WALL STREET PONDERS HOW TO RIG THE GAME EVEN MORE - Financial Elites Plotting a ‘Great Reset’ to Destroy Personal Wealth

 

Financial Elites Plotting a ‘Great Reset’ to Destroy Personal Wealth

Volume 90%

 

BROWNSTONE RESEARCH (SPONSORED)

17 Jun 202110

4:25

The following content is sponsored by Brownstone Research.

As the world’s economy emerges from the crisis caused by the pandemic, global elites have pushed for a “Great Reset.” Brownstone Research founder Jeff Brown spoke with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow about the implications of this globalist vision for ordinary investors and how Brownstone Research’s personalized “Great Reset Protection Plan” provides all the tools investors need to protect themselves against these destructive market forces.

Though the pandemic has pushed talk of the Great Reset into broader political discourse, Brown explained that the idea is much older. The phrase originated with Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in 2014. But, as Brown noted, “Philosophically, this has been going on for thousands of years.”

“The powerful and the elites of the world have always tried to impose their will and signal their virtue to society obviously at their own benefit, not the benefit for the general population,” Brown said.

However, he noted that the pandemic has only accelerated this globalist push, as governments and corporations have exercised unprecedented power over individuals.

Brown framed the Great Reset as part of the trend of “woke capitalism,” which he described as “the corporate version of virtue signaling.”

He explained that we can see the Great Reset in action in the corporate world’s embrace of ESG investing, which stands for “Environmental, Social, and Governance.”

“ESG is one the largest themes in the corporate world right now, as companies try to rebrand themselves,” he said. “And it’s all about money and perception in the sense that even large institutional funds on Wall Street are trying to reposition themselves as being good, raising trillions of dollars of funds only to be invested in ESG approved companies. And, of course, companies are excited to rebrand themselves so that they have access to that kind of capital and those types of investors.”

“From my perspective, a very perverse loop is happening right now that is actually feeding into what those behind the Great Reset are trying to accomplish,” Brown added.

“What is their goal? What is the objective for some of these global elites?” Marlow asked.

“Obviously it’s almost always about money and power,” Brown said. “By imposing controls, they can impose and control the flow of capital into places they see fit, not where we, as taxpayers or citizens, feel is appropriate. If you control the flows of money, obviously you can benefit. They have the added benefit in their eyes of being perceived to be doing good for the world and the perception that they know better about what’s good for us and that they’re steering things in the right direction.”

“But this will absolutely exacerbate the types of inequalities and problems that we see around the world today, rather than solving them,” Brown cautioned. “And the Great Reset, of course, always leaves out one key point: How is the world going to pay for all of these grand visions?”

“Do you know the answer?” Marlow asked.

“They’re going to print a lot more money,” Brown answered. “And what that means is the value of our dollars or our euros or our yen will be quickly devalued and depreciated over shorter periods of time.”

“I know that if folks go over to JeffBrownReset.com, you give them a comprehensive plan on how to deal with this in their personal life,” Marlow said. “What can we be doing to guard against this on an individual basis?”

“My overarching goal is to help normal investors protect against these types of things,” Brown explained. “We try to stack the deck in favor of normal people and give them the same advantages, if not more, than the insiders on Wall Street. And any time we’re living in these types of highly inflationary, very radical progressive monetary policy periods, things like fixed assets are important.”

“If we outpace inflation, then our real return on investments will be greater than a government’s ability to devalue the currency,” he added. “So, what I really try to convey to my subscribers are investing in ways that can do exactly that — that can grow their assets at rates that are much faster than inflation.”

Sign up for Jeff Brown’s “Great Reset Protection Plan” HERE. Learn more at JeffBrownReset.com.

WHEN THE RICH HOWL ABOUT THE 'DANGERS' OF SOCIALISM, THEY MEAN AS IT MAY PERTAIN TO THE POOR AND NOT TO THE CRIMINALS LIVING ON WALL STREET!

The world’s major central bank has indicated it will do nothing that could be construed as withdrawing support from the mountain of debt and fictitious capital its policies have created in the US and worldwide and will continue the flow of ultra-cheap money that has enabled the enrichment of a financial oligarchy to levels never before seen in history.

