Money

Mainstream Reporter Tells The Truth About Audit The Fed And The Creation Of The Federal Reserve

When someone in the mainstream media goes out on a limb to tell the truth, then the rest of us should go out of our way to applaud that effort.  Reporter Ben Swann of Fox 19 in Cincinnati is one of the few local television reporters in the United States that consistently tackles the tough issues.  As you can see from his “Reality Check” archives, he regularly does reports on the Federal Reserve, the emerging police state, the loss of our freedoms and liberties, the advance of globalism, the economic collapse, political corruption, etc. etc.  That is one reason why his YouTube channel is rapidly approaching a million views.  In his most recent Reality Check, Ben Swann asked this question: “Is auditing the Federal Reserve really necessary?”  In just four minutes, Swann covered the creation of the Federal Reserve, where money comes from, the 16 trillion dollars in secret loans given out by the Fed during the last financial crisis, and why an audit of the Fed is so important.  It really was extraordinary to watch a local mainstream news reporter tell the truth about these things.  We could definitely use about 1000 more reporters just like him.

The video of Ben Swann’s recent Reality Check is posted below.  If you have not seen it yet, it is definitely worth the 4 minutes that it takes to watch it….

What in the world would this country look like if we had hundreds of other real journalists such as Ben Swann that were willing to tackle these kinds of issues head on?

Certainly nobody is perfect, but when a reporter like Swann is willing to go out on a limb and attack the Fed we need to applaud his efforts.

The mainstream media is supposed to hold those in positions of power accountable.

But most in the mainstream media treat the Federal Reserve with kid gloves.  It is incredibly rare to hear any real criticism of the Fed by mainstream reporters.

If the mainstream media was actually doing their job, then perhaps we could get some answers to some questions that have gone unanswered for a very long time.

For example, Zero Hedge has published a “smoking gun” that proves that the Federal Reserve was heavily involved in manipulating the price of gold long after the gold standard was abandoned.  If you have not read that piece yet, you can find it right here.

I would love to know to what extent this is still going on today, and why nobody ever asks Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about this.

Another mystery that I would like to see addressed is the trillions of dollars of “off balance sheet transactions” that are unaccounted for at the Federal Reserve.  This was brought up once during a Congressional hearing, but nobody seemed to have any answers.  Video from this hearing is posted below….

As you can see from the video, nobody in the federal government seems to have any idea what is really going on over at the Fed.

But the Fed has more power over our economy and over our financial system than anyone else does.

Isn’t it about time that the American people got some answers?

The Federal Reserve is at the very heart of our debt-based financial system that was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.

The Federal Reserve (and virtually every other central bank in the world) is not accountable to the people.  The Federal Reserve has created a perpetual debt bubble that is designed to systematically transfer the wealth of the American people to the banks.  In this system, the total amount of money and the total amount of debt is designed to continually expand.

Since the Federal Reserve was created, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by well over 95 percent and the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

But nobody seems to want to hold the Federal Reserve accountable for any of this.

Just what in the world is going on here?

In a previous article about auditing the Fed, I listed some more questions that I would like to see someone ask the Federal Reserve….

If the Federal Reserve is supposed to prevent shocks to our economy, then why have there been 10 different economic recessions since 1950 and why are we about to enter another one?

Was the Federal Reserve involved in the manipulation of Libor?

What role did the Federal Reserve play in creating the housing bubble that resulted in our unprecedented housing crash?

Why has the value of the U.S. dollar fallen by 83 percent since 1970?

Why is the Federal Reserve paying U.S. banks not to lend money?

Why did Barack Obama nominate Ben Bernanke for a second term as head of the Federal Reserve when Bernanke has a track record of failure that makes the Chicago Cubs look like a roaring success?

Why is the U.S. national debt more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913?

Why were the Federal Reserve and the personal income tax both pushed through Congress in the same year in 1913?

Why does the Federal Reserve argue that it is “not an agency” of the federal government in court?

Why do all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank?

Most Americans are pinning their hopes for an “economic turnaround” on the upcoming election in November.

But the truth is that until something is done about the Federal Reserve it isn’t going to matter very much who is in the White House.

As I wrote about yesterday, the total amount of all debt in America has grown from about 2 trillion dollars to nearly 55 trillion dollars over the past 40 years.

Yes, we should blame the American people for being really stupid about debt, but we also need to keep in mind that this is exactly what the debt-based Federal Reserve system was designed to do.

We have been enslaved by design and most Americans do not even realize what has happened.

Let us encourage reporters like Ben Swann to keep speaking out about the Federal Reserve, and the rest of us need to keep speaking out about the Fed too.

17 Reasons Why Those Hoping For A Recession In 2012 Just Got Their Wish

If you were hoping for a recession in 2012, then you are going to be very happy with the numbers you are about to see.  The U.S. economy is heading downhill just in time for the 2012 election.  Retail sales have fallen for three months in a row for the first time since 2008, manufacturing activity is dropping like a rock, sales of new homes are declining again, consumer confidence has moved significantly lower and a depressingly small percentage of businesses anticipate hiring more workers in the coming months.  Even though the Federal Reserve has been wildly pumping money into the financial system and even though the federal government has been injecting gigantic piles of borrowed cash into the economy, we still haven’t seen an economic recovery.  In fact, we appear to be on the verge of yet another major downturn.  In California the other night, Barack Obama told supporters that “we tried our plan — and it worked“, but only those that are still drinking the Obama kool-aid would believe something so preposterous.  The truth is that the U.S. economy has been steadily declining for many years and now we have reached another very painful recession.

And don’t let the second quarter GDP number on Friday fool you.  Analysts are expecting to see GDP growth of about 1.4 percent for the second quarter, but the only reason for our very small amount of “economic growth” is because the economy has been flooded with new dollars.

Let me give you an example.  If I could go out overnight and magically double the bank accounts of every single American, would we all be twice as wealthy?

