Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? Thus do we need anonymity?

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-96652

...

There is no way out for Japan. Japan will default, the Yen will crash, and expenses will skyrocket for Japanese citizens.

...

The reality is that Japan has entered a stagflationary phase. The country is seeing higher inflation from rising input costs while growth has been dropping. They can use monetary policy to increase growth by a little bit in the short term, but every single use will become less effective than the last. The only solution for Japan is default, which will happen after (and while) the Yen goes to 0.

Japan is unique not only for having the highest sovereign debt-to-GDP ratio of any major nation, but also for that debt to be nearly entirely financed domestically. So in theory they could default on the debt (and/or increase taxes and decrease government services if politically palatable) without defaulting internationally on the Yen. The Yen might eventually rise in value because what would be remaining after implosion is a higher ratio of exports to imports, as well capital might rush in to invest in the much more competitively priced wages as labor supply would increase. In any case, I agree the burden is going to fall on the Japanese citizens in terms a greatly reduced standard-of-living.

Who are they gonna be open to? The Chinese? The Koreans? They hate both of them.

Japan, China, and Korea are  likely to resort (with the Senkaku a.k.a. Diaoyu islands  as one pretext) to the old pattern of mutual war to make the unavoidable economic implosion to politically palatable.

The global implications of a collapsing periphery (i.e. all nations except the reserve currency USA) is that all capital is being  driven into the dollar, and this dollar hegemony means the USA laws will effectively govern the world, because for example if your country doesn't cooperate with FATCA and fledgling plans for internet licensing then the USA will blacklist your country or company. Essentially the same outcome of rising protectionism that worsened the Great Depression and lead to WW2 is repeating.

We are headed into the typical scorched earth paradigm (e.g. World War 2) that always throughout recorded human history exhibits at the times of peaking [global] socialism [and total global debt]. If we make it through to the other side, the balance of power will have shifted from West to East[1] and from multi-national corporations to individuals (by 2032), but the hell we have to go through before we get there is daunting.

[1] http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/05/the-shift-from-west-to-the-east/
     http://armstrongeconomics.com/693-2/2012-2/we-are-on-the-verge-of-a-very-profound-systemic-global-meltdown/
     http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/19/crisis-collapse-in-world-capital-flows/

P.S. I see this thread is the top performing thread in terms of Views per Replies for threads with more than 25,000 Views, and it is in the Top 10 for that metric amongst all threads with more than 10,000 Views (amongst which my [Anonymint's] Dark Enlightenment thread is another Top 10 member):

http://kwout.com/quote/x2iyv7gy

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

The real plot is to maintain control with rationing when the $227 trillion global total debt comes crashing down. This is precisely what happened to Nazi Germany with their Universal Health Care system which they could no longer afford so they reduced costs and generated revenue put the population in work camps (financed by President Bush Sr's father Prescott Bush's Union Bank) and killed them when they got too skeleton-ized from not being fed (no need to spend money on food on this dispensable human resource).

Final Goal of the Surveillance State

...

What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?

Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.

Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.

Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”

Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”

Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.

This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.

As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.

In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.

We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.

The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.

On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.

Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.

This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.

The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.

Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.

An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.

Surveillance; planning; control.

...

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-96929

He talks about how Spain will collapse any second now since at least 2011

I've been reading every blog post he made, and he never stated it the way you're attempting to spin it. What he said was that Spain's was descending in economic collapse and chaos, which it surely is. His model also predicted in advance the rise in separation movements, e.g. Catalonia.

And the confidence in German Bonds is collapsing? By what measure? Current Yield 0.84%?

He has not stated that. How can post meaningfully if aren't even going to read his blog from start to finish? (yeah I know that will require a lot of effort but you will learn a lot). You are conflating statements about the shift in international capital flows to the dollar and the imminent collapse of Europe (and Germany) with the fact that Armstrong has also admitted the core of Europe would get ingress of capital first (along the way to the end game).

do you believe yourself in all these dates from Armstrong? I mean 25.6 year cycle? Seriously? Why not 25.6565656 year cycle, just to be exact?

As for his performance on specific predictions and dates, indeed is model has been able to predict the exact day of events years in advance. I suggest you review his record as follows.

His 1980s predictions made to US President and Treasury Secretary.

Shaming Jim Sinclair.

Why the mainstream press won't quote him.

My expert (computer science) thoughts on A.I. as pertains to Socrates (his computer model).

All the major turns since 1980s that his computer predicted in advance.

Please understand what the model predicts and doesn't.

It has been so stunning that governments have accused him of manipulating the world economy and imprisoned him in Supermax (overkill!) facility (where he almost died, I was following this back in 2009 or so) on a bogus contempt-of-court charge for 7 years in violation of his right to a speedy trial. He used to help manage 2.2 trillion of funds in Japan (Postal retirement fund and another sovereign wealth fund, both went bankrupt when Japanese government refused to allow them to hedge as Armstrong was advising at the top in 1989). There is (apparently very highly demanded) movie The Forecaster coming out about him and the manipulations he has uncovered and got him in trouble with the powers-that-be (specifically Republic Bank and the collapse of Russia in the 1990s). He has claimed his web site has over 500,000 unique readers.

