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What Happened

If you want to know what happened to the USA and why it is not the same country that we children of the 1970s and 1980s knew, this graph of income distribution explains everything. Notice that this happened as Republicans were bravely fighting “socialism”. And if you still refuse to accept that identity trumps ideology, try to answer this question: what, precisely, is the ideology that represents “rule by foreign elite”?

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The Financial Fifth Column

Vladimir Putin’s economics advisor considers the probable effects of the massive globalist sanctions on Russia and concludes most of them can be negated with proper banking policies:

The damage caused by US financial sanctions is inextricably linked to the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia which is the ideal one for them. Its essence boils down to a tight binding of the ruble issue to export earnings, and the ruble exchange rate to the dollar. In fact, an artificial shortage of money is being created in the economy, and the strict policy of the Central Bank leads to an increase in the cost of lending, which kills business activity and hinders the development of infrastructure in the country.

Sanctions restrictions have caused an extremely high demand for corporate financing in the domestic market. Against the background of a relatively low key rate and access to cheaper funding, large banks consistently keep a net interest margin above the average market level, 5.4% to 6%; whereas for the largest banks in China, the USA, Germany, France, Great Britain and Japan, the net interest margin ranges from 0.8% to 2.3%.

However, these windfalls are not directed to financing infrastructure projects, but to the acquisition of disparate non-core businesses that are combined into ecosystems. Most of these businesses remain unprofitable even at the EBITDA [earnings] level. Despite this, billions of rubles are still spent on their development. These figures are quite comparable to the volume of investments in a major infrastructure project in the real sector of the economy, which can bring both job growth and contribution to the development of the economy. But such projects (as well as filling the budget) are still left to the raw materials companies, while the largest financial corporations prefer to direct their income to the creation of chimeras.

In fact, it was the connivance of the Central Bank which led to the fact that Russia and its industry were drained of blood and unable to develop.

If the Central Bank fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure the stability of the ruble — and it has all the possibilities for this due to the threefold surplus of the currency reserves of the monetary base — then financial sanctions would be nothing to us. They could even be turned, as in other sectors of the economy, to the benefit of the banking sector, if the Central Bank replaced the loans withdrawn by Western partners with its own special refinancing instruments. This would increase the capacity of the Russian credit and banking system by more than 10 trillion rubles. Also, it would fully compensate for the outflow of foreign financing of investments, preventing a decline in investment and economic activity without any inflationary consequences. Thus, it would be possible to avoid a long period of decline in real incomes of the population caused solely by the peculiarities of the monetary policy pursued in Russia, which ensured the effectiveness of sanctions in the monetary and financial sphere.

Assessing the consequences of anti-Russian sanctions, it is impossible to ignore the consequences of severing economic ties with Ukraine. The mutual abolition of the free trade regime and the imposition of an embargo on a wide range of goods led to the rupture of cooperative ties that ensured the reproduction of many types of high-tech products. Blocking the work of Russian banks led to the depreciation of multibillion-dollar Russian investments. The refusal of the Ukrainian authorities to service the debt to Russia caused several billion dollars’ more losses. In total, their volume is estimated at about $100 billion for each of the parties. This is really significant and in many ways irreparable real damage, which we ourselves have aggravated with retaliatory sanctions.

To date, the outcome of the economic consequences of anti-Russian sanctions is as follows. Ukraine suffered the biggest losses relative to GDP, in absolute terms — the European Union. Russian losses of potential GDP, since 2014, amount to about 50 trillion rubles. But only 10% of them can be explained by sanctions, while 80% of them were the result of monetary policy. The United States benefits from anti-Russian sanctions, replacing the export of Russian hydrocarbons to the EU, as well as China; replacing the import of European goods by Russia. We could completely offset the negative consequences of financial sanctions if the Bank of Russia fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure a stable ruble exchange rate, and not the recommendations of Washington financial organizations.

