Category A Life of Pretending

Mar 27 2023

Hungary Not Sure if it Wants to Support Finland and Sweden Joining NATO While U.S. State Dept Tries to Overthrow Hungarian Government


Posted originally on the CTH on March 26, 2023 | Sundance

One of many things to like about Hungary is their brutal honesty when it comes to the United States meddling in their domestic affairs. {Background}

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó gave an interview recently where he said it is more challenging to support the NATO objective, when the United States is so committed to overthrowing the Hungarian government. He has a good point.

(Via Associated Press) – The West’s steady criticism of Hungary on democratic and cultural issues makes the small European country’s right-wing government reluctant to offer support on practical matters, specifically NATO’s buildup against Russia, Hungary’s foreign minister said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó also said Friday that his country has not voted on whether to allow Finland and Sweden to join NATO because Hungarian lawmakers are sick of those countries’ critiques of Hungarian domestic affairs.

Lawmakers from the governing party plan to vote Monday in favor of the Finnish request but “serious concerns were raised” about Finland and Sweden in recent months “mostly because of the very disrespectful behavior of the political elites of both countries towards Hungary,” Szijjártó said.

“You know, when Finnish and Swedish politicians question the democratic nature of our political system, that’s really unacceptable,” he said.

The timing of a vote on Sweden is harder to predict, Szijjártó said.

The EU, which includes 21 NATO countries, has frozen billions in funds to Budapest and accused populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban of cracking down on media freedom and LGBTQ rights. Orban’s administration has also been accused of tolerating an entrenched culture of corruption and co-opting state institutions to serve the governing Fidesz party. (read more)

Hungary has been in the crosshairs of the Biden/Obama administration ever since Prime Minister Viktor Orban refused to align with the WEF Western Democracies in their quest for regime change in Russia.  As the NATO led western alliance assembled to use Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Orban would not join.

In early April 2022, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was overwhelmingly reelected {LINK}, despite the massive efforts against him by the European Union, western and euro-centric multinational globalists.   As a result of the victory, Brussels was furious at the Hungarian people.  Associated Press – […] “Orban — a fierce critic of immigration, LGBTQ rights and “EU bureaucrats” — has garnered the admiration of right-wing nationalists across Europe and North America.” (link)

Within the statements reported from his 2022 victory speech, Prime Minister Orban warned citizens of the NATO and western allied countries about the manipulation of Ukraine and how he views the Zelenskyy regime:  […] “while speaking to supporters on Sunday, Orban singled out Zelenskyy as part of the “overwhelming force” that he said his party had struggled against in the election — “the left at home, the international left, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.” (link)

This put Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the crosshairs of the western alliance, specifically the EU and U.S. bureaucrats who use their power, position and intelligence apparatus to manipulate foreign nations.  A year later and now we see USAID Administrator Samantha Power in Hungary openly discussing her seeding of the NGO’s and political activist systems in order to generate yet another color revolution. {Direct Rumble Link} – WATCH:

Samantha Power, the wife of Cass Sunstein, is well known as the Obama/Biden administration’s advance operative who uses her position in U.S. government to influence activism in targeted nations. Hungary is now a target.

Mar 26 2023

Neil Oliver – The Answer to Who Watches the Guards, Is Not Within The Question


For his weekly monologue, Neil Oliver ponders the collapse of checks and balances. The framework of new democratic norms where the government ruling elite police themselves and their conscripts for violations created by their own conduct.

Encapsulated within the question, “Who guards the guards,” Oliver outlines the answer is not within the question.  It is not a matter of watching the guards, it is now time for people throughout the west to change the guards and throw out the self-policing bums.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – Who watches the watchers? Who guards the guards?

The question was posed by the Roman satirist Juvenal 2,000 years ago, but it has never been more relevant. It’s applied now to remind us of the need to keep a watchful eye on those in power.

This should be our paramount concern now, when lies and liars are everywhere.

