I hate using the term “boom-bust” to describe a period of capital market appreciation and then collapse, for the use of this term is very deceptive to the reality of economic conditions. Intentionally or not, using this term helps to brainwash the masses into believing the agenda of the Keynesian economists that an economic “boom” is occurring when in fact massive price distortions only create the illusion of “prosperity” when none exists. When we hear the term “boom”, most of us associate economic prosperity with its use. When we hear the word “bust”, most of us associate this term with the end of economic prosperity. The Great Deception that occurs, of course, is that there can be no “bust” when there was no “boom” to begin with. The use of the “boom/bust” term to describe a period of rapid price appreciation and then decline is every bit as problematic as the current media use of the “double-dip recession”. Just as a double-dip is impossible if the economy never emerged from the first phase of the recession, a “bust” is impossible when there never has been a “boom”. Read more …
Since world leaders and economists continually display a lack of even the most rudimentary of understanding about the unsound nature of our monetary system, I’ve decided to write them a “Monetary Policy for Dummies” to help them understand why the policies and solutions they constantly advocate amount to legalized theft that destroys the wealth of nations. For example, Dr. Ken Mayland, President of Clearview Economics, LLC, and previously the Chief Economist for First Pennsylvania Bank and KeyCorp, recently advocated a voluntary paycut of 10% for all Americans as his “solution” to the US unemployment problem. Here is his statement below:
“In that vein, let me put forth the ClearView Economics plan to get the nation quickly back to full employment. The current unemployment rate is 9.5%. That amounts to 14.6 million persons who want to work that cannot find jobs. But there is also serious underemployment. I don’t accept the U-6 unemployment calculation as being fully representative of all the truly unemployed, but let’s allow another 3% to account for all the underemployment. [sarcasm] how mighty noble of you, Dr. Mayland! [/sarcasm] That brings the total unemployed to 19.2 million persons…So here’s the plan. EVERYBODY — from the president down to the chambermaid — takes a 10% cut in compensation! This freed-up compensation expense is then used to re-employ the 8% (12.3 million) of the unemployed. Net-net, the nation’s compensation bill has remained unchanged, and the unemployment rate is now 4.5%! Voila!”
That’s your solution, Dr. Mayland? I mean really? Read more …
In light of the US Central Bank’s (I refuse to use their deceitful self-anointed Federal Reserve moniker) most recent grandstanding policy decision that has been referred to as QE light that precedes the inevitable QE2 launch sometime in the not so distant future, I present an open challenge to Paul Krugman and all like minded economists, Nobel prize winning or not, that support the monetary policy of dollar debasement. This will be a straightforward challenge issued by our Founding Fathers, in particular the first US Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, who scripted the US Coinage Act of 1792. The one question I want to see Mr. Krugman and his supporters answer is this:
“If monetary debasement can truly create economic recovery, why did our Founding Fathers establish, in the US Coinage Act of 1792, that any persons discovered to be deliberately debasing US money ‘shall be guilty of felony and shall be punished by death’?”
Note that the punishment was not imprisonment, not even hard labor, but death. Read more …
Ever since the roaring stock markets of the 1920′s in the US preceded the great stock market crash and the ushering in of the Great Depression, it has been apparent that rising stock markets have never been indicators that “all is well” in economyland. Yet the Alices out there still always want to believe the fantasy land proclamations of economic health by the leaders of the EU and the Americas that economic recovery is on the way. Today, rising stock markets in the EU and the US are undoubtedly and unfortunately nothing more than evidence of the vast extent to which stock markets are manipulated by bankers and politicians today. And the current reinflation of stock market bubbles in the EU and the US only mean that the structural integrity of the stock markets have been greatly impaired by such excessive meddling with free market forces and the consequent creation of vastly distorted stock prices.
When this current stock market rally in the US and the EU fall apart and they are very close right now to reaching the apex of this fake rally, I expect the downside of this fall to exceed the fall of the markets that I predicted in April, 2008 given the enormous energy and exhaustion of buyers that has been required of these current manufactured rallies.
