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The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008 Part 14: Practical Prepping, Necessities

Posted in Financial Markets, Financial News, Prepper, tagged , , , , , on November 17, 2019| 2 Comments »

Financial Crisis

A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.

Proverbs 22:3

The hits – negative economic news, that is – just keep coming.  To underscore what I mean by bad economic news, consider the following headlines from just last week:

Yet for all that, stocks hit a record high on Friday with the Dow closing above 28,000 for the first time.  CNBC’s headline on Thursday summed up the mainstream financial press’ exuberance quite well, “This is now the best bull market ever.”

How is it possible, on one hand, for there to be so much bad economic news and, on the other hand, for stocks to be hitting record highs?  We dealt with this topic last week, but this topic is of such importance that it bears additional commentary.  The answer to this question, to borrow a turn of phrase from one commentator I follow regularly, is that nothing’s real.  We have fake financial markets designed to manipulate your perception of reality.

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The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008 Part 13: Practical Career Prepping

Posted in Financial Markets, Financial News, Prepper, tagged , , , , , , on November 10, 2019| 1 Comment »

Financial Crisis

A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.

    Proverbs 22:3

“Dow hits record as stock market rally extends into 5th week” ran Monday’s AP headline. The same day, CNBC was even more ebullient, proclaiming “After Dow hits a record, analysts believe these stocks will lead the measure to its next milestone.” So what shall I say? The past three months I’ve been writing series talking about the ongoing financial crisis of 2008 and not only are the stock markets refusing to crash, they’re hitting records highs! To make matters worse, Yahoo reports that “Gold Suffers Worst Week in Three Years as Bulls Run for Cover.”

I guess I should just give up writing about financial matters, right?

Or maybe not.

You see, my thesis that the American economy has never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis is not based upon where the Dow or S&P averages close or the price action of gold and silver in a particular week.

As a Scripturalist, that is, as someone who believes that the Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth, I seek to analyze the markets and the overall economy, not by what the day’s headlines report, but by the propositions found in the Word of God.

When looked at in light of the Scriptures, we can see that what is hyped as the greatest economy ever is, in reality, a house built upon sand, which, in the opinion of this author, the coming economic storms will sweep away.

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The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008 Part 12: Practical Financial Prepping (B)

Posted in Financial Markets, Financial News, Prepper, tagged , , , , , on November 3, 2019| 3 Comments »

Financial Crisis
A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.

    Proverbs 22:3

It’s been a couple weeks since my last posting in this series, but there certainly has been no break in the flow of events. In the intervening time since my last entry on 10/20/19, there have been several noteworthy bits of financial news. Of those, the most important was the announcement from the Fed this past Wednesday that they had decided to lower the Fed Funds rate another quarter point. This was the third time the Fed has lowered interest rates in the past three months.

Now any such decision by the Fed is important given the tremendous power of the Fed to push financial markets one way or the other. The big takeaway, however, is what this decision says about the Fed’s assessment of the economy. Despite all the propaganda from the administration saying the economy is doing great, the decision by a the Fed, or any other central bank, to lower interest rates is a tacit admission that the economy is not doing well. If the economy were doing well, the Fed would be raising rates, not reducing them.

When you add to the Fed’s lowering of interest rates the ongoing (permanent?) bailout of the overnight repo market and the restart of quantitative easing (i.e. money printing), it is obvious that the those closest to the situation think that the economy is seriously struggling.

One of the justifications put forward for lowering interest rates and money printing is that there is no price inflation. But even according the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the official measure of price inflation put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the CPI-U (the broadest measure of inflation) rose 1.7% for the period September 2018 to September 2019. But beware of official government statistics! Over the years, the federal government has changed the way it measures inflation. And it should come as no surprise that the change has been in the direction lowering reported inflation.

Economist John Williams runs a website called Shadow Stats where he purports to calculate inflation the old fashioned way. His most recent calculations of the CPI-U tell a very different story from the figures put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). As you can see Williams most recent numbers come in a little higher than those of the BLS. According to Williams, the official method of calculating inflation used prior to 1990 shows inflation running at a more than 5% annual rate. If you look at this calculations with the pre-1980 method, the difference from the current official number is even more striking. The pre-1980 method of calculating inflation indicates that the current inflation rate is almost 10% annually!

