The USA's ruling class has been on a wild bender these past few decades, with their incompetence and criminal corruption rising to unprecedented heights since the scamdemic started. They're like the leadership of late-stage Enron, with a lot of smoke-and-mirrors accounting to enable their recklessness and debauchery. Will this be the year it all comes apart? We'll see.
One thing is for sure, the longer the party goes on, the worse the hangover will be, and this party has been going on since the Johnson Administration, though back then it was relatively quiet affair, with all the really sordid details kept out of the public eye. With the Brandon's Administration, it's like they started livestreaming themselves smoking crack with strippers and chugging Jaeger straight from the bottle. I don't think their party can go on much longer, and they have run up an unpayable tab by this point. Whether it happens in 2023 or not, the aftermath is going to be ugly for all of us, not just these criminal retards who took the greatest economy the world had ever known (post WWII America) and ran it straight into the sewer.
Dec 29, 2022·edited Dec 29, 2022Liked by Tree of Woe
Another reason the US will lose a war is that the corruption and totalitarianism of our ruling regime (Clown World, the Empire of Lies, the Cathedral, whatever you want to call it) has been clearly revealed, and will continue to be revealed. It's now obvious that democracy is a sham and that free speech is a lie, and that we have no real say in our own governance as our ruling class shoves woke insanity down our throats to weaken American society even further and to give its rule an illusion of "moral" justification.
This is a large part of why military recruitment is down. Young men of fighting age who love their country and wish to defend it no longer wish to join, because they can see that it's no longer their country and way of life that the military is defending, but rather the hegemony of a tyrannical and illegitimate regime that hates them and is actively working to destroy their country and way of life from within by pushing CRT and pronouns and child grooming and all the rest of the woke cult's madness on them. And they know that "military readiness" has largely been replaced by DEI lectures and brainwashing in the evils of their own "whiteness" that they find intolerable.
And those relatively few people who are still going into the military are disproportionately woke progressives. You can't successfully run a lemonade stand with such people, much less win a war.
Myself, I'd never fight for the US empire in a world war (were I still of fighting age), precisely BECAUSE I love my country, and the only hope for America in its essence to survive and be restored is for the present ruling regime to be toppled one way or another. Hell, if we DID have a world war and lose, I'd go so far as to help the victor (regardless of who) round up the members of our present ruling class to be executed if I had the opportunity to do so, because justice is long overdue for them and can't be procured in the illegitimate regime they have created.
A key point you missed during your (quite good) analysis. It seems like Wall Street, the fed and the treasury are all aware of the risks to the Petrodollar system and are at least taking some steps to mitigate the risks:
Central Bank Digital Currencies and
The slow dispossession of housing from middle american owners to middle american renters.
Central Bank digital currencies are way too complex to discuss here and my knowledge in them is limited, so I will skip them.
The slow dispossession of housing. Blackrock and its ilk financing the conversion of housing stock from single family owners to single family renters is by now well known to the readers of this blog. I postulate that the reason this process is occurring is because traditionally, once a note on the house was paid off, the asset disappeared from the market because, well someone now owned it outright. This wealth would be passed down to the children (who would usually just sell it and split the proceeds among themselves to help finance their own homes).
For Wall Street though, when the note was paid off, the asset disappeared from the market and no money was transferred to Wall Street because well, the occupant now owned it. This has the effect of reducing the available number of things for dollars to chase. Same amount of dollars chasing fewer things means inflation.
If you convert Americans from owners to renters, this presents a number of advantages to our Ruling Class:
1. The drive for economies of scale will cause the property holding companies to consolidate into perhaps 2-4 mega-companies. This small number of companies is much easier to regulate and manage than millions of independent owner-occupiers. Elizabeth Warren's wettest of wet dreams. "Smart" thermostats will start appearing in all of the houses and if EW decides that your house is too warm in the winter or too cool in the summer, there is not much you can do about it. Want that gas grill? Too bad.
2. These mega corporations are going to be publicly listed so their equity stakes can be traded, because of the way finance works (Treasury Securities are used as collateral for stock purchases by brokerage houses), the more assets listed on the stock exchange, the more opportunities for Treasury Securities to be used as collateral, driving up demand for them.
