Showing posts with label inflation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inflation. Show all posts

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Whodunit? Sneak attack on U.S. dollar

If you've been paying attention, you know the money powers have planned to collapse our currency the entire time. A 96% devaluation of the dollar since 1913 cannot happen by accident. They knew it when they created the Fed, they've been aware of it the entire time, and they present it to us as something good for us, because the average idiot has no idea what the Fed or inflation is. They think the fact that a loaf of bread cost a nickel when our grandparents were kids yet now costs three dollars is just the natural increase in prices, when, were all things to be equal, with technological developments that would increased efficiency and productivity, the price of bread should've gone down.

Meanwhile, for decades, economic profits like Ron Paul have predicted the collapse of the dollar due to Fed inflationary policies - this collapse being the inevitable and unavoidable outcome of such a policy. Again, this cannot have been an accident; they knew exactly what they were doing the entire time. The answer then becomes, not who, but why? Every economic crisis for at least the last 100 years has been engineered by the robber barons. They know how to manipulate the market, usually through manufactured confidence or fear. The panic of '07 was engineered by JP Morgan as justification for demanding a central bank - The Fed. Every boom since has been the result of the Fed's expansionary monetary policies, and every bust the result of the Fed's money contraction. They inflate the bubble, hoodwink the people into investing in it, then burst the bubble by pulling out of the market en masse, so that those on the outside lose everything, then they buy up the spoils at pennies on the dollar. They then reinvest in the market, reinflate the bubble, and the cycle continues, ad infinitum, leading, inexorably, to the here and now, when the dollar has been stretched as thin as it's going to go, so they will collapse it, along with our entire economy, so they can consolidate it under a global cashless scheme and world government. And the media continues to tell us this is the only thing that can save us. Yet every time they create a crisis, declare themselves the savior if we only give them more power and more money, the middle class only seems to be further obliterated, and the gap between rich and poor expands. Again, this was the plan the entire time.

    Politico -

    It’s the biggest mystery in global finance right now: Who conducted a sneak attack on the U.S. dollar this week?

    It began with a thinly sourced but highly explosive report Monday in a British newspaper: Arab oil sheiks are conspiring with the Russians and Chinese to quit using the dollar to set the value of oil trades — a direct threat to the global supremacy of the greenback.

    Is it true? Everyone from the head of the Saudi central bank to U.S. officials scrambled to undercut the story, but no matter.

    With the U.S. economy on the ropes and America by far the world’s biggest debtor, investors aren’t feeling as secure about the dollar as they used to. And the notion of second-tier economies ganging up on Uncle Sam didn’t sound so far-fetched.

    For American officials, the possibility of the dollar losing its long-term dominance in global commerce is a nightmare scenario because it would likely mean sharply higher interest rates at home and a declining ability to finance the U.S. debt. No one believes it could really happen right now, but stories like the British report this week make it seem incrementally more likely.

    So the piece by Robert Fisk of the Independent shocked currency traders around the world and almost instantly sent the value of the U.S. dollar spiraling downward and the price of gold skyrocketing to an all-time high, as a hedge against a weakened dollar.

    The website drudgereport.com quickly amplified the impact of the story with a headline atop the site: ARAB STATES LAUNCH SECRET MOVES WITH CHINA, RUSSIA, FRANCE TO STOP USING DOLLAR FOR OIL TRADING ...

    “You read that story, and you do two things: You sell the hell out of dollars and you buy gold,” said Les Alperstein, president of the financial research firm Washington Analysis. “The story has a lot of credibility, with some caveats.”

    So who wanted dollars diving and gold rising? In other words, who is Fisk’s source, and why did he or she want to tank the dollar? It’s the global currency version of the old Washington parlor game of speculating on the real identity of Deep Throat.

    No one knows.

    But one thing is for certain: With the price of gold jumping to $1,048.20 per ounce, traders who moved early enough stood to make millions.

