The IMF is trying to move the world away from the U.S. dollar and towards a global currency once again. In a new report entitled “Enhancing International Monetary Stability—A Role for the SDR“, the IMF details the “problems” with having the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the globe and the IMF discusses the potential for a larger role for SDRs (Special Drawing Rights). But the IMF certainly does not view SDRs as the “final solution” to global currency problems. Rather, the IMF considers SDRs to be a transitional phase between what we have now and a new world currency. In this newly published report, the IMF makes this point very clearly: “In the even longer run, if there were political willingness to do so, these securities could constitute an embryo of global currency.” Yes, you read that correctly. The SDR is supposed to be “an embryo” from which a global currency will one day develop. So what about the U.S. dollar and other national currencies? Well, they would just end up fading away.
CNN clearly understands what the IMF is trying to accomplish with this new report. The following is how CNN’s recent story about the new IMF report begins….
“The International Monetary Fund issued a report Thursday on a possible replacement for the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.”
That is exactly what the IMF intends to do.
They intend to have SDRs replace the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.
So exactly what are SDRs?
Well, “SDR” is short for Special Drawing Rights. It is a synthetic currency unit that is made up of a basket of currencies. SDRs have actually been around for many years, but now they are being heavily promoted as an alternative to the dollar.
Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) are international foreign exchange reserve assets. Allocated to nations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a SDR represents a claim to foreign currencies for which it may be exchanged in times of need.
The SDR is a hybrid. SDRs are part U.S. dollar, part euro, part yen and part British pound. In particular, the following is how each SDR currently breaks down….
U.S. Dollar: 41.9%
Euro: 37.4%
Yen: 9.4%
British Pound: 11.3%
Now there are calls for other national currencies to be included in the basket.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has publicly called for the national currencies of Brazil, Russia, India and China to be included in the SDR.
In January, the Obama administration said that it fully supports the eventual inclusion of the yuan in the SDR.
So yes, it looks like we are definitely moving in the direction of the SDR becoming a true global currency.
But is this a good idea?
Globalist organizations such as the IMF say that having a true global currency would facilitate world trade, it would make currency wars less likely, it would stabilize the global economy and it would make the rest of the globe less reliant on what is going on in the United States.
In fact, there is a lot of discussion in international financial circles that oil should be traded in SDRs rather than in U.S. dollars.
In a recent interview, IMF Deputy Managing Director Naoyuki Shinohara even suggested that the IMF may actually consider issuing bonds that are denominated in SDRs. Apparently the goal would be to promote the use of the new “currency”.
But once again, it is important to remember that the IMF does not see SDRs lasting forever either. Rather, the IMF considers the SDR to be an “embryo” from which a true global currency could emerge.
“A global currency, bancor, issued by a global central bank (see Supplement 1, section V) would be designed as a stable store of value that is not tied exclusively to the conditions of any particular economy. As trade and finance continue to grow rapidly and global integration increases, the importance of this broader perspective is expected to continue growing.”
In fact, at one point the IMF report from last year specifically compares the proposed global central bank to the Federal Reserve….
“The global central bank could serve as a lender of last resort, providing needed systemic liquidity in the event of adverse shocks and more automatically than at present. Such liquidity was provided in the most recent crisis mainly by the U.S. Federal Reserve, which however may not always provide such liquidity.”
Yes, unfortunately this is what the IMF really has in mind for all of us. A one-world economic system with a one-world currency and a one-world central bank.
Is that what we really need?
A “global Federal Reserve” that dominates the currency and the economy of the entire planet?
At least with the U.S. Federal Reserve there is hope that someday the American people can convince Congress to shut it down.
A “global Federal Reserve” would not answer to anyone. Individual nations could attempt to pull out, but then they would potentially be isolated from the rest of the globe and potentially cut off from world trade.
That may sound very far-fetched now, but that is the direction we are headed.
And shifting away from the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the world would be disastrous for the U.S. economy.
Right now the fact that the U.S. dollar is the primary reserve currency of the world is one of the only things holding it up. If you took that support away the U.S. dollar could end up collapsing quite quickly.
Let us hope that the American people wake up and start insisting that we want no part in a global currency. If we ever allow a world currency to start replacing the U.S. dollar to a large extent, we will lose a great deal of our economic sovereignty. Not that we haven’t lost most of it already, but at least if we are still using our own national currency there is a greater chance that we can reclaim it.
What the IMF is proposing right now may seem very innocent, but the long-term consequences of going down the road they want to put us on could potentially be absolutely catastrophic.
The American people need to send a very clear message to their representatives in Washington D.C…..
In the shocking video you are about to watch, Howard Dean declares that it is the job of the government to redistribute our wealth. Not only that, he says it in such a way that indicates that he believes that such a notion should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. Well, while it is true that the United States has become a highly socialized nation, the reality is that this is not what the founding fathers intended. The founders intended for us to live in a land where we would have enough freedom and enough liberty to be able to work hard and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They did not intend for a gigantic federal government to take huge amounts of money from one group of people and give it to another group of people. In any nation where a large scale redistribution of wealth is happening, the incentive to work goes right out the window. Pretty soon you end up with an entire class of people that have learned how to “make a living” by being a parasite of the government, and that is not good for any economy.
If our founding fathers were alive today, they would be horrified by what we have turned into. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following….
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
The sad truth is that democracy starts to break down once people start realizing that they can vote themselves money out of the national treasury. In fact, that is a very large part of what politics in America is all about today. Politicians are constantly promising what they are “going to do” for various groups of people.
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
Not that our founding fathers were against charity. In fact, they believed in it very much. It is just that they did not believe in repressive taxation by a huge national government and they did not believe in large scale redistributions of wealth.
With all of that in mind, watch this shocking video of Howard Dean declaring that it is the job of the government to redistribute our wealth….
Obviously Howard Dean envisions an “America” that is very different from the one that our founding fathers intended.
But does that mean that all government welfare programs are bad?
Of course not.
In fact, if we were to cut them all off today we would have millions of people starving in the streets.
A very large percentage of Americans today don’t even know how to take care of themselves. If we pulled away all government support all of a sudden there would be chaos and anarchy in the streets.
The sad reality is that we have tens of millions of Americans that are now deeply dependent on the socialist system that we have established.
Unfortunately, this is what socialism does – it turns people into pets of the government. Our society should be teaching people to be self-sufficient, but instead we are teaching people to allow the government to take care of them from the cradle to the grave.
