Again, as-yet unpublished at Bob Livingston's Personal Liberty, by Brandon Smith:
Trade is a
fundamental element of human survival. No one person can produce every
single product or service necessary for a comfortable life, no matter
how spartan their attitude. Unless your goal is to desperately scratch
an existence from your local terrain with no chance of progress in the
future, you are going to need a network of other producers. For most of
the history of human civilization, production was the basis for
economy. All other elements were secondary.
At some point, as trade grows and thrives, a society is going to
start looking for a store of value; something that represents the
man-hours and effort and ingenuity a person put into their
day. Something that is universally accepted within barter networks,
something highly prized, that is tangible, that can be held in our hands
and is impossible to replicate artificially. Enter precious metals and
stones.
Thus, the concept of "money" was born, and for the most part it
functioned quite well for thousands of years. Unfortunately, there are
people in our world that see economy as a tool for control rather than a
vital process that should be left alone to develop naturally.
The idea of "fiat money," money which has no tangibility and that can
be created on a whim by a central source or authority, is rather new in
the grand scheme of things. It is a bastardization of the original and
much more stable money system that existed before that was anchored to
hard commodities. While it claims to offer a more "liquid" store of
value, the truth is that it is no store of value at all.
Purveyors of fiat, central banks and globalists, use ever increasing
debt as a means to feed fiat, not to mention the hidden tax of price
inflation. When central bankers get hold of money, it is no longer a
representation of work or value, but a system of enslavement that
crushes our ability to produce effectively and to receive fair returns
for our labor.
There are many people today in the liberty movement that understand
this dynamic, but even in alternative economic circles there are some
that do not understand the full picture when it comes to central banks
and fiat mechanisms. There is a false notion that paper currencies are
the life blood of the establishment and that they will seek to protect
these currencies at all costs. This might have been true 20 years ago or
more, but it is not true today. Things change.
The king of this delusion is the U.S. dollar. As the world reserve
currency, it is thought by some to be "untouchable," a pillar of the
globalist structure that will be defended for many decades to come. The
reality, however, is that the dollar is nothing more than another con
game on paper to the globalists; a farce that they are happy to
sacrifice in order to further their goals of complete centralization of
the world's trade and therefore complete centralization of control over
human survival.
That is to say, the dollar is a steppingstone for them, nothing more.
The real goal of the globalists is an economic system in which they
can monitor every transaction no matter how small; a system in which
there is eventually only one currency, a currency that can be tracked,
granted or taken away at a moment's notice. Imagine a world in which
your "store of value" is subject to constant scrutiny by a bureaucratic
monstrosity, and there is no way to hide from it by using private trade
as a backstop. Imagine a world in which you cannot hold your money in
your hand, and access to your money can be denied with the push of a
button if you step out of line. This is what the globalists really
desire.
Some people might claim that this kind of system already exists, but
they would be fooling themselves. Even though fiat currencies like the
dollar are a cancer on free markets and true production, they still
offer privacy to a point, and they can still be physically allocated and
held in your hand making them harder to confiscate. The globalists want
to take a bad thing and make it even worse.
So, the question arises: How do they plan to make the shift from the
current fiat paper system to their "new world order" economy?
First and foremost, they will seek a controlled demolition of the
dollar as the world reserve currency. They have done this in the past
with other reserve currencies, such as the Pound Sterling, which was
carefully diminished over a period of two decades just after WWII
through the use of treasury bond dumps by France and the U.S., as well
as the forced removal of the sterling as the petro-currency.
This was
done to make way for the U.S. dollar as a replacement after the Bretton
Woods agreement in 1944.
The dollar did not achieve true world reserve status until after the
gold standard was completely abandoned by Nixon in the early 1970s, at
which point a deal was struck with Saudi Arabia making the dollar the
petro-currency. Once the dollar was no longer anchored to gold and the
world's energy market was made dependent on it, the fate of the U.S.
economy was sealed.
Unlike Britain and the sterling, the U.S. economy is hyper-dependent
on the dollar's world reserve status. While Britain suffered declining
conditions for decades after the loss including inflation and high
interest rates, the U.S. will experience far more acute pain. A complete
lack of adequate production capability within U.S. borders has turned
our nation into a consumer-based society, rather than a society of
producers. Meaning, we are dependent on the demand for our currency as a
reserve in order to enjoy affordable goods from other
manufacturing-based countries.
Add to this lack of production ability the fact that for the past
decade the Federal Reserve has been pumping trillions of dollars into
financial markets around the globe. This means trillions of dollars held
overseas only on the promise that those dollars will be accepted by
major exporters as a universal store of value. If faith in that promise
is lost, those trillions could come flooding back into the U.S. through
various channels, and the buying power of the currency would crumble.
There is a delusion within the American mainstream that even if such
an event were to occur, the transition could be handled with ease. It's
fantastical, I know, but never underestimate the cognitive dissonance of
people blinded by bias.
