Are Central Banks Running the Oil Market or Just the World?

Central banks are cause of inverted yield curve recessions

The question begs for conspiracy theories to satisfy it, but one might more aptly say that central banks beg for conspiracy theories to explain them, since they operate in the shadows while being given charge of all the financial systems of all the world’s greatest economies. Central bankers have the unchaperoned power to create the greatest fortunes ever known to mankind at will and to invest those fortunes wherever they want. With trillions of dollars or euros or rubles or yuan at their disposal and trillions more whenever they want to conjure them into existence, what is to stop them from cornering every market on earth now that they have been unleashed?

The price of oil has been rising, no matter how bad the oversupply news gets. Even as Saudi Arabia increased its supply in April and all of OPEC began gearing up for more production, oil prices rose. US oil companies have started to resume mothballed production because prices are going up, and still oil prices rise in the face of expanding oversupply.

Once Dohaha failed, nearly everyone started doing what they could to ramp up production, and prices still rose. Brent oil, in fact, hit its highest price since November after Doha failed to curb the supply glut. When prices go up, even as oversupply noticeably worsens all over the globe, a logical person will wonder if the market pricing is seriously rigged.

 

Capitalist central banks have become ultimate central planners

 

Why would we even think central banks wouldn’t manipulate all markets to the benefit of their own member banks when two Fed officials have stated that by intention the Fed’s FOMC was front-running the stock market to create a “wealth effect”? (Apparently the “wealth effect” is to make the wealthy vastly wealthier because that’s what happened; I certainly haven’t seen any wealth trickling into my bank account as a result of this overt manipulation of markets.)

We used to have regulations in the US that prevented banks from investing in stocks (and thereby central banks from indirectly manipulating the stock market by giving money to their member banks to invest). Next, the Fed will be deciding what companies to favor. Maybe they already do.

What if another corporation like GM that is too big to fail is failing, say a big oil corporation? Is there any reason this time around that central banks should tell us they are going to bail it out by buying up its stocks now that central-bank intervention is standard procedure? (The Fed would argue to congress, “It was important we did that quickly and secretively so as not to create a massive market scare that could have jeopardized the recovery.”)

Anything is justifiable if it necessary for “the recovery.” The Fed, of course, wouldn’t buy those stocks directly; but will it’s member banks suddenly start sweeping up some company’s stocks with money the Fed creates as it nudges them to spend the money in that direction?

How would we know? Nudges that happen between major bankers at Federal Reserve board meetings (or the Fed’s FOMC meetings where the dollars is regulated) are unseen as they are not a part of corporate reports that would explain why a large national bank suddenly bought a great deal of one company’s stock. “It just looked like a good investment for us.”

 

How today’s oil prices are really determined is done by a process so opaque only a handful of major oil trading banks such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley have any idea who is buying and who selling oil futures or derivative contracts that set physical oil prices in this strange new world of “paper oil….” The Senate committee staff documented … a gaping loophole in US Government regulation of oil derivatives trading so huge a herd of elephants could walk through it. (GlobalResearch)

 

Maybe a hole so big the Fed could lumber through it.

 

Persons within the United States seeking to trade key US energy commodities – US crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil futures – are able to avoid all US market oversight or reporting requirements by routing their trades through the ICE Futures exchange in London instead of the NYMEX in New York. Is that not elegant? The US Government energy futures regulator, CFTC opened the way to the present unregulated and highly opaque oil futures speculation…. This is not an OPEC problem, it is a US Government regulatory problem of malign neglect. By not requiring the ICE to file daily reports of large trades of energy commodities, it is not able to detect and deter price manipulation.

 

“Persons” or entities. From the very start of the present oil price war, Russia has claimed the price war is a nationally rigged game:

 

The head of Russian energy giant Rosneft and right-hand man of President Vladimir Putin launched an extraordinary attack on the entire global system for the supply, pricing and control of the world’s energy resources…. According to Mr Sechin, energy markets are being manipulated by a powerful alliance of forces, from Washington to Riyadh and Vienna, which present a long-term risk to the global economy. (The Telegraph)

 

Russia believed prices were being rigged by the US and its consort, Saudi Arabia, to hurt Russia’s economy. If so, those prices can just as easily be moderated back the other way once it becomes evident they have reached a point where they are also destroying major US banks. And what entity has more power to do that in an “opaque” system than the Federal Reserve with its infinite money supply?

