Sunday, June 1, 2014

MARTIN ARMSTRONG'S LATEST BLOG POSTS

Definition of Hyperinflation

GermanHyperInflation
I have answered this question many times that the definition of hyperinflation as thrown around being 26% based upon accounting standards does NOT match the historical examples that will end society pointing to Germany. The USA had inflation at 20% into 1980 and we currently have asset inflation in the 26%+ area. A Phase Transition is the doubling.
If you want to pretend that 26% inflation will destroy society as we know it, sorry, there is not a single example of such an event. Using that definition and then trying to merge that with events like Germ in the 1920s is bogus and seriously distorted evidence.
HYPERINFLATION to me is not survivable. That is the collapse of government a restart of everything. We have seen more than 26% inflation in many South American countries and they survived.
This is not about selling nonsense to fleece you out of money. This is the bottom-line hard facts. High rates of inflation even reaching 50% have not resulted in the collapse of society. That has been seen in both France and England not to mention Spain. What killed Spain was its serial defaults until nobody would lend them a dime.
So if you want to talk about high rates of inflation as separate and distinct from HYPERINFLATION that destroys governments and society, that is fine. We have many different types. Do not use 26% and then claim it will have the same effect as trillions of per cent. That is just being dishonest.

NSA – The Next Shoe

Gov-Hand
I have been concerned about the NSA because this is getting very Orwellian. This is not about terrorism, it is about identifying anyone who would rise up against the government in the coming Civil Unrest storm. It has been reported that the biggest revelation about the NSA is yet to come. Here is the next shoe. The NSA is gatheringimages of everyone including emails, Facebook, and photo ids, This is all going into a database so they can scan a crowd and know who you are.
orwellian
I am against conspiracy theories BECAUSE they too often go to extremes and that provides perfect cover for the truth to hide in plain view. I know what is capable with technology for I use it to predict the next step in the economy. These people seem to be obsessed with protecting government from the people and that is what is scary. That eliminates democracy and strips us of all liberties. This is not a stark world in which I wish to live under a microscope. This to me is one-step shy of creating some master race of obedient servants – the same thinking that went on behind the Iron Curtain. See something – say something..

France Defending its Banks Against USA Global Dominance?

bnp-paribas
The US Department of Justice is off the hook. They are seeking to lay fines on any bank that violates its rules simply because the transaction took place in US dollars. This is one primary reason we will see a neutral reserve currency. The USA is violating international territorial jurisdiction claiming authority over transactions conducted simply in dollars. This is a way to justify a one-world electronic reserve currency to prevent precisely this sort of claim of jurisdiction internationally based solely upon currency. Now the French government may have to defend its banks against insane fines – $10 billion they want from BNP Paribas

Thatcher & the Euro

British-flag
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; You were a key player in Britain and the euro. That is well-known in private circles here in the UK. You were friends with Thatcher’s personal economic advisor Sir Alan Walters. I believe John Major’s government called you in September 1992 when Major was forced to float the pound as Thatcher had wanted all along. Can you shed any light on those events since you were there and the future for Britain?  It might be enlightening if you came out and stated what really happened. I had spoken to Sir Alan at a lecture he gave and he said your computer was an amazing invention he believed countries should follow. He also said that Milton Friedman had first told Alan about you. What are your comments on that?
Respectfully yours;
SFBG
ANSWER: Yes. I was there. Alan and Lady Thatcher were my friends as was Milton Friedman. However, I was unaware that Milton had told them about me. I suppose that makes sense when I think back, but we never spoke about who knew who and why, although we all knew each other. I did discuss with Alan and later Lady Thatcher that the free markets would govern and they were the weapon that destroyed Communism – not politics. How the idea of creating a euro would fail without a political union was the basic theme based upon history.  The idea behind the Poll Tax was marketed wrong, but her idea was that if everyone paid something as a flat tax, then they would be that check and balance against runaway government. We drew upon the collapse of the Roman Republic for that very corruption was allowed to take place because the people were bought-off so to speak..
Thatcher - We are simply asking for our own money

