Some people have wrongly expected a crash in the long bonds. What has actually happened is that China and others have sold into the high, liquidating their long bonds, and moving short-term. This is why rates are negative on the short-end. The CRASH comes in the opposite direction this time. Why? Because the central banks have engaged in Quantitative Easing. The ECB (European Central Bank) stepped up its buying of long-term debt to hold the market from 25% to 33%. Smart money is not interested in buying long-term paper, especially when the Fed keeps warning that they MUST normalize interest rates, i.e. raise rates.

So whom has the bonds and will take the loss? Guess who? The central banks. They are loaded to the gills and cannot sell the long-bonds they bought. There is no bid. In this debt crisis, there is no bid for debt, which is typically how empires, nations, & city-states collapse.

The system is now highly geared and we will see in the months ahead that short-term rates rise when people begin to wake up and realize that this system is failing. The U.S. Congress tried to push the debt ceiling from the September 30 deadline, which was precisely the day of the ECM – 2015.75. They could not make it out to December. There is a war within Congress and this is critical, for if the debt ceiling fight gets much worse, then we may indeed begin to start the perception that this is not going to look very pretty the further we move from 2015.75.

QUESTION: Mr Armstrong,

I am an avid fan of your site and thoroughly enjoy your posts.

As much as I am against tax, would you not agree it’s rather sick that a company the size of Facebook paid out less tax than I did last year?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34504474

I know you advocate a tax on sales, but in the UK we already pay VAT on goods.

Any suggestions on a fair system?

Many thanks for all your work.

Regards,

G

ANSWER: This is the problem with taxation. Major public corporations can move their tax domicile offshore to avoid taxes legally. The average person cannot move his labor offshore to lower his taxes, which is a disadvantage we must address with tax reform. With VAT, that is far worse than a sales tax. Every person in the chain must collect and file paperwork. It must require three times the number of people to administer such a system compared to a point of sales tax collection.

But that issue aside, there should be ABSOLUTELY NO income taxes whatsoever. That not only eliminates government having to track everything, but it also eliminates the whole movement of capital solely for tax purposes. This is unfair, for the average person cannot send their labor offshore to avoid taxation without moving. Even then, that would only get an American the first $100,000 tax-free; after that, it would be subjected to U.S. income tax.

The Founding Fathers of the United States revolted over taxation without representation. We are back to that now, for we are being taxed to pay interest to service debts from the last two generations. We had no right to vote on that spending, which took place before we were born. This is not a democratic process.

There should be ONLY a retail sales tax EXCLUSIVELY for local government. Federal government should be prohibited from imposing ANY tax and it should be barred from borrowing money. The local tax will naturally be checked by the free market, for if they keep raising taxes, businesses will move to the next town and there goes the jobs. This will help to restrain government on a more practical level.

Moreover, there should be NO PUBLIC SCHOOLS. All schools should be private for then there will be no mismanagement, crazy pension failures, or tax hikes to line their pockets. Schools should be by voucher and run by private industry just like Catholic schools, which were always known for having better education in the States.

It is the teachers and their unions who have ruined society, as taxes are imposed on property and people cannot afford to retire in their home where they raised a family. They are forced to sell because they cannot afford taxes that never stop and only rise. PROPERTY TAXES must also be abolished.

Our problem is the total mismanagement of government. They promise and award themselves all sorts of perks, which reduces the quality of life for everyone else. We must look at the cause and that is the seriously flawed design of the financial-economic-governmental system.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron reflects the serious problem we have with politicians. Politicians have ZERO respect for our human rights for they only think about how they are going to raid our wealth to pay for their families and retirements at our expense. Cameron actually asked, “In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication we cannot read? My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not’.”

These people are highly dangerous. They only see government as the solution and do not grasp that we have rights. Government wants to eliminate all encryption because they are hunting money. You have a 1000 times greater chance of dying in a car crash than by a terrorist. They use terrorism as the great excuse to collect everything we do.

How did the world function before the internet? Did they intercept every letter in the mail or record every phone call? Why is it that with the internet these people feel they have a right to listen and read everything we communicate? This is EXACTLY the same paranoia displayed by Stalin. Human rights do not simply vanish because we have entered the internet age. We still have rights that governments need to respect, but refuse because they are always desperately in need of more taxes to pay their bankers. The OECD has stated, “Co-operation between tax administrations is critical in the fight against tax evasion and a key aspect of that co-operation is exchange of information.” It’s all about money any nothing else.

