Imagine if tomorrow, the Federal Reserve announced that the top ten home builders in the United States are insolvent. They would cease paying interest on debt and probably would default on principal payments. Further, their bonds would be frozen for some period as the Fed sorted through their finances. It is not too hard to imagine as 13 years ago something close happened when Lehmen Brothers collapsed. It started a long financial panic and then a long recession.
Something similar is now happening in China. The nation’s largest developer is no longer able to pay its creditors. The Chinese government announced yesterday that the firm will not make interest payments and probably will default on principal payments, although that remains unclear. China Evergrande has liabilities over $300 billion, but this is China, so no one knows the real number. All anyone knows is they sit at the heart of the Chinese financial and real estate system.
One thing that is universally true in all times and all places, even in China, is that real estate is the base asset. Mother Nature is not making more of it, so it remains a constant and therefore the basis of all value. It is why this development is not just another story of corrupt financial dealings. As in the West, all land in China is leveraged and that leverage is treated as an asset, which means it is leveraged. If Evergrande stops paying its bill, many other firms stop paying their bills.
At this point, the financial world is not all that concerned with what is happening in Chinese real estate, but they were not concerned about the mortgage crisis in the United States until it was a pending disaster. The old claim that financial markets look forward and therefore offer a glimpse of the future was always nonsense, but the Lehman disaster proved that markets are not the future. The world of finance assumes tomorrow will be yesterday but better.
At the minimum, the Evergrande crisis is a test of the new Chinese model of governance ushered in under Xi Jinping. The relatively loose days of Chinese capitalism are coming to a close as the party imposes new rules on the economy and cracks down on its pirates. The focus is now on domestic growth, rather than cheap labor and exports. China is no longer the cheapest or most productive labor market in the world, so it cannot remain an export economy.
No one really knows if China can successfully make the turn from export economy to one driven by domestic consumption. The breathtaking modernization of the country is impressive, but that required massive cooperation from the West. If the United States had a ruling class concerned with the welfare of the American people, for example, the Chinese miracle never would have occurred. The feckless American ruling class cannot help China transition to a domestic demand driven economy.
The bigger question with regards to China and this current financial crisis is can the Western financial model survive the Chinese transition. For the last thirty years the corrupt Western ruling class has preserved itself like all corrupt ruling classes have done and that is with bread and circuses. The Chinese economic miracle has kept inflation down and money printing up. Cheap goods from China have been an essential part of maintaining stability in the West.
Inflation is already becoming a problem in America. In most parts of the economy, the food markets are plagued with supply chain problems and rising prices. Then there are labor market problems, some of which were created by the Covid panic, but others are the result of demographics. Those Baby Boomers taking early retirement due to the Covid panic are not going to be replaced by the magical people that we see on television shows and commercials.
Of course, the great retirement boom that is just started in the US will put massive strain on programs like Social Security and Medicare. Those programs represent trillions in debt that can never be paid in current dollars. Medicare is now projected to run out of cash in ten years. Social Security has been insolvent for a long time now, based on generally accepted accounting practices. Its assets were spent years ago by the government, leaving it with worthless IOU’s.
People are pointing to the current crisis in China as a replay of the Lehman debacle 13 years ago, but in reality, it is a continuation of it. Starting in the 1980’s, the people actually in charge of the world began to transition the global economy away from an asset based system to a credit based system. The great debt explosion that ensued took many forms and the rise of China was one aspect. Without the massive growth in global debt, China’s growth would have been impossible.
The thing with debt is that it has to eventually be repaid. That means there is a hard limit to the amount of debt that can be generated. A system based on the assumption that debt can expand forever will naturally end in a crisis when that that assumption runs into the reality of the debt limit. In this regard, Lehman, the mortgage crisis and now the Evergrande crisis should be seen as warning tremors. One day soon there will be no way to paper over one of these crises.
Step back and look at what has happened over the last half century and what you see is an effort to mitigate the demographic decline of the West. The reason China was so attractive to the West is she was full of young people. China’s utility to the West is in decline because she is rapidly getting old. The massively complex system that is the Western financial modern is just a way to turn the youth of other societies into cash for the Western welfare state. Their vigor is our safety net.
The trouble is the system drains the vitality of all those exposed to it. Japan was the first example of a formerly fecund society drained of its youth and vitality by exposure to the Western economic model. Korea soon followed. Now we see all of the same signs in China as she nears the end of her economic cycle. The only place left with lots of young people is Africa, but even the scheming of Western elites will never be enough to conquer the dark continent in this way.
In this context, what is happening in China is a sign that the system of endless credit expansion is really the implementation of a system that converts civilizational vigor into cash for a tiny minority. The natural limit on the expansion of credit is set by the limit of young people available to be consumed. China’s future was written in her one child policy and ultimately that would set the end times for the West. Once we run out of kids to convert to credit, the plates stop spinning.
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The Burden of Inflation, Hyperinflation, The Collapse (TM) is and will be borne and suffered by the ENEMY of the Cloud People- The Dirt People.
All the way to famine and mass killing off of Dirt People- which is an expressed desire.
So no downside for Team Cloud – they get Americas true assets of yes Land, but the richest lands on earth in all resources, guarded by matchless geography.
Team Cloud ☁️ don’t see no rain.
This is original. More, please. In a book.
The citizens of the West — clear-eyed on a few issues, and blinkered on others — have been watching their television for too long.
A lot of these issues Z mentions stem from control of the public space (i.e. mass TV) being in the hands of the Leftist Cathedral. It is ridiculous how biased this space is. He who owns the Remote, controls the Destiny of the many. Long term, the combination of CNN and the top primetime shows make the dynasty that rules the civilization.
Quit thinking like a communist. The precipitous drop in fertility (aka “aging”) among American tributary states has nothing to do with the American economic model and everything to do with the American religious model. Progressivism is social sterilization, not quite as effective as the chemical kind but still highly effective. Globohomo turned Japanese women into whores and Japanese men into simps, and while it failed to have quite the same effect on China, it ultimately achieved the same end by promoting the one-child policy. Economics are not even in the picture here. It’s feminism, feminization and gay parades all the… Read more »
Religion, economics. Hard to tell the difference these days.
It is indeed when “For the love of money…”
I work with Chinese women all day long, middle and upper middle class. They are practically indistinguishable from western women. They laugh when I ask them if they have a husband when they are under then age of 25. ” haha, no, I’m. just out of university!”
China has our disease bad.
Simps. lol. Okay. No. Actually, if anything “simp” would be an upgrade. The sexes don’t interact with each other like normal human beings any more. At least the simps pay attention to women (and they hit up all the stereotypes you’d expect). Most youth and middle aged Japanese can’t even walk 50 feet without staring a phone. And this has really become obvious within the last 15 years. For the young guy who isn’t broken and is properly socialized, they can slap ass all year long.