So does that mean that our founding fathers would be in favor of the rampant corporate greed that we are witnessing today?
Of course not.
As I have written about previously, the founding fathers were against all large concentrations of power. During the Boston Tea Party, it was the tea of perhaps the most powerful corporation in the entire world at the time (the East India Trading Company) that our founders dumped into the harbor.
If you study early American history, you soon come to realize that corporations were generally very limited in scope and size for many, many years. The era of the giant corporation is relatively new, and our founding fathers never intended for our society to be dominated by gigantic international corporations.
So when the Democrats argue that we should give more power to the federal government and the Republicans argue that we should give more power to the big corporations they are both wrong.
Our founding fathers did not intend for our federal government to have nearly so much power and they did not intend for big, wealthy corporations to have so much power either.
Fortunately, many Americans today are getting back in touch with those principles. There is a growing dissatisfaction with the size of government, and according to Gallup two-thirds of Americans are now dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations in America today.
However, it is one thing to discuss the finer points of political and economic philosophy, but it is another thing altogether to deal with the reality of tens of millions of people that cannot feed themselves.
As I have mentioned many times before, there are over 43 million Americans on food stamps today.
So what are we going to do with all of them?
Allow them to starve?
Almost 53 million Americans receive Social Security payments.
What are we going to do – cut off Social Security and watch millions of elderly and disabled people freeze to death in their own homes?
Of course not.
But we have got to start swinging the pendulum back in the other direction. Right now one out of every six Americans is enrolled in some kind of anti-poverty program run by the federal government.
How many Americans being taken care of by the federal government will be too much?
One out of five?
One out of four?
One out of three?
Eventually the entire system crumbles when there are too few people still willing to work hard.
If you ever get the chance to visit a communist country you should. You will notice that nobody really works very hard. That is because there is no incentive to work hard. Very little real wealth gets produced and everyone suffers for it.
So does that mean the U.S. system works?
Of course not.
What we have in the United States today is not real capitalism. It is more aptly called “corporatism”. The big corporations and the big financial institutions have accumulated an absolutely stunning amount of economic power and over the decades they have gotten the government to tilt all of the rules of the game in their favor.
In America today, it is really hard for the average person to start a successful business. The big, powerful international corporations that dominate our economy are everywhere.
So most Americans today have to rely on working for an employer. Unfortunately, the big employers have started to realize that they can make much larger profits by shipping our jobs overseas. That is really bad news for the U.S. middle class.
Well, can’t we just tax all of these big corporations like crazy and even everything out?
Unfortunately it just does not work that way in today’s global society.
As I have written about previously, the ultra-wealthy and many of the biggest corporations have figured out how to “minimize” their tax burdens. While you and I are being taxed into oblivion, the global elite have figured out how to move their money around to escape taxation as much as possible. In fact, it is estimated that today approximately a third of all the wealth in the world is held in “offshore” tax havens.
Ultra-wealthy individuals and mega-powerful corporations can call just about anywhere “home” in today’s global economy. That is just the way the world works now.
In order to “tax the rich”, you first must get legal jurisdiction over their money.
Our tax system has become entirely unfair and it simply does not work. The whole thing needs to be scrapped.
But as we discuss tax policy, there are tens of millions of Americans that are living in poverty.
So what are we going to do about the growing number of Americans that cannot even feed themselves without government help?
Well, the truth is that what they really need is not more handouts.
If you give people handouts, they will just need more handouts tomorrow.
No, what all of these Americans really need are good jobs.
Unfortunately, there are a whole lot less good jobs in America today than there were ten years ago.
Our politicians have stood by as the giant corporations have moved thousands of facilities over to places such as China and India where they can legally pay people slave labor wages.
Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good, and that number is going to continue to increase unless someone stops it.
But nobody is.
Virtually all of our politicians are just standing off to the side with their hands in their pockets.
Our entire economic system is breaking down. Millions of Americans families are scrambling to find some way to survive. Over the past two years, U.S. consumers have withdrawn $311 billion more from savings and investment accounts than they have put into them.
Other Americans are going very deep into debt because they don’t have any other options. When they finally can’t keep up with all the debt, many of these families are losing their cars and their homes.
We are in the middle of an economic nightmare that is absolutely unprecedented. “Redistributing the wealth” would just be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. It would not fix a darn thing.
When our politicians promise that a little “change” here or a little “tweak” there will get our economy back to normal they are lying to you and most of them know it.
What we need is a comprehensive overhaul of our entire economy. Basically what we need to do is to go back to the blueprint (the U.S. Constitution) and essentially start over.
But most Americans are not ready for that. Most Americans are still enjoying the tremendous prosperity that the biggest debt binge in the history of the world has purchased for us. Most Americans still do not believe that an economic collapse is really coming.
But a massive economic collapse is coming. This whole thing is going to come crashing down and it is not going to be pretty.
Well, it was nice while it lasted. One of the really good things that came out of the recent economic downturn was that millions of American families decided to get out of debt. In particular, we had seen a sustained trend of reduced credit card usage in the United States. It looked like Americans had finally wised up. But we should have known that Americans would not be willing to tighten their belts forever. Unfortunately, it appears that getting out of debt is no longer so “trendy”. In fact, the month of December was the third month in a row in which consumer credit grew in the United States. Prior to that, consumer credit in the United States had declined for 20 months in a row. The American people were doing so, so good. Why did they have to stop? It appears that the American people have fallen off the wagon and have gotten a taste for credit card debt once again. This time, however, the credit card companies are back with interest rates that are higher than ever. In fact, one national credit card company has hundreds of thousands of customers signed up for a card that charges interest rates of up to 59.9%.
59.9%?
You mean there are people that are stupid enough to actually sign up for a credit card that will charge them 59.9% interest?
Unfortunately the answer is yes.
In fact, the top rate was 79.9% before First Premier Bank lowered it.
These cards are targeted at Americans that have a poor credit history, and these days there are a whole lot of those.
A recent story on the website of CNN described how large numbers of U.S. consumers with poor credit are gobbling up credit cards like these. Unfortunately, many of these consumers are also not smart enough to realize what they are getting into. The CNN story contained a quote from a woman who was in complete shock when she discovered that her interest rate was going to go up by 50 percentage points….
