Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of “keeping us safe” or “promoting democracy” or “protecting their strategic interests.”

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.

Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers’ attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.

Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.

The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe-straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment towards us.

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn’t stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.

Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome’s did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

Imagine!: speech written & given by Ron Paul
should you be a US citizen in support of Ron Paul: http://revolutionpac.com/defense

Press TV – The Greek prime minister says his country has no intention to leave the Eurozone after reports from Germany revealed Greece might leave the common currency.

“These scenarios reach the borderline of criminality, just like yesterday when some again irresponsibly worked to spread fear for various reasons, perhaps also for reasons of speculation,” Prime Minister George Papandreou said on Saturday in response to a report by an online news magazine Der Spiegel, Reuters stated.

Papandreou added that no such scenario for Athens to quit the Eurozone has even been discussed.

The Greek prime minister also called on the EU to leave his troubled country alone. On Friday, finance ministers from several Eurozone countries met in Luxembourg to discuss Greece’s debt crisis.

This was while Greece and senior EU officials have denied any prospect for Athens to leave the 17-member Eurozone. The news of the country possibly leaving or being kicked out of the Eurozone has led to a sharp fall of the euro against the dollar.

Greek media reported that the EU finance ministers have discussed giving more time to Athens to repay its EUR 110 billion EU-IMF bailout, as well as offering it more lenient deficit reduction measures.

Greece has so far not been able to meet its deficit reduction targets stipulated in the bailout agreement.

Some economists think the country cannot overcome its debt, which stands at more than EUR 340 billion.

The National Inflation Association (NIA) released the following economic update article:

China this morning reported 4.9% price inflation for the month of February, exceeding analyst expectations of 4.8%. With China now mimicking the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and taking steps to artificially manipulate their consumer price index (CPI) numbers as low as possible, it is likely that real price inflation in China is now closer to 10%. China was at least smart enough to raise interest rates last month by 25 basis points to 6.06%, while the Federal Reserve continues to leave interest rates near zero with there being absolutely no talk of the Federal Reserve ever raising interest rates again. China will be successful at containing inflation, as U.S. inflation spirals out of control and becomes the greatest economic crisis in American history.

China this week reported a $7.3 billion trade deficit for the month of February, its largest trade deficit in seven years, which surprised many global economists. NIA believes China’s trade deficit is temporary and that China will quickly return to having a trade surplus. The Federal Reserve’s QE2 along with China’s destructive monetary policies, which artificially devalue the yuan, have led to a massive rise in China’s raw material costs this year. NIA believes that in the upcoming months, Chinese manufacturers will raise the prices of their products that get exported to the U.S., to counteract rising commodity prices. With most products used by Americans today having been manufactured in China, this will mean Americans will soon see massive price inflation in just about all consumer goods they use. NIA projects that by the end of 2011, we will begin to see the U.S. CPI increase by 4.9% or higher on a year-over-year basis, with real U.S. price inflation rising north of 10%.

The mainstream media is proclaiming that China’s trade deficit will silence calls for the Chinese to allow their currency to strengthen against the U.S. dollar. The fact is, China’s government has for long been making the major mistake of printing too many yuan in order to artificially prop up the U.S. dollar. Their fear was, if the U.S. dollar was allowed to decline too rapidly, prices of Chinese goods would rise in terms of U.S. dollars and Americans would no longer afford to import them.

The truth is, if China allowed the yuan to strengthen, the Chinese would have enjoyed a much higher standard of living. Sure, prices would rise in dollars and Americans would import less, but the Chinese would have the ability to consume more of their own products. Now, as a result of China expanding its own money supply in order to keep the yuan pegged to the U.S. dollar, Americans will be forced to pay a much higher price for Chinese goods anyway. The same higher prices Americans were going to pay as a result of exchange rate appreciation, Americans will now pay as a result of inflation. For the Chinese, the exchange rate appreciation route would have been a much better route to take than the inflation route, because now the Chinese will also be forced to pay higher prices. In the very short-term, China might actually suffer more than the U.S. because they lack the social safety nets that have been implemented here in America.

The U.S. government has been successful at temporarily paying off Americans into not rioting in the streets like in Arab nations. It was just announced a few days ago that the number of Americans on food stamps in the month of December of 2010 was a record 44,082,324, up 13.1% from one year earlier and 1.1% from one month earlier. That is more than 14% of the total U.S. population! Combined with President Obama extending unemployment benefits up to 99 weeks, American citizens are too busy and distracted playing with their iPad 2s and gossiping on Twitter about Charlie Sheen, to have any time to protest in Washington, DC.

