QUESTION: Interest on savings instruments (i.e. CD) for 1 yr terms is non-existent at <= 1.0%. Why would interest rates increase in a digital currency system/world?
IS
ANSWER: The only reason rates would rise is by simultaneously converting the debt to perpetual. They have to end Keynesian Economics. They cannot raise rates as long as they have to buy the debt as in Europe. Therefore, we see most countries preparing for the real BIG BANG which is the default on dent by converting outstanding debt to perpetual, then they no longer need to artificially suppress interest rates they cannot raise if the debt is still issued.
I tend to get called in because they know I will say the truth. I do not take funds from any group and we pride ourselves on independence. It is a club because unless you have been called in by one government you will not get into others. Very interesting criteria. Nevertheless, I believe you will see this simultaneously. A digital currency swap will allow then the perfect excuse to change the debt structure and then they do not have to outright default.
Big Bang began in 2015.75 within about one year of them moving to negative interest rates in 2014. The next crack is due 2021 and the big break post-2024. We are now entering the next phase and we are running out of time. That is what these lockdowns are really about. They know civil unrest will rise when the public realizes that the old financial systems are collapsing.Categories:Bonds
QUESTION: Marty, you mentioned several times now, that the ECB MUST convert to a digital Euro. I have done speeches about that based on a paper from the IMF (Christine Lagarde) last year, in which they too discuss how to do it. But I have a serious question regarding timing.
I live in Germany and I would say that WE (the country) are not ready for such a move yet. Let alone many people. I have people in my family who still don’t have smartphones (just plain mobile).
I am completely with you that this move is coming (I am also part of a crypto community but as a critical member (I am the party spoiler there)).
But how can they move to a digital Euro to prevent bank runs, when I can’t see the infrastructure in place to do so.
Especially in such a short amount of time rg. the date you mentioned. They can eliminate cash withdrawals, yes, but paying with my smartphone reguires technology .. ?
Thanks a lot,
A
ANSWER: We are talking about bureaucrats. They only think in concepts much like Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. The practical application of what they are doing is not there. They lack even the infrastructure, as in California, to force all cars to be electric. They do not have the power grid to support that.
I was in meetings where they actually told me with a straight face that they had to take trading the Euro away from Britain. I asked if they were going to take it away from the USA, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc? They looked at me puzzled, and said no! Just Britain. I asked if they really wanted to control the Euro just convert it into the old Soviet Union ruble. No free market at all.
Then there was all the rage that in London the big banks all threatened that they would move their trading to Frankfurt if BREXIT took place. But again, neither Frankfurt nor Paris has the telecommunication capacity of London. They could not possibly set up shop in Europe. There is no infrastructure to match London.
The problem that is the hidden crisis is that they have DESTROYED their own bond market. The ECB cannot even allow its balance sheet to shrink as debt matures. The Federal Reserve was not rolling over the debt they bought back in the 2007-2009 crisis. As it matured, they cashed it in.
The ECB is trapped. It cannot shrink its balance sheet for there is no market for the debt. They have finally agreed to fund this Coronavirus destruction they organized by creating combined Euro Debt for the first time. That is because nation-states cannot raise the capital.
They lack the infrastructure on every front. That does not mean they will not try. They have run out of opinions. They are desperately trying to revive their debt market, but they have wiped it out with negative interest rates since 2014.
This is what I keep warning about. INFLATION has nothing to do with the money supply any longer. Those are an old idea from the time of Gresham’s Law in advising Queen Elizabeth not to debase the currency as her father did.
We must understand that the exchange value between the various currencies back then was the metal content. Therefore, inflation was a factor of the exchange rate rather than the money supply. The more the coinage was debased, the more people hoarded the old currency. Hence, Gresham’s Law became that bad money drives out good. As this process takes place, the money supply DECLINES because of hoarding. This forces the state to debase even more to create money to pay its expenses. Roosevelt confiscated gold in 1934 for the same reason – people were hoarding gold. The German hyperinflation was the result of the 1918 Communist Revolution which scared people and they converted their money to foreign currencies and hoarded precious metals. The greater the hoarding, the more the money supply shrank, which in turn forced the government to print more.
We find hoards of Roman coins during the 3rd century in particular after Valerian I (253-260AD) was captured by the Persians. That broke the confidence of the Roman people and other barbarian tribes in the north saw the weakness and began to invade.
The coinage collapsed in metal content in just 8,6 years. We find hoards of even the debased coinage because people lost confidence in the government. We see the very same patterns in human behavior over and over again.
This is a hoard of Arab gold dinars. We see always the same pattern of hoarding when there is a decline in the confidence of the government in power at that time.
