In fact, international financial markets are in a state of chaos as I write this article.  Asian markets are a sea of red, and at this moment Dow futures are way down.

So it appears likely that Wednesday’s nightmare may extend into Thursday as well.

But before we look ahead too much, let’s talk about the utter carnage that we just witnessed.

According to Bloomberg, the 500 wealthiest people in the world lost 99 billion dollars on Wednesday…

Plunging global markets lopped $99 billion from the fortunes of the world’s 500 wealthiest people on Wednesday, the year’s second-steepest one-day drop for the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos lost $9.1 billion, the most of anyone on the index, as shares of the online retailer fell the most in more than two years. The plunge lowered Bezos’s net worth to $145.2 billion, its lowest since July.

Can you imagine losing that much money on a single day?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has now fallen for four out of the last five trading sessions, and for the month as a whole all three of the major indexes are way down…

Stocks have fallen sharply this month. For October, the S&P 500 and the Dow are down more than 4.4 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, has lost more than 7.5 percent.

Tech stocks are being hit particularly hard.  In fact, tech stocks just had their worst day in more than seven years…

Technology stocks got clobbered on Wednesday, suffering their worst day in more than seven years, as concerns over rising interest rates punished the overall market, particularly shares of companies that have been the best performers.

The S&P 500 Information Technology Index closed at $1,220.62, down 4.8 percent, marking the biggest decline since August 18, 2011, when the index dropped 5.3 percent. All 65 members of the index fell.

At this point, 330 out of the 505 stocks that make up the S&P 500 are already more than 10 percent below their 52-week highs.

That means that about two-thirds of all S&P 500 stocks are officially in correction territory.

And 140 of those stocks are already down more than 20 percent from their 52-week highs, and that means that they are officially in bear market territory.

So why is this happening?

Many of the “experts” are pointing to the dramatic rise in interest rates…

Nervousness had been building for days on Wall Street. The catalyst was the recent spike in the yield on a closely watched government bond to a seven-year high.

The 10-year Treasury note — whose key rate impacts the pricing on things ranging from fixed-rate mortgages to stocks to virtually every financial asset on the planet — recently climbed above 3.25 percent for the first time since May 2011. And when you add the threat of higher borrowing costs on things like houses and cars and corporate debt to the economic obstacles caused by the U.S. trade war with China, all it takes is a whiff of weakness to set a major sell-off in motion.

A week ago, I warned my readers that rapidly rising rates could spark a market sell-off, and now it is happening with a ferocity that is absolutely breathtaking.

Needless to say, President Trump was not thrilled by the market crash on Wednesday, and he is pointing the blame at the Federal Reserve…

President Donald Trump slammed the Federal Reserve as “going loco” for its interest-rate increases this year in comments hours after the worst U.S. stock market sell-off since February.

Trump said in a telephone interview on Fox News late Wednesday night the market plunge wasn’t because of his trade conflict with China: “That wasn’t it. The problem I have is with the Fed,” he said. “The Fed is going wild. They’re raising interest rates and it’s ridiculous.”

“That’s not the problem,” he said of the trade standoff. “The problem in my opinion is the fed,” he added. “The fed is going loco.”

I love it.

I absolutely love it.

Could it be possible that we will soon see supporters chant “end the Fed” at Trump rallies?

No president has ever openly criticized the Federal Reserve like this, and I greatly applaud Trump for doing so.

And he is precisely correct – the Federal Reserve is the problem.

Nobody has more power over the performance of the U.S. economy than the Federal Reserve does, and the only way that our long-term economic and financial problems will ever be fixed is if the Federal Reserve is shut down.

So I hope that President Trump’s feud with the Federal Reserve gets as heated as possible.  I hope that the Federal Reserve becomes a central issue during the 2020 presidential election, and I hope that every Trump supporter in the entire country will urge Trump to make a promise to shut down the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve is a deeply insidious system that has turned America into a nation of debt slaves, and it is definitely time to end that sick and twisted debt-based system and return this nation to a solid financial foundation.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Last Days Warrior Summit is the premier online event of 2018 for Christians, Conservatives and Patriots.  It is a premium-members only international event that will empower and equip you with the knowledge and tools that you need as global events begin to escalate dramatically.  The speaker list includes Michael Snyder, Mike Adams, Dave Daubenmire, Ray Gano, Dr. Daniel Daves, Gary Kah, Justus Knight, Doug Krieger, Lyn Leahz, Laura Maxwell and many more. Full summit access will begin on October 25th, and if you would like to register for this unprecedented event you can do so right here.

The post We Witnessed The 3rd Largest Point Crash In Stock Market History On The Same Day That The 3rd Most Powerful Hurricane To Ever Hit The U.S. Made Landfall appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

But even though he has retired from politics, Ron Paul is still speaking out about the most important issues of the day.  And what he recently told CNBC is extremely ominous.

The following comes from a CNBC article entitled “Ron Paul: US is barreling towards a stock market drop of 50% or more, and there’s no way to prevent it”…

According to the former Republican Congressman from Texas, the recent jump in Treasury bond yields suggest the U.S. is barreling towards a potential recession and market meltdown at a faster and faster pace.

And, he sees no way to prevent it.

Of course lots of such predictions are flying around these days.

In fact, at this point even the IMF is warning of a “second Great Depression”.