“I about had a heart attack when I got a disclosure notice saying that my starting rate of 29.9% was going up to 79.9%.”
First Premier Bank has since lowered the top rate on those cards to 59.9%, but that it still completely outrageous.
Not only are the interest rates on those cards super high, but they also charge a whole bunch of fees on those cards as well. The following are some of the fees that First Premier Bank charges….
*$45 processing fee to open the account
*Annual fee of $30 for the first year
*$45 fee for every subsequent year
*A monthly servicing fee of $6.25
So you would think that nobody in their right mind would ever sign up for such a card, right?
Wrong.
CNN is reporting that almost 700,000 Americans have signed up for the card.
Ouch.
In fact, CNN says that First Premier Bank gets between 200,000 to 300,000 new applications a month for the card, but that they only open about 50,000 new accounts each month.
Are there really this many Americans that are this gullible?
If Americans would just remember the “DBS” rule they would be so much better off.
DBS = Don’t Be Stupid
Do you know how long it would take to pay off a credit card with a 59.9 percent interest rate?
Just a 20 percent interest rate is bad enough.
According to the credit card repayment calculator, if you owe $6000 on a credit card with a 20 percent interest rate and only pay the minimum payment each time, it will take you 54 years to pay off that credit card.
During that time you will pay $26,168 in interest rate charges in addition to the $6000 in principal that you are required to pay back.
Ouch!
The number one piece of financial advice that most of the “financial gurus” give is that you should get out of credit card debt – particularly credit card debt that has a high interest rate.
Unfortunately, 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month today.
Of U.S. households that have credit card debt, the average amount owed on credit cards is $15,788.
This is how the bankers enslave us.
We end up paying them 3, 4 or even 5 times as much as we originally borrowed.
Month after month after month we slave away to make them wealthy.
So how do you stop this vicious cycle?
You quit buying stuff that you can’t afford!
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans have never received any formal training on how to manage finances.
Most of us were never taught any of this stuff in school. Most of us were totally unprepared when the financial predators started preying on us in college. Most of us got sucked in and spent years and years trapped in credit card debt.
When you carry a balance from month to month you are willingly signing up to become a debt servant to the big banks. They get rich while you suffer.
The sad thing is that the mainstream media is pointing to increased credit card spending as a sign that the U.S. economy is getting back to normal.
But gigantic mountains of debt is what got us into all of this trouble in the first place.
Average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income.
In China that figure is only 17%.
Obviously, we have a massive, massive problem with debt in this country.
Cranking the debt spiral back up is not going to cause the economy to recover.
Well, the profits of the big banks might recover, but the rest of us will suffer.
If you want to be financially free, then it is time to pay off your credit card debt and get off the debt payment treadmill for good.
The entire global economy is on the verge of collapse, so now is a great time to renounce consumerism. Instead, we need to be preparing ourselves and our families for the hard times that are coming.
So what do you all think about the outrageous interest rates that the credit card companies are charging these days? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section below….
What you are about to read is perhaps the most heartbreaking story that I have ever come across. It is so tragic that I am not even quite sure how to introduce it. Some time ago, a reader named Ashley sent me an email that described the nightmare that she has been living through over the past year. Ashley’s email was very different from the vast majority of emails I usually receive, and I wrote her back right away and asked her some questions. One of the most important questions I asked was whether or not she really wanted me to share her story with the public. Privacy is such a precious thing, and I wanted her to understand that if I shared her story that thousands upon thousands of people would end up seeing it. After considering what I had to say, Ashley said that she was 100% sure that I should share her story because she felt that it could really help some people.
Sometimes it can be really easy to get lost in the economic numbers and to forget that this economy is really and truly destroying lives. The truth is that there are millions of Americans out there today that are hurting just like Ashley is. Her story is more dramatic than most, but that doesn’t mean that we all don’t know someone that could use our help. We have lost our sense of community in America, and thousands upon thousands of people like Ashley are falling through the cracks.
I cannot even imagine going through the things that Ashley has had to go through over the past year. If you think about it, please say a prayer for her. Also, let this story be an inspiration to all of us to stop being so cold-hearted and to help out those in need that are all around us.
The following is Ashley’s story as told in her own words….
*****
Dear Michael,
My name is Ashley. I live in Upstate New York I have been reading your Economic Collapse blog for the past year. Everything that you have said is true. Our economy is dying, and the economic collapse has destroyed the lives of many, many people. I should know. I am one of them. I lost my house, my car, my feet and my father, all in just seven months.
My father and I had a great life together. He raised me as a single parent. My mother died while giving birth to me. So it was just him and me as I was growing up, and things were wonderful for us, but then everything changed.
In September of 2009, my father was laid off from his job after 26 years. He tried so hard to find another job, but he just couldn’t get one. The economy was too horrible. As a result of the loss of income, he was unable to continue making the mortgage and car payments. Our car was repossessed, and not long after that, the bank foreclosed on us and we lost our house.
We moved into a low rent, hole in the wall apartment and lived off of his savings and his unemployment benefits for the next few months. Finally, in December of 2009, I was lucky enough to get a part time job at a pizza place. It was a really long walk from our apartment, but we needed the money badly. So I took the job.
By mid winter, my old snow boots, which had successfully lasted me through several terrible winters, were beginning to rapidly deteriorate. They had holes all over them and they were splitting at the seams. My feet were soaked and freezing all day long. At that point, we were lucky to have food on the table. We had to watch every penny. We couldn’t afford to get me new boots. So I had to make do with the ones I had. My father worked feverishly to try and repair them. He spent hours supergluing them duct taping them. In addition to that, I doubled up on socks and wore plastic bags inside my boots, but nothing did any good. My feet still got drenched.
One morning, in mid February of 2010, I took the last walk I would ever take on my own two feet. There was a huge blizzard raging outside, but we couldn’t afford to lose a day’s worth of pay. So I ventured out into the blizzard and made the long trudge to work anyway. As usual, my feet were drenched and freezing within minutes of leaving my apartment, but there was no choice but to just stick it out. So I kept going. I finally arrived at work to find the place closed. Nobody had called to tell me. There was nothing to do but turn around and make the long trudge back home. By the time I got home, I knew that something was seriously wrong with my feet. They felt horrible. My father helped me out of my drenched boots and socks and we discovered that my feet were all purple and swollen. They were severely frostbitten.