Xi is onto the toxic crap being spewed by Hollywood and Silicon Valley and why he is limiting video game playing to 3 hours a week, banning pictures of emos and wimpy males, etc. The commies are a lot of things and suicidal is not one of them. Whereas your educated white males think nothing of binging on videogame playing and watching netflix while consuming junk food. If we were smart we’d limit video game playing and pretty much ban social media to protect our children instead of using them as digital baby sitters that rewire our children’s brains and… Read more »
Morgorth’s Review or Black Pigeon Speaks?
This is a repy to Compsci and Disruptor below. It akshually is, Vizzini, since we trust His Holiness, the Science! —– Compsci: marching to the sound of different drummers. Many drum tonight. The natives are restless. Disruptor: I agree that, like Fauci’s original fraud, AIDS, an actual vitus as never been isolated, and CSars2 is a basket of symptoms magnified by dodgery and media into a useful “pandemic”. AIDS gave us Gay Power, remember. Still, just as Cuban soldiers picked up a bush-meat virus from Angolan whores and spread it from Cuban prisons to the gay kindom of Key West… Read more »
Science as a guild is just meme shit trough feed for internet Christians. Science isn’t ideological; if it is, it ain’t science. Simple.
Onward to India ! they will be our next china. ! or so the banksters believe .
India’s insurmountable problem is chaotic lack of infrastucture. They don’t have enough water, or smarts, and will probably break up into different states in a water war, trying to place dams on the Ganges. Africa already has a quiet five-way dam war on the Nile.
China is busy poisoning its meager water, air, and land. Water wars are breaking out on every Third World continent.
The only place that paid attention is the White world. Hoo boy…here they come.
Well, India already has a national, digital, biometric-based ID system called Aadhaar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar
They use it for fun stuff like, attendance tracking via biometrics. No more of your buddy punching your timecard in and out if you feel like a paid sickday!
Of course, it is totally voluntary…even though you can’t get a driver’s license or unemployment without it.
On the other hand, those dirty Indian racists are using to track voter registrations….better nuke them from orbit, just to be sure!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar
Globalist bugman talking about how wonderful it is to track India’s two-legged livestock:
https://www.cio.com/article/3172345/a-look-at-indias-biometric-id-system-digital-apis-for-a-connected-world.html
China has a ready remedy: reversion to traditional, hardcore Communism and cracking down on anyone bitching about deprivation. And, in a sense, the totalitarianism spreading throughout the West is a similar reaction to the storm clouds on the horizon. The Cloud People here, though, will face serious threats to life and yacht when their dutiful servants and whores in the political class, administrative state and their personal staff start to experience bounced checks. My money is on the PRC and a shitload of The Best People here turning up dead, either domestically or in their bolt holes. Of course, the… Read more »
A reversion to Maoism, which would deprive Chinese parvenus of their recently acquired wealth, would be a very difficult trick to pull off without losing the mandate of heaven.
President Xi can have those parvenus sent to a labor camp or shot with a simply order and the PLA would gladly obey. Ultimately China is humped no matter what. Its population is set to decline by half within 50 years and Communism will not provide the growth required for people to have kids. In time as the lopsided (as in we aborted all the girls) generation dies and the sex ratios self repair things will get better but this does not guarantee fertility. Plenty of nations with normal sex ratios have low fertility. Over time the US collapse and… Read more »
Not buying India as a nation. Europe has better qualities for nationhood and that effort is a sinkhole to human progress.
Don’t bind the two evils of democracy and diversity and expect something good to come out of it.
Xi could do that, yes, but what about all the PLA members who have enriched themselves? Would they be exempted from the reordering? The paranoia alone might lead to a repeat of the Warlord period of a century ago.
Social Security’s paper is like a married couple where the wife writes a check to the husband for a million dollars and calling themselves millionaires. Social Security’s assets are the liabilities of the federal government, just like our husband’s million dollar check is also a liability he is responsible for. (A Peter Schiff analogy, yeah, a goldbug, but he’s still right). Social Security is going to run out of money long before they run out of paper. If Ryan Faulk is correct, all of the imports of 3rd worlders to pay the taxes so the Boomers can retire is accelerating… Read more »
Simply making all income taxable will fix social security. Its only insolvent because of the stupid pay-go rules from ages ago.
Still if the entire economy collapses as it looks as if it will, nothing will be solvent and we’ll have far bigger problems. The US will be lucky to survive it.
If you eliminated the ceiling on SS tax, I don’t think it would do that much to help, but I haven’t looked at the numbers, so I can’t say for sure. The limit doesn’t just apply to the taxes, but also to the cap on the recipient when it comes time to retire and take the money. How many people make over 142k in wages anyway? The “pay as you go” problem probably is not the root cause of the problem. If not spent, what would they have done with the huge surpluses? Invest it in RE? Stock market? Bought… Read more »
I guess you have not visited a SS office lately have you? If you did you’d understand why it’s losing money. Namely that SS allows elderly and disabled illegal aliens and immigrants to apply and receive aid. And this has been going on since the Vietnamese boat lift. We have tens of millions of 3rd worlders on this scam. When I became disabled and applied for SSDI I was amazed that every SS office visit, the waiting room was full of illegals who could not speak a word of English. And BTW there is a entire army of doctors and… Read more »
That isn’t the proximal cause. Its isn’t good it drains the coffers and needs to go but the reality is that we have a lot of retiring boomers and nearly 50 years of wage arbitrage.
Lower wages and wealth concentration in a few hands depletes the fund more than illegals.
Global debt to gdp hovered around 120% from 1950 to 1983. Since then, it has steadily climbed to ~350%. Granted interest rates have come down dramatically, but the fact remains that debt to gdp has tripled over the last forty years. Again, that level of debt is made possible by extremely low interest rates, but that amount of debt is inherently unstable. Even the slightest rise in interest rates will cause many firms or governments to be unable to service even the interest payments. But it also means that small declines in asset values will bankrupt many lenders. High levels… Read more »
You hit the nail on the head that India is the next mark. There’s a reason Jeff Bezos said this century will be “the Indian Century.” I agree with you though that there’s less blood from that stone than China. It’ll keep the wheels spinning a little longer though.
They will do everything they can to uphold the status quo right up to the second they stop and then all bets are off. India has like ab 83 or 82 average IQ. India cannot save us. This is lower than American blacks. They’re been trying to bring India into the fisrt world really hard for like 20 years. The low interest rates are impossible to raise. Operation Twist should have been followed as long as possible and all of the existing debt rolled into longer term debt. That was really the only way they could have kicked the can… Read more »
We have enough food and energy production. That’s something.
“The feckless American ruling class cannot help China transition to a domestic demand driven economy.”
Sure they can. They’re doing it now. Every point the Dollar index loses is a a gain by foreign currency. They are transferring our purchasing power to the Chinese. That’s what all this inflation is.
Holy smokes. I saw that in Bakersfield. When Xi cracked down on spy chief Bo Xilai, the Chinese generals poured their money into the Pacific Coast: defunct Kern County oilfields, Rosemead (L.A.) office towers, and Vancouver mansionettes. That purchasing power, I mean. Hard-Left Howard Bloom (“Zero Sum”) predicted that China will use the USA’s 300 million consumers to create a floor for China’s 1,300 million consumers. We’re a stepping stone to their self-contained economy (as we used to be). Given Hillary and Hunter’s proclivities, are we about to go full Australia and become a satrapy of the Chinese Empire? Then… Read more »
Note: the Mongol Khans held a bi-annual contest for the barons of Muscovy.