So when it actually takes place it won’t be much of a surprise.  However, I do believe that many will be surprised by the ferocity of the coming crash.  According to Ron Paul, stock prices could end up falling by up to 50 percent…

Paul is a vocal Libertarian known for an ardent grassroots fanbase that propelled him to multiple presidential runs, as well as his grim warnings about the economy. Yet he has been warning investors for years that an epic drop of 50 percent or more will eventually hit the stock market. He predicted the February correction, but not in size and scope.

Actually, stock prices need to fall by at least 50 percent in order for stock valuations to get close to their long-term averages.

In the end, if stocks only fall by 50 percent we will be extremely fortunate.  Stock valuations always, always, always return to their long-term averages eventually, and usually they fall below those averages during a period of adjustment.

And the mood on Wall Street has definitely changed.  The euphoria that we once witnessed is now gone, and instead it has been replaced by a gnawing sense that a really big downturn is coming.  In his most recent piece, John Hussman compared it to the fading out of a pop song…

In recent days, the combination of extreme valuations and unfavorable market internals has been joined by acute dispersion in daily trading data that often occurs within a few days of pre-collapse peaks in the market. My opinion is that the music has already quietly faded out like the end of a pop song, in a wholly uneventful way, and that even a surprise push to further highs would be marginal.

And he concluded his most recent piece with this very chilling statement…

For now, and until market conditions shift, there’s an open trap door under the equity market, and it’s a very long way down.

The end of last week was very bad for the markets, and so Monday and Tuesday will be key.

If stock prices continue to fall, this could be the beginning of a race for the exits.

But if stock prices rebound a bit, it means that we could have some more time.

And keep an eye on junk bonds.  They crashed really hard just before the financial crisis of 2008, and they are starting to slip here in October 2018.

A full-blown junk bond panic would definitely be a very clear sign that a major market crash is imminent.

As I write this, all of the markets in Asia are down.  Chinese stocks have fallen almost 3 percent, and that is very troubling news.

But whether a massive crisis erupts right now or not, the truth is that there is no way that we are going to avoid the consequences of our actions.

At this moment we are in the terminal phase of the biggest debt bubble in human history.  In fact, total indebtedness in the United States has increased by more than 2 trillion dollars over the past 12 months…

In total, indebtedness of consumers, corporations, and all governments has grown by $2.04 trillion over the past four quarters. And they’re going to be paying higher interest rates on this ballooning debt. In other words, debt service costs are going to rise substantially.

All of this debt has fueled a short-term bubble of relative “prosperity”, but meanwhile all of our long-term problems just continue to get worse.

There is no possible way that our debt bubble can continue to grow much faster than the overall economy indefinitely.  In fact, we have already been defying the laws of economics for way too long.

Eventually all debt bubbles burst, and when this one bursts we are going to experience economic pain on a scale that America has never seen before.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Last Days Warrior Summit is the premier online event of 2018 for Christians, Conservatives and Patriots.  It is a premium-members only international event that will empower and equip you with the knowledge and tools that you need as global events begin to escalate dramatically.  The speaker list includes Michael Snyder, Mike Adams, Dave Daubenmire, Ray Gano, Dr. Daniel Daves, Gary Kah, Justus Knight, Doug Krieger, Lyn Leahz, Laura Maxwell and many more. Full summit access will begin on October 25th, and if you would like to register for this unprecedented event you can do so right here.

The post Ron Paul Is Warning That A 50% Stock Market Decline Is Coming – And That There Is No Way To Stop It appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

A lot of people are responding as if this tech stock crash is a complete surprise, but the truth is that it shouldn’t be a surprise at all.

The only surprise is that the bubble lasted for as long as it did.

Even after the declines of the past three days, some of these tech companies still have some of the most absurd valuations that we have ever seen.  There has been warning after warning that something like this could happen, but the optimists on Wall Street wanted to believe that the party would never come to an end.

Well, now the party is ending, and people are starting to understand the gravity of what we are facing.  The following are 10 facts about this “tech bloodbath” that are almost too crazy to believe…

#1 The 10 leading U.S. tech companies lost an astounding 82.7 billion dollars in stock value on Monday.

#2 Overall, FANG stocks have lost 220 billion dollars in stock value over the last 3 trading days.  According to Zero Hedge, that represents “the biggest market cap loss in history”.

#3 Last Thursday, Facebook had the worst day for a single company in the history of the stock market.

#4 The amount of money that Facebook investors have lost is greater than the entire market value of some of the biggest corporations in America…

The gargantuan one-day loss in the social media company’s market value eclipses the total value of warehouse club Costco, drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb, investment powerhouse Goldman Sachs, defense contractor Lockheed Martin and credit-card company American Express, according to Bloomberg data.

The wealth destroyed also is more than the total value of farm equipment maker Caterpillar, home-improvement retailer Lowe’s, coffee seller Starbucks and drugstore chain CVS.

#5 One prominent ETF manager is saying that he doesn’t “see us being heavily invested in Facebook ever again”.

#6 FANG stocks are collectively down more than 10 percent from the record high last month.

#7 The 5 most valuable companies in the United States are all in the tech sector and they are all located on a stretch between Silicon Valley and Seattle.

#8 Thanks to all of the panic, investors are being forced to pay more for Nasdaq downside protection than they ever have before.

#9 Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. equity strategist is warning that “the selling has just begun and this correction will be biggest since the one we experienced in February.”

