Economic Devastation

[practicaldreamer]

AgonyMint, why have you created a new account?

No - he's created 5 new accounts.

[CoinCube]

AgonyMint, why have you created a new account?

No - he's created 5 new accounts.

It appears he has. I think he wrote somewhere that he scrambles his passwords every so often as a form of self imposed exile. Personally I just log off but that's just me.

Personal quirks aside. Its been almost a year now since I started this thread. I did not do so because I wanted to promote Anonymint's economic writings.

I started this thread because I wanted others to find flaws in his economic theory that I could not find. 18 pages later I have yet to see much in the way of serious counterargument. I see a lot of "Agonymint is so arrogant" and "Its so hard to understand what he is saying" but no convincing critiques or counterarguments.

Personally I could care less about personality or arrogance. What interests me is one simple question: Is he right?

[STT]

I dont see a simple answer  except it is fairly clear we are as a society at an extreme in various ways such as the low interest rates and 'easy' monetary policy.    This could end very badly, I think you could even weasel that answer out of Ben Bernanke or Alan Greenspan

I havent read all of the posted links but points to examine are the amount of dollars contained in bonds and the term of those bonds.   The average turnover for 17tn of US debt is I believe 4 years though that data is few years old.   Within a few years that debt could fail to roll over, things could alter drastically and that amount of money being circulated not held would alter considered facts quite quickly.   So extremes vary between default and effects from that or quite large inflation but probably not hyper.
Dont get caught up in the doom and gloom scenario, what matters most is productive capacity, bankruptcy is a positive process for society in sum total even if it doesnt feel like it at the time

[murraypaul]

Personal quirks aside. Its been almost a year now since I started this thread. I did not do so because I wanted to promote Anonymint's economic writings.

Really?

Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read

[CoinCube]

Personal quirks aside. Its been almost a year now since I started this thread. I did not do so because I wanted to promote Anonymint's economic writings.

Really?

Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read

Yep really. That quote was indeed my reaction when I first read the links in post #1. However, AnonyMints economic predictions are rather dire.

I do very well under our current system of government. A very large portion of my salary comes from the taxpayer and government spending.

Personally I will be much better off financially if the economic theories above are false. However, I am unable to find any serious flaws in them. Nothing would make me happier then for someone to convincingly demonstrate that Anonymint is completely wrong.

Unfortunatly, however, despite a lot of interesting conversation AnonyMint's thesis has held up rather well.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

CoinCube,

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg9438334#msg9438334

P.S. notice I am posting much less often. Too busy working.

[CoinCube]

Happy birthday Economic Devastation thread.
A year has flow by very quickly.

Surprisingly 12 months later this thread remains the #1 Google search result for the phrase "Economic Devastation"

Sounds like there are some zerohedgers here..

On this one year anniversary post I want to give a plug to zerohedge.
When the comment above was posted I had not heard of zerohedge.
This comment caught my eye I started reading it.

Zerohedge is now probably the only news page I check on a daily basis and I highly recommend it to anyone who was even remotely interested in this thread.  

[OROBTC]

...

Yes, ZeroHedge is a very interesting site.  Very opinionated replies, but many ZH-ers are knowledgeable and connected in finance.  They tend to be libertarians.  There is lots of love for gold.

Many of them are not very friendly to BTC however.  Which is curious.  Also curious is the Putin man-lover there.

Nonetheless, ZH is required reading for anyone wanting something that differs (a lot!) from the MSM/CNBS party lines...

[CoinCube]

Cross posting this here as it is also relevant to this thread

Seems everyone is using that statement about Armstrong's computer being self-aware to discredit him.

There are two interesting issues surrounding Mr. Armstrong.

1) That he was held in jail without being charged or convicted of a crime for seven years by a judge for being in "contempt of court"
2) His claim (to date unverifiable) that he has perfected or at least vastly improved on Kondratieff Wave analysis via computer modeling.

The first issue is simple judicial tyranny. It should bother any US citizen that someone can be held in jail for seven years without being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime. However, I am most interested in Armstrong's claim to have perfected Kondratieff Wave analysis.  

I would note that Armstrong is far from the first to promote the use of very long term cyclical modeling of the economy. Modeling of this type can be traced back to Nikolai Kondratieff who identified four stages of cyclic behavior and identified the as spring, summer, autumn and winter. Kondratieff calculated that a complete cycle or wave lasted for approximately 53 years. He published his theory in 1925 in his book "The Major Economic Cycles". Kondratieff overlaid his wave on world history and projected it forward.