The third Big Lie concerns the economic recovery.  Kunstler thinks that since the 2008 financial meltdown, the U.S. economy has been "held together with the baling wire and duct tape of Federal Reserve money games and ... government fiscal recklessness."  Kunstler thinks we will soon have to admit that there won't be a true recovery and that we are entering what he calls "the long emergency."  No cyclical depression is on the menu, I'm afraid.  It's more sobering than that.

Global debt binge continues as Fed keeps printing money

Nick Beams

10 hours ago

There is a clear conclusion to be drawn from the two-day meeting of the Federal Reserve’s policy-making committee, which concluded yesterday.

The world’s major central bank has indicated it will do nothing that could be construed as withdrawing support from the mountain of debt and fictitious capital its policies have created in the US and worldwide and will continue the flow of ultra-cheap money that has enabled the enrichment of a financial oligarchy to levels never before seen in history.

In the financial press, the indication by the Fed that it may start raising its base interest rate from virtually zero at the end of 2023 rather than in 2024, as had been previously indicated, was described as “hawkish.” But in fact, the Fed did not lift a finger to change its monetary policy.

The Fed’s program of asset purchasing, initiated in response to the freeze in financial markets in March 2020 with the onset of the pandemic, will continue at the rate of $120 billion a month.

In the lead-up to the meeting, the issue had been raised in financial circles about whether the Fed would begin to “taper” its financial asset purchases. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was at pains to offer reassurances that nothing would be done to upset the financial markets.

The standard for reducing the level of asset purchases was “a ways away,” he said, and while the Fed was “talking about tapering,” any move would be “orderly, methodical and transparent,” and communicated well in advance. This was, in effect, a guarantee to financial markets that at the very first sign of market turbulence any hint of ending support would be withdrawn.

Before the global financial crisis in 2008, the Fed held around $900 billion worth of financial assets on its books. That rose rapidly to more than $4 trillion as a result of quantitative easing and then rose again to more than $8 trillion in 2020. It is now on course to reach at least $9 trillion by the end of this year.

The Fed’s policies, which have been followed by other major central banks, have had two effects. First, they have directly facilitated the transfer of wealth into the hands of a global corporate and financial oligarchy. Data published by Forbes in April showed that in 2020 alone the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by 60 percent from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion, described by the magazine as “the greatest acceleration of wealth in human history.”

Second, they have created a mountain of debt. Some indication of the extent of this process was outlined in an article in the Wall Street Journal this week. It noted that after issuing $1.7 trillion in bonds last year, nearly $600 million above the previous high, the total debt of US corporations at the end of March was $11.2 trillion, equivalent to around half of US gross domestic product.

The same situation exists in Europe, where thousands of companies are being sustained only by the zero interest rate policy of the European Central Bank and its financial asset purchases, as well as direct government support.

The extent of this operation was highlighted in recent comments by the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. “We do not want to abruptly cut our support and trigger dozens of thousands of bankruptcies,” he said.

The creation of a debt mountain is only one consequence of the Fed’s policies. The flood of ultra-cheap money into the global financial system has promoted a wave of speculation, ranging from commodities to housing, shares of stock and cryptocurrencies, to name some examples.

With Wall Street trading at record highs, price-earnings ratios on stocks, the traditional metric for assessing market valuations, have been climbing.

The yield on corporate junk bonds—those rated below investment-grade status—has fallen to all-time lows. This week, Bloomberg reported on a company that had floated a $500 million offering of junk bonds to purchase bitcoin and received a favourable rating from Moody’s because it has a “very low cost of borrowing.”

Commodities have been the centre of speculation, with prices swinging wildly. In May, lumber prices in the US rose to record highs and then plunged by 41 percent this month. Industrial commodities such as iron ore and copper have also been the subject of speculation, sending their prices to record highs.

According to the latest global data, house prices are rising at the fastest rate since before the global financial crisis of 2008, with New Zealand recording a 22 percent rise in the past year and the US seeing an increase of 13.5 percent.

It is vital for its ongoing struggles that the working class grasp the objective significance of this vast escalation of speculation promoted by the Fed and other central banks. Debt, corporate bonds and other financial assets are what Marx characterised as fictitious capital. That is, they do not have an inherent value. Rather, in the final analysis, they are a claim on the surplus value extracted from the working class in the production process.

The escalation of this mountain of fictitious capital has decisive implications for the development of the class struggle. It portends an immense intensification of the assault on the working class—the extraction of ever greater amounts of surplus value—to meet the claims of these assets.