If Williams is even close to being right, all this latest round of money printing by the Fed is like dumping gasoline on a raging fire, meaning we can expect to see much higher inflation numbers going forward.

Here’s a critical idea to keep in mind when talking about price inflation: Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary event. By this I mean that inflation is always the fault of money printing by central bankers. You can watch the evening news faithfully for decades on end and you will not hear this. Ditto with the financial channels such as CNBC and Fox Business. They will never tell you the simple reason for price inflation: Central bank money printing.

Why is this? It’s not an accidental oversight. The mainstream press is essentially the propaganda organ of the establishment, and central bank money printing is the financial black magic the establishment uses to increase its wealth and power at the expense of ordinary Americans. The powers that shouldn’t be – Washington politicians of both parties, Wall Street bankers and big shot investors together with a gaggle of academic theorists and news media talking heads – have a great scam going and do not want to let ordinary Americans know how badly their being ripped off and by whom.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Warren Buffett, “If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour at the table and you still don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”

Ordinary Americans have been the patsies of the financial elite, of whom Warren Buffett is one, since the founding of the Fed over 100 years ago. The Fed’s inflation games are not only bad policy, they are also sinful in the eyes of God. The Bible unequivocally condemns “divers weights and measures” which God calls an “abomination” (see Proverbs 20:10 and 20:20 for example), which merchants of the day used to rip people off in much the same way central bankers, politicians and their super wealthy clients do today. It’s high time people woke of to this fact. End the Fed!

There’s much more that could be said about inflation and, Lord willing, I shall discuss this topic in greater depth in the future. For now, though, it is enough to know that 1) the cause of price inflation in money printing by the Fed, 2) the current method of measuring price inflation deliberately and significantly understates its true rate and 3) these facts are not reported in mainstream news outlets in order to keep the public in the dark about what is going on.

“So what,” you may ask, “does any of this inflation talk have to do with financial prepping?” Quite a lot, actually. If we understand that a falling dollar is the product of the Fed’s intentionally increasing the money supply too fast, we are positioned to understand ways of protecting ourselves against the ravages of price inflation.

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The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008 Part 11: Practical Financial Prepping

Posted in Financial Markets, Financial News, Prepper, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 20, 2019| 3 Comments »

Financial Crisis

A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.

    Proverbs 22:3

It was back in August that we began our look at the ongoing 2008 financial crisis. The immediate occasion for my writing on this topic was the sudden plunge in the US stock indices following the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates in late July. The market sold off hard, but managed to stabilize, or more accurately, was stabilized by the powers that be after a phone call by President Trump with three major bank CEO’s.

This was a similar situation to what happened around the end of the year in 2018. On December 23, the day before the Dow and S&P indices had their largest ever declines on Christmas Eve, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin placed individual calls to America’s six largest banks – Brian Moynihan, Bank of America; Michael Corbat, Citi; David Solomon, Goldman Sachs; Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase; James Gorman, Morgan Stanley; Tim Sloan, Wells Fargo. When the market re-opened after the Christmas break on December 26, the Dow closed up 1,086.25 points, the largest single day gain in the history of the index. This huge day was after a terrible December and in the absence of any news that would have caused a market surge.

Was there a relationship between Mnuchin’s call on December 23 and the blast off in the stock market three days later? While this can’t be formally proven, in the opinion of this author it is the most likely explanation. In short, I think that Mnuchin told these CEO’s to buy the market and that they obliged.

If my understanding is correct, this means that at least twice in the period of eight months orders came down from on high to rescue the stock markets. What, I would ask you, does this say about the state of our financial system? What are we to think of a system that requires this level of manipulation to keep from crashing?

Of course, calls from Trump and Mnuchin are not the only sort of manipulation in the financial system. In the short time that I’ve been writing this series, we’ve seen additional extraordinary measures taken by the Fed to prop up the system.

