Investors’ curiosity has peaked as central banks are increasing their gold purchases. We are not going back to a Bretton Woods type situation and that is not the issue. You must understand that gold is neutral. Central banks are buying gold because the Neocons have weaponized the dollar.
Russia was removed from the SWIFT system, and private citizens’ assets were confiscated. When Russian assets were removed from SWIFT, a threat to the world was issued to say, “Hey, if you don’t do what we tell you to do, we will take you out of SWIFT.”
This is not the end of the dollar. Money continues to pour into US equities, particularly the Dow. Why? When the drum of war is beating, major institutions rush to move their money into a safe haven, which happens to be the US at this point in time. The big money is not purchasing start-up equities on the Nasdaq, for example, as they will not take that risk. Our computer model indicates the Dow will continue rising into 2032 as it remains one of the last safe havens.
The West has become extremely aggressive in its geopolitics. You simply do not buy the debt of your enemy. Central banks are buying gold because the USD is political.
There is a stark difference between short-term and long-term bonds. The central banks have zero control over the short-term and that is how this whole QE fiasco began as central banks began purchasing long-term debt in an attempt to reduce long-term interest. Why would you buy long-term when war, the primary driver of inflation, is looming? This is a serious situation that the neocons who have weaponized the dollar simply do not understand.
Posted originally on Apr 3, 2024 by Martin Armstrong
QUESTION: I believe you analyzed inheritance and how altering it had contributed to society’s decline. Politicians here in Australia are talking about when you die; everything should go to the state because it is not fair that one person inherits more than another.
I would greatly appreciate any comments you might have historically on that subject.
Bret
REPLY: Yes, I forgot when I did that analysis. It was a long time ago. Inheritance Taxes are Marxist and highly destructive economically. Suppose you have a company worth $100 million; your children must pay 40% taxes. They have to fire people and sell assets to cover the tax. This has been HIGHLY destructive in farming. Heirs have been forced to sell off farmland to pay the tax. This is how large farming companies and Bill Gates have accumulated farmland. This exploitation of the heir reduces productivity and thus reduces GDP and employment.
Before Marxism, inheritance became the primary reason the first son inherited everything during the Middle Ages, and the second son was donated to the church to become a priest, whether he liked it or not. In ancient times, if you had many children and evenly divided an estate among them, you effectively destroyed society’s productive capacity.
There had previously been two types of marriage in France, temporary and permanent, until the Catholic Church insisted on only permanent marriages. Charlemagne married all his daughters in only a “temporary” marriage, meaning that they possessed no legal right to the throne or property. That was the distinction between the two types. The question of inheritance was a major issue historically.
The ancients knew the consequences of dividing estates (partibility) among heirs. Sparta in Greece rewarded fathers based on the number of children. Sparta wanted soldiers, so the more children, the better. But Sparta undermined its own economy in the process. Production of children was rewarded in Sparta, and the fathers of three or four sons were exempted from military service and other economic burdens. Aristotle is sharply critical of this practice and wrote:
“It is obvious that, if there were many children, the land being distributed as it is, many of them must necessarily fall into poverty.”
If you create a major company like Ford Motors and you die, then the government is only interested in grabbing taxes. They think nothing about the jobs this company creates. The ancients realized that even dividing it up equally among the heirs destroys the productive capacity of the entity. This is why they evolved into the first son who inherited everything to preserve the estate rather than destroy it.
After 2032, we MUST prohibit any such idea of direct taxation (income/inheritance) as the Founding Fathers of the US Constitution intended. They understood this lesson from the past – Marx was a hateful, jealous person, only concerned with not having as much as his neighbor. This is what has brought us to the brink of disaster. Our government has followed Marx rather than those who created the Constitution out of experience.
Thomas Paine was famous for saying: Give me liberty or death. But he also made it very clear why history repeats fro the people refuse to ever learn:
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worse state, an intolerable one.”
