By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,
Financial writer John Rubino says everywhere you look, debt is exponentially mounting.
Nothing demonstrates the “imminent bankruptcy” problem better than the financial obligations of New York City. Rubino says,
“They just announced that they have unfunded liabilities for retiree healthcare, just retiree healthcare and not the rest of their pensions, of $100 billion. That’s for a city, not a state or a country, and if you add their unfunded liabilities for their pensions, which is another $50 billion or so, and their official debt, which is $50 billion or so, you get $200 billion that New York City is on the hook for that they have not put money away for. If a private sector company had finances like that, they would be insolvent, and their accountants would force them to say that.”
You can tell the same story for cities, states and countries around the world swimming in unrepayable debt. So, what will be done when bond defaults and financial failures begin? Will Trump let it go like the failed debt of Puerto Rico or have massive bailouts? Rubino says,
“It’s possible that Trump will teach that lesson to the system, but I think the numbers are so big now the risk of a 1930’s style depression, or a Weimar Germany hyperinflation, is so great these guys are going to be terrified of anything that seems to be destabilizing.
The pressure on whoever is in charge of the central bank or federal government is going to be to try to nip crises in the bud before they can really get going when you don’t know what is going to happen. For instance, New York City goes bankrupt, and that pulls down Chicago, and then that pulls down California. What does that mean? Nobody knows, and nobody wants to find out.”
Rubino contends massive bailouts will explode in the next economic downturn, and they will have grave consequences for interest rates and the U.S. dollar. Rubino says,
“They would say, hey, here’s $5 trillion to bail out states and localities across the country. People will see that and will worry about what that means for the value of the dollar. So, they sell dollars, and not just here, but all around the world.
The dollar starts to fall, and interest rates start to go up. If the dollar is tanking, who wants to lend money to the federal government that is going to be paid back in a depreciating currency?
So, our interest rates go up. That causes our interest costs to go through the roof and forces the government to borrow even more...
At some point, the whole thing blows up. There is a number out there when all this will happen... So, the question is what is that number, and when do we hit it?
This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group
Around three years ago, in September 2015, I wrote an article titled ‘The Real Reasons Why The Fed Will Hike Interest Rates‘ in which I predicted that the Federal Reserve, in the face of criticism, would soon pursue a program of interest rate hikes into economic weakness. I argued that this plan would be somewhat similar to what the Fed did in the early 1930’s; an action that prolonged the Great Depression for many more years. So far, my prediction has proven to be correct.
Despite the fact that the Fed keeps raising rates as it tightens the noose around the supposed economic “recovery”, there are still many people out there who refuse to accept that the central bank would deliberately implode the fiscal bubble that it has spent the last ten years inflating. Even today, I still see arguments proclaiming that the Fed will be forced to pull back if stocks fall beyond 15% to 20%. I also see claims that Fed officials like Jerome Powell had "better start looking for another job" because Donald Trump won’t be happy with Fed policies that could cause a crash. This is pure delusion from people who do not understand how the Fed operates.
First and foremost, let’s be clear, the Federal Reserve is an autonomous entity that does not answer to government oversight. It never has and it probably never will. This reality is supported by admissions by former Fed officials like Alan Greenspan, who publicly noted that the Fed answers to no one.
The central bank functions in quite the opposite capacity from what many people assume. As Carroll Quigley, prominent American historian and mentor to Bill Clinton, noted in his book Tragedy And Hope:
"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."
In other words, governments do not assert control over central banks; central banks assert control over governments. That said, there are some exceptions to this rule. For example, an act of Congress can be used to enforce a full audit of Fed activities, something which has never been done.
Fed propaganda asserts the lie that the bank is audited annually by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), but this is NOT an audit of Fed financial actions and policy initiatives. Rather, it is an audit of minor expenditures. Knowing how many pencils and desks the Fed purchases in a year does not help us to understand the bank’s influence over our economic security. All other audits of the Fed are done internally by the Fed’s own Board of Governors. This is hardly transparent or independent.
The only time the public has gained access to even a partial government audit of Fed activities was during the audit of TARP. This alone exposed trillions of dollars in bailouts and overnight loans to various banks and corporations, many of which were foreign.
The GAO did nothing in terms of regulatory action against the Fed after it was revealed that they were funneling trillions in capital into foreign corporations. All they did was make a ledger of the transactions, and remained silent on the rest.
I remind readers of this history and the conditions surrounding Fed actions because I want to drive the point home that, for now, the Fed and other central banks dictate the rules of the game. Some may say this has changed with the election of Donald Trump, but I disagree. If anything, as long as Trump is in office, the Fed will chase higher interest rates and steeper balance sheet cuts. They will not stop until markets break. And, the only solution (shutting down the Fed entirely) also comes with a set of extreme fiscal consequences.
There is a wall of cognitive dissonance when some in the public are confronted with this notion. They prefer to believe in a set of standard lies rather than accept that the Fed is a saboteur of our financial system. Here are those lies, listed in no particular order…
While it is true that the Fed is currently in charge of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the idea that the Fed is somehow indispensable to the global establishment has always bewildered me. Everything the Fed has done since its inception in 1913 has been designed to diminish the U.S. economy and erode the purchasing power of our currency. I ask, at what point has the Fed ever taken an action which did NOT result in a bubble or a bubble collapse? At what point has the U.S. economy ever improved at a fundamental level because of the Fed, rather than diminished in the wake of a fake recovery the Fed conned the public into believing in?
What else does the Fed do besides sabotage?
I believe the truth is that the Fed does not care about the U.S. economy, or even the survival of the dollar, as is obvious in their actions. The Fed is merely a puppet entity of larger institutions like the Bank for International Settlements or the International Monetary Fund. These institutions seek centralization at a global level, with a global currency system and global economic authority, as they have openly admitted to in their own publications. The U.S. economy as we know it today, and the Fed by extension, are expendable in this pursuit.
The Fed will continue on its current course no matter the cost, because there is a greater strategy in play. In fact, some elites may even welcome a shutdown of the Fed at this time because this opens the path for the death of the dollar as the world reserve currency and the introduction of a new world monetary system, while all the consequences surrounding the shift can be blamed on political chaos and coincidence.
To drive the point home, I leave readers with a revealing quote from Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, as she outlines why crisis in national economies is actually good for the IMF:
"When the world around the IMF goes downhill, we thrive. We become extremely active because we lend money, we earn interest and charges and all the rest of it, and the institution does well. When the world goes well and we’ve had years of growth, as was the case back in 2006 and 2007, the IMF doesn’t do so well both financially and otherwise."
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