A popular narrative among libertarians, gold bugs, doomsday types and other pessimists involves the end of the dollar. Because of the structural flaws in fiat money, the abuse of the dollar’s reserve status, excessive money printing, the prettiness of gold or other factors, the world will one day decide that it no longer wants to use dollars and the dollar will collapse. Peter Schiff has built a media career using a combination of these causes to predict the end of the dollar.
There is an old joke about the market pessimists having predicted ten of the last three market crashes that applies here. The people predicting the end of the dollar, or the petrodollar as many prefer, have been making this prediction since Nixon closed the gold window fifty years ago. All of the predications have turned out to be wrong, but that has had no impact on the dollar pessimists. It turns out that there is good money to be made in being wrong about the dollar.
There are a number of reasons why the dollar remains the global currency, despite the abuse of it by the Global American Empire. This post on Revolver by an anonymous former U.S. Treasury official covers some of the major ones. The simple elevator speech on why the dollar remains the reserve currency is that the major powers of the global economy prefer it for now. China, Russia, India and the OPEC cartel continue to use the dollar as they work on the coming alternative.
That last bit is an important part of understanding what will come in the next decade with regards to global currency. The unipolar world controlled by Washington is slowly slipping away, being replaced by a multipolar world. For ideological and practical reasons, Washington is fighting this with all of its might. It is a losing fight as a unipolar world was an accident of 20th century history. It turns out that Samuel Huntington was right and Francis Fukuyama was wrong.
The great challenge of this age, it turns out, is that the emerging civilization centers of the world are emerging into the unipolar world. On the one hand, they need to remake the world order to reflect this new reality. On the other hand, they still depend in significant ways on the old structures from the unipolar order. They cannot overthrow the old order without incurring significant costs. Of course, there is the Global America Empire, which stands athwart history yelling “stop!”
In this regard, the dollar is a symbol of the current crisis, because it is the symbol, the primary tool, of the old unipolar order. Just as removing the dollar as the reserve currency would bring about significant economic costs, removing America as the center of the global order brings serious risks. Not the least of those risks is an increasingly unstable political class armed with nuclear weapons. Joe Biden prattling on about nuclear war does not inspire confidence.
The result is the emerging new power centers are becoming extremely cautious as they proceed down the path toward a multipolar world. China could take Taiwan by force if it chose, but that brings risks it is unwilling to assume. It is not just the cost of war, which would be significant, but also the cost of victory. The sight of an American carrier, on fire, sinking into the Pacific could collapse the American empire. That would take the dollar with it and everything that counts on it.
Similarly, the Russians could have hit back at the West over the economic sanctions, but instead it has simply chosen to avoid them. The reality is, every European country is looking for ways around the sanctions. These workarounds are costly and they are hollowing out their economies, but they are the better than alternative. For Russia, the sanction regime is mostly a nuisance, but it buys time as they and the other emerging global power centers build their infrastructure.
In a way, we are seeing a real world example of what Joseph Tainter described in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Collapse is only possible if there is no supporting structures surrounding the society. The Western Roman Empire collapsed because there was nothing around it. It was a complex society in isolation, as what surrounded it was a collection of tribal societies. America, in contrast, is deeply connected to the other complex societies.
Instead of collapse, what we are seeing is a controlled demolition. The Russians, for example, would welcome the return of rational governance in Europe, they would prefer to avoid radical change. An economic crisis could easily trigger a political crisis and unleash sudden political change. The last two times this happened have not been good for Russia. The first time brought Napoleon to Moscow. Of course, the last time it brought Hitler to Stalingrad.
China, India, the OPEC countries and even Brazil have similar concerns with what lies between the present order and the multipolar order that is coming. The Global American Empire, including its control of the global reserve currency, is an obstacle that lies between now and then, but it is a problem that must be carefully managed. The efforts by Washington provoke a crises in Asia and Europe are viewed as an effort to derail the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar world.
This brings us back to the dollar. If the world avoids catastrophe, then it will avoid the sudden uncontrolled collapse of the dollar. Instead it will be a slow transition to a world of multiple trusted currencies that rely on separate financial systems. Those currencies will be linked to the only true global commodity, which is energy. The relative strength of each currency will reflect the trust and accuracy of the corresponding financial systems that make transacting in the currency possible.
What this means is the petrodollar will slowly become the petro. All the large global currencies, including the dollar, will be pegged to the supply of energy, plus or minus the relative trust of the political systems of the issuing society. Again, this assumes the world avoids catastrophe. If a controlled demolition of the Global American Empire proves impossible, then all of those off-grid living videos you watched will suddenly and explosively come in handy.
If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.
Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at
sa***@mi*********************.com
.
correct geese. and the agenda is still moving along.
Hmmm. From my lofty perch up here in the Peanut Gallery…. I’m not sure of what I’m seeing. But… Putler flips the bird at Globohomo. He kicks the jews out of his financials, and ties the Ruble to the gold standard. The world beats a path to his door.
Have I got that much right?
The push towards “Green Energy” is undoubtedly a thinly veiled recognition on the part of the GAE’s ruling elite of the primacy of energy as the only real “reserve currency” that matters. Basically, they aim to create a tightly woven regulatory framework that will artificially constrict the energy supply by requiring new housing, businesses, etc… to use “green” energy. Since green energy is mostly a fraud that has to be carefully subsidized using real (i.e. fossil) energy and since the GAE can dick around with those subsidies on a whim, this amounts to a “fiat-ization” of energy.
Thankfully for the world (and for us after we ride out the inflation) this is probably a Hail Mary play on their part. It does, however, make use of one of their genuine and so far uncontested assets, which is their control of millions of Blue Check zombies in the metropoles. If anyone is willing to freeze in the dark for Uncle Sambo while patting themselves on the back for “making the sacrifices needed to beat the Ebil Russo-Nazis and power the Green Unicorn Fart Future” it’s these people.
Anyone doubting the value of this zombie army need only look at the West’s (entirely self inflicted and nearly fatal) wounds incurred during the Covid panic. My guess is that the Empire’s planners are banking on the ability of the Blue Check Army to mind-fook the world into an energy crisis and then an obsequious submission to the Regime’s coming Soviet-style carbon rationing scheme. To make this work, of course, they need to prevent anyone from “cheating”, hence the aggression towards Russia and China.
My guess is that this is a bridge to far. The Blue Check Army, after all, was always a bunch of hysterical women and mercurial sexual degenerates. This is NOT the army of Stalingrad. The world is also wise to their tricks after the Covid debacle.
Respectfully, I disagree. Mostly because I don’t think they are capable of planning that far ahead or keeping track of that many chess pieces.
The green energy grift, to me, seems like a virtue signal within and amongst hive creatures.
Mishandling our currency is a whole different line of incompetence. Add in the gratuitous wars, and it tells me they don’t have a plan other than getting and keeping money/power.
Oh I actually agree with you. They can’t manage the complexity of anything like this. That’s why it’s a Hail Mary. This is undoubtedly one of those things that a few Big Brain types *think* they’re going to be able to micromanage to their benefit. It’s the kind of thing that might have had a 65% chance of success – in 1990 and riding on the then huge prestige of the GAE and the abject state of Russia and every other power.
What will actually happen today is that (ironically many of the same BB people) will also sabotage the whole thing because they will be unable to resist making fortunes trading carbon credits or making back room deals to personally enrich themselves. In some situations they will be forced to gamble *against* the “Green Dollar” the same way Soros made his initial fortune betting against the British Pound. After all, how do you make sure the team you’re betting against in the playoffs loses? By being that team’s goalie of course.
Then there are the millions of borderline psychotic Juggalos in the Blue Check Army itself. Controlling these people and keeping them on board the Green Gravy Train will be extremely difficult especially because even the official Plan doesn’t allocate much gravy for them at all.
So yeah, it’s unworkable. In the short run though it does make a good virtue signal grift for the insiders and offers huge profits when they eventually pull the rug out from under the greater fools.
Let’s try to catalog some of the problems we face.
1) self imposed energy crisis
2) open borders
3) currency wars
4) degeneration of the population
5) corrupt federal bureaucracy
These problems are all occurring all at once. This is a recipe for massive unrest if not collapse,and remember unrest cannot result in a voter revolt because Democrats have fixed that problem. It has nothing left to do but fester. We may collapse faster than the world would like us to collapse.
We recently had a new hire at work. He was a freshly minted doctorate but he wasn’t very smart and physically uncoordinated, in other words he was a walking disaster. He gave notice before we could fire him because he couldn’t pass his professional certification test. He was such a mess that on the days he was in the lab he causes more incident investigations than he was worth, and so we just told him to stay home for the rest of his resignation period.
