Archive for March, 2010
In today’s financial world, a real life, real-time economic World Series of Poker is being played out before our very eyes between the Central Banks of the world’s largest economies. As opposed to the annual Las Vegas World Series of Poker tournament, the buy in at the Central Bank World Series of Poker table is exponentially steeper, in the range of trillions of dollars, yen, and Euros that have been used to monetize the world’s debt, and the stakes are default of sovereign debt and the accompanying collapse of that domestic fiat currency. Like the annual Las Vegas World Series of Poker tournament, there are players like the UK, the United States, and Japan, that have terrible hands (an obscene amount of debt and/or just too large of a domestic currency base given the size of the country’s GDP) but are deploying bluffing strategies as a ploy to delay the inevitable, while players that possess strong hands like China (a strong surplus) also continue to bluff as a ploy to buy more time to execute its exit strategies (think bank robber Clive Owen’s bluffs to buy more time in the film “The Inside Man”).
For now, the two biggest players roundly discussed in the media are clearly the United States and China. And as with every WSOP tournament, there is also a sleeper that everyone ignores in the beginning that ends up proving a worthy player by the tournament finale. In this case, this sleeper is represented by the Middle East Sovereign Wealth Funds with their hundreds of billions of petrodollars. Read more …
March 23rd, 2010
“We apologize for the inconveniences, but this is a revolution.” – Subcomandate Marcos, January 1, 1994
As a history buff, I recently started to re-read a book of essays from Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos that I read more than 8 years ago. I was struck by the prescience of Subcomandante’s essays. Even when he seemed to offer no predictions for the future, more than a decade later, many of his arguments, though he offered them with Mexico in mind, remain remarkably applicable to the state of the Western financial world today. His following essay, “The Fourth World War Has Begun” originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique in September of 1997. It is a critically important essay because 12 years later, the intimate link that Marcos speaks of between globalization and the fraud of our global banking system has now in 2010, washed upon our shores. Read more …
March 10th, 2010
Despite the fact that nearly all of the macroeconomic trends I have predicted since 2006 on my blog, the Underground Investor, have come true, the percent of people that disagree with my predictions for 2010 and 2011 still outnumber those that agree by a factor of ten to one. There is a rational explanation why the public still grants a great deal of validity to the opinions of people I like to call the “men who cried wolf” – Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geitner, Gordon Brown, Alan Greenspan, et al.
The explanation is that the fastest growing export of the Western banking industry is fraud. Read more …
March 8th, 2010
Just a quick reminder that our contest to give away 8-free Wealth Secrets memberships ends on midnight, New York time, one week today on March 8, 2010. To see contest details about our 18-course Wealth Secrets membership that provides all the missing knowledge from business curricula today vital to understanding how to remain significantly profitable during the, global economic crisis, click here.
March 1st, 2010