#10 One major investor has told CNBC that he believes that the major tech stocks could ultimately lose 30 or 40 percent of their value…

Ahead of Apple earnings scheduled for Tuesday evening, Larry McDonald, editor of the Bear Traps Report, warns to stay away from what has been one of the hottest areas of the market this year.

“These are stocks you want to run away from,” McDonald told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday. “I see potentially 30 percent to 40 percent downside on the FAANGs.”

Tech stocks led the way up during the first Internet bubble, and they also led the way down.

Will the same thing happen again this time around?

If some people think that the broader market will be immune as tech stocks continue to crash, they are just deceiving themselves.  To a very large extent, it has been the tech industry that has been responsible for holding the market up in these troubled times.  Right now the housing industry is slowing down substantially, we are in the midst of the worst “retail apocalypse” in American history, and big agriculture is being absolutely devastated by foreign tariffs.

There aren’t too many other bright spots for the U.S. economy at the moment, and so if the tech sector implodes we are going to see a lot of others go down with it.

Look, there is a reason why Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook insiders dumped billions of dollars worth of Facebook stock in the months leading up to this crash.  They all knew that trouble was brewing, and they wanted to get out while the getting out was good.

As I have told my readers so many times before, you only make money in the stock market if you get out at the right time, and those Facebook insiders picked the right time.

Earlier this month, Ron Paul warned that the stock market could be cut “in half” when the “biggest bubble in the history of mankind” finally bursts, and a lot of people laughed at him.

Are they still laughing now?

Hopefully the market will settle down tomorrow, and without a doubt we will see a bounce at some point.  But it is certainly starting to feel like 2001 and 2008 all over again, but this time the bubble is far bigger than ever before.

How will this story ultimately end?

I think that we all know the answer, and it isn’t going to be pretty…

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The post They Are Calling It “The Tech Bloodbath” – 10 Facts About This Tech Stock Crash That Will Take Your Breath Away appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

Of course we have been hearing warnings like this for a very long time.  In fact, I have been warning about a market crash for a very long time.  Just the other day, one of my readers insisted that if something was going to take place that “it would have happened by now”.  In the Internet age, we have been trained to have very short attention spans, but financial bubbles don’t care about the length of our attention spans.  They all inevitably come to a bitter end, but they don’t reach that end until they are good and ready.

And without a doubt we are on borrowed time, but meanwhile so many of us that are continually warning about what we are facing are getting a lot of heat for it.

For instance, when Ron Paul told CNBC that the stock market is “the biggest bubble in the history of mankind”, he was strongly criticized for it, but he was 100 percent correct…

This market is in the “biggest bubble in the history of mankind,” and when it bursts, it could cut the stock market in half, he told CNBC’s “Futures Now” Thursday.

If the Dow only plummets to about 12,000 or so during the coming downturn we will be exceedingly fortunate, because the truth is that stock prices need to fall by at least that much just to get us into the neighborhood where stock prices will start to make sense once again.

Today, sales to stock price ratios are hovering near all-time highs.

The same thing is true for earnings to stock price ratios and GDP to stock price ratios.

The only other times these ratios have been so elevated were just before major stock market crashes.

In the end, these ratios always, always, always return to their long-term averages eventually.

It may take many years, but it always happens.

So what factors led Ron Paul to make such an ominous prognostication?  The following comes from CNBC…

“The Congress spending and the Federal Reserve manipulation of monetary policy and interest rates — debt is too big, the current account is in bad shape, foreign debt is bad and it’s not going to change,” he said.

Paul isn’t alone in his critique. A number of politicians have voiced concern over ballooning deficits, including current House Speaker Paul Ryan, who raised a warning on the nation’s debt in 2012.

Of course it isn’t just the U.S. that is drowning in debt.

According to the Institute of International Finance, total global debt just hit a brand new record high of 247 trillion dollars…

Every quarter the Institute of International Finance publishes a new number of the total amount of global debt outstanding, and every quarter the result is the same: a new record high

Today was no exception: according to the IIF’s latest Global Debt Monitor, the amount of debt held in the world rose by the biggest amount in two years during the first quarter of 2018, when it grew by $8 trillion to hit a new all time high of $247 trillion, up from $238 trillion as of Dec. 31, 2017 and up by $30 trillion from the end of 2016.

Global debt has been rising much, much faster than global GDP, and at this point there is three times as much debt in the world as there is money.

There is no possible way that all of that debt can ever be paid off.  The only way that the party can continue is for debt to continue growing faster than global GDP, and everyone knows that is simply not sustainable in the long-term.

So an absolutely monumental “adjustment” is coming.  You can call it a “crash”, a “collapse” or anything else that you would like, but just as certainly as you are reading this article it is coming.

It is just a matter of time.

But for now, the talking heads on television continue to insist that everything is just fine and that the stock market still has more room to go up…

There’s still room for stock markets to rise and worries of an impending recession are premature, according to Berenberg Capital Markets’ chief economist.

“Even if profits peaked in (the first quarter of) 2018, which remains uncertain, history suggests the stock market has room to appreciate,” Mickey Levy, Berenberg’s chief Americas and Asia economist, said in a client note this week. He pointed to data demonstrating how in every economic expansion since the mid-1970s, the S&P 500 index went on to appreciate for a “significant period” after corporate profits peaked.

I wish that CNBC would have me on just one time so that I could refute some of these guys.

Since 1913, the Federal Reserve has gone through 18 rate hiking cycles.  In 18 out of 18 cases, those rate hiking cycles have ended in either a recession or a market crash.

