Steve Bull's Blog, page 117
April 23, 2023
World War Three Chronicles, Part 2
As World War Three progresses with the proxy war in Ukraine grinding the nation and its war weary people into dust, we need to pay close attention to the second front. The systematic demolition of US Dollar Hegemony.
Part one of this series is embedded here: World War Three Chronicles, Part1
We are witnessing epochal changes in the global economy with the independent states, centred around the BRIC’s nations, now trading oil in their own currencies.
This development represents an existential threat not ‘just’ for US Dollar hegemony but for US military and industrial hegemony in what has rapidly become a multi-polar world.
China and to a lesser extent Russia are masters of “Soft Power”. The controlled demolition of US dollar hegemony is clearly underway.
Let’s take a field trip to the frontlines. Batton down the hatches, it’s going to be one hell of a transition, let’s hope we survive it! I would rate our chances as slim because of the mendacity existing in the USA and the impossibility of it meeting it’s debt obligations once the Greenback is no longer the worlds reserve currency.
“Brian Berletic and Danny Haiphong discuss the HUGE implications of Saudi Arabia taking steps to join China in forging peace in the Middle East.”
“The BRICS collective, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is working on a common currency in an attempt to ditch the US dollar and push back against America’s dominance. The move comes as Moscow and Beijing call for de-dollarisation in the face of Western sanctions”.
Dumping the Dollar: Will a new BRICS currency replace the US currency for trade?
“As the United States combats a recent flood of countries ‘de-dollarizing‘ – trading commodities in other currencies, the last thing that was needed was French President Emanuel Macron amplifying this message.“
…click on the above link to read the rest…
“No Way Out” for Global Markets Trapped in a Doom Loop of Debt
In this compelling conversation with Wealthion founder, Adam Taggart, Matterhorn Asset Management principal, Matthew Piepenburg, addresses the current and vast range of headline market topics, signals and risks. Inflation, deflation, risk assets, bond stress, cryptos, war, bank failures, CBDC’s rise, trapped policy makers and, of course, the topic of precious metals are all carefully and plainly discussed.
Piepenburg’s broader views on current and future financial conditions are bluntly yet realistically presented as a “no way out” scenario for global economies distorted by cornered central bankers. The bottom line is as simple as it is incontrovertible: The global economy is stuck in a doom loop of debt.
Either central banks raise rates to allegedly “kill inflation” by killing the economy and markets, or they resort to more mouse-click money and kill the currency in your wallet.
Historically, all debt-cornered nations spur collapsing markets followed by collapsing currencies and inflation-driven social unrest. Leaders of all eras and stripes (left or right) then address this unrest with tighter, more centralized controls over our economies and lives. CBDC is a classic and modern symptom of this timeless pattern. So is war. The current era will be no exception, as history (from ancient Rome to Chairman Mao, or Napoleon to the rise of fascist leaders of the 1930’s) offers no exception.
Piepenburg tracks the current evolution of this trend in a Federal Reserve that has tightened too fast and too high, breaking everything in its path in one dis-inflationary debt or banking crisis after the next, which are inevitably “solved” via more inflationary and mouse-clicked dollars. End result? Currency debasement, for which gold is one obvious and historical solution rather than “gold bug” apology.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Europe’s Energy Troubles Continue: Hydro And Nuclear Output Declining
Last year, Europe was on the brink of an energy breakdown as Russian gas flows dried up and most of Europe doubled down on renewable energy.
The renewable energy bet paid off, in a way. Solar and wind electricity generation in Europe hit a record in 2022. In fact, for the first time in history, wind and solar together produced more electricity than natural gas-fired power plants.
There was just one problem with that. Lower hydro and nuclear output more than wiped out the significance of that record output.
Droughts were severe in Europe last year. They threatened major trade routes such as the Rhein in Germany and the Po in Italy. And they also caused severe declines in hydropower electricity output. For example, in Spain, hydropower output dropped by almost half because of the droughts. All this might repeat this year as well.
Meanwhile, nuclear wasn’t doing so swell, either. France suddenly found that years of underinvestment in maintenance would have consequences: emergency reactor shutdowns for repairs and maintenance.