This week, former PM Boris Johnson told the House of Commons privileges committee he had not lied when he told the House that his own Covid guidance was being followed in No.10.

Note the word guidance – made especially interesting by the fact ordinary members of the public were, as I seem to recall, arrested, charged and fined for sitting together on park benches or on the beach. I’m not sure that’s how guidance normally works.

In any event, I honestly don’t care whether he lied or not to parliament. I don’t care if they were having cake or coke. This is a red herring, a sleight of hand, a tactic to distract the gullible. The point that must neither be overlooked nor forgotten is that neither Johnson nor anyone else at those gatherings was demonstrably afraid of Covid.

We know that because we have seen the photos of them standing together without masks. Standing apart and wearing masks was for the little people. We might also assume that we were being laughed at by those who knew there was nothing to fear and therefore no reason not to party.

Keir Starmer’s Labour party was the same – we saw those pictures too. He and they called for earlier, longer, harder lockdowns and all the rest, and then met for curry and beer and cosy chats.

Fear was for the little people and so Left and Right, Blue and Red and all positions and team colours in between laughed up their sleeves as the nudge units and the paid propagandists told us anyone breaching the regulations – sorry, I mean guidance – was a granny killing Covidiot and Pandemic Denier.

Look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t so.

So, who guards the guards, who watches the watchers?

Let’s notice, among much else, that this is the Commons sitting in judgment on the Commons, which is to say politicians sitting in judgement on politicians. This is the guards, judging the guards. This is the same Commons whose inhabitants worked together in unquestioning lockstep to impose policies that ruined lives, wrecked livelihoods and upended the economy. This is the same Commons that, far from accepting responsibility for the carnage, is actively seeking to have us look the other way while they get about the business of doing nothing more than playing politics, all they’re fit for, fiddling while Rome burns. The is the same Commons that empties when one of their own stands to speak up on behalf of people killed or harmed by medical products pushed as vaccines. And trust me, I’ll get back to that safe and effective nonsense they pushed in a moment.

We never quite got to mandated jabs for all, but people all over the world were sacked for opting to live by the ideal of my body my choice, the notion enshrined in the Nuremberg Code that states that a person should at all times: “Have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or other forms of constraint or coercion …”

We didn’t quite get to mandates for the jabs for the general population, but I say it was a damned close-run thing. I say they were itching to mandate the vaccines. I say mandates weren’t pushed across the line in the end because enough of us made plain it would mean civil disobedience if not full-on civil war. I maintain that while they’ve gone quiet about lockdowns and face-masks, it can only be a matter of time before that playbook is brought out for the next crisis they can cook up. More and more are queuing up to distance themselves from the harms done during the last three years, while still priapic on account of all that unbridled power over the everyday lives of the tax-paying public.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

There are calls for a war crimes trial for Putin. What about a war crimes trial for Tony Blair while we’re at it? We hit the 20th anniversary of his unlawful war in Iraq last week – that unlawful war that led to over a million deaths, that destabilised the entire region to this day and gave birth to Isis. Wouldn’t the moral way to mark that birthday be a war crimes trial for all the people who took us there? And while we’re considering war crimes trials, shouldn’t we look again at precisely what successive United States administrations did in Korea, in Vietnam, and more recently in Libya, and in Syria and in Afghanistan and other sovereign nation-states too numerous to mention? Shouldn’t we look at what was done, and by whom?

US libertarian think tank the Cato Institute recently looked again at the behaviour of successive US presidents in relation to the Saudi Arabian horror show in Yemen. They reported, and suggested the appropriateness of war crimes trials for Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden:

“Whose administrations serviced the US-provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, schools.

“Whose administrations serviced the US-provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, school buses and other civilian targets, gave intelligence used for targeting and for a time refuelled Saudi and Emirati aircraft.”

“US officials could not claim to be surprised at their culpability,” they added. “The state department warned that they could be held responsible for war crimes.”