My father was terrified to take me to the emergency room because that would have bankrupted us. So he did everything he could to try and rewarm my feet at home. He spent the next several days giving me hot chocolate, bundling my feet up in blankets, putting my feet on his stomach, etc. But nothing did any good. My feet didn’t get any better. They just kept getting worse. They eventually turned black and began to ooze. At that point, my father broke down and called a car service to take us to the hospital. The doctors told us that, given the extent of the damage, they would not able to save my feet. The frostbite had progressed too far. I ended up having both of my feet amputated.
For the next whole month, my father didn’t do anything but sob. He sobbed himself to sleep every night. He blamed himself for me losing my feet. I rolled myself into his room on my wheelchair every night and wrapped my arms around him as tight as I could. I told him that it wasn’t his fault and that I didn’t blame him for anything. I told him he was the best father any girl could ever have and that I wouldn’t trade him for anything. I think it helped a little in the moment, but as time went on, he just fell further and further into depression.
On the morning of March 15th, 2010, I was awakened by a knock on the door from a police officer. He told me that my father was dead. I told the officer that was ridiculous and that there had been a mistake, but he insisted that my father was dead and that I should come with him. I went racing into my father’s room as fast as my wheelchair could carry me, but he was gone. There was a note on his bed that he had left for me. In the note, he told me that he loved me dearly. He loved me more than anything, but that he had failed me. He told me that I would be better off without him. At that moment, my heart stopped as I began to realize what must have happened. Horrified, I made my way back to the police officer, and he told me that my father had jumped out the window of our apartment in the middle of the night. I went into shock and begged the police officer to let me see him, but he insisted that I wouldn’t want to see him that way. I started sobbing so hard that the police ended up having to take me to the hospital.
I’ve cried myself to sleep every night since. I’ll never understand how my father could have thought that I’d be better off without him. If only he had known how much I needed him. If it wasn’t for my extremely kind hearted and caring neighbor, I don’t know where I would be right now. She’s such a sweet lady. After I lost my father, she took me in and took care of me as though I were her own family. She has gradually helped nurse me back to health, both physically and mentally.
This is probably going to sound really crazy, but throughout this past year, you have been one of my heroes, Michael. As devastating as the truth of your words may be, it is refreshing that somebody has the good sense and the good judgement to come forward and say them. All the government and the media do is lie to us, every single day. I only wish more people would listen to you and heed your warnings. Feel free to post my story on your blog if you would like. You have my permission to do so. I just ask that you not reveal my full name and my email address. Just use my first name. Perhaps my story will serve some purpose in the way of helping to wake some of these idiots up and getting them to realize that this nightmare is real.
The American people are becoming increasingly angry about the extraordinary amount of power and influence that corporations have in the United States today. A new Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations in the United States today. Not only that, the most recent Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index found that only 26 percent of Americans trust our financial system at this point. The mainstream media is acting as if this is a new phenomenon, but the truth is that a dislike of giant corporations goes all the way back to the founding of this nation. Our founders held a deep distrust for all big concentrations of power, and they intended to set up a nation where no one person or no one institution could become too powerful.
Unfortunately, we have very much strayed from those principles. In the United States today, the federal government completely dominates all other levels of government and mammoth international corporations completely dominate our economy.
If our founding fathers could see what is going on today they would probably roll over in their graves.
The history of the corporation can be traced back to the early part of the 17th century when Queen Elizabeth I established the East India Trading Company.
Our founders were not too fond of the East India Trading Company. In fact, it was their tea that was dumped into the harbor during the original Boston Tea Party.
In his book entitled “Unequal Protection”, Thom Hartman described the great antipathy that our founders had for the East India Trading Company….
“Trade-dominance by the East India Company aroused the greatest passions of America’s Founders – every schoolboy knows how they dumped the Company’s tea into Boston harbour. At the time in Britain virtually all members of parliament were stockholders, a tenth had made their fortunes through the Company, and the Company funded parliamentary elections generously.”
So a disgust for great concentrations of financial power is built into our national DNA.
Many people today think of giant international corporations as being synonymous with “capitalism”, but that is just not the case.
Our founders envisioned a land where free enterprise could flourish in an environment where no institution held too much power.
So this false left/right debate about whether we should give more power to the government or more power to the corporations is largely a bunch of nonsense.
If the founders were around today they would say that we need to take a lot of power away from both of them.
Fortunately, it looks like the American people are starting to think the same thing. Not only are the American people dissatisfied with government, they are also becoming increasingly dissatisfied with big corporations.
As mentioned above, according to Gallup two-thirds of Americans are now dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations in America today….
As you can see, the gap between those in favor of the size and influence of major corporations and those not in favor has been significantly widening over the past decade.
That is a good thing.
Not only that, but the latest Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index shows that Americans have very little trust in the financial system at this point.
*Only 26 percent of Americans trust the nation’s financial system.
*Only 13 percent of Americans trust big corporations.
*Only 16 percent of Americans trust the stock market.
*Only 43 percent of Americans trust the banks.
These numbers are staggering, but they should not be surprising. The American people were not pleased at all when the major banks and big financial institutions were showered with bailouts during the recent financial crisis. A lot of that anger is still simmering.
The recent housing collapse, which is still ongoing, was caused in great part by the behavior of the major banks and big financial institutions, but it is the American people which have suffered the most from it. The following very brief animation from Taiwan demonstrates this very humorously….
The American people are still wondering where their “bailouts” are. Most of the big banks and big corporations seem to be thriving even while the number of Americans slipping into poverty continues to grow.
According to Calculated Risk, approximately 15 million Americans are unemployed, about 9 million Americans are working part-time for “economic reasons” and approximately 4 million American workers have left the labor force since the beginning of the economic downturn.
When you total that all up, you get 28 million Americans that wish they had full-time jobs.
Ouch.
There are other numbers that are very disturbing as well. In the month of November, the number of people on food stamps set another new all-time record: 43.6 million Americans.
So we have tens of millions of Americans that can’t get the jobs that they want and we have tens of millions of Americans that can’t feed themselves without government assistance.
No wonder so many people are angry at the big corporations!
The U.S. government has showered the big corporations and the big banks with bailouts, tax breaks and cheap loans and yet the big corporations and the big banks are not coming through for the American people.
Meanwhile, food prices continue to go up. According to the United Nations food agency, global food prices set another new all-time record during the month of January, and they are expected to continue rising for months to come.