The problems cost EDF a massive annual loss of $19 billion as half of its reactors had to be shut down for maintenance. Most blamed the pandemic, but nuclear experts such as Mark Nelson saw the roots of the problem much further into the past when France decided to bet on renewables over nuclear.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
MIT Study: Nuclear Power Shutdown Could Lead To Increased Deaths
The MIT team took on the questions in the text following in a new study appearing in Nature Energy.
Nearly 20 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power. The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Many of these power plants have run for more than half a century and are approaching the end of their expected lifetimes.
Policymakers are debating whether to retire the aging reactors or reinforce their structures to continue producing nuclear energy, which many consider a low-carbon alternative to climate-warming coal, oil, and natural gas.
Now, MIT researchers say there’s another factor to consider in weighing the future of nuclear power: air quality. In addition to being a low carbon-emitting source, nuclear power is relatively clean in terms of the air pollution it generates. Without nuclear power, how would the pattern of air pollution shift, and who would feel its effects?
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization
Highlights
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
Abstract
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
A Pyrrhic End to 130 Years of Vicious Bad Money and Banking Crises
A Pyrrhic End to 130 Years of Vicious Bad Money and Banking Crises
The original vicious circle starts with inflationary interventions in an up-to-then well-anchored monetary regime. Consequent asset inflation spawns a banking crisis. That leads to the installation of anticrisis safety structures (one illustration is a novel or enhanced lender of last resort). Alongside a possible monetary regime shift, these damage the money’s anchoring system. A great asset inflation emerges and leads on to an eruption of another banking crisis, devastating in comparison with the first.
An array of additional safety structures is put in place which makes the now-bad money worse than before. After a long and variable lag, a long and violent monetary storm means the safety structures fail, a banking crisis again erupts but this time milder than the previous.
Then a further tinkering with the safety structures causes money to deteriorate even more in quality. Another shift in monetary regime coincidentally does much additional damage. Consequently, in time, a new crisis erupts much worse than the last one.
The safety engineers do more work, causing yet more damage to the mechanisms essential to sound money. But now the safety structures are so pervasive and strong across the banking industry that there is widespread belief that bank crisis eruptions will be smaller or, more likely, totally repressed.
Subsequent events demonstrate those beliefs to be hollow. There is a new round of safety structure elaboration leading to further monetary deterioration. Regime officials declare the end of bank crises.
The cumulative economic cost of this vaunted triumph over bank crisis is an advance of monopoly capitalism and monetary statism that throttles the essential dynamism of free market capitalism. Malinvestment becomes cumulatively larger. Living standards in general suffer. The severely ailing money which subsists is beyond any cure except the most radical.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
April 21, 2023
Facebook Censors Seymour Hersh’s Article About US Involvement in Nord Stream Pipeline Attack
Using a biased ‘fact check’ with direct links to the Norwegian government.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Facebook is censoring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s story about US involvement in the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines using a ‘fact checker’ with links to the Norwegian government in what represents a clear conflict of interest.
Earlier this year, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation which was organized with the aid of the Norwegian government, Norwegian Secret Service and Navy.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger first noticed the issue when he tried to post Hersh’s article to Facebook, but saw the social media giant had slapped a warning label on the link stating, “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.”
Except the ‘fact-checkers’ in question aren’t independent at all.
As Shellenberger notes, “Hersh is infinitely more independent than Facebook’s Norwegian fact-checker. The fact-checking organization is a partnership with a Norwegian government-owned media company, NRK, which has a direct self-interest in censoring the story.”
By censoring the article with a dubious ‘fact check’, Facebook is preventing it from reaching a much wider audience, relegating it in the algorithm.
This is yet another example of how the ‘fact-checker industrial complex’ serves to censor legitimate information at the behest of governments by posing as an independent, non-bias actor when in reality it is merely a front for state control.