Do you really think that the 19th time will be different?

10 years ago, virtually everyone thought that the “boom times” would last forever too.  But they didn’t.  Instead, we plunged into the greatest economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression, but at this point 2008 seems like ancient history to most people.

Yet again we have fooled ourselves into thinking that the good times will just continue to keep on rolling, and once again our society will be in for a very rude awakening when the inevitable crash finally arrives.

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The post Ron Paul Warns That When The “Biggest Bubble In The History Of Mankind” Bursts It Could “Cut The Stock Market In Half” appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

The only long-term solution that is going to work is to get rid of the entire steaming pile of garbage.  Ron Paul understood this, and we would be very wise to take his advice.  The following is the full version of the quote from the headline above…

“By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing.”

If I run for Congress, and I am very strongly leaning in that direction, this is what my position on taxes is going to be.

Of course we are going to have to dramatically change the composition of the House and the Senate in order to get this done, so in the short-term we may have to focus on reducing tax rates and the size of the tax code by as much as possible.

But ultimately, the goal will be to abolish the tax code and the IRS altogether.

We have become so accustomed to an income tax that many of us couldn’t possibly imagine a society without one.  But today there are seven states that do not have one, and that includes very big states such as Texas and Florida.  And from 1872 to 1913, there was no federal income tax.  When a federal income tax was finally reinstituted in 1913, the rates were extremely low.  The following comes from Politifact…

The 1913 law imposed a tax of 1 percent on income up to $20,000, for both individual and joint filers. However, exemptions from the tax — the first $3,000 of income for individuals and the first $4,000 for joint filers — meant “virtually all middle-class Americans” were excused from paying, according to W. Elliot Brownlee’s book, Federal Taxation in America. The law also put in place a graduated surtax on incomes above $20,000; the highest rate paid, 7 percent, applied to Americans making more than $500,000 (about $11.4 million in 2011 dollars).

So how did things go for our country during the four decades when there was no federal income tax?

Well, if you regularly follow my work you already know the answer to that question.

That period of time just happened to be the best period of economic growth in U.S. history.

Oh, but we wouldn’t want to change from the way things work today, would we?  After all, the U.S. economy has grown at a blistering average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent over the past decade, and we are actually behind that pace so far in 2017.

If you want a no growth economy and a steadily shrinking middle class, then our current system is perfect for you.

But I believe that we can do so much better.

So how are we going to fund the federal government if we eliminate the income tax?

Well, the truth is that taxing individual incomes accounts for only 46.2 percent of all federal revenue.  The federal government has lots of other ways that it raises money, but of course we wouldn’t be able to keep the massively bloated federal bureaucracy that we have today.  We would need to reduce the size and scope of the federal government to an appropriate constitutional level, and of course most politicians on the left would resist this greatly.

There are some federal agencies and programs that we could completely eliminate altogether.  If it was up to me, the EPA, the Department of Education and the BATFE would be good places to start.  Any essential functions that they are currently performing could easily be absorbed by other agencies.

There are very few politicians in our entire country that will still talk like this, because our leaders have taken us so far down the road toward “a social state” that most Americans don’t even know what “limited government” looks like anymore.

I would like to share with you an old newspaper clipping that was posted to Facebook by Get Involved, You Live Here…

Over the past several decades, the left has made a tremendous amount of progress toward achieving the goals that Saul Alinsky originally outlined in Rules for Radicals.  Obamacare was a giant step toward federal control over our healthcare system, poverty is exploding as the middle class shrinks, we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt, our public schools have become left-wing indoctrination centers, and God has been pushed out of almost every corner of public life.

We should be very thankful that we got Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton, but many radical leftists consider Trump to simply be a bump in the road on the way to completely eradicating our way of life.

They want to criminalize what we believe by making it “hate speech”, they want to steal the minds of the next generation by dominating our system of education, and they want to use government institutions and the legal system as tools to completely reshape society in their image.

The only way that we are going to defeat this tyranny is if we stand up and fight for our country, and that is precisely what we are going to do.

The post ‘When I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing’ appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

My father was in the U.S. Navy, and so sometimes I like to put things in military terms.  When an amphibious invasion is being conducted, it is the troops that hit the beach first that take the most fire.  To me, that is a perfect picture of what is happening to Donald Trump right now.  He has established a beachhead, and now the rest of us need to rush to shore to back him up.

If we are not willing to try, what is going to happen?  Our political system on the national, state and local levels will continue to be dominated by Democrats and “progressive Republicans”, and our once great nation will continue to fall apart all around us.

We need patriotic men and women to challenge every available seat in America in 2018.  Some of us will win and others will lose, but at least we will have given the American people a choice.

We are never going to have a true political revolution if we don’t at least try, and this election cycle represents a tremendous opportunity.  I really like how Rush Limbaugh made this point during one of his programs…

Do you realize what a nothing burger the Democrat Party is? Do you realize the Democrat Party literally has nothing virtuous, positive, uplifting to run on? In all of this, the Democrat Party dares not ask people, “Hey, take a look at us. We got better ideas. Hey, take a look at us. We can fix this.” None of that. The only thing they’ve got is this insane, invisible, nonexistent, so-called connection between the Russians and our election. They have no ideas. They have no optimism. They have no leaders. They have no vision. They are ripe for being smoked for generations! This is the time to move in politically and wipe them out. …

Don’t misunderstand here, folks. I’m not saying the Democrats don’t pose a threat. I’m not… Look, two things here. The Democrats are in deep trouble, electorally. The Democrats are not running the left; the media is. And the media is clearly not inconsequential. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that what’s happening here is obviously to everyone. I’m saying the Republican Party has a golden opportunity here to continue to hammer the nail into the coffin of the Democrat Party.