Through the decades-long process of deregulating, we removed vital barriers between banks and markets and have created a free-for-all. Central banks have the power to create unlimited amounts of money in a single day, based solely on their own discretion, with no supervision by any other entity as to what they are doing. They create that money as deposits ex nihilo in banks that know where the money is intended to go. (Where the money should go can be agreed upon as gentleman and gentlelady over a martini and cigar with no public record other than “met to discuss corporate default problems.”)

 

Central banks run their national economies unsupervised by anyone

 

Seriously? You think they’re supervised? By whom? Certainly not by congress here in the US. Congress merely asks the head banker some questions and then lets the Federal Reserve continue on with whatever its bankers were doing. We audit corporations, and government even audits the government; but the largest financial institution on earth runs audit-free year after year, decade after decade, as congress grandstands in feigned outrage at times and at other times listens in awe, but always defaults to merely trusting the Federal Reserve. Always.

If you were corrupt, wouldn’t you naturally try to get on the board of the largest financial institution on earth that never gets audited and has the power to create as much money as it wants to out of thin air to give to your bank with one the provisos that it keep inflation in check and keep jobs looking halfway respectable?

There is nothing to stop the Fed — nor probably most central banks — from deciding to create $100 billion in the accounts of its member banks, saying, “We’ll deposit this money when you show us you’ve purchased that much in oil from companies being hit the worst.” There is no risk for the bank or the Fed because it was all free money anyway. They just suddenly own lots of oil.

If there are any barriers still standing to that sort of thing, how would we or congress ever know if those barriers were being respected when congress never audits the Fed and accepts anything it says as sufficient for congressional oversight? It is in that sense that I say there is really nothing to stop central banks from soaking up all the oil for sale in the oil market right now. How would anyone ever know if they bought oil through corporate banking proxies or through other central banks who used their own proxies?

That is exactly what the Fed overtly did with US government bonds, so why not oil? They were front-running the bond market by saying to their member banks, “If you buy these government bonds, we’ll buy them directly from you the next day. That way we are not breaking the law by directly buying the government’s debt, and then we’ll create as much money in your reserve account as what you spent on the bonds plus half a percent.”

What a joke! How is that simpleton’s shell game not directly buying the government debt? As soon as you start telegraphing to banks that you will buy government bonds off of them overnight for a half a percent profit to the bank (called front running the bond market) on a no-risk deal for the banks, you know banks are going to leap to do that.

You’re creating the market for the bonds. You’re not just soaking up the banks’ bonds. The fact that you passed the bond through someone else’s hands is no different than money laundering. It’s bond laundering. “NO, we didn’t finance the government. We bought up some old government bonds that some of our banks no longer wanted.” Yeah, right.

This the Fed did overtly for years.

What a charade … and no one cared … other than a few readers of The Great Recession Blog, Zero Hedge, and other similar sites. Most didn’t bat an eye. The same thing was happening with stocks for the entire past seven years (and still is happening as the Fed reinvests its money). Even though the Fed originally denied it was pumping up the stock market; recently two major Fed FOMC members admitted the Fed was front-running the stock market, and still few cared. It’s no surprise to anyone because most people knew that is where much of the Fed’s free money was going.

 

Are central banks manipulating the oil market?

 

Therefore, it should not seem like any big conspiracy theory, when you see total nonsense pricing (bad news is good news) in the oil market to ask, are central banks now moving on to doing the same thing in the oil market?

Why wouldn’t they? 1) What’s to stop them? 2) Clearly US banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System are being hurt by the oil price war, so the Fed can justify this as another “intervention” they need to do to save their own banks from collapsing due to bad loans throughout the oil industry.

Two more oil company’s declared bankruptcy this week. Week by week, a storm surge is building up against banks that are heavily invested in this industry:

 

The bankruptcies are continuing fast and furious across the energy sector. With the ill-effects spreading beyond just the oil and gas business — evidenced by major renewables firm SunEdison filing for Chapter 11 last month.

But the U.S. E&P [exploration and production] sector still remains one of the biggest unknowns when it comes to bad loans. With numerous observers having recently warned about a big wave of defaults coming in this space.

And a new data point late last week suggests we may be reaching a tipping point.

