Steve Bull's Blog, page 1301
September 28, 2017
Market Analyst: “We’re Going To Have A Biblical Event… There Is No Way To Stop This”
Gregory Mannarino of TradersChoice.net has been eerily prescient in recent years, having accurately forecast stock movements, Federal Reserve rate hikes and market sentiment. In a recent interview with Greg Hunter at USA Watchdog, Mannarino says that U.S. debt has reached such extreme levels that when foreign creditors and investors finally decide to pull out of the U.S. dollar the system will collapse to such an extent that it will have a devastating impact not just on our way of life, but may lead to a massive bursting of what he has dubbed “the human population bubble.”
Citing a “hockey stick” graph of U.S. debt, Mannarino explains exactly why you need to put your survival and preparedness plan in place:
That chart in front of you has to continue to rise. It can never stop. We can never pay off the debt.
If we try to do this the system implodes… the system is dependent on debt being borrowed into existence in perpetuity, in greater and greater amounts… that’s why the debt has doubled under Obama… it will double under Trump as well… until the system hits a moment of maximum saturation… when we cannot borrow anymore… that’s when the system implodes…
The scary thing about with that hockey stick?
The global population is paralleled with that hockey stick… So what does that mean?
If the debt were to correct… and it is going to at one point… what do people think is going to happen to the human population?
We are going to have, unfortunately, a biblical event… there is no way to stop this. People think that their lives are going to go on the normal way if the debt bubble bursts… People think that things are not going to change dramatically…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Conversation With Dr. Daphne Miller
A Conversation With Dr. Daphne Miller
Daphne Miller: These days I’m focused on the true cost of food. We have the cheapest food in the world. Food purchases make up something like 8% of our GDP. But when you start to factor in all the chronic diseases and environmental impacts—the health footprint of food—then all of a sudden we have the most expensive food in the world. Not 8% but 25% or higher. How is it we have something that is so cheap but so expensive?
Woody Tasch: How do we tackle this?
It’s clear to me that we need to start with the soil. It’s a vertical process. The businesses that are putting food on our table must have an interest in the soil. Their financial return has to be linked back, somehow, to the substrate of the soil. Any consumer goods company that isn’t thinking about the ecosystem in which the food is produced isn’t going to produce healthier food. We can slightly unprocess this or that, but unless we start thinking about the soil, we’re not going to get the shift we need. Farm policy is one shift we need, but the other is to shift the way the food companies do their business. And we need to change our understanding of health.
How does this affect your medical practice?
People are getting so sick because they aren’t connected to a healthy food system. Medicine is putting out fires, it gets to people way too late. We need to work upstream, outside the medical model.
When you say this, what’s the response of your colleagues in the medical community?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Affluence Without Abundance: What Moderns Might Learn from the Bushmen
Where did things go wrong on the way to modern life, and what should we do instead? This question always seems to lurk in the background of our fascination with many indigenous cultures. The modern world of global commerce, technologies and countless things has not delivered on the leisure and personal satisfaction once promised. Which may be why we moderns continue to look with fascination at those cultures that have persisted over millennia, who thrive on a different sense of time, connection with the Earth, and social relatedness.
Such curiosity led me to a wonderful new book by anthropologist James Suzman, Affluence without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen. The title speaks to a timely concern: Can the history of Bushmen culture offer insights into how we of the Anthropocene might build a more sustainable, satisfying life in harmony with nature?
Writing with the emotional insight and subtlety of a novelist, Suzman indirectly explores this theme by telling the history and contemporary lives of the San – the Bushmen – of the Kalahari Desert in Africa. The history is not told as a didactic lesson, but merely as a fascinating account of how humans have organized their lives in different, more stable, and arguably happier, ways. The book is serious anthropology blended with memoir, political history, and storytelling.