3. Reduced risk for financial institutions. A 30-year fixed rate mortgage issued when interest rates are 1-3% stay at a low level for the duration of the mortgage, if interest rates rise, the house payment stays the same, pinching bank profits pretty hard. If a 30-year fixed rate mortgage issued when interest rates are high can be reduced by refinancing, reducing an occupant's monthly payment further cutting into bank profits. Now that everyone is renting, your rents can be increased annually, and more importantly, never decreased at all.
I commend the author for having the guts to publish what others have also said both privately and publicly - and yesterday, I archived Saker's Most Important Question: Will we make it to December 31, 2023?
At a high level I’ve been betting on this for some time. Russia seems to be pretty clearly saying “ending the dollar as world reserve currency is our goal.” Totally agree that “things are bad because of the war” is a much more sellable argument than “things are bad because your leadership has failed miserably.”
One piece of this that doesn’t make sense for me is whether China really wants its property values to go up. I thought Xi Jinping would prefer property values go down, to help ease his demographic crisis.
While it is certainly true that the Saudis have decided to pivot to Eurasia; it is highly unlikely that them "formalizing" said pivot (and inking the deal with the Chinese) will do much.
Recall that as of typing this up, the Saudis already export more than double to China what they do with the US (I believe the number is about daily half a million barrels to the latter and over a million daily to the former); so it would just be a formalizing of "the rift" that has already been developing these past few decades or so. The USD Milkshake will shake this off most likely.
Since unlike the 70s when the Saudis played a leadership role amongst the Muslim nations... nowadays they are viewed by the grassroots as pariahs (the brutal invasion of Yemen has helped cement these feelings). As such, bedding the Chinese will not prompt the OPEC nations to dive into the petroyuan or "rublegas" en masse (akin to how they did so into the USD back in the 70s.)
The Americans produce about two-thirds of their daily needs (i.e. around 20 billion barrels). Of the 6-8 billon shortfall, some 4 billion daily is imported from the Canadians and the rest made up via imports from OPEC+ and others. The "Conquest of America" can never become a reality thus without large scale sabotage, EMP attacks, etc to "open up the gates" from within the Fortress of CONUS.
As such I see the "Petrodollar" surviving (and it likely will continue to do so for a while longer) precisely because the "Multipolar world" that the Eurasianists are selling... is stillborn. Namely, the nations of the world recognize the coming age of Great Power conflict, and are not under the impression that siding with Eurasia would somehow imply a "peaceful way" out of that.
More likely what will happen in 2023 is that the Eurasian bloc (be it BRICS+, The Eurasian Economic Union, etc.) will swell in membership (formal and informal) and the position of "Fortress CONUS" will decline further. Sabotage on the power grid (already a common occurrence on both coasts) will rapidly increase as the Eurasians probe evermore for "weak links" to exploit.
Meanwhile, The Ukraine will be partitioned and the Russians will move heavy equipment to the new "NATO border" (i.e. with Ukraine AND Finland), whilst also dialing up the pain (more restrictions of gas and oil exports to the West, greater export volumes eastward, etc.). Poland, Hungary, etc. will "bite off" chunks from the rump Banderistan and that will end any illusions of "European Unity".
The Chinese will activate their sleepers in Mexico and Central America and did what the British did in the early 1800s: Dump Cheap Drugs everywhere and decimate the family unit in CONUS and "create demand" such that cashflow out of CONUS accelerates evermore (along with labor outflows as well). Taiwan at this point will be "peacefully" reunited via a Diplomatic Play.
The Taiwanese will likely not fight back (due to sabotage, propaganda, sleepers being activated, etc.) It would be similar to the "Little Green Men" incident of 2014 whereby Crimea was annexed (i.e. rapid deployment of special ops and sleepers) except on a larger scale. This will end the Unipolar moment with a mundane finality. The move then (i.e. from early 2024 and beyond) is straightforward:
Turn America into a scapegoat. European Unity, now dead from the Polish and Hungarian incidents... would implode, and NATO + The EU would be tossed into the dustbin of history. The "Values"-nation that is the US would at this point be made into a pariah and play the role of a future Homo Sacer.
