so........how do you like your new POTUS?.....Inflation?....Supply and Deman?...General state of the

Sorry, it's not my job to educate you. If you wanted to know you would.

 

That's a big reason why so many job quits are occurring right now... Switching jobs provides a much faster "pay raise" than getting one at one's current job. Another aspect of the job quits is the COVID jab mandates.

Inflation will even kill people who ARE getting raises, as raises are simply not keeping up with it... I get really good raises at my job and if my raise is similar to last year's it won't even be close to keeping up with inflation.

 

Flawed numbers...

... and more importantly, how is your pocketbook doing?? Do your groceries cost a bunch more? How about your gasoline?? How about your home heating costs? How about your energy bills?

 

So you got nothing then?? That's what I thought...

 

I'm happy Trump is gone. My vote wasn't for Biden, it was against Trump. Anyone without the last name of Trump would have done. If the election was held today, I'd still vote against Trump. If he runs in 2024, I'll vote against him again.

My criteria is simple, anyone but Trump. I got sick and tired of his childish antics of name calling and his throwing of temper tantrums like a spoiled 4 year old brat whose parents forgot to teach him any manners. Throw in Trump's 3rd grade schoolyard bullying tactics, he had to go. I could support his policies 100%, but would still vote against him.

I was one of 7 million voters who cast a ballot for Biden, against Trump then voted Republican down ballot enabling the GOP to gain 13 house seats, 2 state legislatures and a governorship all the while losing the presidency by 7 million plus votes.

Look at how independents voted, 41% for Trump, 48% for Republican congressional candidates, 51% for Republican senate candidates, 52% for Republican governor candidates. Guess who's low man on this totem poll. Look at Virginia independents, 2020 they voted for Biden over Trump 57-38. In 2021, they switched to Republican Youngkin 54-45. A swing of 28 points.

Get rid of Trump, then Republicans will regain the support of independents. Keep him, you may be shocked with the results of the midterms coming up.

 

I got a 46% raise from last year in the same job so I am doing fine, but the inflation is bad. Most people's real wages are down despite the so-called "red-hot" economy. And I did not vote in 2020 except for some local offices.

 

Unless you believe this, this guy says, and he has been right, that the FED is only beholden too the IMF and BIS, the crooked Globalists that are ran now from Israel thru Austria, I know, the greed that now runs the world is insane and we are caught in it. I think they bring America down to a Level of Brazil, Argentina, Greece, and slums of Britain. China and Russia will do their own thing, as will many in middle east, and areas in Southeast Asia Pacific look good, many Americans do really well in that part of the world, you can live very well. America is going to continue a huge decline because we listen to TRUMP, BIDEN, and other people who just work for themselves. Trump is a con man, Biden is a dope politician, both controlled by the elite Jewish Banking System and your Opinion, vote matter not!!!! Dont think they do and a HUGE CHANGE in American thinking needs to happen :





From Brandon Smith

The effective Federal Reserve funds rate (the EFFR) has been sitting at virtually zero for a long time now. It feels a little strange to think about the fact that it was 14 years ago when the central bank first helped to trigger the crash of 2008; and we are still dealing with the consequences of it today. I only started writing for the liberty movement two years before that. The amount of time that it takes for economic disasters to develop is well beyond the average person’s attention span. In fact, there are many people who are adults today that have no clue what happened in 2008 because they were in elementary school when it went down.

This is how the establishment is able to get away with the negative changes to our national standard of living – because these changes usually happen over the course of decades and almost no one notices.

That said, there comes a point in any financial collapse where the floor is as thin as it will ever get. When the next shoe drops it’s going to break right through along with along with all the furniture. At this stage there is no slow moving crash, everything goes all at once. We have already seen this scenario in action, and again, I don’t think very many people remember the event.

Here’s what most people have forgotten
In 2018 the Fed began hinting at the institution not only of rate hikes but also cuts to asset purchases and its balance sheet simultaneously. It’s important to understand that effective rates had been sitting near zero for almost a decade and cheap overnight loans from the central bank were feeding one of the longest running corporate stock buyback bonanzas in history. Stock buybacks and easy Fed money facilitated a near endless bull market rally in equities. The lack of real price discovery and the perpetual free-for-all was so bad that the mantra for stocks became “Buy the freaking dip!”

The assumption was that the Fed was always going to step in to protect markets from falling. Why? Because they had done this for several years, creating the biggest spike in the Dow and Nasdaq of all time. Why would they do anything different? But, in 2018, for short time we witnessed what would happen if the central bank was to take away the punch bowl and it was not pretty.