Posted originally on Mar 29, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
According to leaked sources, Biden’s new simplified income-tax form to fund World War III and his Proposed $7.5 trillion budget will be revised, containing only four lines:
Posted originally on the CTH on March 30, 2024 | Sundance
Guyana President Dr. Irfaan Ali sat down with BBC narrative engineer Stephen Sackur, host of BBC’s HardTALK, to talk about Guyana’s vast offshore oil and gas reserves and how it is transforming their national economy.
The BBC production crew came with an intent to confront President Ali about climate change and the unwillingness of the emerging nation to adhere to the dictatorial fiats of the Western world. BBC arrived fully immersed in the climate change agenda, with a narrative that stands aghast at the nerve of another nation to look out for the best economic interests of their citizens.
President Ali was not going to allow the BBC to avoid the hypocrisy within their position and he fired back brilliantly. WATCH (prompted):
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Pretending leftists wonder why the world is cleaving. Then again, in order to advance their insane ideology, the progressive left must always pretend not to know things. The BBC narrative engineer is a case study in this pretense.
An entire generation within the walled and occupied West have been indoctrinated to believe in the cult of climate change. As the same ‘Western world’ loses a grip on their historic influence, the global cleaving does not come as a surprise.
People have asked me about the origin of the CBDC planning, the motive for the master design of the WEF and Western financial and corporate world. Why would they need to wall-off the West through banking, finance and economics?
The answer really does boil down to diminished influence and fear. The need for control is a reaction to fear.
In very real and practical terms, can we stop China from taking Taiwan? No.
Can we really stop Russia from taking eastern Ukraine? No.
Think logically.
In the chase for corporate profits, multinational financial gains and enrichment of the coffers, the USA and proverbial West deindustrialized. We outsourced our manufacturing to foreign nations. Those same multinational institutions, and the politicians they control, are now facing the consequences of their greed.
♦ Diminished influence.
Do we really expect China to provide the rolled steel for a war against them over Taiwan?
Do we really expect China to provide the microchips, material and elements needed for use in missiles, weapons or war material, if we make them our enemy?
Do we really expect the softened and complacent youth citizens, created purposefully to benefit a “service driven economy” from within the USA and West, to sign up for the meat grinder of yet another bankers’ war? Of course not.
None of this aforementioned action would ever happen. That’s the pragmatic reality that everyone pretends not to know.
The Western global alliance has diminished its usefulness, exploited its leverage, and expended all of its effort in the chase for corporate profit and greed. The grey zone influence is rising, an inflection point is upon us, and new global alliances are being formed – example BRICS+.
Against this backdrop, the WEF/Western corporate world is seeking to squeeze (and control) the remaining wealth from a loin cloth that is increasingly drying.
Their previous acceptance phase led to strategic planning. The powers that control the mechanisms of Western wealth have constructed financial walls in order to preserve their own system of control. That’s the big picture origin of the dollar-based central bank digital currency.
They are erecting walls and creating systems of compliance for financial engagement within a cleaved world. A cleaving their globalist greed created.
The financial cleaving creates a pipeline for money and transactions between the zones. They will control the pipeline. That’s the motive, and their mechanism to try and retain affluence (CBDC) against a backdrop of diminished global influence.
The citizens within the WESTERN construct, are seemingly trapped inside this abusive relationship with an increasingly fascist government. Note the COVID dictates.
The quoted banker does not specifically talk about the Central Bank Digital Currency that lays at the end of the promoted rainbow; the author does. However, the banker does outline a familiar step in the current process. As a result, it is worth drawing attention to the continuum.
MAINE – “According to Hannigan, the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to implement “paper-free and virtual processes” to handle their finances while “adapting to the new reality.
“For years, Americans had been slowly moving away from cash and paper checks, but the pandemic supercharged the trend,” Hannigan wrote. “By last year, 41% said they never use cash for purchases, up from 24% in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. Only 14% still exclusively use cash and checks.” (Read More)
There is a BIG difference between electronic funds (current), and a digital dollar (future).
Posted originally on Mar 27, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
Did we get enough of them to save the planet?
I am not kidding. There are now Climate Zealots who are eager to bring about World War III as the means to save the planet by eliminating 50%+ of the world population. This is why all our world leaders are promoting war, and the NEOCONS love it.