It will likely be some false flag akin to the Marco Polo Bridge incident... but most likely some event of said calibre would be "invented" by the Eurasians to justify an International "UN-army" (basically a Eurasian coalition) intervening in CONUS to "restore the peace".
This would be the outbreak of hostilities... and every sleeper, traitor, etc. would now come into full bloom. It will take a while (a decade or even a decade and a half) to pacify the Yankee, but it will be done. And once the Salting is completed, the women and children violated and drugged into genetic slavery and whatnot; then comes the final pursuit: rewriting the History Book.
For the Eurasian coalition will not stop until ever mention of "The United States of America" ever made from henceforth, is done so via spitting and cursing their name (moreso than Nazi Germany and other past losers) and so that said name is never again uttered in certain circles (i.e. such as "education"/indoctrination circles of the Next Generation of workers drones).
Whether or not the Saudis accept yuan or not, they have a military based on US arms, and as we are learning in Ukraine, US arms are pretty kick ass. (And this holds even if we discount the Pollyanna projections of the US media and we accept most of the Putin cheerleaders. The objective fact is that Ukraine has held back a Russian invasion using US weaponry despite no long term training in such, and despite not getting our best stuff.)
If they drop the petrodollar arrangement, the Saudis would indeed invest less in US financial instruments. But they would still like dollars to buy our weapons, which are not only potent, but that's what they have. It took Iran a LONG time to wean itself from US weapons parts dependency.
But is investing in China really that good a deal? Our gerontocracy favors investors over workers and consumers. This makes the US a good place to park your cash. We are Switzerland with nukes.
And how much of our trade deficit is real? Our tariff rates are far lower than our combination of income and payroll taxes. For example, Apple pays royalties to a bunch of sheep in a minor British Isle for intellectual property developed in California.
-----
Should your prediction become correct I fear:
1. Even more foreign buying up of US real estate and once great corporations.
2. A price surge on the cheap Chinese stuff I buy on Amazon.
If I had money to invest, I'd stockpile Chinese made merch, not gold. This is a variant of John Pugsly's "Alpha Strategy" from back in the day.
I don't fear a long term surge in energy prices. We are one election away from regaining energy independence. (And let us keep in mind, that Peace through Dirty Energy was Jimmy Carter's policy.) We do not need Saudi Arabia for energy. We need Saudi Arabia to help finance our defense industry.
By crashtime, our biodiesel and biofuel (fermented kasava-derived alcohol) industry should have been launched and our solar-powerd water pumps and comfort fans should deliver us paradise on earth. By this time we hope that Russia and China will have forced the US to claw back its military machine from American colonies in the southern hemisphere, which means our US-owned politicians will be defenceless. This will precipitate a whole new segment of the public entertainment industry, mass freedom and justice celebrations, and we hope to corner the market in natural fibre noose production.
I indeed agree with you. The outcomes domestically-culturally though, I am very frightened of. This because, in my own conversations with people they cannot even fathom the idea that the dollar wouldn't reign supreme. To them it is an unthinkable, they are unaware of any historical currency crisis. Thus whatever comes they will not see it coming. Two books of interest are P. D. James's Children of Men, and Jane Jacobs's Dark Age Ahead. Children of Men is a fictional dystopia where all men go sterile in 1996, and the panic that follows. Mass state sponsored suicide is featured in the book, and I think across the West if we have massive recession this will ensue. Take away bread, circus, and security and the average American (or anyone dragged with us) is in for a sad surprise. Dark Age Ahead, is nonfiction, Jacobs who was a city planner goes over the various way that the modern West is just not really sustainable. She covers from education to taxation, this is book I keep going back to. Anyway, I know that was a bit of a spew, but I do appreciate your work.
The USA's ruling class has been on a wild bender these past few decades, with their incompetence and criminal corruption rising to unprecedented heights since the scamdemic started. They're like the leadership of late-stage Enron, with a lot of smoke-and-mirrors accounting to enable their recklessness and debauchery. Will this be the year it all comes apart? We'll see.