Our founders intended for us to have a constitutional republic with a limited central government, but the globalists have turned the federal government into an absolute monster.  We need to tame that monster and restore the constitutional republic that our founders originally designed.

The easy route would be to sit back and wait for someone else to do something.

But I have decided not to do that.

Earlier today, I announced on the Alex Jones Show that I am “strongly considering” running for Congress in 2018…

On Tuesday, U.S. Representative Raul Labrador announced that he will not seek another term because he plans to run for governor in Idaho.

Labrador represents the district in which my wife and I live, and when I heard this news I realized that this represents a truly unique opportunity.

Congressman Labrador has been doing a wonderful job, and if he had run again he would have won by a landslide.  But now that he is not running, there is no incumbent and the race is entirely wide open.

If I decide to run, and I am very strongly leaning in that direction, the key to the race will be to win the Republican primary.  Hillary Clinton got only 27.5 percent of the vote in Idaho last November, and Labrador won his last election by more than 120,000 votes.  So whoever wins the Republican primary will almost certainly win the general election.

Donald Trump has shown us that nothing is impossible in politics.  When he first declared his candidacy, liberal pundits literally laughed at him on the air because they thought his candidacy was such a joke.  But his bold message struck a chord with conservative voters all over the country, and now he is the president of the United States.

If he can do it, why can’t we?

If I run, I plan to continue the absolutely outstanding work that Congressman Labrador has been doing, and I plan to be a key ally for President Trump in Congress.  Right now Trump has very few friends in Congress, and that desperately needs to change.

In recent years, the House has lost some tremendous conservative voices.  I plan to continue the legacy of Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and so many others that stood strong for conservative causes at a time when it was not always popular to do so.

But if I am going to do this, I am going to need lots of assistance.  If you have experience with campaigns on a state or local level, or if you just want to help out any way that you can, please feel free to drop me an email or contact me on Facebook.  I have never run for office before, and so I have a lot to learn, and I greatly value the advice and counsel of others.

Also, if there are other pro-Trump activists out there that plan on running in 2018, we should definitely connect.  If we all work to promote one another, we can create a giant groundswell of momentum which could sweep a whole bunch of pro-Trump activists into political positions all around the country.

For a long time I have been writing about the great problems that this nation is facing, and now I am trying to be part of the solution.

It has been said that life is like a coin.  You can spend it any way that you want, but you can only spend it once.

As for me and my house, we are going to spend our lives doing things that really matter.

The post Michael Snyder Is Calling For An Army Of Pro-Trump Activists To Run For Office All Over America appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

So why is an audit of the Federal Reserve so important?

Why does Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke consider an audit of the Federal Reserve to be a “nightmare scenario” that must be avoided at all costs?

Well, perhaps it is because there has never been a true comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve since it was created back in 1913.

The Federal Reserve has more power over the economy than anyone else in the country does, and yet they are virtually unaccountable and the American people have very little idea what has been going on behind closed doors over at the Fed for the past 100 years.

A very limited audit of the Fed that was passed a couple of years ago that examined transactions during the last financial crisis discovered that the Federal Reserve had actually loaned out more than 16 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free money to the “too big to fail” banks between 2007 and 2010.

Keep in mind that U.S. GDP for the entire year of 2011 was only slightly more than 15 trillion dollars.

The Federal Reserve loaned out trillions upon trillions of dollars to their friends and never told the American people about it.

Whoa.

You would think that Congress would be quite eager to see what else has been going on over at the Federal Reserve.

But instead, many Democrats are completely and utterly opposed to auditing the Fed any further.

U.S. Representative Barney Frank (a Democrat) seemed to regard the bill as a joke even after it overwhelmingly passed in the House.  Frank stated that “nobody here thinks this will ever become law“.

According to Politico, there is zero chance that the bill will get through the U.S. Senate….

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said the Senate will not consider the bill, effectively killing its chances of becoming law.

But we all know that if Obama wanted this bill to become law that it would be a done deal.

If Barack Obama came out tomorrow in front of the television cameras and declared his support for this bill it would sail right through the Senate.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has made it very clear that it considers a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve to be a really, really bad idea.

For example, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner once stated that auditing the Fed is a “line that we don’t want to cross” and that if we did audit the Fed it would be “problematic for the country”.

So what exactly did he mean by that?

That is a very good question.

In any event, people should take this as an opportunity to confront Barack Obama about the Audit the Fed bill wherever he goes.

Perhaps Obama will prove me wrong.

Perhaps Obama will show that he is willing to stand up to the Federal Reserve.

In fact, if Obama gets this bill pushed through Congress and signs it into law, I will not criticize him for an entire month.

But we all know that will never happen.

The Federal Reserve is going to be able to continue to keep their secrets hidden from the American people.

The following is what Ron Paul had to say following the vote on Wednesday….

“I think the whole idea that they can deal in trillions of dollars and know that nobody is allowed to ask them a question is a moral hazard.”

And Ron Paul is right.