That certainly is not going to ease tensions in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. When people are not able to pay for the food that they need that tends to make them very, very angry.
For now we are not likely to see food riots in the United States, but as food prices rise all of those food stamp cards are not going to go as far as they used to. Average American families are going to feel more strain at the supermarket. There will be less money available for other things.
A key indicator to watch is the price of oil. The price of oil is one of the key components of the price of food, and if we see the price of oil go up to $120 or $150 a barrel that could mean really bad things for both the U.S. economy and the overall global economy.
If we do see another financial crisis like we did in 2008, is the U.S. government going to rush to bail out the big corporations and the big banks like they did the last time?
As we have seen from the numbers above, that certainly would not sit well with the American people.
The world is becoming a very unstable place, and the pace at which things are changing all around us has become absolutely mind-numbing. In fact, change has become one of the only constants in today’s world. Once upon a time, people in the United States could actually make 20 or 30 year plans and feel confident about achieving them. But now, nothing is stable anymore. The financial crisis showed us that some of the biggest corporations on the globe can collapse in a single day. The events of the past few weeks have shown us that entire governments can be brought down in a single week. We live in a world where there are now very few “guarantees” that you can count on. One of the only things that is guaranteed is that technology and information will continue to grow at exponential speeds. This year, the total amount of information produced on electronic devices around the globe is projected to be more than a zettabyte. A zettabyte is equivalent to one sextillion bytes. In other words, imagine a one with more than 21 zeroes following it.
Many of the things that we take for granted today didn’t even exist a few short years ago. Facebook has only been with us since 2004. YouTube has only been with us since 2005. Can you imagine a world where those two websites did not exist?
We live in a world of information overload. Once upon a time it would have been possible to go to sleep for a decade and wake up and everything would still be pretty much the same. But today if you were to do that you would be in for a case of severe culture shock.
Do you remember when you could buy a set of encyclopedias and the information in them would still be good a decade or two later?
Well, things do not work that way anymore.
In fact, most of the articles on this website will be obsolete a month from now.
In today’s world, you really have to think twice before you say that something is “not possible”.
A few months ago, it was absolutely inconceivable that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would declare to the world that he has “spent enough time serving Egypt“.
Yet here we are.
One week the government of Tunisia seemed perfectly stable and the next week it was toppled.
Do any of you out there still think that you can make realistic “plans for the future” in today’s world?
Once upon a time in America, many of us were taught that if we worked really hard in school we could get a great job with a great company. We were promised that if we were faithful to that company for 30 or 40 years that we would be treated fairly and given a good pension.
Well, in today’s world you might as well crumple up that plan and throw it into the wastebasket.
There is no such thing as a stable job anymore. Businesses are coming into existence and going out of existence faster than ever before. Today, one out of every four Americans workers has been with their empl0yer for less than a year.
Most Americans still don’t really understand that they are now part of a global economy. They keep thinking that things were the way they used to be. They keep thinking that the U.S. economy is invincible.
Well, those days are long gone. The United States is being deindustrialized at lightning speed. Tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been sent overseas. China, once a complete economic backwater, is now kicking the crap out of us on the global economic stage.
Our financial system is certainly on incredibly shaky ground. Will any of us ever forget what happened in 2008?
Do any of us actually believe that it can’t happen again?
Our health care system is also incredibly unstable. Today, 46 million Americans have absolutely no health insurance. That means that 46 million Americans are just one major injury or illness away from financial ruin with no protection whatsoever.
Not that those that actually have health insurance are protected. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that did have health insurance.
So just because you have health insurance does not mean anything. One bad accident or one really bad disease and you could be totally wiped out.
Isn’t that comforting?
But the truth is that our entire economy is on the verge of total collapse.
World famous investor Harry Schultz recently published the last issue of his legendary financial newsletter. After 45 years, the following is how Schultz summed up the economic collapse that we are now facing….
“Roughly speaking, the mess we are in is the worst since 17th century financial collapse. Comparisons with the 1930’s are ludicrous. We’ve gone far beyond that. And, alas, the courage & political will to recognize the mess & act wisely to reverse gears, is absent in U.S. leadership, where the problems were hatched & where the rot is by far the deepest.”
David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan was quoted by Schultz as saying the following about how desperate things are about to become….
“Get some gold, beans, water, anything that Bernanke can’t destroy. Ron Paul is right. We’re entering a global monetary conflagration. If a sell-off of U.S. bonds starts, it will be an Armageddon.”
Millions of Americans have become “preppers” in recent years as they have come to realize that our economy is headed down a very dark road.
But sadly, the reality is that the vast majority of Americans are not prepared for any kind of economic or natural disaster. As this week has shown us, just the threat of a major snow storm can wipe out store shelves in a single day.
So what would this country look like if a major disaster fundamentally changed life in America and suddenly people were desperate for food and supplies?
It is a frightening thing to think about.
As the pace of change has accelerated dramatically, the U.S. government and other governments around the world have responded by trying to get a tighter grip on everyone and everything.
To get on an airplane in the United States today, you either have to allow a security goon to use a scanner to look over your completely exposed body, or you have to allow a security goon to feel up all of your private areas with the fronts of his or her hands.
The America that so many of us once loved is rapidly disappearing.
But it is not just our man-made systems that are rapidly changing. Something seems to be happening to the entire planet. Flooding of biblical proportions has hit Australia, Brazil, China and Pakistan over the past 12 months. Scorching heat caused massive crop failures all over Russia last summer. Record-setting cold temperatures and snowfalls all over the northern hemisphere have scientists scratching their heads. On top of everything else, mass deaths of birds and fish are suddenly being reported all over the globe.
Even the crust of the earth is becoming increasingly unstable. Did you see that volcano go off in Japan the other day? Over the past two years it seems like volcanoes have been suddenly erupting all over the world.
Not only that, but sinkholes have become an absolute epidemic all over the planet. Some of these sinkholes have been so large that they have swallowed entire apartment buildings.
In addition, it seems like there is a magnitude 6 or magnitude 7 earthquake somewhere in the world almost every day now. They have become so common that the mainstream media barely even takes notice of them anymore unless one happens near a very populated area.
None of us really knows what the world is going to look like ten years from now. What will the “new” Facebooks and YouTubes be? Will Ben Bernanke’s reckless money printing destroy our economy by then? Will our U.S. dollars still be of any value ten years from now? Will there even still be a U.S. dollar?
