Economic Devastation

[CoinCube]

greek agreement deadline 28th this month grexit might start contagion

I do not believe there is a high chance of a grexit. An exit would be in the best interest of the Greek people but it would cause immediate and severe economic pain. The Greek people despite recent cutbacks are not living within their means. In 2014 their budget deficit was 12.2% of GDP.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-budget

Greek Government Debt to GDP is 174.90% (the second largest in the world).
In 2015 Greece also will owe at least 22.3 billion euros in interest and principal payments (probably more as this assumes low interest rates on Greek debt). With the planned reversals in austerity it is an open question whether the Greeks would achieve a budget surplus even if all its debt was completely forgiven (which will not happen).

On the question of liberalizing labor markets, the government Greek government spokesman Sakellariis recently stated:"We will discuss it with workers and with pensioners. Whatever we do, we will do through dialogue. We will not legislate at the sole behest of outside factors."

That does not sound like the stance of a government interested in building a competitive economy to but a group of people interested in spending more of other peoples money. Greece is bargaining to extract concessions from richer European taxpayers. Their government will push hard for the best deal they can get and then fold as a grexit would result in much more short term economic pain and make the pledge of the Greek government to roll back austerity impossible to achieve.

The difference between the current and former Greek governments is a lot like the divide between Democrats and Republicans in the US. The former redistribute from the productive to the nonproductive poor while the latter redistribute from the productive to the nonproductive financial elite. The end result is the same.

[OROBTC]

...

CoinCube

The time may come soon when a thread on "Plan B Countries" should be started...  iamback has already given us a taste of which countries he would suggest.

I do not remember where I read a comment once, but it was to the effect of that the time to get OUT is when the pressure FIRST starts getting turned-up for real.  It is clear to all who observe the trend of an "Exit Tax" that it is getting higher and higher.  The comment I read pointed to when the Jews could have left Germany (at not outrageous cost) in the 1930s when all of THAT started.

One can learn from reading History.  While it does not repeat, there are always parallels.

[iamback]

For lack of a place to post this self-aggrandizing post, I torture readers here.

Armstrong has written about my T.O.E. which fundamentally models fundamental matter as cycles:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/02/16/time-the-fourth-dimension/

Welcome to my life now. That shit is what I feel again now (in spite of grinding my teeth to do 390 pushups and run 2 kms in the hills).

I used to have perfect health and energy. I used to run 13 miles (20 kms)!

350 pushups (100 x 100 x 100 x 50) and a faster 2kms this morning at 75 degree F (80+ in the closer tropical sun and due to high humidity) with 78% humidity.

[iamback]

Cross-posting from the Skycoin thread...

His model is ad-hoc, has too many variables and it works but you dont need more than nine variables.

Let's not lose too much time to somewhat off-topic tangents, but I just want to interject that Armstrong's model gives daily, weekly, and monthly trading information for numerous asset classes and even political economic issues. And the model has correlated repeating cycles (of human and nature) throughout recorded history. So he is able to make very time specific predictions, such as predicted the top of the Japanese stock market to the day and predicted the closing price of oil for Dec 31 2014.

The government insurance pool will be underfunded and forced to do death panels and deny coverage for necessary medical procedures, like what is happening in the veterans affairs scandal.

I wrote similarly recently:

...

This downward spiral for example reached genocide in Nazi Germany, because Hilter's Universal Health Care couldn't be funded, thus Goebbels created the propaganda excuse to exterminate the Jews, handicapped, etc.. The very wealthy can escape to alternative citizenships and position their investments and capital outside of harm's way. The middle class is trapped. (Note the USA will break up once the stage of violence is reached, and will not proceed to the abyss of genocide for those who have guns and/or organization. Those who don't have guns and remain within the bankrupt socialism cancer may experience eugenics, especially assisted suicide will probably become an option in the Obamacare at some point)

Note my salient point (in my prior post) that the USA has a large productive private sector yet also a large underbelly. This implicates the USA is the most dangerous in terms of what is coming because it has to expropriate to fund that underbelly and it has the military and NSA might to do so...a wounded Godzilla is more dangerous than a healthy mouse...