The ECB can cut rates to try to stimulate and that failed. People are hoarding cash in Europe and that creates deflation. There is NO AMOUNT of money that can be created to offset the DEFLATION when people lack any confidence in the future. Then they are imposing this “New Norm” of lockdowns and destroying jobs and they actually expect to sell debt and keep interest rates at negative and somehow this will stimulate the economy they have worked so hard at destroying? The increase in the money supply of all these central banks is still less than 20% of the economic contraction globally.
QUESTION: Hi, Mr. Armstrong I noticed that the national news agency in my country had an article about a local digital currency in Maricá, Brazil. It is called Mumbuca. What I read about Mumbuca sounds good and all that, but I am curious if the news is just conditioning people to a new age of digital currency. Do you have any comments about Mumbuca? Thank you for your time and what you stand for. Best Regards AA
ANSWER: It is important to highlight that Mumbuca is a local digital currency whose name is a reference to the main river and to one of the native peoples of the city. A unit of Mumbuca is equivalent to R$ 1.00 (US$ 0.19). What is interesting is that this is a local city currency much like the Depression Scrip of the 1930s. This is really an experiment of guaranteed basic income. Increasingly, customers in the city don’t pay with cash but with this digital currency. They receive it as part of the town’s basic income program. They pay with a quick scan of a QR code, using their phones. So far, just over 42,000 inhabitants can pay local merchants with Mumbuca.
This is Brazil’s first big experiment with digital currency. Those without smartphones can pay using a card, which has a scannable barcode. They are way ahead of the game and, actually, it is being followed closely internationally.
This year’s World Economic Conference, which Nigel Farage called “the alternative to Davos,” will be held in Orlando on December 4 & 5. We had to cancel Shanghai and Frankfurt this year, but our arrangements with the hotel here in Orlando and politics have opened doors. We will not be able to accommodate the usual 1,000 attendees. This will be a limited in-person session, but it will be more intimate.
Since so many people from overseas may not be able to fly in this year, we have made arrangements to have a virtual conference option for everyone to participate globally. We still have to limit that to a max of 20,000 attendees simply as a matter of technology (sorry, we cannot handle more than that).
From the outset, I have explained that not only did Socrates begin to pick up what has turned into this COVID scam in August 2019, but our HIGHLY RELIABLE inside sources were also already warning that strategic players were selling as early as December of last year, and telling people a “virus was coming.” There are clear warnings within the global economy that we are facing serious upticks in civil unrest in Europe. However, we now have ANTIFA overturning statues of even Abraham Lincoln. Obviously, this has migrated from toppling statues of racists to just pulling down statues of any president which is anarchy.
(Click on Image to see World Markets)
The WEC has been the only truly international conference held since 1985. To see the future of any country requires us to look at the world. As you can see, not every market has been making new highs. Capital flows are ABSOLUTELY critical. We have the ONLY such model gathering the global information of ebbs and flows from all countries and Socrates is writing reports on over 1,000 instruments around the world. This is not about my personal opinion or gut feelings. We have to look at the world objectively and call the shots as the data requires.
o truly see the future this cannot be done on a gut feeling. Nobody is going to be consistent on this one. Our only shot is to see this through the lens of Socrates. What will be critical here is looking at this from a global perspective. Those attending in-person will receive their mug and their autographed copy of “The Cycle of War and the Coronavirus.” Virtual attendees will receive all the digital copies of reports being provided and videos. We have countless separatist movements brewing in Europe, Canada, the USA, and even Australia.
This is going to be obviously an important WEC. We have so much from rising civil unrest, international tensions, governments trying to lock people down, and they are already proposing this as the “new norm,” for lockdowns may be necessary to stop climate change, which has been the real agenda from the start. They think we are stupid. Granted, there are a lot of fools out there who just follow whatever they are told. We have billionaires trying to change the system to socialism to prevent people from ever making what they did to cut off any competition.
Even Schwab’s movie launched in 2019 was skewed to climate change as he was preparing this agenda for the Great Reset. This has been a grand plan.
We are fighting against the fools who think this is just something like a ship that will pass in the middle of the night. The global markets are revealing the trend. It is time for us to listen to the whole and not just one market.
QUESTION: I thought big police forces are malinvestment just like big government. doesn’t returning to hard money reduce malinvestments?
BF
ANSWER: These people can no longer fund themselves by borrowing. I have been advising in Europe that the Euro could never become a major reserve currency without a single debt. They are now looking at that option and the European Commission is expected to sell consolidated debt into the bond market this month for the first time on a large scale to fund its coronavirus-relief programs. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank on Friday took a step closer to issuing a digital version of the euro. Even Goldman Sachs admits that Biden’s tax plan will hurt the economy. We already have the IRS being investigated for using your location data to tack you for possible hidden assets. Do you really think these people would EVER return to hard money that they cannot spend whatever they want? Socialism would have to end under hard money. This is not a rational expectation from people embracing MMT because they are running out of other people’s money to spend.