“George W Bush is another good candidate for a trial on his aggressive unjustified attack on Iraq based on manipulated and fabricated intelligence. His war ended up killing hundreds of thousands of civilians as well as triggering years more of conflict. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair today spending his golden years profiting after acting as Bush’s poodle would be an appropriate co-conspirator.”

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

We are trained to fear Global warming … the warming of the planet … while that world burns still on account of the fire Tony Blair helped light in the Middle East with UK taxpayer-funded missiles and bombs.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

Let’s look again at the banks and the simmering chaos there … in that world in which banks are secretive, privately owned businesses, in which central banks have the power to create money out of thin air and lend the same sums over and over and over again while growing fatter and fatter on more and more interest and debt. Another former PM, Gordon Brown traded on and perpetuated a myth of being a safe pair of hands when it came to money matters. This is the same Gordon Brown who sold off half of the UK’s gold reserves at a knockdown price so low it was remembered ever after as the Brown Bottom and one of the worst deals in recorded history.

In 2008 Brown bailed out the banks with billions and billions of pounds worth of our money and those banks duly stayed open, the bankers kept getting their bonuses and nothing changed when it came to stopping their reckless games with fantasy money. We were sold down the river and now the banks are shaking on their fantasy foundations once again and for more of the same reasons.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

The MHRA – the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is supposed to monitor the information we get about health and the safety and effectiveness of the drugs we are offered. But the MHRA gets 86 percent of its funding from the pharmaceuticals industry. Is that the recipe for unbiased behaviour always and only in the interests of the people? I’m only asking.

It’s the same the world over: 65 percent of the US Federal Drugs Administration comes from Big Pharma. Between 2006 and 2019, nine out of 10 FDA Commissioners went on to secure jobs with pharmaceutical companies. 89 percent of the European Medicines Agency funding comes from Big Pharma. 96 percent of the funding for the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia comes from Big Pharma. In Japan, the relevant agency gets 85 percent of its funding from Big Pharma.

No lesser publication than the British Medical Journal asked, in a headline over a recent article:

“From FDA to MHRA – are drug regulators for hire?’

Obviously, I couldn’t possibly say one way or the other. A recent report from Australia’s TGA – the Therapeutic Goods Administration – equivalent to our MHRA – a report made available only by a Freedom of Information Request – makes plain that in January 2021 it was known to anyone privy to Pfizer’s own data that the lipid nanoparticle was widely distributed all around the body.

All of this was known before the so-called vaccines were approved for injection into billions of human beings, from babies up. Those entrusted with our health care knew, in advance, that the tiny oily bubbles carrying the making of the toxic spike protein could and would go to brains, hearts, livers, ovaries, testes, everywhere, and they went right ahead and did it anyway.

Safe and effective they said, over and over and over. Misinformation, anyone?

If they were doing their jobs and reading reports like this, then Chris Whitty would have known, Patrick Vallance would have known, Antony Fauci would have known.

This information is out there now, in the public domain, though heavily redacted – and God alone knows what remains redacted – and so why isn’t this front page and main TV news all around the world? Why not?

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

The answer is as stark as it is depressing:

Westminster awards itself the power to make laws, enforce those laws and decree the punishment for any transgressions of those laws. This is a textbook definition of the tyranny that our constitution, enshrined in Magna Carta 1215, was specifically shaped to prevent. And yet here we are – with the watchers watching the watchers, the guards guarding the guards.

It is as obvious as Boris Johnson’s estrangement from the truth that this tyranny should never have been allowed to evolve and that, since it has, we must not tolerate it a moment longer.

Decisions of importance must be made by those with skin in the game, but with no means to profit either directly or indirectly from the decisions they come to.

Who guards the guards is a 2,000-year-old question. Older by 500 years is the Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way, by Laozi, the Old Master.

Last week a friend reminded me of words that sound as though they might have been written this morning:

“When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land. When government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures. When the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn. All this is robbery and chaos.”