Here is Armstrong's post about that scandal:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/05/21/21188/

[iamback]

Decadence.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/joe-bidens-woman-touching-habit/article/2560311

Joe Biden's woman-touching habit

Vice President Joe Biden left some observers in and out of Washington aghast with his whisper-in-ear embrace of new Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter's wife Stephanie at Carter's swearing-in Tuesday. As Carter was delivering his first speech as Pentagon chief, Biden, standing in the background, put his arms on Stephanie Carter's shoulders and his face to her ear, apparently telling her something in what could reasonably be interpreted as an intimate embrace. A still image of the gesture shot around the social media world:

[r.jewell]

I agree with the 'can't buy knowledge' part. Internet has made the cost of most knowledge almost free or next to nothing, something that people in the pre-internet era couldn't dream of. Hopefully these large amounts of knowledge available can bring some quality changes.

and theres still so much common internet user doesnt even realize

[picolo]

Decadence.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/joe-bidens-woman-touching-habit/article/2560311

Joe Biden's woman-touching habit

Vice President Joe Biden left some observers in and out of Washington aghast with his whisper-in-ear embrace of new Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter's wife Stephanie at Carter's swearing-in Tuesday. As Carter was delivering his first speech as Pentagon chief, Biden, standing in the background, put his arms on Stephanie Carter's shoulders and his face to her ear, apparently telling her something in what could reasonably be interpreted as an intimate embrace. A still image of the gesture shot around the social media world:

He did it with a politician's daughter a few weeks ago. It could just be considered being friendly.
The real problem with Joe Biden is that he is a professional politician that has been living off everyone else's work.

[iamback]

It could just be considered being friendly.

Your "open-minded" attitude is a sign of decadence. In China, party officials are publicly demolished for immoral intrigue. Long gone is the era where doing something that could even be misperceived as immoral was considered a liability to public office. And long gone is the right to be politically incorrect on gay rights, feminism, etc..

[iamback]

Cross-posting from the Skycoin thread...

Gold price wont increase. Bitcoin wont increase. By the time this starts, the capital flows get cut off and there will be no money or capital inflows left to pump into the assets. All capital flows will get sucked in by extraction and a cratering economy. There will not be any hyperinflation. The prices may not increase until the chaos settles and economic growth resumes.

I roughly agreed with everything you had written, except for the clarification on Armstrong's model complexity, and I disagree with the above quote.

That capitals flows will get cut off is a possibility and worth discussing. If that happens, even partially, it will surely have effects, Dark Age or not. You cannot just ignore it or declare it not so.

I did not write that capital flows will not get cut off. They surely will!

I wrote that it is very unlikely that capital controls are successfully enforced in every nook and cranny of the globe, such that all global wealth is destroyed and we go into a Dark Age where only food is money. As far as I know, that has never happened in recorded history. Dark Ages have occurred (where only food was money and all the gold and silver gets buried in the ground because it is useless), but they were always limited to a portion of the globe. Asia has no economic incentive to do capital controls, they are not bankrupted by huge government socialism and cultural decadence as the West is. Asia will cooperate with the USA and Europe to hunt down the non-Asians, for as long as USA and Europe remain important markets. But Asia will not and has no incentive to apply wealth destruction to its own citizens, other than going after corruption in government (e.g. coup in Thailand, firing 900 party officials in China, and the Napoles scandal in the Philippines). Rather it is launching free trade and migration Asian Union in 2015. Asia is moving the opposite direction, and is becoming more financially liberalized, not less.

Skycoin was arguing that it was impossible for gold to rise because he was asserting that all wealth would get cut off. He was using that as a justification for why we need his Skycoin. I disagreed with him and also I think that is very pitiful marketing strategy. Good for a pump and dump on wide-eyed crypto zealots only. Rather I'd actually like to create something that normal people would flock too without any self-flatulating doom porn pumping.

[iamback]

I don't know how representative this is of France, but looks like a Islamic volcano ready to explode when the economy turns down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AltyhmrIFgo

[iamback]

OFF TOPIC. For those who are wondering about my chronic health issue.

Photos of back of my oral cavity: severe viral infection or oral cancer





Note I have not seen a physician on this particular aspect of my throat recently. If someone feeds back to me that I should, I probably will at some point soon.

I think I am correct to become aggressive in my treatment, because I have so many confirmations of HPV attacking in the head & throat area where it normally kills men with cancer about 10 - 15 years after initial
infection. In theory I was infected in 2006.

See 3 attached pics. Note also that my dangling soft palate is not pink not a solid color, rather more off whitish with pinkish spots.

Note I've had difficult swallowing for 2 years and larger tablets that I used to swallow easily not get lodged in my throat more easily.