    So in government circles in Washington, speculation immediately centered on gold traders: With the skyrocketing price of gold, they’d be the biggest beneficiaries of the article.

    Fisk’s story itself isn’t much help in solving the mystery — it is sourced vaguely to “Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong,” and it included one blind quote, attributed to “a prominent Hong Kong broker.” That doesn’t narrow down the pool very much.

Continue reading....

Thursday, April 9, 2009

The Coming Collapse of the Dollar

Most Americans hear about inflation on the news and they really don't understand much about it, except that it is associated with rising prices. Rarely, if ever, does a news report explain why prices rise, and thus mischaracterize its meaning.

Inflation is actually an increase in the supply of money. It can happen naturally, like say for instance if a factory opens up in a local town and creates jobs, thus increasing the local supply of wealth. More commonly, especially as more and more of our production jobs are shipped overseas or simply collapse and fail, inflation is generated by the Federal Reserve and its printing press.

The reason inflation causes a rise in prices is simply relative to the law of supply and demand. Resources are always scarce, so a higher demand creates scarcity which drives up prices. More wealth, in general, increases demand and so prices must rise. In our local town, this wouldn't be so painful, since the inflation would generally be associated with a rise in the standard of living. But when generated by the Fed, this wealth arrives first into the hands of already wealthy elites favored by the government, such as banks, health care giants, and the military industrial complex (Boeing, Halliburton, etc). Of course eventually this money gets passed on and distributed throughout the rest of the economy, but by the time it affects the average person prices have already risen and it does none of us much good to receive it. Inflation is a hidden tax on middle and lower class Americans, especially those on fixed incomes. So when the Fed announces it has created a trillion dollars out of thin air, this should concern us far more than it general does, because so few of us understand economics. What's sad is, it's not as difficult to understand as they lead you to believe, and certainly not as boring (you're being ripped off - how can that be boring?!). But I digress.

What should concern us all in the midst of this crisis is China and other foreign countries like Russia and the oil producing gulf states that purchase our debt. When we borrow money off them, they purchase a treasury bond. When the bond matures, we have to buy it back with interest. But since we produce so little of value we have little recourse but to borrow more money just to pay off our previous debt. This is why Secretary of State Clinton went to China: to beg them not to cash in our treasury bonds and pocket the money.

But the day will soon come when China figures out its workers are merely slaves to the American consumer, because the wealth they actually produce is loaned out to Americans just so we can buy the products they make. And China will cash in our treasury bonds and they'll want a straight up payment, and we're not going to have a way to pay them, considering our massive spending and budget deficits, except to either drastically raise taxes, and not just on the wealthiest 2% or whatever, but on every American who actually still has a job at that point, or, more likely, they'll just print it up at the Fed, which will increase the money supply and weaken the dollar further. In fact this has already started to occur - the trillion dollars the Fed just created was used to buy, among other things, treasury bonds. Not only does this weaken the dollar, but it will precipitate a flight from the dollar that will prove fatal to our economy.

And there will come a day when Americans cannot afford to buy basic necessities because our currency will be worthless. The government, in typical government fashion, will attack the symptoms of the inflation and not the cause. They'll implement price controls, oblivious to the law of supply and demand, which will create shortages, because nobody is going to want to sell anything they can't actually make a profit off of. From then on you can only imagine the horrors that will ensue, as Americans continue to lose the ability to support themselves and their families. One way or another we are all going to realize, through much suffering, that a fiat economy can only lead to ruin.

This may sound like some ridiculous scenario that only happens in other countries, or that society has progressed to the point where these kinds of things are impossible. But the laws of economics do not evolve over time, nor is America invincible to the consequences of trying to overcome economic law, and neither does the market care if it destroys America or Zimbabwe or the Wiemar Republic, etc. All the rousing rhetoric of hope, all the adoring throngs of fans, all the chest-thumping American triumphalism, will be humbled before the market. And having foreknowledge that that day will come gives me little solace. I am very fearful of the suffering they are going to cause. If you don't care, if you're not interested, you should be.