The Toppling

Ghost of a Warrior (1960) Paul Klee

“Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well Lighted Place

The tidied city-square evokes a time
when regimented form could contravene
dull happenstance. The city’s arch-sublime
and measured patch of monumental green

now weathers stiff resistance. Icons fall
on white-washed knee. Recumbent, from the grass
a stone-ear wants to melt into banal
repose. Yet rigid swordplay’s bound to cast

(even when charging heedless sky) a pall
across the Commons’ gathering expanse.
Nothing resolves along the garden-wall.
The deepest wounds play stillborn to advance.

Banishing form from centralizing space?
That’s half the battle. What will take its place?

Park in the Rain (1920) Paul Klee

The Hawthorn Tree

 

Cradle of Life (by Jennifer Elizabeth Hall)

In the garden at the greenhouse, by a waterfall

that dives into a pond of stones, splashes in

tiny ripples near reeds, and old fallen leaves,

under a red maple, as frogs call back and forth—

I hear baby birds chirp, above a vine-draped arbor,

from a tall tree with blossoms from tiny white buds,

that reaches to the height of the Conservatory

under solid blue day and a warm orange sun.

 

Up high on the side of the round white flowers,

I find the cradled bird’s nest. Within the dense tree,

a mockingbird mother with gray tipped black wings

jumps to safety in the middle of the tree, to observe me

with curious gold eyes, glowers and sings, a warn full

reproach, and I notice the thorns, two inches and sharp,

that surround the tree. Only a small downy white

feather, caught on the end of a thorn still wavers

with the breeze, evidence of the price to breach the tree.

 

Careful not to prick myself on the thorns’ tips,

I feel the soft, silk spring petals, with pink tipped

filaments, sprouts from the pale green stems of this tree,

called a Hawthorn. Cradled deep, small and round,

dark fruit begins to grow. The nest of brown twigs sleeps,

quiet, embraced by the knowledge mother bird is there,

though she has not yet returned to her babies. Above

she waits, her fluffy beige underbelly and gray fan tail

patient, lest she give away their location. Soon it is time

to go, to let the mockingbird alone in its home.

 

As I walk away from the full tall Hawthorn, now

it appears to resemble a small hedge or bush of green

leaves, more innocuous, less formidable. I can imagine—

once this was the Tree of Eden, in the Garden, in a place

Adam and Eve took the knowledge of good and evil.

Above the shade of the thorns, the sun shines bright over

the greenhouse, just a harmless green tree beside.

Copyright 2017 by Jennifer Elizabeth Hall

_______________________

“Like the leaf clings/To the tree/Oh my darling/Cling to me/For we’re like creatures/In the wind/And wild is the wind/Wild is the wind”

 

Financialienation

Suddenly oil, eo ipso, is becoming rather blunt about things:

‘This is where I need to be. If you won’t discover my price, I’ll discover it on my own. My truth promises to be ugly. How ugly? I plan to dot our beautiful blue seas with pregnant tankers.’

And so oil is mounting its escape from the Wall Street Penal Colony, the bars of which are fashioned from the blackest pig-iron hubris.

Further behind in the escape-tunnel is gold. Its time is coming too. The physical is already speaking for itself, demanding a price that bears no resemblance to the cartel proxies. LBMA and COMEX are floundering OPECs in their own right.

Of course gold’s discovery (de-alienation) process, as denoted –for the moment and of necessity– in currency, is inherently more ‘detainable’; compounding things further, gold is in the grips of its own transition drama, as it departs the sui generis commodity grouping to re-claim its unique historical role as monetary metal.

So make room at the table. In the final analysis real things are gluttons for real space. Keyboard strokes can no more banish the real than summon it.

Eric Peters by way of Zero Hedge this weekend called out the fraying prescriptive remedy of endless and ephemeral storage: “…credit a column, change a ledger, hit a button, hire the Blackrock boys. Add a server, maybe two. That’s the Fed’s storage cost.”

As youtuber Belangp notes, even gold may be experiencing storage/capacity issues of its own as the deteriorating gold-lending business, victim of negative interest rates, bids for constrained vault space as evidenced by exaggerated carry rates at front-end contracts. Interesting parallel. All of a sudden the metrics of volume are back in the news.