If the Federal Reserve can zap trillions of dollars into existence out of thin air and loan that money to their friends at the big banks and to central banks in other countries, then it should not be too much to ask them to be accountable to the American people.

Over the coming months, the American people will heatedly debate whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney would be better for the U.S. economy.

But the truth is that the Federal Reserve has far more power over the U.S. economy than the president of the United States does.

The Federal Reserve has been called the “fourth branch of government” because of how much power it has.  The Federal Reserve sets our interest rates, it determines the level of our money supply, it regulates and secretly bails out our banks, it determines the “target rates” for unemployment and inflation, and every small move the Fed makes causes global financial markets to swing wildly.

The Federal Reserve does all of this without ever having to be accountable to the American people.  In fact, whenever a bill is introduced that would shed some light on their activities they whine and cry about how important their “independence” is.

In a previous article, I described how preposterous this all is….

For a moment, imagine that there is a privately-owned organization in the United States that can create U.S. dollars out of thin air whenever it wants and can loan that money to whoever it wants to.  Imagine that this organization is able to act with the full power of the U.S. government behind it, but that nobody in the organization is ever elected by the American people, and that for all practical purposes the organization is not accountable to the president or to Congress.  Imagine that the organization is able to make trillions of dollars of secret loans to banks, to foreign governments and even to their close friends without ever having to face a comprehensive audit.  Does that sound preposterous?  Well, such an organization actually exists.

The American people need to stand up and demand an audit of the Federal Reserve.

We deserve to know what is going on over there.

Sadly, the mainstream media makes it sound as if hell has a better chance of freezing over than this bill does of becoming law.  The following is from a USA Today article that was posted on Wednesday….

The bill stands no chance of becoming law because the Democratic-controlled Senate will not take it up. The vote, however, served as a symbolic swan song for Paul, who is not seeking re-election. It is also an indicator of how Paul’s economic views have gone more mainstream, particularly within the Republican Party, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that shook Americans’ confidence in Wall Street and the federal government.

Well, let us hope that this kind of a bill keeps getting introduced in Congress.

Perhaps someday we actually will get a real audit of the Federal Reserve.

When that happens, the following is a list of questions that I would like to see asked by those auditing the Fed….

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 an 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?

Do you have any other questions that you would like to have asked during an audit of the Federal Reserve?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

The post The Audit The Fed Bill Gets Passed By The House But Obama And The Democrats Are Going To Kill It appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

Unfortunately, we are running out of time as a nation.  You know that things are late in the game when the head of the Federal Reserve starts using apocalyptic language to talk about the national debt.  The following is what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress recently….

Having a large and increasing level of government debt relative to national income runs the risk of serious economic consequences. Over the longer term, the current trajectory of federal debt threatens to crowd out private capital formation and thus reduce productivity growth. To the extent that increasing debt is financed by borrowing from abroad, a growing share of our future income would be devoted to interest payments on foreign-held federal debt. High levels of debt also impair the ability of policymakers to respond effectively to future economic shocks and other adverse events.

Even the prospect of unsustainable deficits has costs, including an increased possibility of a sudden fiscal crisis. As we have seen in a number of countries recently, interest rates can soar quickly if investors lose confidence in the ability of a government to manage its fiscal policy. Although historical experience and economic theory do not indicate the exact threshold at which the perceived risks associated with the U.S. public debt would increase markedly, we can be sure that, without corrective action, our fiscal trajectory will move the nation ever closer to that point.

The sick thing about this is that the Federal Reserve system is actually designed to generate government debt.  The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.  So it is kind of ironic that the head of the organization that was designed to perpetually generate U.S. government debt is now warning that there is too much of it.

But Ben Bernanke is far from alone in warning about the danger of our exploding national debt.

For example, world famous motivational speaker Tony Robbins is also warning that the national debt crisis could destroy our future.

These days, most people throw around the phrase “a trillion dollars” without ever really grasping what it means.

In the video posted below, Tony Robbins uses a fun illustration to help put in perspective how large a “trillion dollars” really is.

If you had a million seconds to do something, would you consider that to be a long time?

Well, it turns out that a million seconds is only about 12 days.

What about a billion seconds?  Is that a long period of time?

Well, yes, a billion seconds is close to 32 years.  So that is definitely a lot longer than a million seconds.

What about a trillion seconds?

How long do you think that is?

Well, a trillion seconds is about 31,688 years.

So when we talk about how the U.S. government is stealing more than a trillion dollars from future generations every single year, we are talking about an absolutely massive amount of money.

The Tony Robbins video about the national debt crisis posted below has started to go viral all over the Internet.  If you have not seen it yet, I definitely recommend taking a few minutes to watch it….

So why are our politicians not doing anything about the U.S. debt crisis?

Well, it is because most of them value getting elected over and over again above doing what is right for future generations.

For the past four decades, the United States has been enjoying a 15 trillion dollar party.  All of this borrowed money has enabled us to live far, far beyond our means.

If our politicians voted to severely cut spending or to raise taxes dramatically at this point, our economy would suddenly readjust to a more realistic standard of living.  But that would be extremely painful and most Americans voters would be absolutely furious.  They would demand that someone “fix” the economy immediately.  But the truth is that what we have been enjoying all these years has not been real.  It has been bought with trillions of dollars stolen from future generations.  But most of our politicians just want to keep the party rolling as long as humanly possible so that they can keep getting voted back into office.