I know you’re looking for my point, right? My point is that if America becomes that problem, then we’ll have to be dealt with, even without collapse. We can’t be allowed to gawk around the world screwing things up like a 400 lb retard in a candy factory.
Let’s add to your list: inept public education, kleptocratic city government, anarcho-tyrannical rule backed by pozzed jurisprudence, widespread suicidal drug abuse, overreliance on junk carbs in the average American diet, ecological degradation via wind turbines and massive solar panel installations, the criminalization of independent thought, the homosexualization of churches, the deliberate and systemic mutilation of children a la Unit 571, the militarization of the IRS, the sacralization of vibrant criminality, the open calls for the elimination of an entire race, and a noticeable uptick in common littering… I could go on.
You have a point. The world may not want AINO to collapse yet, but maybe AINO has other ideas. We are the baddies. AINO is the rogue state that has to be put down, like a rabid animal, for the sake of future humanity.
The complicated part is that AINO, unlike the rabid animal, has nukes.
The launch sequence for the nukes is quite complex. Even if the president decided to do it, do you think we still have the competence in the system to successfully execute the complex launch system that has many builtins to prevent accidental launch that may prevent a deliberate launch.
All those things were happening 50 years ago. It’s true immigration is a lot worse now. And forced integration is hurting a lot of our quality population.
But the energy crisis and federal corruption may have been worse in the early 70s. People were predicting financial Armageddon all the time under Nixon.
In the long run, destroying the white population will have the biggest impact. But that doesn’t happen in a moment or a decade or even a generation. Or maybe even a century.
Countries such as China are holding way too many dollars that they can use to buy up U.S. assets to allow the sudden destruction of the dollar. The markets are also sensitive to dollar movements so they can’t dump dollars quickly…at least not yet.
“Countries such as China are holding way too many dollars that they can use to buy up U.S. assets”
They’re not allowed to, same way as the Arabs are prohibited from buying up real assets (other than houses and apartments).
complete nonsense. the chinese already own everything from smithfield foods and a massive chunk of our farmland to many of our resort properties. where do you get this crazy idea?
what happens if/when AINO defaults on the national debt; just goes “nah bro, not paying it back”? who will actually be out of pocket? how will it affect joe average?
much of the debt is in social security trust fund, prnsion funds, and mutual funds. so what do you think would happen if social security went broke Bro. and everyones pension went broke and couldn’t pay out either.
well those t-bills don’t pay much if any interest, so i don’t think their value going to 0 would have any effect on SS payouts. it’s my understanding that SS payments are based on current collections; is this not so?
I get no interest on my checking account but if it went to zero value bad things would happen . you misunderstand that it’s not the interest that pays the benes, its the money that was surplus that was stored in treasuries. same in pension funds. also if the fixed interest portion of your 401 K went to zero, and it was 50% of your 401K , you have 50% less money, even though the return on the fixed interest fund had been 1% . Hope you can see that .
Garland is getting ready to steal all the frozen Russian assets. That will make the dollar far less desirable.
https://youtu.be/vWHmGnHW0V0
US will “inflate” the debt away. Everyone is forced on the ride.
about “the end”, Mexico had choosen its fate by taking the aztec emblem on its flag.
I would be awfully ashamed to have emblem of this degenerate people on my flag.
Sangre por sangre, Aztec to cartel, knifes to chain saw, that’s the same horror and devilish cult.
Few could have read more blogging about dollar “collapse” than I have. (I’ll be sure to put that on my cv). It really hit a crescendo around the time the sanctions were levied on Russia. One big problem in assessing the accuracy of such predictions is separating out what percentage of it is wishful thinking. That percentage seems high.
Another big problem with discussing dollar “collapse” is there isn’t all that much agreement on what the term means. Hyperinflation would seem to be a better term to use than collapse, in describing what the worst case scenario is.
There are not any good current or historical analogies, or examples, for a severe hyperinflation of a currency as widely used as the US dollar. By severe I don’t mean 20% annually like we’ve seen a couple of times, I mean severe like you’re using it for toilet paper. There is not much about Weimar, or Zimbabwe, or Argentina, or Venezuela, or Turkey, that is worth comparing to a global reserve currency backed by the empire.
If you read up on this subject you will see a lot of predictions that as the USD is abandoned as the reserve currency, those dollars will make their way back to the USA and drive inflation here. But this seems unlikely to happen very fast. The move away from USD as the reserve isn’t going to happen overnight, neither will the inflation caused by reshored dollars happen overnight. It is most likely to be drawn out over many years. Perhaps it has already begun, driving some of our current inflation.
Thus, assuming the continued decline of the empire and its currency, I think higher inflation than what we are accustomed to is probably our new normal. It shouldn’t be crippling in any sudden sense, but unless you find some way to beat it (i.e. through shrewd investing) then your standard of living will diminish over time.
Or else maybe Russia really does “collapse,” Putin is deposed, China cries uncle, the empire reigns supreme, Davos is ascendant, you eat the bugs, and the dollar rolls merrily along. That all seems a lot less likely than what I was describing. However, you can be assured that the empire has some new gambit(s) you haven’t thought of that they will deploy to support the currency. As I always say, who could have predicted the petrodollar before it happened?
It is a mistake to think in textbook economic terms when forecasting the future of a reserve currency. For the managers of the reserve currency possess power not found in textbooks.
” Putin is deposed”
Alway makes me laugh. If he is it’ll be by the hard-liners and then the West is really fucked.
I believe we are witnessing the collapse now. Utterly brain-dead young folks, moronic adults, regularly increasing cost of living, complete divide between wealth and poor, selective lawlessness (paradoxical, I know), utter debasement everywhere, and a general indifference. I wouldn’t argue that this is a controlled demolition; I would say that it is a controlled debasement.
Exactly. And what is the debasement of the dollar? Inflation! I maintain the dollar has been debased for more than a century, only now the speed is picking up such that even the slow and dim of mind in society can sense it. So, yes, tomorrow the dollar will continue to be the dollar and used in trade, but it will not purchase nearly what it purchased today.
I go to the stores and restaurants weekly and being set in my ways buy the same things. And with frequency never in my memory, I am charged more and more for the same items. I don’t need an economist to compute the cost of a “market basket” to tell me holding on to dollars is a foolish thing. So yes, I do convert them into commodities such as gold and silver when they accrue. Even should I have to convert those commodities back into dollars in the future, I’ll be ahead of the game.
Energy too Compsci. Those assets will compound the gains of inflation. They carry more risk, but they carry far more upside and not as much risk as holding cash.
On top of that is leverage on the, “energy transition.” They incentivize lack of investment, the demand goes up thanks to the transition, the new supply takes a long time to come online due to the lack of investment.
Some amount of PMs is good. They will tax the crap out of the way out of it at some point. Copper, Nickel, Aluminum, Oil (producers and mid-stream), Coal (met and thermal), Nuclear (Uranium today – emerging tech in 10-15 years).
There has already been a big sector rotation, so buy in wisely. Energy is more valuable than gold and silver and it produces income that is levered to inflation.
I use an analogy about PMs I heard a long time ago. It highlights both the way in which inflation continues and the value of PMs. 100 years ago, 20 bucks bought you an ounce of gold. 20 bucks also bought a very nice, tailored suit. Today, 1800 bucks buys you a tailored suit or an ounce of gold. Did wages increase 90 fold in that time?
The pernicious inflation has only become obvious in the past few years (for those that are ignorant), but any thinking, observant person realizes that standards of living have dropped for 50 years. In the 50s, a man with a blue collar job could pay for a house in the burbs, support wife and kids, two cars, and have a retirements. Now, two full incomes can barely rent an apartment. That is the real metric for inflation – the lifestyle the average wage affords. Speak to me not of indexes! The old common-sense reasoning is all I need.
I sure appreciate you finance bros sharing your thoughts.
All good suggestions. PM’s have the possibility of being used directly in trade/exchange—and of course, I keep such in my direct control, but yes, investment in energy related entities has the prospect of producing growth and income.
Things like brain dead youth and moronic adults were common in the 60s. Increasing cost of living was the entire decade of the 70s. The 60s through 90s saw a bigger crime wave than we have now.
The 70s we’re all about debasement. It’s when pornography first exploded. And look at the forms of pornography that were totally legal throughout Europe (especially the Netherlands) that are illegal today.
It’s easy to argue the outlook for the USA and the West were more bleak in 1975 than they are today. Especially considering there was a very hostile USSR at the time.
I despise our fake elites but I don’t understand the passion for believing that Someday Real Soon it’s all going to collapse. It sounds like a wish.
True collapse is pretty rare. Even during Weimar, after military defeat, the abdication of the Kaiser, several communist coup attempts, and currency hyperinflation, there was still enough institutional authority for the cops to throw Uncle A in prison for attempting the putsch.