Truth, while irrepressible in the long run, is often destructive towards the tissues of prevailing lies. Normally, a Truth Reconciliation movement deserves our unabashed applause. It should be no less so for resumed price discovery, a critical mechanism for planetary resource allocation.

Except in this instance, we are all implicated –by way of pension plans and 401ks– in the levitational excesses.

The OPEC weak sisters have all grown into the comfortable lifestyles paper oil afforded them. Nigeria, Tunisia, Algeria, Venezuela; these nations are unrecognizable without plumped-up oil. How will these nations survive?

This brings us to one of the more indispensable essays of the last few years (2018) where Alistair Crooke (channeling Chris Cook) zeroes in on the “more US power, less empire” re-calibration inherent in Trump’s Energy Dominance doctrine, a doctrine which cannot possibly survive commodity truth-reconciliation.

This doctrine was born of pure shimmering hubris as it sought to build atop the pre-existent petrodollar form a superstructure of such towering, Babelian ‘managerialism’ that authentic supply/demand signals would forever languish in a state of permanent estrangement beneath a will-to-power complex of enforced alienation.

Oil would become the in-house poker chip. Wall Street would become the jealous casino. As for oil’s use-value (checkers-playing plebes can be excused for thinking raw utility was the reason for sending their kids to war; all wars are bankers wars), it would become a tertiary and manipulable orphan subject to the geopolitical whims of the banking class.

A lengthy except is warranted:

“It seems, as Chris Cook explains, that Gary Cohn, then chief economic adviser to the President had a part in the genesis to this ambition. Cohn (then at Goldman Sachs), together with a colleague from Morgan Stanley, conceived of a plan in 2000 to take control of the global oil trading market through an electronic trading platform, based in New York. In brief, the big banks, attracted huge quantities of ‘managed money’ (from such as hedge funds), to the market, to bet on future prices (without their ever actually taking delivery of crude: trading ‘paper oil’, rather than physical oil). And, at the same time, these banks worked in collusion with the major oil producers (including later, Saudi Arabia) to pre-purchase physical oil in such a way that, by withholding, or releasing physical crude from, or onto the market, the big NY banks were able to ‘influence’ the prices (by creating a shortage, or a glut).

To give some idea of the capacity of these bankers to ‘influence’ price, by mid – 2008, it was estimated that some $260 billion of ‘managed’ (speculative) investment money was in play in energy markets, completely dwarfing the value of the oil actually coming out of the North Sea each month, at maybe $4 to $5 billion, at most. These ‘paper’ oil-option plays would therefore often trump the ‘fundamentals’ of real supply, and real end-user demand.

‘Step one’ for Cohn, was therefore, for the US to manage the trading market, both in price and access – with U.S. antagonists such as Iran or Russia, being able to access the market on inferior terms, if at all. The putative ‘step two’, has been to nurse US shale production, build new American LNG export terminals, and open America to further oil and gas exploration, whilst strong-arming everyone from Germany to South Korea and China, to buy American LNG exports. And ‘thirdly’, with Gulf oil exports already under the US umbrella, there were then, two major Middle East energy producers beyond the boundaries of cartel ‘influence’ (falling more into rival Russia’s strategic energy-producing ‘heartland’): Iran – which is now the subject of regime change–style, economic siege on its oil exports, and Iraq, which is subject of intense (soft) political pressures (such as threatening to sanction Iraq under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) to force its adherence to the western sphere.

What would this Trump notion of energy dominance mean in simple language? The US – were energy dominance to succeed – simply would control the tap to the economic development – or its lack thereof – for rivals China, and Asia. And the US could squeeze Russia’s revenues in this way, too. In short, the US could put a tourniquet on China’s and Russia’s economic development plans. Is this why JCPOA was revoked by President Trump?

