From mutual credit systems to time banking to private currencies and social currencies, there are no shortage of ideas for how to transition off of the current system in a gradual manner while increasing and facilitating local trade.
by James Corbett
The International Forecaster
As events in Cyprus, Greece, Brazil, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere in recent years have taught us, the euros or real or dollars or yuan in your bank account are only as secure as the bank that holds them.
[…] In fact, the lesson is deeper than that: That the money in your bank account is not cash at all, not pieces of paper sitting in a bank vault waiting for you to withdraw them, but mere digital ones and zeros in the bank’s database, capable of being subtracted from your account at a moment’s notice, or even less. Cash that is not in your hand, it turns out, is not cash at all.
This should be reason to give pause for thought about some of the deeper issues behind our current international financial order: what is money, after all, if it is not physical pieces of paper that we keep in our wallet? And if we don’t control it, who does?
As opposed to this system of financial control by a few bankers, heading as it is toward a seemingly inevitable financial collapse that threatens to crash the entire world economy, there are many alternate ideas for facilitating transactions. Some advocate for a gold-backed system, or some other hard asset backed currency that protects against rampant government printing and the possibility of hyperinflation.
“Capitalism was driven by investment, savings, capital accumulation, reinvestment and capital accumulation… But history got in the way…”
[…] After a lifetime of watching financial markets, the speed at which traders react still amazes me. Sometimes it seems to me like they hail from the “ready, shoot, aim,” school of thinking. Economic trends almost never turn on a dime; and though we can look back and find a moment that was the exact bottom or top, there were forces building that caused people to move from one side of the boat to the other, tilting the economy or markets or society in a different direction. New data can alter our probabilities – but rarely as fast as trading algorithms seem to think. Long-term trends, by definition, change slowly.
[…] I hope to start looking more closely at the markets the week after next, when the next round of hospital visits for various follow on treatments will be at an end. There is almost one every day.
The EU Referendum campaign that had seen momentum on LEAVE’s side was thrown into a state of turmoil Thursday following the killing of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was gunned down and then stabbed to death in horrific manner by Tommy Mair, allegedly done in the name of the extreme right group “Britain First” as per witness statements.
Taking Off Like a Rocket
After a volatile week of trading in key markets, today London metals trader Andrew Maguire told King World News that we are now witnessing a major paradigm shift in the gold market.
The often-heard comments when someone says they’re eating HFLC include “your kidneys will explode”, “Atkins was really bad for him (Mr. Atkins)”, “You’ll have a heart attack”, “You can’t be athletic doing that; you need carbs” and more.
One of the worries that keeps Federal Reserve honchos up at night is the weak level of business spending. The reluctance to invest is both a short-term and long-run albatross on the economy.
In the ongoing war of words between president Obama on one hand, who has repeatedly said that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was “self-radicalized” and was not influenced by Islamic elements, and Donald Trump prominently on the other, where the Republican presidential candidate has repeatedly alleged that Mateen’s actions were provoked by “radicalized Islam” which has prompted Trump to renew his calls for a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants as well as profiling Muslims already in the US, it appears that the president is about to get some much needed help from none other than the Department of Justice, which will step into the debate, by releasing Mateen’s 911 transcripts however only after heavy edits which censor and remove all references to Islamic terrorism.
In War for Market Share with US shale oil.
Both silver’s price action and its latest COTs suggest that it has just put in a short to medium-term top, a view which is reinforced by what we are seeing in gold, where COTs just hit a record extreme. Long-term the outlook for both gold and silver remains very bright, due to the eventual demise of the current fiat money system, which now out of control and in its terminal phase.
2 Things Jim Rickards Wants You to Do