Closing in on mid-2018 the Fed began to hike rates and cut its balance sheet more aggressively. We had seen small intermittent rate hikes since 2015, but these had not coincided with asset cuts or changes in overnight loans to major banks and corporations. The markets immediately began to reverse more than we had seen in some time, gas prices jumped and the yield curve flattened after rates rose a mere 50 basis points. It didn’t take much to cause a panic among investors.

So, to be clear, the major business and investment framework of the U.S. has been so dependent on cheap credit from the Fed that even the tiniest increase in interest rates was enough to almost unhinge the entire system. Of course, bull market ticker trackers in the media missed the whole purpose of this exercise.

The Fed reversed course on hikes and their balance sheet in mid-2019, so the mainstream once again assumed that this meant the central bank would “never” allow markets to fall.

Back in 2018 the argument was that there was no need for the Fed to hike rates or drop assets because there was no imminent threat of inflation. The average economist and the media refused to acknowledge the many warning signs that high inflation was going to hit us in the near term. But the Fed knows exactly what it is doing and they understand that the trillions upon trillions of dollars they created out of thin are after the derivatives crisis will ultimately come back to bite the U.S. economy in the butt in the form of price inflation and stagflation.

Another interesting fact about the hikes of 2018 is that Jerome Powell had warned about the consequences of such actions years prior in 2012 during the October Fed meeting:

…I think we are actually at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause. Investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses. It is not that it is easy for them to make money but that they have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so. Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy. [emphasis added]

Yet, he signed off on the policy anyway once he became chairman. Why?

Because he was ordered to. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan once admitted that the central bank answers to no one in government, but this does not mean the Fed is independent. The Fed is only a part of a larger global central banking machine under the oversight of the Bank for International Settlements.

This is not “conspiracy theory,” it is simply reality. The notion that the Fed acts thoughtlessly, or that their goal is to keep the U.S. economy afloat, is simply I. There are much bigger plans at play.

The next deliberately-engineered economic crisis
My position back then remains the same today: The rate hikes of 2018 were a test run for a more aggressive and deliberately engineered crisis down the road. The Fed has its own agenda, it does not care about protecting U.S. markets, nor does it even care about protecting the U.S. economy in general.

I hold that the Fed is a weapon for social and political change within America and part of its job is to greatly reduce the standard of living of the population while making it appear as if this decline is a “natural” consequence of the U.S. system.

Keep in mind that none other than Karl Marx was insistent that central banks were a primary pillar of a socialist/communist system and its ability to maintain control of the public. As Marx noted in his Manifesto Of The Communist Party written with Fredrick Engels, “despotic inroads on the rights of property” would be “unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.” In other words, in order to meet their revolutionary goal, communists would need to destroy property rights.

Among his ten requirements for a communism government, number five reads:

Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Control of the currency and credit framework means control of the population of any given nation because it allows a central authority to reduce the standard of living “scientifically.” That is to say, they can create economic decline or collapse out of thin air.

But why do this at all? Because financial desperation is the fastest way to create public dependence on a central authority.

Every collectivist regime in history has used poverty and near-starvation, or government rationing and management of production, as a means to keep their populations under control. This is nothing new but for some reason many people think this strategy will never be attempted in America. They think the establishment “needs” the American economy intact. They are simply delusional.

When the government and the elites behind government become everyone’s Mommy and Daddy, the sole providers for the means of survival, it is unlikely that the citizenry will try to rebel. That is to say, people rarely bite the hand that feeds them. By this point, it’s too late.

So, central banks and their corporate and political partners follow the Marxist model and seek to become the hand that feeds; by hook, by crook or by financial collapse if necessary.

I have covered this agenda of central banking and the Fed in many articles the past year, but what we now face is the inevitability of Fed rate hikes. Yet I still see many analysts in the mainstream and in the alternative media who refuse to admit the chances are high that the central bankers will again engage in a rate hike demolition, only this time they are unlikely to have mercy as they did in 2018.

What has changed since the last tightening cycle? Well, in 2022 we now have immediate and obvious stagflation with price inflation of most necessities hitting 40-year highs. This is something the alternative media has been warning about for some time and now the moment has arrived.

Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse. The Fed has created a Catch-22 situation in which inflation will hit hard regardless of whether they hike rates.

Get ready for the yield curve to flatten again and for long term Treasury bonds to be dropped by most foreign investors. Also, get ready for the value of the dollar to plummet, after a short initial spike, as stocks fall.

I believe the Fed will stick with rate hikes this time because they have to be seen as trying to do something about inflation – the same inflation the Fed themselves created through over a decade of fiat money creation and easy credit.

