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Things are breaking loose. Holes have appeared in
the fabric of fraud and lies that passes for the world money system. They are
black holes, gravitationally sucking in the things breaking loose, and as these
things cross their event horizons, they will never be seen again. These
things I speak of are the collateral for vast nebulae of falsely generated
debts and obligations that were never intended to be honored (i.e. regarded
as real). As they vanish down the wormholes of time, they take with them
their pretenses of money value, meaning they leave reverberations of
impoverishment in the shadowy place that the real world has become.
The process described above - an
alchemy of physics - will begin to shed light where the shadows have been,
revealing a much harsher world in sharp contours and shocking color, for
instance: red, the color of ink representing losses on real balance sheets of
every household, every enterprise, and every government the whole world
round. A scramble for safety now ensues, not just to lay hold of anything
with remaining real "moneyness," but for the resources that drive
the kind of economies we have. In other words, for gold and silver, and for
oil and gas.
Of course, great geopolitical
forces spin in the background. Only idiots subscribe to the paranoid
fantasies of "one world government" and "global
currencies." In the scramble underway, the things falling apart include
units of governance, breaking into smaller pieces: empires, nation states.
These will include the unraveling European Union but also the matrix of
agreements and protocols that binds together the West - everything from the
IMF to the G-7 to the World Bank - into an entropy express. One rather
extreme scenario I do subscribe to was laid out by blogger Jim Willie recently: the effort by Russia, China, and others to isolate and
neutralize the US dollar as the world's so-called reserve currency by
systematically converting holdings of US Treasury bills into gold wherever
possible, and to thereby diminish the baleful influence of the Imperial US
behemoth. They are assisted in this endeavor by the US itself in its bungling
efforts to manipulate and suppress gold prices, as well as our prevarications
as to exactly how much gold remains in the various places it is supposed to
be stashed - Fort Knox, West Point, and the sub-basement labyrinth of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York - generating ever-greater uncertainty about
the extant world gold supply, and hence its value relative to things like
currencies. Nobody here can even ask the right questions.
While The New York Times
focuses on the momentous issue of real estate sales in the Hamptons, Russia
and China will build gold-backed currencies aimed at monopolizing the trade
in mineral and energy resources, leaving America and much of Europe to freeze
in the dark and sit on gasoline lines at the empty filling stations. For a
while that will work to the East's advantage - until it becomes clear that
the entropic contraction of industrial economies is for everyone as we veer
into a literal world made by hand. That's right, sooner or later Russia and
China will get theirs, too. But in the meantime they have the ability to make
the story a lot more interesting.
There's plenty of suspense this
Easter weekend as observers nervously await the breaking action, to find out
how much the oft-cited fear of confiscation has penetrated the regional money
centers around Europe. Slovenia, a fairy-tale republic somewhere between
Austria and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has been nominated by observers as
the place most likely to be whacked by EU treasure confiscators. It owes
about 10 billion Euros to the EU entropy cloud, with exactly zero chances of
meeting its obligations. But then, it's in the nature of such non-linear
event sequences that the shadows of the black swan's wings will pass over
Slovenia and alight on a chimney-top in some utterly surprising place, say,
Latvia or perhaps even Italy. In any case, European money will be on fire and
a lot of that smokin' moolah surely will wend its way into the US equity
markets under the illusion of safety. It's all just an accident waiting to
happen. Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
There must be an inverse
relationship between the juiced S & P index and the IQs of the public
figures in America who pretend to be able to think, so that there are now
just six remaining people in the political arena who can articulate the
various parts of the mega-swindle that besets us: Bill Black, Jim Rickards,
Bill Moyers, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and David Stockman. Stockman
is out with a new book, The Great Deformation, that manages to concentrate
all the requisite outrage in one gale of rectified objurgation. It is a
pleasure to read Stockman - former budget director under Reagan and Michigan
congressman - call out the villains from Reagan to Bernanke to Paulson to
Rubin and scores of others in the most opprobrious terms. Stockman
characterizes the financial action of recent decades a "leveraged buyout
of the USA" and it sure looks that way. If you travel around the towns
of the upper Hudson Valley - once an industrial corridor full of Jimmy
Stewart type burgs - it's beginning to look like the country Borat grew up
in. Everything of value that wasn't nailed down was taken, and everything
that remains is broken, including the ragged population.
On Sunday night, wire stories
had Cyprus close to "going Icelandic," that is, hoisting the middle
finger to Brussels and repudiating the money owed. That option may end up
seeming more attractive to virtually everybody in the broke world, including
even the young college loan debt donkeys of the USA, groaning under their
loads as they stand idle in the barren fields of unemployment. Imagine, all
those people thinking that nirvana is a place of cold and darkness... with
the vague odor of rotting fish hanging in the still air.
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For a complete list of books by James Howard Kunstler and purchase
links, CLICK HERE.
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