QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; What do you think of the Biblical forgiveness of debt which this time was due with the turn of your model?

ANSWER: Debt cancellation or forgiveness actually was a tradition that began under Sumerian rule in Mesopotamia. The Jewish tradition appears to have been adopted from the Sumerian. Do not forget that Abraham came from the Sumerian city of Ur. Therefore, he would have grown up with that tradition.

Consequently, the debt cancellation practice began in Mesopotamia and can be traced back to 2400 BC extending into 1400 BC. The noted historian on this subject, Michael Hudson, I believe is absolutely correct when he states that general debt cancellation was one of the principal characteristics of Bronze Age societies in Mesopotamia. There were numerous debt cancellations in the Mesopotamian cities which used the words for these debt forgiveness decrees or cancellations such as amargi in Lagash (Sumer), nig-sisa in Ur, andurarum in Ashur, misharum in Babylon, shudutu in Nuzi.

(See:Michael Hudson’s Debt Cancellations)

However, we are way beyond such a solution thanks to SOCIALISM. Countless people now rely entirely upon pensions and social security type systems for their retirement. Many such programs by decree must invest “conservatively” in government debt. To default will set off a blood-bath if not a Mad Max event. During the Bronze Age, debts were private and did not tend to be expectation that you would be taken care of for life. So the debt structure was entirely different. Today, such a debt forgiveness would cause total economic meltdown. This is why we have proposed the solution we have. There is no option to cancel of default without major civil unrest if not revolution.

The debt cancellations of the Bronze Age can be distinguished as PRIVATE. They were not PUBLIC debts borrowed from the people that they just never paid back. This was a debt forgiveness within the private sector. I might add that during the civil war that ended the Republic of Rome, the people cheered Julius Caesar and assumed he too would cancel all private debts. He adopted a different resolution forgiving all past interest applying that to capital with revaluing property and money to the same purchasing power parity. Clearly, the people were aware of the debt forgiveness ideas in that region. (See Anatomy of a Debt Crisis).

(Note: We have collected economic text from Mesopotamia as part of our research project in reconstructing the historical economic history of civilization. Here I hold one Sumerian cone from our collection. I funded archaeological digs that would further our knowledge of the past in order to reconstruct the history of the world, much of which the academics will not explain for reasons it will contradict prior theories. Then there is their communistic approach to knowledge.

I was asked to fund the dig at the House of the Papyri near Pompey in Herculaneum. Half of this villa has still not been excavated. This was a villa of a book collector and the Greek part of the collection is still buried. Here is all the lost books of Greek historians waiting to to uncovered. The Italian government lacks the money so 20 years after I was asked to fund this project, it still remains undone.

Additionally, the latest issue concerns material that arises on the black market rather than a archaeological dig. For example, during the first Gulf War in Iraq, the bombing uncovered a city previously unknown. The archives of all the text appeared on the black market. Academics boycott such things rather than trying to save them. They object to private people using private funds for research and treat the subject as if it were a communistic state that only they should have such cache to play with. Something I seriously disagree with for there is never always public funds available for such projects.

In this particular case, thousands of tablets were on the black market. I bid to get the entire collection. There was a Norwegian collector of documents, Martin Schoyen. I do not recall what my bid was but it was many millions of dollars. Martin and I met in Zurich for dinner. Since he was a specialist in documents, we reached an agreement that my interest was economic. Martin even had an original Magna Carta. So the deal we struck was that I could use the economic text in return for bowing out of the bidding.

What made this find so valuable was it contained legal code predating Hammurabi who academics teach was the first legal code. Here we have the Legal Code of (ca. 2100BC) which is the oldest known, written law code that predates Hammurabi’s law code by about 300 years. The translation of this legal code was provided by Martin Schøyen, a Norwegian collector of manuscripts containing over 13,000 documents. His private efforts have contributed greatly to our knowledge base when government funding for translation is lacking and academic lack the funds to save material on the black market. When the Legal Code of Hammurabi (1792-1750BC) was first discovered in 1901, his laws were heralded as the earliest known examples. Subsequent to that discovery, older collections of legal codes have been unearthed. There are even older Babylonian copies of the Legal Code of Ur-Nammu (ca. 1900-1700 BC).

When I say we have THE largest database known to humankind, I am not exaggerating. You cannot create models if you lack the data to input. How can you forecast a debt crisis or list the possible outcomes without understanding how such a crisis has been resolved throughout history or how they appeared in the first place. People can pretend to do what we do, but how is that possible without the data?