Will we still be able to feed most of the people in the world by 2011? Will shortages of food, water and oil start driving people crazy? Could some amazing energy discovery completely transform society?
Who will be the president of the United States? Will there even be a president of the United States? Will war have erupted in the Middle East by that point? Will the United States be in another war by then?
The truth is that things are changing so fast that it is hard to even come up with the right questions to ask. The world is going to change faster this year than it did last year. In 2012 the pace of change will be even faster.
So buckle up and hold on tight because this is going to be one wild ride.
For much more on how incredibly fast the pace of change is in our modern society, check out the video posted below. It is entitled “Did You Know?” and it has been viewed more than 12 million times on YouTube….
This past week was a perfect example of how the “Internet kill switch” is rapidly becoming one of the favorite new tools of tyrannical governments all over the globe. Once upon a time, the Internet was a bastion of liberty and freedom, but now nation after nation is cracking down on it. In fact, legislation has been introduced once again in Congress that would give the president of the United States an “Internet kill switch” that he would be able to use in the event of war or emergency. Of course there would be a whole lot of wiggle room in determining what actually constitutes a true “emergency”. The members of Congress that are pushing this “Internet kill switch” bill want the U.S. to become more like China in this regard. In China, the Internet is highly controlled, highly regulated and highly censored. In fact, China has shut down the Internet in entire regions when they have felt it necessary. So what Egypt did in shutting down the Internet this past week is not unprecedented – but it was quite shocking.
Organizers of the protests in Egypt had been using the #Jan25 hashtag on Twitter and had been communicating with each other via Facebook, and so the Mubarak regime thought that they could significantly derail the protest movement by shutting down the Internet.
It has been widely reported that approximately 88 percent of the Internet in Egypt was shut down at one point. Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of an Internet monitoring firm known as Renesys, described on his blog just how complete and total this Internet shutdown in Egypt actually was….
“Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world.”
So how was this all done? How could such a large section of the Internet be taken offline so rapidly? Well, a recent article on MSNBC described how it works….
According to David Clark, an MIT computer scientist whose research focuses on Internet architecture and development, a government’s ability to control the Internet depends on its control of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the private sector companies that grant Internet access to customers.
“ISPs have direct control of the Internet, so what happens in any country depends on the control that the state has over those ISPs,” Clark told Life’s Little Mysteries in an e-mail. “Some countries regulate the ISPs much more heavily. China has in the past ‘turned off’ the Internet in various regions.”
Whenever the subject of Internet censorship comes up, China always seems to be involved in the conversation. China has more Internet users than anyone else in the world, but they also have the tightest controls.
The Chinese government is absolutely obsessed with “maintaining order” and it has shown that it will go to extreme lengths to quell dissent.
For example, the government of China cut off the entire Xinjiang region from the Internet for nearly a year after civil unrest erupted there in 2009.
The Chinese government is so sensitive to political dissent that they even began censoring the word “Egypt” on a number of micro-blogging websites this past week.
On the sina.com and sohu.com sites, the Chinese equivalents of Twitter, which is censored in China, a query with the word “Egypt” returned the response: “According to the laws in force, the results of your search cannot be given.”
Isn’t that bizarre?
Nothing like that would ever happen in the United States, right?
“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.”
That statement should chill you to your bones.
U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman wants Chinese-style Internet censorship to come to the United States.
In fact, as mentioned above, legislation that would give the president of the United States an “Internet kill switch” has been introduced in the Senate once again, and in fact it has already been approved by a Senate panel.
The legislation has bipartisan support, and it is being pushed this time by Maine Senator Susan Collins, who is a ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
This bill, S.3480, is entitled “The Protecting Cyberspace As A National Asset Act of 2010“. It would create a brand new government agency (as if we needed more of those) known as the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications.
This new agency would be given extraordinary power over the Internet – including the power to completely shut down the Internet for 30 days.
Collins insists that this new law is necessary because it would enable us to protect the Internet against “cyber threats” before they could cause serious damage.
While that may sound good on paper, the reality is that giving the government an “Internet kill switch” would create opportunities for tremendous government abuse.
A congressional white paper (.pdf) on the measure said the proposal prohibits the government from targeting websites for censorship “based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
It has been revealed time after time after time that the U.S. government has been investigating large numbers of people based on their political beliefs.
The Internet is a great way for people to express and share their political thoughts and ideas, but it is also providing a way for governments around the world to watch and track dissenters.
For example, major news websites in China now require users to register their true identities before they are able to leave any comments. This enables the government to be able to identify (and potentially deal with) anyone that does not express the “right” views.
In the same manner, the Obama administration is now proposing the introduction of a “universal Internet ID” for Americans. The program is being touted as “voluntary”, but how long do you think it would be before a whole host of government agencies started to use these universal Internet IDs to watch, monitor, track and control the Internet activities of tens of millions of Americans?
The following is a video news report from CBS News about these new universal Internet IDs….
So where does all of this Internet censorship end?
Well, the truth is that it is only going to get tighter and tighter as the years go by.
Eventually you will probably need a government-issued license to put up websites such as this one, and in fact someday you will probably need a government-issued license before you can even log on to the Internet.
So enjoy this era of relatively unlimited Internet freedom while you can, because it is rapidly coming to an end. Tyrannical governments all over the globe are realizing that in order to maintain “control” they must place a much tighter grip on the flow of information on the Internet.
If you live in the United States or another nation where there is still at least a limited amount of liberty and freedom, it is going to be important to let your representatives know that you do not want Internet censorship and you certainly do not want any sort of an Internet kill switch.
Liberties and freedoms are incredibly precious, and once they are taken away they are very difficult to get back.
As if the world economy did not have enough problems already, now the riots in Egypt threaten to send the price of oil soaring into the stratosphere. On Friday, the price of U.S. crude soared 4 percent. A 4 percent rise in a single day is pretty staggering. The price of Brent crude in London closed just under the magic $100 a barrel mark at $99.42. The incredibly violent riots in Egypt have financial markets all over the globe on edge right now. Any time there is violence or war in the Middle East it has a dramatic impact on financial markets, but this time things seem even more serious than usual. Many believe that we could see an entirely new Egyptian government emerge out of this crisis, and the uncertainty that would bring would make investors all around the globe nervous. Financial markets like predictability, peace and security. If Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year reign is brought to an end, it will severely shake up the entire region, and that will not be good news for the global economy.
