Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Firing the Elites

Given what’s happening right now with the EU redux, it’s hard not to write a little something about it, so I won’t even try to resist the temptation. Stock markets are crashing, banks are on the verge of failure, gold is spiking and City of London and Wall Street financial types are running around with their hair on fire. But beyond such financial superficialities, what is really happening is that class warfare is back with a vengeance, so far in the UK with the Brexit referendum, but likely to spread.

In that referendum, the older generations who know which class they belong to voted to fire their malign overlords in Brussels and London, while the younger generations, brainwashed by EU propaganda, did not. Some “experts” claimed that there is some sort of generational divide, but I think that older generations did a smart thing, and that this is adequately explained by the fact that they are smarter. You see, fools tend to die young, and the mere act of surviving is a sign of intelligence. But that’s just a minor side-point.

The main point is that the malign elites very much need to be fired, both in Europe and in the US. There are several problems with them, which I would like to briefly enumerate:

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Negative interest rates are coming to America

Well, that didn't take long! Negative Interest Rate Policy appears to be a gift that keeps on giving.

Just a little while ago I wrote that, in essence, if the Federal Reserve wants to keep the financial party going a little bit longer, it will have to continue lowering interest rates to below zero, as this is the only way to keep broke debtors alive and prevent the gigantic debt bubble from imploding. And now we find out that the Federal Reserve has resolved any legal impediments (such as the Federal Reserve Act) that have kept it from doing just that.

To recap, negative interest rates are a way to pay debtors to hold onto their debt instead of defaulting on it or repudiating it, thus preventing the debt pyramid from pancaking and taking the entire financial system with it. But this effect is temporary, for at least two reasons.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

The Five Stages of Collapse French Edition

Nous avons aujourd’hui le plaisir de vous informer de la sortie du livre culte de Dmitry Orlov, Les cinq stades de l’effondrement aux éditions Le retour aux Sources.

Éditions Le Retour aux Sources
Disponible sur notre boutique (prévente)

Si vous nous lisez depuis ces deux dernières années, vous avez eu le plaisir de suivre la pensée de Dmitry, grâce à ses articles quasi hebdomadaires. En plus d’un grande érudition et d’une pensée en effervescence souvent teintée d’un humour caustique, Dmitry est aussi d’un abord très simple et nous entretenons avec lui une relation de confiance pour améliorer les traductions et aider à la diffusion des idées alternatives au Système.

Pour la sortie de son livre, nous vous proposons une interview réalisée il y a quelques jours.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction is a staple of motivational speakers. The premise is that thoughts determine outcomes. If you can visualize a better future, and conceive of the steps you need to take to reach it, a potential future magically pops into existence.

In reality, change requires more than positive thinking. There is a feedback loop between thinking and acting. If we think differently, we must also act differently, and only by acting differently can we hope to achieve something new. In turn, new achievements lead to new experiences, which may cause us to think even more differently, revise our plan, try acting even more differently, and so on.

One of the issues we face in addressing massive, overwhelmingly complex problems such as, just to rattle off a few, climate change, economic inequality and social and political dysfunction, is that it is hard for us even to conceive of a better way of doing things. Not knowing what to do is bad enough; not knowing what to think is even worse!

Please note...

[Update: So many people write to tell me how much they've enjoyed reading these two books, but there are no new reviews of them on Amazon! Yes, five stars is very good, but some more thoughtful reviews certainly wouldn't hurt these two wonderful authors. So, if you bought, read, and enjoyed these books, please post a review. Thank you.]

The reason I edit, typeset and publish books by promising new authors is that I want you to read them. And to do that you have to buy them. Someday soon these excerpts will stop, and then, unless you buy the books and read them, you will end up with half-baked thoughts in your heads. Enough said. Please click on the images below.


Tuesday, June 07, 2016

The Money Cult

Ask the right question
and you are automatically
a member
Previously, I have written about the progression from positive interest rates to zero interest rates (since 2008) and finally to negative interest rates. And I asked my readers a simple question: How will negative interest rates blow up the financial system? And apparently none of you knew the answer. Now, I must confess that to start with I didn’t know the answer either, which is why I asked the question, and my first attempts at finding it were somewhat tentative. But now, having thought about it, I do seem to have found the answer, and it is that…

But first let us back up a bit and answer several preliminary questions:

1. Why did zero interest rates become necessary?
2. Why are negative interest rates now necessary? and,
3. Why are negative interest rates a really excellent idea?*

* if you ignore certain unintended consequences (which is what everyone does all the time, so let’s not worry about them just yet).