No, because there would be twice as many dollars now chasing the same amount of goods and services.  The price of those goods and services would soon rise dramatically to reflect this new reality.

With all of those new dollars spinning around in the economy it would look like “economic growth” was going through the roof, but in reality the amount of real economic activity would be about the same.

So whenever we talk about GDP, we need to properly adjust it for inflation.  That means using accurate inflation figures and not the highly manipulated inflation figures that the U.S. government is putting out these days.

And as I noted the other day, after properly adjusting for inflation the U.S. economy has been continually experiencing negative economic growth since about 2005.

So let’s not deceive ourselves.  The U.S. economy has been declining for a long time.

But soon even the GDP number that the government gives us will turn negative.  We will probably see a slightly positive number for the second quarter, and the number will likely go negative either in the third quarter or the fourth quarter.

Economists will debate when this new recession officially “began” just like they do with every recession, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is happening to our economy right now.

The following are 17 reasons why those hoping for a recession in 2012 just got their wish….

1. U.S. retail sales have declined for three months in a row.  This is the first time this has happened since 2008.  Every other time this has happened in U.S. history (except for once) this has signaled that the U.S. economy was either already in a recession or was about to enter one.

2. The Philadelphia Fed index of manufacturing activity contracted for the third month in a row during July.  According to the Financial Post, this is a very bad sign….

Seven out of eight times when the average reading has been that low (-11.8) for that long the U.S. economy has tipped into recession.

3. Manufacturing activity in the mid-Atlantic region has also declined for three months in a row.  In fact, the only time in the past decade when manufacturing activity in the mid-Atlantic has fallen more dramatically was during the last recession.

4. A factory index calculated by the Institute for Supply Management has fallen to its lowest level since June 2009.

5. The Conference Board index of leading economic indicators has fallen for two of the past three months.

6. According to a recent survey conducted by the Conference Board, only 17 percent of CEOs had a positive view of the economy during the second quarter of 2012.  During the first quarter of 2012, 67 percent did.

7. Gallup’s U.S. Economic Confidence Index is now the lowest that it has been since January.

8. Optimism among small business owners has declined in three of the last four months and is now at its lowest level since last October.

9. Believe it or not, the amount of waste being carted around on trains in the United States has an 82 percent correlation with U.S. economic growth.  Unfortunately, right now the number of garbage carloads on trains is falling dramatically.

10. Sales of previously occupied homes dropped by 5.4 percent during June.

11. Sales of new homes declined by 8.4 percent during June.  At this point new home sales are less than a third of what they were during the boom years.

12. An increasing number of Americans are relying on high interest “payday loans” to pay the rent and put food on the table.

13. Far more companies are defaulting on their debts this year than last year.

14. According to the U.S. Labor Department, the unemployment rate fell in 11 states and Washington, D.C. last month, but it rose in 27 states.

15. The unemployment rate in New York City is now back up to 10 percent.  That equals the peak unemployment rate in New York City during the last recession.

16. The teen unemployment rate in Washington D.C. right now is 51.7 percent.

17. A recent survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics found that only 23 percent of all U.S. companies plan to hire more workers over the next 6 months.  When the same question was asked a few months ago that number was at 39 percent.

All of those are very powerful pieces of evidence that a new recession has started.

But do you want to know one of my favorite indicators that the U.S. economy is sliding into recession?

In a previous article, I noted that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made the following statement to Congress recently: “At this point we don’t see a double dip recession. We see continued moderate growth.”

As I mentioned the other day, Bernanke has a track record of failure that is absolutely embarrassing.  Back on January 10, 2008 Bernanke made the following statement….

“The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.”

That turned out to be a great call, didn’t it?

On June 10, 2008 he doubled down on his call that the U.S. economy was going to avoid a recession….

“The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”

Just before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed Bernanke made this statement….

“The GSEs are adequately capitalized. They are in no danger of failing.”

And there are dozens of other examples just like these.

This is the guy running our economic system.

I am very critical of the Federal Reserve, but there are very good reasons for this.

The Federal Reserve is running our economy into the ground, and we need to pound this into the heads of the American people so that they will wake up and demand change.

Perhaps this next recession will be painful enough to wake people up.

The Wall Street Journal is already even using the “D word” to describe what we are experiencing.  Just today, the Wall Street Journal ran an article that asked this question: “Do Two Recessions Equal One Depression?”

Sadly, this is just the leading edge of what is coming.  By the time 2014 or 2015 rolls around, we are going to look back and long for the “good old days” of 2011 and 2012.

Over the next few years, the unemployment rate is going to skyrocket and poverty in the United States is going to get a whole lot worse.

Now is not the time to goof off.  Now is the time to work really hard to get yourself and your family into the best position that you can for the storm that is coming.

Nothing is going to stop the terrible economic crisis that is coming, but at least we can get prepared for it.

There is hope in being prepared.

Sadly, most people will never even see the next crisis coming until they get blindsided by it.

20 Signs That All Point To The Exact Same Thing – Can You Guess What That Is?

The U.S. economy is in a massive amount of trouble.  There aren’t enough jobs.  There isn’t enough money to go around.  Business activity is slowing down again.  Household wealth has been falling.  Food prices have been rising.  Many state and local governments all over the country are flat broke and are drowning in debt.  The federal government has been rolling up unprecedented amounts of debt in an attempt to keep things going, but everyone knows that kind of borrowing is simply unsustainable.  So where do we go from here?  We consume far more than we produce and we use debt to make up the difference.  40 years ago the total amount of debt in America (government, business and consumer) was less than 2 trillion dollars.  Today it is nearly 55 trillion dollars.  How in the world did we let the total amount of debt in the United States grow more than 27 times larger over the past 40 years?  Our economic system is fundamentally broken, but most Americans don’t realize it yet because times are still relatively good.

However, the next great economic crisis is going to wake a whole lot of Americans up.

And when they realize what has happened to our future, they are going to be really, really angry.

