"The Royal Scam" by Anonymous Correspondent
August 3, 2009
Are we at the end? These massive insolvable problems: where can they lead? The inattentive political class, too selfish to care. The corrupt and venal insiders, what can they do?
What can they do? Here's an idea, presented in the book
And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina (2006)
Here's Argentina's CPI in 2001:
Here's the chart, and this deflation head-fake has happened elsewhere, such as Weimar. See how Mish is right and there is REAL Deflation here? He's not kidding. CPI is minus 1% to 3%, while Case-Shiller CPI is minus 6%:
Nevertheless, 3 months after Deflation begins in Argentina, Inflation rises to 120%. The Peso is devalued 73%
The bond market collapses:
And a few months later, Argentina defaults on sovereign debt, for a multi-billion dollar loss to foreign creditors. A mere two years later, the country is without debt, working hard, and booming.
Hmm...
Work with me here. Suppose, just suppose, that mathematically, the US Fiat system has a very certain, very predictable end date, easily seen even by such non-monetary critics such as Martenson's “Crash Course”.
(Also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIwyMif5EOg&feature=related )
This certain end date is roughly when the parabolic curve goes vertical as mapped using the average interest rate of all national transactions—6% perhaps. And suppose, just suppose, that being no dummy and working with money as your sole object, clawing your way to the top of the Billionaire's club, you could see this coming. In fact, everyone can—all your peers who clawed through the same training, saw through the same veil, and are now in positions of unimaginable influence, having friends who are Presidents, Diplomats, nation-shaking Hedge Funds, and IMF/BIS bankers. And they all looked at each other and said: “This is bad, dahlink” and: “It's mathematically certain, mate,” then everyone together: “So what do we do?”
Well, no one knows what to do. Nothing like this has never been tried before. The financial world has never had ALL baseless currencies before, and never has a country as large as the US been brought down except during a war that exhausted all nations together. The risks are too high just to guess what will happen if we pull lever X instead of lever Y when the end comes. So you pick a country a lot like America. Productive, hardworking, modern, agricultural, having a corrupt, spendthrift political class and an uninvolved, unassuming, spendthrift-but-hardworking middle class—a country the most like America. And you run a little experiment.
What happens to a country when it does exactly what we're about to do? You influence leaders here, fund populist movements there, then get your friends to invest in this nation, knowing all along what's going to happen, and knowing that—because we know, we're making it happen—no one important will lose their money playing along. A nation like, oh, Argentina.
You push foreign investment through banking and diplomatic channels from the top, while as in “Economic Hit Man” no one below the 1st level need know, and you over-invest in the country, buying the leaders and giving them every assurance that things are fine, they're not too far along, the world believes in them, and the IMF is right there to catch them.
Until one day, you don't. Once they've gone too far to pull back, you spread some rumors, cause a run on some investments, then have your banking friends step back a bit. Then a bit more. Then at the 11th hour, despite daily promises all along the way, the IMF also leaves them in the lurch, cutting off their last foreign credit. What do they do? What do the people do? What does it take to keep them under control in this transition? Where are the pressures? Do they give in to interminable debt slavery to the IMF, or do they default on foreign investors? And what happens when they do? Does the world punish them or two years later is it like nothing happened?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, with another placid, productive, agricultural, English-speaking country with a strong middle class and rule of law, also most like America, you try the other direction: unlimited inflation. In Zimbabwe, three eggs cost 100 billion dollars...back in 2008, before things got really bad.
What happens there? Which way was better, for power, influence, and control in world affairs? Which way do the important people remain in power with less bother?
Just a thought, mind you. I'm sure no one would actually do such a thing.
Here's what happened in Argentina: the political leaders are dysfunctional and infighting, paying out to their home provinces, uncaring of the enormous debt and with no reason to care so long as foreign money could be borrowed. Meanwhile the economy began to rest more and more on bubbles and speculation funded by this foreign borrowing. When the balloon went up, the insiders saw which way it was headed and got their money offshore, something like Cheney and Halliburton did the other year. Then as things devolved, ever-increasing capital controls were put in place, just like now with the US investigating “off-shore havens” and profits one might have made overseas using the premise of money laundering to chain the firedoors shut one by one.
Finally, they enforced the official “corrilito”, and soon after had an extended Bank Holiday for the 5 months it took to devalue the Peso by 73%--far faster than anyone not forewarned could adjust and react. Once every exit was chained tight, they firebombed the casino, trapping everyone inside. Even if you had thousands in stocks, bonds, and savings accounts, with the market frozen and the monthly bank withdrawal limit set at $300/mo, the little people could not pay rent or even eat, becoming “Cartoneros” garbage-picking architects and engineers, wandering the streets with their children at midnight as the nation devolved into a chaos that did not topple the ruling class.
Once all the assets in the country had been discounted a minimum of 73%, the insiders then repatriated their money and bought their neighbor's fortunes for pennies on the dollar, finding cheap, hungry, competitive labor, ready to compete with even 3rd world wages. The prudent, hard-working, and savers (the wrong people) were wiped out, and the money was transferred to the speculators and insiders (the right people). Massive capital like land and factories can not be expatriated, but are always worth their USE value and did not fall as much, or even rose afterwards as with falling debt ratios and low wages these working assets became competitive again. It's not so much a “collapse” as a redistribution, from the middle class and the working to the capital class and the connected. ...And the genius is, they could blame it all on foreigners, “incompetent” leaders, and careless, debt-happy citizens themselves.