Consider the threats of American and European Russophobes against the new ‘sanctions from hell’. It has already been mentioned above that the threat of disconnecting Russian banks from the SWIFT system, widely discussed in the media today, although it will interfere with international settlements at first, will benefit the Russian banking and payment system in the medium term.

The threat to ban transactions with Russian bonds will also benefit us, since their issue in a budget surplus is nothing more than a source of profit for foreign speculators. And their profitability is overestimated three times in relation to the market assessment of their riskiness. The termination of the self-serving [самоедской] policy of the monetary authorities, who are borrowing money which is objectively unnecessary to the budget at exorbitant prices, will allow us to save billions of dollars. If the sanctioneers try to prohibit the purchase of the foreign currency bonds of Russian corporations, then it will be possible to compensate for the missing financing for the purchase of imported equipment by buying them out at the expense of part of the excess foreign exchange reserves. If foreign loans are cut off to them, then the risk of their default will fall on the European and American banks themselves.

There is also a potential risk of seizure of Russian state assets. But we can respond to this symmetrically by imposing an embargo on servicing debt obligations to Western creditors and also arresting their assets. The losses of the parties will be approximately equal.

There remains, in fact, one threat – to take away foreign assets from Russian oligarchs. For all its popularity among the common people, this will stimulate the return of capital exported from the country, which will also have a positive effect for the Russian economy.

The evils of free trade are such that the penalties imposed by its defenders are actually a long-term blessing. However, incompetent or treasonous monetary policy can harm any country, regardless of what its external trade possibilities are. In any case, sovereignty is always more important than sanctions or access to global markets, especially for a country rich in human potential and natural resources.

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The Intoxification of Success

The neocons running the neo-liberal world order are not hesitating to sabotage the economies they are financially raping even though the negative consequences are obvious.

Ross: Michael, sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is all we hear now. We’re sanctioning people. The West sanction people back to the Stone Age. What are the unintended consequences of sanctions?

Michael Hudson: Well, one is to serve very much like a protective tariff on the sanctioned country. For instance, when America made sanctions on European trade with Russia, Lithuania dutifully stopped exporting cheese to Russia. Well, the result is that Russia set up its own cheese’s sector, and now it’s self-sufficient in cheese. If you sanction a country, you force it to become more self-reliant and across the board, from agriculture to dairy products to technology, Russia is forced to become more self-reliant and at the same time to depend much more on trade with China for the things that it is still not self-reliant in. So America is bringing about exactly the opposite of what it intended. It’s hopeless to somehow isolate Russia and then be able to go after China without Russia. And instead, what it’s doing is integrating the Eurasian core, Russia and China, exactly the policy that Henry Kissinger warned against going all the way back to Mackinder a century ago that said, Eurasia is the world island, Russia and China could be the whole world centre. That’s what the fight is all about. Well, American sanctions are driving Russia and China together, and America has gone to China and said, Please don’t support Russia. It most recently, on Monday, March 14, Jake Sullivan came out and told China, we will sanction countries that break our sanctions against Russia. And basically, China said, fine. You know, we’ll just break off all the trade between East and West now and the East, Eurasia is pretty much self-sufficient. The West is not self-sufficient since it began to industrialise, and it’s heavily dependent on Russia for not only oil and gas, but palladium and many raw materials. So the sanctions are ending up driving a wedge between the European countries.

Ross: Don’t people who apply these sanctions think this through? Are they so short-sighted they don’t understand that these sanctions are going to build further capacity within Russia, push Russia further towards China, make that economic alliance concrete and, ultimately, you’re not going to be able to keep the lights on in in Europe? All the while underestimating the fact that from a food security point of view – take the U.K., for instance, a net importer of food – not appreciating the fact that, for instance, Russia/Ukraine, they create twenty five percent, a quarter, of all wheat annually. The estimation this year is one hundred and two million tonnes Russia and Ukraine, wheat. Don’t people realise that there’s going to be a massive knock on effect?

