The US border guards have been illegally searching laptops and phones for anything that might lead to hidden money. A Federal Court in Boston has ruled warrantless searches of the phones and laptops of international travelers violates the Fourth Amendment. It is amazing that you would even have to take them to court to force them to honor the Fourth Amendment. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without individualized suspicion of any wrong-doing. The ACLU described the searches as “fishing expeditions” where border guards must now demonstrate individualized suspicion of contraband before they can search a traveler’s electronic device.

COMMENT #1: Hi, Marty if you can, let the readers know if the “mother of all financial crisis” is the big bang.

N

COMMENT #2: Wow. I am left speechless. I think your title Repo Crisis is misleading. This is just the staging ground. It takes someone in the international arena to understand the implications of this going forward.

Thanks for making this an updating service.

Bill

REPLY: Perhaps I should have named this report “The Mother of all Financial Crises.” The Repo Crisis is just part II in the lead-up to Big Bang that nobody seems to grasp is already unfolding. This is the Sovereign Debt Crisis on steroids. Whatever they could have done wrong, they have done with absolute precision. The projected losses for institutions I have laid out will range from 40% to 60% of assets. This time, whoever is caught holding will not be bailed out this time around. This is the combination of the 1998 Liquidity Crisis and the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis. So hang on to whatever you can grab ahold of. You will need it for this one.

QUESTION: Hi Mr Armstrong,
I have been a subscriber for several years and I appreciate your work. You mentioned that when the dust settles there will be pockets in the US that are safe. Can you elaborate where they will be? Also if your child was planing on majoring in finance in college next year, would you steer them away or have them specialize in something like forensics since there will be a mess to sort out? Or would you steer them to a different major or no college at all?

Thanks again for everything you do

BV

ANSWER: It is still too early to forecast which areas will be best specifically. In general, the major regions will be split politically between left and right. There will be stark differences politically between California v Texas and Florida for example. You certainly do not want to be in any state that is out of control with respect to taxes and police abuse. Most people would never guess, but the state that abuses the law the most is Iowa. The percentage of drivers who have been given speeding tickets is 23.2%. That is a stunning percentage of the population. Indeed, Iowa wrote 148,755 tickets in 2016, which was a lot given the population compared to 712,000 tickets written by New York.  Additional states where the percentage of people who have been given speeding tickets over 20% are Wisconsin (20.2%), Ohio (20.5%), Nebraska (20.8%), Wyoming (21.3%), South Carolina (22.7%), and North Dakota (23.1%).

We have states that have been funding themselves with traffic fines for all sorts of things. A friend’s wife was ticketed for looking at Google maps on her phone while at a red light. She went to court to prove she was not texting. The judge ruled for the state, as they are instructed to do, and fined her by saying she is not even allowed to look at he phone. So if she had a paper map, that would have been OK. So this is what we call legal persecution for monetary gain.

COMMENT:

You may already know this but in case you don’t: this is a prime example of the ‘war on cash’.:

Yesterday I walked into my sisters bank (Santander) in the local town in England, a quite affluent town not somewhere deprived. I handed over and politely asked to deposit a mere £200 (that’s two hundred) and I was told: ‘You cant do that anymore because of government regulations, you cant deposit cash into someone else’s bank account no matter how small.’ I was told it has been in place since last April!.
That should be a wake up call for a lot of people but most people don’t know, it hasn’t been discussed publicly anywhere at all, only bank employees seem to know about it.

How long before they do an India and get rid of popular notes overnight without telling anyone?

HO’N

REPLY: I tried to buy a cash card to send to a friend and was told I cannot do that. They would sell me a card only in my name. Governments are hunting cash on every level right down to the smallest amount. It is also ILLEGAL to mail cash in the United States.

QUESTION: Mr Armstrong,
I have great respect for your work.
Can you explain how the Fed’s QE fits into the cycle of things. It seems to me that their interference in the markets is disrupting/altering the cycle. For example, the latest Fed purchases of T-bills every month in the amount of $60.
Who are they buying from? I assume Inv Banks, Comm Banks and hedge funds, and now these entities, instead of having low yielding bills on their books have zero coupon cash, which they then seek yield and put into the shares markets. It seems pretty clear and appears to extends the cycle. Can money printing just cause the 8.6 yr cycle for instance to extend to say a harmonic of that, 17.2 or 25. 8?

ANSWER: No. The Repo Crisis is on time. Our forecast for the start of the Liquidity Crisis was after Labor Day in September. The Fed is trying to prevent short-term rates from rising. They are not engaging in Quantitative Easing for the sake of “stimulating” the economy.

Things are getting bad and the rumor behind the curtain is that European banks will be prohibited from participating in repo for year-end. That is how bad things are getting.

So the cycle appears to be coming on time. All the implications are far too great to cover in a blog, which is why I have created a a report on the repo crisis that is around 150 pages

QUESTION: Marty; Why is Legarde pitching Euro Green Bonds when they lose money?

JL

ANSWER: If she can use the climate change nonsense to shame Germany into agreeing to issue Eurobonds, it would be a step to eliminate the refusal to issue a single European debt. If Legarde can sell that issue, then it will restructure Europe’s debt position