NIA believes the U.S. government’s entitlement spending is currently having the unintended consequence of making Americans dependent on government. It is like when you take wild animals into captivity and you feed them, teach them to do tricks and take care of them for a period of many years; if you just dump them one day back into the wild, it will be very difficult for them to survive. Americans who have become dependent on unemployment checks and food stamps will likely soon abruptly find out that they must begin to fend for themselves without any help from the government. The result will be many Americans turning into wild animals and becoming so desperate that they will have to rob and burglarize their fellow neighbors who were smart enough to prepare, or else they will risk starving to death.

As a result of QE2, the Federal Reserve is now buying 70% of U.S. treasuries, up from previously only buying 10% of treasury bonds. Foreign central banks are now buying just 30% of U.S. treasuries, compared to previously buying 50% of treasury bonds. The U.S. budget deficit in the month of February reached a record $222.5 billion or $2.67 trillion on an annualized basis. With the Federal Reserve now monetizing our debt in full swing, a complete and total loss of confidence in the U.S. dollar could be imminent.

Just like how nobody in the mainstream media was calling for the collapse of Egypt’s government a few months ago, almost nobody in the media believes a collapse of the U.S. dollar could possibly take place anytime soon. NIA members are educated enough to see that the writing is on the wall. The Federal Reserve can deny all it wants that the U.S. is experiencing inflation, but with the cost to print a single U.S. dollar paper note rising by 50% since 2008, massive inflation is here right under Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s nose. Every day that goes by, China is quietly implementing more and more steps that expand the yuan’s use in cross border trade, in order to position the yuan as the world’s next reserve currency.

So few Americans are presently preparing for hyperinflation that if hyperinflation broke out today, approximately 90% of Americans won’t have the means to put food on the table or put fuel in their automobiles. During the upcoming hyperinflationary crisis, food stamps will no longer have any value at all and all U.S. entitlement programs will come to a complete halt. Americans will take to the streets like the world has never seen before.

The biggest question NIA has today is, will the U.S. government resort to firing at its own citizens, if major riots take place in Washington, DC. On Thursday, police in Saudi Arabia shot and wounded three protesters. The price of oil rose by a few dollars per barrel as soon as this news hit the wire, which shows just how nervous the world’s financial markets have become in recent weeks. The fact that the Dow Jones has declined significantly in recent days, in our opinion means that the odds of QE3 being launched as soon as QE2 is over, are now much higher than they were several weeks ago.

The other big question NIA has today is, if in the unlikely event there is no QE3, who will fill in for the artificial buying demand currently coming from the Federal Reserve. After all, with no QE3, the Federal Reserve will go from buying 70% of treasury bonds to being a seller of U.S. treasuries. NIA is 100% sure that foreign central banks aren’t itching to jump back in to fill the hole. While in the past, the private sector may have picked up the slack, we believe individual investors will now be more reluctant to jump into government bonds, especially with bond king Bill Gross reducing the government bond holdings in his Pimco Total Return Fund down to zero. The bottom line is, no QE3 means interest rates will fly sky high and destroy the phony so-called “economic recovery”.

From April to August of 2010, the last time the Federal Reserve allowed its balance sheet to shrink, the Dow Jones fell by over 1,000 points. If Bernanke doesn’t soon begin to leak out the strong likelihood of QE3, we could see the stock market decline by 1,000 points or more, which will force Bernanke into launching QE3. If we see a major sell off in stocks, NIA doesn’t necessarily think that precious metals prices will follow. In fact, we could see gold and silver rise along with the Dow Jones falling. NIA projects the Dow Jones to gold ratio to decline to 6.5 in 2011. This means even if the Dow Jones fell to below 11,000, we still believe gold is likely to rise to around $1,600 to $1,700 per ounce this year, with silver soaring to around $42 to $44 per ounce. NIA believes the worst decision any American can make is to sell their gold and silver and go long U.S. dollars, hoping to buy their precious metals back at a lower price in the future.