The rebuilding of a production base within the U.S. to offset the
crisis of losing the world reserve currency would take many years;
perhaps decades. And this is in the best-case scenario. With a
plummeting currency and extreme price inflation, the cost of
establishing new production on a large scale would be immense. While
labor might become cheap (in comparison with inflation), all other
elements of the economy would become very expensive.
In the worst-case scenario there would be complete societal breakdown
likely followed by an attempted totalitarian response by government. In
which case, forget any domestically funded economic recovery. Any
future recovery would have to be funded and managed from outside the
U.S. And here is where we see the globalist plan taking shape.
The banking elites have hinted in the past how they might try to
"reset" the global economy. As I've mentioned in many articles, the
globalist run magazine
The Economist in 1988
discussed the removal of the dollar to make way for a global currency, a
currency which would be introduced to the masses by 2018. This
introduction did in fact take place as
The Economist declared it would.
Here is how I believe the process will unfold:
The 2008 crash in credit and housing markets led to unprecedented
money printing by central banks, with the Federal Reserve leading the
pack as the greatest source of inflation. This program of bailouts and
QE stimulus conjured and even bigger bubble, which many alternative
analysts have dubbed "the everything bubble."
The growing "everything bubble" encompasses not just stock markets or
housing, but auto markets, credit markets, bond markets and the dollar
itself. All of these elements are now tied directly to Fed policy. The
U.S. economy itself is not only addicted to stimulus measures and
near-zero interest rates; it will die without them.
The Fed knows this well. Chairman Jerome Powell hinted at the crisis
that would evolve if the Fed ever cut off stimulus, unwound its balance
sheet and hiked rates in the
October 2012 Fed minutes.
Without constant and ever-expanding stimulus measures, the false
economy will implode. We are already seeing the effects as the Fed cuts
tens-of-billions per month in assets from its balance sheet and hikes
interest rates to their "neutral rate of inflation." Auto markets,
housing markets, and credit markets are in reversal, and stocks are
witnessing the most instability since the 2008 crash. All of this was
triggered by the Fed simply exerting incremental rate hikes and balance
sheet cuts.
The Fed will continue tightening, either by rate hikes, asset cuts,
or both at the same time. The Fed's purpose is to create a crisis. The
Fed's goal is to cause a crash. The Fed is a suicide bomber that does
not care what happens to the U.S. system.
But what about the dollar, specifically?
The Fed's tightening policies do not only translate to crisis for US
stocks or other markets, though. I see three primary ways in which the
dollar can be dethroned as the world reserve.
- Emerging economies have also become addicted to Fed liquidity over
the past 10 years. Without continued access to the Fed's easy money,
nations like China and India beginning to seek out alternatives to the
dollar as a world reserve. Contrary to the popular belief that these
countries would "never" be able to decouple from the U.S., the process
has already begun. And it is the Fed that has actually created the
necessity for emerging markets to seek out other sources of liquidity
besides the dollar.
- Donald Trump's trade war is yet another cover event for the loss
of reserve status. If the trade war continues through the next year, it
is only a matter of time before China, already seeking dollar
alternatives as the Fed tightens liquidity, will start using its US
treasury and dollar holding as leverage against us. Bilateral agreements
between multiple nations that cut out the dollar are being established
regularly today. If China, the largest exporter/importer in the world,
stops accepting the dollar as the world reserve, or if they start
accepting other currencies in competition, then numerous other nations
will follow their lead.
- Finally, if the war of words between Trump and the Fed becomes
something more and Trump undermines faith in U.S. credit, or if he shuts
down the Fed entirely, the globalists are handed yet another perfect
distraction for the death of the dollar. I can see the headlines now -
The "reset" could then be painted as a "rescue" of the global economy
after the "destructive actions of populists" who "bumbled into fiscal
destruction" because they were blinded by an "obsession with
sovereignty" in a world that "requires centralization to survive."
The specifics of the shift to a global currency are less clear, but again, we have hints from the globalists.
The Economist
suggests that the U.S. economy will have to be taken down a few pegs,
and that the IMF would step in as the arbiter of forex markets through
its SDR basket system. This plan was echoed recently by globalist
Mohamed El-Erian in an article he wrote titled "
New Life For The SDR?"
El-Erian also suggests that a global currency would help to combat the "rise of populism."
The Economist
notes that the SDR would only act as a "bridge" to the new global
currency. Paper currencies would still exist for a time, but they would
be pegged to the SDR exchange rates. Currently, the dollar is only worth
around .71 SDRs. In the event of the loss of world reserve status,
expect this exchange rate to drop significantly.
As the global crisis deepens the IMF will suggest a "reset" to a more
manageable monetary framework, and this framework will be based on
blockchain technology and a cryptocurrency
which the IMF has likely already developed. The IMF hints at this
outcome in at least two separate white papers recently published which
herald a new age in which crypto is the
next phase of evolution for global trade.
Without ample resistance, the introduction of the cashless society
will be presented as a natural and even "heroic" response by the
globalists to save humanity from the "selfishness" of destructive
nationalists. They will strut across the world stage as if they are
saviors, rather than the villains they really are.
To truth and knowledge,
Brandon Smith
