Category Archives: Monetary reform

Central banking, Complexity, Great Reset, Liberty, Monetary reform, Social development, Tyranny

CBDCs: why their future is not so bright

CBDCs are an expression of bankers’ fantasy of total control. Their first pilot program lasted 108 days and ended in total failure, lost elections and prison time.

This post was originally published on Alex Krainer’s Substack

Will the dreaded Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) become a thing? Will they be as awful as the ruling parasite class has intended? Will they be able to enforce compliance with whatever rule they choose to impose, oppressing us under a draconian system of arbitrary restrictions and prohibitions? Rest assured, they will not.

Over the last few months I was asked about CBDCs in a number of podcast interviews. The questions generally reflect the unease and anxiety about the prospect of finding ourselves in a totalitarian dystopia. CBDCs would allow our banking overlords to ‘see’ every purchase we make and condition our access to money through a system of permits that would enable them to micromanage any and all of our transaction choices in real time. This is what they mean when they say, “programmable” CBDCs.

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Economics, Monetary reform, Policy, Politics, Real life, Social development

Policy: economic growth or quality of life?

Published on my Substack, 7 Dec. 2022.

It goes without saying that the key policy objective of fiscal and monetary authorities the world over is to achieve and sustain economic growth. This imperative is ultimately the by-product of the fraudulent monetary system we’ve had in place for several centuries now. In that time, the system has shaped and distorted economic and social policy, economic theory, cultural norms and even the way we think of ourselves.

But living under this system has been a relatively recent socioeconomic experiment. It has proven highly flawed, unsustainable and even pathogenic. At present, it is in an irreversible decline, and it is incumbent upon our generation to rethink and reimagine how to build the future, as even the Davos set claims we must. But we cannot hope to solve society’s problems unless we diagnose the problems correctly.

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Eurasia, Monetary reform, Politics, Social development

A report from the Eurasian Integrations conference

At the end of October I travelled to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan located on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. I went there to speak at the XV Verona Eurasian Economic Forum held on the 27 and 28 October 2022. I found a few things about this experience quite remarkable. For one thing, Azerbaijan was never on my bucket list of places to visit, so I was very pleasantly surprised with what I saw there – so much so that I put together an impromptu video postcard you’ll find below in this post.

The conference itself was superb, both in terms of the program and in terms of the caliber of its participants, among them the former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, Russia’s Integrations and Macroeconomics Minister Sergey Glazyev and many high-level executives from central banks, commercial banks, industry, research institutions and media. Participants came from Russia, France, Germany, India, China, United States, Turkey, Azerbaijan as well as many other Eurasian nations. As far as I know, I was the only participant from Croatia.

The content of the conference focused on the area’s economic development, banking and finance, evolution of the currency and payment systems, cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding; about infrastructure and social development, food production, and a very intelligent discussion about the role of technology in society. Quality of the deliberations was actually quite impressive. This wasn’t about possibilities of development in some distant future, but discussions about real solutions: elements of a new and improved operating system for society that are actually being developed and implemented even as you read these lines.

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Central banking, Eurasia, Great Reset, Monetary reform, Politics, Social development, War and peace

The real war: People vs. the Banks

Recessions, debt, energy crisis, inflation and wars… somehow it is all related, and it is related at a global level, impacting nearly all economies and markets. It all seems to be going rather badly for the “rules based global order,” or as some prefer to call it, “the empire of lies.”

Shock, after shock, after shock…

Last week, on Oct. 6, Kristalina Georgieva, IMF’s Managing Director gave a speech at the Georgetown University in Washington where she explained that the global economy, which was expected to recover strongly after the Covid 19 pandemic, experienced a “shock, after shock, after shock” instead, that it is now experiencing a “fundamental shift,” and that this shift could create a “dangerous new normal.” Georgieva thinks this can only be mitigated by “countries working together.”

We’re winning in Ukraine! Or maybe we’re not.