Enjoy the good times while they last.  The next recession is rapidly approaching, and it will not be pleasant.

The following are 20 signs that all point to the exact same thing….

#1 The unemployment rate in the U.S. has been above 8 percent for 40 months in a row, and 42 percent of all unemployed Americans have been out of work for at least half a year.  As I wrote about recently, there are never going to be enough jobs in America ever again.  As bad as things are right now, they are about to get even worse.  So what is our country going to look like once the unemployment rate starts shooting up rapidly once again?

#2 35 percent of all unemployed workers have had to dip into retirement savings in order to make ends meet over the past year.

#3 Since 2008, the U.S. economy has lost 1.3 million jobs while at the same time 3.6 million more Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program.

#4 A recent survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics found that only 23 percent of all U.S. companies plan to hire more workers over the next 6 months.  When the same question was asked a few months ago that number was at 39 percent.

#5 An important measure of U.S. manufacturing activity has fallen to its lowest level since June 2009.

#6 Hundreds of thousands of federal jobs at civilian agencies will likely be lost if Congress allows the automatic federal budget cuts to go into effect next year.  The following is from a recent article posted on federalnewsradio.com….

A report released Tuesday suggests that several hundred thousand federal jobs at civilian agencies would be on the chopping block within the next year if Congress lets the automatic budget cutting process known as sequestration go into effect.

The study, authored by George Mason University professor Stephen Fuller, adds a new dimension to a budget debate that’s so far been centered on sequestration’s effects on the military.

#7 The teen unemployment rate in Washington D.C. right now is 51.7 percent.

#8 Gallup’s U.S. Economic Confidence Index is now the lowest that it has been since January.

#9 The median net worth of U.S. households in 2007 was $126,400.  By 2010, it had fallen to just $77,300.

#10 Pensions at S&P 500 companies are more under-funded than they have ever been before.

#11 According to the New York Times, state and local governments across America “shortchanged their pension plans by more than $50 billion” between 2007 and 2011.

#12 The city of Compton, California is evaluating whether or not it should declare bankruptcy.  If it did, it would become the fourth California city to declare bankruptcy this year.

#13 The percentage of U.S. households that are spending more than half their incomes on housing is at an all-time high.

#14 For the first time in modern history, Canadian households are wealthier than American households are.

#15 One recent poll found that 42 percent of all Americans believe that China is the leading economic power in the world while only 36 percent believe that the U.S. is still the leading economic power in the world.

#16 According to the federal government, the price of food rose much faster than the general rate of inflation did during 2011.  Just check out these rates of food inflation for 2011….

  • Beef: +10.2%
  • Pork: +8.5%
  • Fish: +7.1%
  • Eggs: +9.2%
  • Dairy: +6.8%
  • Oils and Fats: +9.3%

If that happened during a somewhat “normal year”, what will food prices look like after we are done with the drought of 2012?

#17 The price of a bushel of corn has risen by 54 percent since mid-June.

#18 According to one survey, 42 percent of all American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.

#19 A different survey found that 28 percent of all Americans have absolutely no emergency savings at all right now.

#20 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made the following statement to Congress on Tuesday: “At this point we don’t see a double dip recession. We see continued moderate growth.”

Do you remember that old Seinfeld episode when George Costanza decided that he would “do the opposite” of everything that his instincts were telling him to do and everything started working out great for him?

Well, when it comes to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the key is to “believe the opposite” of everything that he says.

And since Bernanke does not believe that a double dip recession is going to happen, that probably means that we are about to hit another recession.

If you doubt this theory about Bernanke, just go back and check out his track record.

Okay, so if our economy is in big trouble shouldn’t our leaders be doing something about it?

Well, it is election season now so I wouldn’t expect too much from Barack Obama.  He is too busy raising money in France and in China.

I wouldn’t expect too much from Obama’s economic advisers either.  In fact, Obama’s much-ballyhooed “jobs council” has not even met in six months.

Not that the “jobs council” was ever going to do anything substantive anyway.

The truth is that it was just for show and most of the CEOs on the council have been sending jobs overseas anyway.

Well, what about the SEC?

Shouldn’t they be doing something to fix the financial system?

No, they are too busy investigating the Amish.

It looks like we are on our own.

Soon, even more parts of the country will start looking like Detroit or Baltimore or Cleveland.

This country is rapidly falling apart, and the federal government is not going to save us.

That is why we need to focus on preparing to weather the coming storm on a family and community level.

There is hope in being prepared.  The coming economic crisis will wipe out many Americans because they will never even see it coming.  But that does not have to happen to you.

If you work really hard right now to prepare your family for the storm that is on the horizon, then you will have a much better chance of making it through to the other side.

If One Storm Can Turn D.C. Dark For Several Days, What Would A Massive EMP Burst Do?

Sometimes we all get a little reminder of just how completely and totally dependent we are on the power grid.  Massive thunderstorms that ripped through Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Washington D.C. and Virginia left millions without power over the weekend.  At this point it is being projected that some people may not get power back until the end of the week.  The “super derecho” storm that pounded the Washington D.C. area on Friday night with hurricane-force winds is being called unprecedented.  But the truth is that there are other events that could happen that would be far more damaging to our power grid.  For example, a substantial EMP burst over a major U.S. city would fry virtually all of the electronics in the city and take the power grid in the area down indefinitely.  A gigantic EMP burst over the entire country (caused by a massive solar storm or a very large nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere) could theoretically take down the entire national power grid.  Just try to imagine a world where nobody has any electricity, nobody can pump gas, nobody can use their credit cards or get any more money, where most vehicles won’t start, where nobody has the Internet, where all cell phones are dead and where nobody can heat or cool their homes.  That is how serious an EMP burst could potentially be.  We are talking about an event that could be millions of times worse than 9/11.

Hopefully this latest storm has reminded Americans about how vulnerable our power grid really is and about how close we really are to being knocked back to the late 1800s.