Note I often have tightness in my throat and also nearly always have to clear my throat (of Flem) before I can speak.

http://whitespotson.com/white-spots-on-tongue-on-side-of-tongue-and-under-tongue/

Since the bulk of papillae is focused on the back of tongue, it is the most common place for the appearance of fur. Besides, this part of the tongue can be affected by vesicles (bubbles), which result from herpes infection

Uniform fur, located all over the back of tongue, is one of the
distinctive features of inflammation. It can appear on the background of acute respiratory infection, as well as in the aggregate of symptoms of such serious ENT diseases, as tonsillitis or diphtheria (in case of diphtheria, however, the fur has grayish hue). Sometimes, blotches concentrate in the view of the tongue tonsil, without spreading all over the back of tongue.

Besides, white spots on back of tongue accompany diseases of the digestive tract (ulcer, colitis, cholecystitis, pancreatitis). In case of the last 2 pathologies, the fur has more of a yellow coloring.

http://www.foodpyramid.com/conditions-disorders/white-spots-on-throat-causes-and-symptoms-10618/

Mononucleosis, also known as mono, is a contagious, viral infection that can cause white patches on the throat. This condition can cause symptoms for months and tends to be associated with severe fatigue and a sore throat. If you have mononucleosis, you may notice yellow or white spots on the back of your throat (where your tonsils reside). It is important to note that a strep throat infection that refuses to go away, even with treatment, can signal mononucleosis.

You may experience recurrent rashes, drowsiness, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, a lack of appetite and/or a swollen spleen, along with the white spots on the throat, fatigue and sore throat. Treatment may involve learning how to effectively manage your condition and/or any related infections. You can expect your fatigue to subside within a couple months.

[picolo]

I don't know how representative this is of France, but looks like a Islamic volcano ready to explode when the economy turns down.

If both your parents don't work, you are likely not to be productive either even if the state pours a lot of money in schools, housing ect. All this money may or may not help but you are still likely not to be productive because you are starting way off with both parents not working.

[okthen]

Note I have not seen a physician on this particular aspect of my throat recently. If someone feeds back to me that I should, I probably will at some point soon.

Man!!! Go to the doctor immediately!
You never know, it could be cured.
Stay away from stress, exercise if you can, cut the processed crap and sugars.
All the luck!

[picolo]

Note I have not seen a physician on this particular aspect of my throat recently. If someone feeds back to me that I should, I probably will at some point soon.

Man!!! Go to the doctor immediately!
You never know, it could be cured.
Stay away from stress, exercise if you can, cut the processed crap and sugars.
All the luck!

Good luck.

[CoinCube]

...

CoinCube

The time may come soon when a thread on "Plan B Countries" should be started...  iamback has already given us a taste of which countries he would suggest.

I do not remember where I read a comment once, but it was to the effect of that the time to get OUT is when the pressure FIRST starts getting turned-up for real.  It is clear to all who observe the trend of an "Exit Tax" that it is getting higher and higher.  The comment I read pointed to when the Jews could have left Germany (at not outrageous cost) in the 1930s when all of THAT started.

One can learn from reading History.  While it does not repeat, there are always parallels.

Parents of US expats are already starting to not report the birth of their children to the USA.

http://blogs.wsj.com/expat/2015/02/18/when-american-expats-dont-want-their-kids-to-have-u-s-citizenship/

"Jessica, who asked that her last name not be used, says she initially looked forward to getting her infant son an American passport. But after considering the implications of American citizenship, including the possibility of her son being drafted or taxed by a country where he may never live, she and her husband decided against applying for the moment.

“Ultimately it just seemed unfair to make the choice for him if there wasn’t a clear, long-term benefit for American citizenship,” she said."

An American woman who didn’t want to be named and who lives in Zurich with her dual Swiss-German husband, said the American friends she consulted advised her not to apply for a U.S. passport for her daughter unless there was a specific need. “My ancestors gave up everything to move to the U.S. in the late 1800s and here I am back in Europe and not giving my daughter the right to be a U.S. citizen, a right that others have risked their life or even died to have,” she said. “Seems a bit strange but it just doesn’t make sense for us in the moment.”

“I wish that it was not this way, but on balance, unless living and working in the U.S., being an American citizen is a burden not a benefit,” he said in an email exchange. “This is exacerbated by the increasingly draconian annual reporting and filing requirements for Americans abroad.”

The USA may be the exception to the rule now but other countries are going to follow the example of the USA. Up next is China which will do the same. Eventually I suspect that all/most of the current bankrupt western and asian governments will go this way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/business/international/china-starts-enforcing-tax-law-for-citizens-working-abroad.html?_r=0

Chinese officials chose the American definition of income, with its worldwide scope, in issuing their tax code in 1993. It remains in force today, although with many amendments.