Source.

theeconomiccollapseblog.com - One of the quickest ways to bring down the U.S. economy would be to dramatically increase the price of oil. Oil is the lifeblood of our economic system. Without it, our entire economy would come to a grinding halt. Almost every type of economic activity in this country depends on oil, and even a small rise in the price of oil can have a dramatic impact on economic growth.  That is why so many economists are incredibly alarmed about what is happening in the Middle East right now.  The revolution in Libya caused the price of WTI crude to soar more than 7 dollars on Tuesday alone.  It closed at $93.57 on Tuesday and Brent crude actually hit $108.57 a barrel before settling back to $105.78 at the end of the day.  Some analysts are warning that we could even see 5 dollar gas in the United States by the end of the year if rioting spreads to other oil producing nations such as Saudi Arabia.  With the Middle East in such a state of chaos right now it is hard to know exactly what is going to happen, but almost everyone agrees that if oil prices continue to rise at a rapid pace over the next several months it is going to have a devastating impact on economic growth all over the globe.

Right now the eyes of the world are on Libya.  Libya is the 17th largest oil producer on the globe and it has the biggest proven oil reserves on the continent of Africa.

Libya only produces 2 percent of the oil in the world, but with global supplies so tight at the moment even a minor production disruption can have a dramatic impact on the price of oil.

Before this crisis, Libya was producing approximately 1.6 million barrels of oil per day.  Now the rest of the world is wondering what may happen if revolution spreads to other major oil producing nations such as Kuwait (2.5 million barrels of oil per day) or Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia produces 8.4 million barrels of oil a day.  It produces more oil than anyone else in OPEC.

If revolution strikes in Saudi Arabia and a major production disruption happens it could be catastrophic for the global economy.

David Rosenberg, the chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates, is warning that if there is major civil unrest in Saudi Arabia we could end up seeing oil go up to $200 a barrel….

“If Libya can spark a $10-a-barrel response, imagine what a similar uprising in Saudi Arabia could unleash. Do the math: we’d be talking about $200 oil.”

200 dollar oil?

Don’t laugh – it could happen.

In fact, if it does happen the global economy would probably go into cardiac arrest.

The truth is that if the flow of oil from Saudi Arabia gets disrupted there is not enough spare capacity from the rest of the globe to make up for it.

Paul Horsnell, the head of oil research at Barclays Capital, recently said that the world does not currently have enough spare capacity to be able to guarantee that an oil “price shock” will not happen….

“The world has only 4.5m barrels-per-day (bpd) of spare capacity, which is not comfortable.”

Horsnell also said that even in the midst of potential supply problems, the global demand for oil continues to grow at a very robust pace….

“In just two years, the world has grown so fast as to consume additional volume equal to the output of Iraq and Kuwait combined.”

For now, Saudi officials are saying all the right things.  They say that there will be no revolution in Saudi Arabia and that there are not going to be any supply problems.

For example, Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi recently announcedthat the rest of the world should not worry because his country is definitely going to be able to make up for any shortage in the global supply of oil….

“What I would like you to convey to the market: right now there is absolutely no shortage of supply.”

But what happens if revolution comes to Saudi Arabia?

Suddenly the whole game would change.

But even with a peaceful Saudi Arabia the price of gasoline in the United States is already rising to alarming levels.

The average price of gasoline in the United States reached $3.14 a gallonlast week.  This closely mirrors what happened back in 2008.  Three years ago at this time the average price of gasoline was right around $3.13 a gallon.

Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see a repeat of what happened to oil prices back in mid-2008.  The price of oil reached an all-time record of $147 a barrel and gas prices in the United States absolutely skyrocketed.

So how high will the price of gas in the U.S. go in 2011?

We haven’t even come close to 4 dollar gas yet, but a large number of analysts believe that it is coming this summer.

Is there even a possibility that we could see 5 dollar gas in America at some point in the next couple of years?

Well, there are some in the oil industry that are convinced that it could actually happen.  Just consider the following quotes….

Darin Newsom, senior analyst at energy tracker DTN….

“If this thing escalates and there’s a good chance that there’d be a shift in supplies, $5 gas isn’t out of the question.”

Peter Beutel, president of energy adviser Cameron Hanover….

“If you are looking at the disruption of movement and production in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, you’re easily talking $5 gas.”

John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil, on his belief that we could see 5 dollar gas by 2012….

“I’m predicting actually the worst outcome over the next two years which takes us to 2012 with higher gasoline prices.”