It’s hard to imagine things will get that bad here any time soon. A British-style, decades long slide into second-rate status is more likely.
Of course, the Germans of 1914 never imagined how bad things would be by 1920, either… so you never really can tell for sure.
Within 20 years, Britain will be so bad the migrants won’t bother coming over because it will be at the same level as their homeland.
And yet the US is still awash in immigrants today.
Most Third world countries don’t have the levels of violent crime, drug addiction, and street pooping the US has right now.
Untrue. If you use homicide as a proxy, the US homicide rate hovers around 5 per 100k lately. There are vast numbers of countries, third world and otherwise, with much higher homicide rates — up into the 50s. Most of the ones lower than the US are Western, East Asian, very authoritarian countries, or countries with really crappy record-keeping (Liberia, and the -stans for example).
USA homicide is at the level it is (but rising) because of the racial mixture. Brazil for example, is pretty bad and we are pretty good when compared, however as we approach the promise utopia of racial mixing, we will also approach Brazilian crime rates.
“If you use homicide as a proxy, the US homicide rate hovers around 5 per 100k lately. There are vast numbers of countries, third world and otherwise, with much higher homicide rates — up into the 50s.”
Correct. You have to compare like with like. The inner cities, which are filled with joggers, can compete with African countries. The lily-white suburbs can compete with Europe (well, Europe minus immigrants).
As bad as Britain is the U.S. is far worse off than any of the European countries regarding immigrants. They are catching up though.
Sorry but I have to disagree with your view. Most societal collapses in history are accompanied by horrific conditions compared to what existed before the collapse. The gentle British decline was an anomaly due entirely to having the US, a staunch ally, there to take its place as the global hegemon. We (the current US) have no such ally to help us gently decline. We have a world full of adversaries salivating at the chance to get their kicks in on the dying beast. It will be ugly.
The British people were European so still had the IQ and culture to maintain a functioning society whereas the US..
Yes, the slow British decline was about force projection. The UK tried to punch above its weight in two world wars and eventually paid the price. The UK still had a higher IQ, lower crime rate and longer life expectancy than the US.
“Most societal collapses in history are accompanied by horrific conditions compared to what existed before the collapse. The gentle British decline was an anomaly”
I’d say that getting 750,000 young men killed in World War I and then getting almost 400,000 killed 25 years later qualifies as “horrific conditions.”
There was no genuine need for Britain to have fought in either of those wars.
One positive of a complete societal collapse would be the alleviation of the need to restrain ourselves from rounding up the leftists and, well, you know…. “Dealing with them”. That would be worth going through the hell of the collapse…
So what is it? War to keep the petro dollar or
Fight for green energy to replace petroleum
Both! Why do you really think they’re pushing green energy? It ain’t to save the environment. But it might be easier to control for a country who squandered its oil wealth and has only been kept relevant via fracking.
I’ve posted this here before but i’ll post it again:
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
I know he’s a communist but his take is still the best i’ve seen that doesn’t go totally bat shit crazy (they’ve been planning this for 50 years! Its aliens i tell ya! Little robots in your blood ect ect)
Would love to hear your take Zman.
“The bottom line is that the paradigm shift underway is the necessary condition for the (dystopian) survival of capitalism, which is no longer able to reproduce itself through mass wage-labour and the attendant consumerist utopia.”
The bigs always seem to find a way to come out on top of the messes they create. Almost like that’s how they consciously do business. Calling it a self-fulfilling prophecy is perhaps too generous. Maybe this is the blind spot:
“Those sitting in the control room fail to realise the extent to which their dominance is uncertain. What they do not see is that their authority depends on a ‘higher mission’, to which they remain partly blind, namely the anonymous self-reproduction of the capitalist matrix.”
It’s the Selfish Gene again!
In fairness, I’ll talk about the spirit of the age, and that way of seeing things has been criticized to hell, but seriously, anyone interested in seeing the retardation the mechanistic view comes to should read Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
I start from the viewpoint that we don’t really live in a capitalist system. TBTF and so forth. We live in a corporate feudal system of laws for thee but not for me. With regards to being selfish, the covid years didn’t prove to you how selfish and stupid most people are, generally used against their own welfare?
Some rich asshole once said i can pay half of the lower class to kill the other half. Was he right or wrong?
And try to tell these people, try to warn them what they are walking into! after 15 years of trying to wake people up, you slowly start to understand why some of the very rich view most people as cattle. Think back on your life, can you think of a period when the mass of people didn’t act like cattle?
Who knows what capitalism is anymore?
Yep, covid showed most people might as well be cattle. ‘Chattle slaves’, as I got it wrong yesterday.
But the elites are cattle, too (or at least the owners tied to them), apparently having bought into ideas that strip them of agency, excuse their bad behavior.
If you called it demon possession, people would laugh you out. Call it the workings of capital or genetic competition, and they nod in sage contemplation. Call it depravity, and you might get reserved agreement for your moralizing. Which is interesting, because all you’ve done is introduce agency into the mix, while the other two basically differ in lingo.
Interesting times!
There’s a video on youtube of one of the Dollar pessimists on the Donahue show in 1980 predicting imminent hyperinflation. I want to say it’s Doug Casey. Of course, Irwin Schiff, Peter Schiff’s father was predicting hyperinflation back in the 70s all they way till his imprisonment for tax evasion. Isn’t it funny how Peter Schiff went from middle class to 10s of millions of Dollars in the bank while his clients have supposedly lost a ton of money.
They aren’t wrong, its just the same as that quote on the stock market. It will remain irrational longer then you will stay solvent. In regards to the dollar going the way of the dodo, i think COVID was a direct reaction to that. Europe, Japan, and a few others have been enjoying their vassalage to the US since WW2. The people at the top like being at the top, and for quite some time it really hasn’t had much to do with talent.
Being decades early is being wrong.
Maybe, i suppose we’d have to see how they perform when their predictions come true to really judge.
What makes a prediction valuable is the timing. I can predict that everyone on this site (robots excepted) will die. But that prediction is worthless without saying when.
Indeed. All of this makes me believe in nihilism more and more each day.
“Give us the money or we cut of your johnson lebowski!”
That’s my favorite scene from “The Big Short” It’s the money management guy and his boss talking to Michael Berry about pulling his money out. Berry says that he was right about the housing market, he might have been early, but he was right. The smart money management guy told him there was no difference. Early and right is just as wrong as being wrong.
No, it’s being before your time. Most on the DR fall into that category
I don’t think it’s wrong to call what’s happened to Americans’ money since ~1970 hyperinflation. “The dollar” in finance and the dollars in our hands aren’t signifiers in the same market, really, so we haven’t had picturesque experiences like the Weimar wheelbarrow or Zimbabwean zeroes. Yet the average American family’s success at trading its “productivity” for material goods has absolutely cratered, partly for traditional “goldbug” reasons.
Chart fans will enjoy this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Think of the inflation of the 70’s and early 80’s. When did 401ks start? When did the stock market begin to go wild? When can you access that 401k money? What are the odds that a 401k is just an inflation relief valve that wall st milks and shows you paper gains every year?
Honestly i think bitcoin is the same thing.
Also, I know a lot of people dismiss Schiff (and his father) as Chicken Little, but there are some other outside the box financial thinkers that have started sounding the alarm that some big financial disaster is looming soon; most notably Ray Dalio and Michael Bury. While the Schiff family has been ringing the bell for 50 years, Bury was famously about a year early on the 2008 housing crisis, and he believes the looming disaster will be worse. Dalio is a strong believer in the fact that all hegemons have predictable life cycles, and that the US is at the end of its life cycle in time and in numerous signs and symptoms. This is a worthwhile video on the topic.
https://youtu.be/xguam0TKMw8
He wasn’t the only one calling the real estate crash way in advance, but he was ridiculed by the mainstream until it actually happened. And anyone who bought gold twenty years ago based on his advice and sold later made a fantastic return!
First, the sudden collapse of the GAE is a prayer more so than a prediction. It needs to happen in order to provide the impetus for foundational change, which is the only way we can rebound rather than dissolve. Our people are fast becoming fat, lazy, and insane; and those problems cannot be fixed with a simple change in attitude. “Oh my gosh, Bertha, it turns out that wearing face diapers and inviting pedophiles to children’s story hour is not a good idea after all.” There needs to be an interregnum of serious hardship to shock the system into restoring the ancient drivers that got our species to the top of the life pyramid. Yes, this period of hardship will leave a lot of deadweight by the side of road (pro tip, don’t be a couch potato), but survival-of-the-fittest will reemerge with a vengeance and it’s the only proven path to redemption. Get a headstart now: better diet, more exercise (or physical work), improve your aim, etc.
