3 unmistakable signs that the US Government’s totalitarian creep is turning into a grip:
1) The debt ceiling limit is removed, supposedly temporarily. The jury is out on the “temporary” nature of that – I bet the “no ceiling” status gets extended in February. No debt ceiling limitation essentially gives the Government its own printing press 2) Capital controls. Many are poo-poo’ing JPM’s move to limit the ability of depositors to wire money in and out of the country, but reports are indicating that other banks are going to follow suit and I would bet big money that it’s a “creep” toward capital controls. 3) NSA. Diane Feinstein surveillance legislation – need I say more?
Submitted by Truth in Gold:
I first want to preface my remarks by saying that, although Obama has tragically and immorally failed to deliver any of the promises on which he rode into the Presidency in 2008, it’s not his fault. He is nothing but a pawn, maybe at best a bishop or rook, on the insidious chessboard of political and economic power and control that is dominated by big bank, oil, defense and other corporate interests and long time elitists like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Bryzezinski. Many of the rooks and “royal” players do not have identities because they stay behind the scenes. But many you’ve heard of, like Robert Rubin, George Soros and Warren Buffet. The person who gets put in the charge of the Fed is also a lower-ranking piece on the board, like the President. This is not about Democrats vs Republicans – that’s the distraction they throw out like fish bait to deflect your attention from the real story. Behind the scenes the big monied interests donate equally to both parties. They don’t care which party fills the seats as long as they control the votes.
Another piece of the overall puzzle fell into place for me when I chatted with a good friend of mine today who was going home from a hedge fund conference. He said the majority of people there were completely disgusted with our markets and the big buzz was about how the markets are completely out of touch with reality and that it was impossible to value anything. As an example: Sovereign Ghana bonds are yielding only 7%. Ghana for chrissakes. That’s a lower rate of interest than many muni bond issues in this country. They were also disgusted and mystified by the relentless move higher in the U.S. stock market.
He also said that people were talking about how big Wall Street firms were starting to withdraw from trading a lot of markets, especially commodities because they are impossible to trade, so it’s not just gold and silver. As participants and capital leave markets, they become less liquid.
That’s when it occurred to me: this is what the Government and elitists who control the Government want. To the extent that markets are liquid and freely trading, it’s harder for the Government to control them.
Let me explain this control thing. I’ve noticed since the Patriot Act was passed that the Government has been slowly taking away civil and Constitutional rights and taking more control of our lives. It happened somewhat slowly at first but it’s starting to happen very quickly now. Obamacare is a prime example. Obamacare is going to “blow up” – doctors are opting out en masse, there will be a shortage of doctors to service patients in the system and many people will only buy insurance when they have to because pre-existing conditions must now be accepted. etc etc. It will give the Government the perfect excuse to consolidate even more control over our lives by moving the role of healthcare management into the Executive Branch of Government. All it will take is yet another Executive Order signed by Lefty (for those who never noticed, Obama is left-handed, I’m ashamed to say as a lefty).
Same deal with the markets. In July the average NYSE volume per day was 952mm shares. It has declined at a remarkable rate. Yesterday NYSE volume was under 700mm shares. It’s that way below that on many days. It’s easier for the Fed, with the big banks as their proxy, to keep the market from tanking when the volume is low. When volume is low a $1.8 billion QE operation like today is all it takes to keep the market from cliff-diving, which it started to do at the open, until the Fed was done with its POMO operation (QE bond buying – today it bought $1.8 billion of 30yr Treasuries).
If the Government can force liquidity to withdraw from the markets, it makes it easier for it to control the markets. Here’s what this means with gold and silver: Gold and silver have been under oppressive price-capping manipulation since peaking in 2011. The price of metals were a run-away freight train back then and it was getting to the point at which the dollar’s “supremacy” was threatened. Gold and silver bottomed in June and have been slowly drifting higher, despite daily paper bombing attacks from Australia, London and the Comex. The underlying strength of the physical market in the eastern hemisphere is preventing them from pushing the metals lower other than an occasional blatant paper raid, typically on Friday when the Comex is the only game going around the world. From here, I believe gold and silver will start to “leak” higher as we get closer to the tipping point for the U.S. dollar. At some point the paper manipulators will receive delivery demands that can’t be met. At that point in time gold and silver will go bid without, the dollar collapses and our system implodes. I don’t know how long that will take, but I see that the Government’s pace of implementing totalitarian control is moving along a lot more quickly now than it was 10 years ago when I first starting thinking about the end game.
Here’s some more unmistakable signs: 1) The debt ceiling limit is removed, supposedly temporarily. The jury is out on the “temporary” nature of that – I bet the “no ceiling” status gets extended in February. No debt ceiling limitation essentially gives the Government its own printing press 2) Capital controls. Many are poo-poo’ing JPM’s move to limit the ability of depositors to wire money in and out of the country, but I have read that other banks are going to follow suit and I would bet big money that it’s a “creep” toward capital controls. 3) NSA. Diane Feinstein surveillance legislation – need I say more?
There are other signs but those are the big ones. Whether my overall scenario for how the exact events unfold is accurate or not is not important. I am becoming more convinced that my thesis is correct. It doesn’t have to be accurate for things to become unbearable here, just correct. After all, “1984,” “Animal Farm” and “Atlas Shrugged” are not necessarily “accurate” in their portrayal of the unfolding of actual events but they sure are correct in their underlying modelling of what has been happening and what will happen.
This is a concept that anyone who has kids, or even only grand kids they care about, can’t accept because the implications of what it means about where life in the U.S. is headed are too horrible to contemplate. Denial sets in and fears are rationalized away as being “irrational” and those “irrational” fears are replaced by hope. The only “hope” I have right now is that Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is not only not accurate but not correct.
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About Dave Kranzler