Facebook’s claim, made a few years ago, that it cannot act as “the arbiter of the truth” for any contentious issue, has been proven dishonest once again.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
April 17, 2023
Stable Electricity: A Long Slow Goodbye
Photo by Dan Meyers on UnsplashElectricity shortages are looming for the UK and Europe, and then later for the rest of the overdeveloped world as well. Blackouts will become common, and you will get power only for a couple of hours a day — just like in countries with a less favorable economic position. Most likely not this summer though, maybe not next year. Perhaps not even the year after. Losing a stable electric grid is a slow grind and will go in tandem with the long decline of fossil fuels.
Although most people, who got used to receiving a stable supply of power from the magic wall socket, don’t realize this as an immediate danger, the stability of the grid depends on the availability of fossil fuel (mainly natural gas) power plants ready to fill in the gaps during peak consumption hours. Contrary to the magical thinking pouring in on all channels, we are lacking the infrastructure to switch to a grid powered by ‘renewable’ electricity alone. As ecologist William E. Rees has pointed out:
The U.S. consumes about 4000 terawatt-hours of electricity every year, or 563 times the existing battery storage capacity…
An entire year of battery production from the multi-billion Gigafactory could only store a mere three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electric demand…
Storing only 24 hours’ worth of U.S. electricity generation in lithium batteries would thus cost $11.9 trillion, take up 345 square miles and weigh 74 million tonnes…
…and would take 10 years for 48 Nevada sized Gigafactories to produce the battery cells… For storing one, single day worth of electricity. One day, not months needed to cover the supply and demand gap in the winter. All this would come at an enormous ecological as well as resource cost (lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and their resulting toxic waste streams). Not to mention the fact that we simply neither have these resources at hand nor the mining capacity to get them (if would find them).
…click on the above link to read the rest…
The Green Growth Delusion
Advocates of “Green Growth” promise a painless transition to a post-carbon future. But what if the limits of renewable energy require sacrificing consumption as a way of life?
A tree is surrounded by solar panels in Los Arcos, Spain, on Feb. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos, File)
In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also an act of desperation. Our energy-ravenous culture cannot continue producing carbon without destroying the systems that are the basis of any advanced civilization, not to mention life itself. Something must be done, and quickly, to moderate the pressure on the atmospheric sink while powering the economic machine.
The consensus on the need for scaling up renewable energy is rarely disturbed by a disquieting possibility: What if techno-industrial society as currently conceived — based on ever-increasing GDP, global trade and travel, and complex global production and distribution chains designed to satisfy the rich world’s unquenchable appetite for bigger, faster, more of everything — what if that simply cannot function without energy-dense fossil fuels? What if, despite the promises of Green New Deal boosters, it is impossible to make sustainable the current system that provides billions of people sustenance, shelter, goods?
This possibility is not mentioned thanks to the dominance of “green growth.” This is the idea that the organizing principle of our civilization — endless growth of economies and populations — can be decarbonized swiftly in a way that will involve no material disruption. Green Growth holds out the promise of transitioning from fossil fuels directly into something like an earth-friendly utopia without a hitch and without meaningful sacrifice…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
April 12, 2023
Project Icebreaker: The Beginning Of A One World Digital Currency System?
There has been extensive discussion in the past couple of years within alternative media circles about the dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs); a currency framework very similar to blockchain based products like Bitcoin but directly controlled by central bankers. It’s a threat that some analysts including myself have been writing about for more than a decade, so it’s good to finally see the issue being addressed more in the mainstream.
The Orwellian nature of CBDCs cannot be overstated. In a cashless society most people would be dependent on digital products for exchanging goods and labor, and this would of course mean the end of all privacy in trade. Everything you buy or sell or work for in your life would be recorded, and this lack of anonymity could be used to stifle your freedoms in the future.
For example, say you like to eat steak regularly, but the increasingly authoritarian government decides to list red meat as a health risk and a “climate change risk” due to carbon emissions from cows. They determine by your purchase history (which they have full access to) that you have contributed more carbon pollution than most people by eating red meat often. They declare that you must pay a retroactive carbon tax on your past purchases of red meat. Not only that, but your insurance company sends you a letter indicating that you are a medical risk and they cut off your health coverage.
Products you consume and services you use can be tracked to create a psychological profile on you, which could then become a factor in determining your social credit score, just as CCP authorities do in China today…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
