“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”
—The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
The fall of Rome was gradual and then sudden. So, too, will our current situation play out. I have never witnessed—nor have any of us—a time when everything boils over at once; but here we are.
It has been apparent, certainly over the last five years or so, that the federal government is in a death spiral. So, too, are many governments in the West as well as many others in far-flung corners of the world. It feels like we’re on a train crashing into a cavern and as each car tips into the abyss we continue to run to the caboose, praying that we have the strength to jump off before certain ruination.
We’ve run out of track.
Is Joe Biden responsible for this? He’s the engineer who sees the bridge is out and throws the throttle wide open as he manically giggles incoherently into that dark night. He didn’t blow up the bridge; we were going to roll over the edge eventually but slamming on the breaks may have been able to salvage something.
I keep harping on the fact that our national debt is no longer sustainable. That has been true for many decades but that was the gradual part. Suddenly we’re adding a trillion dollars to our national debt every 100 days. We used to talk about kicking the can down the road but we’ve run out of road, too. We could close down government tomorrow and raise taxes but we’d still not be able to pay off the debt. There is no help on the horizon. Keeping with the train analogy, that light at the end of the tunnel is not Donald Trump; that is the abyss.
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”
—Alexander Fraser Tytler
The gradual part was set in motion because we found a way to vote ourselves public monies. Obviously, that’s not money going into our pockets; that’s money removed from our pockets and spent to retain power by our political elites; while they believe they can happily ride the train till the very end, they don’t realize that they won’t be able to jump off either. That money was, too, thrown away into that abyss. It’s gone. We have received nothing in return and now we have to pay it back. Bankruptcy and ruin.
Institutional Blackholes
Samo Burja, CEO of Bismarck Analysis, suggests that at the peak of every civilization, institutional failures ensue. Institutions—meaning government, academia, business, industry, finance, professions, bureaucracies, etcetera—are intertwined and are built upon past institutions and in support of other institutions. When one institution fails, we hardly notice. However, a complex world system is built of a symbiotic nature of institutions and if these institutions are corrupt—by greed, politics, or incompetence—or have outlived their purpose, that interdependency acts like the proverbial house of cards and crashes gradually and then suddenly.
In his essay, Why Civilizations Collapse, Burja uses an example of institutional crumble that I found astonishing. FOGBANK is a code name for a material used in manufacturing nuclear missiles in our national stockpile. The actual substance or process remains classified and so the public doesn’t know exactly what it is.
The problem: Neither did the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), tasked with updating out aging nuclear missiles in 2000.. Because we stopped building nukes by 1989, the NNSA had lost the knowledge of how to manufacture this magical item. When the project began, it was learned that all records of the FOGBANK manufacturing process had been lost during decommissioning programs. At a cost of over $69 million dollars and five years, the agency was able to finally reverse engineer the material so that it could finish the refurbishment project.
In eleven years, we had lost technological knowledge that had been developed during the Cold War. Just think of all of the institutional knowledge that has been lost since the beginning of the Internet Age. Software takes care of most all activities within institutions. As time passes, the building block knowledge for the computer age has faded into distant memories that are no longer supported by the inventors.
Think about the use of calculators since the 1970s. Can an engineer of today use a slide rule? How many of us even know what is a slide rule?
If globalists are successful at their idiotic Great Reset, how much institutional knowledge will be lost forever?
Why does the scientific community suddenly abandon the scientific method, a rigorous exercise to validate observations?
In the case of Climate Change!, they have, en masse, ignored true scientific observations for mathematical models that predict the end of the world, even though they “validate” their models with tampered data and false narratives to reenforce their echo chamber (never mind that the models cannot “predict” past atmospheric conditions).
These scientists propose ludicrous ideas to combat Climate Change! that could actually do real harm to global climate like injecting millions of tons of ice into the stratosphere in order to dry out the atmosphere and allow heat to escape earth. Holy Biblical Floods, Batman. Great idea! Nothing could possibly go wrong by removing natural water from our skies, could it?
The same can be asked about the covidiocy fiasco when world scientists proclaimed that the public health professionals are incontrovertible in their pronouncements. Government “overseers” ordered us to take an untested shot; medical associations claimed it to be safe and effective; hospitals wouldn’t treat anyone who had not received the shot; doctors pushed it on unsuspecting patients like they were drug pushers on a seedy street corner. It doesn’t take a scientist to know that was a disaster, something that this society will be paying for far into the future. All of the failings of the two most ludicrous issues in the modern era can be explained by greed (both money and power), politics, and/or incompetence.
Our great industrial strength is crumbling. Forget about the fact we shipped all of our factories to China in the name of globalization. Our largest aircraft manufacturer is teetering on the brink of destruction. When bolts, jet fuel, and landing gear rain down on the unsuspecting and wing tips disintegrate it’s no wonder that nearly half of all Gen Z kids don’t want to fly on Boing aircraft. There are now apps that allow people to book flights based upon whether or not the plane is a 737 Max. And it’s a good idea since Boing admitted that wiring issues in the 737 Max could cause a pilot to suddenly lose control of the aircraft.
Even West Point is crumbling. The superintendent of the military academy changed the mission statement of the Corps of Cadets. Once it said, in part, “…committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country…” Now it states “…committed to the Army Values…” Nowhere in the revised statement is mentioned the United States. By going to West Point, you are now expected to follow what the Army tells you are their values. What if the orders are to mow down a group of protesters because they stand against Army Values? Who decides what are Army Values?
