by Mark Sircus

Director

30 November 2011
from IMVA Website

 

 

Kondratieff Winters
 


 

I have been holding back this essay for months.

 

It is not a good sign that I am finally bringing myself to publish it. I have tired of being a prophet of doom so have been waiting for the drums of doom, which are now sounding loudly. I hope this essay will help people understand what we are about to suffer through.

 

George Soros himself warned,

"The current global financial system is in a self-reinforcing process of disintegration, the developed world is falling into deflationary debt trap."

Peter Schiff president of Euro Pacific Capital, identified the state of the Union saying,

"Our government doesn’t have enough spare cash to bail out a lemonade stand. Our standard of living must decline to reflect years of reckless consumption and the disintegration of our industrial base. Only by swallowing this tough medicine now will our sick economy ever recover."

The Economist writes,

 

‘Unless Germany and the ECB act quickly, the single currency’s collapse is looming‘

“Mrs. Merkel is possibly underestimating the speed and ferocity at which a market panic could crush her ambitious integration plans. We also agree that there are a number of potential events that could become the triggers for such a panic.

 

There is considerable risk that in the case of the failure of a big bank, a wave of cascading cross-defaults could engulf the system.”

Britain’s Foreign Office is advising its overseas embassies to draw up plans to help expats should the collapse of the Euro turn explosive. Almost incredibly, a senior minister has revealed that Britain is now planning on the basis that a euro collapse is matter of time.

 

British ministers privately warned that the break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible.
 

Hardly a week goes by, without a major summit between German
Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, trying
to devise another clever scheme to save the Euro. Yet after 1-½ years of trying

to contain the wildfire, - the Euro-zone’s debt crisis is more dangerous than ever.
Gary Dorsch

“The raging European monetary collapse will ripple through America’s banking system, completing the 2008 meltdown that never ended because Wall Street fought all reforms.

 

But now, a bigger meltdown as history repeats a dangerous cycle like the 1929 Crash and Great Depression. History will also deal a fatal blow to Wall Street. Martin Weiss adds a key warning: No bank bailouts.

 

America’s banking system is bankrupt, structurally and morally. Washington is broken. And thanks to the Occupiers Revolution the masses will never accept new bank bailouts. Never. They’ll toss politicians and overthrow government first.

 

No new bailouts will be the stake in the heart of Wall Street, ending the ‘greed is good’ power of America’s ‘bloodsucking vampire squid,’ handing the Occupiers new political power in Washington.”

Market Watch.

 


 

 

  • Greece will default very soon.

  • The contagion of fear will spread.

  • European mega banks will collapse.

  • EU governments suffer new credit rating downgrades.

  • Spain and Italy are next to face defaults on their massive debts.

  • Global debt markets will suffer a critical meltdown.

  • The vicious cycle - sovereign defaults, bank failures, global depression - will continue.

We have been living through an agonizingly slow death of the system for years, so at this point, or a point very soon, the entire system will go down and go down fast like a house does when on fire.

 

Since 2008 all the financial remedies have only made the wood dryer so when things start to burn, when bond holders lose their shirts, when banks go down, when governments default, the fire will burn hotter.

Accountants know that there is only so far you can stretch, leverage and borrow before the bomb bay doors to bankruptcy open and the system falls to its doom. Hope has lost its battle against simple arithmetic and it is frightening to look at the harpoon targeting all of our lives. What we are faced with depends on the mathematics of balance sheets that are tilting far over into insolvency.

 

Authorities around the globe will certainly do all they can to keep things stable, but in the end it is inevitable that the house of cards is going to come crashing down.

“The current system will not so much collapse as evaporate,” writes Trace Mayer, J.D., who is predicting what is called a Kondratieff Winter, which is the correction of a credit expansion.

Like a black hole, the entire world of money and commerce gets sucked into it as money runs out at an increasing rate for more and more people, towns, cities, counties, states, businesses and countries.
 

The world financial system is a total fraud. It is one gargantuan Ponzi
scheme, no better than the one Bernie Madoff used to swindle his
friends and neighbors, and thousands of times worse if you add up
the total number of victims it has ripped off over countless generations.
Paul Hellyer
 

Mayer’s chart below speaks volumes about what’s going to evaporate.

 

It will be like an attic full of squirrels running from one end of the attic to another. There is a point when a stampede occurs and in a credit collapse everyone runs at once into gold and silver and away from paper full of fancy ink and images.

 

Right now though the squirrels are running to buy up paper instead, American paper and its worthless values are going up, meaning many other currencies are going down hard.
 



Just as an individual can go bankrupt no matter how rich she starts
out, a financial system can collapse under the pressure of greed,
politics, and profits no matter how well regulated it seems to be.
Ken Rogoff & Carmen Reinhart
Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

“Much as I’d like to see the end of the extend-and-pretend game, I’m pretty convinced that it’s the only thing left standing between the world as we knew it and the demise of the financial and political system that went along with it,” writes the Automatic Earth.

For the few who have used these past few years of borrowed time to prepare for a general depression and financial collapse one can only be thankful for the extra time, but it looks like time is just about up.

I have written a lot about the nature of our deteriorating reality and have been watching circumstances develop for decades.