None of that is going to happen. Instead, and it will take MANY generations, an extinction will occur. Right now, the latest generation of children have 20% LGBTQ alignment. Expect that to ratchet up more and more. The population numbers will dwindle because they simply don’t reproduce (thank God). Something else will replace them. Unfortunately, I don’t see that as being any better, it will just be the feral black and browns that pour into the country. Most of the infrastructure will crack and fall apart, so expect to see run down roads and ruined buildings. The smart white population that kept things running will be long gone and you will see America turn into a balkanized land of “tribes”. There will be some gated communities of people who have generational wealth, completely walled off from the chaos outside of them. Away from the sealed off communities will be drug riddled compounds with homeless people living in dumps on the sidewalk (we’re already starting to see that now) along with murder and mayhem amongst the ferals.
None of this is happening in our lifetime, and probably not even in your children’s lifetime. Maybe the generation after that. The decline needs more time because it is gradual, despite the attempts to accelerate by our esteemed ruling elite.
“Our people are fast becoming…”
OUR people? Are you sure about that? In 1970, the foreign born population of the US was about 5%. Today it’s about 26%, and is projected to rise to well over 30% by mid-century. That’s foreign BORN by the way, not including the children of the foreign born, who largely adopt the major cultural traits of their parents.
There’s no “rebounding” with this demographic trend. People need to disabuse themselves of this notion that what the US WAS, will ever be again. It’s over. What comes next is unknown, but it surely won’t be what once was.
Rule of three? If you apply that then the foreign born is 78% of the population and that is just silly. However, it’s not insane to imagine that the 26% figure is a massive underestimation.
“There’s no “rebounding” with this demographic trend. People need to disabuse themselves of this notion that what the US WAS, will ever be again. It’s over. What comes next is unknown, but it surely won’t be what once was.”
This is correct. Not only that, but much of the white population is absolutely crazy. A man in a dress is a “woman”, black people are oppressed and we must worship them, etc. There is no coming back from this. Any attempt at fixing it is simply slowing down the inevitable. This has been happening steadily over decades, with nothing to stop it, why is there any reason to believe there is anything to fix it in the future?
“30 % by mid century” my azz, 30% by mid dcember is more like it
With around 80% of trade and well over 50% of debt in dollars, don’t expect the dollar to go anywhere, anytime soon. The Eurodollar system took many decades to be created and has run for many decades. It’ll take awhile to recreate anything close to it.
It’s a bit like how English became the world language. Once it’s established, it’s very hard to dislodge. Everyone already knows English. They don’t want to be forced to learn a whole new language.
The other problem is that there’s no current alternative to the dollar. No other currency comes close in terms of acceptance. You also have the issue of reserves. Treasuries are used by both the banking system and central banks as their reserve for trading, lending and for when they need dollars in a crisis. If you think the dollar is dominate, look at government debt. There is no other country even in the universe of treasuries in terms of acceptance and liquidity.
T-bils reign supreme.
That said, the dollar/treasury system is unsustainable. The Russia sanctions and seizure of treasuries drove home to everyone how vulnerable they are. Yes, the GAE system benefits them (a lot), but the price has become too high.
The other issue is that US govt debt has become so high that it can no longer afford positive real (above inflation) interest rates. Indeed, it needs rates below inflation to make the interest costs bearable. So now, holding treasuries makes you vulnerable to seizure and, even if the US doesn’t just take your treasuries, you’re going to lose money holding them.
Btw, for all those people who say that the US benefits from having the global reserve currency (GRC), that’s not accurate. Parts of the US benefit and parts get hurt. The US govt, military, Wall Street all benefit. US manufacturing gets hurts. Triffin’s dilemma.
Z is probably right that the dollar/treasury system won’t so much get replaced by another country/currency but by an energy-backed system. Zoltan Pozsar has been writing about this for the past year. That solves a lot of problems.
But it will take a long time to create that system. But something is coming, even if it takes more time than people think.
Everyone keeps acting like running a freaking bank is some mysterious high technology. That it’s something incredibly hard for humans is an indictment of their morals, not a statement about the complexity of the problem.
All you have to do is make sure your damn books balance. Addition and subtraction needs to happen faithfully without monkey-business. The stuff in the vault needs to still be there when the depositors ask for it. Some reserve must be maintained, and loans should be for things that aren’t insane.
“All your alternatives are worse!” is the angry appeal of an abusive husband. All that’s keeping this thing afloat is inertia, and people have been given the kick they need to start casting about for alternatives.
Eventually they’ll find someone capable of running a freaking spreadsheet without being a lying embezzler.
The wildcard is the sustainability of the dollar-debt system. M1 money velocity has steadily declined since the mortgage crisis. M2 velocity has also been in steady decline. The system assumes money never sleeps, so to speak, but every year more and more money lies dormant for some reason.
Then you have the amount of debt denominated in dollars. There has to be some limit on the overall amount of debt the planet can carry. Given that the American finance system assumes unlimited debt growth, there is a point at which that assumption slams into reality.
Crises are like earthquakes. A lot happens in a short period of time that was going to happen anyway, but everyone hoped would happen slowly. We could be inching toward such a crisis.
I’m with Emil Kalinowski and Jeff Snider that something broke in the Eurodollar system during the Great Financial Crisis. You can see it in any number of metrics – money velocity, industrial production, lending, etc. The world economy never got back on track after the GFC.
Kalinowski calls it the Silent Depression, and he’s right. We didn’t have the deep collapse during GFC, but the recovery has been so anemic that we’re worse off now than we were following either the Great Depression or the Long Depression of 1873-1896.
That’s why money lies dormant. It has no where to go. The investment opportunities just aren’t there like they were in the past.
It’s also why govts have had to crank up debt. They’re papering over slow growth, much like Japan since the 1990s.
And, of course, central banks dropped rates to zero to spur lending (and to keep govt debt payments reasonable), but that only push money into financial assets or corporate debt.
But as you say, that debt is the rocks upon which the system will crash. The world is trapped. The debt is killing growth, so we’re not growing out way out of this. The debt also requires servicing and that requires at best zero but probably negative real interest rates.
What happens if the bond market doesn’t want to lose money on their bonds? Maybe more importantly, what if the amount of debt simply overwhelms the bond market?
The global bond market is ~$125 trillion. In 2021, issuance was ~$27 trillion. Before 2020, the US deficit was ~$600 to $900 billion. Going forward, it will be much closer to $2 trillion. The bond market will need to absorb an additional $1 trillion a year in US govt debt. That’s a lot.
Right now, it’s not an issue because everyone is worried about a recession so they want treasuries, but when the economy picks up again, that $1 trillion year after year after year will be tough to absorb by the bond market.
But that same problem will be seen in all kinds of debt. The ability to the bond market to absorb so much debt – govt and corporate – will be tested over time.
“Then you have the amount of debt denominated in dollars. There has to be some limit on the overall amount of debt the planet can carry.”
If you mean dollar debt, sure, that was reached some time back in the precise sense that no foreigner in his right mind wants to buy more. The problem for the Chinese is that they can’t liquidate their US treasury holdings without precipitating the very thing they fear — a meltdown of the US bond market. But they have to be knowing that their US bond holdings aren’t going to be worth much in terms of actual purchasing power. For the last few years the US has been “monetising” its own debt, since foreigners don’t want to buy it. Of course it adds to inflation — but this is something Schiff has accurately been pointing out.
Michael Hudson has been referring to the USD as “hot potato dollars” — if you have them you want to pass them on to someone else.
To paraphrase what some character in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” said, the USA is going bankrupt slowly, but then it’ll go bankrupt all at once.
Zman, do you remember M3? Quite the tell when they stopped publishing it and said it was irrelevant….. and that was like 20 years ago.
Wouldn’t a real energy-backed system enhance the power of red states?
As for languages, for example, the complete set of Japanese kanji is now over 75k pictograms. Including all diacritical marks, the hiragana and katakana add another 142 symbols to written Japanese.
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
While living in Korea in the 90’s, I had a friend tell me that he’d been informed by a local that very soon, “Korean will be the international language of business!” Absurd of course, but their alphabet is quite simple to learn, they’ve pretty much abandoned the use of hanja (hanzi, kanji…) in the written language, and it’s a non-tonal language. But even with all that, why would everyone abandon English when they already have a proficiency in it?
Well, Korean Hangul has a lot going for it, but my ongoing guilty pleasure of Kpop girl groups and solo singers hasn’t improved my proficiency much.
More seriously, Korean is not baked into the international language of engineering, computing, business, and aviation in the way English has from day one.
