Handwriting On The Wall

Ireland has this banking advice for
Spain: Imagine the worst and double it.
Bloomberg, June 14

The financial and economic disaster that I present in this essay will have a great bearing on the public health sector as well as push stress levels of most people through the roof.

“Health care services in Greece, Spain and Portugal are already under enormous pressure, with drug companies refusing to supply essential medications, hospital staff going on strike to protest wage cuts, you name it. Europe is burning from both sides, either of which will be sufficient to burn it down to the ground in its present state. And Europe is rotting at the core, gutting its societies for the benefit of the stakeholders in its banking sector, the majority of whom are global financial institutions. Europe, like America, is stuck on a one-dimensional dead end highway to nowhere at all,”`writes the Automatic Earth.

“The U.S. economy is nothing but a credit card which is past the point of being “maxed-out”. As our economies collapse it is inevitable that both our banking system and markets will be forced to shut down – likely for extended periods. Understand that what looms ahead of us is an economic cataclysm more severe than anything we have even read about in our history books, let alone experienced in our own lives,” writes Jeff Nielson.

John Embry, who is Chief Investment Strategist of the $10-billion-strong Sprott Asset Management said, “…the chaos will accelerate,” and “…before this ends, it will be cataclysmic.” “The global data is an outright catastrophe. Moreover, the jobs reports in the U.S. and the U.S. ISM manufacturing numbers are a catastrophe as well,” writes Mike “Mish” Shedlock.

“The entire financial system is under collapse,” says Gerald Celente. “It’s not about the Greeks; it’s not about the Spanish; it’s not about the Italians; it’s not about the English; it’s not about the Americans; it’s not about the Chinese; it’s about everybody.” Darker days are ahead. The world and everyone in it has much to fear as we cascade down into a black hole of deflation, even as prices continue to inflate.

Michael Snyder summarizes the situation saying, “Global leaders have tried just about everything that they can think of, but the coming global financial catastrophe continues to march steadily toward us. We have seen ‘stimulus packages,’ quantitative easing, bond buying, interest rate cuts, emergency economic summits, bailout packages for banks, bailout packages for entire nations, ‘Operation Twist,’ unprecedented government intervention in business and massive amounts of new government debt and yet nothing seems to revive the global economy. In fact, it looks like we are rapidly heading into the second dip of a ‘double dip recession.’ Unfortunately, many believe that this next dip will be more like a full-blown depression. All over the world, top economic experts are warning that we are facing an unprecedented crisis of debt and insolvency that will result in a global financial catastrophe. The Eurozone is drowning in debt, the U.S. government is drowning in debt and major banks all over the globe are drowning in debt. Global authorities have been trying to patch the system together and keep it going, but the incredible damage that all of this debt has done is now becoming apparent to everyone. The global debt bubble that has fueled prosperity in the western world for the last several decades is getting ready to burst, and when that happens the chaos that will result will be absolutely horrifying.”

If you want to be scared, truly terrified, listen to Mark J. Grant. He might be right. For the past two years, Grant, a managing director at a regional investment bank in Florida, has been predicting the bankruptcy of Greece and a cascade of chaos across the global economy, attracting quite a following on Wall Street in the process.

And people feel it where it hurts. Access to critical supplies becomes difficult. In the case of Greece, the collapse of life as Greeks know it has taken place over the last several years but is now accelerating to the point where chaos will spread and other countries, which are in similar positions, will be pulled into a black hole of economic contraction.

“Greece is an accident that keeps on crashing. Spain’s government is propping up its banks with European Union help, so that these banks can keep propping up the government by buying the government’s bonds—the equivalent of two drunks holding each other up. And the sad fact is: Italy, Portugal and possibly France are not far behind,” writes Douglas French.

The massive disconnect between what the data tell us and people’s optimism are deeply concerning; it suggests that the majority of people are completely oblivious to what’s happening. “Governments are, in fact, going bankrupt and they’re turning the heat up against their own citizens in a desperate attempt to maintain the status quo. Here in Europe, bank runs are becoming commonplace, and depositors are being frozen out of their accounts without warning,” writes Simon Black.

