Tag Archives: Monetary Policy

Nov 29 2019

Repo Crisis – Best Kept Secret Ever!


Armstrong Economics Blog/Interest Rates

Re-Posted Nov 29, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

COMMENT: Marty; I want to thank you for a great conference. It is clear you are the only true institutional adviser. Our board is very impressed. The FT reported that there is still no  single factor that caused the dislocations in the repo market in mid-September. You are the only one who explains the event authoritative.

Thanks

JG

ANSWER: Nobody will talk publicly. Everyone is scared to death of starting a panic. This is the BEST kept secret I have ever seen in my career. The real test comes at year-end when banks typically step back from the repo market so that their balance sheets are smaller for December 31 regulatory calculations. We will see what really happens then on the chaos scale of 1 to 10. I find it really funny how there are articles calling it the new QE to where the Fed is clandestinely buying T-Bills through repo. This really seems to be an orchestrated effort at disinformation. It is hard to say if the people who make this up are deliberate agents of the government hired to keep people looking in the wrong direction.

Nov 26 2019

William Koch & Ancient Coins


Armstrong Economics Blog/Ancient History

Re-Posted Nov 26, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: I understand that the Koch brothers bought ancient coins. Is there any truth to that?

WJ

ANSWER: Oh, yes. William Koch was involved in a very famous case involving the Athenian decadrahms. There was a hoard discovered in Antalya by a television repairman and two other people back in 1984. They found a hoard of 2000 ancient silver coins with a metal detector. The hoard contained the rare Athenian decadrachms, which were produced as a commemorative 10-drachma coin. There were only 7 previously known examples. The Elmali Hoard contained 14 of them and became known as the “The Hoard of the Century.” The first one sold for $600,000 dollars, easily breaking the old record. The billionaire, William Koch of Boston, bought 1,800 of the coins for $3.5 million dollars. The Turkish Government knew that the treasure had been smuggled out of the country, but after it was taken across the border they didn’t have the slightest knowledge of its whereabouts. The treasure disappeared.

Based on the evidence, the Turkish Government started legal proceedings in Boston. The judge gave an important interim judgment in Turkey’s favor. Koch lost the hoard to Turkey

Nov 26 2019

Britain GDP Has been declining ever since joining the EU


Armstrong Economics Blog/BRITAIN

Re-Posted Nov 25, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

REQUEST: 
Hi Martin, I trust you are well. Would you post the chart you showed of how the UK has performed since joining the EU? I’ve been ploughing through your emails but am unable to find it. In short, I want to show my partners son the chart, who is a vehement ‘remainer’. Ie, evidence that the Uk would be better off leaving the EU.
Thanks for your help,
Cheers
Charlie

Nov 15 2019

Understanding the Repo Crisis


Armstrong Economics Blog/Banking Crisis

Re-Posted Nov 15, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

COMMENT: Marty, thank you for a great conference. The comments out there on the liquidity crisis have been just domestically focused. Thank you for keeping my eyes focused on international events and your analysis about the crisis at Deutsche Bank

GH

REPLY: The raid on Deutsche Bank in Germany back in September over the money laundering probe of Danske Bank, which is the biggest lender in Denmark, contributed to the sudden collapse in confidence. The governments are desperate for money and they are hunting it on a global scale. Deutsche Bank served as a correspondent bank to Danske’s Estonia branch. That is where the latest money laundering is alleged to have occurred. The banker there in the Estonia branch of Danske, Aivar Rehe, was found dead by police there in Estonia. He had been previously questioned by prosecutors and was considered to be THE key witness in the money laundering probe. As always, just like Jeffrey Epstein, his death was declared to be a suicide. This is standard whenever they need to cover something up. Boris Berezovsky suddenly commits suicide being very remorseful for making billions I suppose. Anyone who could expose things others do not want always seems to commit suicide.

The crisis in liquidity is that American bankers will NOT lend to Europe. Because of the European Banking Crisis, banks just do not trust banks. Nobody knows who will be standing after a failure at Deutsche Bank. The Fed has had to step in to be the neutral lender NOT because of a crisis in the USA, but because of the collapse in confidence in Europe’s banking system as a whole. Stay alert – this is just getting started.