The baron who repressed and extracted from his subjects most cruelly, won the prize: the right to repress them even more.
I see both China and the U.S. as big countries with big problems. The plus for China is that even though they’re aging, they’re starting out with a billion people, and the ones left will be mostly smart. The U.S., not aging quite as badly, rests precariously on the brown JC students majoring in Kill Whitey studies with a minor in social work. China will have a spectacular banking crisis, one that will costs hundreds of billions, even trillions to repair. But when you look at our books, they’re even more hollow. The largest “asset” on the Federal balance sheet… Read more »
When the paper ponzi scheme collapses, China will have a brand new economy loaded to the gills with productive factories, while we have empty strip malls, Targets and Walmarts and a bunch of former factories now empty and in disrepair. People mistake the financial for the real. It will take decades to rebuild America if it can even be done. It will take years for China to effectively deal with all their bubbles.
Exactly. China’s future is China. Ours is Brazil.
A true, but sad upvote (if there is such a thing)
The future was sold as Brazil. But Haiti is what true equity sharing will deliver.
Ideally, we build a wall between New Haiti and our lands, much like the other DR has.
I say Guatemala. The old Spanish Empire legacy families, you know, (((United Fruit))).
>9K Haitians at the Del Rio checkpoint being processed as I type.
I’m expecting Japan to be rising again. Unlike the West, they are not trying to replace their workers with foreigners. What should happen is as all these ancient Japanese start dying off, the price of RE will collapse, the stock market will collapse and a labor shortage and a new generation with access to cheap housing and government sponsorship and good wages will have lots of kids. I saw a talk by Kyle Bass who claimed that 2012 saw adult diapers outsell baby diapers in Japan for the first time ever. That was 9 years ago. It’s got to be… Read more »
That’s an interesting theory. I would imagine that birth rates (and infant mortality) will rise everywhere once the lights go out.
We have what has been called the Bullshit Economy it has been based on paper shuffling, cons, grifts and corporate raiding since Michael Milken came up with Junk Bonds and allowed a bunch of sociopathic WASPs like Romney to eviscerate corporation after corporation leaving a husk. It grew worse with NAFTA and allowing China into the WTO and PNTR.. The worse thing about this, Is even if we reversed the off shoring tomorrow we no longer have the technical talent to rebuild the factories. Sure we have legions of whites with useless MBA degrees and other equally worthless certs but… Read more »
The single biggest advantage the Chinese have is that they don’t have a tribe of “Fellow Yellow Men” destroying their society from within.
“Those Baby Boomers taking early retirement due to the Covid panic are not going to be replaced by the magical people that we see on television shows and commercials.” – This is true. I generally don’t get along with boomers, but you can’t say they were stupid, at least in an academic sense. The magic people we see in TV commercials will sit at the levers not even knowing what half of them do.
You mean the vibrant aerospace engineress who was profiled, complete with photos of her in her favorite Wakanda costume, in the last issue of my engineering college alumni mag won’t develop the next SR-71?
They’ll probably never be another Skunk Works – or the sorts of characters who made that stuff possible.
All of those projects had brains and brawn and balls behind them. Just think of the test pilots. What is Silicon Valley’s latest offering? Some ML algorithm – I bet those QA testers would be attaching themselves to rocket sleds given half the chance! They’re stunning and brave.
Anyway, the fancy aircraft come later. After we’ve crushed anti-whites and their vanguard of misfits and freaks.
Maybe I’m naïve, but Elon’s SpaceX has done some amazing things. Seriously, who wakes up one day and says “I think I’ll start a rocket company?”
Really have put the hurt on Boeing. Once a crown jewel of American exceptionalism, they can’t innovate anymore. They can’t even deliver tried-and-true products without real problems.
Space X is not super novel, old tech reused. Its a cool thing but its roughly what we’d have been doing 3 or more decades ago if space was valuable enough to invest in which BTW it isn’t.
Boeing drastically cut the Seattle based engineering staff & farmed it out all over the world. Problems ever since. However the 737 max Problems were entirely due to poor pilot training by third world operators.
Nah.
I know ALOT about the 737, and the MAX.
Inside baseball knowledge. Ahem.
Boeing executives should be going to jail for the deaths of 300+ people in their product.
Commercial airline pilots aren’t test pilots. They’re not “Chuck Yeager”. And by definition, half of them are “below average”.
Airbus builds planes suited for the 3rd world pilot market. Boeing MARKETS planes for the 3rd world pilot market.
See the difference?
Boeing’s problem is that it’s not run by airplane people but by MBA types and that is how you get tthe 737 MAX which is a study in bad engineering and cutting corners.
There’s a old joke about Boeing that goes a bit like this. When Boeing bought out MacDoug Boeing effectively adapted MacDougs defective management and engineering styles. IOW Boeing is more MacDoug in terms of management than what they used to be.
And this is how Boeing produces a flying death trap like the 7373 MAX.
Here’s an inside pilot (sadly dated) joke:
“Boeing builds airplanes
McDonald Douglass builds character “.
(Because the MD-80 series, while safe, was…well, my god, “temperamental “).
I have an older co-worker, about 70, who has seen “Hidden Figures” and is convinced that a group black women sent us to the moon. He has said it twice and the last time I did a ‘Welll ackshually, it was Nazi rocket engineers”. He is not a dumb guy but has a gay son and he is big in that community so his entire identity is wrapped up in that mess.
WJ16: Usually it is women who project the personal onto the national or philosophical level; when men do it it’s truly pitiable. Being unable to separate one’s own feelings or experiences (i.e. having a pederast son) from what ought to be rationally-derived moral or political preferences (heterosexuality is normal and preferable and homosexuality is not) is childish and irrational and very, very female. You might tell your older co-worker that I, a woman, find his belief thoroughly girlish. Of course, given he has a pederast son whom he prizes, he’ll probably consider that a compliment.
It is possible, that as older men lose the higher levels of testosterone, they have a tendancy to become feminized in their outlook and actions. I am homing in on 70, but make a real effort to remain forward-looking, seeking out projects to plan and execute (within the overall context of an aging body). An active body, and perhaps more importantly, an active mind, can do a lot for a man who is aging. It is sad that this fellow has so much invested in his twink of a son; this can only exacerbate whatever tendency toward a feminized outlook… Read more »
If the writing on those levers is in English, it will confuse them even more!