One thing is for sure, the longer the party goes on, the worse the hangover will be, and this party has been going on since the Johnson Administration, though back then it was relatively quiet affair, with all the really sordid details kept out of the public eye. With the Brandon's Administration, it's like they started livestreaming themselves smoking crack with strippers and chugging Jaeger straight from the bottle. I don't think their party can go on much longer, and they have run up an unpayable tab by this point. Whether it happens in 2023 or not, the aftermath is going to be ugly for all of us, not just these criminal retards who took the greatest economy the world had ever known (post WWII America) and ran it straight into the sewer.
Another reason the US will lose a war is that the corruption and totalitarianism of our ruling regime (Clown World, the Empire of Lies, the Cathedral, whatever you want to call it) has been clearly revealed, and will continue to be revealed. It's now obvious that democracy is a sham and that free speech is a lie, and that we have no real say in our own governance as our ruling class shoves woke insanity down our throats to weaken American society even further and to give its rule an illusion of "moral" justification.
This is a large part of why military recruitment is down. Young men of fighting age who love their country and wish to defend it no longer wish to join, because they can see that it's no longer their country and way of life that the military is defending, but rather the hegemony of a tyrannical and illegitimate regime that hates them and is actively working to destroy their country and way of life from within by pushing CRT and pronouns and child grooming and all the rest of the woke cult's madness on them. And they know that "military readiness" has largely been replaced by DEI lectures and brainwashing in the evils of their own "whiteness" that they find intolerable.
And those relatively few people who are still going into the military are disproportionately woke progressives. You can't successfully run a lemonade stand with such people, much less win a war.
Myself, I'd never fight for the US empire in a world war (were I still of fighting age), precisely BECAUSE I love my country, and the only hope for America in its essence to survive and be restored is for the present ruling regime to be toppled one way or another. Hell, if we DID have a world war and lose, I'd go so far as to help the victor (regardless of who) round up the members of our present ruling class to be executed if I had the opportunity to do so, because justice is long overdue for them and can't be procured in the illegitimate regime they have created.
Saudis have to be very careful. To avoid the emergence of petroyuan, US will not go after China, but Saudi Arabia itself.
A key point you missed during your (quite good) analysis. It seems like Wall Street, the fed and the treasury are all aware of the risks to the Petrodollar system and are at least taking some steps to mitigate the risks:
Central Bank Digital Currencies and
The slow dispossession of housing from middle american owners to middle american renters.
Central Bank digital currencies are way too complex to discuss here and my knowledge in them is limited, so I will skip them.
The slow dispossession of housing. Blackrock and its ilk financing the conversion of housing stock from single family owners to single family renters is by now well known to the readers of this blog. I postulate that the reason this process is occurring is because traditionally, once a note on the house was paid off, the asset disappeared from the market because, well someone now owned it outright. This wealth would be passed down to the children (who would usually just sell it and split the proceeds among themselves to help finance their own homes).
For Wall Street though, when the note was paid off, the asset disappeared from the market and no money was transferred to Wall Street because well, the occupant now owned it. This has the effect of reducing the available number of things for dollars to chase. Same amount of dollars chasing fewer things means inflation.
If you convert Americans from owners to renters, this presents a number of advantages to our Ruling Class:
1. The drive for economies of scale will cause the property holding companies to consolidate into perhaps 2-4 mega-companies. This small number of companies is much easier to regulate and manage than millions of independent owner-occupiers. Elizabeth Warren's wettest of wet dreams. "Smart" thermostats will start appearing in all of the houses and if EW decides that your house is too warm in the winter or too cool in the summer, there is not much you can do about it. Want that gas grill? Too bad.
2. These mega corporations are going to be publicly listed so their equity stakes can be traded, because of the way finance works (Treasury Securities are used as collateral for stock purchases by brokerage houses), the more assets listed on the stock exchange, the more opportunities for Treasury Securities to be used as collateral, driving up demand for them.