Fortunately, there are a few politicians that are willing to stand up and tell the truth about our national debt crisis.  For example, in the video posted below Ron Paul scolds the rest of Congress for continuing to vote for debt limit increase after debt limit increase….

Unfortunately, the American people seem to prefer politicians that endlessly lie to them about how bad things really are.

For example, back at the beginning of the Bush administration we were promised that we would be swimming in gigantic surpluses by now.

That didn’t exactly work out, now did it?

Barack Obama promised us that he would cut the size of the federal budget deficit in half by the end of his first term.

Well, guess what?

He lied too.

Things just continue to get worse and worse.

Since 1975, we have added more than 15 trillion dollars to the national debt.  In fact, the U.S. national debt is now more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.

A lot of talking heads on television continue to assure us that everything is going to be okay, but the truth is that we are about to experience some absolutely devastating consequences for decades of really bad decisions.

For example, the rest of the world is rapidly losing faith in our currency and the reign of the U.S. dollar as the primary world reserve currency is in serious danger of coming to an end.  When that happens, gasoline, food and just about everything else that you buy is going to be a lot more expensive.

Already, there are very ominous signs that the rest of the world is getting tired of financing our endless spending.  In 2011, the Federal Reserve bought approximately 61 percent of all new government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department.  This is not supposed to happen.  The Federal Reserve is not supposed to be monetizing our debt and this is something that Congress should be looking into.

Also, at this time of the year people love to complain about the outrageous amount of taxes that most hard working Americans have to pay, but the truth is that eventually it will likely get a whole lot worse.

Just look at Greece.  Taxes in Greece have been raised to suffocating levels, government spending has been slashed to the bone and yet they are still running up more debt.

That is going to happen in the United States at some point too, especially if our leaders choose the path of austerity and deflation.

You can’t hide from debt forever.

Have you ever run up debt on a credit card?

A lot of us did that when we were young and foolish, and it can be a lot of fun on the way up.

But eventually a day of reckoning comes and it is extremely painful to find yourself drowning in credit card debt.

Well, we are rapidly approaching our credit limit as a nation.

Some hard choices will have to be made, and there will be a lot of pain.

The false prosperity that we are enjoying now is going to disappear.

Now is the time to prepare for the massive economic shift that is coming.  In the coming economic environment, those that are currently living month to month and those that are 100% dependent on the system are going to be in a huge amount of trouble.

Instead of wildly spending money as if the good times will never end like most Americans are, now is the time to get out of debt, to become more self-sufficient and to set aside the money, resources and supplies you will need to weather the storm that is rapidly approaching.

Anyone with half a brain should be able to see that a gigantic economic collapse is coming.

Use the time that you still have left to prepare the best that you can.

The post Tony Robbins, Ron Paul And Ben Bernanke All Agree: The National Debt Crisis Could Destroy America appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

And why shouldn’t the Federal Reserve be fully audited?  The Federal Reserve has more power over the U.S. economy than any other institution and yet it has not been subjected to a comprehensive audit since it was created back in 1913.

So what would an audit accomplish?

Well, it would hopefully expose what is going on inside the Federal Reserve.

A very, very limited examination of Fed transactions that occurred during the recent financial crisis forced the Federal Reserve to reveal the details of 21,000 transactions stretching from December 2007 to July 2010 that totaled more than 3 trillion dollars.  It turns out that the Federal Reserve was just handing out gigantic piles of nearly interest-free cash to their friends at the largest banks, financial institutions and corporations all over the globe.

These revelations have many members of Congress wondering what else has been going on inside the Federal Reserve.

For example, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders was absolutely outraged by these “backdoor bailouts” by the Federal Reserve….

“The $700 billion Wall Street bailout turned out to be pocket change compared to trillions and trillions of dollars in near zero interest loans and other financial arrangements that the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution.”

More members of Congress than at any other time in recent memory are openly wondering if it is now time “to pull back the curtain” at the Federal Reserve.  For those who would like to see the power of the Federal Reserve greatly diminished, there should be one primary goal right now.

Expose the Federal Reserve.

The truth is that the more the American people learn about the Federal Reserve and about what it has been doing the more they disapprove.

During his farewell speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week, Senator Jim Bunning noted that as the American people become increasingly aware of what the Federal Reserve is doing the less they like it….

“Public awareness of what the Fed is doing is increasing while public opinion of the Fed is falling.”

Unfortunately, the views of Ron Paul and other anti-Federal Reserve members of the Tea Party movement are strongly opposed by many other members of the Republican Party.

In a recent Bloomberg Television interview, Barney Frank noted this division within the ranks of the Republicans….

“I do not believe that Ron Paul’s views on the Fed represent the views of most Republicans.”

However, there is evidence that the tide is turning with the American public.

According to a recent Bloomberg National Poll, the number of Americans that would like to see the Federal Reserve held more accountable or even completely abolished is increasing….

Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo.

Those are very exciting numbers.  A majority of Americans now want the power of the Federal Reserve to be reduced or they want it shut down entirely.

If Ron Paul is able to get a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve passed, the revelations that would come out of that would certainly turn public opinion against the Fed even more.

So what is so bad about the Federal Reserve?

Well, think of it as a perpetual debt machine.

Did you know that the U.S. national debt is 5,000 times larger than it was a hundred years ago?

That’s right – back in 1910, prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.6 billion.

Since that time, our debt has been endlessly skyrocketing.