Here then, is the squaring of that circle (more US power, yet less empire): Trump’s US aims for ‘domination’, not through the globalists’ permanent infrastructure of the US defence umbrella, but through the smart leveraging of the US dollar and financial clearing monopoly, by ring-fencing, and holding tight, US technology, and by dominating the energy market, which in turn represents the on/off valve to economic growth for US rivals. In this way, Trump can ‘bring the troops home’, and yet America keeps its hegemony. Military conflict becomes a last resort.”

Since 1971-73, this transportive disease, financialization has spread like a virus, inflicting the imaginarium-for-profit paradigm upon our terra-firma walkaboutness.

Now the cure is arriving on the heels of a virus. The pain will be widely-felt. However the aftermath, provided we survive the cure, will be a world that can be held, touched and transacted-upon once again.

Credit is a Circle

Walter Spitzer
ODYSSEUS’ FATHER LAERTES, SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH ON ITHACA

“Scotiabank’s exit of the metals business ends an end of an era that began in 1671 when Moses Mocatta opened an account with one of London’s most famous goldsmith bankers, Edward Backwell. Mocatta and his descendants would go on to build what became one of the world’s largest metals-trading businesses and the oldest member of London’s bullion market. The firm has long participated in the London gold auction, where an industry benchmark price is set twice a day.”–Zero Hedge

____

“Q: But the basis of banking is credit, is it not?

JPM: Not always. That is an evidence of the banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, nothing else.” –JP Morgan, 1912 Congressional testimony

____

“Holy God. We’re About To Lose Everything” –Panic-stricken AirBNB Superhost, Zero Hedge

____

When losing what you thought was everything amounts to nothing at all…

Like an Asperger’s version of Odysseus, gold is going home, singularly unaltered by the journey. Unlike the original Odysseus however, Laertes will recognize his returning son. Because the barbarous metal is immutable. Gold is a stake in the ground against which all travelers are obliged to rise and fall. This particular Odyssey was a gilded dream held aloft with credit.

Gold never went anywhere.

Yet what a long, strange trip it turned out to be. How material was this circuitous round-trip that looked, for all the world at times, like human progress? Some cruel circles can mimic an ascent. 

How fascinating though that, on this earthbound plane at least, it was always about gold, it will always be about gold and it is definitively rendezvousing back to gold.

Gold is the marker, the only substance on earth that can extinguish debt. Oligarchic family is the trans-generational glue. In a world shorn of expansive and ostensibly ‘democratic’ wealth attainment via various credit derivations, only ancient familial bonds and indecipherable spiritual praxi will survive the planet’s looming dislocations.

The funniest thing in the vacating room are the people still in the room portfolio-allocating as though their futures depended on credit rituals of the past.

Why shouldn’t the purveyors of credit expansion be allowed to ‘de-hypothecate/de-multiply’ their hoards by returning them to ancient vaults? The forward contract game of generating income from static hoards is nonviable in a negative interest rate environment.

Ah, but you’ve grown rather fond of your credit-implicated lifestyle. In fact your existence is unimaginable absent the $247T of global debt (3.14x coverage ratio on a pre-Covid $80T global GDP) that struggles now to keep that lifestyle afloat. The Earth is tired.

But wait. Before you insist you’re bigger than your voracious credit appetite, perhaps even evolved or self-actualized (esoteric lifestyles are self-indulgent creatures of discretionary income), the baseline we are returning sans credit is nothing short of the Dark Ages.

The Babelians conform to a timeless regime. They inflict upon us various horizontal teacup-storms that hint at progress but deliver only social confusion and chaos (fads, trends, movements, social dialectical ‘advances’) in order to preserve their hermetic Olympian altitude. A vertical assault is best deflected by lighting numerous horizontal brush fires. Read Facebook to discover just how devoted people are to their cherished horizontals. Fear and uncertainty only makes them grip harder.

The Top know that when humanity fully grasps that its so-called advances and progressivities were little more than credit-facilitated mirages, the ensuing social disintegration is gonna be a royal bitch.

Their desired follow-on paradigm for a credit-vacated world is Green totalitarianism, an existence that will extol scarcity and sacrifice in lieu of upward mobility and elevating enterprise, to be regulated on all sides by a surveillance apparatus that ensures their continued safety and insulation from vertical assaults.