Now I'm no genius here, but couldn't the United States do the very same thing?
What you need to do is--and bear with me here--send your best Wall St. salesmen and diplomats to China and sell them a bill of goods about how they can “modernize” with our help. The Cold War is over. Capitalism reins. You know us Wall St. types! It's all about the dollar! Have the radio scream the President sold out and sign them up to the WTO as you suck Asia into massive overcapacity and a deep, unbreakable reliance on the US and G-8 as customers while paving over the national independence of their life-giving water and farmland. Then, once they've tasted freedom and affluence, once they're unable to support themselves independently, you pull the plug not on them but YOURSELF. Implode your own middle class as above. Kill the bond markets, cause a run on your own currency, and default on the debts you owe them. Hey, it's the only thing you could do, right? Americans are just stupid, right? Wall Street is just greedy. It's all an accident, an act of God really. No one's to blame. It's classic Judo.
In a single stroke you:
a) lose the burden of external debt
b) by devaluation lose your internal debt
c) make the nation competitive as a manufacturing power.
d) scare the people back into compliance, even exultation with their low wages.
e) with the renewal of manufacturing, re-cast the power that your military rests on
f) during a time of Peak Oil, radically reduce unnecessary consumption while insuring strategic (military) supply.
g) by doing that, suck in the oil powers of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela enough to knock them off-base, first with high prices, then low prices.
h) club China into submission to the G-8 money powers again
and best of all:
i) enrich insiders beyond their wildest dreams, insuring their dominance for a generation to come.
All the right people win, all the wrong people lose.
Seeing the monetary parabola looming dead ahead after the near-miss of the Tech collapse, what do you need to insure this happens on a very tight schedule?
First, knowing this will happen, you suck in your own people by demanding—straight from the top—that bankers loosen lending standards so low even the dumbest financier couldn't believe it was prudent, then refuse to prosecute even the most blatant corruptions by mortgage originators, fraudulent borrowers, and other “outsiders”. Suspecting this will all blow up, pay yourself today in bonuses instead of later in investments.
Then, knowing you'll never repay, you jack up national spending beyond anything anybody's ever seen and go do what you want all over the world, in any country you want, with impunity.
Then you have a scare that gives you cover to set up conduits that insure all the right people have lifeboats, even if it costs $23-30 Trillion, and even if the Hoi Polloi scream bloody murder. It'll all be over soon anyway.
It was only a 3% GDP deficit that sank Argentina:
But the US$ is not the Peso. You need to make sure it goes down on demand. You aim straight for $2+ Trillion yearly deficits for 70 years and threaten more if necessary.
Hey, is this enough to insure a collapse, even of the world’s reserve currency?
Is this enough to force China to cut us off and play the role of the bad guy we have planned for them? Funny how convenient that is, no? When every economist is screaming, “Mr. President, don’t do this, why are you doing this?” Why indeed.
Hit health care as a way to make the people dependent on the government--innate independence is America's resistance to the plan—and a way of tracking and controlling them. Computerized medical records were the first thing they brought up, the highest priority, and have been attempted regularly over the years. (1993, 2004, 2009...)
Use the 5 owners of nearly all media to keep up the drumbeat of the “other”: left, right, black, white, famous, religious, atheist, straight, gay, immigrant, commie, Muslim--whatever the people will buy--to insure confusion and infighting when the time comes.
And here we are. Eye of the storm, explosives primed, waiting to pull the detonator.
Any reason the US could not do this, and that everything these incredibly smart, ruthless, immeasurably connected people have been doing is actually not stupid but smart? And what if they believe what they're doing is all for the good of the country and are willing to take any measure, any action no matter how awful or unprincipled, because it will put America back on top again? And if they get richer than Croseus in the process, well, who's fault is it anyway? It's hard work after all.
Like I said, just a thought.
The real magic of a good Con is not to get the money. It's to do it in such a way that the Mark thinks he knows what happened, thinks he saw the Con you're pulling, when in fact, the real Con is somewhere else. There's a saying: “Before the scam, you have the dream and they have the money; while afterwards, you have the money and they have the dream.” If you want to know the real Con, when it's all over, find out who walked away with the money. Before then, you won't know.
These Billionaires are the smartest, most unprincipled, double-thinking gamesmen in the world, playing the biggest, most dangerous games in the world, on a field where whole nations are at stake. They didn't get to where they are by being stupid, taking chances, and making mistakes. You can be sure they're not making them now. They have immense control in media, finance, military, government, business, and while every plan has risk and it might still get away from them, it sure won't be for lack of trying. And that goes for the gamesters in China and every other country worldwide who are try every day to do the exact same thing to back to them. It's the big boy's game, and when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.
So when you're reading the news about how randomly careless and stupid everybody was, just remember the Argentine plan: all the right people win, all the wrong people lose, and the good people never knew what hit them. The Royal Scam.
Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation (PDF version (111 pages): Survival+ )