Apparently Armstrong is legit and a very big time fish. He has connections amongst big bankers, billionaires, formerly heads of State (e.g. Margaret Thatcher), etc..

@Jon,
Armstrong has the problem of writing incoherently at times because he is moving too fast. When he slows down, his intellect becomes clear, e.g. he nailed the mistake the West has made in Ukraine.

[cryptocoiner]

Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? - NO
Thus do we need anonymity? - YES

But I think there will be ww3, but it will not lead to a mad max scenario.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? - NO
Thus do we need anonymity? - YES

But I think there will be ww3, but it will not lead to a mad max scenario.

I consider the holocaust of WW2 to be Mad Max. Remember the genocide the Nazis did in Africa also. I think people are numb to the gruesome reality of world war because they been watching on CNN the USA drop cruise missiles on Iraq. In the local newspaper here in Davao, Mindanao, they published a photo today of two victims that were unidentifiable after being tortured by burning them to death. Their charred bodies were still in the clutched arms position so you can see the horrific agony they went through.

Armstrong wrote, “...all the studies show China could take Japan in less than 30 days and Russian tanks could be strolling down the Champs-Élysées‎ in Paris in less than 15 days...”, Russia has over 10,000 nuclear warheads, and Putin has been demonstrating he can fire nuclear tipped cruise missiles at major USA population centers―demonstrated more than once.

Note I had already covered this upthread:

If it came to this, your problems would all be solved... by your death.
The ammo would run out within a year, so would the food. Assuming it is a worldwide loss of civilized society, billions would starve. The only monies that would matter are food and slaves. I can't see this happening by 2020, but if we have a nuclear exchange, it could look like this in a week or two.

You are thinking only in terms of dipolar extremes. There are many gradients of economic collapse scenarios that are less extreme yet extremely disruptive to our lives.

You will experience economic collapse in 2016. 100% guaranteed.

True, I was. I thought the scenario was "MadMax". That's about as extreme as it gets! Although a more realistic post-apocalypse movie is "The road". That is a depressing movie and a chillingly real look at life in a dying world.

Not as extreme as Mel Gibson's movie. Expect something similar to 1929 and WW2 was Mad Max in my opinion, but with much more State control in the USA (see below for reason):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfaKT0_frE#t=92s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwvDBeP9HkE

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/11/04/judges-are-free-to-take-your-liberty-for-anything-didnt-cut-your-lawn-jail-time/

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=riots+in+China

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=riots+in+Europe

The reason why is before the collective society could afford FDR's New Deal, but this time we are bankrupt so these sort of socialist deals are going to result in hardship (state rationing via Medicare, Obamacare, 57 million on food stamps, etc.) which will lead to more rioting and spirals into uncontrollable chaos.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/15/pentagons-1033-program-is-preparing-for-war-against-the-civil-population/

The assault on the veterans who defended the world in World War I and were treated like garbage moved the nation. That incident was the final straw that led the people to elect FDR with a majority in excess of 60%. This use of these very same tactics today is outrageous and quite frankly warrants criminal action against those in charge. This is not war games. But we have to realize, what you see in Ferguson is the attitude that has engulfed the entire civil police force throughout the nation. Top military generals led the assault against the veterans. It was the lowest point in American military history. Because of this incident, when World War II came, Congress had to pass the GI bill to promise veterans would never be treated that way again.

Daniel in the Bible predicts the time based on the Abomination of the Desolation, based on historical events such as the Holy war in 1967 (google can help you find the detailed calculations). Now we have all the signs as reported by NASA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euK-koV-8k

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97210

@Derivs

“I’m not familiar with Armstrong”

I think you would have needed to be in jail for a few years to know him personally. It’s been a long time since I have written a research paper, so someone needs to refresh my memory if there is a special way to footnote references by convicted fraudsters.

Armstrong agreed to a plea bargain after being held for 7 years on contempt-of-court, because he refused to hand over the source code of his computer model to the courts (the CIA wanted it).

You need to do some research. Armstrong is not a fraudster. He has laid out a lot of evidence and explanation in his blog about he was framed for the Republic Bank fiasco as a way to cover up the fraud at the NY money center banks.

Indeed statist academia won't allow you to cite the truth, they would rather pontificate in ignorant bliss.

Sorry Michael for this blunt comment. I will leave it at that. Enough of this about Armstrong. It is up to each reader to decide for themselves.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Cross-posting from other thread...

I trust my government a million times more than I trust my ISP. That is the bottom line for me.  

The point you are missing is that in a free market, you don’t need to trust your ISP as competition will provide you with options.