In 2020, messages including “The Earth has a deadline” began to appear on the display. Then, numbers 7:103:15:40:07 showed up, representing the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until that deadline. On September 17, the clock began counting down from seven years, 103 days, 15 hours, 40 minutes, and seven seconds, displayed in red.
Ironically, they may be correct in proposing that in 2027, the world will end geopolitically, but not for climate reasons. They realize there is NO WAY we can abandon fossil fuels and replace them with wind and solar. That is just impossible. To make the power grid and electric cars feasible, you must reduce the world population by 50% while maintainer the power grid as it is today. Our computer has forecast that the peak of World War III is most likely in the 2026/2027 time period.
This is NOT my opinion. I stood up at our World Economic Conference in 2011 and showed that the War Cycle would turn up in 2014, and our computer even projected Ukraine would be the place. I even posted that Ukraine would be the place to watch for the start of World War III back in 2013, BEFORE the 2014 revolution. It was Victoria Nuland who selected the UNELECTED new government and instructed them to start the civil war by attacking the Donbas. Everyone knew that would force Putin to defend the Russian people there.
Our computer is not partisan or biased and is not influenced by human intervention. It is the ONLY Artificial Intelligence Computer with a 40-year track record. The ONLY mainstream press to ever slightly review the forecasts was the New Yorker Magazine back in 2009 with the title The Secret Cycle. In 2011, this model forecasted the markets would make all-time new highs above 2007. Most laughed. Barrons wrote: Circular Reasoning: A Market for Pi in the Sky? The man who called the ’87 crash is now calling for a long-term market rise. By ROBIN GOLDWYN BLUMENTHAL. Barrons never reported how the forecasts were the only ones to be correct. They reported them in 2011 because they thought they were absurd.
Even the German magazine Smart Investor pointed out that we were the only ones projecting inflation and an economic boom into 2024, while the majority kept calling for a recession over the last three years. They wanted to know, “Could you please briefly explain your forecasting approach?”
Even with the AI craze, mainstream media is NOT interested in reporting our forecasts because they contradict the instructed narrative.
Forecasting war is NOT what I want to see. Many people have written in and said I should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama wanted to invade Syria, so he got the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting war. Most assumed he got it for simply being the first black president. I speak out against a war our computer is forecasting, so I am not qualified for that Nobel Peace Prize since I actually advocate peace. Nobody wants this forecast to be wrong more than me.
Julius Caesar wrote in his commentaries that people “believe what they wish,” and that statement has defined the human race for thousands of years. This is why you CANNOT have an intelligent conversation with ANY of these climate change people. It has become their religion. The stupid ones have confused climate change with pollution. They are dancing the world into a nuclear holocaust and assume that they will survive, but the other half of the world will not. They have taken over the White House alongside the NEOCONS and are on the same agenda – reducing the population, albeit for different reasons.
Posted originally on Mar 27, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
In 1996, the US government released a white paper entitled, “How to make a mint: the cryptography of anonymous electronic cash.” Released by the National Security Agency Office of Information Security Research and Technology, this document basically explains how a government agency could create something like Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.
I encourage those interested to read the contents of the link above. This document was released during the dawn of the dot.com bubble before the technology existed to create such a currency. The NSA quickly realized that it could weaponize this technology to create a cashless society.
As explained in the introduction:
“Among the most important uses of this technology is electronic commerce: performing financial transactions via electronic information exchanged over telecommunications lines. A key requirement for electronic commerce is the development of secure and efficient electronic payment systems. The need for security is highlighted by the rise of the Internet, which promises to be a leading medium for future electronic commerce.
Electronic payment systems come in many forms including digital checks, debit cards, credit cards, and stored value cards. The usual security features for such systems are privacy (protection from eavesdropping), authenticity (provides user identification and message integrity), and nonrepudiation (prevention of later denying having performed a transaction) .