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Asset management, Central banking, Commodity price, Economics, Inflation, Monetary reform, Policy, Risk management, Trend following

Inflation: we passed a phase transition

In April 2012, economist Robert Wenzel[1] was invited to speak at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On the occasion, he told the central bankers that “vast amounts of money printing are now required to keep your manipulated economy afloat. It will ultimately result in huge price inflation, or, if you stop printing, another massive economic crash will occur. There is no other way out.”[2]

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Central banking, History, Media, Monetary reform, Policy, Politics, Social development, Truth, War and peace

Covid 19: the banking cartel is driving the agenda

For weeks now, the media and “health” authorities have relentlessly promoted a fear-inducing narrative about the Covid 19 “pandemic” as if the daily count of new “cases” were a major public health emergency, sensationalized by the media nearly 24/7. The official narrative is sharply at odds with the gathering voices from hundreds of doctors, virologists and epidemiologists.

Incoherence of the official narrative

Supposing that we are up against a “once-in-a-century” pandemic, this would be a great challenge for humanity, wrought with uncertainty. One would expect to encounter a lively debate, discussions, much doubt and controversy. Journalists should seek out as many domain experts as possible so we can all gain the clearest possible understanding of the new health challenge and how to confront it. Effective treatments should be promoted, celebrated, screamed from the rooftops. But the reality is very different. Continue reading →

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Central banking, Economics, History, Inflation, Monetary reform, Stock market

Financial bubbles and their human toll

Bursting of an asset bubble can have grave consequences for the economy and the society at large – so grave, it’s worth paying attention at this point. I’ll elaborate.

In only six trading sessions from the 20th February peak, the S&P500 shed more than 12%, one of the fastest declines on record for the index (only the 1987 black Monday was worse). Only a week before this event I posted the article, “Bubbles Always Burst…”on SeekingAlpha, warning about the risk of this happening.

Whether last week marks the beginning of the bubble’s bursting remains to be seen, but this is only a matter of time. Bubbles always burst, no exceptions. But what’s important to understand is this: bubbles are meant to be burst! For guidance, let’s look again at the bursting of Japan’s own everything bubble of the 1980s. Continue reading →

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Central banking, History, Inflation, Monetary reform

On the other side of the financial repression dam: epic inflation

Inflation is with us – and in time it will flood the economy. Regardless of how powerful and prosperous a nation may appear in its peak, no empire ever was able to exempt itself from the elemental laws of economics any more than we can exempt ourselves of the laws of gravity.

Warren Buffett warned that for a debtor nation, inflation was the economic equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. Runaway inflations tend to emerge when an economy’s debt burden becomes unsustainable, usually as a consequence of too much government spending and too much war. Today, nearly all categories of debt in the U.S. economy are breaking records: government, corporate as well as household and student debt. Worse, the levels of delinquency have been rising and credit standards have been deteriorating over the recent months, particularly for corporate debt. Continue reading →

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Central banking, Economics, Inflation, Monetary reform, Social development, Uncategorized

Inflation: lessons from the last empire’s collapse

So far, the dreams of 1,000-year empires and stable world domination have eluded the ruling elites throughout history and across the globe. Empires arise, sustain themselves for a century or two and then rapidly decay and collapse. The collapse may appear relatively fast and obvious in hindsight, but in reality it spans decades, may appear as a series of temporary crises and only become obvious very late into the slow-motion train wreck. Continue reading →

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Central banking, Commodity price, Economics, Inflation, Market trends, Monetary reform, Stock market

Stock markets might not crash. Investors might still lose big.

Our future is being shaped by an unprecedented monetary experiment run by our central bank mandarins, but a happy ending is a mathematical impossibility. The economic imbalances that resulted in the last, 2008 financial crisis are now much worse and we are facing two possible routes of their resolution. One is a full-blown deflationary depression that could see asset prices drop by 50% or more. The other is a strong and sustained decline in the US Dollar (and other major currencies) with an accelerating commodity price inflation that might span a full decade.

Central banks’ overt commitment to supporting asset prices at all costs suggests that the second scenario may be more probable. In this case, a major stock-market crash could be averted; instead, we could see a significant and sustained rise in equity markets, as was the case most recently during the Zimbabwean and Venezuelan inflations, as well as the Argentinian, Brazilian, Israeli and German inflations before that. Below is the chart showing the appreciation of Israel All Share index during the country’s inflationary crisis in the 1980s: Continue reading →

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