What you don’t believe or fail to understand is that regulatory capture of your government is precisely what stifles competition. This is what the quote from Eric S. Raymond about “asymmetric power” means.

So yes the monopolistic telcos are on their knees praying that you will trust the government more than the free market, because the more power you give to the government to regulate, the stronger their monopolies will become.

This has been proven over and over to always be the outcome in all of recorded human history. The mathematical reason was explained by Mancur Olson’s book, The Logic of Collective Action.

I don’t expect you to be able to wrap your mind around this, because the reason socialists are socialists is because they don’t have the IQ to reason rationally at this high level.

And evolution is at work (over and over throughout recorded human history since Mesopotamia) to cull the population of the low IQ fools (via the war, eugenics, genocide, rationing, and totalitarian megadeath that results from peaking socialism when it runs out of other people's resources to steal, ahem redistribute) so the human race can get smarter and advance knowledge. So sorry for you, you haven’t been able to grasp how to survive.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

I request we continue to delete our upthread posts on each reply as I have done, at least for as long as this sub-thread is of reasonable length. Hopefully we can reach agreement now.

I kindly request you to delete your prior posts upthread on this sub-thread of discussion as I have done also. So as to not clutter the thread, our entire discussion is quoted in this one post below.

anonymity is a myth

someone somewhere always knows

Actually as an expert computer scientist, I assert that is not true. I have explained that a high-latency redesign of Tor would be anonymous:

Anonymity: Death of the Stateless Web (a.k.a. “Tor Is Not Anonymous—Web Paradigm Shift Underway”)

You would be correct if you instead wrote, “if someone could correlate all the data in the world for infinite time, they could always know”.

being a mathematician i know full well there are no secrets, if it is anonymous it would not be long before it is not.

it is the same as saying the code is unbreakable

as the recent news on tor proves as well http://betanews.com/2014/11/19/new-report-claims-81-of-tor-users-can-be-identified/

You did not read the link I provided to you. In that link I explain that the reason Tor is vulnerable is because it is a low latency design. That exploit you linked to is well known to be caused by traffic analysis (confirmation) because of the low latency design. I have proposed how to make an improved Tor that is high latency and truly anonymous.

Please write down some math that you are using to justify your claim, so I can discuss with you in your mathematical perspective where we differ. I have some math capability also.

done deleted posts

read your post did not say much about the encryption

tor is vulnerable because it is mathematically encrypted ergo it can be mathematically unencrypted

not much to go into really, anonymity is achieved via encryption, encryption can be broken, yes a lot of resources required but it can still be done.

so if someone really wanted to see what was going on all they need is the resources, usually government/military.



the current project I am excited about at the moment is where electrical signals from the brain are being translated

e.g. if i think food the receiver reads the electrical brain signals I have at the time and translates this into the word food

This would defeat anonymity completely unless you are wearing funny hats.

I've done extensive thinking about the breakage of the encryption and that is why I favor Lamport signatures, Mceliece public key cryptography, and not using public key (i.e. using symmetric cryptography) as much as possible.

There is no reasonably trusted quantum computing resistant Diffie-Hellman key exchange, so I am thinking we can eliminate it from an improved Tor by sending a Nonce to the prospective relay encrypted with its public key, then the encrypted (in our public key) reply must include the Nonce. The entire reason Diffie-Helman is needed in Tor is because the prior relay hop could inject its only symmetric key instead.

All encryption will eventually be broken and I made this point in a long discussion (READ THIS LINKED POST!) on this forum with smooth about how all anonymity can eventually be broken ex post facto. But as I stated in my first reply to you, this requires the adversary save all the data. For example, a global national security PRISM adversary can’t save the data mixes we do offline.

This is why I am arguing to use only quantum resistant encryption for anonymity aspects and to use much larger key lengths than we think are necessary.

Note I will be cross-posting our excellent discussion to that thread I linked in my first reply to you.

Being able to read the brain’s thoughts could indeed make anonymity much more challenging, but we are at least a decade from that being something the authorities can realistically deploy and even then it will probably require they get proximity to your brain. Our physical bodies are going to become a burden. Hopefully by that time we can upload our brain to a computer, put our body into zombie state, continue thinking there on the computer, then download it back to biological brain copy later. In that way, we could side-step the authorities anew. You see technology is not asymmetric in support of socialism. We just have to be willing to find the solutions for liberty.

I hope I have inspired some libertarian readers!

[mymenace]

I request we continue to delete our upthread posts on each reply as I have done, at least for as long as this sub-thread is of reasonable length. Hopefully we can reach agreement now.