So why is everyone so concerned about gas prices?

Well, because it affects the price of almost everything else in the economy.

David Wyss, the chief economist at Standard & Poor’s, says that every extra dollar that is spent on gasoline is a dollar that will not be spent somewhere else….

“The money that you spend filling up your car is money you don’t have to spend at the shopping mall.”

Not only that, but when gasoline costs more it has a negative effect on economic growth.  Almost all economic activities involve the use of oil in one form or another.  When the price of oil starts getting really high it motivates people to start cutting back on many of those activities.

The truth is that our whole economic system is based on the ability to use massive amounts of very cheap oil.  Now that the price of oil is rapidly rising again, many economists are becoming very alarmed.

Nobuo Tanaka, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency,recently told CNBC that his organization is extremely concerned about what high oil prices could do to the global economy….

“That is our concern, regardless of the margins of disruption, if the $100 per barrel of oil is continued in 2011, the burden of oil to the global economy is as bad as 2008.”

So what was so bad about 2008?  Well, the price of oil soared to $147 a barrel in mid-2008 and this was a huge factor in the financial collapse that happened a few months later.  Now oil prices are returning to levels that we have not seen since 2008….

So if the price of oil breaks the all-time record this year will we see another global financial crisis?

It is hard to say.  But what almost everyone agrees on is that it will not be good for the global economy at all.

In addition, a higher price for oil will also have a huge impact on the trade deficit.  Because oil prices were at such a high level back in 2008, oil imports actually made up almost 50 percent of the U.S. trade deficit that year.

In 2010, the U.S. trade deficit was just a whisker under $500 billion.  If the price of oil gets up to 140 or 150 dollars a barrel we could easily see the U.S. trade deficit explode to 700 or 800 billion dollars in 2011.

That would be really, really bad for the U.S. economy.

So where are oil prices going next?

Well, if you could predict that with 100 percent certainty you could make a whole lot of money.  Nobody knows for sure.

But almost everyone believes that the price of oil is going to go up.  In fact, a lot number of investors have been making some very large bets that the price of oil is going to go up very significantly this year.

Recently, large numbers of investors have been betting that the price of oil will rise to $125 a barrel by May.  Shockingly, some investors have even been betting that the price of oil will rise to $250 a barrel by next December.

Let us hope that the price of oil does not rise that rapidly, but as the past couple of months have demonstrated, the world is becoming a very unstable place.   Just about anything is possible at this point.

If the price of oil rises significantly above $100 a barrel and it stays there for an extended period of time, it is going to be absolutely devastating for the U.S. economy.

So what do you all think is going to happen to the price of oil in 2011?  Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below….

Max Keiser, financial analyst and host of RT’s Keiser Report says Germany is ready to emerge as the world’s new superpower.

Trends expert Gerald Celente talks with RT about the bailout bubble which began under the Bush administration and has accelerated under the Obama administration.

“You have the blindsided, the stupid, and the incompetent telling us what to do next. They’re ruining the country. They’re devaluing the dollar. They’re driving the country into poverty and they’re causing a trade war.”

Celente argues that the same scenario from World War 2 is now being setup for the next war.

By David Swanson

War is a Crime

The endless and infinite “war on terra” is bankrupting the planet. I don’t mean moral bankruptcy; that goes without saying. I mean financial bankruptcy. And don’t take my word for it. This is the argument made in a new book called “Terrorism and the Economy: How the War on Terror Is Bankrupting the World,” by Loretta Napoleoni, a financial reporter for Internazionale, l’Unita, il Caffe, Mondo e Missione, El Pais, Vanity Fair Spain, and Vanity Fair Italy.

Perhaps Napoleoni is insufficiently subservient to Wall Street to write for U.S. newspapers — unlike, say, the United States government: “Washington needs Wall Street’s help to keep international investors funding the U.S. debt,” the author explains, “which in turn provides the $1.6 billion needed each month to keep troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Which explains the lack of criminal prosecutions and serious regulation of Wall Street.

Napoleoni traces some surprising changes in the world financial system over the past nine years to the latest U.S. warmaking spree: “Though it may sound implausible, as soon as the West focused its attention on the war on terror, the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the Persian Gulf began experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. Money started to flow toward their economies.” The U.S. government did not investigate the sources of terrorist funding, but did put restrictions in place through the PATRIOT Act that led money launderers to take their business to Europe, which suffered from that transfer as well.