And, as a final example where there are so many more, Google, the monopolistic purveyor of all things influenced by modern tech, has a diversity problem. The AI-powered Google Gemini famously spit out racially inaccurate pictures of historic figures, among other misappropriated images, to reflect a white-free environment. Was this intentional or the product of too much diversity?
According to insiders, it was a product of the dysfunctionality of Google’s corporate culture. In its zeal to wipeout whitey, it diversified based on race but expunged political and cultural differences. The company gained its dominance through innovation and creativity but retracted its claws after it captured an unassailable market share. It has waged a war to “reimagine” the world in its own sicko critical social justice persona, i.e. wokism. The corporate environment is in free fall and the monolithic institution of Google itself is crumbling. Will it continue in its missteps and, hopefully, destroy itself to be rebirthed by competitors with true diversity of thought and reason?
All institutions are but cogs in the machine of our society and only a few cogs have to crack before the whole machine grinds to a halt. We have become over-reliant on and too trusting of our institutions because they promised safety and convenience, but have only delivered ruination.
The Financial Death Spiral
Noted investor and financial expert John Rubino has been sounding the alarm of the inevitable death spiral of the dollar.
What is a financial death spiral? Very simple: when you borrow money to pay off the money you borrowed yesterday, how will you pay off today’s debt tomorrow? You can’t. Even the most ignorant of ignoramus lenders will eventually cut you off. Hopefully, it isn’t some predatory mobster who will send someone to kneecap us, like, say a Putin or Xi.
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) just sold their 29% interest in a Manhattan office building on Park Avenue for $1 and the assumption of their debt. They would rather lose what they put in than get sucked into the debt hole. Other investors are doing the same. This will become a contagion as commercial real estate investors begin dumping debt.
The losses will hit the small and regional banks particularly hard. As Rubino states:
You will get these massive bank runs that the government will have to step in and bail out. This is one of many things that will happen in the not-so-distant future. This will impact government finances in a scary way that will send people’s attention to the currency. In other words, if we have another $3 trillion bailout on top of everything else that’s going on . . .what is that going to do to the dollar?
...Currencies are being inflated away [in the hopes of mitigating the debt] with all these bailouts, deficits, wars and all these things that are going on that are bad for the currency. So, people start selling government bonds, which push up interest rates and blows up even more bad [sic] real estate and paper . . . until you get a debt spiral, a real live financial death spiral than cannot be fixed...
I was talking to a real estate guy the other day, and he said this is not just inevitable, it is imminent. It is happening now. It is happening quickly, and it is going to hit the headlines... [emphasis from source]
Bank of America seems to be the first of Big Finance to sound the alarm, issuing warnings of an eminent U.S. dollar collapse. The financial institutions are the big cogs and as they crumble, as they did in 2008, along with all of the other institutions now in peril, society will be in a precarious situation.
These are called bubbles:
A bubble is an economic cycle that is characterized by the rapid escalation of market value, particularly in the price of assets. This fast inflation is followed by a quick decrease in value, or a contraction, that is sometimes referred to as a "crash" or a "bubble burst."
What goes up must come down, gradually and then suddenly.
While greed, as always, can be blamed, it is the condition the world’s central banks created as they pushed “free money” (loaned to institutional investors at near zero percent interest rates for years) into the stock market. Until recently, no one could deposit their money into savings accounts with the expectation that their accounts would grow. In fact, some banks were charging customers for keeping their savings in their banks. If one was looking for a safe haven for their retirement savings, there was no longer one to be found. Only investments in the stock market and real estate were offering any long-term return on investment. These are the institutions that are now crumbling.
Congress can no longer control this beast they created with unwieldily deficit spending and they are no longer even trying. Part of that is because they’re a bunch of conniving fiends that are stuffing cash into their pockets while waiting their turn for the lifeboats (which, they don’t realize have massive holes in the keels).
Part of the problem is that we continually voted these scoundrels back into office. There are some very intelligent members of congress but the vast majority couldn’t pass a high school civics test—nor do they care to; they are mostly plastic-haired, blindingly white-toothed morons who are greatly deficient in the self-awareness category. And none of them have a grasp on basic economics. I wouldn’t turn my household finances over to any of them and yet we’ve given them the keys to our national treasures? Not too smart on our part.
If it’s all ending, why even vote in November?
There’s no such thing as a soft landing. A crash is a crash and a lot of people are going to really get hurt. The eventual unraveling of our financial system (and, because of interconnectivity, the rest of the world’s) may happen sometime this year—though the progressives are going to try like hell to keep it from happening before November—or next, or even a few years down the road. Politicians certainly have been the catalyst behind the catastrophe so why do we want to trust them with what happens next? I certainly trust a businessman who has weathered storms in the real world (and continues to do so), coming through the whirlwind stronger than before. There is, however, no guarantee that Donald Trump will be able to manage what’s coming.
We must look beyond the coming valley to the peak just over the horizon. What do we want that to look like?
Where do we want to be when the worst is in the rearview mirror? Do we want the emergence of a tyrannical dystopia governed by the people trained by organizations like the World Economic Forum, or those that would encourage a return to a simpler, market-based economy designed to rebuild, not further destroy?