I kindly request you to delete your prior posts upthread on this sub-thread of discussion as I have done also. So as to not clutter the thread, our entire discussion is quoted in this one post below.

anonymity is a myth

someone somewhere always knows

Actually as an expert computer scientist, I assert that is not true. I have explained that a high-latency redesign of Tor would be anonymous:

Anonymity: Death of the Stateless Web (a.k.a. “Tor Is Not Anonymous—Web Paradigm Shift Underway”)

You would be correct if you instead wrote, “if someone could correlate all the data in the world for infinite time, they could always know”.

being a mathematician i know full well there are no secrets, if it is anonymous it would not be long before it is not.

it is the same as saying the code is unbreakable

as the recent news on tor proves as well http://betanews.com/2014/11/19/new-report-claims-81-of-tor-users-can-be-identified/

You did not read the link I provided to you. In that link I explain that the reason Tor is vulnerable is because it is a low latency design. That exploit you linked to is well known to be caused by traffic analysis (confirmation) because of the low latency design. I have proposed how to make an improved Tor that is high latency and truly anonymous.

Please write down some math that you are using to justify your claim, so I can discuss with you in your mathematical perspective where we differ. I have some math capability also.

done deleted posts

read your post did not say much about the encryption

tor is vulnerable because it is mathematically encrypted ergo it can be mathematically unencrypted

not much to go into really, anonymity is achieved via encryption, encryption can be broken, yes a lot of resources required but it can still be done.

so if someone really wanted to see what was going on all they need is the resources, usually government/military.



the current project I am excited about at the moment is where electrical signals from the brain are being translated

e.g. if i think food the receiver reads the electrical brain signals I have at the time and translates this into the word food

This would defeat anonymity completely unless you are wearing funny hats.

I've done extensive thinking about the breakage of the encryption and that is why I favor Lamport signatures, Mceliece public key cryptography, and not using public key (i.e. using symmetric cryptography) as much as possible.

There is no reasonable quantum computing resistant Diffie-Hellman key exchange, so I am thinking we can eliminate it from an improved Tor by sending a Nonce to the prospective relay encrypted with its public key, then the encrypted (in our public key) reply must include the Nonce. The entire reason Diffie-Helman is needed in Tor is because the prior relay hop could inject its only symmetric key instead.

All encryption will eventually be broken and I made this point in a long discussion on this forum with smooth about how all anonymity can eventually be broken ex post facto. But as I stated in my first reply to you, this requires the adversary save all the data. For example, a global national security PRISM adversary can’t save the data mixes we do offline.

This is why I am arguing to use only quantum resistant encryption for anonymity aspects and to use much larger key lengths than we think are necessary.

Note I will be cross-posting our excellent discussion to that thread I linked in my first reply to you.

Being able to read the brain’s thoughts could indeed make anonymity much more challenging, but we are at least a decade from that being something the authorities can realistically deploy and even then it will probably require they get proximity to your brain. Our physical bodies are going to become a burden. Hopefully by that time we can upload our brain to a computer, put our body into zombie state, continue thinking there on the computer, then download it back to biological brain copy later. In that way, we could side-step the authorities anew. You see technology is not asymmetric in support of socialism. We just have to be willing to find the solutions for liberty.

I hope I have inspired some libertarian readers!

Outstanding I agree completely, anonymity can be achieved as outlined above and should be, but not at the expense of user acceptance that it is a fail safe and completely anonymous to all giving a false sense of security.

This has been an excellent enlightening discussion on the road to complete anonymity thank you

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

I need to make the last reply on our discussion, so I can also post it to that other thread as well.

Please don't delete your prior post as you need to be able to find this discussion in your recent posts list.

I request we continue to delete our upthread posts on each reply as I have done, at least for as long as this sub-thread is of reasonable length. Hopefully we can reach agreement now.

I kindly request you to delete your prior posts upthread on this sub-thread of discussion as I have done also. So as to not clutter the thread, our entire discussion is quoted in this one post below.

anonymity is a myth

someone somewhere always knows

Actually as an expert computer scientist, I assert that is not true. I have explained that a high-latency redesign of Tor would be anonymous:

Anonymity: Death of the Stateless Web (a.k.a. “Tor Is Not Anonymous—Web Paradigm Shift Underway”)

You would be correct if you instead wrote, “if someone could correlate all the data in the world for infinite time, they could always know”.

being a mathematician i know full well there are no secrets, if it is anonymous it would not be long before it is not.

it is the same as saying the code is unbreakable

as the recent news on tor proves as well http://betanews.com/2014/11/19/new-report-claims-81-of-tor-users-can-be-identified/

You did not read the link I provided to you. In that link I explain that the reason Tor is vulnerable is because it is a low latency design. That exploit you linked to is well known to be caused by traffic analysis (confirmation) because of the low latency design. I have proposed how to make an improved Tor that is high latency and truly anonymous.

Please write down some math that you are using to justify your claim, so I can discuss with you in your mathematical perspective where we differ. I have some math capability also.

done deleted posts

read your post did not say much about the encryption

tor is vulnerable because it is mathematically encrypted ergo it can be mathematically unencrypted

not much to go into really, anonymity is achieved via encryption, encryption can be broken, yes a lot of resources required but it can still be done.

so if someone really wanted to see what was going on all they need is the resources, usually government/military.



the current project I am excited about at the moment is where electrical signals from the brain are being translated

e.g. if i think food the receiver reads the electrical brain signals I have at the time and translates this into the word food

This would defeat anonymity completely unless you are wearing funny hats.