The U.S. claimed it wanted to cut off the terrorists’ lifeline, but Napoleoni finds little evidence of action behind the claim. Instead she sees Bush’s failure to pursue bin Laden’s bankers as in line with his failure to try to prevent 9-11 or to capture or bring bin Laden to trial. The 9-11 attacks were Bush’s excuse for war, and war was what he wanted.

Napoleoni sees the “war on terror” as a response to Islamic jihad and draws a comparison to Saladin’s jihad as a response to the Christian crusades. The Pope’s call to “liberate” the holy land in 1095, Napoleoni writes, was for “the starving masses of Europe . . . a way of feeding themselves and an escape from a life of misery and suffering. For the knights and nobility, it offered an opportunity for economic expansion. . . . Europe was a colony of Islam. Today the Muslim world feels equally subjugated to the West.”

One of the ultimate aims of the Islamic insurgency, Napoleoni writes, is “to bleed the American economy until it is bankrupt.” Bin Laden has “even calculated the amount of profits that Americans have accumulated from the sale of Arab oil. For every barrel sold over the last twenty-five years, he claims they pocketed $135. The total loss of income adds up to a staggering $4.05 billion per day, which he describes as the greatest theft in history.”

U.S. actions these past nine years have tended to self-inflict the economic wounds bin Laden desires, while simultaneously building al Qaeda into a more powerful and efficient enterprise. The United States had tended to tolerate money laundering because it benefitted the economy and the domestic money supply. The PATRIOT Act imposed regulations on money laundering and therefore on international banks, which immediately began advising their clients to avoid and divest from dollars. International crime syndicates took their money laundry to Europe. The war on terra also drove the price of crude oil through the roof. But it was the otherwise unregulated free-for-all on Wall Street that did the most damage to the U.S. and world economies. “The likelihood that bin Laden will destroy us is extremely low,” writes Napoleoni, “the likelihood that finance will do so is, on the other hand, extremely high, a virtual certainty.”

U.S. propaganda “magnified al Qaeda’s power exponentially. . . . On 9/11, few knew that this was nothing more than political theater and that few Muslims had ever heard of al Qaeda. . . . Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had no ties whatsoever to bin Laden. . . . [T]he invasion of Afghanistan decimated al Qaeda. Yet we believed what politicians told us.” Our policies — destabilizing Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Horn of Africa — created shell states and easy recruitment for terrorism, which we thereby helped make more affordable. “The 9/11 attacks cost al Qaeda $500,000, while the Madrid massacre cost only $20,000, and the London suicide bombings less than $15,000. Osama bin Laden no longer operates costly training camps but relies upon the proliferation of jihadist websites to indoctrinate and train a new generation of jihadists at rock-bottom prices.” The U.S. has spent trillions on war, while Iraqis have successfully fought back for less than $200 million.

We can’t waste money this way without Wall Street, which is “as free and unregulated as it was before the credit crunch.” We’d transferred “bad risk accumulated by the private sector to the balance sheet of the state,” rather than eliminating it as needed. “In March 2009, the share prices of companies and banks ‘saved’ by governments were all below the levels at which the state had purchased them. . . . The desire to maintain, at any cost, a damaged and anachronistic system will only bring ruination.”

Instead, Napoleoni suggests, we should restructure the financial system, nationalize the banking sector, prune all the deadwood that does not serve the real economy, outlaw damaging products like derivatives, and preserve insurance operations while allowing gambling operations to collapse. We might learn from Islamic economics, which Napoleoni describes as “the opposite of capitalism”:

“In the Eastern world, the selfish behavior of each individual, aimed at maximizing profits and minimizing costs, is not believed to miraculously enrich entire nations. In the short shadow of the minarets, wealth comes from cooperation and joint ventures between banks and clients.” Drawing on this source, we might require that money always be invested in the real economy, thereby banning speculation on securities not tied to the underlying companies.

And instead of paying people to do nothing, through unemployment compensation, Napoleoni argues we should pay people, the unemployed and recent graduates, to convert our industries to clean energy, build infrastructure, and redesign our manufacturing base. Sounds like a plan that would even take care of the much bemoaned enthusiasm gap.

Watch full episode 86 of Keiser Report on Thursday. Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, look at hard assets versus high assets, Hu Jintao bonds, political witches and more bank bailouts.

