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If prosperity is based on prodigious production of useful surplus goods and services, equitably traded and enjoyed, then anything that interferes with that is contrary to reason.
Since money has no correlation with the marketplace of goods and services, a people bent on "getting rich" in terms of money tokens will be endlessly fooled. Just look at the inflation the past century has experienced.
The buying power of $0.10 in 1910, was 100 times greater than the $10.00 of 2021. But the person getting paid piles and piles of depreciating currency thinks he is "getting richer."
He might work 2x as much as the generation of the 19th century to acquire what they did, but he has the advantage of high technology and power tools that should make life easier - right?
Look around - how many "jobs" in America still involve producing surplus usable goods and services necessary for our survival?
Excluding usury (interest), and all related enterprises based on that scam, what's left?
Where are the truck farms, and producers of basic foodstuffs? In the supermarket, we're importing food from Asia, S. America, Europe, etc.
EX:
Great Value cooked shrimp - product of Vietnam
Great Value canned mushroom pieces and stems - product of Poland
Star Kist Tuna - canned in the USA but caught where? and by whom? Or were they factory ships of another flag?
Birdseye frozen broccoli - product of Mexico
Ditto for Birdseye frozen cauliflower - product of Mexico.
Many foods are 'distributed' by American companies - but do they also PRODUCE those foods?
If it doesn't say "Made in America" one might be suspicious.
Where are the American factories producing clothing, shoes, outwear, let alone the mills to make fiber into thread, etc?
Peavey Musical Instruments shut down their whole American production in Meridian, Mississippi, and now sources their instruments, etc, from Vietnamese and Chinese companies. Ironically, Hartley Peavey was the pioneer that used computerized mass production to precision cut his necks and bodies for his guitars. Now, China is using it to crank out gazillion instruments, etc.
. . . .
When a people would rather "make money" than be more productive producers of useful goods and services, it's over, and the fat lady has left the building.
(I excluded usury because that is the engine of destruction. Even GM makes more profit from GMAC than from building cars and trucks. Insanity!)
But the REAL CULPRIT is the government that debauched the money token, triggered inflation (by taxing American labor and industry) and capitulated to international usury.
"Star Kist Tuna - canned in the USA but caught where? and by whom? Or were they factory ships of another flag?"
They are probably referring to their factory in American Samoa. So while it's "canned in the USA" it's a different animal. The minimum wage for cannery workers is $5.56/hour. Up until several years ago the US minimum wage didn't apply to territories but they changed the law so that the minimum wage goes up like 40 cents every 3 years until it does match federal minimum wage.
As a result of the law, most of the canneries closed and shipped the jobs to Asia. Star Kist is owned by a South Korean company.
I believe the tuna at the American Samoa plant is all from US flagged ships. There is (or was) a 50 mile exclusion zone around the island where only small American Samoan fishermen can fish. Outside that zone larger ships can fish but it is US waters and NOAA polices against foreign vessel intrusion. Foreign flagged vessels wouldn't take their catch to American Samoa because of the minimum wage, they would ship them to another starkist (or other company) cannery.
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I believe the tuna at the American Samoa plant is all from US flagged ships. There is (or was) a 50 mile exclusion zone around the island where only small American Samoan fishermen can fish. Outside that zone larger ships can fish but it is US waters and NOAA polices against foreign vessel intrusion. Foreign flagged vessels wouldn't take their catch to American Samoa because of the minimum wage, they would ship them to another starkist (or other company) cannery.
As a guy who specializes in Electrical and Communications Infrastructure, with some knowledge of supply chains, I am always amazed at, and indebted to, guys like you, who know were the factories and stuff are.
Oddly, these just showed up on my system this morning. Wonder if they got quarantined because you have links with no commentary, or if the problem was something causing me to see a cached version of the page.
While I think the actual topic in this thread is financial or social collapse, this indecent does illustrate a social disorder and give us a time line from the igniting indecent to system fail.