I've done extensive thinking about the breakage of the encryption and that is why I favor Lamport signatures, Mceliece public key cryptography, and not using public key (i.e. using symmetric cryptography) as much as possible.

There is no reasonable quantum computing resistant Diffie-Hellman key exchange, so I am thinking we can eliminate it from an improved Tor by sending a Nonce to the prospective relay encrypted with its public key, then the encrypted (in our public key) reply must include the Nonce. The entire reason Diffie-Helman is needed in Tor is because the prior relay hop could inject its only symmetric key instead.

All encryption will eventually be broken and I made this point in a long discussion (READ THIS LINKED POST!) on this forum with smooth about how all anonymity can eventually be broken ex post facto. But as I stated in my first reply to you, this requires the adversary save all the data. For example, a global national security PRISM adversary can’t save the data mixes we do offline.

This is why I am arguing to use only quantum resistant encryption for anonymity aspects and to use much larger key lengths than we think are necessary.

Note I will be cross-posting our excellent discussion to that thread I linked in my first reply to you.

Being able to read the brain’s thoughts could indeed make anonymity much more challenging, but we are at least a decade from that being something the authorities can realistically deploy and even then it will probably require they get proximity to your brain. Our physical bodies are going to become a burden. Hopefully by that time we can upload our brain to a computer, put our body into zombie state, continue thinking there on the computer, then download it back to biological brain copy later. In that way, we could side-step the authorities anew. You see technology is not asymmetric in support of socialism. We just have to be willing to find the solutions for liberty.

I hope I have inspired some libertarian readers!

Outstanding I agree completely, anonymity can be achieved as outlined above and should be, but not at the expense of user acceptance that it is a fail safe and completely anonymous to all giving a false sense of security.

This has been an excellent enlightening discussion on the road to complete anonymity thank you

You reminded we need to inform the user as to limitations of anonymity.

Tangentially I note this thread is about to attain 40,000 Views.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

There is no chaos in Southern Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As9xwlzd3gI#1m45s

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

The Movie Trailer is Out (about Armstrong)

http://vimeo.com/112432439

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJNEjq7I5Is

I arrived in Amsterdam. It has begun. As I have stated, this film is not about my life, but about my battle against the market manipulators who have blackmailed government into bailing out their losses while they keep all the gains. When I objected to the seizure of the tapes I had made documenting all the market manipulations since they began they said that was absurd. NY banks did not manipulate markets. That was 1999. Today, the CFTC has been forced into investigating Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan for a Commodity Manipulation. I believe this film is causing some scrambling. It has reached blockbuster level in Germany. It will be appearing in 80 cities simultaneously next year. The takeover of Wall Street began with the takeover of Salomon Brothers by the commodity house that made all the money against the Hunt Brothers back in the Crash of 1980. Within just 10 years, Salomon got caught with their hand in the cookie jar manipulating the US Treasury Auctions. Warren Buffet then comes to the rescue and his marketing firm has done a fantastic job in putting forward an image of a knight in shining armor. From that takeover of Wall Street by the Commodity trading industry, Wall Street was assimilated into a very different trading culture. From that event onward, the real downside of this takeover of Wall Street has been the fact that it transformed the big money center banks into aggressive traders. Profits trading were instant – while lending money for long-term to further economic expansion became the less lucrative bet, even though that is what creates jobs (not government Hillary). Trading makes money which is instant, but lending long-term creates and economy. The banks quickly learned how to hand the losses to government threatening them with the inability to sell their bonds unless they were bailed out. That was the beginning of the end. This film is about the battle I found myself in with the “club”. The schemes kept getting bigger and bigger. Takeover government and repeal Glass-Steagall was just the start. Take over Russia and control commodities was the lofty goal. Everything became a strategy and a game – the combination of monopoly and chess. They saw me as influential and if they could get me to join, they saw the dollar signs in their dreams. Get me to put out fake analysis and we will all get rich. That was not something that interested me. But they did this for the Dot.COM bubble and paid fines for putting out bogus research. That was why they kept trying to get me involved – eliminate the independent research and control the flow of info as does government. The world was becoming just a pawn of finance. The fate of nations no longer mattered. Every single thing became just a trade and the way to create the “perfect trade” was to control everything – not figure out how to actually trade. I was interested in figuring out what made the world tick. You cannot spend billions of dollars. That is for power-plays, it does not change your lifestyle. The most expensive house sold was just under $150 million. Even if you filled it with rare art, you would be hard pressed to spend $1 billion. So making billions is for playing the game of monopoly – not lifestyle. So I was just never interested in such nonsense. I needed mental stimulation. It was more challenging to figure out the game than to just play it mindlessly without purpose. I had more than enough to come and go as I pleased and it came from trading and analysis I could be proud of. I have witnessed the demise of the industry and how it has taken us to the brink of total chaotic destruction that has resulted in a G20 meeting that shifts the burden of bank losses to the people without NOTICE. This culture then infected all banks as victims as well as government. Literally, the takeover of Salomon Brothers by PhiBro opened the Gates of Hell. Goldman Sachs then took over J.Aaron to compete. Life has never been the same ever since. This proprietary trading has now threatened the entire world economy and the future of everyone for its irresponsibility. That is why I agreed to do this film – nothing else. I too have a family and I will not be here forever to take defend them against this insanity.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Why am I nearly always correct? Because I am an accomplished senior level programmer which means I have extremely accurate logic skills. I am also an accomplished bug finder and fixer, so it means I know how to hunt through complex data sets even when I don’t have the entire situation revealed to me. Also because (except in the recent years past where I tried to become a short-term speculator in precious metals), I generally discern what I can’t know and thus do not try to claim things I can not know with high certainty. Meaning I am humble and also do readily admit when someone points out a flaw in my logic or research.