First there was the bailout of the overnight Repo market. Originally, this was to be for a few days in September. Next, they extended it to a couple weeks. Then it got pushed out to the second week of November, then it was January 2020. Just last week, Fed President James Bullard expressed his preference for a “standing repo facility.” By this he seems to mean that he wants the current repo market intervention by the Fed to become a permanent policy tool of the central bank.

And that’s not all. Last week on Wednesday, the Fed started QE4. With this latest iteration of what in 2008 was termed an “emergency policy,” the Fed will by purchasing $60 billion a month in T-Bill (T-Bills are short-term US Treasury debt instruments). Where, you ask, does the Fed get the $60 billion per month to conduct QE4? They get it by a process that, were you or I to try it, we’d be arrested. In short, they counterfeit it out of thin air.

Here’s another question you may want to ask yourself. If the economy is doing so great as we’re constantly being told by the mainstream financial press, why is the Fed running simultaneous bailouts of both the overnight repo market and the bond market, both of which are designed to prop up the stock market? The obvious answer is that, far from being the greatest economy ever, the US, and indeed the world’s, financial markets are a mess and getting messier by the day. All the hype you hear about how great the economy is doing is propaganda designed to keep you locked into the system for the benefit of those who run it.

In light of the enormous lies that are being told to the American people by government officials, by bankers, and by the press, in the opinion of this author it is imperative that God’s people hear the truth about the financial state of the country and some sound advice about how to take measures to protect themselves financially. That is the purpose of this week’s installment.

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The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008 Part 10: Biblical Prepping, A Few Practical Pointers

Posted in Financial Markets, Financial News, Prepper, tagged , , , , , on October 13, 2019| 6 Comments »

Financial Crisis

A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.

    Proverbs 22:3

“How did you go bankrupt?,” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. Gradually, then suddenly.”

That line from Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises could, I am sure, be repeated by many who have found themselves in serious financial trouble. A man can pile up debt for years with seemingly little consequence, until suddenly it all comes crashing down. Likewise, a scam artist can go on scamming, until one day his fraud is exposed. Think about Bernie Madoff whose Ponzi scheme blew up during the 2008 financial crisis.

One can find examples of the gradually then suddenly principle in the pages of Scripture as well. Psalm 73 records the psalmist’s lament that wicked men can do what they want and never seem to suffer the consequences of the actions. That is, until he understood that God would bring them “to desolation in a moment.”

Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” expounds a passage in Deuteronomy which expresses much the same idea as Pslam 73. “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.” In his exposition of Deuteronomy 32:35, Edwards wrote, “It implies that they [unbelievers] were always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction. As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall; he can’t foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next; and when he does fall, he falls at once, without warning.”

Gradually, then suddenly. Was that not also the case with the men in Noah’s day? They were marrying and giving in marriage. Yet all the while they were adding to their sins, until, as Jesus said, the flood came and took them all away. They never saw it coming.

Much the same can be said of the Canaanites. It was told to Abraham in his day the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet fulfilled. That is, God would judge them, but not yet. Some four hundred plus years later, destruction cane swiftly. Gradually, then suddenly.

Or consider what happened to Israel once the nation was settled in Canaan. Despite God’s sending prophets to warn, gradually the people became more and more corrupt, until suddenly they were carried away into captivity. The Northern kingdom in 722 BC when Samaria was taken by the Assyrians, the southern in 586 BC with the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon.

Gradually, then suddenly. These ideas can be applied to America in our own day. A nation born out of the Protestant Reformation has gradually forgotten its roots, has gradually turned away from the source of its strength. And what are we to say about such a nation? What will be its end? If the Bible, and even secular history, are any guide, unless the Lord grants many repentance, quite obviously it is headed for a fall. Likely a sudden one at that.

But a sudden fall for America, if in fact it comes, and the West more generally, does not mean that American Christians or Christians in other Western nations have no defense and no hope. We shall look at this further in a few moments. But before we begin our discussion of practical pointers for Christian preppers, I would like to point out a couple of noteworthy announcements last week relative to the financial markets.

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The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008 Part 9: A Biblical Theory of Prepping (continued)

Posted in Financial Markets, Financial News, Prepper, tagged , , , on October 6, 2019| 1 Comment »

Financial Crisis

A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.