The top 1% will hire the next 9% as a Praetorian Guard to manage the bottom 90%. There’s your Orwellian tripartite structure: Inner Party, Outer Party, Prole.

Next up? Criminally-induced food shortages and the manifestly horizontal travails of food lines and hunter-gathering.

I’m a Christian. This isn’t my fight. It was their gold to loan and theirs to take back. We must remove our heads from the ass of yesterday’s portfolio gyrations. Price discovery is a bygone fool’s errand that was always only earmarked for fool’s gold. The more pressing question is did you allow them to alter you on the journey? Or did you remain an eternal credit to yourself?

Wrapped-Up in Lysol

The transcript is Spic ‘n Span clear. The President made zero reference to household cleansers. Nonetheless Reuters continues to ‘merchandise’ the Pelosi wrap-up smear with the following today:

“Americans appear to be losing faith…with almost everyone rejecting Trump’s remark that COVID-19 may be treated by injecting infected people with bleach or other disinfectants…”

What a devilish bit of writing.

As Reuters addresses Americans, it subtly guideposts the mood of how the reader’s fellow Americans ‘appear’ to be feeling. While the article gently interrogates the reader, the whopper-of-a-lie is allowed to slip by unexamined. In this way, bleach creeps into the debate by way of conflation and distraction.

This is too well-done to be anything other than carefully devised.

Here we have manufactured consent ripening right before our eyes. What weird stragglers are still endorsing the use of bleach to cure Covid19, one wonders. I mean, Ted Bundy was executed years ago so he’s certainly not in their number (since ‘almost all’ implies not everyone is on board; surely you’re not a bleach-lover dear reader?? Don’t fret though. In the words of Led Zeppelin, ‘there’s still time to change the road you’re on.’ Consider this article a life-rope to renewed normalcy. Oh, and Get Trump!)

How many Americans, having read the article, now ‘appear’ to be feeling the same way as a result of being directed to the (hoped-for) mood of the herd by the ever-helpful press. Understandably, most people don’t want to be within ten feet –even of the very image– of spooning out bleach to children. Nice bit of self-referential wizardry, while creating an alienative effect. On Wall Street they call it front-running. The hurtling snowball grows ever larger.

Pelosi was kind enough to explain the self-feeding dynamics of the wrap-up smear in a 2018 press conference:

True to textbook form, here’s the Lysol wrap-up finding its early legs with Pelosi (“The President Is asking people to Inject Lysol into their lungs”)

If it’s true that some impressionable folks (most likely children) out there have ingested poisons, the path of this mendacious snowball is easily traced like a bad game of Postman–from transcript to video– along its entire path.

So who exactly injected household cleansers into this debate? Like a slug, every smear leaves a trail. This one is no different.

I Herd It Through the Grapevine

Herd immunity is a nonprofit entity established by the wisdom of Gd in the year naught.

The universe rejected the Windows approach with its compulsory updates (injections) in favor of Open Source eons ago. Gd doesn’t throw you off your computer. He prefers working subtly –and collaboratively– on that diaphanous operating system, your soul. All upgrades however are yours to make.

So own your General Protection Faults. They’re Gd’s way off telling you your hubris is in danger of freezing your keyboard.

The Commodities Are Finally Speaking Up for Themselves, but Does Anyone Really Want to Hear What They Have to Say?

Suddenly oil, eo ipso, is being rather blunt about things. It’s sticking a stake in the Middle Eastern sands, flipping the bird at (or is it sticking a fork in?) the latest iteration of Ozymandianism, fossil-foolery:

‘This is where I need to be. If you won’t discover my price, I’ll discover it on my own. My truth promises to be ugly. How ugly? I plan to dot our beautiful blue seas with pregnant tankers.’

And so oil is mounting its escape from the Wall Street Penal Colony, the bars of which are fashioned from the blackest pig-iron hubris.

Further behind in the escape-tunnel is gold. Its time is coming too. The physical is already speaking up for itself, demanding a price that bears no resemblance to the cartel proxies. LBMA and COMEX are floundering OPECs in their own right.

