A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.
Proverbs 22:3
Last week we concluded our look at various examples of prepping the Bible. In Parts 4, 5, 6 and 7 of these series, our focus was on Noah, Lot Joseph and the teachings of Christ in that order. Not that this list exhausted all the examples of prepping found in the Bible. Indeed, there are a great deal more examples of prepping in the Scriptures than I have the time or space to discuss in this short series on Christian prepping. That said, I believe the examples we looked at are enough to establish that God approves of prepping.
It had been my intention today to follow the prepping examples discussed in Parts 4-7 with some practical advice on prepping. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed good to follow the Scriptural examples of prepping with a more doctrinal discussion. Examples are helpful, for they help us to see the practical application of Christian doctrine, but examples do not replace doctrine.
But before we dive into Biblical prepping theory, I’d be remiss if I did not review the financial news from this past week. As has been noted previously, the main title for this series, “The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008,” expresses this author’s opinion that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) that struck in that year has never really ended. As some historians consider World War II to be a continuation of World War I separated by 21 years of uneasy peace, so too are there many financial market observers who argue that the next financial crisis simply will be a continuation of the GFC, separated by a decade or so of uneasy financial normalcy.
The reason some market observers argue this way, and I happen to agree with them, is that the cause of the GFC was never honestly dealt with, but rather was papered over. The 2008 crisis was caused by excessive debt, which itself was the inevitable result of a corrupt global financial system, founded as it is on the fraudulent, debt-based, central bank issued, fiat US Dollar.
When things became unglued in 2008, the US and the world in general were presented with an opportunity to deal honestly with a bankrupt – bankrupt in both the economic and moral sense of the term – financial system. It was a bit like the alcoholic being given the opportunity to clear out the liquor cabinet, sober up, and get his life back, or to again reach for the bottle and find temporary solace in the very thing that’s destroying his life.
America, and the West generally, made the wrong choice, deciding to take another hit from the debt bottle that is destroying our nations, all the while making some fabulously wealthy.
As proof that the issues of the GFC were never resolved, consider the absurd spectacle of negative interest rates. According to Mike Shedlock, there are five central banks with negative interest rates – the Swiss National Bank, Denmark, the European Central Bank, Sweden and the Bank of Japan. Negative interest rates – this is a situation where savers are charged a fee to save and borrowers are paid to borrow, the exact opposite of how a financial system is supposed to work – rob the prudent and reward the profligate. Put another way, they are the financial equivalent of calling good evil and evil good. Such a situation never could exist in a market economy, but has come about as a result of the monetary sorcery of an immoral central banking cartel that currently runs the West.
Negative interest rates are a screaming danger signal to anyone with any financial sense that there are serious problems in the global financial system, but that hasn’t stopped President Trump from calling for them.
But negative interest rates aren’t the only danger signal flashing red. As we discussed last week in Part 7, the Fed continues to bail out the overnight repo market. To give you a sense of just how big the ongoing bailout is, CNN noted on 9/20 that in the first four days of the operation, the Fed had injected over $275 billion into the repo market. “In less than a week,” CNN went on to say, “the Fed injected 34.4% of the $800 billion that it printed during the 2008 bailout.”
That is simply breathtaking. To think that in the first four days of the most recent bank rescue the Fed printed more than a third of the total it did during the 2008 crisis. And note well, that total was as of 9/20. An entire new week of repo market bailouts has since gone in the books. And the bailouts are scheduled to continue until 10/10! At the current rate, the repo bailouts will exceed the (at least publically admitted) bailouts of 2008.
Apart from its sheer size, another remarkable facet of the current repo market rescue is that the cause of the crisis has not yet been disclosed. One clue to the locus of the problem is in the fact that this is a repo market bailout. According to an article by Pam and Russ Martens posted on Wall Street On Parade, “The New York Fed is only allowed to engage in these repo transactions with its 24 primary dealers. That list of 24 primary dealers includes the securities units of big U.S. banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, but it also includes the U.S. based securities units of troubled foreign banks like Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Societe Generale (SocGen).” Because the New York Fed is not announcing which banks are drawing down the bulk of its loans, neither Congress nor the American people know if the money is flowing to U.S. banks or foreign bank subsidiaries in the U.S. Propping up troubled foreign banks in not what most Americans want their central bank to be doing.” Of course, I would add that I don’t want the Fed bailing out troubled American banks either.
So here you have this massive bank bailout going on, a bailout that more than one analyst think involves Deutsche Bank, but the American public is largely in the dark. This, naturally, is exactly what the fed and other financial ne’er do wells want. Let the people obsess about the Democrats’ frivolous impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, while the Fed once again bails out the billionaire bankers and hands the bill to the American people.
Very clearly, there are serious problems in the financial system. Enough so that it probably is inaccurate to speak of a coming Phase 2 of the GFC, for it is already upon us.
But enough of Wall Street intrigue for the moment. Let us now turn to discussing the Biblical doctrine of prepping, to see what the Scriptures teach us about how Christians should prepare for the financial storm in which we find ourselves.
Lux Lucet 