Robbery and chaos – that’s what our leaders and their little wizards have inflicted upon us. It was true two and a half thousand years ago and it’s still true now.

That old book also warns us about:

“Those who try to control, who use force to protect their power … They take from those who don’t have enough and give to those who have far too much.”

This is how we will beat them, how we will win – by remembering what our ancestors learned long ago and finally, finally doing something about it.

Here’s the thing: it’s long past time to watch the guards. What we need, all over the West and once and for all, is a changing of the guards.

[Transcript End]

March 25, 2023 | Sundance

Mar 24 2023

US National Debt – A Different Perspective


Armstrong Economics Blog/Uncategorized Re-Posted Mar 24, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

In 2010, Barron’s wrote a piece on me effectively laughing at my forecast that the share market would rally to new highs. What seems to inevitably unfold is this notion that whatever the event might be in motion, the mere thought of a reversal in trend appears impossible. When the press disagrees with Socrates, I know it will be the press who is wrong. And because they end up being wrong, of course, they cannot print a retraction so they will just pretend you do not exist rather than admit – Sorry, we were wrong. The Dow made that new high above 2007 by February 2013. That was 64 months from the October 2007 high.

I have been in the game for many years. With each event, it appears to be like Groundhog Day. They pop their heads out and declare they do not see their shadow, so the entire world will disintegrate and that is always based upon opinion. It is never backed by real analysis. Just the standard human trait of assuming whatever trend is in motion, will remain in motion.

Being an institutional adviser, I have never had that luxury. We have had to deal with some of the biggest portfolios in the world. They want accurate forecasting, and it has to be long-term – not day trading. They are not interested in the typical headlines of doom and gloom that the press love to print with every financial event simply to get readership. That is all they care about. It has been the financial version of the fake news.

When we step back and look at this favorite fundamental that people beat to death to predict the end of the world, the national debt, and the collapse of the dollar. Little did they know that the increase in National Debt during the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis was supposed to bring down the sky and end the existence of the dollar. We can see the sharp rise in debt simply made a double top with the Financial Crisis of 1985.

It was that previous 1985 Financial Crisis that set in motion the Plaza Accord which brought together the central banks creating what was then the G5 – now G20. Of course, like every government intervention, the side effect was the 1987 Crash and their attempt to reverse their directive at the Plaza Accord became the Louve Accord. When the traders saw that failed, the collapse in confidence led to the 1987 Crash.

It has always been a CONFIDENCE game as I pointed out with the 1933 Banking Holiday previously. In this case, the failure of the Louvre Accord which came out and said the dollar had fallen enough, once new lows in the dollar unfolded and the central banks could not stop the decline, led to financial panic by 1987 which manifested in the 1987 Crash.

This chart shows the quarterly change in the National Debt since 1966, Here you can see the 1985 and 2008 Financial Crises were on par. Neither one ended the dollar no less the world economy. So when I warned the share market would rally and make new highs and Barron’s laughed in 2010, I said the same thing after the 1987 Crash and people laughed.

In fact, on the very day of the low, I said this was it and that we would rally back to new highs by 1989. That was perfect and the market responded to the Economic Confidence Model (ECM) which has been published back in 1979. This was more than simply forecasting the 1987 Crash and the very day of the low. It clearly established that the ECM had revealed that there was a secret cycle behind the appearance of chaos even in economics.

Larry Edelson was actually a competitor at the time. But Larry respected that the forecast from the model was far beyond what people would ever expect. If we are ever going to advance as a society, we have to stop the bullshit and understand HOW markets trade and WHY. Larry did that. He understood that the model was something larger than just personal opinion.

Even those claiming to be using the K-Wave cannot make real forecasts. The basis of Kondratieff’s argument came from his empirical study of the economic performance of the USA, England, France, and Germany between 1790 and 1920. Kondratieff took the wholesale price levels, interest rates, and production and consumption of coal, pig iron, and lead for each economy. He then sought to smooth the data using an averaging mathematical approach of nine years to eliminate the trend as well as shorter waves. Kondratieff thus arrived at his long-wave theory suggesting that the economic process was a process of continuous waves of boom and bust.