We have run out of other people’s money. They are hunting money like a starving animal. They see Modern Monetary Theory as the answer – create money at will under the new theory that there will never be inflation.
QUESTION: Hi Martin, Thank you so much for sharing the connections Socrates is making between seemingly unrelated ideas. I’m a high school/collegiate science teacher and am wondering if Socrates has identified any correlations between coming astronomical phenomenon (like lunar phases or planetary alignment) to war or the economy. The information you’ve provided on the Sun has been amazing! BTW, my students and I use the information you blog about as the foundation for the conversations in our Socratic seminars. Thanks for all you do! MC
ANSWER: I have never input the planetary information into Socrates. The Moon is capable of picking up the ocean and moving it creating a high and low tide. I would think it can have some influence on people but probably highly differential because we are all perhaps sensitive to various things on an unequal basis. The terms “lunatic” and stories of werewolves are all about people who were sensitive to the moon.
The attempt to correlate the heavens and events on earth as omens of the future date back to the Babylonians. I have been asked this question many times because some of our dates may align with some astronomical phenomena. I would look at it as a separate model. Our Arrays have some 72 different models. They are not a single cycle. There are many. Even take volatility. How do you define it? We have overnight volatility from today’s close to tomorrow’s open. Then there is internal volatility which is the percentage movement between high and low for the day. Then there can be closing volatility measured from yesterday’s close to today and likewise between openings. There are many aspects that the computer is looking at and then it correlates between markets, countries, etc. There are far too many calculations for any individual to do every day.
After my experience with cycles, they go through inversion processes where the same targets remain fixed, but instead of a low, it becomes a high. I would suspect that attempts to use astronomical phenomena will result in the same outcome. The same event will not always produce a high or low. This simply takes place because every market is influenced by everything else around it. It really takes a supercomputer to work out the countless possibilities.
That is why I say my opinion is just personal. Anytime I have thought something would happen which Socrates has disagreed with, I am the one who is wrong. So I have learned. My job is to provide some clarity, but it is not to forecast the future from a personal opinion perspective. Forecasting Civil Unrest was not something that came to me in the middle of the night. It is not even something I personally would have preferred to see.
And BTW, I have been a programmer all my life. I do not see how it is possible for a program to EVER become aware of itself and then dominate humanity. I can mimic human emotion, but I cannot create it for real. And to set the record straight, I have been the ONLY coder on the AI systems behind Socrates. This has been my life’s work. We have a whole team of programmers who manage the delivery systems. But as for the AI, in all honesty, I had the skill to program, I also had the skill to trade, but I also had the clients to show me with a front-row seat how they all look at the world economy from their own perspective. That is why there is no competition for Socrates. It has taken over 50 years to create what you see.
It is also why nobody wants to address Socrates because it changes the entire forecasting game where people advise they are the guy who forecasts some event so see what he is saying next. Personal forecasting is not consistent.
QUESTION: What do you have to say about Trump’s taxes?
GS
ANSWER: Let me explain something. Let’s take one of the richest men in the world — Bill Gates. He achieved that station by co-founding and then leading Microsoft. Most of his wealth came not from his salary, but from the Microsoft stock that he owns, which was equal to about 10% of the company’s outstanding shares. Wealth gained from stock price appreciation is NOT taxable until you sell the shares. By holding most of his shares since the company’s founding, Mr. Gates DELAYED paying any tax on those capital gains. Then by donating the shares to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that wealth was NEVER taxed!
Why do you think all these people create foundations from the Clintons, Gates, to John McCain. You get to play with the money tax-free while you are espousing economic equality. There should be NO income taxes. It should be a consumption tax (retail sales tax). Donating money to a foundation that you control should be illegal, but its not.
The central banks have been digging deeper and deeper into their monetary toolboxes in a vain hope of cushioning the COVID-19-induced shock, which has been orchestrated by this global effort to CRUSH the economy and redesign it in their image of a fossil-free world. The fake pandemic aside, the notion that the banks were already beyond hope since the ECB lowered rates to NEGATIVE back in 2014 and Keynesian Economics has failed. What has emerged is that the central banks have accelerated their transformation of monetary policy, which was once focused on defending and controlling inflation, into “Guardians of the Galaxy” combating inequality, climate change, inflation, and anything else they can think of. This decreases the possibility of ever returning to the existence of central banks pre-2007.