Of course gold’s discovery (de-alienation) process, as denoted –for the moment and of necessity– in currency, is inherently more ‘detainable’; compounding things further, gold is in the grips of its own transition drama, as it departs the sui generis commodity grouping to re-claim its unique historical role as monetary metal.

So make room at the table. In the final analysis real things are gluttons for real space. Keystrokes can no more banish the real as summon it. Clearly the real is getting ornery and wearies of being overlooked by a bunch of silly electrons.

Eric Peters by way of Zero Hedge this weekend called out the fraying prescriptive remedy of endless and ephemeral storage: “…credit a column, change a ledger, hit a button, hire the Blackrock boys. Add a server, maybe two. That’s the Fed’s storage cost.”

As youtuber Belangp notes, even gold may be experiencing storage/capacity issues of its own as the deteriorating gold-lending business, victim of negative interest rates, bids for constrained vault space as evidenced by exaggerated carry rates at front-end contracts.

Interesting parallel. All of a sudden the metrics of volume are back in the news. 

Truth, while irrepressible in the long run, is often destructive towards the tissues of prevailing lies. Normally, a Truth Reconciliation movement deserves our unabashed applause. It should be no less so for resumed price discovery, a critical mechanism for planetary resource allocation.

Except in this instance, we are all implicated –by way of pension plans and 401ks and such– in the levitational excesses. 

The OPEC weak sisters have all grown into the comfortable lifestyles paper oil afforded them. Nigeria, Tunisia, Algeria, Venezuela; these nations are unrecognizable without plumped-up oil. How will they possibly survive? 

This brings us to one of the more indispensable essays of the last few years (2018) where Alistair Crooke (channeling Chris Cook) zeroes in on the “more US power, less empire” re-calibration inherent in Trump’s Energy Dominance doctrine, a doctrine which cannot possibly survive commodity truth-reconciliation. 

This doctrine was born of pure shimmering hubris as it sought to build atop the pre-existent petrodollar form a superstructure of such towering, Babelian ‘managerialism’ that authentic supply/demand signals would forever languish in a state of permanent estrangement.  Welcome to the will-to-power complex of enforced alienation.

Oil would become the in-house poker chip. Wall Street would become the jealous casino. As for oil’s use-value (checkers-playing plebes can be excused for thinking unabashed utility was the reason for sending their kids to war; in fact, all wars are bankers wars), it would become a tertiary and manipulable orphan subject to the geopolitical whims of the banking class.

An extended except is warranted:

“It seems, as Chris Cook explains, that Gary Cohn, then chief economic adviser to the President had a part in the genesis to this ambition. Cohn (then at Goldman Sachs), together with a colleague from Morgan Stanley, conceived of a plan in 2000 to take control of the global oil trading market through an electronic trading platform, based in New York. In brief, the big banks, attracted huge quantities of ‘managed money’ (from such as hedge funds), to the market, to bet on future prices (without their ever actually taking delivery of crude: trading ‘paper oil’, rather than physical oil). And, at the same time, these banks worked in collusion with the major oil producers (including later, Saudi Arabia) to pre-purchase physical oil in such a way that, by withholding, or releasing physical crude from, or onto the market, the big NY banks were able to ‘influence’ the prices (by creating a shortage, or a glut).

To give some idea of the capacity of these bankers to ‘influence’ price, by mid – 2008, it was estimated that some $260 billion of ‘managed’ (speculative) investment money was in play in energy markets, completely dwarfing the value of the oil actually coming out of the North Sea each month, at maybe $4 to $5 billion, at most. These ‘paper’ oil-option plays would therefore often trump the ‘fundamentals’ of real supply, and real end-user demand.

‘Step one’ for Cohn, was therefore, for the US to manage the trading market, both in price and access – with U.S. antagonists such as Iran or Russia, being able to access the market on inferior terms, if at all. The putative ‘step two’, has been to nurse US shale production, build new American LNG export terminals, and open America to further oil and gas exploration, whilst strong-arming everyone from Germany to South Korea and China, to buy American LNG exports. And ‘thirdly’, with Gulf oil exports already under the US umbrella, there were then, two major Middle East energy producers beyond the boundaries of cartel ‘influence’ (falling more into rival Russia’s strategic energy-producing ‘heartland’): Iran – which is now the subject of regime change–style, economic siege on its oil exports, and Iraq, which is subject of intense (soft) political pressures (such as threatening to sanction Iraq under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) to force its adherence to the western sphere.