As I argued to Martin Armstrong in email some months ago which is quoted on this forum, there is proof that Russia’s motive was not to annex countries and Armstrong is wrong and the Ukraine revolution and problem was instigated by the USA (skip to 14min in linked video and see Bush promised Gorbachev “NATO will not move 1 inch east of the former Berlin wall”) and Dick Cheney (with John Kerry) is still running foreign policy in Ukraine (skip to 10min in linked video). This is the geographic pathway that Russia had been attacked throughout history such as Napoleon. This is why Russia is now angry at the legacy of Gorbachev with Putin’s popularity rising to 80% since the start of the Ukraine crisis. Armstrong misses this key point in his analysis. Thus, Bush and Cheney are driving us towards World War 3. The smoking gun audio of Assistant Secretary of State explaining our manipulation in Ukraine.

35 year CIA Analyst Ray McGovern: Obama Will Lead US Into Nuclear Holocaust.

USA is an extra-constitutional state now and we no longer have a free [mainstream] press (skip to 8min 30seconds in linked video).

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97452

What he seems to be saying, if particular market coincided with his ECM model, then it is a proof that the model is correct. And if it did coincide? Well, the model is correct, it just means we are not looking at the “correct” market.

Real estate was the thing being pushed into a bubble by the government (Fannie Mae, Fed, etc). And this ECM is in a Private wave against government. You have to understand that in order to know which market to expect to coincide with the turn date[1].

Now Armstrong is speculating that Private assets such as gold and collectibles will also include USA real estate and stocks and they will continue to rise after the 2015.75 turn in the ECM model. He is observing for evidence of this “phase shift” as ithe calls it.

[1]

Please understand what the model predicts and doesn’t.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

P.S. if the  ‘no’ votes are pertaining to the rise of the global police state and the need for anonymity, I can only sigh again soon. I was watching the NBA (i.e. Rome’s bread and circus, or the Roaring 1920’s socialite glitter & glee) and realized why most people today would again think it is ludicrous to claim such horrific outcomes as we approach the cliff.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97710

Suvy I already provided links on this page that showed the cyclic model since the 1980s has been accurately predicting events even a decade into the future. If you are truly rational and believe in the scientific method, then you must adjust your wrong assumptions to the reality that has been observed and start performing your own tests with the model to continue to verify it predicts the future or disprove it.

Most readers and people in the West believe war and pandemic can't touch them. The model says they are in for a nasty awakening over the next 10 years. Tell your assumptions about the nature of war to the headless and limbless corpses in Ukraine or Iraq.

You love to predict economic hardship for others but don't think the USA will be harshly affected. Tsk, tsk.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97707

Resource scarcity is complete bull. We are moving into a higher tech knowledge based economy where resources are not the scarce asset. This changes everything in macroeconomics because knowledge can't be financed, so capital can't be aggregated.

Populations do come down when wealth increases, pandemics, and war, but they come back up again when those [conditions] abate.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Medium size corporate taxes are much higher in Asia than I thought:

http://business.inquirer.net/182452/ph-medium-firms-said-to-struggle-with-high-tax-rates

Of the Philippines’ total tax rate, 20.5 percent are profit taxes, 8 percent are labor taxes, while other taxes constitute the remaining 14 percent.

The nine other countries in the Asia Pacific with total tax rates higher than the Philippines were Palau (75.4 percent), Marshall Islands (64.8 percent), China (64.6 percent), India (61.7 percent), Micronesia (60.5 percent), Sri Lanka (56.6 percent), Japan (51.3 percent), Myanmar (47.7 percent) and Australia (47.3 percent), the latest report showed.