Kondratieff also noted that those same 53 year economic cycles could be relied upon to mark major world conflicts. Below is the 53 year war cycle that was derived from his work and nestled within that a 17.7 year war cycle.






The best discussion of Kondratieff Wave analysis that I have come across was published by Grant Williams in his superb article The Consequences of the Economic Peace
(Note clicking the link will prompt you to sign up for the newsletter this can just be closed to proceed to the article)

So what happened to Mr. Kondratiev? He was accused by the soviets of being a member of a "Peasants Labour Party". Convicted as a "kulak-professor" and sentenced to 8 years in prison. In September 1938 during Stalin's Great Purge, he was subjected to a second trial, condemned to ten years without the right to correspond with the outside world and executed by firing squad on the same day the sentence was issued.
 

[Morbid]

andrey fursov, a prominent current russian analyst, historian and academic claims that kondratieff wave cycles are generally correct but total defeat in cold war and pillage of soviet block prolonged the capitalist system until now since its been at its end as far back as 80s-90s. so we are in late autumn now but the winter is far overdue.

[hashman]

What's that on the y axis again? 

There are even numbers there, as though everything weren't just totally made up but it obviously is. 

[CoinCube]

What's that on the y axis again?  

There are even numbers there, as though everything weren't just totally made up but it obviously is.  

Skepticism is a very appropriate response. I am about as far from an expert on this topic as you can get but here is what I have found
in my own quite limited research.

Question #1 Is there any actual solid statistical analysis to show these Kondratieff cycles really exist.

I found this very interesting statistical analysis of Kondratieff waves.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9jv108xp#page-1

These authors did a tremendous amount of work on Kondratieff waves or K-waves and world GDP dynamics.
Their analysis supports the existence of a K-wave with a period of 52-53 years with a level of evidence or p value between 0.04 and 0.05.  
With data like this it cannot be argued that this is something totally made up. Advocates of K-waves may be wrong in their assumptions
or analysis or they may be wrong in arguing that any cyclical behavior seen in the past is predictive of the future but there is at least some
data to indicate that K-waves are real.

Question #2 Does K-wave analysis actually predict war

Here I have struck out. I have not found any source nearly as compelling as the the statistical analysis on GDP dynamics. I cannot answer your question
about the war cycle graph because I have not found a solid enough reference to back it up.  

[hashman]

What's that on the y axis again?  

There are even numbers there, as though everything weren't just totally made up but it obviously is.  

Skepticism is a very appropriate response. I am about as far from an expert on this topic as you can get but here is what I have found
in my own quite limited research.

Question #1 Is there any actual solid statistical analysis to show these Kondratieff cycles really exist.

I found this very interesting statistical analysis of Kondratieff waves.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9jv108xp#page-1

These authors did a tremendous amount of work on Kondratieff waves or K-waves and world GDP dynamics.
Their analysis supports the existence of a K-wave with a period of 52-53 years with a level of evidence or p value between 0.04 and 0.05.  
With data like this it cannot be argued that this is something totally made up. Advocates of K-waves may be wrong in their assumptions
or analysis or they may be wrong in arguing that any cyclical behavior seen in the past is predictive of the future but there is at least some
data to indicate that K-waves are real.

Question #2 Does K-wave analysis actually predict war

Here I have struck out. I have not found any source nearly as compelling as the the statistical analysis on GDP dynamics. I cannot answer your question
about the war cycle graph because I have not found a solid enough reference to back it up.  

Thanks for the link, I do like the analysis.  However I am inclined to go with garbage in - garbage out. 

If you wish to do meaningful economic analysis you need to start with meaningful numbers.  If you are starting your analysis with so called "GDP" measured in "fiat" by, uh, agencies..  well..  you got nothing to go on.  Bullshit from the start. 

How about something like wheat production?  Population?  Birth rate?  Sure it's not possible to get perfect numbers for anything but at least you are starting with something of relevance that has a verifiable unit on some level.     

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

If you wish to do meaningful economic analysis you need to start with meaningful numbers.  If you are starting your analysis with so called "GDP" measured in "fiat" by, uh, agencies..  well..  you got nothing to go on.  Bullshit from the start.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/12/02/25432/

This forecast is based upon our proprietary index 1900=Par. The reason is simple. In 1985 the Euro did not exist. Therefore, how they patched that index we have not looked at carefully. It may exceed the 1985 high depending on its mix. In our index, it extends back much further and is far more comprehensive. You can see that the 1985 high is no longer a spike isolated high. We are flattening out the pattern and this warns of a rally. We are just the prettiest of the three ugly sisters – Japan – Europe – USA.  On their index, the low was 1992 compared to ours was 1995 which was the high in the yen against the dollar prior to this deflationary rally in recent years. The 1995 low was a retest of the highs of the Great Depression. This is the same general testing pattern we should see in gold – the retest of the 1980 high of $875.