Let’s review some of the damage that this “super derecho” storm caused to the D.C. area….

-Thousands of businesses have been forced to close temporarily because they cannot operate without electricity

-Many federal agencies were closed on Monday because there was no power

-Many 911 call centers throughout Northern Virginia were down over the weekend and could not respond to emergencies

-Without electricity, many families have not been able to cook warm meals

-Without warm water, many families have not been able to take hot showers

-A “boil water advisory” was put into effect for several areas of northern Virginia

-Many families that still do not have power are in danger of losing much of the food in their refrigerators and freezers

-Many gas stations were not able to operate because of a lack of electricity and so this has made filling up the gas tank a major hassle for many families

-Hundreds of traffic lights are still out and this is making commuting a major problem in some areas

-Without air conditioning many families are absolutely sweltering as high temperatures remain well above 90 degrees

-During the power outage some people have been without cell phone service because many cell phone towers were inoperable

-Without electricity, thousands upon thousands of people have not been able to use their computers for several days and this is causing a lot of frustration

-Several major websites were totally knocked offline by the storms as Robert McMillan of Wired Magazine explained….

Hurricane-like storms knocked an Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, offline last night, and a chunk of the internet felt it. The six-hour incident temporarily cut off a number of popular internet services, including Netflix, Pinterest, Heroku, and Instagram.

But to be honest this was not a major disaster.

After a few days the damage will be fixed and people will start to forget what just happened.

Well, what if the damage was permanent and the entire nation had to go without electricity for the foreseeable future?  The following is from a USA Today article by Dan Vergano….

The sky erupts. Cities darken, food spoils and homes fall silent. Civilization collapses.

End-of-the-world novel? A video game? Or could such a scenario loom in America’s future?

There is talk of catastrophe ahead, depending on whom you believe, because of the threat of an electromagnetic pulse triggered by either a supersized solar storm or terrorist A-bomb, both capable of disabling the electric grid that powers modern life.

As I have written about previously, an EMP attack could fundamentally change life in America in a single instant.

What would you do if such a scenario happened?

Would you try to go somewhere?  Even if the electronics in your car were not totally fried, you would not be able to pump more gas anywhere.

Would you try to call someone?  Most phones would be totally dead and all normal communications networks would be down.  So who would you call?

Would you bunker down and try to survive on what you have at home?  Most of the food in your refrigerator and freezer would rapidly go bad and most Americans only have enough food to last a few days or a few weeks.  In addition, most Americans would no longer be able to heat or cool their homes, so extreme cold and extreme heat would become huge problems very quickly.

How in the world would any of us survive in a world without electricity?

In past centuries our forefathers knew how to survive in such a world, but most of us do not have the same skills or resources that they had.

The following is how an article in the Wall Street Journal once described what a massive EMP burst would do to this nation….

No American would necessarily die in the initial attack, but what comes next is potentially catastrophic. The pulse would wipe out most electronics and telecommunications, including the power grid. Millions could die for want of modern medical care or even of starvation since farmers wouldn’t be able to harvest crops and distributors wouldn’t be able to get food to supermarkets. Commissioner Lowell Wood calls EMP attack a “giant continental time machine” that would move us back more than a century in technology to the late 1800s.

What would you do if you were suddenly cut off from all electricity, all money, all modern forms of communication, all modern forms of transportation and all modern forms of shopping?

Don’t think that it can’t happen.

Scientists tell us that massive EMP bursts generated by gigantic solar storms have hit our planet in the past and that it is inevitable that it will happen again.

In addition, nations all over the planet are aware of what an EMP burst can do and have been developing “Super-EMP” weapons that can take power grids down in a single strike.

The following is a short excerpt from a statement by Dr. Peter Vincent Pry to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on March 8th, 2005….

Russian and Chinese military scientists in open source writings describe the basic principles of nuclear weapons designed specifically to generate an enhanced-EMP effect, that they term “Super-EMP” weapons. “Super-EMP” weapons, according to these foreign open source writings, can destroy even the best protected U.S. military and civilian electronic systems.

That doesn’t sound good.

But perhaps even more troubling is that North Korea has been reportedly developing this type of weapon.  In fact, it has been reported that North Korea may have tested a “Super-EMP” weapon all the way back in 2009….

North Korea’s last round of tests, conducted in May 2009, appear to have included a “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting enough gamma rays to disable the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 states

In time, these kinds of weapons will get into more and more hands.

Will someone try to use this kind of weapon at some point?

Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, believes that a single EMP burst could potentially end up killing the vast majority of the population of the United States….

“Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity”

Once you understand these kinds of threats, it makes it a lot easier to understand why preppers are so busy preparing for the future.

Our world is becoming incredibly unstable.  Another major economic crisis could hit us at any time, war in the Middle East could erupt without warning, earthquakes and other natural disasters are becoming more frequent and society seems to get a little crazier with each passing day.

The era of tremendous peace and prosperity that we have all been enjoying is rapidly coming to an end.  In a world filled with instability and chaos, it only seems prudent to take some precautions.

You might want to get prepared while you still have time.

Kicking The Can Down The Road

Has Europe finally been saved this time?  Has this latest “breakthrough” solved the European debt crisis?  Of course not, and you should know better by now.  European leaders have held 18 summits since the beginning of the debt crisis.  After most of the preceding summits, global financial markets responded with joy because European leaders had reached “a deal” which would supposedly solve the crisis.  But a few weeks after each summit it would become clear that nothing had been solved and that the financial crisis had actually gotten even worse than before.  How many times do they expect us to fall for the same sorry routine?  Nothing in Europe has been solved.  You can’t solve a debt problem with more debt.  European leaders are just kicking the can down the road.  More debt will relieve some of the short-term pressure, but in a few weeks it will be apparent that the underlying problems in Europe continue to grow.  Unfortunately, there is not an unlimited amount of EU bailout money, so once all of these “financial bullets” have been fired European leaders are going to find that kicking the can down the road will not be so easy anymore.  The truth is that the financial crisis in Europe has not been cancelled – it has just been put off for a few weeks or a few months.