That came from leading American investment bank JPMorgan. Which said in an SEC filing Friday that its holdings of potentially bad loans took a major jump over the past quarter. JPMorgan reported on its holdings of “criticized” loans — a term used in the banking industry to refer to “substandard or doubtful” debts … leapt by 45 percent over the last quarter — to $21.2 billion as of March 31. (Oilprice.com)

 

Over twenty billion of bad debts — most of it in oil companies! That number beats many of the big bankster bailouts during the worst of the Great Recession for size. That’s just one major bank, and those are only the loans the banks is showing as bad. How many other loans does JPMorgan have that are not in some stage of default but that are with oil production companies that are sinking fast?

How bad is the pinch on other banks that invested in the oil sector? Read the “panic index”:

 

Little-reported but extremely critical data point for the oil and gas industry emerged yesterday. With insiders in the debt business saying that risk levels in the sector have risen to unprecedented levels.

That came from major ratings service Moody’s. With the firm saying that one of its proprietary indexes of credit problems in the oil and gas sector has hit the highest mark ever seen.

That’s the so-called “Oil and Gas Liquidity Stress Index”. A measure of the number of energy companies that are facing looming credit problems because of overextended debt…. In fact, that level is now considerably worse than seen during the last recession…. “This progression signals that the default rate will continue to rise as the year progresses.” (Pierce Points)

 

You may recall there was a commodities crash in energy prices running into the Great Recession, too. In other words, the pain is just beginning. The squeeze will get tighter.

At present oil prices, we are already at the highest default rate for high-yield energy bonds in energy industry’s history according to Fitch Ratings. What better way to keep some of these companies out of default (and thereby keep the banks who financed them out of trouble) than by getting the price of oil back up a little? So, would the Federal Reserve become proactive to support these American companies that are pressing major US banks into perilous situations, now that it is accustomed to massive interventions and financial inventions as daily procedure?

Might that explain why the price of oil goes up, regardless of what happened at Doha?

Maybe that is exactly what the surprise, “expedited” meetings of the Federal Reserve were about shortly before the Doha meeting and what the Fed’s rushed closed-door meeting with the president and vice president was about — what to do when Doha failed (as they knew it would, given Saudi Arabia’s overt statements). As anyone knew it would if they were willing to see straight.

If not the Fed, then why not some other central bank in some country where a major bank is being crippled by the oil price crush? A bank that could fall on others and create a domino effect if it fell.

Central banks are so grossly out of control with no elected oversight and unlimited financial power to create money and decide where it goes, that I have to ask, is it possible that there are no honest markets left anywhere? How would we know? No one ever gets to see inside the central bank’s inner workings to know. Just how completely have the banks taken control of every aspect of the economy — or, at least, of every aspect they care to control?

 

We … beyond any shadow of any doubt, are living in an environment where nothing is real, from the prices of assets, to what is going on with the big Wall Street banks, to Federal Reserve interest rates and everything in between. All of this is being played in a way to keep people believing that the system is working and will continue to work…. We are going to continue to see more fakery and twisting of this entire system. Right now, it’s upside down and nothing is real. We now are in an environment where the financial system has been flipped upside down just to make it function. That’s very scary. . . . We’ve never seen anything like this in the history of the world. (Financial analyst and stock trader Gregory Mandarin in USAWatchdog)

 


[amazon_link id=”0977079333″ target=”_blank” ]There is an unexploded bomb in the global financial system, threatening to bring the greatest disruption to the lives of people since the Depression on the 1930s. This potential explosion has been set up by world’s largest central banks in their efforts to create an unsustainable illusion of personal wealth and national prosperity, exposing the public to uninsurable risks in the process.[/amazon_link]


 

 

But you cannot manipulate markets forever

 

Suppose some central bank somewhere decided to buy up oil through proxies to keep the price rising, in spite of all risks, in order to keep a few of its major member banks from going bankrupt due to exposures even more extreme than the one known about and admitted above.

As a result, the producers keep producing because someone keeps buying. The price keeps bubbling upward, which saves some companies and their banks for the time being; but also entices more producers to come back on line. Prices keep going up, regardless, and even though Saudi Arabia and Russia actually increase production, too.

In such a situation, you might expect to see headlines, such as the following:

 

Oil Rallies On As Traders Ignore Red Flags

 

No matter how much crude oils stocks around the world rise, prices keep rising because of the price intervention. Oil tankers stack up at sea, but the prices keep going up. You start to wonder if the market is rigged. Why are so many speculators betting that the price of oil can go up forever? You start to think of the US housing market in early 2007 when everyone thought housing could defy gravity and climb forever.

Then one day you read a headline like …

“Rotterdam Tanks are Full: All tankers being sent back out to sea”

A week later, you read the same thing in Oklahoma and other parts of the world.