Price inflation will be aggressive this year and going into next year regardless of what the Fed does. Costs are going to rise exponentially for most people. This does not mean that we will be dealing with Weimar-style inflation with wheelbarrows full of Benjamins to buy a loaf of bread’. I’m betting we would see government price controls before that happens (which will trigger mass shortages of goods).

However, it ’oesn’t take much in terms of price spikes to cause a breakdown. An increase of 50% in overall costs would crush a large number of U.S. households and make them desperate for aid.

The Fed has used interest rate hikes into economic weakness in the past, including at the onset of the Great Depression. We have also seen the Fed increase interest rates as high as 12.3% as they did during the inflationary crisis of 1974. These hikes crushed a lot of small and medium businesses at the time. In fact, my own grandfather had expanded his trucking company with multiple vehicles and millions of dollars and a large amount of credit in the early 70s, only to have his business destroyed by skyrocketing interest rates. The 1970s stagflation crisis was nothing compared to what we now face.

Prepare today, because tomorrow will be too late
The conclusion is obvious – get prepared. Price inflation is already here and I believe climbing credit costs are on the way. Getting prepared means stocking staples now that you and your family use regularly. Buy at the lower prices of today so you don’t have to buy at the much higher prices of tomorrow. If you have debt I suggest dealing with it now if you can, and don’t take on any new debt if you can help it.

Do not expect that borrowing at fixed rates today will assure you fixed rates tomorrow.

Invest in commodities that don’t lose value to inflation, especially physical precious metals. There will come a time all too soon when street prices of gold and silver will explode far beyond the fake paper-gold markets.

Most importantly, organize with like-minded people in your community. Trade must decentralize and localize to survive stagflation, and each community is going to need networks of producers and marketplaces to facilitate the shift. We can no longer rely on the supply chain and the global economy; as a culture we will have to relearn how to provide for ourselves and our loved ones.



Brandon Smith has been an alternative economic and geopolitical analyst since 2006 and is the founder of Alt-Market.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Birch Gold Group.

2022, federal reserve, interest rate hike, stagflation

 

FIGHTING U.S. INFLATION WITH WORKER UNEMPLOYMENT.
(Don't look up!)
​

Watch out for the "Inflation Scare Meme." The inflation we are currently experiencing is caused partly from "speculative-inflation" and not from Push-inflation (increase in production costs), not from Pull-inflation (increase in demand), nor foreign exchange-inflation (currency exchange cost).

Speculative-inflation can be caused by reducing production to increase scarcity and price increases; withholding commodities from the market by restricting product distribution is especially easy since many commodities in the US are imported from China over 7,000 miles away. Before the Covid-19 pandemic the cost of shipping a 40 foot container from China to the U.S. was $2,000. Until recently the same shipped container cost $20,000 (10X higher). One would think this would be a U.S. National Security Issue since the U.S. gets many of its war weaponry microchips from CHINA!

The year before Ronald Reagan's became president the election was about hyper-inflation. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to slow borrowing capital for business. After Reagan's election there as a mass layoff of managers and employees and then re-hired most back at lower wages, followed by a massive orgy of monopoly corporate mergers. Unemployment was the highest in the early 1980s since the great 1929 depression. Many workers getting ready to retire were laid-off and lost their pensions. This attack on workers is very profitable.

So the plan of American Business and government is to use the same strategy: FIGHT INFLATION WITH UNEMPLOYMENT. Raising interest rates will slow the US economy causing worker wages to be cut with the resulting unemployment reducing consumer demand followed by manic corporate mergers. The deliberately created unemployment will shut-down worker demands of any kind. Get ready to suffer.

I lived through the 1982 depression; if you are a young person, or about to retire, you are going to be ****ED big time.

 

Here is detailed video on speculative inflation that I have been posting about. Rupert Russell has a PhD in sociology from Harvard University, and released both a film documentary and book titled, "Price Wars: How the commodities markets made our chaotic world (Feb. 2022)."

"...Russell travels to Tunisia, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, East Africa, and Central America and discovers that unrest in all these places was triggered by dramatic and mysterious swings in the price of essential commodities. Deregulation of the commodities markets means that food prices can shoot up even in years of abundant harvests, causing hunger and protest. Oil prices and real-estate values can surge even when supplies are normal, enriching and emboldening dictators. It is this instability–fueled by banks and hedge funds in faraway New York and London–that has toppled regimes and unsettled the West. Price Wars is a fascinating, original, and groundbreaking exposé of the power of the commodities markets to disrupt the world. Review "

Sam Seder interview: De-Stabilization Through Commodities w/ Rupert Russell - 2/14/22

​

 

All I know is my life was better when Trump was president. My retirement account increased in value almost every month. Now it's losing every month, thousands of dollars. And it costs more to live, with every single thing being more expensive. Most notably gas and groceries.