Now, China is taking the first steps to enforce that broad definition.

China’s decision could increase pressure for similar action by countries that face sizable budget deficits and have large numbers of affluent expatriates, like Australia, Britain, France and Ireland. Although not one of these countries has shown signs yet of switching to a different model, there has been a broad increase in interest by governments around the world in sharing more information on overseas financial accounts.

Japan is also likely to copy the USA. Right now they are focused on capital gains only but that will likely expand to include income in the near future.

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1636852/japan-targets-its-expat-tax-dodgers-big-apartments-and-yachts-hong-kong

The Japanese government is planning to target the assets of expatriate citizens squirrelling wealth abroad

This is not a USA problem it is a global trend. Plan B countries may become very hard to find.

[iamback]

CoinCube,

Japan is bankrupt so they will have to tax everything. China is not bankrupt, and everything the Communist Party does is for show, while the Communist Party members use Singapore to hide profits offshore. China will make a show of force but in reality 75% of what is being done will be free market. Asians say one thing to save face (and even to appease the G20), and do another thing to maximize profit. In China it won't be a completely transparent system, you have to know how to game the system. That is the way Asia works. It is strange concept for a Westerner to understand since we are so accustomed to transparency and openness of communication. What you think you see of China is not the real China. You would need to have many friends and relationships before you understand the real China and how to game the system in way that is unseen and unspoken.

IMO you have not provided any evidence to refute my assertion that capital controls will applied mostly to Westerners (and Japanese perhaps) but not to Asians because their societies are not bankrupt.

Btw, I could see European countries hunting down their expats for wealth confiscation because European countries are bankrupt.

Plan B countries are those societies (private and public finances and social capital, education levels, socialism levels, etc) that are not bankrupt and thus will not self-destruct taking their citizens down into the abyss.

[CoinCube]

CoinCube,

Japan is bankrupt so they will have to tax everything. China is not bankrupt
...

IMO you have not provided any evidence to refute my assertion that capital controls will applied mostly to Westerners (and Japanese perhaps) but not to Asians because their societies are not bankrupt.

Btw, I could see European countries hunting down their expats for wealth confiscation because European countries are bankrupt.

Plan B countries are those societies (private and public finances and social capital, education levels, socialism levels, etc) that are not bankrupt and thus will not self-destruct taking their citizens down into the abyss.

Why do you think China is not bankrupt? To me they look like Japan circa 1990

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-09/weak-china-import-figures-shouldn-t-spur-stimulus

Driven by the vast shadow-banking sector (which contains at least $6.5 trillion of debt) and a construction boom fueled by local officials, China's debt buildup accounted for a third of all borrowing globally since 2007. In that period, total Chinese debt quadrupled to $28 trillion by mid-2014 from $7 trillion. China's public debt now stands at 282 percent of gross domestic product -- a far higher debt ratio than that of advanced economies like the U.S., Germany and Australia.

The U.S. had a total debt-to-GDP ratio of about 260 per cent by the end of last year, while the U.K.'s ratio was at 277 per cent. Japan topped the world table at 415 per cent, according to Standard Chartered.

It is true that current (officially reported) government spending in china as a percent of GDP at 23.9% is much lower then the USA at 41.6% or Japan at 42% But the trend is climbing and climbing rapidly.






Back in 1990 before Japan turned down it's government spending as a percentage of GDP was around 30% the government spending climbed when the economy turned down.

[OROBTC]

...

CoinCube must be a banker with Goldman-Sachs, look, his reply number is 666...  

I have seen various figures for debt in China and Japan, it is hard to know which figures are "best" for examining their financial situation, so I will not go into that here.

Similarly for capital controls, a topic which I must leave for another rainy day.

*   *   *

The whole issue of "Plan B countries" is very complex, at least for Americans.  There are a slew of factors to be taken into account, and these factors have to be judged for each individual.

1)  Plan B countries among the "developed countries"?  Well, ahh, I don't know.  ALL of them have arguably MOAR problems than the USA.  Canada?  Europe?  Japan?  Australia/NZ?  None are convincing candidates for me.  Lots of debt, risk of authoritarian governments as bad or worse than the USA.  The weather in Canada and most of Europe is unattractive to me.