When debt defaults, the value of the asset balanced by the defaulted debt reverts to zero. Printing currency to repay the debt doesn’t re-inflate the value of the asset. Prices merely rise offsetting the debt by the equivalent cost of consumption. The remedy seems to be collateralizing future labor (e.g. mortgaging the kids.) But that can’t work forever. The future will then be the raw material of capital: land on which people are squatting, what tools and access to energy — sun, wind, water, wood — they have and basic human skills (food, shelter, maintaining one’s health naturally.) A small… Read more »
Great post Zman. I’d like to add a few things. One, Chinese media has been running articles about how their navy will be turning up in Hawaii. Two, the Regency has an alliance with the UK and Australia to pump up Australia’s navy with nuclear subs so the Pacific is not a Chinese lake. Three, with conflict with China looming, it looks like a massive defeat for America as the Regency is still on anti-White autopilot. More stuff out of the Regency on the menace of YT. But it certainly looks like a big conflict with China in the Pacific… Read more »
Nah. The Ozzie sub deal is merely a cover for the Pretendsident to turn over the latest sub tech to the Chicoms so they can easily avoid and neutralize our subs at will. If I were a TSMC engineer in Taipei I’d be putting in to lead the team setting up the new plant in Arizona to get my family out of there and maybe buy a couple more years of easy living. Ol’ Nik has been surprisingly based on WuFlu. I hear she’s even wearing pink to the WH like Reese Witherspoon in that one movie so the POTATUS… Read more »
‘POTATUS’, ‘Tali-bros’… You’re coming up with some real gems of late.
Thanks!
Though, I will admit to borrowing POTATUS from a commenter on Kunstler’s blog.
Now be fair, Geese.
Nikki Minaj, Beyonce, Rhiannon…
You know that long, straight hair is perfectly natural.
POTATUS probably will try to reassure Nikki that the coming Covid Crackdown will exempt peoples of color. It could get nasty either way, though, in which event we will never hear about it.
We know that corporate America will gleefully give YT the boot for vaccine refusal but will they do the same for POC?
Booting Y/T is amazingly stupid as its transitioning Y/T from the “obey the law, work hard, do well” compliance sheep to something rather older school, nits make lice, collective punishment, the Saxon has learned to hate pure blood outlaws. There may well be no mercy for any of the A,B and C Suite or three generations of their spawn . And note it only take a small number to wreck everything. Right now its just open talk about monkey wrenching and scenarios and a lot of hope we don’t have to go there but its reaching a level of scary… Read more »
Think about all the industrial applications of nitrogen gas.
There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of production processes that would instantly cease if they were starved of their nitrogen input.
About the only thing I have faith in anymore is that white men will prevail. I probably won’t see it but I hope my sons will.
FWIW, I know retired carrier guys who say that the US knows that any tiff will kick off with one US carrier going to the bottom of the ocean.
Then the gloves will come off.
Maybe. Who knows? Hard to care about anything the military does anymore. 20 years in the ‘stans makes the US military industrial complex look like the ultimate in grifting.
Other than that more white men will die for nothing, there is no downside to globohomodiversitytrannypowerskirt navy going *glug-glug-glug*. If China defeats FUSA navy and the supply lines of overseas manufactures get severed, this might be good for interior America in the long term. If our international trade links through the Pacific are severed then it is Commiefornia that will be dependent on long supply lines running through interior America from Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico ports. Globohomo might even have to start investing in white men again, because for damn they aren’t to retool our industries to accommodate increased… Read more »
Operators call the surface fleet “the gray ghetto”
The chinks will harpoon a carrier in the next Hassel for sure.
White men, go submarine not SWO.
As my go-to guy, David Goldman, says: the youth have the energy, the old have the money, so growth occurs when the old lend their savings to the young. This one-way scenario falters when there is less of both savings and (educatable) youth. I don’t see any big ideas on how to handle “less”, other than Japanese feminoid robot nurses. Here’s another monkey wrench in the works. Just as the service economy was supposed to replace a production economy, our service economy is about to be replaced by…our phones. Ethereum (stock symbol: ETH) is priced at $3600 per share. To… Read more »
I’m convinced all the cryptos are merely training wheels and prototypes for the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) they want to roll out for us livestock.
The thing with debt is that it has to eventually be repaid.
That’s actually not true, it’s an artifice of Western culture. Throughout history a large amount of debt has not been repaid. Beyond that, large amounts of current debt isn’t actual debt in any meaningful sense.
Whatever troubles lie ahead will be caused by the drop in human capital, environmental change, overconsumption and choice to idle productive capabilities – not because of some figures in some ledger.
As Goldman says, the institutionals will simply re-price the bond markets. In virtual money, at that. As the Stratosphere economy seperates further from the Prole economy, I see our countries moving to a dual currency. Renminbi for China’s self-contained domestic market, yuan for their international settlements. America had Continentals domestically, gold internationally, and scrip locally at one time. Yangbux, bonds, and WebBank this time? Dissidents need to Gab their own bank. A shared pool similar to a credit union, perhaps? (Blacks tried their own bank with U.S. People’s Penny S&L Bank in the 1920s, until the black bank president stole… Read more »
Exactly .Debt defaults and jubilees are a historical norm and what can’t be repaid won’t be despite what parasites think.
The wonders of usury. Or capitalism, as they call it nowadays. Turning youth into cash, leveraging that cash to develop tech so we don’t need babies, don’t need to labor. All of those abortions keeping young women in the workforce. Sure, it was really about empowering women and eliminating undesirables, wink, wink. Now to do away with the old and their entitlements. Not enough kids to take care of them and pay their bills. Guess we’ll see if tech is ready for prime time. I get it, fecundity isn’t a nerd thing, so there has to be a different solution.… Read more »
Worth pondering the roles The Great Reset and AI will play in this. The elite plan to automate most jobs and make the majority landless, carless and burgerless peasants. The elite will no longer need most of the population if they achieve their goals. Even if they don’t achieve them, Western societies will possibly have more in common with Mad Max than 1950s America the way things are heading. It is hard for me to see the soy and feminist Zommers creating a great new society from the rubble. Which brings me to China. China has a lot of problems… Read more »
Every year AI and automation are held up as over the horizon threats that will make a majority of people unemployable – people were saying the same in the 1970s when I was in HS and were probably saying similar fifty and a hundred years before that,
And yet labor shortages or the fear of them has been the norm, with a few notable exceptions here and there, for the last forty + years.
Labor shortages, but where? Seems all I see these days are complaints of low wage labor shortages. And if I recall, in the past even the high tech H1b visa’s were most often in reality a replacement of high wage American tech’s for low wage foreigners.
In our high tech society, I’m more concerned with a shortage of intelligence among all classes of workers. Warm bodies are meaningless.
Construction and legal in the Denver area will hire anyone with a pulse and two brain cells to rub together.
AI is like nuclear fusion: always 10 years away on the horizon.
Used to worry about it. Now I’m mostly just trying to figure out how to withdrawal all my 30+ years of retirement savings out and burn it in a bonfire before it’s confiscated for life’s “less fortunate”.
AI, fusion, and room-temperature superconductors are three great technologies that can solve every problem except leaving a controlled lab environment.
There is no labor shortage. There’s an unwillingness to raise wages to attract/retain employees.
Exactly.
In a capitalist system, there is no such thing as a “labor shortage” – only choosing what is valuable enough to allocate finite resources into.
(We don’t live in a capitalist system.)