In 2010, the U.S. enacted legislation known as FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act), which is destroying the world economy and lowering economic growth globally. Effectively, FATCA requires foreign financial institutions around the globe to report account details of their U.S. customers to the U.S. tax administration. However, this requires foreign institutions to file that they do not have any American clients. The legal and cost issues of this approach imposed by the USA are being adopted by five other countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. FATCA has become a model for the intergovernmental cooperation in hunting taxes. The postwar economy was built on the free flow of capital. Americans cannot open accounts overseas because the penalties are far too stiff for failure to report any American to the U.S. authorities. They will be giving up everyone to their respective countries, which will be implemented in 2017.

If we do not eliminate taxes and transform the monetary system into a new era where the cost of government is held to 5% of GDP and money is merely created to fund the cost of government, along with abolishing career politicians, we will lose everything. We are heading into the direction of a total loss of all rights simply because of taxes.

The latest economic news from China shows that, in dollar terms, imports collapsed 20.4% in September from a year earlier to $145.2bn. This is one of the sharpest declines ever, and it is far beyond what was expected. This has had a further impact upon the raw commodity sector and metals. This latest drop in Chinese imports was down 20.4%, year-on-year, compared with a 13.8% decrease in August. Meanwhile, China’s exports were also down 3.7% during September after a 5.5% decline during August.

The other side of 2015.75 still looks like a sharp cliff going into next year. From an economic viewpoint, the economy turned down Wed., Sept. 30, 2015, on a global scale coinciding also with our Cycle of War on the international model. We should see the economy turn downward into a steeper recession moving into Wed., Sept. 28, 2016, which is the next turning point on the Economic Confidence Model followed thereafter by Tues., Oct. 24, 2017. Caution is advisable for it appears we should see an overall recessionary trend emerge on a global scale this time.

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong;

Thank you for coming to Athens. After the presentation, there were so many questions that the moderator did not have time for. You answered some for the crowd afterwards that I had never heard anyone ever explain. You said Quantitative Easing was not money printing nor did it really increase the money supply. You also said to the crowd that fiat is not paper money, but anything declared by government including pegs.

Could you elaborate on those statements.

Thank you for your enlightenment.

GP

ANSWER: Quantitative easing is not responsible for increasing the money supply or printing money. It is a swap of bonds for cash so they are not outright printing money. It is a swap transaction. This combined with the idea that paper money is fiat and precious metals are tangible are all seriously wrong. Fiat is the attempt by government to decree the value of money. This is no different from a peg that broke, such as the Swiss/euro peg, or the Bretton Woods attempt to fix gold in terms of dollars. ANY attempt to flat line the value of money by decree is fiat, regardless of whether the instrument is paper or seashells.

This idea that Quantitative Easing is printing money is very pre-1971 thinking and is a throwback to Bretton Woods. Such an assumption focuses on the differentiation between debt and money or cash. Pre-1971, you could not borrow against government debt so there was a clear difference between debt and money. The theory that it was less inflationary to borrow than print made sense only when there was a real difference between debt and cash or money.

Today, debt and cash are the same. If you trade futures, you deposit cash and to earn some interest you buy TBills, which are deposited and used as collateral. The distinction between debt and cash has vanished. This means that Quantitative Easing does NOT actually stimulate the economy. The giant assumption was that the cash would be spent within the system. But the banks complained and the Fed created the EXCESS RESERVE window which has about $2.5 trillion on which the Fed pays 0.25% interest. They only swapped bonds for the right to deposit cash at 0.25%, so where was the stimulus? Nothing was stimulated and there was no inflation since there was no actual increase in private spending.

These theories are very primitive to say the least. Nobody looks at them closely or follows the money to see if they are doing anything what the theory pretends should happen. The ECB bought 25% of the bonds and inflation still turned negative. They have stated that they will increase that to 33%. They never review their actions when something fails to work. All government ever does is move further in the same direction because government employees will NEVER admit a mistake.