3. Reduced risk for financial institutions. A 30-year fixed rate mortgage issued when interest rates are 1-3% stay at a low level for the duration of the mortgage, if interest rates rise, the house payment stays the same, pinching bank profits pretty hard. If a 30-year fixed rate mortgage issued when interest rates are high can be reduced by refinancing, reducing an occupant's monthly payment further cutting into bank profits. Now that everyone is renting, your rents can be increased annually, and more importantly, never decreased at all.
food for thought
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/turbo-america-is-beginning-to-resonate
I commend the author for having the guts to publish what others have also said both privately and publicly - and yesterday, I archived Saker's Most Important Question: Will we make it to December 31, 2023?
My archive - https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/?m=0
At a high level I’ve been betting on this for some time. Russia seems to be pretty clearly saying “ending the dollar as world reserve currency is our goal.” Totally agree that “things are bad because of the war” is a much more sellable argument than “things are bad because your leadership has failed miserably.”
One piece of this that doesn’t make sense for me is whether China really wants its property values to go up. I thought Xi Jinping would prefer property values go down, to help ease his demographic crisis.
Any thoughts there?
While it is certainly true that the Saudis have decided to pivot to Eurasia; it is highly unlikely that them "formalizing" said pivot (and inking the deal with the Chinese) will do much.
Recall that as of typing this up, the Saudis already export more than double to China what they do with the US (I believe the number is about daily half a million barrels to the latter and over a million daily to the former); so it would just be a formalizing of "the rift" that has already been developing these past few decades or so. The USD Milkshake will shake this off most likely.
Since unlike the 70s when the Saudis played a leadership role amongst the Muslim nations... nowadays they are viewed by the grassroots as pariahs (the brutal invasion of Yemen has helped cement these feelings). As such, bedding the Chinese will not prompt the OPEC nations to dive into the petroyuan or "rublegas" en masse (akin to how they did so into the USD back in the 70s.)
The Americans produce about two-thirds of their daily needs (i.e. around 20 billion barrels). Of the 6-8 billon shortfall, some 4 billion daily is imported from the Canadians and the rest made up via imports from OPEC+ and others. The "Conquest of America" can never become a reality thus without large scale sabotage, EMP attacks, etc to "open up the gates" from within the Fortress of CONUS.
As such I see the "Petrodollar" surviving (and it likely will continue to do so for a while longer) precisely because the "Multipolar world" that the Eurasianists are selling... is stillborn. Namely, the nations of the world recognize the coming age of Great Power conflict, and are not under the impression that siding with Eurasia would somehow imply a "peaceful way" out of that.
More likely what will happen in 2023 is that the Eurasian bloc (be it BRICS+, The Eurasian Economic Union, etc.) will swell in membership (formal and informal) and the position of "Fortress CONUS" will decline further. Sabotage on the power grid (already a common occurrence on both coasts) will rapidly increase as the Eurasians probe evermore for "weak links" to exploit.
Meanwhile, The Ukraine will be partitioned and the Russians will move heavy equipment to the new "NATO border" (i.e. with Ukraine AND Finland), whilst also dialing up the pain (more restrictions of gas and oil exports to the West, greater export volumes eastward, etc.). Poland, Hungary, etc. will "bite off" chunks from the rump Banderistan and that will end any illusions of "European Unity".
The Chinese will activate their sleepers in Mexico and Central America and did what the British did in the early 1800s: Dump Cheap Drugs everywhere and decimate the family unit in CONUS and "create demand" such that cashflow out of CONUS accelerates evermore (along with labor outflows as well). Taiwan at this point will be "peacefully" reunited via a Diplomatic Play.
The Taiwanese will likely not fight back (due to sabotage, propaganda, sleepers being activated, etc.) It would be similar to the "Little Green Men" incident of 2014 whereby Crimea was annexed (i.e. rapid deployment of special ops and sleepers) except on a larger scale. This will end the Unipolar moment with a mundane finality. The move then (i.e. from early 2024 and beyond) is straightforward:
Turn America into a scapegoat. European Unity, now dead from the Polish and Hungarian incidents... would implode, and NATO + The EU would be tossed into the dustbin of history. The "Values"-nation that is the US would at this point be made into a pariah and play the role of a future Homo Sacer.