Hashman, Armstrong is legit. He had even people collecting data from the archives of newspapers around the world, he spent $10 million in the 1970s to collect ancient silver coins so he could build the only detailed accurate chart of silver money of the Western Roman Empire. He claims he has spent over $1 billion (inflation adjusted) on data for his machine learning model of the global economy. The machine decided that international capital flows are what drives the economic shifts of the nations.

Considering how accurate his model as been (predicting events to the day, decades in advance), I believe him. You have no clue, until you dig. Read the entire Mad Max thread and bring yourself up to speed. Or don't. I don't care.

[hashman]

Hashman, Armstrong is legit. He had even people collecting data from the archives of newspapers around the world, he spent $10 million in the 1970s to collect ancient silver coins so he could build the only detailed accurate chart of silver money of the Western Roman Empire. He claims he has spent over $1 billion (inflation adjusted) on data for his machine learning model of the global economy. The machine decided that international capital flows are what drives the economic shifts of the nations.

Considering how accurate his model as been (predicting events to the day, decades in advance), I believe him. You have no clue, until you dig. Read the entire Mad Max thread and bring yourself up to speed. Or don't. I don't care.

Thanks for your reply, OK I will take a closer look you have piqued my curiosity.  For me a scientific analysis is not just the clever analysis of measurements but that the measurements themselves need to be verifiable by the reader.  Silver can be assayed.  Physical units can be measured.  However "nations" are whatever the guys with the guns claim them to be, and "fiat" is whatever the counterfeiters claim it to be.  Hardly a good starting basis for a scientific treatise.  And when it comes to making spectral analyses, people are often too quick to jump to conclusions.  Sampling relics and background trends almost always dominate the features of a power spectrum.     

[Morbid]

whats really funny is that it took us, the general public more or less 100 years to realise the extent of this crime against humanity and fraud that our current banking system is. as soon as even few find out how this (or any other) system operates it stops working properly as everybody starts taking advantage of it reducing profits/power of those who invented it. i believe that this is thanks to internet and extremely good communication technologies that we are able to use. now. whatever new design these guys are gonna come up with in future (bretton woods 2 happened behind closed doors one month ago) it will definitely be much more complex and sophisticated. though for it to be prolonged they absolutely must reduce the ability for us to communicate as its getting out of order and masses become too clever having access to all the free information. the next stage has to be an attack on the internet or for it to be controlled and eventually contained. its highly questionable whether this is possible at all.

[hdbuck]

whats really funny is that it took us, the general public more or less 100 years to realise the extent of this crime against humanity and fraud that our current banking system is. as soon as even few find out how this (or any other) system operates it stops working properly as everybody starts taking advantage of it reducing profits/power of those who invented it. i believe that this is thanks to internet and extremely good communication technologies that we are able to use. now. whatever new design these guys are gonna come up with in future (bretton woods 2 happened behind closed doors one month ago) it will definitely be much more complex and sophisticated. though for it to be prolonged they absolutely must reduce the ability for us to communicate as its getting out of order and masses become too clever having access to all the free information. the next stage has to be an attack on the internet or for it to be controlled and eventually contained. its highly questionable whether this is possible at all.

+1 i believe this is why we have not even started the so called internet revolution.
but once it will kick off, there will be no returns.

[DhaniBoy]

basically the economic collapse can be overcome with some practical steps, among other things:
1. promoting micro business community, home industries and others
2. exporting more than importing, proudly use of domestic goods
3. saving on the use of appliances that use electricity and energy
4. more use of tools that use renewable energu
  possible to do things above, we can overcome the economic collapse ... 

[Possum577]

Why do we have to read some article to respond to this thread? Can't you summarize the article, state your thoughts on it and just provide the link as a source...how many ppl actually have interest in going to another site to read an article just to comment here?

[orsotheysaid]

Why do we have to read some article to respond to this thread? Can't you summarize the article, state your thoughts on it and just provide the link as a source...how many ppl actually have interest in going to another site to read an article just to comment here?

Maybe OP is promoting his site and wants some clicks.