As a Gen-Xer growing up French was still considered a contender for the “global language” and the “pinky tea-set” prided themselves on pretending to be able to speak it. But really, that was nothing but a hold-over from what? The early 1800s? English has a long way to go as the lingua franca (ahem).
>The Russia sanctions and seizure of treasuries drove home to everyone how vulnerable they are. Yes, the GAE system benefits them (a lot), but the price has become too high.
If ‘this time is different,’ the new trend toward weaponizing control of the global financial and communications systems might be why. Presumably many countries are thinking long term, and don’t want a potential adversary to have such power.
I think it’s always important to quality such statements when discussing the GAE by saying insane. Presumably many countries are thinking long term, and don’t want a potential insane adversary to have such power. I think that’s a better representation of the conditions that exist. When you don’t know what a woman is, and you’ve got your military strutting around in red high heels………. serious nations have to begin to wonder about you.
The cynical take is that our military has something to do with everyone using the dollar. Up until very recently, I doubt this was the case.
Nations around the world used the dollar, because up until very recently, the dollar was trustworthy. Even a few decades after we got off the gold standard, we still had an industrial economy. We exported physical goods. Our services didn’t suck. We were obviously “good for it” when we sold bonds.
We were also trustworthy. Your money was still going to be there when you dialed a US bank account.
We’ve spent the past 4 years (and to a lesser extent the past 20) *performatively* shitting on that trust. We’ve seized assets. (The IRS literally launched a campaign of piracy against safe deposit boxes in LA 3? years ago. Stole 800 million dollars, then defied federal judges when ordered to return it.)
We’ve frozen people’s bank accounts without anything resembling the rule of law (no jury trials, no convictions, just the whims of the police and bureaucrats.)
Davos types publically crow about erasing people and zeroing bank balances as a punitive measure. We decided to not honor the property rights of foreign private citizens from countries we don’t like, and stole their shit.
Now all we have is the military might. No one trusts us anymore. You’d have to be absolutely mad to do so. So no one will keep their wealth with a nation of obvious thieves and public liars.
What’s this “we” business? You and I had nothing to do with any of that.
P.S.: Sorry to be a nagging nellie. I just think it’s high time regular folks stop equating themselves with the sordid criminals who run the Global American Empire. I stopped thinking of myself as an “American” a while back because, quite frankly, virtually nothing that goes by the label “American” these days bears any connection to my own personality or preferences. Consider it a mental secession of sorts.
Yeah, verbal habits die hard. I’m certainly not co-signing any of DC’s shit.
I still consider myself “American”. I just don’t consider this government “American”. We have been ruled by an elite that might as well be a foreign nation, considering how little in common they have with normal people.
Exactly. WE are American. Our criminal rulers are foreign occupiers.
I’ve stopped thinking of THEM as American …
Oops … I see Rando above says the same thing.
toastedposts: This. All this and more. I would argue we’ve been shitting on the trust built up over decades for longer than 4 or even 20 years. It’s like the old saw about democracy being the worst system, but applied to capitalism and now the dollar. It has lost most of its value and almost all of its misplaced trust, but inertia and the fear and danger of massive change keeps it going. It started with ‘canceling’ stupid things like the Olympics and gradually progressed to seizing yachts and bank accounts. Governments have always been thieves, but Washington used to be a little more subtle about it.
As I’ve mentioned before, my husband likes to say the dollar will fall when the drug cartels stop using it as a medium of exchange. He is also of the opinion that there is not enough precious metal in the world to legitimately back the amount of money needed for today’s global economy. That, of course, leaves the question of how long the ‘global’ economy will endure. When there is no longer a more or less honest country to guarantee global shipping free from piracy or attack. When there is no longer sufficient and/or affordable energy to ship things made at point A to point B. When there are no longer sufficient stable, competent White men to keep the system running or to find practical and logical work arounds.
I’m not one who thinks the US will experience catastrophic decline because of the sudden fall of the dollar. I expect a continuing and gradual (albeit increasingly) decline based on debt and profligacy and complacency and hubris and, above all, on demographics. I would argue, in the shorter term (5 years perhaps?) the danger will be in the form of CBDC. When you cannot control or access the legal medium of exchange without government oversight and permission, that’s when the real problems start.
It certainly appears that AINO and various globalists are determined to move in this direction. I make no prediction about potential seizure of privately-held precious metal and/or exchange of old dollars for new, but I do see a gradual tightening of both individual credit and the use of cash. I know that whatever money we leave in the bank to pay bills ultimately belongs to the bank and it can be frozen/seized at any time. I feel the same way about 401ks and any potential retirement account.
Average idiots willingly take their personal surveillance device with them everywhere, and post the minutiae of their idiotic lives for everyone to see. Even if one tries to avoid the surveillance state, it is always there. That’s yet another reason to move to rural property – far fewer people with phones and public places with cameras. I’m sure drones will eventually make short work of even that space, but for the moment it’s the only way to preserve a modicum of privacy. Same with using cash, or buying one’s own groceries rather than depending on stores’ delivery services.
We’ve gotten so far worse than lazy that merely going to the grocery store – as unpleasant as it is today – is too much work for many. Again, time to set up personal relationships for future trust and barter. The eventual collapse of the dollar is a question of when rather than if, but the path to such a collapse is strewn with its own boulders and pitfalls. Look out for yourself and your loved ones, because no one else will. And put not your trust in men, or governments, or the greenback. I’ll end with a quote cited in a video I skimmed earlier this morning: Only the paranoid survive.
Pissing away the enormous trust and goodwill in the USD for nothing will go down as one of the greatest geopolitical mistakes of all time.
Yes lets not forget that these are globalists who believe in a no-border trade free-for-all, and in their incompetence they will destroy globalism. They behave as if it’s inevitable, but with no reliable method to settle trade, no global security, no trustworthy partners, etc. it won’t work apart from some fits and starts.
You know, the drug trade has been really useful in dollarizing the world. All of South America has been dollarized by the drug trade money that has been constantly washing up on shore down there.
Today’s post from Tom Luongo dovetails nicely with today’s post here. I’d love to hear a discussion between Z and Luongo (he’s got a podcast.) Make it happen!
“There is no ‘economy’ folks. There is just you, me, and the 7+ billion other schleps on this planet trying to dodge bullets every day.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/thomas-luongo/be-careful-of-the-goals-you-seek-with-bad-data/
Gave it a read. Dude is a terrible writer. He loves to stroke himself doesn’t he?
As I read that article the thought that kept coming was, “What if our rulers spent this much energy protecting our borders, dealing effectively with crime and albatross populations and facilitating the creation of an education system that enabled our citizen’s to maximize their potential and ability to flourish on their terms?”
Luongo is less tiresome than Denninger, who is constantly reminding us how smart he is and his endless tough guy talk about how everyone else should go commit various fedpost-worthy felonies right NOW!!!
Indeed, ive always found that annoying, though he was an excellent source of info on covid.
If I didn’t know the type I’d think it was an act. He is man of high capabilities, but his ego still finds a way to exceed them.
You forgot another big reason why the dollar remains the world reserve. It’s backed by the United States military, which many still regard as the best in the world. I’d say this is more important than simply those countries just preferring the dollar for now. This is one of the reasons Ukraine is so important to the regime. Russians making quick work of US wonder weapons on the battlefield will leave a lasting impression on people like the Saudis. The petro dollar was set up, in no small part, to protect the Saudis with the military might of the United States.
Our military is based upon shock-and-awe technology that will decimate you within a week, and then troops coming in to do mop-up. In long, protracted containments and land-war grinds like Ukraine they aren’t any more effective than Russia or China. Increasingly, they are dependent on social technologies and NGO’s that make the masses do the regime change for them.
Russia is trying to avoid giving the GAE an opportunity to use these shock-and-awe toys, and have been very effective in countering U.S. psychological operations. Not a hard thing to do, since any sane person can see a culture that encourages castration isn’t something to mimic.
I’d argue the strategy is far less effective in these types of wars because we simply don’t have the manufacturing base to churn out the quantity necessary. As z has pointed out, mass amounts of cheap kamikaze drones and artillery makes the expensive US toys almost obsolete.
Russia is not going to allow the GAE months and months of time to build up a coalition of 950k troops across the border in the same way it did for one of the Gulf invasions.
The grinding approach Russia is using against the West is actually a brilliant inversion of the benefits of the, “just-in-time,” logistics model. One would expect no less from an experienced judoka like Putin.
That sprung to mind with the Bradley shipment where GAE practically sent the daily torpedo firing requirements for the ship to the Russian navy: “Oh no” says Vlad, “you’re going to pay to ship them over the ocean, then pay to ship them over land, then pay to train the Uke troops on them, pay to fuel and service them, and then, once we have squeezed every dollar we can out of you with your boondoggle, we will blow them up.”