Under the Federal Reserve system, the U.S. government cannot just go out and print money.  It is actually the Federal Reserve that issues our currency.

The way our system works, whenever the U.S. government arranges for the Federal Reserve to issue more currency, more government debt is created at the same time.  In fact, as I have written about previously, all of our money is now based on debt.

No debt, no money.

What we desperately need is for the current monetary system to be scrapped.  The federal government should take back the power to issue currency and should implement a new system based on money that is debt-free.

The truth is that it is insane that any sovereign government should have to go into debt just to produce more of its own currency.

Instead, what we have under the Federal Reserve system is a money supply that will forever be expanding, a currency that will forever be deteriorating in value and a national debt that will continue to skyrocket until the entire system collapses.

Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power.  This continual debasement of our currency is called “inflation” and it is a hidden tax on every man, woman and child in the United States.

It is absolutely guaranteed that every single dollar that you own will go down in value over the long-term.

But the American people have come to accept that a constantly expanding national debt and a currency that is constantly losing value is the most “rational” economic system that humanity has ever come up with.

So who benefits from all this?

Well, for fiscal year 2010 the U.S. government paid out over 413 billion dollars in interest on the national debt.  In future years that number is projected to rapidly skyrocket even more.

Wouldn’t you like to be getting a nice chunk of that 413 billion dollars?

It turns out that loaning money to the U.S. government is very, very profitable.

That 413 billion dollars is money that was transferred from the American people to the U.S. government, and then transferred from the U.S. government to big financial institutions, foreign countries, and very wealthy bankers.

So what did we get in return for our 413 billion dollars?

Nothing.

Sadly, this is not just going on in the United States.  This is going on literally in almost every nation on earth.

All over the world sovereign governments are drowning in debt and so they have to drain their citizens dry so that they can meet their obligations.

In the book of Proverbs, it tells us that “the rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”  Americans like to think that they live in “the land of the free”, but the truth is that we have become enslaved to debt.

But even worse, we have consigned our children and our grandchildren to a lifetime of debt.  They will have to work all of their lives to pay trillions of dollars in interest on all of the debt that we have accumulated in this generation.

How would you like to be born into a world where the previous generation had racked up a $13 trillion debt that now you were expected to pay off?

There is a reason why people like Ron Paul are so obsessed with the Federal Reserve.  It is not because they don’t have anything better to do.  It is because the future of our country literally hangs in the balance.

Throughout American history, presidents, top members of Congress and leading business people have warned us about the dangers of having a central bank.  In fact, even though our young people are no longer taught this, the debate over central banking was one of the most important themes in early American history.

But we didn’t listen to the warnings.

We were convinced that we knew better.

Well, now we have an economic system that is dying and a $13 trillion debt that we are passing along to our children and to our grandchildren.

Perhaps we were not as smart as we thought we were.

The post Will Ron Paul Be Able To End The Fed? appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

Of course we all know that the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air all the time, so that is not new, but what is new is the recklessness and openness with which they are going about doing it.

Need to help your buddies down on Wall Street by buying up a tsunami of bad mortgage securities?

Just zap another trillion dollars into existence!

Need to bail out the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Just get the magic money printing machine ready!

Wouldn’t it be nice if the rest of us could create money out of thin air?  It would make life so much easier.

A video clip of the exchange between Ron Paul and Bernanke at this hearing is posted below.

The key moment comes when Ron Paul makes this statement….

“Well, where did you get the money? You created this money. So you did monetize debt, and that went into the banking system.”

As you watch this video, you will notice that at that moment Bernanke nods his head up and down repeatedly….

So who does all of this money printing benefit?

Well, it benefits the Federal Reserve and the big financial institutions on Wall Street that have financial ties to the Federal Reserve.

It certainly does not benefit the rest of us.

No, in fact Bernanke says that the rest of us need to get ready to pay higher taxes and have a lower standard of living in order to pay for the big financial mess that our politicians and the Fed have gotten us into.

So while there are lots of smiles going around in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street these days, the same cannot be said for the rest of the good ole U.S.A. as the following video illustrates….

The reality is that the United States is a nation that does not even have control over its own currency.  If the United States government wants more money, it has to go ask the Federal Reserve to create it.  Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve does not also create the interest that will ultimately be paid on that new money that is being created.  So where will the money come from to pay the interest?  Well, by creating even more money (debt) in the future.  It sounds like insanity, but that is the U.S. financial system.  It is a perpetual debt machine that was created to have an ever expanding national debt that is mathematically impossible to pay off.

Just because the folks down on Wall Street do not dress up in gang colors or try to sell drugs to our children does not mean that they are not corrupt or that they are not criminals.  In fact, the truth is that the corruption in our financial system is hitting unprecedented levels.

But most Americans have no idea what in the world is going on in the financial system.  All most of them know is that things are getting bad and they want somebody to “fix” the problems.

Unfortunately, the folks that the American people are expecting to “fix” things are the very same ones who got us into this mess in the first place.

“Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.”
-Senator Barry Goldwater

“A great industrial nation is controlled by it’s system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world–no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”
-President Woodrow Wilson

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.”
-Abraham Lincoln

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes it’s laws”
-Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild

The post Created Out Of Thin Air – That Is Where The Federal Reserve Got The 1.3 Trillion Dollars That It Bought All Of Those Mortgage Backed Securities With appeared first on The Economic Collapse.