Sooner or later reality butts in. Price manipulation causes distorted markets and only accelerates the problem when falling prices fail to happen and, therefore, don’t result in supply correction. Instead, the prices, themselves, get corrected by the banking central planners; and supply follows the money … until the money has nowhere left to go. You cannot buy oil at any price — regardless of how low — if you have nothing to put it in.

 

The manipulation is absolutely epic. We have never seen anything like it. There is going to be a horrible price to pay for this. Why? Because it will correct to fair market value. There is no doubt in my mind that all of this will correct to fair value. All these distortions can only go so far, and we know this…. It will burst because every single financial bubble in history, without exception, has burst before it. This one is going to burst too, but this one is going to engulf the world. (Mannarino continued in USAWatchdog)

 

Game over … just as it was for housing in the last half of 2007.

 

Speaking at a panel in the Milken conference titled “Monetary Policy: Out Of Ammunition” moments ago Pimco’s global economic advisor Joachim Fels … hinted what he, and/or Pimco, would prefer that the Fed should buy next. Stocks…. By the time it’s all over, central banks will be buying not just credit and equities, but virtually every asset class, both directly and indirectly through helicopter money. (Zero Hedge)

 

That’s right! Why create money in the reserve accounts of major national banks for them to buy stocks? Why not skip the middle man and just have the central bank buy stocks directly? It’s more efficient. Be like China: anytime a stock goes seriously down, the the central bank can just fly over in its helicopter and dump a lot of new money on that corporation by buying its stock. (No sense giving helicopter money directly to the poor when you can target the drop directly on the rich to prop up their stock values, trusting that a few dollars will drift away in the prop wash to help the poor, too, so they can glean their benefits.)

That kind of quantitative easing may be the new spin for our next dance in this whirling dervish of an economy. The Fed can buy stocks directly. Buy oil directly. (Maybe they already are.) Heck, buy anything that threatens to fall on us that is too big to fail in order to save us all from the tipsy rich. Because the Federal Reserve can create money at will, it can dance that dance forever … that is, until it collapses on the dance floor due to its own obesity.

You see, eventually nothing works in the land of total make-believe, so all things fall down. For now, however, the Fed’s next round of QE already has PIMCO’s vote. The only question that haunts my mind is how long the helicopter money of QE4 can work before the helicopter, itself, blows down the entire house of cards?

Bonds, stocks, the oil market — they all look as rigged right now as the Arizona Republican Convention where Trump, who won the vast majority of votes in the Arizona primary, got almost none of the delegates. The party establishment will make sure their guy wins no matter what in order to protect the establishment from being trumped by some rogue element. And “the establishment” is largely Wall Street — mostly banks.

That’s why it is is time to, above all else, vote against the establishment in either party, top to bottom. Ironically, even a socialist president would be better for our long-lost capitalist economy than the central-planning central bank’s Democrat and Republican choices for candidates. Nothing could be worse than the establishment’s make-believe economy.

Exxon, Chevron, PetroChina, Conocophillips, all reported heavy losses. Who are they banking with? Are they also too big to fail?

 

 

More reading on who is rigging the oil market:

 

[amazon_image id=”0977079333″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Debt and Delusion: Central Bank Follies that Threaten Economic Disaster (Deluxe Edition)[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B00CMDPTA4″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Prize – An Epic Quest for Oil; Money & Power[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B004S95I4M” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Blood and Oil – The Middle East in World War I[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B00HKKX2L2″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Oil: Black Gold[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B01A7OLKHK” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Frack Us[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B0037VY1ZO” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Crude Independence[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B00DY2T6BA” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Split Estate[/amazon_image]

21 Comments

  1. Ping from Knave_Dave:

    If central banks are the primary direct investors in stock markets ( http://business.financialpost.com/midas-letter/0425-midasdaily ), why not oil markets?

  2. Ping from Ace Ace:

    Your posts are phenomenal. I just finisheded your Opech epoch post on zero (though couldn’t comment there because not registered) and bookmarked your blog here. Keep up the great work.

    • Ping from Ace Ace:

      My first wtf thought came about a week after Doha when it finally began to slowly drop, and at about the $41.50 point the crude inventory report came out and the global crude price soared about $3 in one day off that one report. All I could do was shake my head in disbelief that a draw in one country had lifted an oversupplied global market price $3 in a day.