Debt can be defaulted upon also. Yes a price will be paid by the creditors, unless taxpayers bail them out again, in which case the taxpayers will pay the price which could be more or less depending on inflation…my head hurts….
“The only place left with lots of young people is Africa, but even the scheming of Western elites will never be enough to conquer the dark continent in this way.”
You’re forgetting India, which is now the most populous country in the world. They have plenty of young people, suggesting the can-kicking might plausibly go on for another generation. Maybe by then we’ll all be growing our own food and sewing our own clothes, and none of these “modern economics” will matter.
Indians are bit like Mexicans though aren’t they? Cheap, but they make poor cogs.
Indians are not quite South Americans. The average country IQ IIRC is said to be 83. How can that be when so many Prajeets are here in high tech and business—caste system. India has several (smallish) “high” castes, with correspondingly high IQ and ability. Those are currently the ones we are mostly seeing. They came here for opportunity and of course, $$$. As India advances—and they are advancing rapidly—they are absorbing their elite castes in high paying industries. That’s how a country with an average IQ of 83 can have a nuclear bomb and develop their own jet fighter. They… Read more »
Compsci, that’s blood calling to blood, isn’t it? The Aryans are trying to come home.
Yes, good call. As with all minorities—except stupid Europeans—blood ties trump most else.
Yes, but the impetus would not be to supplement western engineers but rather to replace the dumb, low-IQ Chinese factory workers with even cheaper dumb, low-IQ Indian workers so that the west can continue to find cheap foreign labor even after China pivots away from an export economy. Parts of India now provide the same labor cost differential versus 2021 China that China itself provided versus the American midwest a generation ago.
Yep, and don’t forget most all of Indochina. Vietnam is booming from producers in America, Korea, and Japan.
Once again, the ultimate heresy must be spoken. The collapse IS the cure. At the root, our problem is not about greedy elites, corrupt governments, or even financial mismanagement. It’s about the devolution of our species due to the extinction of real hardship & natural fitness selection. It used to be that our ancestral environment acted to cull the weakest & stupidest among us, generation after generation; and that took us to the top as a sentient species. But now we not only preserve our societal cancer cells, we celebrate them and encourage them to reproduce. IOW, we proactively hasten… Read more »
We are heading to a demographic collapse.
But you are kidding yourself if you think you’ll escape it by buggin out to the woods somewhere.
It’s not going to be some short sharp punctuation. Instead it will play out over a century or two, cause hardship everywhere and make a lot of rural areas into wildernesses again.
No one can predict the future with perfect accuracy (that used to be common sense), but we are endowed with a rational mind and we naturally take our best shot at prediction; and then either live or die by the consequences. My best guess is that the collapse will be sudden & unexpected by most. In densely populated cities, hunger will drive people to desperation and extreme violence in search of food & safety. It will become a melee of chaos & conflict; many will die quickly in many different ways. Odds of survival, very low & declining. Rural communities… Read more »
Alexander Jablakov writes the best political science fiction. In his engaging first novel, “Carve the Sky”, he notes that “after 400 years of war and plague, Boston had returned largely to forested woodlands.” That rung my bell because I saw it happening in real time in Gary, Indiana. Where there had been suburban lots were now trees interspersed with a few surviving 2-storied hulks inhabited by squatters. Main Street? 10 years after the Apocalypse. The only activity was the Soviet-bloc welfare office, a semi-truck engulfed in flames, and a huge black biker gang funeral, with a purple-suited pastor presiding. Gary… Read more »
The brain volume of homo sapiens peaked roughly 20,000 years ago. Our hunting prowess became so good that we drove the large mega fauna to extinction throughout much of Eurasia. Fire combined with a diet of the most nutrient dense animal foods on the planet allowed us to evolve these enormous brains. This extinction ultimately led to the development of agriculture, which in turn made civilization and the resulting population explosion possible. We have been killing each other for finite resources ever since, all the while gradually declining in intelligence and fitness as a result of the inferior nutrient density… Read more »
And the decimation of the wild meat population drove us to animal husbandry…
which led to range wars, just as grains drove us to irrigation empires and their armies, and storage temples, and written inventories and scribes, and tax levies, and slave laborers, and beer to purify the fouled city water…
And, those priestly scribes administering civilization could draw handily from the weaker grain eaters, since they weren’t wrestling wounded yaks…
This is really good stuff, BerndV.
Sorry, addendum:
A Massai, who proved his manhood and fitness to marry by planting a spear into the chest of a charging lion, wondered why the skinny little dweeb with glasses and a suit from Nairobi could afford a wife, when the Massai warrior couldn’t.
Since we’re getting erudite (which I find comforting), there is some new DNA analysis that suggests a fascinating explanation for the rise of the Mongol Empire during the Middle Ages. Apparently the Mongols consumed a significantly different diet profile than neighboring largely agrarian cultures, which conferred them with greater innate size and strength. That, plus excellent skill at horsemanship, proved decisive in battle. In essence, the native hardships & diet of growing-up Mongol made them a naturally superior subspecies with respect to their neighbors, and it was survival of the fitness writ large. The moral of this story is that… Read more »
Eat millet, man!
And mare’s milk mixed with horse’s blood!
Let us not so easily forget Neanderfellow, who’s brain was considerably larger than Sapien. His physical superiority was dramatic and his tastse and talents were very different, perhaps for that reason alone. Then the meek inherited the earth. Against an intelligent and powerful foe nature selected for the cunning and shrewd, female qualities. We see those qualities in ascendance once again in the democracies.
Quite so. Average height 6 feet to our four.
The largest part of ‘Thal brain capacity was occipital, that is, memory storage. It’s been theorized that they could practically relive ancestral memories, as if the long chain of lineage were a continuous movie in their mind.
That so, their stone axe technology didn’t change for 250,000 years. They had no art.
(I believe this is related to the function of the anterior corpus in Jayne’s ‘Bicameral Mind’. We children of catastrophe use the corpus callosum, in what people call ‘intuition’.” Old circuitry and whatnot.)
Z –
You forget the main driver of this inflation, which is the pseudo guaranteed basic income that is keeping people out of the market and having a direct impact on supply. Additionally, demand has increased since people who normally paying their rent are using it to buy useless consumer goods. Rents payments that would normally be reinvested (or used for normal purchases by the rightful owner) further create a supply issue as less money is being returned to the market. It’s an overall disaster.
The Chinese market, I agree, will give us a bad cold.
I’m sure its the literally tens of millions of dollars in the retail and rental economy driving inflation, not the tens of trillions in the financial instruments markets.
Oh boy, look at that stick! It looks tasty! Chase the stick! Ignore the person throwing the stick!
“The Chinese market, I agree, will give us a bad cold.”
That is one sick burn.
******
Rebel mentions the high end derivatives and rehypothecation markets. Good catch.
But, that means those ‘markets’ and their pricing is purely virtual. Even more so since they’re based on estimates of future money flows.
Does this mean that inflation, being also virtual, can continue ‘forever’?
No collapse of the Cloud stratosphere, that is.