 

It’s a deplorable and absolutely unprecedented situation that has gotten steadily worse because,

“the world is controlled by a bunch of genocidal maniacs hell bent on extending the system for one more day,” writes Tyler Durden.
 

The reality of the situation is this: there are no magic
monetary tools that can fix the global monetary crises hidden
in the basement of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England,
or any of the others. The fiat money-instruments themselves
 - Dollars, Euros, Yen, etc. - are the problem.
Daily Bell
 

Durden says,

“The entire European insolvent periphery is now merely squeezing as much money out of the core as they can before everything falls apart.”

September might very well be the month of doom for the European Union, or at least the beginning of a precipitous fall. Unless aliens land with trillions lining their pockets it looks like we are headed for another massive credit crunch.

“It’s not really the end of the world, but to read some of the analysis and data over the past week, it’s hard not to wonder if it’s not the beginning of the endgame at the very least,” wrote conservative John Mauldin a few weeks ago.

David Icke is at his best in this video. His lecture on the engineering of economic collapses by those who think they are better than everyone else is riveting.

 

We are beyond the point where playing the blame game counts for anything though but Karl Denninger tells us to,

“Make sure you thank Congress and our wonderful ‘President,’ all of whom are far more interested in making sure that the banksters simply rob you blind than anything else when it comes to the economy. In fact, by their actions it’s clear that’s all they care about,” he writes.

“Mankind is reeling under a whopping $158 trillion debt pile that, according to analysts and economists, might get out of hand if not dealt with carefully. Gulf News takes a look at how this massive debt pile was created and how the world can get out of this mess. Every human being on earth currently carries a debt burden of nearly $22,733 on average, if the latest reports are to be believed.

 

Every child is sharing the same debt burden at birth, as debt growth rates beat the global population growth rate,” writes Saifur Rahman for the Gulfnews

If someone can’t pay his debts,

you don’t help him by giving him a larger loan.
 

The problem of over-indebtedness is tearing the world’s economy apart.

 

We’re on the cusp of a global recession that will turn into a full blown depression or collapse because the first world will hit a brick wall in terms of ability to pay up on its debts.

 

Louis James asked Doug Casey about the coming crash, about leaving,

“the eye of the storm and backing into the raging winds of financial, political, and social turmoil - What if you’re wrong?”

Doug responded,

“I honestly hope I am, because if I’m right, the global economic devastation is going to have a very real and significant death toll. The price in human suffering these fools in government are setting us up for is truly monstrous.

 

As a human being, of course I’d rather see good times.”

But he and many others are no longer dreaming of fairytale endings...

 

The speed of the disintegration said everything. It took
less than 48 hours for London to descend from self-styled
capital of the world into a circuit of burning dystopian hells.
Gautam Malkani
 

In Kondratieff Winters, or what are otherwise known as great depressions, millions starve.

 

In our next Kondratieff Winter it will probably be hundreds of millions if not a billion or two who will starve because we are simultaneously being taken down by Mother Nature who is devastating agriculture around the globe with floods, drought, fire, cold and heat, and now even radiation exposure will cast a dark shadow on the agriculture sector.

The gigantic rotting corpses of governments around the world are contracting, stumbling into walls of debt that they simply cannot get around. Our present way of organizing societies, economies and government is now visibly falling apart.

 

Calls for economic “austerity” - reduced government deficits - are the early warning signs of hard economic contraction - the early signs of the Kondratieff Winter that is now starting.
 

 

 

 

Dangerous Times
 

As the crisis mood congeals, people will come to the jarring
realization that they have grown helplessly dependent on a
teetering edifice of anonymous transactions and paper guarantees.
The Fourth Turning - 1997

“Buy a weapon to prepare for what may be the most devastating economic downturn our nation has ever faced.

 

As one trained in economics, I never thought I’d write those words. However, I’ll repeat them. Buy a gun. The coming storm will not only impose financial hardships for those unprepared, but also entail a physical threat to you, your family and your property.

 

The threat will come from inside the halls of government with the constant attack on savings and investments through inflation, monetary gimmickry and, eventually, the destruction of our currency. The world around us is deteriorating every day: socially and economically.

 

It’s not limited to London,” writes Joseph McBrennan, editor of the Taipan Publishing Group.

Silver Shield has written an essay Five Reasons American Riots Will Be the Worst in the World, that is just over the top, but in it he says some very serious things to his fellow Americans.

“When the dollar collapses, all American illusions will collapse with it. Deep denial will turn into deep anger. The Baby Boomer generation’s obsessive pursuit for material possessions was matched by their embrace of debt.

 

The American riots will be the worst the world has seen because of the amount of arrogance, denial, narcissism, drugs and violence in our society."

 

 

 

 

 

I believe the pent-up pressures will explode and what will happen in the course of a few days or weeks will take our collective breath away.

 

So it’s a good idea to start now with some deep-breathing exercises to give some extra emotional strength to get ready for the event. It is that close. I think most of us sense it by now - the approaching danger.

The Burning Platform writes,

“As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can’t help but wonder whether there is anyone home.

 

Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb?

 

I’ve concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines.

 

Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators.”