After spending 25 years studying every major Bushman group, Suzman has plenty of firsthand experiences and friendships among the San to draw upon. In the process, he also makes many astute observations about anthropology’s fraught relationship to the San. Anthropologists have often imported their colonial prejudices and modern alienation in writing about the San, sometimes projecting romanticized visions of “primitive affluence.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Late-September heat wave leaves climate experts stunned
“Never been a heat wave of this duration and magnitude this late in the season,” reports NOAA
found, “climate change increased the chances of seeing a summer as hot as 2017 by at least a factor of 10 and a heat wave like Lucifer by at least a factor of four since 1900″ (emphasis in original).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Puerto Rico is our Future
News reports tell of the devastation left by a direct hit from Category 4 Hurricane Maria. Puerto Ricans already coping with damage from Hurricane Irma, which grazed the island just days before, were slammed with an even stronger storm on September 20, bringing more than a foot of rain and maximum sustained winds of at least 140 miles per hour. There is still no electricity—and likely won’t be for weeks or months—in this U.S. territory of 3.4 million people, many of whom also lack running water. Phone and internet service is likewise gone. Nearly all of Puerto Rico’s greenery has been blown away, including trees and food crops. A major dam is leaking and threatening to give way, endangering the lives of tens of thousands. This is a huge unfolding tragedy. But it’s also an opportunity to learn lessons, and to rebuild very differently.
Climate change no doubt played a role in the disaster, as warmer water generally feeds stronger storms. This season has seen a greater number of powerful, land-falling storms than the past few years combined. Four were Category 4 or 5, and three of them made landfall in the U.S.—a unique event in modern records. Puerto Rico is also vulnerable to rising seas: since 2010, average sea levels have increased at a rate of about 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) per year. And the process is accelerating, leading to erosion that’s devastating coastal communities.
Even before the storms, Puerto Rico’s economy was in a tailspin. It depends largely on manufacturing and the service industry, notably tourism, but the prospects for both are dismal. The island’s population is shrinking as more and more people seek opportunities in the continental U.S.. Puerto Rico depends entirely on imported energy sources—including bunker oil for some of its electricity production, plus natural gas and coal.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
September 27, 2017
The ONLY Variable That Matters To The Price Of Gold
There are all sorts of positive fundamentals when it comes to the price of gold. There are the positive supply/demand fundamentals. The gold market is in a supply deficit. Mine reserves are at a 30-year low . The price of gold is below what is necessary to sustain the gold mining industry .
There are the positive geopolitical fundamentals. The world’s two most-unstable leaders – Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump – have been constantly trading threats and insults. And both of these people have nuclear weapons at their disposal. There is the endless “War on Terror”.
There are the positive economic fundamentals. Western real estate bubbles in major urban centers are at never-before-seen levels of insanity. Western markets are generally also at bubble levels, with U.S. markets representing bubbles on steroids . Western governments are bankrupt.
In relative terms, none of these fundamentals count .
There is one more important fundamental for the price of gold. Not only is it the most important fundamental, but it involves a variable which dwarfs all other fundamentals in magnitude — combined.
Regular readers have heard many times before that gold (and silver) is “a monetary metal” . The definition is simple. Gold is money. Therefore the price of gold must change proportionate to changes in the supplyof other forms of “money” (i.e. currency).
This is not a theory. It is a function of simple arithmetic. An elementary numerical example will illustrate this principle.
Suppose (in the entire world) there was a total of 10 oz’s of gold. Suppose also (in this hypothetical world) that there was a total of only $10,000 U.S. dollars. And in this hypothetical world, the price of gold is $1,000/oz.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Courage to Normalize Monetary Policy
A decade after the onset of the global financial crisis, it seems more than appropriate for central bankers to move the levers of policy off their emergency settings. A world in recovery – no matter how anemic it may be – does not require a crisis-like approach to monetary policy.
NEW HAVEN – Three cheers for central banks! That may sound strange coming from someone who has long been critical of the world’s monetary authorities. But I applaud the US Federal Reserve’s long-overdue commitment to the normalization of its policy rate and balance sheet. I say the same for the Bank of England, and for the European Central Bank’s grudging nod in the same direction. The risk, however, is that these moves may be too little too late.
Central banks’ unconventional monetary policies – namely, zero interest rates and massive asset purchases – were put in place in the depths of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. It was an emergency operation, to say the least. With their traditional policy tools all but exhausted, the authorities had to be exceptionally creative in confronting the collapse in financial markets and a looming implosion of the real economy. Central banks, it seemed, had no choice but to opt for the massive liquidity injections known as “quantitative easing.”