The Asia-Pacific average stood at only 36.3 percent. Globally, a standard company may have a total tax rate of 40.9 percent of profits, the report showed.

The significance of that is I expected Asia to outshine the West because of a lower tax burden. Asia will outshine the West because it has lower sovereign debt and statutory unfunded social welfare obligations, but what this information above tells me is that the more significant leap forward will be for the decentralized knowledge based economy which will be nearly untaxable once we complete the implementation of the anonymous internet.


Armstrong's model is being proven correct as the Philippines economy starts to turn down:

http://business.inquirer.net/182456/ph-seen-posting-balance-of-payments-deficit

The Philippines faces a full-year BOP deficit for the first time in a decade. The last full-year deficit was seen in 2004.

“The dominant factors affecting the BOP are external in nature, specifically the normalization of monetary policy in the United States,” Tetangco told reporters.

He was referring to the gradual reductions in and recent halt of the US Federal Reserve’s monthly asset purchases. Interest rates have been on the rise due to the end of these asset purchases, which had previously flooded financial markets with freshly-printed cash.

As a result, cash that flowed to emerging markets since the Fed program have started to reverse, returning to advanced markets like the United States.

The country’s BOP position is a summary of all its transactions with the rest of the world.

For 2014, the BSP now sees the Philippines posting a deficit of $3.4 billion, compared to the previous forecast of a surplus of $1.1 billion.

“This is mainly due to developments in the capital account,” Tetangco said.

Latest data from the BSP showed that at the end of October, the country posted net outflows of foreign portfolio investments totaling $1.1 billion, compared to the $3.6 billion surplus posted in the same 10-month period last year.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98048

There’s ZERO statistical validity to such nonsense.

You haven't studied the implementation of the ECM model so you have no way of knowing what statistical models are used. I haven't either, because it isn't open source (yet). But Armstrong has said astutely that all the economists are using statistical models with data that only goes back less than 100 years, so their models can't possibly be valid. That means he (after spending over a $billion in today money) on collecting data since Mesopotamia has found that that the correct statistics requires a very long sampling interval.

What I said is that it won’t be as difficult for the US as it will be for others (for many good reasons).

I guess you haven't noticed how much more developed the police state is in the USA (with a 99% conviction rate and paramilitized local "peace" officers) as compared to any where else, even communist China has a lower percentage of the population incarcerated.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97426

@Jon
I agree Armstrong writes in disjoint blog posts which makes his theme incoherent to most readers.

You need to go to his ECM models page and understand that model first, so his disjointed blog posts can make sense.

2011 was the start of a 4.3 year turn up in the ECM which is currently in a 51.6 year overall Private wave.

2007.15, 2015.75, and 2024.25 will all be turns down in the ECM and will mean renewed contagion for government (Public) woes, getting worse each time. Until we finally reset the world monetary system and start anew in a 51.6 year Public wave starting 2032.

[iCEBREAKER]

Isn't it nice that you have this thread to talk to yourself in?

It's like your own padded room! 

Very useful to contain your lunacy and prevent it from bothering the sane people.   

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Isn't it nice that you have this thread to talk to yourself in?

It's like your own padded room!  

Very useful to contain your lunacy and prevent it from bothering the sane people.  

You choose to remain ignorant of the poll on this thread and that 46% voted in agreement.


http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97706

None of that really matters now. The reality is that Russia is on the verge of financial collapse.

...

Also, we’re not headed towards World War III. I think we’re headed towards a bunch of Cold War-type scenarios and proxy wars. You’re seeing a containment policy on not just Russia, but China as well.

...

With the containment policy towards China, it’ll be Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Australia, and a few other countries against China. In the case of Russia, we’re seeing the lines being drawn. The line being drawn in Ukraine is a HUGE advantage for both the US and Europe.

...

Autocracy and authoritarianism doesn’t work over an extended period of time.

Suvy you pontificate without considering reality of history as a catalog of repeating outcomes.

1. The entire world is on the verge of economic collapse. Historically when countries implode economically, they start an external hot war to turn national disgust into patriotic sacrifice which is what we will see in those countries which are unified internally (e.g. Putin has 80% approval rating, Japanese and Chinese are still patriotic to the extreme of being xenophobic). The USA instead will fracture internally as the disagreement over socialism (Obamacare, police state, etc) reaches the boiling point.

2. As the global economy implodes, the price of oil falls, North America's fracking and oil sands become uneconomic (below about $75/bbl). One of the pillars of the USA remaining relatively stronger was its recent upsurge in fossil fuel production.

3. Russia and China are nuclear powers. Japan and Australia are not and the rest you mentioned have no military capability except India which has no incentive to enter a hot conflict with China. Russia has been flying their nuclear bombers close to USA's West Coast over the past year or so.

4. Russia and China are doing deals with countries all over the world. They both recently inked deals for example in Argentina.

5. The USA is now approaching a totalitarian regime (with its true nature as a police state to be more pronounced after 2015.75 as the USA economy starts to head down).