Michael Hudson: Yes, they do realise it. Yes, they’ve thought it all through. I worked with these people for more than 50 years.

Ross: Who are these people?

Michael Hudson: The neocons, basically, the people who are in charge of U.S. foreign policy? Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, the people that President Biden has appointed all around him, from Blinken to Sullivan and right down the line. They are basically urging people around the New American Century. They’re the people who said America can run the whole world and create its own reality. And yes, they know that this is going to cause enormous problems for Germany. They know that not only will it block the energy that Germany and Italy and other countries in Europe need through their oil and gas, but also it’ll block the use of gas for fertiliser, upping their fertiliser production and decreasing their food production. They look at this and they say, How can America gain from all of this? There’s always a way of gaining what something looks to be bad.

In fact, sanctions against Russia and Iran have worked so well in bending those nations to the will of the global imperialists that now they’re actively pushing for sanctions on China.

Britain will sanction China if it supports Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a Cabinet minister warned last night. Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan urged Beijing not to send arms or financial aid to Russia after the US claimed it requested China’s support, which both countries deny.

Joe Biden last week warned Chinese president Xi Jinping there will be ‘consequences’ if he backs the invasion.

‘We’ve sanctioned Belarus right alongside Russia precisely because they basically said ‘feel free to park your tanks on our lawn’. That is just not acceptable,’ she added.

I used to wonder how Hitler could possibly have been dumb enough to seek a two-front war after being unable to finish off Britain in 1940, and how the Japanese armed forces could have imagined it was a good idea to bring the USA into the Pacific war while they were still absorbed with fighting the Communists and Kuomintang armies in China. Both ideas appeared, in historical hindsight, to have been obviously stupid even at the times the decisions were made. And it is already obvious that the multi-front economic war is a failure, even before the Chinese front has been opened.

What is clear is that Western sanctions policy is the worst of all worlds. We are allowing Putin to exploit Russia’s leverage as a full-spectrum commodity superpower.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Now that I’ve seen how the neocons who have taken over the US empire and overthrown the governments of Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine are intoxicated with their successes, it doesn’t surprise me that they would attempt to extend their European satrapy by engaging in economic war with both Russia and China. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the consequences of their failure will be even more horrific for them and their subjects than the consequences of their previous failures were.

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Reversing Demographic Decline

Never ever accept the baseless lie that government policies can’t reverse European demographic decline. Hungary has proved, conclusively, that it is not merely possible to do so, it is actually quite easy and relatively inexpensive:

State Secretary for Family and Youth Affairs Katalin Novák announced on Thursday that Hungary had seen a rise in both the number of births and a 5.7 per cent rise in the fertility rate in the first four months of this year, compared to the same period in 2019.

“Good news again!” she stated added that marriages have also increased with one-and-a-half more marriages recorded this year compared to the previous year.

The report comes after Hungary passed pro-family legislation last year that included a Family Protection Action Plan which increased government spending on families by 224 billion Hungarian Forints (£619 million).

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been a major advocate of pro-family policies to increase his country’s birthrate as opposed to mass migration.

Among the many pro-family policies has been a government grant of 10 million Forints (£27,000) which is initially styled as a loan but can be wholly forgiven once a couple has at least three children.

Mass immigration has never been necessary to solve economic problems. The free movement of peoples doctrine is every bit as much a satanic lie as the free trade nonsense. Pro-family legislation is a moral imperative for any society that wishes to survive and thrive.

Objections from childless libertarian theoreticians to “state interference” are both irrelevant and wrong.

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Hostile Countries

Russia lists its confirmed enemies. This probably wasn’t a good time for the Swiss to decide to abandon their neutrality. They know it too, because the government is frantically babbling nonsense about how economically sanctioning a country isn’t not neutral. The thing about neutrality is, though, that you don’t get to define it. Like a nickname, it’s something that is only meaningful when others honor it of their own accord.