Do you solve the problems of a credit card addict by giving that person another credit card?  Of course not.  You may delay the short-term financial problems of the credit card addict by giving that person another credit card, but in the process you make the long-term problems even worse.

Well, that is essentially what is happening in Europe.  European governments and the European financial system have become ridiculously dependent on debt.  By giving European debt junkies another “hit” or two it may relieve a bit of short-term suffering but it doesn’t solve anything.

Just think about it.

Did the first bailout package solve the problems in Greece?

No.

Did the second bailout package solve the problems in Greece?

No.

Today, the Greek financial system is a complete and total mess, and Greek politicians are saying that a third bailout package may be necessary.

Many are claiming that Italy and Spain have been “saved” by this new deal, but that is a joke.

Yes, the ability to inject bailout funds directly into troubled banks is going to keep some of them going for a little while.  But the deal also calls for a new governing body to be established that will supervise those banks.  Will that governing body be established in time to even provide the short-term help that is needed?

Yes, spending bailout funds to buy up Spanish debt and Italian debt will artificially suppress bond yields for a time.

We have seen this before.

But what happened?

After the bond buying program was over, bond yields started spiking again.

So do the Europeans plan to suppress bond yields forever?

Of course not.  There is not enough bailout money to do that.

Let’s review the equation that I have shared in previous articles….

Brutal austerity + toxic levels of government debt + rising bond yields + a lack of confidence in the financial system + banks that are massively overleveraged + a massive credit crunch = A financial implosion of historic proportions

Have any of those elements been removed?

No.

Bond yields will be suppressed for a period of time, but that will not last forever, and all of the other underlying issues are still there.

Meanwhile, the rest of Europe continues to follow the Greek economy into economic depression.

The Spanish economy shrunk again in the second quarter of 2012, and austerity in that nation has barely even begun.

As a recent CNBC article detailed, the big spending cuts are still coming….

The conservatives, who inherited from the outgoing Socialists one of the euro zone’s highest public deficits, at 8.9 percent of GDP in 2011, have said they will shrink the shortfall to 5.3 percent this year and 3 percent in 2013.

Austerity has absolutely shredded the Greek economy, and we are starting to see that same pattern be repeated all over Europe.

When you spend far more money than you bring in for decades, eventually you have to go through a very painful adjustment.  What is going on in Greece should be a lesson for all of us.  Debt allows you to live above your means, but the consequences of going into way too much debt can be absolutely horrific.

More debt can delay the consequences of a debt problem but it cannot solve a debt problem.  The following is what Jim Rogers told CNBC on Friday….

“Just because now you have a way to get them (the banks) to borrow even more money, this is not solving the problem, this is making the problem worse,” Rogers said on Friday.

“People need to stop spending money they don’t have. The solution to too much debt is not more debt. All this little agreement does is give them (banks) a chance to have even more debt for a while longer,” he added.

But if you just went by the headlines in most of the newspapers around the world you would think that European leaders had discovered the cure for cancer or something.

Sadly, the truth is that they are simply choosing to fire off a few of the “financial bullets” that they still have left as a recent Washington Post article described….

The European bailout funds don’t have unlimited resources. If they throw $125 billion at Spain’s banks and another couple hundred billion toward Italy, pretty soon they’ll be running low. The only entity with unlimited euros is the European Central Bank. And right now, there’s no talk of using the ECB to provide bailouts. Which means that this latest move might have just forestalled the crisis, rather than ending it permanently.

So what comes next?

Bruce Krasting believes that the “half-life of this bailout will be measured in weeks”.  The following is his summary of what he sees coming next in Europe….

If I’m right, after a few weeks things turn south again in the capital markets. Then what?

– More LTRO. No – there is no more collateral. All of the swill loans have already been hocked.

– Cut ECB % rate. Doesn’t matter. It won’t change conditions in Italian or Spanish funding markets one bit.

– A spending plan of <1% of GDP. That won’t put a dent in the recession that is building.

– Brussels buys more sovereign bonds to avoid a catastrophe of Italian 10-year exceeding 7% (capitulation). Sorry. There are “wise men” in Germany who will simply not allow this to happen in the scale that is required.

– The ECB goes Defcon 1 and launches a E2T QE program. No – same answer as above.

– Merkel does a 180 and embraces Euro bonds. No chance in hell.

–The US or China are going to start buying EU bonds? Lunacy – not happening.

-The IMF will come to the rescue? No way – the IMF does not have the resources to solve anyone’s problems.

In other words, kicking the can down the road is going to get quite a bit harder after the current “sugar high” wears off.

Europe is still headed for the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression (at least) and European leaders seem powerless to stop it.

Of course the United States is also facing a crisis of too much debt and a great day of reckoning is on the way for this country as well.

So yes, the global economy is still heading for collapse and there is still a multitude of reasons to be extremely concerned about the second half of 2012.

What is your opinion about all of this?

Do you think that European leaders will be able to keep kicking the can down the road?

Please feel free to post a comment with your opinion below….

Where Does Money Come From? The Giant Federal Reserve Scam That Most Americans Do Not Understand

How is money created?  If you ask average people on the street this question, most of them have absolutely no idea.  This is rather odd, because we all use money constantly.  You would think that it would only be natural for all of us to know where it comes from.  So where does money come from?  A lot of people assume that the federal government creates our money, but that is not the case.  If the federal government could just print and spend more money whenever it wanted to, our national debt would be zero.  But instead, our national debt is now nearly 16 trillion dollars.  So why does our government (or any sovereign government for that matter) have to borrow money from anybody?  That is a very good question.  The truth is that in theory the U.S. government does not have to borrow a single penny from anyone.  But under the Federal Reserve system, the U.S. government has purposely allowed itself to be subjugated to a financial system in which it will be constantly borrowing larger and larger amounts of money.  In fact, this is how it works in the vast majority of the countries on the planet at this point.  As you will see, this kind of system is not sustainable and the structural problems caused by such a system are at the very heart of our debt problems today.