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      Thanks. Some people have said they are too long. So, I’ve been thinking about making them shorter, but that also means less comprehensive in covering multiple articles on one topic for the week. So, I’m not sure which way to go. I do know that it appears a lot of people go to them but don’t read them, perhaps because they see how long they are.

      • Ping from Ace Ace:

        Well, fwiw, Google prefers longer more comprehensive articles when determining search results, and comments which you already have. For best results, as far as an answer to the problem you just named and also better search position, try splitting one article into 3 pages rather than one continuous page. Then the reader won’t see a long article when they arrive, you can leave them with a hook question or statement that makes them want to click to go to the next page, and Google will gauge they are interested in your article/ blog because they went further in. Can just put an easy “continue to page 2” hyperlink at bottom of 1st page. Just make sure next page has both “back to page 1” and “continue to page 3″ hyperlink at bottom.

        If you want even more traffic I’d suggest joining google+ and joining a group directly related to your blog theme. Be active as far as participating in others google+ post while dropping your own posts (they hate bloggers who just self promote and don’t participate in their community”). Google tends to be slightly biased in promoting results from ppl on their software/ platform. Also since Google knows the search habits of every end user it knows your blogs relevance to a particular theme and it’s popularity based on end users interested in that subject clicking on links to your site from there or anywhere. So being active in a google+ group related to your theme and getting clicks from these users is important.

        Try to be selective in who you follow. Better for you to follow 100 industry leaders related to your theme and have 1000 ppl from your industry following you to demonstrate which subject you are interested in (shown when you follow the 100) and your popularity and expertise on the subject becomes evident when the 1000 follow you abd click on your articles. Answering other people’s post on there with solid expertise, or providing feedback on there with solid well thought out answers, and on a regular basis, will gain you lots of followers, lots of feedback to your participation posts as a member there when you post, and traffic when you promote a post. Google+ also more often than not promotes your post to your google+ followers in search results first, another great advantage.

        Finally, and one I’m sure you already know, easy search navigation, breadcrumbs, title tags, h1 h2 h3 tags correct, and hyperlinks as partial sentences and NOT always keyword/ keyphrase rich, but rather subjective to current subject of sentences/ subject around it (you already do this perfect. Your hyperlink sentence on zerohedge.com opec epoch article that led here is a perfect example.).

        Sorry for long exhaustive reply. Hope any of it is useful. You have a great blog and I was big into SEO and SEM a little while back, though obv algorithms change but should still be solid. Gl

        • Ping from Knave_Dave:

          Actually, thanks very much for an exhaustive reply. Some of that I’m already doing (but not the splitting long articles part), and my Google search engine results are often pretty good; but I’m not doing much with Google+, so that may be another area to mine. (Hard to find the time to do all the writing, much less the networking, but they’re good idea to make note of.)

          –David

  3. Ping from Paul Camera:

    First time reader…Just outstanding!!!

  4. Ping from Delving Eye:

    Watch “The Big Short.” It eerily mirrors the kind of high-level deceit and outright fraud now taking place.

    This time it may not be synthetic CDOs that bloat mortgage-backed securities to 20 X their value (not sure if it’s oil, dollars, student loans, car loans, or the number of times people watch “Game of Thrones”), the fact of the matter is: Headlines Don’t Make Sense.

    Take a gander at, oh, say, WSJ or the FT, any day of the week, and you’ll find a headline saying the jobless rate is falling right next to one announcing another giant corporate layoff. (Zero Hedge has that covered in spades, but who of the entities that run this world reads ZH?)

    In “The Big Short,” this kind of mind-blowing paradox occurred for over a year — the percentage of mortgage failures climbed, while the value of any bond/trade/product involving the housing market remained unchanged or climbed! The guys who were trying to short the market because they knew the truth (Michael Burry, Jared Vennet, Ben Rickert, Mark Baum) were dumb-founded by the lag.

    I suspect we are in exactly the same kind of lag. It’s a time warp that is being woven by, as you say, CBs, and the Fed — and it will probably unravel just after the election in November.

    Trump warns of a massive recession — or did. (He wants to get elected now). I think he sees what you see, what a bunch of see. It would take someone with super-powers to quell the coming shit-storm, powers more massive than even The Donald can muster.

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      Hi, Eye. Good to see you here again.