    Proverbs 22:3

In Part 8 of this series, we began formulating a Biblical theory of prepping. In Parts 4-7, we had looked at some examples of prepping in Scripture. While the examples of Noah, Lot and Joseph clearly establish that God approves of prepping, it seemed good to me to begin to articulate some of Christian prepping’s main components with an eye to defining the term.

In last week’s post, I closed by asking the question, For whom do we prep?, and answered, in part, that we prep for ourselves. It may seem strange to say that we prep for ourselves. After all, isn’t that just obvious? Not necessarily. The unchristian idea of altruism has so tainted many Christians’ thinking that some believers think that it is somehow sinful to think of their own interests. But although it is common to hear Christians deny they have a self interest, this is not a position consistent with the Scriptures.

Today, I’d like to continue, and hopefully conclude our discussion of the Biblical theory of prepping by exploring the other parties for whom Christians prep apart from themselves. But before we do that, I’d like to briefly review the financial news from last week.

When I began this series a couple of months ago, the stock market was recovering from a serious downturn in early August that was, apparently a reaction to the Fed’s decision to lower interest rates and the inversion of the Treasury yield curve. The Plunge Protection Team (PPT), apparently, saved the day once again, pushing the major stock indices out of correction territory. But even though the stock market has been stabilized and, at least on the surface, things seem normal, there are abundant signs that all is not well on Wall Street.

Just last week (September 29 – October 5), there were more signs of major problems in America’s economy. First, as MarketWatch reports, the Chicago Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) dropped in September for the third time in four months. The expected number was 50, but the index reported 47.1 in September. So what does all that mean? When it comes to the PMI, any reading above 50 means the economy is expanding, any reading below 50 indicates economic contraction. Not only did the September number come in well below expected, but it actually was the worst reading since 2009, around the time of the last financial crisis.

Second, the ongoing “repo madness.” Not only has the Fed been bailing out the overnight repo market to the tune of $75 billion every night, but last week pledged to continue the bailout. Originally, the Fed was going to supply funds to the repo market just for a few days. This was then extended to October 10. Friday, the New York Fed announced that it will “continue to boost liquidity in money markets [the repo market] into November.” Fund manager Dave Kranzler said of the repo operations that they will eventually morph into outright money printing. With every extension of the Fed’s repo market intervention, Kranzler’s evaluation comes closer and closer to being realized.

Third, the chances of a Fed interest rate cut in October are going up. The reason behind this seems to be the previously mentioned bad September PMI reading, which was not limited to just the US, but extended to other industrialized economies as well. Please keep in mind, the Fed cuts rates when it sees economic activity slowing down, either in an attempt to prevent a recession or to pull the economy out of one. If the US economy were really as strong as the Trump Administration would like people to believe, they would not at the same time be pushing the Fed to lower interest rates.

Fourth, layoffs. As was widely reported last week, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that it plans to cut its workforce by up to 16% and expects to cut between 7,000 and 9,000 jobs from its global workforce of 55,000. Kroger, America’s biggest grocer, announced plans to lay off hundreds of workers last week, as question arose about its turnaround plan.

In summary, last’s weeks economic news provided further evidence that the US and world economies are slowing down. It has been in anticipation of a significant economic shock that I undertook to write this series on prepping several weeks ago. Let us now continue to look at what the Bible says about prepping.

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The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008 Part 7: Biblical Case Studies in Prepping – The Teachings of Christ

Posted in Financial News, Prepper, Scripturalism, Theology, tagged , , , , on September 22, 2019| 1 Comment »

Financial Crisis

“But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those who are in the midst of her depart, and let not those who are in the country enter her.”

    – Luke 21:20-21

Last week we looked at the third of three case studies in prepping from the Old Testament, Joseph, Prime Minister of Egypt. The other two case studies were the accounts of Noah and the end of the world as he knew it and Lot’s narrow escape from Sodom. This week, I’d like to turn our attention to the New Testament and in particular to the teaching of Jesus himself that relate to the subject of prepping.