Kondratieff’s work was compelling and contributed greatly to the Austrian School of Economics that first began to develop the concept of a Business Cycle. The general central principle of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is concerned with a period of sustained low-interest rates and excessive credit creation resulting in a volatile and unstable imbalance between saving and investment. Within this context, the theory supposes that the Business Cycle unfolds whereby low rates of interest tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking sector and thus then result in the expansion of the money supply that causes an unsustainable credit ­source boom which leads to a diminished opportunity for investment by competition.

Benner

Here is a chart of the business cycle that was created by a farmer named Samuel Benner. Benner based his work on Sunspots, which actually incorporated solar maximum and minimum that today’s Climate Change zealots refuse to consider. Nevertheless, someone manipulated Brenner’s work and created a chart to try to influence society handing it in with a wild story to the Wall Street Journal published this cycle on February 2nd, 1932, when the market bottomed in July 1932. Still, nobody knew who had investigated this phenomenon in 1932.

WSJ1933

When I was doing my own research reading all the newspapers to understand how events unfolded, I came across this chart. I found it interesting that during the Great Depression people were reaching out and some began to embrace cyclical ideas. The problem with both Kondratiff and Brenner was that the period they used to develop their cycles was the 19th century because the real Industrial Revolution was unfolding and in the 1850s, 70% of the civil workforce were all in agriculture. Consequently, if you constructed a model based entirely upon one sector, it would work only as long as that sector was the top dog.

Being a historian buff, it quickly hit me that NOTHING remains constant and that the economy will ALWAYS evolve, mature, and then crash and burn. Where agriculture was 70% of the workforce in 18590, it fell to 40% by 1900, and then down to 3% by 1980.

Just look at energy. The earliest lamps, dating to the Upper Paleolithic, were stones with depressions in which animal fats were burned as a source of light. In cultures closer to the sea, they began to use shells as lamps which they would burn at first animal fat. Clay lamps began to appear during the Bronze Age around the 16th century BC and the invention quickly spread throughout the Roman Empire. Initially, they took the form of a saucer with a floating wick.

We even find Roman oil lamps as luxury items crafted out of bronze. There are collectors of terracotta oil lamps for there is a vast variety of motifs. There is everything from dolphins, and various entities, to erotic oil lamps, which may have been used in brothels. The point is, if you constructed a model on oil, you would have surely accomplished similar results to Kondratief and Brenner.

Then of course, just as the energy moved from animal fats to vegetable oils, by the 19th century it returned to whale oil which was extracted from the blubber. Emerging industrial societies used whale oil in oil lamps and to make soap. However, during the 20th century, whale oil was even made into margarine.

Then the discovery of petroleum and the use of whale oils declined considerably from their peak in the 19th century into the 20th century. Ironically, it was fossil fuels that probably saved whales from extinction. Hence, now we are entering a period where they deliberately want to end fossil fuels and move to solar and wind power. Obviously, just a cursory review of energy reveals the problem of basing a model on the current energy source or major economic industry. Things change with time.

Mar 20 2023

The Silence of the Shams – Pay Attention to The Specific Silence, and What They Are Waiting For


Posted originally on the CTH on March 19, 2023 | Sundance

It is good that people are starting to realize the deception in the world of politics, specifically Republican politics, by watching what is not done, who does not speak, and what is not being said in the aftermath of a visible effort to indict President Trump by a politically motivated New York district attorney.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; however, the silence tells you something very specific when it comes to politics.  The corrupt and manipulative political system is designed to test opinion, that is what most professional politicians do before they take a position.  In essence, the ones who wait are the ones who manipulate.