I half-think that’s why their offensive on the southern flank “stalled out” and why only contractors have been sent to Bakhmut as it’s too early for this party to end.
“The petro dollar was set up, in no small part, to protect the Saudis with the military might of the United States.”
Probably be more accurate to say that Kissinger threatened the Saudis with “shock and awe” unless they priced their oil in dollars. But if the Saudis acquire another protector or simple stop fearing the US paper tiger, er juggernaut, then we enter another era.
Someone here posted a description a few days back of the contrasting ways in which Biden and Xi were received in Saudi. Fist bump for Biden, a two-hour meeting, and then sent on his way with nothing in his hand. For Xi seven Saudi jets to escort his plane, a meeting with the king himself, red carpet, and extended discussions. A sign of the times and a more convincing sign of the demise of the dollar then the prognoses of Peter Schiff.
I remember when China humiliated Obama on his visit over there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/world/asia/china-obama-group-of-20-summit-airport-arrival.html
Our leaders underestimate how much world leaders despise our ruling class. They think they are, at best, petulant children who somehow got access to dad’s firearm collection.
Who can argue with that assessment?
Chet: For all the European glitterati oohing over the Abomination, a blaq fambly with its overbearing mama-in-law in tow somehow does not equate to “Visiting Leaders of a Super Power.” Even the Euros know this, innately. The Arabs and the Orientals – despite the verbal deference paid to African ‘potentates’ – have a very long history of knowing this.
And a White dementia patient is not exactly a step up, but rather a way station on a clearly-observable road to decline and ruin.
There is nobody else, in the near term, who can guarantee safe transit for Saudi oil tankers.
Sorry, Jeff: I bet any white man under the age of 60 could organize adequate security.
Unless the US Navy starts hijacking oil tankers, I figure five Indians/ Pakistanis with rifles per tanker would be more than enough to keep pirates at bay. $5k per trip. Staff would have to supply their own firearms and ammo. Pay ’em each $500 cash per trip. $2,500 to the arranger.
The USG wanted “Captain Phillips” ship to be captured. US tacticool deterrence doesn’t work if you can’t show it off now and again.
There are a lot of navies with the power to prey on tanker commerce, if no Big Navy is out there preventing it. Navies that won’t have any problem dispatching a handful of guys with rifles. Assuming their goal is capturing the ship. It may be destroying it. I’m not talking about protecting the tankers from Somali pirates.
You have a point. Part of Pax Americana is safeguarding the sea lanes for global commerce. Just as over a century ago Pax Britannica did the same.
Allow me to be the first to welcome Peter Zeihan to the board!
America’s military is highly overrated because America’s economy is highly overrated. Any war with a near-peer who could drag on the war could defeat the US. We cannot reproduce our equipment fast enough to replace it in real time.
During WW2, the US built and floated 90 carriers, hundreds of other types of ships and, 64000 planes! We could not build even a single carrier in the length of time of WW2. Maybe we could complete 1 on an emergency expedited schedule increase.
It was the heavy industry economy of the US which allowed it to fight on 2 fronts. The flaws our equipment had were more than made up for in quantity. The military wasn’t “woke” either.
Yes. I strongly recommend “Freedom’s Forge”, a great book on this topic.
“because America’s economy is highly overrated.”
Agreed. USA’s GDP figures are just as bogus as its inflation and unemployment figures. There was a time when the GDP figure for the USA actually meant something.
the dollar remains the world reserve. It’s backed by the United States military
It is a big factor, which is why the Ukraine war, while not necessarily existential for the US, is pretty close at this point. It didn’t have to be, but by sticking its fingers into it as deep as it has, the US military has put its credibility (or what remains of it) on the line.
As for collapse of the US dollar, it looks more like a “phase out”. It is the current operating system of international trade. Don’t want to replace it suddenly with a new OS without extensive beta testing. It may never be fully replaced, but will lose market share to competing systems. Sucks for us, because much of our economy and well being relies upon our ability to dominate the reserve currency market.
There is nothing to replace the dollar right now or probably for many decades.
No one’s going to trust China, Russia, Brazil or any of the other major players. Europe could get its house in order but that’s not going to happen soon.
Of course, the USA could start doing even more reckless things that destroys trust. Our elites are no longer trustworthy. Who wants to be at the mercy of Victoria Nuland.
Big collapse theories get a lot of attention because they’re fun. But it’s not likely in our lifetime. We’ll probably have to deal with a slide to mediocrity more than a collapse to Mad Max.
Things will never ever change theories are popular for the same reason. The truth lies in the middle, which is the point of the post.
Yep. The destruction of an empire is a process, not an event – at least not usually. Even with the cataclysm of WWI, the British Empire staggered until finally getting the stake in the heart of WWII. An empire that was already on the decline required two massive wars to kill it.
It’s going to take time to destroy GAE. That said, I do wonder if we’ll look back on Ukraine as a key turning point. I suspect that we will.
“Even with the cataclysm of WWI, the British Empire staggered until finally getting the stake in the heart of WWII.”
And even after two world wars that bankrupted the nation, it took Britain’s humiliation in the Suez Crisis a decade after the Second World War to drive home the point that the British Empire was coming to an end and Britain was henceforth a second rate power.
Is there any reflection in England that their role in pushing two world wars backfired on them horribly?
I think that Suez just made everyone accept what was already the case.
It’s funny that the US was there at every turn in the 20th Century to destroy the British Empire. We didn’t forgive their debts after WWI, which caused all kinds of problems – for them and, eventually, us.
Then we bled them dry during WWII. We screwed them over big time and destroyed the pound as the global reserve currency.
And the pound remained good currency for many decades after Suez. Still is, relatively, although it shows problems.
Robert on February 8, 2023 at 10:12 am said:
“Is there any reflection in England that their role in pushing two world wars backfired on them horribly?”
Childish view to believe there’s some historical force punishing countries because their actions upset you; Obama’s “long arc of history” idiocy is a good example of this inanity.
You not aware of appeasement?-Britain went out of its way to avoid WW2;to the extent that Chamberlain is used as an example of the dangers of avoiding war at all costs. The French at the time nicknamed hin Jaimeberlin because of his pro-German actions.
How did Britain push WW1 when it was one of the last countires to declare war? How did Britain cause Germany to invade France? How did Britain make Germany threaten to abandon the alliance with the Austro-Hungarian empire if it accepted Serbia’s peace terms? You are full of it.
Ha! Churchill spent his life inadvertently destroying the British Empire. He did it in a fit of absent-mindedness.
Churchill gave up the British Empire to help Uncle Joe Stalin save the Soviet empire and conquer half of Europe. But somehow cuddling up to Sweet Uncle Joe Stalin isn’t appeasing evil. He was as kind and loving as a doting grandfather!
“Big collapse theories get a lot of attention because they’re fun. But it’s not likely in our lifetime. We’ll probably have to deal with a slide to mediocrity more than a collapse to Mad Max.”
“Mad Max” style post-collapse scenarios at least have the virtue of being entertaining in a morbidly escapist sort of way. No one romanticizes the idea of living in a 21st century version of the Brezhnev-era USSR or the “No Future for You” Britain of the 1970s.
““Mad Max” style post-collapse scenarios at least have the virtue of being entertaining in a morbidly escapist sort of way. No one romanticizes the idea of living in a 21st century version of the Brezhnev-era USSR or the “No Future for You” Britain of the 1970s.””
Who is to say we do not live on one of those dystopian societies now? To wit, my electric bill came and is more than DOUBLE this time last year. Yes, 20% of that is usage, the rest is “delivery charges”, whatever that workaround represents. It is still $440.00 for ONE home. My home.
I live in a suburb of one of the largest cities in the USA and the roads are a moonscape of potholes. Some, craters. Large tree limbs, downed by storms, were seen for months laying against power lines on a main road.
Laborers, our new residents, are picked up and dropped off every day of the week so contractors can skirt labor laws. Zoning laws are ignored, and those places also have out of state plates on likely uninsured cars 24/7.
Every LEO known to man, multiple agencies, set up speed traps and ticket left and right. Yet, the town and county police usually let the State Police handle anything beyond a fender bender.
We pay MORE for ‘water’ than we did for taxes when we bought our home. This ‘water’ bill includes more than the cost of water, and includes new local police cars, which while doing nothing more than writing tickets, they seem to get new ones regularly. The new ones are unmarked, black, and made to look sinister with their various pieces of equipment scanning the plates of the innocent.
I could go ON AND ON. Bottom line, who is to say…?
These things never happen until they do. Surely the Romans thought the Empire would never fall.
Britain in the 1970s was a lot better than present day US .