During his presentation and question-and-answer session following the Fed meeting, Powell devoted considerable attention to inflation and the prospects for its increase.

The chief concern of the central bank is not price rises as such, but whether this brings about an upsurge of the working class in support of wage and other demands, and resistance to the “restructuring” of labour and working conditions to meet the relentless demands of finance capital to increase the flow of surplus value.

Powell indicated that the Fed stood ready to use its monetary policy tools if a permanent rise in inflation results in struggles for higher wages.

But monetary policy alone—higher interest rates to prevent so-called “overheating” in the economy—is not enough. Moreover, it contains the danger of setting off a financial crisis.

Other means, therefore, have to be developed, chief among which is the use of the trade union bureaucracy as the industrial police force of finance capital, a method being employed in the US and internationally.

Herein is the significance of the struggle waged by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections for the formation of rank-and-file committees and the development of an international alliance to advance the independent struggle of the working class against the suppression of wages organised by the trade union apparatuses.

These committees will go forward and develop to the extent that they are guided by an international socialist perspective. The deepening economic crisis has not only revealed the objective necessity for this program, it has also shattered the ideological nostrums advanced by the capitalist ruling class and all its agencies.

The central doctrine of the ruling elites, developed over centuries, is that the so-called capitalist free market operates like a law of nature and is the only viable, the only possible, form of socioeconomic organisation, and that a socialist program, based on the conscious control and regulation of the economy to meet human need, is therefore irrational.

The socialist movement has continually exposed this outlook, drawing out its absurdity: the claim that while mankind can probe the outer reaches of the universe and the inner structure of the atom and the mechanisms of life, it cannot consciously organise society.

Long ago refuted theoretically, the doctrines of the free market are now being torn to shreds in practice. The so-called free market has ceased to function. Without the daily ongoing intervention of the capitalist state, in the form of the Fed, it would collapse in an instant.

The state has now assumed the role of the chief economic organiser. The chief question today is in whose interests it will function. The present capitalist state, the instrument for the enrichment of the oligarchs and the impoverishment of the working class, must be overturned and a workers’ government established. That is the inherent logic of the struggles now unfolding.

Futurist limns out future of the Biden regime

By Jon N. Hall

Tuesday night at LewRockwell, I read a terrific article that laid out a plausible near future for our declining nation, "The Three-Way Squeeze" by James Howard Kunstler.  Conservatives and libertarians really ought to read it.  Those disgusted and horrified by the state of our nation will take heart at Kunstler's opening line:

Here is why the "Joe Biden" regime only has a few months to live: it is caught in a squeeze between some of the greatest lies in world history, and they're all unraveling now.

Kunstler then explains the three Big Lies that he feels will soon doom the current regime.  The first Big Lie concerns the government's handling of the pandemic.  He touches on Dr. Fauci's involvement in and funding of the Wuhan lab, the medical bureaucrats squashing of therapeutics like HCQ, and the adverse effects of the COVID vaccines, which aren't getting a lot of press.

Kunstler's Big Lie No. 2 concerns the presidential election, which he thinks was fraudulently "won."  This second lie is where we get some delicious "red meat": the Arizona vote audit.  We learn that other states are going to Arizona to observe their audit.  You'll love this section.

The third Big Lie concerns the economic recovery.  Kunstler thinks that since the 2008 financial meltdown, the U.S. economy has been "held together with the baling wire and duct tape of Federal Reserve money games and ... government fiscal recklessness."  Kunstler thinks we will soon have to admit that there won't be a true recovery and that we are entering what he calls "the long emergency."  No cyclical depression is on the menu, I'm afraid.  It's more sobering than that.

Do read Kunstler's article from start to finish.  Don't jump ahead, because the entire article will prepare you for the last paragraph, the Big Reveal.

James H. Kunstler is an interesting cat.  In addition to non-fiction (or verity), he's written novels and dabbles in painting.  Visit his website to find out more about the guy.  The CF of the CFN he refers to is perhaps a trifle naughty for the genteel readers of AT and might be unfamiliar.  The term may have arisen in the Vietnam Era; here's an explanation of the term from Quartz.  To find out what the "N" refers to, visit his website.

In any event, do read "The Three-Way Squeeze."  It might give you some hope that our national nightmare might not have to go on for another three and a half years.