The global financial crisis has barely started and is likely to last for at least another 15-20 years as major economies cut debt levels, according to Jamil Baz, one of Europe’s most prominent hedge fund managers. “This crisis has not even started. It will take an extremely long time to reach its peak velocity, and by a long time I mean at least 15-20 years. The economic impact of this crisis will be devastating.”

“Trying to ‘reform’ the present system is a waste of time and energy. When and how exactly the present system will end, nobody can say. I believe we are in the final inning. Around the world, all major central banks have now established zero or near-zero interest rates and are using their own balance sheets in a desperate attempt to avoid their highly geared banking systems from contracting or potentially collapsing. If you think that this is all just temporary and that it will smoothly unwound when the economy finally ‘recovers,’ then you are probably on some strong medication, or have been listening for too long to the mainstream economists who are, in the majority, happy to function as apologists for the present system,” wrote Detlev Schlichter.

The Federal Reserve released its Survey of Consumer Finances last week. It’s a fact-filled 80-page report they issue every three years to provide a financial snapshot of American households. The worldwide financial collapse has been catastrophic to most of the households in the U.S. according to the report that showed a 39% decline in median net worth over a three-year timeframe.

“It will be no surprise that the news coming out of the Eurozone just gets worse and worse. The reality is that Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Greece, and France (in no particular order) are all in debt traps from which there is no escape. A debt trap is sprung when bankruptcy becomes the only outcome,” writes Alasdair Macleod. Lately, though not glaring in the news, the number of towns and cities that are declaring bankruptcy, especially in California, has been increasing.

Charles Ferguson said,“Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.”

The fact that the capitalist economic system is in worldwide meltdown is still not registering in most people’s minds but we are on the cusp of a global recession that will turn into a full-blown depression or collapse. Doug Casey has said, “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.”

Most of us just cannot appreciate what will happen when the isolation and comfort that technology affords us now is gone and what that will do the modern medical paradigm. In a flash we can lose access to drugs vital for surgery and will have to learn new ways of taking care of ourselves. In a worst-case scenario, as is beginning to be demonstrated in Greece, we will see a cessation of medical services, police and fire protection, and an absence of food.

Conclusion

Chris Martenson writes, “In the book, When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson, which details Weimar Germany’s inflation over the period from 1918 to 1923, the most riveting parts for me were the firsthand accounts from the people caught in the storm. So many people left their wealth in the system only to watch it get eroded and utterly destroyed over time. The reasons were many: patriotism, inertia, disbelief, and denial cruelly fed by hope every time prices moderated or even retreated momentarily. The simple observation is that many people had a blind belief in the money system. They lost their wealth because they were unable or unwilling to allow reality to challenge their beliefs. It’s not that there weren’t numerous warning signs to heed—in fact, they could be seen everywhere—but most willfully ignored them. Most mysterious is the fact that in Austria and Germany, where the inflation struck most severely, there were numerous borders and currencies into which people could have dodged to protect their wealth. That is, protecting one’s wealth was a relatively straightforward and simple manner. And yet… it did not happen.”

In his essay, “The Drowning Pool,” James Howard Kunstler says, “News that that a swarm of termites deep inside the British banking system have been fiddling the interbank interest rates (LIBOR) for years in order to systematically vacuum a few billion pence off the exchange floors for themselves is the latest blow to the credibility of the global money system—and probably a fine overture to a looming climactic implosion of the gigantic, creaking, smoldering, reeking, duck-taped edifice of broken promises, booby-trapped hedge obligations, counterparty follies, central bank euchres, sovereign flim-flams, and countless chicanes too various, dark, and deep to smoke out. Next, we’ll probably hear that Lloyd Blankfein over at Goldman Sachs has been tinkering with the rotation of the earth in order to gain a few micro-milliseconds of advantage in his firm’s high frequency trading rackets. After all, back in 2008 Lloyd himself claimed to be ‘doing God’s work.’”

Kunstler goes on to say, “In short, world banking is now hopelessly pranged, and I am not at all sure the project of civilization (modern edition) can continue by other means. The impairments of capital formation are now so profound that no one and nothing can be trusted.”