What would this Trump notion of energy dominance mean in simple language? The US – were energy dominance to succeed – simply would control the tap to the economic development – or its lack thereof – for rivals China, and Asia. And the US could squeeze Russia’s revenues in this way, too. In short, the US could put a tourniquet on China’s and Russia’s economic development plans. Is this why JCPOA was revoked by President Trump?

Here then, is the squaring of that circle (more US power, yet less empire): Trump’s US aims for ‘domination’, not through the globalists’ permanent infrastructure of the US defence umbrella, but through the smart leveraging of the US dollar and financial clearing monopoly, by ring-fencing, and holding tight, US technology, and by dominating the energy market, which in turn represents the on/off valve to economic growth for US rivals. In this way, Trump can ‘bring the troops home’, and yet America keeps its hegemony. Military conflict becomes a last resort.”

Since 1971-73, this transportive disease, financialization has spread like a virus, inflicting the imaginarium-for-profit paradigm upon our terra-firma walkaboutness. 

Now the cure is arriving on the heels of a virus. The pain will be widely-felt. However the aftermath, provided we survive the cure, will be a world that can be held, touched and transacted-upon once again.

Credit Is as Much About a Metric of Wealth as it a Substitute for Money

The petulant deckchair-tipping contest that’s been passing for essential political debate in America has been definitively overshadowed in recent weeks by the dawning realization that the Ship of State (indeed the entire global community) is retracing the voyage of the RMS Titanic.

Engulfed in its looming shadow, all chairs –red and blue alike– reflect the same monochromatic pallor. Arguing their relative merits becomes an exercise in denial, captured cognition and stalled derangements of varying hues. Old paradigms never die outright. Instead they tend to hang around like cement shoes. As Antonio Gramsci remarked, stubborn morbidities haunt all significant interregnums.

Frankly, TDS looks even sillier than before as it attempts to scratch this subterranean itch with the usual facile I hate Trump refrain. Zeus could preside in the Oval Office and it wouldn’t make a whit of difference. The President, any President, is the dependent variable and Chief Narrative Engineer. That’s if he’s lucky. The Globalist Medical Complex (WHO, the CDC and The Gates Foundation) has been running this show.

Trump has played an ancillary role at best, which only makes the TDSers’ insistence on his derelictions and tardiness that much more pathological. Who after all can hold a dramatic candle to Bill ‘Dr. Mengele’ Gates and his personal Renfield, Dr. Fouci?

Monetary historian Alastair Macleod traces the origins of this credit super-cycle back to England’s Bank Charter Act of 1844. 

For the long view, only a historian will do. A protracted trend (call it an epoch) can commandeer both horizons, mimicking an immutable reality from which few can see either beyond or behind. Credit is oxygen, or so it can seem. 

There are precious few today who can even begin to imagine that the accumulated credit of generations is not intrinsic wealth; that gold is denominated in weight, not in fiat couponry.

Which brings us to one of many elephants in the room…

Gold is the great apriori, inexpressible in denomination. From late 14th century Old French we have denominacioun, “a naming, act of giving a name to.” The act of naming occurs aposteriori as that which is named must precede the nominational act. Comex has (mis)trained us to seek gold’s value in their aposteriori (spot) pricing. Tail wag dog. Good enough for government work –until moments such as these. 

Regular peeps can be forgiven for the pragmatics of imprecision. After all, whole generations have lived and died, awash in the accouterments of prosperity, without having to contend with the ultimate reckoning:  that their sweated-for net worth is a credit-dressed wealth mirage. No wonder denial is rampant. Our set course is a stubbornly determinate voyage hellbent on coming to rest at the submerged foot of Mt. Telos.

Try walking through your day, paying bills and chasing raises, fully aware that your existence sits inextricably atop an eschatological collision course. 