Congressman Ron Paul discusses the riots in Greece, the start of a currency crises, and the consequences of not having sound money.

Dr. Paul believes we’re now shifting from the financial crises to a currency crises and the world is in for big trouble. “In terms of gold, the dollar has been rapidly devalued,” says Dr. Paul. “This means that gold is acting as money.” He notes that paper currencies are being given up.

“It is a world problem. We’re going to be the last one to fall because we still have the dollar and people still think the dollar will save everybody.”

Dr. Paul notes the importance of fully auditing the private Federal Reserve, the source of both the financial crises and currency crises.

The current dollar rally wont endure, questions for the future of the Euro, No collapse of currency overnight, but we see it coming, record low interest rates drive bond purchases, Fed will continue to feed the economy, the threat is deflationary depression, China continues to dump dollars, US in a box, Fannie and Freddie bondholders should not hold their breath, unemployed are also exhausted…

Every important factor we see is working against the dollar and we believe that trend is irreversible. That means the present dollar rally probably cannot endure and it could well be the time to short the USDX.

Most observers discuss Europe’s problems and the plight of the euro, pound, and the Danish and Swedish koronas. They believe these European currencies will plunge lower versus the dollar and that the dollar will maintain, even after a dollar rally from 74 to 81 on the USDX. As we have said before the euro was unnatural creation born of a desire to usher in a world currency. As we shall see in the future the euro will fail. In spite of that the dollar is certainly no bargain, because next year America will be totally bankrupt. As a result of the terrible conditions among currencies, gold makes great gains. Last year and so far this year gold is up 10% to 24% against many major currencies. This kind of action of course proves again that gold is the world’s strongest currency. We might add here that we believe that it is only a matter of time before the LBMA, or Comex, or the ETFs, GLDs and SLVs are enveloped in scandal. As so often has happened in history fiat currencies have collapsed. Thus, it will happen again. Those of you not in gold and silver related assets will lose most of what you have worked for your entire lives.

The collapse of currencies and nations won’t happen overnight, because their demise has been planned, and a subtle collapse is in process. Our guess is that next year is when the collapse will finally take place followed by one of the greatest deflationary depressions of all time. During the last 2-1/2 years all the toxic investments have been and will continue to be transferred from the Illuminist banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies and transnational conglomerates to the public. The Federal Reserve is the repository for this junk, which includes Treasuries and Agencies. That means the public foots the bill. Every government and bank in the world will be affected. This magical game of 3-card-Monte will never work and the Illuminists know it won’t work. That is why they have war on demand to distract the public and to escape punishment for the devastating thing they have brought upon mankind. What we are facing is as bad if not worse than the collapse of the Lombard system in Venice in 1348, the year of the plague and the collapse of the Hanseanic League in the 1600s, the creation of the Medici’s. For starters we already have 19 bankrupt or near bankrupt major countries and many others that will be pulled into the vortex of financial and economic calamity. In each country we see the Illuminists doing their evil work, legends in their own minds, in a system that they know cannot survive. They are waiting for orders to pull the plug in each and every country. These masters of the universe all know that prosperity cannot be created by printing money and issuing credit indefinitely. They know full well that such a system cannot survive.

Overall the issuance of bank credit declined $470 billion, or about 5% y-o-y. Loans to individuals and small to medium sized companies fell some 20%. We do not interpret this as deflationary, but it sure doesn’t reflect a growing economy. These small to medium sized companies are the ones that create 80% of the jobs. Fed mantra has been save the banks and NYC and then we’ll see what we can do for the 21-1/8% of unemployed. At the same time Fed holdings of MBS was $69 billion. Today it is $1.027 trillion. This was not done to save the public or their homes, but to bail out banks and allow the taxpayer to pay for it.

The sales of bonds are booming at record low interest rates. Buyers obviously think rates are going to stay low forever. Just last week investors bought $2.6 billion in global bond funds. This has been going on for more than a year. Buyers are left with slight gains and small yields, risks hardly worth taking. At the same time gold and silver and related shares rose more than 24%. What could they be thinking about? In the meantime debt prices have held in spite of the disruption in Europe over Greece and the euro. Then the international elitists oversubscribed Greece’s bond offering by three times. The yield was 6-3/8%, but Greece is bankrupt and has been for years.

Read the full article.