So where does money come from?  In the United States, it comes from the Federal Reserve.

When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.

Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.

So why does the U.S. government go to all this trouble?  Why doesn’t the U.S. government create the money itself?

Those are very good questions.

One of the primary reasons why our system is structured this way is so that wealthy people can get even wealthier by lending money to the U.S. government and other national governments.

For example, last year the U.S. government spent more than 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt.

Over the centuries, the ultra-wealthy have found lending to national governments to be a very, very profitable enterprise.

The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system.

But wait.

There is a problem.

Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created.

So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?

Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.

But that never actually happens, does it?

And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well.  They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt.  They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.

That is why I call the Federal Reserve a perpetual debt machine.  The Federal Reserve was created to trap the U.S. government in an endlessly expanding debt spiral from which there is no escape.

And the Federal Reserve is doing a great job at what it was designed to do.  Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.

Another way that money comes into existence in our economy is through the process of fractional reserve banking.

I originally pulled the following simplified explanation of fractional reserve banking off of the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but it has been pulled down since then.  But I still think it is helpful in understanding the basics of how fractional reserve banking works….

“If the reserve requirement is 10%, for example, a bank that receives a $100 deposit may lend out $90 of that deposit. If the borrower then writes a check to someone who deposits the $90, the bank receiving that deposit can lend out $81. As the process continues, the banking system can expand the initial deposit of $100 into a maximum of $1,000 of money ($100+$90+81+$72.90+…=$1,000).”

When you put your money into the bank, it does not say there.  The bank only keeps a relatively small amount of money sitting around to satisfy the withdrawal demands of account holders.  If all of us went down to the banks right now and demanded our money, that would create a major problem.

If I put 100 dollars into the bank and the bank lends out 90 of those dollars to you, now it looks like there are 190 dollars floating around.  I have “100 dollars” in my bank account and you have “90 dollars” that you just borrowed.

The new debt that you have taken on (90 dollars) has “created” more money.  But of course you are going to end up paying back more than 90 dollars to the bank, so more debt has been created than the amount of money that has been created.

And that is one of the big problems with our financial system.  It is designed so that the amount of debt and the amount of money are supposed to be perpetually expanding, and the amount of debt created is always greater than the amount of money that is created.

So is it any wonder that our society is swamped with nearly 55 trillion dollars of total debt at this point?

A debt-based financial system is unsustainable by nature because it will always create debt bubbles that will inevitably burst.

Are you starting to see why so many Americans are saying that we need to abolish the Federal Reserve system?

Our founding fathers never intended for our financial system to work this way.

According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is supposed to have the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.

So why has this authority been given to a private institution that is dominated by the big Wall Street banks and that has actually argued in court that it is “not an agency” of the federal government?

Thomas Jefferson once said that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing….

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

But instead, we have become enslaved to a system where government borrowing actually creates our money.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we have allowed our government to enslave us to the tune of nearly 16 trillion dollars.

There are alternatives to this system.  Things do not have to work this way.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of our politicians consider the Federal Reserve to be good for America and steadfastly refuse to do anything to change the status quo.

So if you are waiting for “solutions” to these problems on the national level you are going to be waiting for a very long time.

The debt problems that the United States and Europe are experiencing did not come into existence by accident.  They are the result of fundamental structural problems with the financial system.

A debt-based financial system is always going to fail in the long run.  Unfortunately, most Americans still do not understand this and so we will all get to suffer the consequences.

Will Toledo, Ohio Be The First Major American City To Be Owned By China?

It has been said that there are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation.  One way is by using the sword, and the other is by using debt.  Fortunately, America is not in danger of being conquered by the sword right now, but America is being conquered by debt.  The borrower is the servant of the lender, and today we owe China more than a trillion dollars.  By running a gigantic trade deficit with us, China has been able to become incredibly wealthy.  We have begged them to lend us back some of the money that we have sent them and this has made them even wealthier.  Now China is gobbling up U.S. real estate and U.S. assets at an astounding pace.  In fact, some cities are in danger of becoming completely dominated by Chinese ownership.  One of those cities is Toledo, Ohio.  In many “rust belt” areas, real estate can be had for a song, and the Chinese are taking full advantage of this.  America was once the wealthiest nation on earth, but now we are drowning in debt and we are being sold off in chunks to the highest bidder.  Is this the legacy that we are going to leave for future generations?

According to a recent Fortune article, Chinese investors have been very busy purchasing distressed commercial real estate in Toledo lately….

In March 2011, Chinese investors paid $2.15 million cash for a restaurant complex on the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio. Soon they put down another $3.8 million on 69 acres of newly decontaminated land in the city’s Marina District, promising to invest $200 million in a new residential-commercial development. That September, another Chinese firm spent $3 million for an aging hotel across a nearby bridge with a view of the minor league ballpark.

Toledo is being promoted to Chinese investors as a “5-star logistics region“.  From Toledo it is very easy to get to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Indianapolis.

With a population of 287,000, Toledo is only the fourth largest city in Ohio, but it lies at the junction of two important highways — I-75 and I-80/90. “My vision is to make Toledo a true international city,” Toledo’s Mayor Mike Bell told the Toledo Blade.

For some reason the Chinese seem to be very interested in that area of the country.  Last month, I wrote about how one Chinese group plans to develop a 200 acre “China city” just 40 minutes away from Toledo….

A Chinese group known as “Sino-Michigan Properties LLC” has bought up 200 acres of land near the town of Milan, Michigan.  Their plan is to construct a “China City” with artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens.  Essentially, it would be a little slice of communist China dropped right into the heartland of America.  This “China City” would be located about 40 minutes from both Detroit and Toledo, and it would be marketed to Chinese business people that want to start businesses in the United States.