In most metrics it was a lot better than the US of the 1970s.
Which country had the worst crime rate, family breakdown,drug addiction? The stats are available to you.
“Which country had the worst crime rate, family breakdown,drug addiction?”
Moot. I have been to both countries and they are spiraling consistently downwards.
Brrrp: Can’t speak to Britain in the ’70s, but Britain in 1980 was not better than the US – I don’t know about the stats, but do have real-life experiences. I grew up in a DC ‘burb and attended an east-coast college, but never experienced the number/variety of alien people until I arrived in England. I had no idea that the women who looked like Filipinas in Muslim robes were Malaysians. I had never before dealt with numerous Pakistanis or Africans. The demographic decline – at least up in the area of England’s red brick universities – was startling to me.
My family was very middle-middle class and my mother was cheap. Yes, we had two cars, and we had color tv (albeit later than all my friends), and we had what I considered the standard household appliances. But none of my English flatmates – who all considered themselves middle class as well – had a ‘tumble dryer’ or a US-size fridge. They had never drunk standard frozen OJ concentrate, or eaten t-bone steaks.
I kinda sorta knew about the punk music and style, but had never in the US encountered so many people with so many safety pins and that colored hair Even making allowance for an older industrial area as opposed to US ‘burbs or college towns, the economic disparity was very stark and the demographics were eye-opening for me.
The Soviet Union collapsed overnight, so there is precedent for a sudden collapse. In my experience, people wedded to the belief in a “slow slide into the ditch” do so because they know they are not well suited to survive the interregnum and prefer burying their head in the sand to getting off the couch.
It collapsed slowly at first, and then all at once (to paraphrase Hemingway). The signs of decay and decline were there for maybe around 15 years or so. Signs that a visitor like Secretary of State James Baker could see.
Are you suggesting that the USA has not been in slow decline for at least the past 15 years? Surely it began no later than the Clinton 90s, and likely as far back as Vietnam. The national debt has skyrocketed during the past decade and cannot be repaid; default is inevitable. The fast part (when it comes) will be unexpected and the main reaction will be “Oh shit.”
Greenspan was right. It’s impossible for a government to default on debt that is denominated in a currency that it prints. Unless it chooses to. Which it won’t, because inflation is preferable to default.
“Are you suggesting that the USA has not been in slow decline for at least the past 15 years? Surely it began no later than the Clinton 90s, and likely as far back as Vietnam.”
I concur. As I often say, “peak USA” was the year 1959. The gradient of decline keeps getting steeper by the year.
It’s true that demographically the USA was much better in 1959. And some of that was due to segregation.
But was everything better? You’re better off having a heart attack today than in 1959. Your car is better and safer. All your tech is better.
We still have tens of millions of high quality people and the technology continues to advance. That’s the plus side. The downside is the ongoing destruction of our people. But that takes generations to fully play out.
Yes, the Soviet Union did collapse quickly. The overall political structure, which had been around for a few generations, went away with remarkably little violence. But while things got tough in the 90s, I don’t think the power grid went down. Running water was still available. TV station still worked. Big rock concerts were held in Russia during the ’90s complete with lighting and sound systems. It was tough times but not what I would call apocalyptic.
I jget the impression that some people think literally everything will collapse. No lights, no water, no internet, back to the 1850s. That’s not going to happen.
I’m not sure how one can’t say the collapse has already happened.
1.1/5 of our kids are gay or think they’re the wrong sex.
2. Men are competing in women’s sports.
3.We worship the most violent and destructive race on the earth.
And to top it off, people who openly encourage the genocide of the people who built the nation are invited to be keynote speakers at events.
I fail to see that the “collapse” hasn’t already happened.
Because that’s not collapse. I hate all the things you mentioned and they’re certainly true, but the country is still here. The power grid is still working. People are still making money.
The Roman Empire had weird beliefs about sexuality and young people and it still rolled on for centuries. Heck, the Aztecs sacrificed them! So maybe we have a different idea of what collapse means. Yes, the old America is gone. But that doesn’t mean we are in Mad Max territory.
you haven’t ben to philladelphia or chicago lately have you?
I tend to agree with you, but it is also true that things appear permanent right up to the moment they rapidly change. A new war in Europe seemed all but impossible right up till the moment the tank column drove into Ukraine. “Negative” nominal interest rates seemed impossible right up until the ECB lowered their rate to below zero.
There are many forces in the world who like the petrodollar and their wealth and power are at least partially reliant on the status quo. The crash of the Dollar would bring about conditions far worse than the depression, so I am told. So they will probably defend the status quo for as long as humanly possible.
A controlled demolition is a double edged sword. It mitigates chaos – though the Lagosvilles of America have been in chaos since peak empire. It means The Great Replacement marches on and accelerates.
That raises the question, who is controlling the demolition and how? That would make for a great post.
I’d like to say as the USA becomes mediocre it won’t attract as many immigrants. But it will still be way better than most of Latin America and Africa. So the genocidal policies will continue.
We need to fight for our right to have our own communities based on free association. We need to free ourselves from forced integration.
For now, it seems that the only way immigration into the Western world stops is if the Western standard of living becomes equal on average to that of the Third World. And by then, it won’t matter any more. Invite the Third World, become the Third World.
as much as I like putin, I disagree with him on his Fair World Order initiative.
after the anglo-zionist empire collapses that’ll be it, a form of isolationism will take hold all across the world, dollar will be replaced by nothing, exports will diminish like crazy, huge number of cities will become obsolete and abandoned etc.
BRICS is an asian enterprise, the only countries who will become rich and powerful from that are Russia, China, India and Iran, that’s it.
Brazil and South Africa will remain as shitty as they are, so will the rest of the world, especially Europe, who now has to survive a horde of migrants who will be able to conquer it more easily now that most weapons were sent to ukraine and poland.
Without the US, or somebody, to prop it up, Europe is in for a world of pain. Most of them are blissfully ignorant of this.
LOL.
The US is destroying Europe.
“Most of them are blissfully ignorant of this.”
True. But as my European nationalist friends point out, they’ve lived in a “golden cage” for so long that they’ve lost sight of basic realities.
Well, it is possible that the invading hordes, seeing Europe as the sinking ship and RCII as the lifeboats, might decide another migration is in order. RCII will not be as accommodating I wager. Interesting times.
The unipolar world controlled by Washington is slowly slipping away, being replaced by a multipolar world. For ideological and practical reasons, Washington is fighting this with all of its might.
One of the theories going round is that the US is lashing out because it’s losing the fight for globalization and against nationalism. It was SO close…up until 2015 or so, the world was about as interconnected as it could get. Migration from all over. A McDonalds on every street corner. iPhones in every pocket. Even Japan was considering immigration. Even the Chinese were beginning to buy on credit, not on savings. There was no serious challenger to the GAE lifestyle.
Then of course elements within the United States and Britain started taking exception, and voters started to rebel. And with that, America’s rivals started getting “paper tiger” vibes about the West. This was unacceptable to Washington. I wonder if the whole Covid thing was a panicked effort to impose uniformity on the world.
The d-right has lots of interesting theories on what or who controls the West and the GAE. But maybe it really is what your tin-foil uncle said all those years ago…TPTB want a one-world government overseen by the UN, or Davos, or the Bilderbergs, or the Rothchilds, or whoever.
“I wonder if the whole Covid thing was a panicked effort to impose uniformity on the world.”
I have always suspected as much.
My money is that the crack-up boom was happening and they moved quickly to shut things down and pump liquidity into the zombie. I say that based on the fall ’19 bond market action and the widely known ’20 corporate debt rollover that was 50% bigger than the ’19 rollover that caused the bond market to go tits up.
Schiff is right about the US’ debt trap. He, nor anyone, can predict when or how it ends. That is probably because Z-Man is correct that the there are beneficial support structures that nobody wants pulverized.
In ’20 the liquidity intervention was massive. More corporations became wards of the state thus vehicles of the woke. Target inflation was once 2%. The Oracles of Eccles will probably emerge from the temple holding entrails and declare target inflation is much better at 5-6%.
Mission Accomplished. The vessel sails on, more bolts are loosened on more sides, more tension builds.
Unroosted chickens to watch: Will the hordes laid off in tech be employed again? If so, doing what? Will they be last in line to those whose feet they gleefully kissed on bended knee?
Apple Geniuses.
Surprisingly, “tech” is laying off a lot of its political commissars. The profit motive lives!
Or not! If the bad guys are smart, they’re knowingly creating a reserve for the antifa/gestapo Obama promised us (and nearly delivered). If they’re dumb, they’re incidentally doing that.
“What’s some noodle-armed blue-haired homo who doesn’t even know he’s a boy gonna do to half a country’s worth of *actually* armed rednecks?”