Categories: Banking C
Nov 13 2019

Gold & the Future


Armstrong Economics Blog/Gold

Re-Posted Nov 13, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; First I want to thank you for your conference. It was my first time and I was impressed when your daughter asked how many people attended prior sessions. The number of people standing beyond 10 years was impressive. I spoke with one who had been at your 1987 WEC. He said you not only called the crash and the day of the low, but you said gold would rally only $25 and resume its decline. Now we have people still preaching how gold will rally because of the credit crisis they seem to lack the understanding of how it is unfolding. I just finished reading the Hoarding Dollars report. It is really outstanding.

Do you see these people preaching the end of the world so buy gold as just a broken record? I looked at the 1987 move. You were correct. Gold rallied begrudgingly and then resumed its decline. What will it take to make gold sustainable?

WK

ANSWER: The 1987 Crash was a FOREX crisis caused by the G5 trying to manipulate the dollar down. The rally in gold from 1985 to 1987 was simply because of the decline in the dollar. When the G5 tried to stop the decline in the dollar with the Louvre Accord in February 1987, the dollar continued to decline and that was the tipping point. The talk was that the central banks were impotent and could no longer control the economy. We are approaching that same moment in time, but it may flip back the other way. The collapse in confidence is concentrated in central banks OUTSIDE the United States. Eventually, that will migrate to the US and then we will see gold rally when people wake up and see that governments are lost.

Categories: Gold
Nov 12 2019

Gold Standard & the Never-Ending Fantasy


Armstrong Economics Blog/Gold

Re-Posted Nov 12, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Do you think it is remotely possible for any return to a gold standard? I believe these arguments are not realistic.

DR

ANSWER: The fringe fantasy of a return to the gold standard just never dies. If we did not have vast unfunded liabilities and rising socialism to contend with, then such a possibility of a partial backing is possible. But to back the currency by gold, even say 1%, the restraints upon government would be unbelievable. First and foremost, politicians could not run with all sorts of promises. Bernie and Warren would be outlawed. We are so far away from any possible fixed exchange rate it is laughable.

There is so much that would have to change politically and economically for any form of a fixed exchange rate system, no less one backed by gold or anything that would be limited. You simply have to comprehend that even attempts to fix the currencies have blown up like the pound in the ERM crisis and the Swiss-euro peg. There is just so much more to this than some fictional return to a gold standard. Bretton Woods collapsed because they fixed the dollar to gold. You cannot fix even gold and silver to an unchanging ratio.

Categories: Gold
Nov 11 2019

FEDERAL RESERVE THANKSGIVING!


GRRRGRAPHICS ON  FACEBOOK INSTAGRAM PARLER   GAB TWITTER POLITICHATTER

The stock market melt-up continues. Oh sure, it may be going down today, but that would indicate another buying opportunity. Buy the dip! That has worked for the past 10 years. Recessions are a thing of the past. Unemployment is low. The economy is doing great! Buy stocks! BUY BUY BUY! The stock market will not go down through 2020. Trump has ordered the Fed to make it so. We should be glad our president has such influence, but it’s more complicated than that.

I support Trump, but he’s wrong about the stock market has an indicator of economic health. The stock market is in a ridiculous bubble. That’s what the Federal Reserve does—it creates bubbles. The valuations of stocks are way out of whack with what the companies earn.

Too many Americans can’t afford to buy such sky-high stocks anyway. Most Americans are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. For the first time, the 1 percent now has more money than the entire middle class combined. Not by means of capitalism, but by fascism. They’ve rigged the game in their favor. They have hijacked our government to make sure they will get more. Always more. The middle class is in decline. Real wages are not rising, but they’re paying more in terms of taxes and the hidden tax known as inflation. The millennials can’t pay off their college debt, let alone buy a house and start a family. The corrupt, millionaire politicians made sure those with college debt can’t declare bankruptcy. Housing prices are prohibitively expensive. That means rent goes up, too. One third of the millennials are forced to move back in with their parents. Meanwhile, 84 percent of the stock market is owned by the wealthiest top 10 percent of Americans. The 1 percent owns 38 percent of the stock market.

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The ‘too big to fail’ banks have no worries. While most Americans fret about paying bills, the banks get free money from their Federal Reserve, which is there to bail them out to the tune of $150 billion per day if needed. Quantitative easing never ended. The Plunge Protection Team that is the Fed always ensures the market is propped up. It’s a perma-Thanksgiving feast for the central banks. These banker turkeys love to gobble up money. They are stuffed with money. A lot of that money goes into ‘their’ stock market. Martin Armstrong predicted the Dow will hit 40,000 in a few years. Why? Because all that free money has nowhere else to go, so they use it to make the stocks they already own go up even more. The banks aren’t going to give it to us, that’s for sure. We do get stuck with the bill, however. We pay for it via inflation and taxes and the national debt has now exceeded $24 trillion.