The politicians who wait to express opinions on substantive issues, are the ones who are comfortable operating in the world where manipulation is the tool, and authenticity is something they do not carry.   In the biggest of big political pictures, this approach is what supports the maintenance of the professional political system.

Without manipulation as the primary agenda of focus, politicians do not need consultants, polling, managers or branding groups.  However, when the creation of an artificial premise, the manipulation itself, is the baseline for the character of the principal – all of these systems are needed.  This video by Vivek Ramaswamy has gained a lot of attention, because at the core of it – he is correct.  WATCH:

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However, the issue extends well beyond individual politicians; the issue goes all the way through the political apparatus into the systems and institutions itself.   This is one of the reasons why, when you fine tune your discernment, you can predict “what systems” are carrying “what motives.”

Remember, CTH outlining the Republican Governors Association (RGA) as one of the manipulative political institutions that was different this time around, for the 2024 race? {Go Deep}  It’s not just Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis that you should notice.  Pay attention to the specific silence, positioning and wind testing that is taking place from within that entire network of the Republican Governors Association.   There’s the *tell* that indicates I was correct.

The good news is that President Trump can also see it.  [LINK]

Why they wait….

The professional Republicans follow the instructions of the professional Republican control agents.  Those control officers are waiting to see if the predictions do come true, and if President Trump is actually indicted.   They want the opportunity for the dates to pass without action so they can use the absence of an indictment as a political tool to advance their narrative against Trump.

The publicity of the statements by Trump and the Mainstream Media, may actually influence the decision by Alvin Bragg and the New York City DA’s office.   However, for the purposes of the RGA and the characters intent on controlling the 2024 GOP nomination, that aspect will be ignored in favor of driving a bigger wedge between Ron DeSantis and President Trump in the absence of an indictment.

DeSantis branding is all about these types of consultant advisors.   This is why I said do not look for a statement from him.  It’s the same reason why the DeSantis managers kept him in a bunker for five days after the Mar-a-Lago raid.   This approach is all about manipulation and narrative creation.

World War Reddit and Ron DeSantis have something identical in common.  It’s the same playbook, the creation of an illusion.

Once you see how much planning goes into these types of operations, then you begin to realize the scope of the financial interests that are involved.  There are trillions at stake.

Mar 18 2023

MSNBC HOST USES THIS PATHETIC EXCUSE FOR GETTING COVID INFO SO WRONG | ROUNDTABLE | RUBIN REPORT


First published on BitChute at 21:11 UTC on March 17th, 2023.

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Mar 17 2023

Senator Bill Cassidy Confronts Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Biden Tax Proposal, “That’s a Lie”


Posted originally on the CTH on March 16, 2023 | Sundance 

During today’s Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) questioned Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen about Social Security and the immediate cuts that take place in nine years if the current plan goes bankrupt.  The confrontation was professional, but also very focused.  WATCH:

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Mar 11 2023

Week in Review: Bipartisan Populists Unite Against War in Syria, China Brokers Historic Iran/Saudi Arabia Peace, & More, w/ Michael Tracey | SYSTEM UPDATE #53


By Glenn Greenwald Posted originally on Rumble on: March 8, 2023 at 7:01 pm EST

Mar 9 2023

The Debt Crisis – What Really Falls to Dust?


Armstrong Economics Blog/Sovereign Debt Crisis Re-Posted Mar 9, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: The sales pitch seems to be that there is this $2 quadrillion in global debt that overhangs everything. Paper assets, therefore, will all implode!  They seem to be saying that everything has risen due to this debt bubble and it was all created with Zero interest rates. Now that they are going up, the debt bubble will burst and everything will decline. The story seems to be that this decades-long Boom Bust cycle was created over and over by the Federal Reserve. 

This seems to be like you have said, they try to reduce everything to a single cause and effect.

What really happens?