Inflation is neither infinite nor virtual; but it is incrementally moving across cultural space, like a financial lava flow. The globohomo capitals get 90% of gubmint inflation output first. When $100 will still buy $100 of goods, the money is still in NYC/DC/San Fran. They then spend it, mostly on intangibles but large amounts on tangible things. As this raises the inflationary pressures, the suburban areas see inflation; that $100 now buys $80 worth of stuff on the second order. It then trickles down into dirt world, screwing everyone down stream a little bit, taking their stuff for ever-decreasing-worth USD’s.… Read more »
First gold nugget: “are not going to be replaced by the magical people”
Good golly Miss Molly!
There certainly are a *lot* of magical people on TV, aren’t there? I thought they only existed in Internet ads, like Bigfoot.
The cosmic joke is that, while our rulers are sterilizing us with various poisons, 80% of the most prolific breeders on the planet are virus free, despite their total lack of sanitation.
Why? They use Ivermectin and HCQ for river worm and malaria.
Blooper: Corona free, not virus free, as tropical viruses are why Africa is so very prolific.
(And, has so many languages. Those language barriers slow the transmission of disease, but also the transmission of ideas.)
Interesting point, as usual, involving “transmission of ideas”. How too does radically different cultures, tied to radically different population IQ, tied to radically different educational attainment, also affect such transmission? And that pretty much describes the current situation here with our diversity and multiculturalism insanity.
Sars-CoV-2 is the name of the alleged virus.
Covid-19 is the name of the disease, perhaps more correctly, a basket of symptoms, of which having none or more constitutes having Covid-19.
Akshually………
Eventually, you run out of other people’s money. And debt. The problem is like the longleaf pine ecosystem of my home state, which requires frequent fires to end competition by hardwoods and clear out the dead brush. Those in control of the financial system refuse to allow another 70s stagflation/long recession that would deal with a lot of these issues. Downturns in the economy are natural and the system’s proclivity to keep the party going ad infinitum by papering over things with new, unsustainable debt will only forestall a deeper reckoning that will likely be a reordering of society. I… Read more »
Interesting point about the autos. Both on the loans and on joggers driving more Nissans.
Perhaps Nissan could introduce a model that resembled the famous African ‘Technical’; replete with large calibre machine gun mounted on the back. Imagine how many homeys you’ll get with that…
I never noticed it, but then last weekend the battery had died leaving a local watering hole. Nissan Altima drives up parks right next to ours while we waited for a tow. What crawls out of driver’s seat 3 sheets to the wind was… you guessed it!
Turns out, the efforts to get away from the business cycle were driven by the useless grifters that recessions are the natural solution to.
It was never about stability.
My dad, who’s an old stock broker, is fond of saying that the surefire way of growing the economy is expanding population. It’s all you need. He says it in a way like it’s received wisdom among his cohort.
He’s old so he’s said this multiple times. When I’m feeling spicy I’ll respond that “the economy isn’t everything”. This is like telling a cleric from the middle ages that Christianity is subjective. The revolution won’t happen as long as the Old Guard lives.
The culture evolves one funeral at a time.
It evolves faster one culling at a time. And if you’re not part of the solution, then by default, you’re part of the problem. There are no bystanders in an earthquake.
I don’t know that we should be celebrating the passing of the living memory of Norman Rockwell’s America. The very oldest Millennials have maybe just the faintest memory of the Reagan Administration, but even those would be memories of the second term, which gave us Simpson-Mazzoli [and already “Seinfeld” had been shat upon this country less than six months after Reagan left office]. There will come a time when* the Frankfurt School will be able to convince gubmint-edumakated White children that life was always sh!t, and that there had never been anything better than the here and now [which, at… Read more »
No, only by-fallers! Haha… ahem
I’ve long suspected that this is the basic economic model of the ruling class. Their version of SimEmpire is maximize profits by maximizing units. Hence, immigrant good, existing citizen bad – yielding a treadmill society. Bill Kristol exemplified this thinking when he declared that once an existing population is used up (becomes ‘decadent’ in his terms) they can be replaced with a new, hardworking population. What to do with the existing population? Well, they become part of a flophouse economy, driven to deaths of despair. We’ve seen this with the White working class; now it is the White middle class’… Read more »
Marko: I have similar issues with my husband, but he’s coming along nicely. So old(er) people can change, but it takes time and a lot of gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) prompting and pushing. My husband accepted racial reality as a child, and it only took a bit of internet reading to be totally onboard re the JQ. But for years he’s parroted the standard ‘free trade/magic market economy’ line. Drives our older son nuts, and leads to some, as you say, ‘spicy’ arguments. I later sympathize with my spouse and then restate our son’s position (the more populist… Read more »
To add an important point – I think my husband’s customers have also helped change his viewpoint. A lot of them (many of them old(er) and rather wealthy) have or are acquiring rural property or second/bugout homes and have made/are making plans for a crash. Not simply standard ‘in case of emergency’ plans, but ‘bad times are definitely coming and sooner rather than later’ plans. They discuss growing food and purchasing generators while calling my husband for business matters. This adds weight to what he sees daily and my own prodding.
Just show him the Generac lead times. The market is aglomerated cumulative knowledge, right?!
My electrician said not to expect our Generac until around Christmas. Storing firewood, candles, charcoal and a solar battery.
John Wayne: Thats what they told me. Ended up getting it in May the next year. And there is no way that got better over the last year.
There’s GDP and there’s “Per Capita” economic growth.The worker’s slice of the pie grows ever smaller while mass immigration and money printing drives up the cost of everything. It’s a massive wealth transfer to the “elites.”
If only ‘Per Capita’ were spoken of in as hushed, reverent tones as ‘Compound Interest’.
What a great catch, RoBG.
A lunker. (bass fishing term)
My unpopular take for the day: The retirement of the Boomers is going to be a bigger factor in our economic disaster than anyone realizes. The Boomers were, as two of them put it a few years ago, a “destructive generation”, and they deserve most of the criticism that they get, but say what you will, they were a) numerous, and b) generally competent at their jobs (I’m talking about ordinary working class and middle class Boomers here. The less said about the Boomer elite, the better). This also goes for the older xer’s as well. There are certainly plenty… Read more »
I should remark – to bolster point (b) – that in my field, almost without exception, the most skilled have been Boomer engineers. The ones with the most comprehensive knowledge, and the ones that’ll be the hardest to replace. No doubt. Also, many ‘came-of-age’ when technology was still in it’s infancy, particularly computer technology. This has enabled them to experience compleat Epoch changes – and the best retain the skills. I’ve yet to see a lad of my generation that looks as though they’ll be an equal – although they’ve got years to go, so it’s an unfair comparison really.… Read more »
You already see signs of it happening. Attempts to replace them with diversity has been a total failure. I also wonder what is going to happen to all their assets. Boomers still own a ton of real estate, some still have multiple homes. Many of them will be too greedy and believe in their own immortality and will let the nursing homes get a big chunk of their life savings rather than gift it to their kids.