6. I have no idea what is your justification that wars need to remain cold? That was only the incentive while debt and global commerce were expanding. Now that everything turns down, the incentive to keep war muted is lost.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97869

Suvy, I agree with you that the USA was more diverse (not controlled by a few oligarchs) which made it more competitive. Unfortunately the socialism has taken over and the USA is losing the freedoms (to innovate) that made us the most competitive. As the USA economy turns down after 2015.75, the police state and socialism will become more prominent and start to drag even more severely on the economy and plundering the high tech sector that made the USA strong. For example, I guess you haven't been paying attention, e.g. Obama is ready to regulate the internet as a public utility using executive power to do so bypassing Congress.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98048

“Suvy I already provided links on this page that showed the cyclic model since the 1980s has been accurately predicting events even a decade into the future If you are truly rational and believe in the scientific method”

Yea, methods like that are inherently unscientific. You can show me all the “evidence” you’ve got, but this is just backtested BS. There’s ZERO statistical validity to such nonsense.

Since Michael didn't accept my prior reply on your assertion of “ZERO statistical validity”, let me phase it in a more concrete manner. Armstrong claims he trained an A.I. model with $millions of data (or $100s of millions if inflation adjusted to today's dollar) that he acquired dating back from 1000s of years ago to present. He for example spent $10 million collecting ancient silver coins to construct an accurate chart of silver coinage during the Western Roman empire.

A.I. models are typically trained with a combination of methods including neural networks. A neural network is inherently a statistical model of the data it has been trained on.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98288

@Suvy & @Csteven,
Please tie this reply together with my other comments today. Although I agree the more acute economic adjustment will be in China (and Japan and Europe), going forward from that long-term China, Japan, and Asia will bottom and are on the way up, and the USA (and Europe) is systemically on the way down. The USA has an aging population and will eventually lose its high tech edge. And I also think there will be a massive brain drain out of the USA as the shakers and movers in the high-tech industry will jump ship as the NSA and Obama take control over the internet. I count myself as one who already did. I think there is coming shift where the incomes of the middle class of the developing world approaches critical mass especially as they start intertrading, e.g. the coming Asian Union free trade and employment migration zone starting 2015. The high tech sector is going to jump to greener pastures. China will correct (probably harder than Pettis' optimistic soft landing), then start moving up again probably within a decade or so, as the West falls over the cliff towards decadence. The new financial center of the world will move to Asia by or just after the global monetary reset by 2032.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98351

Anyone that uses that kind of precision on stuff like this is obviously spewing BS. The more complicated the model, the more quickly you lose precision. Anyone using that kind of precision for this kind of complexity has major red flags on their work.

Armstrong has pointed out that long-term predictions are actually much more accurate (less statistically noisy) than short-term ones[1].

I found the blog where he explained how he discovered the model and the statistical possibility being in in the 1-in-a-billion of the model being a random match.

I also found the blog where he explains the correlation between machine learning and density estimation in statistics.

[1] http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/12/the-long-term-is-not-spontaneous/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/12/17/bernankes-speech-at-the-ceremony-commemorating-the-centennial-of-the-fed-reserve-act/

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-96710

There’s one thing you forgot. Much of the debt has been securitized, so when one loan gets paid off, several others do as well. You need to take a look at the debt adjusted for this part of the financial system (both Steve Keen and Krugman talk about this, and Krugman is right on this occasion). I found the chart somewhere, but I can’t find it right now. It’s NOT the total debt/GDP (which runs at around 250% or so), but it accounts for the securitization–it should be around 170% or something around there.

Ah thanks. So perhaps that explains why I have seen a global total debt figure from Armstrong of $158 trillion while I've been citing the $227 trillion total debt figure I had read at a WSJ blog.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98542

@Jon
I suppose each of us has some confirmation bias, myself included. I caution you on being married to one asset class, because it can cause you to be defiant of the market and lose your shirt.

Armstrong actually doesn't think its very likely that gold will go much higher than $5000. And I agree. Because for gold to go as high as you are predicting would require the world be plunged into a Dark Age. But in Dark Ages, gold loses its value and food becomes money. There is only so far you can go with hard money before society resets the monetary system to satiate and address the problem that was making gold move higher, or society is unable to do so and we go over the cliff into the abyss of another 600 year Dark Age where for example only rice was money in Japan. This is because velocity of money and thus GDP falls off the cliff when hard money is hoarded.

Also don't rule out crypto-currency. This could radically influence the equation of the future monetary system. I am working in that sphere (as well as continuing to program mainstream social media applications) and I know more about what is developing behind the scenes that is not public yet. The key to making a crypto-currency really matter ties in with giving it a reason to be adopted as a currency (i.e. high velocity) by common people. Bitcoin lacked that widespread reason, as well as having technological deficiencies. I think the entire internet model will change (and is underway).