Market Optimism Peaks - Crash in the Cards?

When market optimism reachesdangerous heights, it typically signifies one thing: a crash will be in the cards in the not too distant future.  Many indications exist that we have begun to approach the point of peak optimism.  Both technical market indicators as well as sentiment seem to be alluding to the possibility of a long-overdue crash being in the near future.  For example, stocks have only been this highby historical terms just before previous financial bubbles have burst. 

You may have heard this before.  In fact, if you read so-called “alternative news” (aka ‘fake’ news) you have heard this meme literally hundreds of times over the last eight years or so.

Yet now, more than ever before, circumstances have primed the financial world for a collapse of epic proportions.  It now seems all but certain that sometime during the Trump presidency, we will witness this financial failure. 

Make no mistake – this has been a long, long time in the making.  Trillions of currency units created out of thin air, and many billions of monetized financial assets later, the stars have finally begun to align in such a way that signifies that time may be running out. 

There’s no telling how big this bubble will be blown before it bursts.  As host of The Keiser Report Max Keiser has said, there’s no reason the Dow can’t go to 40,000.  There will always be a higher number.

Yet money printing will not always be a solution.  Even with trillions created and pumped into the system, the world economy has only been growing sluggishly for the past eight years.  The same solution will not work next time around.

According to insider analyst Jim Rickards in his new book, Road to Ruin: The Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, the elite have already begun preparing for the coming crisis.  The Bank of International Settlements warned them as far back as 2014.  And they plan to pursue a different strategy this time around.

In short, the financial system will be frozen, and people will not have access to their financial assets.  Bank accounts, mutual funds, bonds, stocks, everything…it will all be out of reach.  This way, contagion will never have time to spread.  In order to solve the problems, a global currency and system will be introduced.  The powers that be want to control everything and everyone.

What ways can one prepare for this?  There are many, yet a few of the most important involve owning physical silver/gold and virtual bitcoin.  Both will serve as hedges against devaluation of fiat currency.  While the big banks have been prosecuted for massive manipulation of precious metals markets, bitcoin has been the canary in the coal mine for the collapse of fiat money. 

What will you do?  Sit back and watch as the stage gets set for world financial domination?  Or take efforts to insulate yourself and inform others?

Leave your thoughts in a comment below.  Is the recent optimism misguided? 

War on Cash Escalates, Threatens Freedom and Liberty

[This post will be the first in a series on a very important topic with far-reaching implications regarding personal freedom.  As the situation evolves, further posts on the topic will be created.  Also found on: MeaningofFreedom.com]

Do you use cash to pay for things?  If so, it may only be a matter of time before you can no longer do so.

With each passing day, our society moves closer and closer to a cashless one.  And that has very dire consequences for our personal freedom and sovereignty. 

The right to have control over one’s currency must be considered paramount.  Those currency units represent the amount of time it takes to earn them.  In effect, they represent little pieces of one’s life.  Currency equals life. 

Now, imagine being denied the right to do with your life as you see fit.  Imagine it being under the control of government and banks.  Most people cannot imagine this.  Yet it has been happening, and will continue unabated if the banks have their way.

Several countries have recently made startling moves toward a cashless society.  The pace at which this agenda appears to be moving forward looks surprising to say the least. 

India, for example, has seen the war on cash come to its doors.  Its government recently banned high-denomination bank notes (see here) 

In this latest development on what has been termed “the war on cash”, absolute chaos has ensued.  People have been waiting in lines that stretch across entire city blocks just to exchange their cash for smaller notes they can spend.  Just take a look at thisshort Youtube clip: 

In South Korea, the government has decided to eliminate coins altogether, openly declaring the move to be one toward a “cashless society”.

In fact, a whole list of countriesexists that have already made significant move towards getting rid of physical money.  They remain one step away from total monetary control over their citizens lives.