Unquestionably, the Euro experiment is a total disaster for Europe for it was deliberately designed for political-ends not based upon economic soundness. It will be the self-interest of government that destroys it. Just look at Brussels. The design of the Euro was faulty and they knew it from the start creating a monetary union preaching savings on foreign exchange while hiding the agenda to federalize Europe. The elite politicians just needed to sell the idea and swear it was not some federalist agenda. Margaret Thatcher tried to fight against that agenda within her own cabinet. I was there and had intimate conversations about this with her. It was after the 1987 election, when Thatcher became much more an isolated figure within government fighting with members in her own cabinet who wanted to join the Euro as a new Bretton Woods. There was some New World Order in the creation of the Euro that one government would eliminate war. However, I would say the majority in the UK who wanted to join the Euro were trying to recreate Bretton Woods’ fixed rate regime that began with the ERM that also collapsed.
Thatcher’s “The Bruges Speech” delivered September 20th, 1988 will always be remembered. She stated bluntly: “I want to start by disposing of some myths about my country, Britain, and its relationship with Europe and to do that, I must say something about the identity of Europe itself. … Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. … Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution.” Thatcher clearly saw the motivation behind the Euro that this was the federalization of Europe – not simply a monetary union.
Lawson_NigelWalters-AlanNigel Lawson was in her cabinet between 1981 to 1989. Lawson was in favor of privatization and contributed to Britain’s Big Bang. However, he was a closet Bretton Woods guy who felt strongly that currencies had to be fixed. He was not so much a goldbug, but wanted a fixed currency and that would be the ERM followed by the end goal – the Euro.
The issue of exchange-rate mechanism membership continued to fester between Lawson and Thatcher and was exacerbated by the re-employment by Thatcher of Sir Alan Walters as personal economic advisor who was my personal friend. Lawson’s conduct of policy had become a struggle to maintain credibility once the August 1988 trade deficit revealed the strength of the expansion of domestic demand. As orthodox monetarists, Lawson and Thatcher agreed to a steady rise in interest rates to restrain demand, but this had the effect of inflating the headline inflation figure. Yes, I explained how raising interest rates would attract foreign capital. After all, I myself was standing in line buying assets in Britain when the pound fell to $1.03 in 1985.
Lawson’s fixing of the pound within the ERM is what led to the collapse of the pound. This was the clash with Thatcher for Lawson favored the idea of the Euro that would be a fixed rate currency system – a sort of rebirth of the Bretton Woods idea. The clash between Lawson and Thatcher, who was dead against the fixed rate idea of the Euro that would become the federalization of Europe, led to his resignation. Alan Walters continued to favor a floating exchange rate and we had many discussions at the time. Lawson was succeeded in the office of Chancellor by John Major.
Howe_GeofreyThe other key cabinet member who clashed with Thatcher also over the Euro was Geoffrey Howe. He masterminded the development of new economic policies embodied in an Opposition mini-manifesto.  In June 1989, Howe and Nigel Lawson, secretly threatened to both resign over Thatcher’s opposition to British membership in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. Both Howe and Lawson were sold on the ERM and the coming idea of the Euro.
Delors Jacques
In the last weekend of October 1990, Lady Thatcher traveled to a European summit in Rome, where Jacques Delors’ dream of European Monetary Union was high on the agenda. But while Mrs Thatcher was fighting her lone battle against the prospective single currency abroad, she was being fatally undermined at home. Geoffrey Howe, her bitterest cabinet critic, went on television to tell the interviewer Brian Walden that in principle Britain did not oppose the Euro.
Upon Thatcher’s return, she delivered her Commons statement where she was forced to slap Howe down publicly stating: “this government believes in the pound sterling.” Howe resigned, and days later delivered the famous speech from the back benches that set in motion a leadership contest. Howe and Lawson would have destroyed the British economy had they joined the Euro. To Delors, the private discussion I had seemed to believe that he was more trying to defeat the USA than creating a New World Order. He was fixated that joining all the countries together they would have a bigger GDP than the USA and therefore the Euro would displace the dollar. It was a power struggle arising from pride for many in France.
The committee from the EU came to me about the design. So I am not making something up from my imagination. The Asian Currency Crisis in 1997 was sparked by the shift in capital flows to buy into the Euro that was going to kill the dollar. The Bank of China called me in because I said this was the shift that set everything in motion. They agreed and asked me to speak up louder because politically they could not blame the Euro. The Bank of China has come out stating they now use our Capital Flow Analysis.
I do not offer opinions. What I report is based upon fact and observation, not what I think is going on. Brussels will defend the Euro because that is all they have. Lose the Euro and what happens? Tens of thousands of bureaucrats are out of a job. They were hiring 20,000 just to regulate the banks. As one reader points out, the EU Commission is regulating everything – even seeds.
So yes. When the attack upon the ERM and the pound in 1992 took place, I received calls from the British government asking what our models had to say. I warned the pound could not be held. I advised that the pound should be devalued. I was told that John Major had promised the pound would not be devalued. I then provided a “politically correct” way to do it – allow the pound to float to seek its own level. Hence, there was no DEVALUATION, it was the free markets that did the heavy lifting.

Windows 8 – NSA- Creatures of Patterns

Windows-8
COMMENT: Hi Martin,
I’ve just read the following article and the facility to connect to your PC from another machine, using the remote desktop protocol has been in Microsoft Products since Windows 2000, there’s nothing controversial about it, that’s how the industry administer other servers or PC’s. I thought you might like an industry insider’s opinion and for what it’s worth, I’m as wary of new technology as the conspiracy theorists, not all of it is as it’s perceived.
REPLY: The remote access has been around since 2000. However, when you combine this with the ability to turn your system on through backdoors that you never thought existed, they can own your computer just like your phone.  The difference with the Windows 8.1 is there appears to be the ability for someone to be able to control your PC and get data unknown entirely to you. I think this program feature to allow remote access combined with all the other problems is unacceptable and should be removed, If Microsoft does not respect what it has done, then its future is at stake and rightly so. NASA has removed all Microsoft Windows 8 from their entire systems and they said simply for security reasons.
Microsoft has to seriously address these security concerns and decide which side of the fence it is on. Cooperation with the NSA and doing favors for them when they seem to think they have a right to monitor everything every single person does, we are at the threshold of totalitarianism. I know people from East Germany. When the Stassi fell, you could get your file. Those that did were stunned. Everyone was providing info on their friends. They had broken the bonds that make a society – respect, loyalty, and friendship. The NSA is creating a world of paranoia on their part under this wild theory that they are making society safer by weeding out trouble makers who they define.
Divergent
The movie DIVERGENT is based on this theme. Government needs to control people and anyone they cannot control is call a divergent who needs to be exterminated for the greater good of society. These themes are interesting in light of Snowden’s revelations that the NSA is applying our type of technology for markets to individuals.
Collecting everything allows for pattern recognition in your behavior. They can predict where you will go for dinner and when. We are creatures of habit far more than people realize. Putting together just fragments of what you do can be matched against entire patterns and then someone can predict what is likely for their next move.
We do this right now with markets. Just look at the Global Market Watch. This is entirely pattern recognition to forecast where the market is going just one day at a time. The degree of projecting what an individual will do is just as accurate. This has been one reason I have guarded this system intensely.

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