As for the iceberg, it’s the independent variable, yet another immobile elephant in the room against which all parties must contend, much to the same outcome. Debt. Debt with no chance of repayment. 

If sinking to the bottom of the sea in either a blue or red deckchair floats your boat, then by all means, keep jousting. The fact is, deckchair combatants still haven’t grasped, in their intramural fervor, that everybody’s about to drown.

Look at the brightest dark side: Our acrimony has been blissfully superseded.

Going forward, there will no actionable economy, the latter being merely a longstanding figment of credit expansion that was allowed to parade for an extended season as intrinsic and ever-expanding wealth. We’re going back to the future of wealth; wealth stored in castles like inert hoards of gold, absent all multipliers, levers and death-defying elasticities.

Feudal wealth was a wealth devoid of Keynesian feats of Faustian imagination. It was ringed by a moat and lacked the power to elevate serfdom even to the level of proletarian exploitation where  labor becomes, at the least, a barterable commodity.

While we’d love to expropriate your surplus value, there’s no work today. Come back again tomorrow. Please mind the gap between the drawbridge and the castle threshold. 

Credit expansion is a hopelessly distended rubber band too limp to offer any further recoveries, V, U or extended-L. The snap is in because there is no fix.

We’re somewhere in the realm of Pavlovian reinforcement, the pleasure principle and legal tender laws. Ever time the chimp pulled the lever, a banana spilled from the shoot. The more he pulled, the larger the banana. Soon the chimp forgot the lever was a molded-plastic instrumentality. He fetishized it as something more than it was. But it was only ever a bit of plastic and will look ever more plastic as it relinquishes its use-value in a whirlwind of hyperinflation. In the future there will be pictures of Wiemar-like wheelbarrows overflowing with plastic levers. 

A long parade of false dusks and dawns is about to fall away with lightning speed. What will we discover about ourselves on the other side?

The Reset Power of Universal Spontaneous Combustion

“So if you told me that all debt in the western world will be forgiven because it all implodes at the same time…and the only way to blow it up is to keep everyone from spending and it collapses all at the same time…I would believe it.”–Andy Schectman, President, Miles Franklin Precious Metals Investments (@31:50)

Cynics will say precious metals dealer Andy Schectman (interviewed here by Maurice Jackson) is ‘talking his book’. Certainly his outlook here is not antithetical to purchases of gold and silver. Yet I’ve watched his interviews before and appreciate his analysis even as it affirms his line of work. As always, caveat emptor.

Schectman makes a good point here on the importance of simultaneous collapse with egalitarian features. Misery loves company. If such misery can appear to be distributed evenly, social unrest might better be channeled if not mitigated outright.

After all we’ve been told for years that we’re mortgaging our children’s futures. So collective and inward-directed guilt might also help blunt the outrage that otherwise would point upwards at those who conduct our modes of existence from on-high. 

It seems clear the Powers-That-Be have jettisoned any prospect of sustained debt coverage of the world’s $285 trillion debt by acquiescing  to global income curtailment for a period of a month or two, or even more (as evidenced by not muzzling COVID19 press hysteria).

Debt never sleeps. Moreover its insomnia forces income generation to maintain a comparable breakneck pace. Relegating the productive world to lock-down offers clear evidence the demolition is both controlled and premeditated.

Every man’s debt is another man’s asset. The PTB are walking on their claims (held via bonds) to that debt obligation.They are issuing the coup de grace to this phase of their own system and they know it.

The visible world will see the universal application of the reset pain and infer from that an equitable arrangement. We’re all suffering together. 

Of course the gold has already moved into venerable hands. These same individuals have also migrated their financial asset wealth, as much as practicable, into tangible assets: real estate, collectibles, art work. 

an excellent video from the belangp Youtube channel

Yes, the world will quite likely be ‘debt jubileed’. Carrot. But with a new global currency will arrive a ghastly quid quo quo: curtailed prosperity, truncated freedoms, reduced movement, etc. Stick.