This strategy did arrest the free-fall in markets. But it did little to spur meaningful economic recovery. The G7 economies (the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy) have collectively grown at just a 1.8% average annual rate over the 2010-2017 post-crisis period. That is far short of the 3.2% average rebound recorded over comparable eight-year intervals during the two recoveries of the 1980s and the 1990s.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
FEMA Director Urges Americans to Develop “a true culture of preparedness” But No One Is Listening
It looks like preppers aren’t that crazy after all. FEMA’s new director, Brock Long, has repeatedly said that Americans do not have a “culture of preparedness,” something that is much-needed with the startling uptick in natural disasters. Long has only been the director of FEMA since June 20 of this year and already has had to deal with a historic number of disasters in this short period of time.
It appears that Mr. Long has a mindset of self-reliance based on a couple of recent statements he has made to the media, but the MSM doesn’t seem too interested in his ideas about fostering a culture of preparedness, despite the practicality and essential nature of his suggestions.
First, in an interview from Sept. 11 that I personally only heard about yesterday, FEMA’s new director, Brock Long, spoke with journalists to discuss the response to Hurricane Irma. In the interview, he said some things that vindicate all of us who have spent time and money working toward being prepared.
“I really think that we have a long way to go to create a true culture of preparedness within our citizenry in America. No American, no citizen, no visitor to this country is immune to disaster. And we have a long way to go to get people to understand the hazards based on where they dwell, where they work, and how to be prepared financially, how to be prepared through insurance, how to have continuity of operations plans for their businesses, so that we can avoid the suffering, the strife, and the loss of life. It’s truly disappointing that people won’t heed the warnings.
Straight out of our favorite prepper handbooks, right?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ron Paul Fears False Flag Looms, Urges Americans To Resist Deep State Push For War On North Korea
We are seeing now in regard to North Korea a replay of the type of campaign the deep state and the media used in 2001 through 2003 to stir up the American people to support the invasion of Iraq.
The Ron Paul Institute’s Adam Dick writes that this is the assessment of former United States House of Representatives member and presidential candidate Ron Paul in a Tuesday interview with Alex Jones on the Alex Jones Show.
In the interview focused on US foreign policy and, in particular, relations between the US and North Korea, Paul declared:
Just remember … the propagandists, the deep state and the media, convinced the American people that Saddam Hussein was a danger, They’re doing the same thing now with North Korea.
In response to this propaganda, Paul, who has served as chairman of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity since leaving the US House, says Americans “ought to wise up and just not buy into this.”
Watch Paul’s complete interview here:
Paul wrote this week about the move toward a US war against North Korea in his editorial “How to End the Korea Crisis
The Problems With Our Industrial Water System Today
THE PROBLEMS WITH OUR INDUSTRIAL WATER SYSTEM TODAY
Imagine that you´re in your home on a rainy afternoon. It has been raining for two days straight now and your front yard is full of puddles. The water is rushing along the drain ways on the side of the road and the local news is talking about the stress on the local sewer system that this extra rain is causing. When you turn on the faucet in your kitchen sink to wash up the dishes from lunch, however, the water that you use may very well be coming from hundreds of miles away in an area that may very well be experiencing a drought.
Our conventional, industrial water supply has very little connection to local watersheds or local ecosystems. Rather, the focus has been on taking water from areas where water is apparently abundant and moving it to areas with high population densities or areas where water is scarce. To do this, we depend on huge, energy dependent pumping systems that most likely depend on the continued availability of cheap fossil fuels to fuel these pumps.
A CITY IN THE DESERT
Las Vegas, Nevada is the epitome of unsustainability (and lunacy) when it comes to water. Located in the middle of a desert where water is scarce, Las Vegas has depended on Lake Mead for its water. However, in recent years it has become apparent that the thirsty city of Las Vegas is pulling water out of Lake Mead faster than the natural inflows can replenish it. To solve this problem, the city of Las Vegas has begun purchasing rights to groundwater throughout the state hoping to assuage their water crisis by pumping water out of the ground and sending it hundreds of miles away to irrigate the many golf courses in Las Vegas and offer luxurious hot showers to the over 100,000 hotel rooms of the signature casinos of the city.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