The Illuminati won’t spend that money on rebuilding infrastructure such as roads and bridges, but they will use it to buy up utilities and then make sure the electricity gets turned off to make their serfs suffer even more as they usher in their climate change-based ‘globalism.’

Conniving, evil men were allowed to inflict the vile Federal Reserve debt money system upon We The People. Congress unconstitutionally abandoned their mandate to handle our currency. They illegally turned over that power to international bankers. The Illuminati have always been about globalism and control and they’re achieving their goal by controlling our money supply. By this means they buy out everything—the mass media, the politicians, the courts—everything.

It’s time to wake up and END THE FED!

—Ben Garrison

Nov 11 2019

The Solution


Armstrong Economics Blog/Economics

Re-Posted Nov 11, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION:

Hi Marty:

Congratulations on a fantastic WEC 2019.

I have reviewed your Solution video. Could the government ease into such a solution in stages? For example, the government could place a moratorium on issuing debt and pay the year’s budget which included a reduction in principle on outstanding bond debt, and meeting current interest expense, by printing actual currency.

Dan

ANSWER: Yes. I believe we would have to do this in three stages. The point of the exercise is that markets trade on ANTICIPATION. Once it is realized that we are actually making a fundamental change, the markets will begin to move to reflect the long-term expectations.

Categories
Nov 7 2019

China Moving to Create a Digital Currency


Armstrong Economics Blog/Cryptocurrency

Re-Posted Nov 7, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

China’s National People’s Congress has passed a new law to create a digital yuan. Back on December 5, 2013, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) took its first step in regulating Bitcoin by prohibiting financial institutions from handling Bitcoin transactions. They were using Bitcoin to get money out of China in a modern money laundering scheme. Cryptocurrency exchanges or trading platforms were banned by regulation back in September 2017. They closed 173 platforms by July 2018. As I have warned, governments will NEVER allow Bitcoin to replace a national currency. They have used it for study, but it only takes a pen to kill Bitcoin.

Therefore, cryptocurrencies will not be allowed to compete in China against the government. This will be the same worldwide. Countries will move toward digital currency to enforce laws and taxation.

Categories: Cryptocurrency
Nov 7 2019

Trying to Overthrow the Dollar


Armstrong Economics Blog/USD $

Re-Posted Nov 7, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Marty, you said at the conference the efforts to overthrow the dollar as the reserve currency have failed and it will take the Monetary Crisis Cycle to accomplish that. Now that Lagarde is in the ECB, will she aid that overthrow to be replaced by the IMF’s SDR?

It was a fantastic conference this year.

FG

ANSWER: The US has abused the role of the dollar in world commerce by imposing sanctions on places like Iran. These sanctions are supported by enforcement using the dollar. The US has weaponized the dollar in this respect. About 90% of international debt is denominated in dollars. Foreign countries issue their debt in dollars to eliminate FOREX risk in order to sell it globally. Both Putin and Xi want to find an alternative to the dollar. It has been the role of the dollar that drives Putin to dethrone the dollar.

There is NO ALTERNATIVE to the dollar — PERIOD!!!!! The stupid Negative Interest Rates on the euro undermined the euro as a possible reserve currency. It has been dumped internationally, which nobody wants to talk about. In discussions with major central banks and key international banks, nobody wants the euro. Negative Interest Rateshave killed the euro as a viable currency for exchange purposes. The EU President Juncker has said that it is “absurd” that Europe has to pay for its energy imports in dollars. He has failed to understand that it is their own fault, for the structurally defective euro lacks a central national debt and forces everyone to look at each member state independently in the same manner that applies to state debt in the USA. That lack of a national debt where capital can park has been the fatal flaw behind the euro. Then add the stupidity of Negative Interest Rates and you get a currency that dressed up for Halloween, but is by no means a real reserve currency.

China has given up on trying to fight the dollar. They realize that all the yelling and screaming is pointless. The yuan accounts for only 4% of international transactions. The key for China is to use the yuan in loans to build its road of trade globally. Their greatest hope will be for the Monetary Crisis Cycle to undermine the dollar in the year ahead. That combined with the neo-cons trying to weaponize the dollar will be the ultimate means to dethrone the dollar