As far as retirement accounts go, is anyone else thinking of cashing in now, before it gets any worse? I mean if you are old enough, as I am. I think it will get much worse before it gets better. At least, in a savings account what I've got left would be relatively safe. At least until it's necessary to spend it just to survive.

 

On the same subject of speculative inflation, San Seder and journalist Christopher Leonard discuss his recent book "The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy." https://www.simonandschuster.com/book...

(At 15 minute mark)
​

 

Well, Joe Biden has already decided his domestic economic policy will be:

Fed open to speedier interest rates hikes if high inflation persists with six more increases - Powell.​

Of course inflation will persist with Covid, disaster capitalism, monopolies fanning speculative inflation, and getting involve in a foreign civil war the US encouraged!

With interest rates up, investment will drop meaning employers can now purge the employees they don't want with mass layoffs, but then hire some back at a lower wage through a subcontractor offering no benefits, steady schedule, no job protection. The cost of hiring subcontractor proxy managers is tax deductible.

Increasing taxes on the 1% would take inflationary currency out of the market and reduce inflation without torturing the working class. However, cruelty is the point.

 

The 2024 Crash and Coup Plan for MAGA
Volcker-Reagan ​

I called this back in February 2022 because I heard the same economic justifications in 1979 when then Paul Volcker served as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System beginning July 25, 1979. Volcker took office on August 6, 1979, during Jimmy Carter's administration. President Ronald Reagan renominated Volcker to a second term in 1983 as the national unemployment rate rose to over 10%.

The Federal Reserve board led by Volcker raised the federal funds rate, which had averaged 11.2% in 1979, to a peak of 20% in June 1981. The prime rate rose to 21.5% in 1981 as well, which helped lead to the 1980–1982 recession. This recession was planned by Reagan's right-wing advisor's including former CIA Director W,H. Bush (1976), fascist William Casey former OSS agent and Director of CIA from 1981 to 1987, James Baker, Edwin Meese, and Michael Deaver.

And it worked! Inflation was high due to the Arab Oil Embargo, massive interest rates, and the debt generated by the Vietnam War. William Casey and Reagan made sure Iran would hold the American hostages until Reagan won the election. Also, the night of the election, Reagan was called the winner by the media before all national polls were closed. Although he campaigned on reducing the national debt, Reagan tripled the debt by the time he finished his administration 1981-1989 from $997 billion to $2.857 trillion.

I remember the waves of layoffs, families with children dislocated sleeping in city parks in their cars, subcontracting workers, union busting followed by mergers, and rehiring employees at lower wages. The jobs lost in the 1981-82 depression was the worst since 1929 and those jobs were permanently lost. Thousands of industrial factories were exported to China with tax write-offs for moving overseas. There were no objections by the Reagan Right-wing to these jobs moving overseas. College graduates were screwed, but at least there wasn't massive student debt which came later. My generation was inexperienced and didn't have a clue what was happening until a decade after the fact.

Powell-Trump Coup​

The Wall Street Fascists are employing this same plan today. Powell and Wall Street will raise interest rates to crash the American economy to "fight" inflation even though this inflation is "speculative inflation" caused by old fashioned greed and military spending on a mind-boggling scale. On November 2, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Powell to serve as the chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen. Powell has made the tenth consecutive hike since their first pandemic hike in March 2022 in the hope of timing the financial crash just before the 2024 election as with Volcker and Reagan. The Democratic party has no plan, the weakest administration in American history, unaware of what is coming, and in fact following Wall Street's plan for our ruin.

 

Here is an update the original post above in Feb. 2022. Notice the media will not use the economic term "speculative inflation" because it describes how the Wall Street Socialists make their money, so writers use other terms such as "Greedflation"-- same thing.

Proof 'Inflation' Was A BS Excuse For Big Business To Price Gouge
​

 

By what must be assumed to be your argument-- that any circumstances occurring during a President's incumbency, should be treated as that President's fault-- I can only ask, what is wrong with so many Republicans, that they would want to reinstall the President who brought us Covid?

Was getting to flout the advice of public health officials, their idea of "good times?"

 

On the whole, it's looking pretty good.

Inflation cooled to 4% in May, its slowest pace in 2 years

The U.S. added 339,000 jobs in May. It's a stunningly strong number.

Inflation cools again as CPI data shows grocery prices fell, food cost eased

​

 

Yes

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/economy/cpi-inflation-june/index.html

Inflation hits a two year low.

 

... which is still higher than at any point during Trump's term...

 

And the high inflation rates were caused, mostly, by Trump's bungling of the COVID response.

 

Nope. They were caused by the Democrat response to COVID.