      Isn’t it a curious thing that people can sit in mass and watch the Big Short and say, “Why didn’t many others see this coming?” Yet, none of them see that the same thing is coming all over again and that it is much bigger this time around. The same people still don’t see it. Economists don’t acknowledge it. Investors keep believing in a bull market that has been dead for over a year. Once again the market has hit an old ceiling and fallen back down, unable to recover its previous high point. And most people go about their day, completely oblivious to any thought that the world if crumbling everywhere financially, just because the crumbling hasn’t finished yet. They had a good foreshock in January, but now think things are fine again.

      I’ve noticed, too, that headlines turn one’s head into a noodle these days if you try to make sense of their contradictions. One day you read that housing is improving faster than any time since the Great Recession began. Next week, you read it is falling off a cliff … all depending on which barometer one focuses on. Same thing with car sales.

      As you say, one day you read that unemployment claims are up, and the same day you read that stocks went up because the moving average for unemployment is still improving. (Of course it is, since it trails any turnaround in the labor market by simple mathematical law.) People or robots sift out the headlines they want and gamble based on those.

      When I made my prediction that the epocalypse would begin right after the December rate increase, one thing kept nagging at me, which was that I should temper my prediction based on one certainty: as soon as the drop off the cliff began, the Republican establishment would team silently with the Democratic establishment to do anything necessary to keep the economy up in this election year because the Republican establishment would rather vote for an establishment politician like Hillary than for an anti-establishment candidate like Trump. It’s all about keeping the wealthy healthy.

      So, the apocalypse began with all the bang I expected, but things turned around (or appeared to) more completely than I expected — but not more completely than I should have expected. We are in a world where there is no longer any reason to believe there are any markets that are not rigged whenever they need to be, and the vast extent to which that is true is something just dawning on me.

      We know the Fed rigged the stock market and bond market quite openly. It was blatantly obvious, and few people cared so long as stock kept going up to ease our pain. Obvious and now openly admitted as well. So, now the Fed knows it can buy and sell in any market it wants, so why wouldn’t it?

      We can be certain that neither Republicans nor Democrats are going to out the Fed because a drop in the markets would play to Trump, and a drop in the markets is bad for the true establishment — the wealthy one percent. Heck, even the top ten percent.

      The question that remains is how long can they keep the plates all spinning? And how weird will things get this summer as they are forced to go to more and more desperate measures. Central banks and economists and investors are already all talking about “helicopter money” as a possible smart and viable idea where most economists thought it was a wild and crazy idea only a few years ago. Talk is now everywhere of helicopter money because a free float of money out to the masses is about the only kind of quantitative easing that the masses would tolerate, having seen no benefit from QE1-3 to their own pocketbooks.

      So, before we see the next big economic drop over the cliff in this unfolding epocalypse, I expect to see the world getting crazier and crazier. It could get a little dizzying from this point forward as the plate spinners try to keep the whole world spinning on their fingertips. I think there may be some very weird gyrations in the market before the whole thing topples over.

      January was a foreshock.

      –David

  5. Ping from QEternity:

    Buy ‘real things’.

  6. Ping from Ron Chapman:

    G’day Dave,
    Thanks for a really great article.

    After TSHF those left standing will need to rethink everything.
    Here are a few thoughts to consider.
    On the preface to the article ‘The Future Of America? – More Than Half Of All U.S. Adults Under Age 30 Now Reject Capitalism reviewed at: http://abundanthope.net/cgi-bin/artman2/search.cgi?action=search&page=2&perpage=50&template=articleLists/globalIndex.html&includeSubcats=0
    I noted that:
    Such disinchantment with the so-called US Capitalist system suggests that young people may be beginning to become open to the idea of a moneyless economy and society. As the money meme is rapidly destroying humanity and this planet that disinchantment is appropriate. The money meme and the enslavement of humanity and degradation of the planet it has wrought, now demands a total rethink of our societal paradigms. If humanity does not radically reform its attitude to money and the free range serfdom (wage slavery) it produces, anarchy, chaos, endless warfare and a huge human die-off will result, absent Divine intervention. For the mechanisms involved see eg: The Permanent Unemployment & Underemployment Economy. See: http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/The-Permanent-Unemployment-Underemployment-Economy.shtml

    Capitalism is based on the concept of money. Most of the global population is now mentally enslaved by the idea of money. The only real solution to this problem requires humanity to step outside the mental box in which it is virtually entombed; and to realise that happiness and
    abundance depends upon service to others as typified by a healthy
    family. The loving family mentality enshrines service to others and
    gifting rather than payment for goods and services, as the societal paradigm. This article signals the imminent and inevitable ending of the
    materialistic money meme world falsely enshrined in US and global
    culture. Absent the benevolent intervention of Universe Management and its Star Fleet agents, humanity is facing a global financial and economic collapse that will destroy life in the Anglo-US and European world we know it. Young Amerikkans subconsciously sense this.