All (actually about half of the population) of the "liberal" and "green living" people on the east coast (who keep telling us that we don't need fossil fuel) panicked when the pipeline shut down, and caused gas lines to form, stretching for blocks into the stations, long before there was any actual shortage. Ultimately, this wasted quite a bit of gas, running engines, while waiting in line.
While I don't know how many hours it took from when the pipeline shutdown became public to people lining up at the gas station, I do see that it took roughly six days to deplete the on hand supply (even while it was still being supplemented by other pipelines).
This is about the same timeline I have seen in the past. Six days from Obama announcing (between the lines) that he was going to come after our guns, to shelves being cleared of guns and ammo. Six days from announcement that the Covid pandemic was indeed going to substantially interfere with our lives, until most of the TP, rice, beans, and several other product were cleared from the shelves.
Seems to take six days from striking the match to the conflagration consuming most of whatever is targeted. Now the only related question I wonder about is: how long from striking the match until ignition? That would be: how long from public announcement until there are lines (beyond the normal lines)?
A bit of history. We had a "dot com" meltdown in 2001, when too many Internet assets were extremely overvalued, and a housing bubble, pushed to ridiculous extremes by Fannie May and other mortgage resellers, burst led to the near collapse of our entire banking system in 2008. https://blog.confluence.com/blog/mark-model-mark-myth
Now on the financial front, we have a problem looming, in the fractional reserve banking system. Now, fractional reserve banking has been around for more than 500 years, and it is good, to a point. It is like a transmission on a car (or gears on a bicycle), allowing money to do more for us, as it cycles through the economy.
But, like a transmission, if you select too high a gear, or too low, you have problems. In the first half of the twentieth century, the reserve fraction was 20%. Over the next 50 years, it was slowly lowered to 10%. Over the past dozen years, it was lowered to just a couple percent, and in March of last year it was lowered to zero.
Banks, by law, were required to hold a minimum of 10% of their holdings in reserves so they can meet their obligations in case of an emergency.
They just got rid of that requirement on March 26, 2020.
Banks are no longer required to keep any percentage of their deposits in reserves.
The FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) is a government entity that was created to insure your money that’s in the bank up to $250,000 guaranteed in case banks can’t meet their obligations.
While the FDIC is still claiming to be insuring people's money, I think this shows that the system is unraveling.
When the FDIC Chairman has to come out and make a public service announcement telling people not to pull their money out of the banks or keep their cash at home, things look grim.
In addition, we have an eviction and foreclosure crisis on the horizon, and a federal debt crisis at the end of July. We still have time to do something about those, but I don't know what we can do, that won't give us a bigger crisis in the future.
There are no reserves in the system, there is only debt. That is why the FED has to be the primary lender (instead of the lender of last resort per it's original charter). What we are seeing is the beginnings of runaway inflation. When this happened in the 1980's under Reagan, as a result of Nixon taking the world off the gold standard, the Fed chair Paul Volker stopped hyperinflation by raising rates... to 20%! In 1981 the interest rate on a home mortgage averaged about 17%. Contrast this to the present time, when mortgage interest of 4%+ kills the housing market.
The FED can't raise rates to combat inflation this time. It barely got the rates above 2% under Trump and everything started tanking and they had to quickly backpedal. The nominal interest rates (interest earned on currency minus the effects of inflation on the currency) are negative and they have to stay that way due to the amount of debt in the system. At this point it is unlikely that 0% nominal rates can keep the economy going for long. The central banks have painted themselves into a corner.
I'm not suggesting that the only outcome is imminent collapse. Many people thought that was going to happen in the 1970's when the global economy went full fiat. But they didn't anticipate Kissinger convincing OPEC to only sell oil in USD, essentially replacing gold with mid-east oil to prop the USD up as the reserve currency. But I'm also not suggesting that a white swan is going to save things this time. The USA has so many enemies within that those white swans, if not extinct, are endangered beyond help.
Democrat Jimmy Carter was the President from 1977 to 1981. Interest rates were brought under control by the Republicans.
Last edited by nalabama; 05-23-2021 at 10:46 AM..
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