The war on cash has many far-reaching implications and appears to be part of a larger plan by global central banks to centralize all capital under a single digital domain.  This allows for greater control, increased scrutiny over transactions, and total elimination of any personal financial privacy.  As we move towards a cashless society, our freedom diminishes.

As our freedom diminishes, so too does our prosperity.  America became the most prosperous nation in history because it began as the freest.  Now it seems as though everyday brings with it a new deterioration of those freedoms.  Anyone with a conscience cannot stand idly by and watch as a concerted effort by politicians, financiers, bankers, and oligarchs pushes us onward toward serfdom.    

Take a stand and fight back against this war on cash, by committing to use cash to pay for goods and services whenever possible.

What will you do?  Sit back as your liberties get chiseled away, or make any attempt possible to delay this system of control being forced upon us all by globalists and bankers?

Leave a comment below regarding your thoughts. 

Deutsche Bank Fails to Deliver Gold

Deutsche  Bank has failed to deliver physical gold to its customers who supposedly own some.

Of course, as has been said many times before, if you can’t touch it, you don’t own it.  This lesson has been learned the hard way by those who have attempted to get their gold out of Deutsche Bank.

Gold and silver have outperformed all other assets so far in 2016, with silver being up almost 50% and gold being up nearly 25%.  No better way of safeguarding one’s wealth exists.

Former CIA analyst Jim Rickards recently went on RT’s The Keiser Report with Max Keiser to promote his new book, “The New Case for Gold”, in which he describes the modern reasons for owning gold which differ from those of thirty years ago.  He said on the show that investment of about ten percent of one’s net worth into gold will be adequate to preserve one’s wealth. 

Personally, I believe that twenty percent in silver is a much better proposition.  Unless you are rich, you won’t be affording gold in the first place.  Silver is the gold of common folk, and thus far this year silver has vastly outperformed gold and has the potential to do so even more in the future. 

Many have said that this precious metals bull market has only just begun.  While only time will truly tell, it seems almost certain that this hypothesis will be proven correct.  With such unprecedented monetary stimulus combined with geopolitical uncertainty, its difficult to imagine any other scenario playing out.

Brexit, NIRP, terrorism, stock and bond bubbles….the list goes on.  All of these things, while terrible in and of themselves, bode quite well for the precious metals markets.  The reasons will not be elaborated upon here for each specific case.  Anyone can do further research on their own if desired.  Put simply, all of these scenarios add to uncertainty, which leads capital to seek safety.  As stated before, no better safety exists than physical silver and gold.  Many have begun to see this reality, and many more will do so in the near future. 

Just eight months ago, silver was trading around 14 dollars and ounce.  Now it’s trading near $20 an ounce.  The big banks can no longer keep the price suppressed through artificial means.  The cat has been released from the bag, and it has only just begun.     

Lethal Dose of QE On Its Way

On Friday, Janet Yellen hinted at the possibility of unprecedented monetary stimulus.  What form this might take remains unclear.  Yet only a few options exist - mainly, negative interest rates and helicopter money.  Japan has already instituted NIRP (negative-interest-rate policy), as have many European countries.  Japan has hinted at the possibility of helicopter money being necessary, seeing the ineffectiveness of NIRP. 

A healthy economy needs interest rates.  As Peter Schiff has noted in his writings, savings are the bedrock of capitalism.  People use savings and interest income to invest.  Without a positive interest rate, the whole economy stalls out.  That’s what has been happening, as evidenced by the plunging velocity of money, something I have written about previously.

How anyone believes that NIRP can be a good thing lies beyond the scope of reason.  The only way it can be considered positive involves looking at the obscene amounts of debt in the system.  Interest rates must go ever lower in order to sustain more and more debt.  Imagine you have a credit card and keep charging more and more.  That’s fine, so long as your interest rate keeps on plunging, you will never have to make much of a payment.