Barnard: For at least five years I’ve seen references to various articles by blacks claiming that Whites working to accumulate and pass on assets to their posterity is rayciss, or demanding that Whites leave their homes to blacks to make amends for their genetic privilege. Add in the UN’s Agenda # whatever, and the push to get us all living like bugmen in high rises and eating no meat, and it’s easy to see narrative’s direction. Whether I see headlines about housing or food or medicine or vehicles or whatever, the underlying message is always that Whites have had it… Read more »
There’s no doubt that Boomers have been slow to come to terms with their own mortality, and indeed they have many, many other faults; but the attitude of many Boomer-Haters (like Vox E. Coyote, Super Genius) that all of our problems will be solved once the last Boomer kicks the bucket are deeply misguided. The Boomer elites, from first to last, were possibly the worst elite ever produced by any generation ever – but it’s very largely working class and lower middle class boomers (along with a few Xers and Millennials, but not enough) that have kept this clown show… Read more »
The health care industry is definitely going to end up getting most of the boomer assets. Current medical technology is extremely good at preserving life, but not quality of life. Fifty years ago old people tended to drop dead of a stroke or heart attack while they were still ambulatory. Now most people can look forward to 5-10 years of being crippled and requiring a nurse.
Of course.
What the US actually has is a sickcare system intended to inculcate dependency so they can convert the individual into an income stream to be milked dry.
Pissing & moaning is not going to get you to the other side. You better bring more to the party than just a talent for whining, or you won’t make into the second week after collapse.
We’re comparing notes in-between our sets of pushups, recon, and canning stewed possum.
What will be ‘interesting’ as well will be how the boomer wealth goes in the twilight. An economy based on turning children into lamp oil is bound to create the kind of generational issues we see in our people. I am already seeing much angst in the millennials I know who fret over their boomer and genx parents burning the oil 24/7 as opposed to setting them up for a soft-landing into middle class. After all they went to college and stuff. But many others are living at home or in second investment properties owned by their parents and working… Read more »
The smart Boomers will be very proactive in gifting to their children and grandchildren, assuming they have any grandchildren. The others will see it divided between the government and long term care facilities. Or even worse, many have been giving their wealth away to institutions that hate them and their descendants, like their alma mater or some Conservatism, Inc. grifter. It is a safe bet the overwhelming majority of the $8 Kim Klacik raised for her hopeless House race in Baltimore came from white Boomers.
Barnard: Spot on. My years of calling or writing to demand our name be removed from mailing lists (or returning $ requests with a NO!!! and pennies taped on for free return postage weight) are finally bearing fruit, but we STILL get an obscene amount of begging mail. From churchian orgs, from gun orgs, from ‘retirement’ orgs, from pseudo-anti-immigration orgs, from all of Conservative, Inc. Hell, we went to a couple of Dallas plays years ago and got artsy/fartsy mail begs for years thereafter. My own Silent parents were not extreme consumers, but my mother has ensured just about everything… Read more »
Nah, really wise men plant tranches of hardwoods and pines in curated groves, so that when his sons come of age, he has hardwood to build their houses and market pine to pay for it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
The “Boomers” are a large cohort. The vast majority aren’t one-percenters, or even ten-percenters.
Tend to agree. I’m almost last of the “official” Boomers (early 60s); my cohort benefitted because we were, so to speak, the rear guard. By the time we showed up, the school had been built, the jobs available, and so forth. Alas, this may be a disadvantage too. Speaking as if looking back from a future: the vanguard (1945-onward) got to enjoy more of their retirement years before the system slowly failed (perhaps quickly, at some critical point?) In my own case, I’m glad I was able to “retire” in my 40s. How long it’ll last, I don’t know. Private… Read more »
I’m not looking forward to “This Week’s Bridge Collapse” as a regular Friday feature on the local news. Or hearing about the defeat of the 7th Tranny Cavalry during AINO’s fourth invasion of Afghanistan.
3 home run articles in consecutive at bats this week. Even for the Zman – quite a feat. That China’s future was / is written in the one child policy will prove the demography is destiny theorem. When they too run out of kids to convert to credit, and when the plates do stop spinning – how large a crash depends on how many and how rapidly the plates fall. My own guess is the mess of broken plates on the floor will be quite large. All that notwithstanding, good to remember that for the Chicoms – capitalism is a… Read more »
Bow down and scrape before me, Dissidents, for I represent the upper class of tomorrow: a couple aging vehicles, (paid for), a house, (paid for)… and no debt. For now I am debt free.
At least, until the donkey faced AOC notices my pittance, I suppose…😂👍
So how long can Western elites continue to pretend that Africa and uts spawn are viable. Biden occasionally let’s slip that we “have to find a way to live with them”.
How long can they stay delusional?
Oh, don’t worry about that. Much as China’s “miracle” wouldn’t have been possible without a feckless US “elite” selling out its people, so The Most Important Graph in the World doesn’t exist without truly massive foreign aid, mostly (but certainly not exclusively) courtesy of the US taxpayer.
Want to see a real pandemic, of Ebola 2.0 or whatever? Wait until the money spigot gets turned a notch or two towards closed, and Africans start dying en masse, with the inevitable war, cannibalism, etc. I’d give it 10, 15 years, tops, from now.
“Wait until the money spigot gets turned a notch or two towards closed, and Africans start dying en masse, with the inevitable war, cannibalism, etc. I’d give it 10, 15 years, tops, from now.”
Lol. No matter how much the global money supply is constrained, you know there will *always* be enough money found from somewhere to import all those vibrant cannibals to Europe.
Not so, the ongoing imbroglios within and between Kenya, Egypt, and Ethiopia are due to too many people on too little dirt and, more importantly, water).
Water is the one non-fungible factor always and everywhere. I feel bad for all those people out west who depend on water for hydro-power as well as the necessaries. That area was never meant to acommodate the number of people who wish to live there.
Mr. Generic: While the government and ngos will never stop importing non-Whites, the credit life will come to an end sooner or later – or, as many of us believe, in the next 5-10 years. Even in today’s covid economy, there just aren’t enough Whites going hungry and homeless. Wait until that reality starts to bite – until it’s not just somewhat feckless young’uns living in mom’s basement but previously ‘successful’ sons and daughters losing their apartments and big city lives. The economic experiment we’ve been living in since the end of WWII is coming to a close, and the… Read more »
we have to find a way to live with them
The key word there would be the preposition, “with”.
In theory, an entire ocean separates “us” from “them”, but that didn’t stop the sephardic chattel slave traders of 17th Century Holland.
Medieval scholars argued usury was immoral because creating money out of thin air and loaning is essentially loaning something that doesn’t actually exist. Or, as Aquinas said: “I answer that, To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice. In order to make this evident, we must observe that there are certain things the use of which consists in their consumption: thus we consume wine when we use it for drink and we consume wheat when we use it… Read more »
This doesn’t get talked about enough!
Never thought of it like that. This is literally the case with a mortgage and probably the case with money itself, since it’s loaned into existence.
This is going to to be a MESS.
Indeed. I found Murray Rothbard’s book What Has Our Government Done to Our Money most educational regarding how ‘money’ is created.
This whole magic show is truly astonishing, frankly.