This is akin to physicians in medieval times who assumed that bleeding a person would heal them because an illness was seen as if it were a poison in the bloodstream. If the patient died, they never assumed the death to be the result of taking too much blood. Instead, they would state that they did not bleed the patient soon enough and that caused their death.

Welcome to the plague of thinking among humankind. Why learn new ways as long as you can just accelerate the current failed process? It’s safer because you do not have to admit mistakes that way. This is why we must crash and burn. They will never look at their actions and are incapable of admitting an era. Anyone who challenges the status quo becomes the “fringe” element that should be ignored.

I was in Barcelona and was asked by many did I think the pro-independence parties in Spain’s Catalonia region would actually win. I told them it was inevitable for this is the global trend in motion. The vote for Catalonia is in – the separatists have won an absolute majority in regional elections. It looks as though the separatist alliance and a smaller party won 72 seats in the 135-seat regional parliament. They have declared that this will now allow them to declare independence from Spain unilaterally within 18 months.

The Spanish central government in Madrid has pledged to block any unilateral independence moves in court. Why? Politicians are no different than kings, dictators, or emperors. This is not about what the people want, it is all about maintaining power.

This vote is just the BEGINNING of the separatist movement around the world. Centralized government is dying. Society has always swung back and forth between centralized government and regional government. Once a centralized government grabs power, it will always expand until it consumes all power.

This is why I say that TAXES ARE NO LONGER NECESSARY. Money is no longer a commodity and the value of any currency depends entirely upon faith. Even gold has no value unless you believe someone else will accept it from you at some mutual agreed value. This is also why money cannot be a store of value for it requires ending the business cycle and life itself.

Why do we pay federal taxes? What is it really providing for the people? Taxes are necessary locally where governments cannot create money. Yet where government creates the money no longer tied to anything tangible but really the collective capacity of the nation (GDP), then there is also no need to tax nor is there a need to borrow constantly with no intention of paying anything back. Now we have interest rates at near zero and governments need rates at virtually zero or the cost of government will explode. So it is them against the people always. Retired cannot live off of their savings and pensions are going broke all because government is the biggest debtor and it stupidly assumes it can raise or lower interest rates to steer the economy when they themselves are the biggest debtor upon which their own tools have no influence on fiscal responsibility. We live is a world that has totally gone mad and nobody will sit down and just look at how this structure is functioning.

The separatist movement is the breaking up of federal governments and the return of power back to regional governments. This is being fueled by taxes and the diminishing trend in employment and lowering of the living standards.

The Catalonia vote comes right on target with the Economic Confidence Model. This turning point is PROFOUND, for it is not the crash in stock markets, commodities, or the private sector. This is the BEGINNING of the trend which will see the fall of governments and the rise in demands for political change EVERYWHERE.

November 28th, 2018 will be the major target moving forward for political chaos. On the last two important wave formations, 1998.55 and 2007.15, this Pi turning point produced to the day the 911 attack and the day Greece asked for IMF help starting the sovereign debt crisis. So 2015.75 is the BEGINNING, and not the end of a new trend that will be very profound for our political future.

Jeremy Corbyn, the new head of the British Labour Party, is really a Communist. He is not championing a minimum wage, but a MAXIMUM WAGE. He is advocating that no individual should be allowed to earn more than whatever he feels is appropriate. These people view one simple fact: whatever money you earn is not yours, it belongs to the state. I was in Canada and there was some socialist woman on TV being interviewed and she said that openly. It is not your money, it belongs to the state. They merely decide how much you are allowed to keep. I was dumbfounded she actually said that in public whereas I hear that all the time behind closed doors. Nothing belongs to you is their actual true belief.

These Marxists want to suppress freedom and cannot see that we are all different and have a God given right to pursue our own dreams. Some people want to produce while others do not. All these people do is drool over what other people have and demand they have been cheated because they are entitled to the same.

What Corbyn cannot understand is that this is no different from robbery. If you walk down the street and a man points a gun at you, demands your watch, all your cash, and justifies it by saying that he has nothing you have everything, then what is the difference between that and writing a law to accomplish the same thing? Where can we go to be free of people who just want to rob whatever we have because they are lazy or incompetent to ever have an original thought? This may be the final end of the British Empire. After all, it is getting close to 443.76 years from Elizabeth I (51.6 * 8.6). A very precarious event that may indeed signal the shift from the West is underway to China.