Kill them.
Covid, and public health in general are their intended cudgels to impose one-world government.
Why else did we see 195 governments respond in lockstep to what was essentially a bad cold/moderate flu season?
The Coof power-down, and the disarticulation of societal norms and practices that it unleashed, was the way to get to the onrushing food crisis, the culminating piece needed for instituting state dictatorship. That power-down, in tandem with the Ukraine gambit have to be related intimately, exactly how still is being revealed.
“it will avoid the sudden uncontrolled collapse of the dollar”
I doubt even Schiff is talking about the “sudden uncontrolled collapse” of the dollar. “Collapse” is an emotive word. But certainly much of the rest of the world is steadily and carefully moving away from the dollar. Barter deals are becoming more common — e.g., between China and Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, Russia and India. There’s just no particular reason to do deals in dollars anymore. It’s not like 1945, when the USA accounted for half the world’s GDP.
The pound didn’t disappear as reserve currency overnight. It took a while. The coup de grace was administered by the rising US empire, when it did away with the sterling area, incorporating it into the global dollar area. Now the same dynamic is working its way a propos the dollar. Nothing is forever.
Z, you posted pictures a field of rusting farm implements on gab. Have you acquired your post Lagos homestead? Do tell.
It’s strange how little our media outlets – even financial channels – talk about BRICS. As if it will just go away if they ignore it hard enough.
My father worked in a bank in 1962. At that time only the head teller had access to $100 bills. Nowadays people come in asking for $1000 bills, sometimes.
In 1962, $100 had the same purchasing power as $1000 does today. These days, I have little use for either $100 or $1000 bills. Pretty much anything over $30 gets purchased electronically.
“In 1962, $100 had the same purchasing power as $1000 does today.”
Probably more like $3,000 today.
20$ is the new 5$.
“Reg, Reg, do you see this quarter? It used to be a nickel! The golden years are behind you.”
Joe McGrath
TomC: We regularly take significant sums of cash out of the bank – and unless we specify otherwise, they give us piles of primarily $100 bills and a few $50s. I was surprised when I found that the self-checkout machines at the grocery stores would accept $100 bills. Yes I’m old, and yes, our currency is debased. Nothing new under the sun.
If Russia really wants to damage the GAE economy they will take all of Ukraine.
That will implode Blackrock, Cargill, and Pfizer’s existing investments in Ukraine.
It will shut down the ongoing MIC armaments gravy train and reduce dollar demand.
It will prevent the Halliburton-led reconstruction gravy train from ever spooling up.
Putin should have his best people doing a cost-benefit analysis of this scenario. The main tradeoff would be occupying a hostile western Uke population that seems to hate everyone that is not Ukrainian.
In that case, the Russians’ best bet would be to make life so annoying the Ukes voluntarily migrate to Europe and incentivize ethnic Russians to settle the region.
Please no. We will end up with 20 million America hating Ukes coming across out southern and norther border.
In 1870 one of my ancestors founded a Russian mining town that still exists. Wonder if that would buy me a little Visa grace to enter Russia when the SHTF?
Russia is a dump.
A third world country without third world weather.
At least the Us has the weather.
As much as i’d like to see the end of the petro dollar arrangement – i just don’t see it happening anytime soon.
There will be some retrenchment of its use and of the GAE. But empires always wax and wane long before they completely collapse. The GAE has been on a multi-decade roll since the ‘80s.
It pulling back from Eastern Europe and Afghanistan is more akin to Rome pulling out of Mesopotamia (temporarily) than it is to the Vandal conquest of North Africa.
Collapse is a matter of perspective. It took the Soviet Empire about a decade to collapse, maybe longer if you look at Brezhnev as a pivot point in Soviet history. Even if you date the start of the end with Gorby, a lot of people died waiting for the final act. The British empire took generations to finally come to an end. Many Brits are still unaware of this fact. The point is, the end of empire is a process in most cases.
Optimistically, I think we see the Ukraine fiasco trigger a political awakening in Europe. A new generation of pols will come along with a healthy destruct and disdain for America and its hegemony. The American grip on Europe will slowly loosen as a result. In Asia, I suspect the locals simply resist becoming part of an anti-China alliance led by distant America. In time, the cost of trying to create this alliance becomes too much to bear and it slowly fades away.
Twenty years from now, the Global American Empire will be used strictly in the past tense by old people who were alive at its peak.
There are analyses out there that make convincing arguments the West began collapsing in the early ’80s.
“There are analyses out there that make convincing arguments the West began collapsing in the early ’80s.”
It’s difficult to overemphasize the horror which was wrought by Griswold [1965] and Roe [1973].
Griswold literally put an immediate end to the Baby Boom.
Goodness only knows how many more Whites there would be in Amurrikkkuh today if it were not for Griswold & Roe: Another 25 million? 50 million? 75 million? 100 million?
Can you imagine growing up in a society where random acts of fornication produced actually living breathing flesh & blood DESCENDANTS, rather than, say… NOTHING WHATSOEVER?
Griswold, Roe, Hart-Cellar, and suddenly, before you know it, you ain’t got a nation anymore.
PS: As a child, and through high school & college and graduate school, and for years thereafter, NO ONE BUT NO ONE BUT NO ONE ever even hinted to me that the average modern woman’s fecundity falls off a cliff at the age of 35.
I was completely oblivious to that fact – I had to discover it all on my own [when I started studying demographics].
I have since learned that, historically speaking – if you get into serious genealogy – women were able to bear children well into their late 40s, but apparently modern women can’t do that anymore, likely from having been fed a diet of synthetic estrogen/progesterone pills since roughly the age of 12 or 13.
I guess MRNA v@xxines are simply a very mild acceleration of what was started with Griswold.
tl;dr == “They” hate you and “they” want you DEAD.
“When we win, do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids r*ped and brainwashed, and they think it’s funny”
— Sam Hyde.
dude, in the olde days women died in childbirth by the droves. there has never been a period of time when women in their late 40’s were routinely giving birth. never.
karl von hungus: “there has never been a period of time when women in their late 40’s were routinely giving birth. never”
Actually there was, as recently as about 100 years ago.
You need to get into genealogy, bro.
You’re gonna be shocked when you see what your ancestresses & their wombs were capable of producing [when those wombs weren’t being poisoned by synthetic estrogens & progesterones, and when your ancestors weren’t wh@cking off to pr0n rather than making love with your ancestresses].
Your mind is stuck in the 21st Century, where it’s been filled with psychological warfare demoralization campaign after psychological warfare demoralization campaign after psychological warfare demoralization campaign.
The utter degeneracy of US society, deification of blacks and increasing stupidity of the political class has surely been accelerating since the ‘80’s – probably even the ‘60’s. Everyone around the world has to see this, so a collapse of some sort is most likely inevitable and in the process currently. I guess one question is: is there anything out there that’ll push it along faster than is obvious at the moment? Probably, but it’ll be an act of God, which would be poetic justice for sure.
To my mind, the degeneracy appeared in the mid/late 60s and ramped to a crescendo in the mid/late 70s, followed by reactionaries successfully papering it over in the 80s until it reared its ugly head again in the early 90s.
Europe peaked no later than 1914. Without America to protect, subsidize, and underwrite it, its decline would be a lot more obvious.
There isn’t any obvious protector coming to America’s rescue like that when it declines.
“Twenty years from now, the Global American Empire will be used strictly in the past tense by old people who were alive at its peak.”
“Well, grandson of mine, let me tell you about them thar old days. It was a time when you could go to most places in the world with just your US passport and not even bother with a visa. ‘Course nowadays most embassies routinely refuse visas to US citizens — they suspect Americans might be trying to emigrate from the US wasteland and they have problems enough of their own.”
GAE could also go the way of the Ottoman empire of old, coasting by for generations of the fumes of past achievements, kept alive by other powers who wanted to be able to beat each other over the head with what remained of it .
How long before the United States is routinely described as “the sick man of The Americas”?
I do predict a welcome return to young Europeans with their scarves and designer jeans catcalling Americans “facha!” and generally making Amerifats unwelcome in their cities.
Koreans and some Japanese already do this, but they hate their neighbors and especially the Chinese behemoth more than far-off America. Plus America gives them shiny things and lets them make $$$. White Euros don’t care about shiny things as much.
“Twenty years from now, the Global American Empire will be used strictly in the past tense by old people who were alive at its peak.”
“My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos…ruined dreams… this wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Word Warrior. The man we called “Z.” To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time… when the world was powered by the black fuel…and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now…swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war, and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They’d built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed…men like Z…the writer Z…”
” He lives now only in my memory”..
Oswald Spengler: Oh well done Sir!!