PCJ

ANSWER: These people seem to keep preaching the same story but have no historical understanding whatsoever of how the monetary system has ever worked. Their focus on the Federal Reserve shows that they are not looking at the world economy and they do not even comprehend how bad things really are outside the United States.  They do not comprehend what is an interest rate. It is the compensation to a lender for his anticipation of inflation plus a profit. If I think the dollar will decline by 50%, why would I lend you dollars for a year if when you pay me back it buys half of what it did when I lent it to you?

Debt can be a performing asset. I advised many of the Takeover Boys during the 1980s. We would borrow in one currency to buy the asset in another using the computer to distinguish the long-term trends. I would not recommend that to someone just operating on a gut feeling.

We were also advising on real values, which Hollywood distorted and based the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas and his famous speech on greed. What they did not really understand was that after a Public Wave that peaked in 1981, stocks were suppressed and the full-faith in government created the broadly supported bond market.  Hence – bonds were conservative and stocks were risky. There were two aspects that were behind the entire Takeover Boom.

First, I was showing these charts and how in terms of book value, the Dow Jones bottomed in 1977. It was obvious that if you could buy a company, sell its assets, and double or triple your money, then the market was obviously not overpriced. We had forecast that the Dow was undervalued and that it would rise from the 1982 low of 769.98 and test the 2500 level in two years in 1985. Indeed, it reached 2695.47 by September 1987. We also projected that by the next decade, the Dow would test 6,000 on its next rally.

Even the press in Japan was shocked. We were also projected that Crude would fall below $10 in 1998. Indeed, that forecast was covered by Mark Pitman at Bloomberg News. It bottomed at $10.65 in 1998. In gold would forecast that it would drop to test $250 by 1999 completing a 19-year cycle low. Then gold would rally to test 1,000. Gold reached the $1,000 level by 2008. The Japanese press thought those forecasts were wild, to say the least.

The SECOND aspect of our advice to the takeover boys of the ’80s was something the press NEVER understood. We would advise borrowing in one currency for an asset in another. We were able to turn debt into a performing asset. We would make 20-40% profit on the currency alone. Often, the press would just look at the debt and not understand what we were even doing.

Most of this reasoning stems from Sir Tomas Gresham’s observations when he represented England at the Amsterdam exchange during the reign of Henry VI’s reign and debasement. As Henry debased the silver coinage as was taking place in Spain, the more they debased the coinage, the higher the inflation took place. His observation that bad money drives out the good has been grossly misunderstood. When I was growing up, they took the silver out of the coinage in 1965.  People were culling out the silver showing that the debased new coinage of 1965 drove out of circulation the old silver coinage. The same thing has taken place with the copper pennings.

Because people hoard old coinage, the money supply shrinks. That then forces the government to issue far more debased coinage to compensate for the coinage that has been withdrawn from hoarding. Consequently, inflation unfolds for all tangible assets to rise in value as expressed in the newly debased coinage.

What these people always try to sell is the same old scenario that they cannot point to a single instance in history where everything collapses to dust but only gold survives. Such periods will typically result in revolution. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, that was also all bout a debt crisis.

You must also understand that interest rates will be at their LOWEST internationally in the core economy of the Financial Capital of the World – which is the USA right now. The further you move from the center, the higher the interest rate will be. Hence, I have warned that the United States will be the LAST to fall – never the first. This is not based upon my opinion, this is simply historical fact.

We have interest rates back to 3000 BC and have studied the impact of such convulsions in economic history. As for the Debt Crisis that forced Caesar to cross the Rubicon, I suggest you read Anatomy of a Debt Crisis that appears, only Julius Caesar ever understood. 

The Bottom Line is very simple. There is just no such period as people describe where everything turns to dust and only gold survives. Even if that were true, they what good would the gold do if everything else is worth ZERO? Gold would have also ZERO value since nothing would have value.

The real issue is that as government defaults unfold, tangible assets will rise in value for the amount of money in debt always dwarfs that in even the stock market. We are in a Sovereign Debt Crisis and that is very different from a private debt crisis.