But it is not just the rust belt that is being bought up by the Chinese.  A recent Forbes article documented several of the huge real estate deals that the Chinese are doing in New York right now….

According to a recent report in the New York Times, investors from China are “snapping up luxury apartments” and are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on commercial and residential projects like Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Chinese companies also have signed major leases at the Empire State Building and at 1 World Trade Center, the report said.

In addition to real estate, the Chinese are also buying up businesses and natural resources all over the United States.

For example, the Dalian Wanda Group recently bought U.S. movie theater chain AMC Entertainment for 2.6 billion dollars.

Also, the Obama administration has been allowing companies owned by the Chinese government to gobble up U.S. oil and gas deposits worth billions of dollars.

On top of all that, the Federal Reserve recently announced that it will now allow Chinese banks to start buying up American banks.

So how in the world did we come to be so completely and totally dominated by China?

Well, the key to all of this is the trade deficit.

Most Americans can’t even tell you what a trade deficit is, but it is at the very heart of our economic problems.

Basically, we buy far, far more from other countries than they buy from us.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but the truth is that the United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 5 times larger than any other nation on earth has.

Overall, the U.S. has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975.

If you go into a Wal-Mart of a dollar store today and you start looking at product labels, you will notice that hundreds of products say “made in China” and very few of them say that they were made in this country.

Every single month, China sends us gigantic mountains of plastic crap to sell in our stores and we send them gigantic mountains of our money.

The U.S. trade deficit with China during 2011 was $295.4 billion.  That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.

Sadly, so far our trade deficit with China in 2012 is about 12 percent larger than it was last year.

So things are getting even worse.

To get an idea of how far things have come, let us take a look back at the 1980s for a moment.

Back in 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was only 6 million dollars for the entire year.

All of this imbalanced trade is absolutely killing us.

Today, the United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

So why doesn’t China buy more stuff from us?

Well, there are a whole lot of reasons.  One of the main reasons is that they slap huge tariffs on many American-made goods.

For example, according to the New York Times a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

So why do we allow China to keep doing this to us?

That is a very good question.

Meanwhile, China is continually getting wealthier and we are continually getting poorer.

All of the money that is leaving this country and going to China could be going to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers instead.  In turn, those businesses and workers would pay taxes on that money to support the government.

Instead, we have to go beg China to lend us the money that we just sent to them.

At this point, China now holds approximately 1.17 trillion dollars of U.S. government debt.

None of this ever had to happen.

But it did happen because we were stupid.

Now China has mountains of money to literally buy us up.

But China is not the only country that we have an imbalanced trading relationship with.

For example, the new “free trade agreement” between the United States and South Korea that Barack Obama has been touting went into full effect on March 15, 2012.

So how has that “free trade agreement” turned out so far?  The following is from a recent article by Pat Buchanan….

The U.S. trade deficit with Korea tripled in one month. Imports from South Korea jumped 15 percent to $5.5 billion in April, while U.S. exports to South Korea fell 12 percent to $3.7 billion. Suddenly, the U.S. trade deficit with Seoul surged to an annual rate of $22 billion.

Shades of NAFTA. When it passed in 1993, we had a $1.6 billion trade surplus with Mexico. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had reached $61.6 billion.

Ouch.

The truth is that these free trade agreements are not fair and balanced.

U.S. workers end up competing for jobs with workers in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  And other countries often have far fewer rules and regulations to follow as well.  In his recent article, Buchanan described why all Americans should be economic nationalists….

Global free trade means U.S. workers compete with Asian and Latin American workers whose wages are a fraction of our own and whose benefits may be nonexistent. Global free trade means U.S factories that relocate to Indonesia or India need not observe U.S. laws on health, safety, pollution or paying a minimum wage.

Global free trade means that companies that move factories outside the United States can send their products back to the United States free of charge and undercut businessmen who retain their American workers and live within American laws.

Free trade makes suckers and fools out of patriots.

Unfortunately, both major political parties in the United States are absolutely married to the one world economic agenda that the elite are pushing.

So we will continue to bleed wealth, businesses and jobs at an astounding pace.

You can get a really good idea of the horrific manufacturing job losses in the United States over the past 40 years by checking out this map right here.

Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, since 2001 America has lost approximately 2.8 million jobs due to our trade deficit with China alone.

There seems to be absolutely no concern with protecting American jobs these days.

If you can believe it, Chinese corporations are even building our bridges.  The following is a brief excerpt from a recent ABC News article….

In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.

In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.

In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.

These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.

“When we subsidize jobs in China, we’re not creating any wealth in the United States,” said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

Americans need to start understanding that our trade deficit is causing us to lose massive numbers of businesses and jobs and that this is making us poorer as a nation.

As I wrote about the other day, the median net worth of families in the United States declined “from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010” according to the Federal Reserve.

Even if you take away the effect of the housing collapse, household net worth still declined by 25 percent between 2005 and 2010.

A lot of that decline in wealth was due to the recent recession, but the point I am trying to make is that we are getting poorer as a nation.

A decade ago, the United States was ranked number one in average wealth per adult.  By 2010, the United States had fallen to seventh.

And when you factor in our debts, we are a complete and total mess.  U.S. consumers are more than 11 trillion dollars in debt and the federal government is nearly 16 trillion dollars in debt.

We are getting deeper in debt at the same time that our ability to service that debt is declining.

The reality is that our economy is completely falling apart and it no longer produces enough jobs for everyone.

In fact, it isn’t even close.

Right now there are about 3.7 workers that are “officially” unemployed for every single job opening.

So what we are doing right now is clearly not working.

We need to fundamentally change direction as a nation.

Unfortunately, that is not going to happen any time soon.

So where do we go from here?