But before turning to Jesus’ teachings on prepping, it’s worth taking a little time to review the events in the financial markets last week. The general title for this series The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008, because it is the contention of this author that the crisis which manifested itself that year, sometimes referred to as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), has never gone away. Rather, the symptoms only were treated by massive money printing by the world’s leading central banks and other financial fakery, a great deal of which probably is still kept under wraps by the powers that shouldn’t be.

The first event from last week I’d like to look at was the New York Fed’s (The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most prominent of the Fed’s regional banks) bailing out the overnight Repo market to the tune of $53 billion late Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning, September 17th and 18th. Now you may be asking, “So just what is the overnight Repo and why should I even care?” Good questions.

Investopedia defines a Repurchase Agreement (Repo) as, “a form of short-term borrowing for dealers in government securities. In the case of a repo, a dealer sells government securities to investors, usually on an overnight basis, and buys them back the following day…Repos are typically used to raise short-term capital…Classified as a money-market instrument, a repurchase agreement functions in effect as a short-term, collateral-backed, interest-bearing loan. The buyer acts as a short-term lender, while the seller acts as a short-term borrower. The securities being sold are the collateral.”

For most of us, the repo market is a fairly obscure corner of the financial system, something that runs in the background. But what happened overnight while most of us slept was a sudden spike in the repo interest rate, which the week before had been 2.29%, but shot up to 10% before the Fed stepped in. As CNN reported, this was the first time the fed had to bail out the overnight repo market since late 2008, which just happened to be the height of the financial crisis.

The Fed conducted further bailouts on Wednesday night and Thursday night.

Finally, on Friday the Fed announced that it would conduct daily repurchasing operations through October 10.

One big takeaway from operation repo is that market forces want to take interest rates higher, which is exactly the opposite of what the Fed wants to have happen.

Which brings me to the second event of note in the financial markets last week, the Fed’s announcement that it was lowing interest rates by 0.25%. This is the second such announcement in the past two months, the previous one coming at the end of July.

Many mainstream commentators are confused by the Fed’s decision to lower interest rates. The reason is that lowing interest rates is something central banks do when the economy is struggling, but the official line is that the American economy is doing great and has never been better. Why is this?

Think of interest rates as the price of money. If the economy is doing well, this means businesses are borrowing to expand their facilities to keep up with demand, consumers and taking out car and home loans. And what happens when demand for a thing increases? All other things equal, the price goes up. With respect to demand for loans, this means that interest rates go up.

The opposite is the case when the economy is doing poorly. There is little demand from businesses to expand, so there is little demand for business loans. Consumers don’t have the income to support car an home loans, so they too are unable to take on debt to fund these purchases. When demand for money decreases, its price, that is to say the interest rate, tends to drop.

This is where the confusion comes in. Donald Trump is out there telling the whole world that the American economy is doing great, while at the same time forcefully arguing for lower interest rates. The Fed’s decision to lower rates strongly suggests that the economy is not doing as well as the Trump administration would like you to believe. Taken together with the Fed’s needing to bail out the repo market, lower interest rates are another data point suggesting an oncoming recession.

A third item of note from last week was the return of talk about a not too far off return to Quantitative Easing (QE) from none other than Fed Chairman Jay Powell. In plain English, QE is simply massive money printing (aka counterfeiting) by central banks to buy assets no one else wants to keep interest rates under control. First employed during as an emergency during the 2008 crisis, QE is now being seriously discussed in public. Question: If the economy really is as great as the powers that shouldn’t be want us to believe, why is the Fed talking about bringing back QE?

In the opinion of this writer, the three items mentioned above – the Fed’s bailout of the repo market, it’s decision to lower interest rates, and talk about QE – strongly suggest the Fed is worried about major problems in the financial system, perhaps even a financial crisis, just around the corner and strongly suggest what the Fed will do to combat those problems: print money.

So, what are Christians to make of all this? The most logical conclusion is that we are, in fact, facing a major financial storm and we need to rig for heavy weather. That is to say, we need to get prepared and to stay prepared. All which brings us back to where we started, the teachings of Christ on the subject of prepping.

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