    A gifting society would be moneyless with everyone in the community contributing according to ability and as needed. The
    whole community would “own” the planet’s God given resources, which
    means that, among other things, each community, as a collective, would
    be the responsible guardian and controller of all relevant physical
    planetary resources in its domain as well as the technologies,
    robots, machines and human resources needed to sustain everyone in abundance while preserving the integrity and ecology of the planet. Such societies will develop in due course, once humanity evolves in consciousness and integrity.

    But unfortunately, we are not there yet. Currently private individuals
    “OWN” the corporations and governments that “OWN” the planet’s
    physical resources and the factories, technologies, machines and
    intellectual property etc that CAN produce abundance but they only
    produce what they require for their own use and benefit, and/or can
    sell for a profit. As private individuals and their corporations
    (including governments) currently purport to “own” the God given
    resources from which abundance is produced, most of the human
    population is at the mercy of those kleptocratic “owners”and that is why
    the global economy is crashing. IF the current fascist so-called
    Capitalist debt “money” system s allowed to continue the “owners” of the means of production and human survival will starve billions of people. THINK about that!

    The unreal “need” to acquire “money” creates separation, isolation and competition. None of those conditions is beneficial for individuals or the community as a whole.
    Parents and children don’t invoice each other for goods and services
    rendered to other family members. WHY do we assume that we must invoice (charge for goods and services) everyone else? The “money” economy is incredibly cumbersome and wasteful. The amount of work and resources needed in a “money” economy involving charging, billing, paying, banking, accountancy, insurance, advertising, litigation and policing in respect to “money” matters is all unnecessary and adds nothing to productivity, happiness or abundance. THINK of the increased free time available if such activities were dispensed with. The only reasonthat the average ‘smuck’ has for wanting to continue the “money” system is that it is hierarchical, enabling him or her to know their place in society and to feel superior to anyone seemingly beneath themin wealth and position. That mentality is the mentality of a slave.
    there is always someone higher in the hierarchy. The current “money”
    system is on the brink of collapse as instanced by the increasing
    tendency for some financial authorities to recommend that governments
    and/or Central Banks begin to pay all citizens a regular stipend or to
    drop “helicopter money”on commercial banks or even on the general populace.

    Sooo, why don’t we try stepping out of our Jew bankster created “box” and IMAGINING that “money” is not essential to civilised life and that there is NO ‘Square’ to think outside of?!

    Commenting on the article: “Automated Journalism”, Robots in the Newsroom: The Future of Corporate Media – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/Automated-Journalism-Robots-in-the-Newsroom-The-Future-of-Corporate-Media.shtml
    I added:
    Unless we accept total global chaos involving a massive human extinction event and destruction of the scientific and technological advances that cause the greatly reduced need for human labour, humanity needs to RETHINK its existing personal ideological and collective economic paradigms to allow for the impending liberation of humanity from wage slavedom and the money MEME which causes it. THINK ABOUT IT! As robots and technological advances make most physical and much mental labour unnecessary, how should humanity adjust to accommodate the changes involved? Failing to eliminate the current Capitalist (money) meme that justifies a few banksters and corporatists “OWNING” almost everyone and everything on this planet (see eg: The Matrix, the Strawman and WHO You Are – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Ron_71/The_Matrix_the_Strawman_and_WHO_You_Are_3030.shtml), will
    result in mass starvation and violence and the extinction of billions
    of gentiles in the near future as the “OWNERS” fail to provide
    employment and/or the tax revenues needed to fund Welfare States; or to otherwise provide access to food and other resources humanity needs for existance let alone an abundant or any lifestyle.

    The short answer to this problem is that we must ditch the “money meme” mentality and begin to embracea a genuine paradigm of sharing and caring for everyone and everything on this planet. We
    do not have to eliminate money immediately but we do need to start
    rapidly adjusting the mindset that the money idea has created. In
    particular we need to understand and reject the lunatic attitudes and practices of governments, banksters and corporatists which have caused the global dystopia in which we live.