Have you seen how violent these protests have become? Cars and buildings are on fire all over the place. Even the headquarters of Hosni Mubarak’s political party was burned down. The Egyptian military has been deployed on the streets of Cairo. Protesters have been showering government forces with stones, firebombs and anything else that they can find to throw. Security forces have been using rubber bullets, water cannons and tear gas to try to disperse the protesters but those efforts seem to be doing little good. Deaths and injuries are being reported all over the place. There are even rumors that the wife and son of Hosni Mubarak have already left the country.
At this point, Mubarak has gone on national television and has announced that he has asked his cabinet to resign. That is an absolutely stunning move, but it is doubtful that the protesters will be satisfied. All over Cairo protesters continue to chant for Mubarak to resign.
The following is a short compilation of some raw video from the riots in Egypt….
These riots in Egypt come on the heels of violent uprisings in Algeria and Tunisia. In fact, it seems like virtually the entire Middle East is in a very foul mood right now. Riots have been reported in Lebanon, in Jordan and in Yemen over the past few days.
Some of the rioting has been motivated by economic factors, but unfortunately all of this rioting is only going to make the global economic situation even worse. Concern over all of these riots is driving up the price of oil and driving up the prices of agricultural commodities. These higher prices are going to make it even harder for the poor people in the Middle East to afford food.
But also it must be acknowledged that much of this rioting is being done for very deep political and religious reasons as well. Many westerners are cheering the protests in Egypt because they envision the protesters to be some sort of “freedom fighters”. But the vast majority of these protesters do not desire “American-style democracy”. The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the groups at the heart of these protests. The government that they intend to set up would not give “liberty and freedom for all”. Rather, it would be a hardline Islamic government based on Shariah law. According to Wikipedia, the Muslim Brotherhood bills itself as the “world’s most influential Islamist movement”, and their goal is to impose their version of Islam on society….
The Brotherhood’s stated goal is to instill the Qur’an and Sunnah as the “sole reference point for … ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community … and state”
So unless your version of “freedom” includes being forced to live like the Taliban, then you probably would not enjoy the “liberty” that the Muslim Brotherhood wishes to impose on you.
Coptic Christians all over Egypt are already being slaughtered even with a relatively pro-western president in power. On New Year’s Day, an attack on a Coptic Christian church in Egypt killed 21 people. The following is how one eyewitness described the scene to a reporter from the New York Times….
“There were bodies on the streets,” said Sherif Ibrahim, who saw the blast’s aftermath. “Hands, legs, stomachs. Girls, women and men.”
Once a radical Islamic government is installed in Egypt it will be open season on all Christians.
Yes, there is a whole lot of blame to be passed around to other nations, organizations and individuals in the Middle East for things they have done as well, but that does not excuse the horrific persecution of the Coptic Christians in Egypt.
We have to call a spade a spade. We cannot condemn some forms of tyranny and persecution and then make excuses for other forms of tyranny and persecution just because those doing it are on “our side”.
Replacing one form of tyranny (Mubarak) with an even more repressive form of tyranny (The Muslim Brotherhood) is not something that those who love liberty and freedom should be celebrating.
In any event, everyone should be able to agree that these events are going to severely rattle world financial markets that were already very nervous about 2011.
If these violent riots in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East keep going on, the global price of oil and the global price of food will continue to soar.
Not that oil and food were not going to be heading in that direction anyway. Yesterday I wrote about the warning signs for the global economy that we are starting to see. Wheat and corn have absolutely skyrocketed in price over the past 6 months. The UN had already been projecting that we would see a 30 percent increase in the global price of food in 2011 even before these riots.
If you add rampant political instability into the mix, there is no telling how bad food inflation could get this year.
Many experts have already been forecasting substantial food shortages throughout the world this year based on all the extreme weather we have been having. So what is going to happen if something causes those food shortages to be even worse than anticipated?
We live in very interesting times my friends. The globe is becoming an increasingly unstable place. Even nations that seemed perfectly stable just a few months ago can erupt in rioting at almost any moment.
People around the world are getting angry. Thanks to the Internet, people are able to circumvent official government propaganda more easily than ever before. This is making it harder and harder for governments to control people.
Egypt tried to regain some of that control during the riots by shutting down cell phones and by shutting down the Internet but it did not work.
Let’s just hope that Egypt can soon find peace and that the changes that are made in the Egyptian government are good for freedom and liberty.
Do you see all of the warning signs that are flashing all around you? These days it seems like there is more bad economic news in a single week than there used to be in an entire month. 2011 is already shaping up to be a very dark year for the world economy. The price of food is shooting through the roof and we have already seen violent food riots in countries like Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. World financial markets are becoming increasingly unstable as the sovereign debt crisis continues to get worse. Meanwhile, the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits is up, foreclosures are up and poverty continues to spread like a plague throughout the United States. What we are starting to see around the globe is a lot like the “stagflation” of the 1970s. All of the crazy money printing that has been going on is overheating prices for agricultural commodities and precious metals, but all of this new money is not doing much to help the average man or woman on the street.
Do you remember what the economy was like in America during the 70s? We had high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. It was horrible. Well, all the warning signs are there for a stagflation repeat. Unemployment is at epidemic levels and it isn’t showing any signs of decreasing much any time soon. Meanwhile, the crazy money printing that the Federal Reserve and other central banks have been doing is starting to cause significant inflation. The price of oil is about to cross the 100 dollar a barrel mark and the UN is forecasting that the global price of food is going to increase by 30 percent by the end of the year.
So, yes, there are some really, really good reasons to be incredibly concerned about the global economy in 2011.
Meanwhile, the only solutions that our global leaders seem to be offering are more money printing, more government debt and more financial control by international organizations.
The truth is that we have a real mess on our hands. The following are 20 economic warning signs that should be of great concern to all of us….
#1 Over the past seven days, the price of wheat has risen by 11 percent as concerns about food shortages continue to grow around the world.
#4 According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week to the highest level since last October.
#5 According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, of the 14 million Americans “officially” unemployed in December, 30% of them had been unemployed for one year or longer.
#6 Beginning in the month of March, the U.S. Postal Service will begin shutting down up to 2,000 post offices across the United States.
#7 In an absolutely stunning move, Standard & Poor’s has downgraded Japanese government debt from AA to AA-.