Of course, everyone knows that’s just not how it works.  So it’s silly to think this charade can go on forever.  At some point things must reach a breaking point.  Years of stagnation seem destined to precede that breaking point, as we have seen in Japan. 

The Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned to over $4 Trillion USD.  The next dose of QE may be in excess of $2 Trillion.  Like a drug addict, more and more stimulus is needed to prop up the economy, until finally….overdose. 

What will be the ultimate outcome of this insane monetary experiment?  What are your thoughts?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Three points to economic depression

With global stock markets reaching record highs, mainstream media continues to push the narrative that “good times are here again”. 

Yet when one peers beneath the surface of this 1920s-like frothy equity fiasco, a very different picture emerges. 

Objective economic indicators all point toward a grim reality: outright economic depression.  It’s plain enough for anyone to see.  However, most media outlets today do not connect the dots between certain data points, and therefore present a skewed reality again and again.

Which points can show us what’s really going on?  There are three main issues I’d like to mention in this post, all of which demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt that for the great majority of Americans and other citizens, times have never been tougher.  These include the following: 1) Fertility and marriage rates at record lows.  When people live in poverty, they can no longer afford to marry or raise children.  2) Interest rates at record lows, roughly 14 trillion in negative yielding debt.  A healthy economy needs a positive interest rate in order to spur investment based off capital gains.  With no such gains to be found, people pile into risk assets in a desperate ditch for yield.  This raises assets prices and creates the illusion of recovery.  Finally, 3) M2 Velocity of money at record low in America, while Fed’s balance sheet stands at about 4 Trillion USD.  This inconvenient truth never, ever gets mentioned once in the mainstream news channels.  Most people don’t even have a clue what this means. 

Let’s focus first on fertility rates.  Never before in recorded history have people been having less babies.  The significance of this cannot be overstated.  No reason exists for this to be the case other than an utter lack of economic opportunity.  Very few jobs exist that can feed a family, so people forego parenthood.  An entire generation may never have the chance to become parents.  What might the following generation experience?

The previous generation of baby boomers can no longer raise retirement income from fixed-income investments such as CD accounts and government bonds.  Central bank policies known as zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and now negative interest rate policy (NIRP), have eliminated opportunities for investors.  Grandma and grandpa now have to either subsist on social security or risk it all in the stock markets.   In fact, many seniors have been forced to forego retirement altogether and continue working, further tightening labor conditions for the younger generation.  That constitutes two entire generations who must be cash-strapped, as evidenced by point #3. 

Velocity of money can best be described as the pulse of an economy.  No other single objective indicator can better show the state of an economy.  M2 velocity refers to the number of times a piece of currency changes hands within the real economy.  When things are good, people spend money they earn.  I buy something from a local shop, the shopkeeper then invests some of that money into his business, buying other things and then the process repeats.  However, this normal process seems to have stalled out in modern day America.  The evidence cannot be more simple and clear.  The following chart displays a very frightening image of an economy in free-fall. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V  No one can dispute that chart.  The numbers do not lie, and they speak for themselves.  The velocity of money has never been lower, and it continues to reach new lows.  It has fallen every year since 2008, and shows no sign of recovery whatsoever.  Based on this metric alone, it makes more sense to claim we are experiencing an economic depression than some kind of “recovery”. 

Overall, anyone claiming that everything is normal must either be clueless or delusional.  People have stopped having children, interest rates have never been lower, and the velocity of money continues to plummet.  These three points present a solid indication of a zombie economy.  Without low to negative interest rates and massive “quantitative easing” (money creation), who knows what might occur?  And so the central banks, who created this whole mess in the first place, get to pose as the saviors of their own calamity.  Lord Rothschild, one of the world’s foremost bankers, has even declared this to be a monetary experiment the likes of which this world has never before seen.  https://www.rt.com/business/356148-rothschild-experiment-world-economy/

How this experiment ends will be anyone’s guess.  Yet given what has been covered in this post, it seems plain enough that the outcome will be less than positive.