2a)  Rest of Asia?  Well, not for me.  The only candidate that comes to mind for me would be Singapore.  Reasonably free but disciplined.  Wealthy country that seems to be governed reasonably well with good .gov attitudes.  But, I have not been to Singapore.  I have been to Japan (twice), S. Korea and China.  I would feel very alien in any of those three countries.  I do not speak their languages (knowing the local language is almost required to live happily in any country IMO).

2b)  How about other places in Asia?  Author Robert Kaplan recently (2014) a book on geopolitics there in East Asia: Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific.  Highly recommended.  He discusses (a chapter each, and yes, he went there) most of the major players there in E. Asia (not S. Korea and not Indonesia).  He liked Singapore and Malaysia.  He somewhat liked Vietnam and Taiwan.  He did not like the Philippines.  Re the Philippines, he did not like the excess corruption and poverty there that leave it so far behind their neighbors.  He did not much discuss China (other than their threat to "annex" the S. China Sea, which he discussed at length, the point of the book) but did mention some of their problems (pollution, Communism <--- which struck me as a big problem (for me) when I went, and their own Debt Bubble).  The fact that you must be connected to succeed in China is a big drawback for me (iamback).

*   *   *

So where would an OROBTC go?  Europe and all/most of Asia are not attractive.  Most of the developing world is not so great either (forget Africa, S. Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia).  Most "niche" countries would not work either (Iceland, Liechtenstein).  The Caribbean?  No.

For me, that leaves Latin America.  I speak Spanish, so there is some choice (but I do not speak Portuguese, so Brazil is out for me).  We have our company in Peru (as well as nice in-laws there), so Peru wins by default in my case.  Other places in LatAm might work: Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Uruguay and even Paraguay might be OK.

Note that each person's likes & dislikes are very much a part of the complicated equation!  iamback referred to the relatively violent nature sometimes seen in LatAm society, and yes that too is a factor (especially street crime).  Also corruption.  Also the fact that a country today might seem just fine, but in 10 years not (Venezuela and Argentina are great lessons).

[hashman]

I don't know how representative this is of France, but looks like a Islamic volcano ready to explode when the economy turns down.

This is the highest paid advertisment ever on youtube.  They are pushing it to the tune of billions.  All fake of course like all advertisement.  Why?  The people who paid for this are the biggest fools in the world.  

[BitMos]

http://www.infowars.com/greece-and-the-endgame-of-the-neocolonial-model-of-exploitation/

...

But the economic pillaging of former colonies has limits, and as a consequence the global financial powers developed the Neocolonial Model, which turns these same techniques on one’s home region.

Thus Greece and other capital-poor European nations were recognized as the periphery that could be exploited by the core, and the euro was the ideal tool to financialize the economies of nations which could never have generated credit/housing bubbles without the wide-open spigots of cheap credit flooding their economies.

In Neocolonialism, the forces of financialization are used to indenture the local Elites and populace to the financial core: the peripheral “colonials” borrow money to buy the finished goods manufactured in the core economies, enriching the Imperial Elites with A) the profits made selling goods to the debtors B) interest on credit extended to the peripheral colonies to buy the core economies’ goods and “live large”, and C) the transactional skim of financializing peripheral assets such as real estate and State debt.

In essence, the core banks of the EU colonized the peripheral nations via the financializing euro, which enabled a massive expansion of debt and consumption in the periphery. The banks and exporters of the core extracted enormous profits from this expansion of debt and consumption.

Now that the financialization scheme of the euro has run its course, the periphery’s neocolonial standing is starkly revealed: the assets and income of the periphery are flowing to the core as interest on the private and sovereign debts that are owed to the core’s central bank and its money-center private banks.

Note how little of the Greek “bailout” actually went to the citizenry of Greece and how much was interest paid to the financial powers.

This is not just the perfection of neocolonialism but of neofeudalism as well. The peripheral nations of the EU are effectively neocolonial debtors of the core, and the taxpayers of the core nations are now feudal serfs whose labor is devoted to making good on any loans to the periphery that go bad.

Neocolonialism benefits both the core’s financial Aristocracy and national oligarchies/ kleptocracies. This is ably demonstrated in the recent essay Misrule of the Few: How the Oligarchs Ruined Greece.

With the bankruptcy of Greece now undeniable, we’ve finally reached the endgame of the Neocolonial-Financialization Model. There are no more markets to exploit with financialization, and the fact that the mountains of debt are unpayable can no longer be masked.

At this point, the financial Aristocracy has an unsolvable dilemma: writing off defaulted debt also writes off assets and income streams, for every debt is somebody else’s asset and income stream. When all those phantom assets are recognized as worthless, the system implodes.

BTC