All EU member States,
The USA
Australia
Albania
Andorra
Czech Republic
Great Britain (including Jersey, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar)
Iceland
Canada
Liechtenstein
Micronesia
Monaco
New Zealand
Norway
Republic of Korea
San Marino
North Macedonia
Singapore
Taiwan
Ukraine
Montenegro
Switzerland
Japan

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Yeah, That’s Not How This Works

If the global media suddenly begins rehabilitating the image of Vladimir Putin and painting the Zelensky government as the bad guys who need to be regime-changed, you’ll know why:

Ukraine has called on international financial organizations to cancel the country’s foreign debts claiming massive destruction in the country caused by the Russian military offensive that began last Thursday.

“The scale of destruction in Ukraine … is colossal! In view of this, our external creditors must be required to write off Ukraine’s debts. To date, the external debt is 1.6 trillion hryvnia, or more than $57 billion.

International financial organizations should revise the debt policy and zero out the debts of Ukraine!” the head of the Accounts Chamber of Ukraine, Valeriy Patskan, wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

That’s no way to win the support of the global satanists who rule the West. See, what you want to do is demand that Russia be forced to pay those debts while promising that they will be paid no matter what, one way or another. You don’t fill social media with blue-and-yellow flags by threatening the lifesblood of The Empire That Never Ended.

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A Lesson in Leverage

The former Russian president explains the difference between meaningless sanctions and massive leverage to the feckless European lapdogs of the Imperial USA.

Europeans will soon have to pay €2,000 ($2,200) per thousand cubic meters of natural gas, former Russian president and current deputy chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev tweeted on Tuesday. The warning comes after Germany ordered a halt to Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline certification.

“German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ordered to stop the certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Well, welcome to the new world, in which Europeans will soon pay €2,000 per thousand cubic meters of gas!” Medvedev wrote in a half-ironic Twitter post.

Earlier on Tuesday, Chancellor Scholz said that the German government was stopping the months-long certification process of the Russia-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline project in light of the current standoff between Russia and Ukraine over the Donbass regions.

Late on Monday, Russia officially recognized the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics of the breakaway region, sparking criticism from Western countries and claims that Russia is attempting to unlawfully invade Ukraine.

Chancellor Scholz said he had asked the German economy ministry to make sure the pipeline’s certification could not take place at the moment. “That sounds technical, but it is the necessary administrative step so there can be no certification of the pipeline and without this certification, Nord Stream 2 cannot begin operating,” the Chancellor stated.

The 12-billion-dollar pipeline, which is majority-owned by Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom is capable of transporting 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from Russia to Germany. The pipeline could have been the answer to Europe’s current energy crisis and help refill the continent’s gas storage facilities, which had less than 5% of gas left in them last week.

However, while having been completed in August last year, the pipeline has since hit the wall of European bureaucracy, and has not delivered a single cubic meter yet pending certification. The US and Ukraine, as well as several other Eastern European states, have been voicing protests against the pipeline’s launch, arguing that it would allow Moscow to exert political leverage over Europe.

Nordstream 2 is not the leverage. The supply-demand equation is the leverage. The fact that US and European decision makers do not understand the difference is why there is very little chance they will come out on top in the current conflict with Russia.

The Great Negotiator gets it.

If properly handled, there was absolutely no reason that the situation currently happening in Ukraine should have happened at all. I know Vladimir Putin very well, and he would have never done during the Trump Administration what he is doing now, no way! Russia has become very very rich during the Biden Administration, with oil prices doubling and soon to be tripling and quadrupling. The weak sanctions are insignificant relative to taking over a country and a massive piece of strategically located land. Now it has begun, oil prices are going higher and higher, and Putin is not only getting what he always wanted, but getting, because of the oil and gas surge, richer and richer. The U.S. was energy independent under the Trump Administration, an independence that we had never obtained before, and oil prices would have remained low.

President Donald Trump, 22 February 2022

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