Financial markets and economic indicators can be rigged, just like presidential elections.
The critical difference is election fraudsters only need to get away with their act every four years. Market manipulators, on the other hand, need to keep their chicanery hidden from the public day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
And it gets tougher and tougher and tougher to keep the mirage intact.
Eventually, markets demand reality and neither courts nor elected officials are going to be able to stonewall that truth indefinitely.
This is not a partisan rant. Republicans and Democrats alike have been complicit in throwing money at all our problems, keeping markets awash with liquidity and hoping against hope that an eventual solution can be found.
There is no solution. And so this ongoing delusion falls under the metaphorical category of kicking the can down the road.
In the process of can kicking, the powers that be have dug the U.S. into the fiscal abyss, the monetary point of no return.
For all those petty dictators who invoke science to justify their lockdowns and crackdowns, let them now admit to the daunting, inarguable mathematics of the moment.
An early December 2020 report by RBC Wealth Management, citing International Monetary Fund data, put U.S. debt at slightly more than $27 trillion, about 127 percent of gross domestic product.
Add in another trillion in stimulus payments being sent out now and you are at $28 trillion, with Democrats waiting to add trillions upon trillions to that debt total once they take over at the federal level in little more than a week.
For perspective, there has been $10 trillion of total federal government debt added in four years of a Trump administration. Before him, Obama oversaw an increase from $10 trillion total to $20 trillion total in his eight years in office.
Note that the radical Green New Deal, which the socialist arm of the Democratic party has been promised, has been estimated to cost as much as $93 trillion over 10 years.
This estimate is panned as being way too high by leftist advocates of the environmental boondoggle. But even optimists anticipate spending $18 trillion over the next 50 years, which would be slightly less than equaling our entire national debt that had been accumulated in 200-plus years through the end of the Obama administration.
That is $18 trillion in Green New Deal debt without factoring in any other deficit spending for giveaways like Medicare for all, student loan forgiveness, increased stimulus, universal basic income, and all the other promised socialist handouts.
It also doesn’t include deficit spending for things you’d expect from a federal government, such as the military, law enforcement, Social Security, original Medicare for the aged, Medicaid for the poor, etc., etc., etc.
Economists, at least the traditional ones, understand that once nations reach this level of indebtedness above and beyond the national’s total annual output, it is an inescapable situation.
There are no solutions, at least not any that the nation’s inhabitants would find palatable.
Huge tax increases and huge reductions in spending would be needed to address the problems.
Governments around the world, and in the United States in particular, have to keep expanding monetary bases and using their fire hoses of liquidity to keep markets moving and the masses placated.
You think you saw problems this past summer with unhappy social justice warriors taking to the streets? Well, imagine what it would look like if the entire populace, now addicted to periodic government handouts under the catchall term of “stimulus,” suddenly found those handouts stopped due to lack of government credit.
It doesn’t matter that we have a walking cadaver in Joe Biden about to occupy the Oval Office. The greatest financial minds in history could not avert what is coming and that is a worldwide financial crisis.
It is incredible that the whole mess has been kept from imploding to this point. But it is coming.
Look for price inflation to heat up and with that process, the federal government left with no possible remedy other than to keep putting gasoline on the flame in the form of increased borrowing to inflate further the money supply.
Eventually, there is a crash and no amount of fresh money supply will stop it.
This partly explains the surge in Bitcoin, as investors and speculators look for something that won’t be rendered virtually worthless in a hyper-inflationary currency collapse.
More traditional safe havens, ones that unlike Bitcoin are usable even if the power grid and or internet collapse, are gold and silver,
Precious metals have been valued for thousands of years. They will continue to fulfill their role of money of last resort.
Do not be fooled by Central Banks, and others who badmouth gold while holding vast reserves of it. Do not be fooled by investment types, who would rather have you churning your stock portfolio than see you hunkered down with bullion in a home safe or third-party vault.
No one can put an exact date on a collapse. Still, preparing as soon as possible for the potential for one to happen in the near future would seem to be the way to go.
There likely will come a time, perhaps not too far off, when the gold and silver lifeboats will be unavailable. If you doubt that possibility, recall looking for toilet paper early last year, or try going shopping for a gun or ammunition today.
Demand can outstrip supply without warning.
I’m not an investment advisor and I don’t sell gold or silver. Whatever you do, you do by your own choice, taking all the attendant risks.
If you think our roiling society will be stable in the long run, that our economy will boom at historic rates to make the debt burden less onerous, then continue as you are.
Celebrate the Biden win, the Blue Wave, and get giddy with thoughts of persecuting Trump supporters.
The irony will be that many who are preparing for the unpleasant financial future likely will fall into that category of Trump voters, potentially giving them the last laugh after all.
Sam Ross Jr's site 