Once the idea of an object slips its physical bounds there is nothing stopping that idea from slipping toward infinity. Kind of like how once a nation of a people becomes a proposition the people only matter on paper as a means to sell more paper; import more people. The real dagger is that as that idea moves further from its real form (becomes less real), it becomes more “valuable”. An object has finite utility, but oo la la a derivative of that object has exponential value potential. A homebuyer buys the house once but the mortgage paper can represent… Read more »
I suspect Aquinas would not have been enamored of fractional reserve banking.
The idea of usury more complicated than Aquinas states, especially when talking about time preference. There’s plenty of gray areas in the discussion, but the immorality of fractional reserve banking isn’t one of them.
Aquinas would be baffled by our modern lending. The interest is so low it is barely worth noticing, relative to what he would have experienced. Cheap money in his time was 25%, while pawnshops charged 80% interest. Money lenders preyed on the desperate. Today, the desperate are the banks looking for someone to borrow.
zman: Is that truly the case? While we experienced no trouble getting a modest land loan recently, our real estate agent told of countless deals and offers falling through due to lack of financing. For every NY/Cali locust offering cash sight unseen, there were others from all over the country that wanted to buy and just could not get loans – not merely for land, but conventional mortgages for already-built homes.
Nobody was refused a loan offering 20% down the old fashioned way.
I am curious about your thoughts on usury. On one hand, if a lender cannot be compensated for making a loan then there will be no loans. This seems like a bad outcome.
On the other hand, history shows that usury always causes a small number of lenders to accumulate vast resources, exacerbating unnecessary inequality.
The solution is easy bankruptcy. When the lender faces risk AND reward then he has good motivation to proceed.
Usurers doesn’t like the concept of risk.
But money itself has changed, back in the day money was Gold/Silver, today is paper or numbers on a screen
The gold standard was the result of, not the reason for, a more stable society back in the day. It’s a accepted as a great foundation for currency, true, but it’s still just a tool. For all the efficacies foisted onto gold, it never stopped governments from seizing it when convenient. Hell, as Libertarian constantly bemoan, the gov’t simply stopped using it as a standard.
There’s the inter-bank rate (LOL!) and there’s the commercial rate. Oddly the rate setting always benefits one and hamstrings the other.
The very idea that inequality is contrary to justice is bull crap. That is Antifa theology right there. And I don’t care if Aquinas said it or if Franklin said it.
Justice is the equal treatment of people in a society. Injustice is the multi layered system currently employed by our overseers in the former USA.
Equality can only be obtained by the forced taking from one/or some for the benefit of redistributing it to others. We call that theft.
Aquinas’ definition of equality and the modern definition are not the same, *at all*.
Hoagie: While antifa and blacks may be calling for what they term ‘equality’ (i.e. taking Whitey’s stuff), I would term what most here prefer as rather a lessening of blatant income inequality that has been enabled by financial manipulation and immigrant-driven labor market expansion. Two very different things.
Change your diapers, Hoagie.
Z: Once we run out of kids to convert to credit, the plates stop spinning. A few days ago, it was the LAUSD demanding v@xxination of kids 12 and older. But in today’s news, Marin County is pushing for children 5 to 11 to be v@xxinated. [San Francisco Chronicle; Sep. 15, 2021; Amy Graff] The median income in Marin County is $110,843 [versus a median income in LA County of $81,912]. WTF are these lunatics thinking? That they’re gonna sterilize and/or murder everyone else’s children, but somehow not their own [who I guess are gonna be homeschooled]? Or maybe there… Read more »
These types of people view their own children not as humans but as status symbols and tools for virtue signalling. They really could care less if grandchildren never come, as by then their props will have long outlived their usefulness.
Not just that. There’s another deeply sinister belief at play.
Since children are at incredibly low risk from Covid, the only reason to vaccinate them is to reduce their likelihood of transmitting the virus to their elders (let’s set aside the leaky nature of the vaccines for the moment). Put another way, that means the adults want to use the children as HUMAN SHIELDS.
A society that would use children in this way doesn’t deserve survival. And probably won’t have it.
Given that the gene therapy does *not* prevent transmission, it’s stupid *and* evil.
Filed in my top 5 harsh realities & brutal truths of Wuhan flu plague
The progressive death cult has always relied upon child sacrifice. “give us your children”. I’m not a particularly good Christian, nor easily animated by biblical theology, but watching how the left and all its progress has been destroying children over my lifetime has been the primary force in forging my belief that leftism, progressivism, whatever hat it wears, is evil. Which is also why I see no point of negotiation or cohabitation with those who take up the work of evil, if even under the banner of benevolence. To my friends in the civnat “middle”: there are only two sides,… Read more »
Screwtape: Bravo, sir. Even for the normies and churchians, acknowledging the existence of genuine evil (as opposed to misguided or the addicted or mentally-ill) is a struggle. If you can’t recognize evil/Satan and his works in today’s world, you’re not someone I want around even if you’re White.
The vaccines of very close to zero positive benefit to the young and healthy, because they are at near-zero risk of serious complication of COVID-19. Because the vaccines appear to have occasional injurious effects (e.g. heart inflammation, shock, death) plus unknown and unknowable potential long-term harms, some have already opined that they are a net negative for the young and healthy, perhaps even for anyone below middle age. And now let’s go back to that “leaky nature” as it’s a salient feature of the vaccines. At best, the vaxxes reduce the chance of serious illness/death in the vaxxed. They cannot… Read more »
The data would seem to be there, but suppressed. Israel comes to mind. Unless the reports from their national health are faked, the majority of new hospitalizations are vexx’d. The country touts 85% vexx’d rate (a vaccinologist’s wet dream) and now will mandate boosters. So, there must be transmission from vexx’d to vexx’d given the numbers. The strain is Delta if I’m correct. Masking is universal and has been there for a long time. To all reason, the country should have achieved the much discussed “herd immunity”, but to what effect? I suspect the same will occur here, but those… Read more »
Marin goodwhites poisoning their whole population to distinguish themselves from the deplorables is their local equivalent of a burglar asphyxiating in a hood pawn shop heating duct.
Vaccinated children = oversized gold chains.
America’s dumbest criminals.
Vaccinated children = oversized gold chains.
I think we can all go home until tomorrow.
Hemid just won the internet for today.
Not My Usual Pen Name: Yesterday there was a headline in the Daily Mail indicating that Pfizer was seeking approval for its vaxx for use for infants aged 6 months and up. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9993523/American-BABIES-given-low-dose-Pfizers-jab-winter.html
The medical excuse for vexxing infants has alway been their weak and undeveloped immune systems. Somehow, exposing them at an early age will assure lifelong immunity. Last I read there were over 40 vaccines a nervous mother could inflict upon her offspring. My how things change when $$$ is involved. When I was young, polio vaccine was the only shot I got. Then later in grade school, some other shots I was not informed of. Was perhaps 3. Oh and there was of course, Smallpox—which was unknown in the US or even South America at that time. That was it.… Read more »
I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered the children of the elite, but they’re more often just more broken people than the children of the dirt people (to rift Zdude here).