About the author: JS Kim is the Chief Investment Strategist and Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, LLC, a fiercely independent wealth consultancy company that guides investors in the best ways to invest in gold and silver through the progression of this global financial crisis. The above article may be reprinted on other sites provided all text and links are kept intact, including the above author acknowledgment.
In the third video in the SmartKnowledgeU Financial Armageddon to Freedom educational series, I discuss the asset bubbles that exist in China, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand despite false reassurances from politicians and bankers that we are now in “global economic recovery.”
Above is the very first video in a brand new educational series that will address a multitude of topics relevant to the second phase of the global monetary crisis called “Financial Armageddon to Freedom”. This series will be a very casual way for me to express my thoughts about this crisis and all videos will be unscripted, approximately five minutes in length, and address sophisticated topics in a very simple manner (due to the time constraints I’m placing on each video). I will try to produce one video per week. I hope that my “Financial Armageddon to Freedom” video series will provide ample utility to help people of all ages successfully weather the second phase of this monetary crisis. I won’t post every video here; however you will be able to find them on my youtube channel “smartknowledgeu” if you are interested.
Here’s the one question your broker never wants to hear:
“Explain to me how the stock market is not rigged if only 20 stocks account for almost 30% of all daily trading volume, if only 99 stocks account for more than 50% of all daily trading volume and if the bottom 12,112 stocks account for less than 0.05% of daily trading volume?”
Though these were the statistics for the US New York Stock Exchange during the month of June, similar shenanigans were used to rig other major global stock market indexes higher during the global stock market rallies that occurred during the first half of 2010. In 2007, an analysis of the world’s stock markets revealed that only a handful of financial firms controlled the bulk of trading volume every day on the world’s leading stock exchanges, with the most concentrated power being exhibited in the US, the UK and Australia. Read more …
For all those smug PhD economists educated at the University of Chicago, Princeton and Harvard that prescribe fiat currency devaluation to toilet paper valuation as the solution to our global monetary crisis and then feign disbelief at the current state of affairs worldwide, Robert Welch predicted your favored Keynesian nightmare as early as 1958 and once again in 1974. One of his multi-part suggested solution in 1974? “We must once again make our money freely redeemable in gold at some realistic price.”
According to Welch, “both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’”
Though this speech is decades old, most of Welch’s points are eerily still relevant today.
If there’s one thing you should have learned during the past four years it is this. Large global commercial investment firms are about as trustworthy as a used car salesman. This has been the case since the birth of Wall Street, but people are only waking up to this reality today after the ugly secrets of the industry have finally been revealed to the outside world in the past several years. The lesson the public-at-large is learning today is one that old-school American gangster Lucky Luciano learned after spending a day on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, an eye-opening lesson that allegedly induced him to comment: “I realized I’d joined the wrong mob.”Read more …
After watching a great video with Hugh Hendry posted on Zero Hedge earlier today, I decided to search the archives of past-dated interviews with Mr. Hendry. Why? Because the establishment has such a one-sided agenda of hiding the truth from the public that their modus operandi is always the same when confronted with the truth in present day. The establishment which includes Finance Ministers, Treasury Secretaries, and yes, Nobel Prize winning economists, always attempts to ridicule anyone that exposes their fraudulent analysis and expresses dissension to their establishment views. In retrospect, when we listen to their past arguments, we can always expose their views as propaganda and their ridicule of opposition views as an attempt to maintain their veneer of lies and deceit. Read more …
Lars Schall of MMNews Germany has recently interviewed many outspoken critics of the inner workings of our global financial system including former Federal Housing Commissioner and Solari Inc. President Catherine Austin Fitts and Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC) William K. Black. Below is my recent interview with Mr. Schall. Read more …
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 …
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J.S. Kim is the Founder & Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU™, LLC. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, and received a double master in Business Administration and Public Policy from the University of Texas at Austin. Read more...