#872 percent of the major metropolitan areas in the United States had more foreclosures in 2010 than they did in 2009.
#9 Approximately 5 million homeowners in the United States are at least two months behind on their mortgages, and it is being projected that over a million American families will be booted out of their homes this year alone.
#10 According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system will run a deficit of 45 billion dollars this year. When the new payroll tax breaks are factored in, the projected “Social Security deficit” for this year swells to 130 billion dollars.
#13 The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the price of food increased 50 percent faster than the overall rate of inflation during 2010.
#14 According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, visits to soup kitchens are up 24 percent over the past year.
#15 During the last school year, almost half of all school children in the state of Illinois came from families that were considered to be “low-income”.
#16 Those living in the town of Discovery Bay, California will soon not be permitted to use cash to pay for any public services. Could this be another disturbing step in the direction of a cashless society?
#17 French President Nicolas Sarkozy says that the IMF should be given the power to enforce new rules that would be designed to prevent “global economic imbalances” from happening.
#18 The U.S. government is currently borrowing about 40 cents of every single dollar that it spends.
#19 According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. government will have the biggest budget deficit ever recorded (approximately 1.5 trillion dollars) this year.
U.S. Representative Ron Paul has introduced a new bill to audit the Federal Reserve. Let us hope that the move to audit the Fed fares better in the 112th Congress than it did in the 111th Congress. It would be wonderful if the American people could actually learn what has been going on inside the Fed all this time.
But mostly the news about the global economy is really bad. There have been some people that have been warning for decades that all of this money printing and all of this government debt would eventually catch up with us. Now we have almost reached the moment of reckoning that the doomsayers have been warning about for so long, and it is going to be really painful to go through it.
Thanks to the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, we have been living beyond our means for decades. When “times were good” it was not because either the Republicans or the Democrats were doing something right. The truth is that both political parties have been horribly addicted to government debt. The debt-fueled prosperity that our politicians purchased for us is starting to come to an end, and an economic implosion is coming that most Americans will never see coming.
But hopefully most of the readers of this article are much wiser than the average American. The warning signs are there. Now is the time to take action and get prepared.
In the shocking video you are about to watch, Howard Dean declares that it is the job of the government to redistribute our wealth. Not only that, he says it in such a way that indicates that he believes that such a notion should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. Well, while it is true that the United States has become a highly socialized nation, the reality is that this is not what the founding fathers intended. The founders intended for us to live in a land where we would have enough freedom and enough liberty to be able to work hard and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They did not intend for a gigantic federal government to take huge amounts of money from one group of people and give it to another group of people. In any nation where a large scale redistribution of wealth is happening, the incentive to work goes right out the window. Pretty soon you end up with an entire class of people that have learned how to “make a living” by being a parasite of the government, and that is not good for any economy.
Shocking New IMF Report: The U.S. Dollar Needs To Be Replaced As The World Reserve Currency And SDRs “Could Constitute An Embryo Of Global Currency”
CNN clearly understands what the IMF is trying to accomplish with this new report. The following is how CNN’s recent story about the new IMF report begins….
That is exactly what the IMF intends to do.
They intend to have SDRs replace the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.
So exactly what are SDRs?
Well, “SDR” is short for Special Drawing Rights. It is a synthetic currency unit that is made up of a basket of currencies. SDRs have actually been around for many years, but now they are being heavily promoted as an alternative to the dollar.
The following is how Wikipedia defines SDRs….
The SDR is a hybrid. SDRs are part U.S. dollar, part euro, part yen and part British pound. In particular, the following is how each SDR currently breaks down….
U.S. Dollar: 41.9%
Euro: 37.4%
Yen: 9.4%
British Pound: 11.3%
Now there are calls for other national currencies to be included in the basket.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has publicly called for the national currencies of Brazil, Russia, India and China to be included in the SDR.
In January, the Obama administration said that it fully supports the eventual inclusion of the yuan in the SDR.
So yes, it looks like we are definitely moving in the direction of the SDR becoming a true global currency.
But is this a good idea?
Globalist organizations such as the IMF say that having a true global currency would facilitate world trade, it would make currency wars less likely, it would stabilize the global economy and it would make the rest of the globe less reliant on what is going on in the United States.
In fact, there is a lot of discussion in international financial circles that oil should be traded in SDRs rather than in U.S. dollars.
In a recent interview, IMF Deputy Managing Director Naoyuki Shinohara even suggested that the IMF may actually consider issuing bonds that are denominated in SDRs. Apparently the goal would be to promote the use of the new “currency”.
But once again, it is important to remember that the IMF does not see SDRs lasting forever either. Rather, the IMF considers the SDR to be an “embryo” from which a true global currency could emerge.
An IMF paper entitled “Reserve Accumulation and International Monetary Stability” that was published last year even proposed that a future global currency be called the “Bancor” and that a future global central bank could be put in charge of issuing it….
In fact, at one point the IMF report from last year specifically compares the proposed global central bank to the Federal Reserve….
Yes, unfortunately this is what the IMF really has in mind for all of us. A one-world economic system with a one-world currency and a one-world central bank.
Is that what we really need?
A “global Federal Reserve” that dominates the currency and the economy of the entire planet?
At least with the U.S. Federal Reserve there is hope that someday the American people can convince Congress to shut it down.
A “global Federal Reserve” would not answer to anyone. Individual nations could attempt to pull out, but then they would potentially be isolated from the rest of the globe and potentially cut off from world trade.
That may sound very far-fetched now, but that is the direction we are headed.
And shifting away from the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the world would be disastrous for the U.S. economy.
Right now the fact that the U.S. dollar is the primary reserve currency of the world is one of the only things holding it up. If you took that support away the U.S. dollar could end up collapsing quite quickly.
Let us hope that the American people wake up and start insisting that we want no part in a global currency. If we ever allow a world currency to start replacing the U.S. dollar to a large extent, we will lose a great deal of our economic sovereignty. Not that we haven’t lost most of it already, but at least if we are still using our own national currency there is a greater chance that we can reclaim it.
What the IMF is proposing right now may seem very innocent, but the long-term consequences of going down the road they want to put us on could potentially be absolutely catastrophic.
The American people need to send a very clear message to their representatives in Washington D.C…..
#1 We do not want a one-world economy.
#2 We do not want a one-world currency.
#3 We do not want a one-world central bank.