The type of electronic payment system focused on in this paper is electronic cash. As the name implies, electronic cash is an attempt to construct an electronic payment system modelled after our paper cash system. Paper cash has such features as being: portable (easily carried), recognizable (as legal tender) hence readily acceptable, transferable (without involvement of the financial network), untraceable (no record of where money is spent), anonymous (no record of who spent the money) and has the ability to make "change." The designers of electronic cash focused on preserving the features of untraceability and anonymity. Thus, electronic cash is defined to be an electronic payment system that provides, in addition to the above security features, the properties of user anonymity and payment untraceability..
In general, electronic cash schemes achieve these security goals via digital signatures. They can be considered the digital analog to a handwritten signature. Digital signatures are based on public key cryptography. In such a cryptosystem, each user has a secret key and a public key. The secret key is used to create a digital signature and the public key is needed to verify the digital signature. To tell who has signed the information (also called the message), one must be certain one knows who owns a given public key. This is the problem of key management, and its solution requires some kind of authentication infrastructure. In addition, the system must have adequate network and physical security to safeguard the secrecy of the secret keys.”
The introduction goes on to discuss the reasons they could present to the public to switch to a cashless society, including money laundering, convenience, and security. “The term electronic commerce refers to any financial transaction involving the electronic transmission of information. The packets of information being transmitted are commonly called electronic tokens,” the paper continues.
The NSA states that it would like to use “user identification” and “message integrity” to protect privacy in “nonrepudiation” transactions. “Eavesdropping” concerns appear numerous times throughout the document, which could be prevented by “not just privacy but anonymity” in the form of “payer anonymity” and “payment untraceability.” The government clearly states that hard currency, cash, provided these luxuries but could not be traced by the banks and, therefore, the government.
Again, this was released in 1996 before basic online banking. The document outlines basic online banking but takes it a step further by explaining how they could seemingly make payments seem “untraceable” to the public using “blind signatures” that allegedly cannot be seen by the bank. “This step is called “blinding” the coin, and the random quantity is called the blinding factor. The Bank signs this random-looking text, and the user removes the blinding factor.”
Alice sends the blinded coin to the Bank with a withdrawal request.
Bank digitally signs the blinded coin.
Bank sends the signed blinded coin to Alice and debits her account.
Alice unblinds the signed coin.
Payment/Deposit:
Alice gives Bob the coin.
Bob contacts Bank and sends coin.
Bank verifies the Bank’s digital signature.
Bank verifies that coin has not already been spent.
Bank enters coin in spent-coin database.
Bank credits Bob’s account and informs Bob.
Bob gives Alice the merchandise.
“This makes remote transactions using electronic cash totally anonymous: no one knows where Alice spends her money and who pays her.” Full “payment anonymity” would be “too much to ask”, thus, “we are forced to settle for payer anonymity.” In other words, the illusion that no one knows who is making the transaction.
PROTOCOL 5:Off-line cash.
Withdrawal:
Alice creates an electronic coin, including identifying information.
Alice blinds the coin.
Alice sends the blinded coin to the Bank with a withdrawal request.
Bank verifies that the identifying information is present.
Bank digitally signs the blinded coin.
Bank sends the signed blinded coin to Alice and debits her account.
Alice unblinds the signed coin.
Payment:
Alice gives Bob the coin.
Bob verifies the Bank’s digital signature.
Bob sends Alice a challenge.
Alice sends Bob a response (revealing one piece of identifying info).
Bob verifies the response.
Bob gives Alice the merchandise.
Deposit:
Bob sends coin, challenge, and response to the Bank.
Bank verifies the Bank’s digital signature.
Bank verifies that coin has not already been spent.
Bank enters coin, challenge, and response in spent-coin database.
Bank credits Bob’s account.
Note that, in this protocol, Bob must verify the Bank’s signature before giving Alice the merchandise. In this way, Bob can be sure that either he will be paid or he will learn Alice’s identity as a multiple spender.
The government begins to explain basic blockchain concepts, or at least how they’d like them to occur.
“When Alice spends her coins with Bob, his challenge to her is a string of K random bits. For each bit, Alice sends the appropriate piece of the corresponding pair. For example, if the bit string starts 0110. . ., then Alice sends the first piece of the first pair, the second piece of the second pair, the second piece of the third pair, the first piece of the fourth pair, etc. When Bob deposits the coin at the Bank, he sends on these K pieces.
