One view of the market at years end

To be clear, this was not a very popular sentiment at the time, just as it wasn’t popular when I predicted in 2015 that the Fed would launch interest rate hikes instead of going to negative rates in order to start a catalyst for economic crisis. The problem some people have with this concept is that they just can’t fathom that the central bank would deliberately crash the system. They desperately cling to the notion that the Fed and other central banks want to keep the machine rolling forward at any cost. This is simply not true.

The claim is that the banking elites are “required” to keep the system propped up in a state of reanimation because they are reliant on the system to provide capital and thus “influence.” The people that assert this argument don’t seem to understand how central banks operate.

As most liberty activists should know by now, central banks are essentially a legally protected counterfeiting scheme. Using fractional reserve banking at a ratio that is essentially secret, central banks create their own capital from thin air, and they can infuse capital into international banks at will when it suits their purposes. There is no “profit motive” for the banking syndicate. They can print the cash or digitally conjure it anytime they wish, and they can use it to purchase tangible assets before their printing diminishes the buying power of the currency, passing price inflation on to regular citizens.

Thus, keeping the system in perpetual motion is not necessary in terms of the transfer of wealth from the population to the banking class. In fact, economic crisis events are very useful to the elites because these events allow the banks to buy up concrete assets like resources, businesses and property for pennies on the dollar. For example, this is exactly what they did during the Great Depression when major banks like JP Morgan bought out thousands of failing local banks across the U.S. and took control of mortgages and other assets being paid off by a vast portion of the American citizenry. The banking system never looked the same again, and international banks continue to dominate ever since as localized competition remains elusive.

This also occurred after the crash of 2008 when companies like Blackstone bought up billions in distressed mortgages for well below previous market value, taking control of the property market and turning bankruptcies into rentals.

The 2008 crash was an asset buying bonanza for banks and corporation bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Low interest rates provided endless cheap credit through which companies could buy anything and everything. Of course, they mostly bought their own equities through stock buybacks, artificially inflating the stock market to the point of absurdity while taking on historic levels of debt — but we’ll get to that in just a moment.

The point is, there is every reason for central banks and their international corporate banking partners in crime to want a controlled demolition of the economic system. As long as they always control the dominant currency mechanism and the means of wealth distribution, they can use fiscal disasters to buy up hard assets for almost nothing.

The profit motive argument against deliberately triggered market declines has no legs when we consider this reality. But there is another reason far beyond the issue of asset accumulation; namely the psychological effects these events have on the masses.

Economic panic is a very useful tool in the hands of the banking elites for molding social conditions in a way that gives them greater psychological power over the public. In every instance of financial catastrophe, it is the banking cabal that is asked to step in and save the day. In 2008 it was the Federal Reserve that was tapped to act as a hero to the mainstream, and only through the tireless efforts of alternative economists and liberty activists has this fallacy been exposed to some in the population.

In the next crisis, it will be the IMF that is used as the front organization for the next rescue as market collapse leads into a crisis in confidence in the U.S. dollar. I outlined the plan for this in my recent article ‘IMF Reveals That Cryptocurrency Is The New World Order End Game.’

The average person is completely unaware of the Hegelian con-game being played here. And, when banking institutions step in as the designated “caregivers” to the ailing economy, what we sometimes see is a kind of reverse Florence Nightingale effect, in which the patients fall in love with the nurse merely because they have associated the extension of economic function to an extension of their lives (or at least, an extension of comfort in their lives).

The next engineered crash is shaping up to become the most epic in history, and make no mistake, it has already started. Even now mindless optimism and blind faith in the markets continues, and the assumption on the part of the investment world is that the banks will eventually be forced to admit their “policy error” on tightening and that they will revert back to lower rates or even more QE. This is not going to happen.

Hopium sellers have been peddling several scenarios lately in which the current downtrend in markets will stop and the bull rally party rekindled. The three most pervasive are…

Scenario #1: The Fed suddenly skips rate hikes in the near term under pressure from markets and the White House.

Scenario #2: The Fed fully admits to policy error in light of stock market declines and re-launches QE.

Scenario #3: Trump announces successful trade war negotiations, primarily with China, and ends tariff measures.

As I have noted many times in the past year, Jerome Powell admitted in the minutes of the October 2012 Fed meeting that tightening measures in the face of extreme market addiction to stimulus would inevitably cause a crisis event. The Fed had created a monster of a bubble, and a monster in the investment world, and they knew they were doing it. With corporate and consumer debt levels at historic highs, any interest rate increases, no matter how seemingly marginal, will kill stock buybacks, cause corporate cutbacks and derail consumer spending.

Today, Jerome Powell is taking the exact actions in policy that he originally stated would cause a crash. Powell is not tightening out of stupidity, nor is he tightening out of a misguided error in policy. Powell is tightening because the banking elites want a crash. Period.

Because of this, it is highly unlikely that the Fed will stop tightening measures, let alone reverse them. The Fed does not care about “pressure” from markets, or pressure from the White House which I believe is part of a farcical Kabuki theater. The Fed will continue hiking up to the neutral rate of inflation, and probably well beyond that into 2019. This is exactly what they did during the Great Depression to escalate the crisis, and it is exactly what they will do today.

Trump’s trade war rhetoric is now the only lever that can be pulled to stall the market landslide. But it appears that this stalling is meant to make the crash more manageable, not stop it from happening. Trump will jawbone markets up at times, but overall there will be no progression in negotiations. The trade war will eventually escalate to include threats to U.S. bond markets and the dollar itself.

Trump’s policies match almost exactly with the model followed by Herbert Hoover preceding the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. His trade war is a perfect distraction for the masses as central banks, the real culprits behind the crisis, pull the plug on life support for the economy. We will continue to hear rumors of new ground gained with China and other nations, and these rumors will continue to be dispelled days later as they have been for the past year.

The claim that what we are seeing in equities is nothing more than a “correction” is a fallacy that misrepresents the reality of conditions on the ground. It is based on assumptions that the Fed will stop tightening measures and that the trade war will end abruptly and favorably. It is also based on severe cognitive dissonance — the optimism of drug addicts, their veins filled with years of QE heroin. The truth is that the drug binge is over.

The banking elites are done with that phase of the collapse, and they are moving onto the next phase. It is clear in their actions, it is clear in their public admissions, and it is clear in the downward spiral of the economy at large. What we are seeing is not a “correction,” it’s a crash. It is time for people to accept this fact and prepare accordingly if they have not already.