    Those who disagree need to disagree, explain Bail Outs”, “Bail Ins”, Negative Interest rates, “Helicopter Money”, “Too big To Fail”, Quantitative Easing” and all the rest of the bullshit churned out by governments and banksters and their hired help. Arguably, The first step in achieving the needed paradigm switch will be to require that each community either creates for itself or receives from a genuinely incorruptable, transparent and adequatly publiclly audited central source, supplies of gold, silver and Jewly, or commodity backed INTEREST FREE money, sufficient to enable the community to organise and pay for all the physical goods and services its members are able to produce (but no more) for their needs. Moreover, to prevent hoarding and impedance of the velocity of movement of money in the community, money should reduce in face value over time. Banking should become a utility function like the post office with banks having no commercial entrepreneurial functions but able to return money to the Treasury without loss, when its value reduces or expires.

    This process will eliminate the parasitic misuse and hoarding of money and give everyone the ability to earn or obtain (if unable to work or contribute to community welfare for some appropriate reason), sufficient money to maintain a reasonable lifestyle without the stigma of unemployment and poverty. Such changes will also require elimination of Capitalist and materialist attitudes to ownership of land, planetary resources; and community resources like factories, robots and other technologies, required for production of abundance for everyone. It follows that human personhood rights for corporations must also be eliminated and anyone operating any “corporation” or business must be held responsible for whatever is done under their direction and control. In short, everyone would be required to be personally responsible for any harm resulting from what they or their agents do or fail to do.

    Such a system would reduce most societal governance decisions and arrangements down to local and district levels based on Kritarchic principles. For some discussion of Kritarchy see: Life with no Government – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/Life-with-no-Government_printer.shtml

    Since the current enslavement system is coming down we may as well consider what will best replace it.
    Peace and Blessings,
    Ron
    ***************************

  7. Ping from cdndmf:

    Great stuff, as always. Love this site.

  8. Ping from steve jones:

    Hey Dave
    I just discovered your blog through the link to this post by Zero Hedge. I’ve now read 3 of your posts, so far, 3 out of 3 “stone cold masterpieces” of analysis. Each one had a brilliant idea, that I kicked myself that I hadn’t considered, but so obvious in hindsight. Ok, enough tyre pumping, but seriously, thanks for your work.
    cheers Steve

  9. Ping from Donald Sergent:

    Hey, Dave.

    It’s like watching one of those old time jugglers with the spinning plates on poles…

    just waiting for the furthest one to go wobbly. But I’m guessing you’ve been watching the reports of E&P companies rewriting hedges lately. Could futures buying be enough to bring the pricepoint up far enough to enable the risks to be laid off for another year? It probably would be the most efficient way to screw the shorts and speculators at the least cost to the Fed?

    BTW: I’ve been having a lot of success in puncturing the “blissful ignorance bubble” lately, your blog has helped me to clarify and streamline my presentation, but I think everybody’s bullshit detectors are starting to be triggered. Trumped and Sandersed. and “it’s my turn” is starting to wear a little thin.

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      If we could pop all the bubbles before they pop themselves, we’d be better off, messy as it would be. When the bubbles start setting each other off, the trouble really begins. So, keep popping bubbles, and glad to be of some small service. The very fact that you’re having success at it says the bubbles are ready to pop. Usually, you can’t pop them with a baseball bat.

      –David

      • Ping from Donald Sergent:

        shouting “Fire” in a short attention span theater doesn’t have the expected effect. How much of that is a result of the migration of information dissemination from magazine and newspaper articles to TV news to twitter? Add to that a tendency to “memory hole” any historical experiences, and it’s difficult to shift the narrative until “The Narrator” unlocks the door. Whether Trump and Sanders would have had the success they have had unless the public was already losing faith in the narrative, I don’t know, but I DO think that all the lonely bloggers crying out in the wilderness have prepared the soil for a new crop. Whether we have the ability to recognize our own self interest and defend it- not by trusting our Government- but by forming narrowly focused groups to agitate for specific issues. If you haven’t seen “Matewan”, give it a look. Labor vs Capital is not a game of patty-cake. It damn sure didn’t used to be.

        • Ping from Knave_Dave:

          The Trump and Sanders campaign are the first signs of life I’ve seen. So, they do give some hope that the sleeping masses are waking up in significant number so that it may be harder for the central banks to keep rigging markets. Whether they rig oil or not, they have certainly turned the stock market into a rigged casino and bonds. The stock market has always been played like a casino, but for the last few years it’s been a completely rigged casino.

          We’ll keep blowing our horns and see if we can wake up enough people to make a difference when Great Recession 2.0 gets fully underway and the central banks tell us all that we need to bail out the rich again to keep them from falling on us.

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