Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (June 1, 2020)
This month’s update will try to make some sense of all the turmoil taking place today. I have often written about a very widespread global demographic collapse. The pandemic did not cause this, but it is adding to it. Furthermore, any pandemic is yet another manifestation of negative social mood – people are not at ease, and therefore their health suffers. Many countries have actually done a good job of containing the pandemic. The USA has not (it is among the most infected on a per capita basis) and on top of this problem it now faces violent protests and riots in over 140 of its cities from coast to coast – evidence of a profound societal dysfunction………..the society has simply ceased to function. The stock market is utterly disconnected from this morbid reality, but as we shall see, nominal “money” in the USA has little or no real value left.
In any case, it looks like global population has been declining in the recent past and that it will continue to decline in the foreseeable future. One very interesting site which quantifies this in clear terms is “Deagle.” Deagle is a site dedicated mainly to update us on global military weapons system, be they for land forces, naval forces or air forces. One of their internal links has very detailed data for global population, GDP (Gross Domestic Product), annual military budgets and per capita GDP in terms of PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). The first set of figures is actual data for 209 countries in 2017, the second set of figures is for 183 countries forecast for 2025, or a mere 4 years from today: http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx.
Their global population forecast for 2025 is 6,827,253,938 – or what it was a decade ago in 2010.
Yet another topic is what is happening in the world, and specifically in the USA, today. What America is experiencing today is not unlike what the former Soviet Union experienced during its economic, social and political collapse in 1991. Very many people are unemployed, many businesses have closed for good, the purchasing power of money is rapidly evaporating. The pandemic may be seen as a surprise “black swan” event, what has been happening over the last few months is a Global Economic Reset (GER), and the next two stages will be a Global Currency Reset (GCR) and finally a global currency Revaluation (RV). The Global Economic Reset (GER) is visible in the collapse of world trade. The trade war launched by the administration in Washington is a reaction against the inability to continue to purchase foreign goods with an ever collapsing currency – hence the rising prices for these largely basic items in American stores. But as most of us know and accept, no war and no trade war will ever have a good outcome.
The rapidly upcoming Global Currency Reset (GCR) will basically negate global foreign exchange and “reset” all currencies to equal each other at par value – one to one, so to speak. As we have seen, the lion’s share of worldwide financial instruments are financial derivative instruments, which are basically “bets” which money center banks make on the foreign exchange markets. These derivative instruments comprise 80 percent of the USD $4.5 QUADRILLION financial instruments in the world today. The manipulation of foreign exchange (and trade) is basically how the “colonial” powers of the world have short-changed much of the so-called developing world, or their former colonial possessions. The endless creation of credit (the modern day method of “printing money”) has made our money worth less and less. Just one case in point – Quantas (the national airline of Australia) says that social distancing requirements may force air ticket prices up by a whopping 9 fold. Price increases like this will affect everyone. Changes such as this will negate airline deregulation, which took place around 1979. We may return to a world where all airline flights will be the equivalent of today’s first class & business class.
The global currency Revaluation (RV) will take this a step further by inverting global currency valuations as they exist today – thus negating the effect of centuries of colonial policy. Yet another issue is the emergence of digital electronic “encrypted” currencies since 2010, or a mere decade ago when Bitcoin was born. Today, there are at least 285 sovereign countries & dependent territories (“colonies”), but there are already more than 6,000 digital electronic crypto-currencies. The market capitalization of these currencies is a total USD $258 BILLION, or 17,557 times less than the world’s total financial instruments. This is the reasoning behind the belief that digital electronic currencies will continue to soar in value – because eventually all currency will be digital electronic currency.
Here are a few closing statistics with respect to the economic cost of the global quarantine, lock-down, face mask and social distancing costs thus far. 25 percent of US workers have lost their jobs, but the actual figure for unemployment & underemployment is much higher (and of the remaining maximum 75 percent who still have their jobs, the average pay cut is 11 percent of pre-pandemic pay). Something like 30 percent of the American population is unemployed and 40 percent of those demographically in the labor force have no job. Los Angeles County (the most populous American county with 10 million inhabitants) has an estimated unemployment rate of 55 percent – this is likely a better reflection of the national situation in the USA. 60 percent of residents in the European Union report having financial problems due to this pandemic quarantine. Most businesses (at least 70 percent) in the world today are retail businesses (most of these being relatively small in size). Of 7 million such businesses, as many as 681,000 have already gone out of business. Not merely shut for the duration of the quarantine, but permanently out of business. These are concrete reasons why quarantine and lock-down cannot and must not be allowed to last forever. The most recent worldwide precedent (similar situation) was the Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919. That lasted for about 15 months, infected 500 million people (1/3 of the then global population of 1.5 BILLION people) and killed as many as 100 million people. Thankfully, it is looking to be much less of an effect this time around. And thankfully, the entire planet was not affected by previous recent scares such as SARS, Ebola and the Bird Flu.