For the first time in post-1916 history, the US Federal Reserve has bought a wide variety of corporate debt issued by blue-chip borrowers such as Apple Inc., as well as junk bonds from riskier companies. As I have stated before, when the Fed was originally designed, its elastic money creation made sense because they bought private debt, which is paid off compared to government debt which never ends. The Bank of Japan has been what some call the petri dish for central banking since after more than two decades of expanding the money supply with no inflation, this has added to the rise of Modern Monetary Theory where these people assume that they can print money with no end and no inflation.
The central banks have lost control of the economy and the markets. There is no return to normal – they have now become the Guardians of the Galaxy.
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong,
If this “Great Reset” movement pushes gold underground, what kind of a future do we really have?
HR
ANSWER: On election night, Trump should win. However, the real question will be the mail-in ballots, and are they legitimate. As I have said, it really does not matter who wins from the perspective of the model warning that we will see a rise in civil unrest. NEITHER side will accept a loss. As I have said before, if the guy you voted for lost, it was no big deal, you went on with your life. Obama may have said all kinds of nonsense against Bush from Quantanamo was illegal to his authorization of tapping into US phones. But at the end of the day, Quantanomo was still there when Obama left and the surveillance only increased under Obama. The DEEP STATE runs the show and the trend never really changed.
If you look to France, they imposed a 10% tax on gold. I have friends there you buy their gold but post it to Belgium. We have to understand that is far beyond simply Republican v Democrat. Those are the old days. These people are really trying to seize control of the world to push their agenda of POPULATION CONTROL and CLIMATE CHANGE.
There is no way they will achieve their goal. This is wildly naive and it requires an academic to come up with this nonsense. There are two things that they have completely gotten wrong and it seems willing. (1) Climate Change and (2) the Business Cycle. Civilization expands with warming periods and contracts during cold periods. To listen to these people who argue that climate change is caused by humans cannot be supported by the data. We certainly do not want to live in pollution. We need clean air and clear water. But pollution does not change the climate. There are far bigger cycles at work.
Insofar as the business cycle is concerned, this is driven also by weather as well as innovation. The idea that we can create an economy that is the perfect utopia where there is never a recession or depression is absolute nonsense. Just look at any market from stocks and bonds to commodities. Everything fluctuates.
These two assertions that they can manipulate the climate and smooth the business cycle to create the perfect world is the dreams of madmen who are not satisfied with the way things actually work in this universe.
The BOTTOM LINE will be capital flows. What we must be concerned about is that there will be capital restraints imposed in different countries. Cutting off international travel is highly dangerous. The USA is no exception. All my staff outside the country cannot visit for everyone’s visa has been canceled. In Europe, Americans will be prohibited from traveling there without preapproval BEFORE you can even buy a ticket starting in 2021 and that was before COVID. We are staring at a deliberate move to reduce air travel as part of this Climate Change agenda without formally stating so.
This is no longer about Republic/Conservative v Democrat/Labour. There is a much bigger agenda taking place which will dictate the direction of the world economy ahead of us.
QUESTION: Hi Martin,
Thank you so much for sharing the connections Socrates is making between seemingly unrelated ideas. I’m a high school/collegiate science teacher and am wondering if Socrates has identified any correlations between coming astronomical phenomenon (like lunar phases or planetary alignment) to war or the economy. The information you’ve provided on the Sun has been amazing!
BTW, my students and I use the information you blog about as the foundation for the conversations in our Socratic seminars.
Thanks for all you do!
MC
REPLY: I have not used astrology even though my understanding has been that it was devised by the Babylonians who sought to correlate events on earth to events in the heavens, as well as the movements of the earth and animals. I am not so certain that specific events in the markets can be forecast by that method because things change and there are more complexities involved today. Nevertheless, they may align with what I have to say from time to time. The cycle of the sun 300 years aligned with our 309.6-year cycle. It is interesting that these solar cycles are getting weaker. The climate change that appears to be on the horizon is not global warming, but global cooling.
There is no discussion of even how the poles flip. I worked out the cycles on that from the data that was sent to us to see what Socrates would come up with. It turned out to be a 720,000-year cycle, so unfortunately we do not have an account of what took place the last time. Nonetheless, we are in line for that change perhaps post-2032. The poles flip every 11 years on the Sun. But, nobody lives there to explain the impact. There is no discussion of the sun cycle nor the movement of the poles in this climate change scenario they put forth where they claim we will all die after 7 years.
I am thrilled that you are teaching your students how to think. I really wish more teachers stopped the brainwashing and open their own eyes to the agenda being forced upon the youth for nefarious purposes.
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
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
Centinel2012 