If Alice re-spends her coin, she is challenged a second time. Since each challenge is a random bit string, the new challenge is bound to disagree with the old one in at least one bit. Thus Alice will have to reveal the other piece of the corresponding pair. When the Bank receives the coin a second time, it takes the two pieces and combines them to reveal Alice's identity…
Zero-Knowledge Proofs. The term zero-knowledge proof refers to any protocol in public-key cryptography that proves knowledge of some quantity without revealing it (or making it any easier to find it). In this case, Alice creates a key pair such that the secret key points to her identity. (This is done in such a way the Bank can check via the public key that the secret key in fact reveals her identity, despite the blinding.) In the payment protocol, she gives Bob the public key as part of the electronic coin. She then proves to Bob via a zero-knowledge proof that she possesses the corresponding secret key. If she responds to two distinct challenges, the identifying information can be put together to reveal the secret key and so her identity.”
The document then discusses ways to blind the signature, so that the payee may remain anonymous. Now, why would the government allow that to occur? “Even in anonymous, untraceable payment schemes, the identity of the multiple-spender can be revealed when the abuse is detected. Detection after the fact may be enough to discourage multiple spending in most cases, but it will not solve the problem. If someone were able to obtain an account under a false identity, or were willing to disappear after re-spending a large sum of money, they could successfully cheat the system.”
The document even discusses what we now would refer to as a crypto wallet. A seemingly safe offline method to store these electronic coins. They explain that at least one party must always reveal their hand. “When a coin is spent, the spender uses his secret to create a valid response to a challenge from the payee. The payee will verify the response before accepting the payment. In Brands’ scheme with wallet observers, this user secret is shared between the user and his observer. The combined secret is a modular sum of the two shares, so one share of the secret reveals no information about the combined secret.”
Who is the “observer” in this scenario? “An observer could also be used to trace the user’s transactions at a later time, since it can keep a record of all transactions in which it participates. However, this requires that the Bank (or whoever is doing the tracing) must be able to obtain the observer and analyze it. Also, not all types of observers can be used to trace transactions.”
In the event that a transaction was compromised, the bank would have to change its secret key and “INVALIDATE ALL COINS.”
The authors explain that tax evasion, per usual, is the key concern. They mention money laundering and “old crimes such as kidnapping and blackmail” as reasons to allow backdoor entry. Restoring traceability was a proposed solution, and if they could restore traceability in the first place, one must question if the payments were ever truly anonymous. Using Alice as their example, they explain that they could simply issue a warrant and track all her payment history. “Back~ard traceability is the ability to identify a withdrawal record (and hence the payer), given a deposit record (and hence the identity of the payee). Backward tracing will reveal who Alice has been receiving payments from.”
So, while the bank only sees the deposit in encrypted form, the public key must be used for withdrawal. “The ability to trace transactions in either direction can help law enforcement officials catch tax evaders and money launderers by revealing who has paid or has been paid by the suspected criminal. Electronic blackmailers can be caught because the deposit numbers of the victim’s ill-gotten coins could be decrypted, identifying the blackmailer when the money is deposited.”
“In conclusion, the potential risks in electronic commerce are magnified when anonymity is present. Anonymity creates the potential for large sums of counterfeit money to go undetected by preventing the identification of forged coins. Anonymity also provides an avenue for laundering money and evading taxes that is difficult to combat without resorting to escrow mechanisms. Anonymity can be provided at varying levels, but increasing the level of anonymity also increases the potential damages. It is necessary to weigh the need for anonymity with these concerns. It may well be concluded that these problems are best avoided by using a secure electronic payment system that provides privacy, but not anonymity.”
The US government released this document in 1996, 27 years ago. Bitcoin was allegedly anonymously created in 2009, and numerous other blockchain-based payment coins have followed. This, paired with the push for CBDC, where the government simply does not need to pretend payments are anonymous, should make one question the security and longevity of cryptocurrencies.
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This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
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