The IMF has come out and warned that Saudi Arabia may go bankrupt within the next five years if the government maintains its current spending habits. Some emails are asking if the IMF is now copying our projections for they have the same timing. Who knows. I would assume the economic numbers are the numbers, but they do seems to be getting bolder in their forecasts.

There are 30 million people living in Saudi Arabia, but only 5.5 million are actually employed. Out of the 5.5 million people in the workforce, 3 million of them work for government, which is part of the problem. Most financial jobs are given to imported foreign labor. The crisis in Saudi Arabia long-term is that they are following the same model as Spain. True, Spain and its treasure ships from America made it the wealthiest nation in Europe. But they squandered their wealth and failed to invest domestically to create an economy. French were imported to unload ships and the Spanish simply enjoyed life. In the end, their spending habits led to the country defaulting on its debt seven times.

Things have changed. In the Middle East, governments simply spent money for there was no end in sight. Then oil prices dropped after they bumped up their spending and now the revenues are collapsing.

Things are changing out there on this cycle. The USA peaked softly in 2015.75, but the rest of the world peaked in 2007 and has been declining (including China). The USA recovery has been very shallow. We see high-end real estate and the share market at new highs, but not wages or middle class housing in most areas. So the slide from here will be much different than anything we have experienced in our lifetimes.

While so many people claimed that Quantitative Easing (QE) would produce inflation for it was the creation of money, the truth is very far from this simplistic idea. The theory used by the central banks is seriously flawed and throw-back to ancient times before 1971. There use to be a difference between debt and cash when you could not use debt as cash to borrow on. Then it was less inflationary to borrow than to print. But that changed post-1971 and today if you want to trade you post TBills as cash. The REPO market has emerged where AAA securities can be borrowed against for the night.

Therefore, buying in bonds to inject cash into the system under the old way of running the monetary system pre-1971 made sense. Today, it is proving to be a FOOL’S GAME. Why? This is merely swapping debt for cash and the REAL money supply has not increased when the true definition of the base money supply in effect reality is debt + cash. Then you add the leverage from banking.

So what does this new reality mean? This is why the BONDS may not crash but instead become extinct. Under QE the central banks are the bidder supporting the market in the same stupid manner as attempting to peg a currency. The ECB under Draghai has lost its mine. They keep increase the percentage of bonds they are buying in hopes of creating inflation but nothing is working. The bonds will not crash, but instead, they could become extinct. In order for a crash to materialize, there has to be a free market.

Little known to most analysts was that during World War II, Congress ORDERED the Federal Reserve to do something similar to QE. The declared the Fed MUST support the bond market during the war and be the constant buyer at PAR. The market went sideways during the war and what we see is a flat line. 

In the case of the central bank artificially supporting the bond market during World War II, that decree was lifted in 1951. Our present situation is different insofar as the central banks have bought in all the long-term debt so there is a shortage of debt in the short-term. This is also why the Fed is accommodating the banks paying 0.25% on excess reserves.

In trying to figure out this Rubic Cube mess they have created trying to cunning and stalking the financial market like a cat, the truth is rather scary. The rise in taxation is destroying the economy. Ancient Egypt is considered by some to have been the most heavily taxed nation in history and this was the primary reason it collapsed under the weight of the levies imposed on the populace that destroyed its economy weakening the nation from the inside out.

This time, unlike 1951, we are at the extreme in economic destruction by the state in their hunt for taxes. Payroll taxes were just introduced for the war. It was postwar when taxes were reduced in 1951 and the economy began to take off. We are exactly on the opposite side of the curve with rising taxes. This warns that we are in a collapsing side of the Bell Curve.

It is like alcohol. A little is good and too much kills you. Studies have shown that people who drink a little are healthier than those who drink too much or none at all. This time, with taxes rising, there is a contracting global economy and we are in serious trouble, The central banks have bought in the debt rather than declaring they will support the market. This means that they will not have a market to reverse the position and sell the debt they bought in. This means that a sovereign default wipes out central banks as well. Hence, the long-end of the market is being systematically rendered extinct.

We may see the bonds crash in price to the extent that people are not interested. However, the central banks will have to buy in more and more debt. This raises the risk of “conversione forzosa” whereby even if you bought 30 day government paper, they simple decree they will not repay that obligation for 10 years. They can simply convert short-term to long-term. We are more likely to see this type of action before any real reform.

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.