It will likely be some false flag akin to the Marco Polo Bridge incident... but most likely some event of said calibre would be "invented" by the Eurasians to justify an International "UN-army" (basically a Eurasian coalition) intervening in CONUS to "restore the peace".
This would be the outbreak of hostilities... and every sleeper, traitor, etc. would now come into full bloom. It will take a while (a decade or even a decade and a half) to pacify the Yankee, but it will be done. And once the Salting is completed, the women and children violated and drugged into genetic slavery and whatnot; then comes the final pursuit: rewriting the History Book.
For the Eurasian coalition will not stop until ever mention of "The United States of America" ever made from henceforth, is done so via spitting and cursing their name (moreso than Nazi Germany and other past losers) and so that said name is never again uttered in certain circles (i.e. such as "education"/indoctrination circles of the Next Generation of workers drones).
A grim prediction, and likely correct.
But precisely how grim is it?
Whether or not the Saudis accept yuan or not, they have a military based on US arms, and as we are learning in Ukraine, US arms are pretty kick ass. (And this holds even if we discount the Pollyanna projections of the US media and we accept most of the Putin cheerleaders. The objective fact is that Ukraine has held back a Russian invasion using US weaponry despite no long term training in such, and despite not getting our best stuff.)
If they drop the petrodollar arrangement, the Saudis would indeed invest less in US financial instruments. But they would still like dollars to buy our weapons, which are not only potent, but that's what they have. It took Iran a LONG time to wean itself from US weapons parts dependency.
But is investing in China really that good a deal? Our gerontocracy favors investors over workers and consumers. This makes the US a good place to park your cash. We are Switzerland with nukes.
And how much of our trade deficit is real? Our tariff rates are far lower than our combination of income and payroll taxes. For example, Apple pays royalties to a bunch of sheep in a minor British Isle for intellectual property developed in California.
-----
Should your prediction become correct I fear:
1. Even more foreign buying up of US real estate and once great corporations.
2. A price surge on the cheap Chinese stuff I buy on Amazon.
If I had money to invest, I'd stockpile Chinese made merch, not gold. This is a variant of John Pugsly's "Alpha Strategy" from back in the day.
I don't fear a long term surge in energy prices. We are one election away from regaining energy independence. (And let us keep in mind, that Peace through Dirty Energy was Jimmy Carter's policy.) We do not need Saudi Arabia for energy. We need Saudi Arabia to help finance our defense industry.
My prediction for 2023 is that many experts will make predictions, none of which will come true.
Welcome words of wiasurance from Woe (tree of...)
By crashtime, our biodiesel and biofuel (fermented kasava-derived alcohol) industry should have been launched and our solar-powerd water pumps and comfort fans should deliver us paradise on earth. By this time we hope that Russia and China will have forced the US to claw back its military machine from American colonies in the southern hemisphere, which means our US-owned politicians will be defenceless. This will precipitate a whole new segment of the public entertainment industry, mass freedom and justice celebrations, and we hope to corner the market in natural fibre noose production.
Long live private enterprise.
Why did we destroy our domestic oil production?
https://news.yahoo.com/saudi-arabia-open-talks-trade-103814068.html
I indeed agree with you. The outcomes domestically-culturally though, I am very frightened of. This because, in my own conversations with people they cannot even fathom the idea that the dollar wouldn't reign supreme. To them it is an unthinkable, they are unaware of any historical currency crisis. Thus whatever comes they will not see it coming. Two books of interest are P. D. James's Children of Men, and Jane Jacobs's Dark Age Ahead. Children of Men is a fictional dystopia where all men go sterile in 1996, and the panic that follows. Mass state sponsored suicide is featured in the book, and I think across the West if we have massive recession this will ensue. Take away bread, circus, and security and the average American (or anyone dragged with us) is in for a sad surprise. Dark Age Ahead, is nonfiction, Jacobs who was a city planner goes over the various way that the modern West is just not really sustainable. She covers from education to taxation, this is book I keep going back to. Anyway, I know that was a bit of a spew, but I do appreciate your work.