Oh Crud! 19 Reasons Why It Is Time To Start Freaking Out About The Global Economy

Yes, it is officially time to start freaking out about the global economy.  The European financial system is falling apart and it is going to go down hard.  If Europe was going to be saved it would have happened by now.  The big money insiders have already pulled their funds from vulnerable positions and they are ready to ride the coming chaos out.   Over the next few months the slow motion train wreck currently unfolding in Europe will continue to play out and things will likely really start really heating up in the fall once summer vacations are over.  Most Americans greatly underestimate how much Europe can affect the global economy.  Europe actually has a larger population than the United States does.  Europe also has a significantly larger economy and a much larger banking system.  The world is more interconnected today than ever before, and a collapse of the financial system in Europe will cause a massive global recession.  Once the global economy slides into another major recession, it is going to take years to recover.  The pain is going to be immense.  Yes, that is going to include the United States.  Sadly, we never recovered from the last recession, and it is frightening to think about how much farther this next recession is going to knock us down.

The big problem is that there is simply way, way, way too much debt in the United States and Europe.  It has been a lot of fun spending all of this borrowed money, but now we get to pay the price.

The following are 19 reasons why it is time to start freaking out about the global economy….

#1 The yield on 10 year Italian bonds has now risen to more than 6 percent.

#2 The yield on 10 year Spanish bonds has now risen to more than 7 percent.  This is considered to be an unsustainable level.

#3 Citigroup Chief Economist Willem Buiter says that both Italy and Spain are going to need major bailouts.

#4 The Spanish banking crisis continues to get worse.  The following is from a CNN article that was posted on Monday….

But the depth of the nation’s crisis has raised doubts about whether €100 billion will be enough to recapitalize the banks. For example, the Bank of Spain, the nation’s central bank, released data Monday showing that “doubtful” loans — those that are more than 3 months overdue — rose to €152.7 billion in April, equal to 8.7% of all the loans held by the nation’s banks.

#5 Unemployment in Spain is sitting at a record high of over 24 percent with no hope in sight.

#6 Unemployment in the eurozone as a whole has hit a brand new all-time record high.

#7 The socialists won an outright majority in the recent parliamentary elections in France.  That means that France and Germany are now headed in completely different directions.  The close cooperation that we have seen between France and Germany in recent years is now over.

#8 New French President Francois Hollande has promised to implement a top tax rate of 75 percent on those making over 1 million euros a year.

#9 German Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared that Germany will not budge at all on the terms of the Greek bailout.

#10 Analysts at Citigroup Global Markets are projecting that the odds of Greece leaving the euro over the next 12 to 18 months are still between 50 and 75 percent.

#11 Money is being transferred from banks in southern Europe to banks in northern Europe at an astounding pace….

Financial advisers and private bankers whose clients have accounts too large to be covered by a Europe-wide guarantee on deposits up to 100,000 euros ($125,000), are reporting a “bank run by wire transfer” that has picked up during May.

Much of this money has headed north to banks in London, Frankfurt and Geneva, financial advisers say.

“It’s been an ongoing process but it certainly picked up pace a couple of weeks ago We believe there is a continuous 2-3 year bank run by wire transfer,” said Lorne Baring, managing director at B Capital, a Geneva-based pan European wealth management firm.

#12 As I wrote about recently, about 500 million euros a day has been pulled out of Greek banks so far this month.

#13 The Bank for International Settlements is warning that global lending is contracting at the fastest rate that we have seen since the end of the last financial crisis.

#14 Lloyd’s of London has publicly admitted that it is making preparations for a collapse of the eurozone.

#15 Government debt levels all over the industrialized world have exploded in recent years.  The following is from a recent article by Stephen Lendman….

Five years ago, OECD countries sovereign debt/GDP ratios were 70%. Today it’s 106% and rising.

Anything over 100% is considered to be an extremely dangerous level.

#16 The economic problems in Europe are already taking a toll on the U.S. economy.  At this point U.S. exports to Europe are way down.

#17 One recent poll found that 75 percent of Americans are either “very or somewhat worried” that the U.S. economy is heading for another recession.

#18 Under Barack Obama, the United States has been indulging in a debt binge unlike anything ever seen in U.S. history.  The following is from a recent Forbes article….

After just one year of the Obama spending binge, federal spending had already rocketed to 25.2% of GDP, the highest in American history except for World War II.  That compares to 20.8% in 2008, and an average of 19.6% during Bush’s two terms.  The average during President Clinton’s two terms was 19.8%, and during the 60-plus years from World War II until 2008 — 19.7%.  Obama’s own fiscal 2013 budget released in February projects the average during the entire 4 years of the Obama Administration to come in at 24.4% in just a few months.  That budget shows federal spending increasing from $2.983 trillion in 2008 to an all time record $3.796 trillion in 2012, an increase of 27.3%.

Moreover, before Obama there had never been a deficit anywhere near $1 trillion.  The highest previously was $458 billion, or less than half a trillion, in 2008. The federal deficit for the last budget adopted by a Republican controlled Congress was $161 billion for fiscal year 2007.  But the budget deficits for Obama’s four years were reported in Obama’s own 2013 budget as $1.413 trillion for 2009, $1.293 trillion for 2010, $1.3 trillion for 2011, and $1.327 trillion for 2012, four years in a row of deficits of $1.3 trillion or more, the highest in world history.

#19 Barack Obama almost seems more focused on his golf game than on the problems the global economy is having.  He just finished up playing his 100th round of golf since he became president.

If you are looking for some kind of a global financial miracle you can stop watching.

If European leaders had a master plan to save Europe they would have shown it by now.

If Barack Obama had a master plan to fix things he would have implemented it by now.

If the Federal Reserve had a master plan to fix things we would have seen it by now.

The entire house of cards is starting to come down and things are going to get really messy.

A lot of people both in the United States and in Europe are going to lose their jobs and their homes over the next few years.

It is likely that the next recession will be even more painful than the last one was.

Now is not the time to panic.  If you acknowledge what is coming and prepare accordingly then you will likely be in good shape.

But if you stick your head in the sand and pretend that everything is going to be okay then the next few years will likely be incredibly painful for you.

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