Readers are urged to visit my ‘Twin Tower Collapse’ post where I discuss Alasdair Macleod’s ‘John Law’ redux for the future. The double whammy of currency and financial asset collapse will render most assets valueless. When combined with Schectman’s universality supposition, we appear headed for economic smoke and ash the world over.

Let us not forget the tiniest sliver of a bright side. Smaller nations will be rescued from a rampaging King Dollar, just as the latter seemed poised to eviscerate their currencies and local economies. Hurray!

Mankind emerges, saved in the nick of time by a bigger more pernicious noose than before –-tyranny in the guise of salvation.

That Fine-Wrought Mesh Proximity Bestows

The term supply chain falsely evokes the analogy of link-by-link linearity. I prefer supply mesh, a far more complex, intricate (and delicate) series of vendor relationships and social proximities often decades in the making. Once you’re into mesh architecture you’re into complexity theory, so expect nonlinear outcomes.

When Bill Gates argues for 10 more weeks of suspended business activity he should be more honest and call his cure what it is: the complete dissolution of the modern economy and the inevitable onset of economic nonentitude for billions of post-late-capital earthlings which sure sounds like neo-serfdom to me.

Even Marx needed something to work with, an exploited class, the proletariat. Serfdom was an inert proto-capitalist class whose only use-value comprised episodic  conscriptions into noblemen’s armies or subsistence/tenant farming. The Soviet Union’s ruinous collectivization program was an attempt to vault over what was called ‘the agrarian question’. How does one free a nation of peasant-farmers from capitalist exploitation before the dawning of capitalism on a broad scale? Many suggested that Russia was least probable state to host Marxism’s maiden foray. 

In the age of 3d-printing, robotics and transhumanity, labor loses it barterable leverage; back to the future we go, and what a long, strange, circuitous journey it turned out to be after all. 

If he was to get struck by honesty, he’d also concede he’s really ‘talking his book’ i.e. forestalling herd immunity in order to inject us all with a syringe-full of his latest concoction. Gates should be in The Hague awaiting trial.

Told a second hand story today that one of the largest suppliers of eggs—two million a day—can't get the eggs to market because they can't source the proper containers. They are being dumped onto fields. Not yet confirmed.

— Dave Collum (@DavidBCollum) April 13, 2020

A supplier of 2 million eggs per day is forced to destroy his product because his traditional carton vendor is unable to perform due to some miscue within the latter’s own dense web of relationships. And so it goes.

Vendor payment failures start springing up like leaks in a massive pipe system. The overall business risk profile increases and banks pull back on lending (even with huge offers of government largess) at precisely the moment they are most needed to liquify a broken system.

Alasdair Macleod offers an excellent analysis of how bank failures (likely to emanate outwards from Europe) are the next step in the long arc of economic destruction.

My bank is now appointment only three days a week for lobby business, of course due to Covid-19. Great way to avoid the optics of a bank run. FDIC insurance fund? $109 billion. Total US deposits? $13 trillion. Less than 1% which is barely a fig leaf in the event of systemic issue.

Planet Earth is saddled with $250 trillion in debt. What’s the monthly carrying cost does one suppose, and what happens when global income generation takes a two-month (or more) sabbatical? 2% interest on that debt load, just to toss out a low-ball swag, is $5 trillion per annum or about $40 billion per month, all for the luxury of standing still. Never happened before.

The lending class needs inflation (i.e. the confiscation of everyman savings). All the system has been able to generate so far is deflation which invariably leads to debt default. Debt runs a 24-7 clock. Usury is a pitiless machine.

I’d call Macleod a monetary historian, i.e. a very rare bird. No one’s begun to contemplate the credit implications about to gurgle up everywhere when business resumes, least of all the stock market. I see Goldman Sachs was out with a report yesterday stressing the long hard road back as opposed to the wishful V-shaped recovery.

Of course my belief is that the mass economy was willfully broken, and not for the purpose of building it back either. Hence the cry for ten more weeks.

That’s an eternity -not to mention a tombstone- for America and Britain’s preeminent jobs-creators, small business.

Thus without needing to delve the myriad conspiracy narratives, we see the first-order victims right away. 

Luv ya buh-bye MAGA and Brexit.