Tag: economics

Debt Slavery and the Carbon Credit Coup | Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin

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UPDATE: Major Black Pill. I already am black-pilled and believe all we can do is maybe sometimes achieve anarchic resistance to excessive authoritarianism. Basically, kings & queens are back or never left. A friend explained that Webb and many of the people she speaks with online are anti-statist, against nation states, libertarian, anarchic. I don’t know enough about Webb and her circle to say, nor do I know if my friend is right. But it does seem that something like that is so.

I appreciate Webb and Goodwin’s detailed breakdown and analysis of who is doing what, how and why. It’s definitely worth listening to.

To readers who are royalists or want to return to traditional empires, that’s where we are now. We are inside an empire right now and it is growing, going for world domination. I for one do not see any way we can change the composition of world or regional power elites. Those people have wealth and connections that no mass of people can ever muster. Elections are clearly rigged, like everything else. Going off grid or putting your money in a local bank or gold appear to be futile. I plan to have fun and recognize all of the above proves the First Noble Truth, which is good if that’s what you perceive in all this. ABN

The Great Dispossession Part 1 — Paul Craig Roberts

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Some definitions: an “account holder” is you, your IRA, your pension plan, your stock and bond investments held at an “account provider” or “intermediary” or “depository institution” such as Merrill Lynch, Schwab, Wells Fargo. An “entitlement holder” is the definition of you whose ownership claim to your financial assets has been subordinated to the claims of “secured creditors” of the institution where you have your accounts. Please do understand that the dispossession of which I write is your dispossession.

Klaus Schwab tells us that in the Great Reset that the World Economic Forum is preparing for us “you will own nothing and you will be happy.” Well, we already own nothing. Our bank deposits and stocks and bonds, in the event the depository institution gets into trouble, belong to the depository institution’s creditors, not to us. All assets are pooled and serve as collateral whether or not labeled “segregated.”

You might remember that during the last financial crisis we were told that there would be no more bail-outs, that in the future there would be bail-ins. A bail-out is when central bank money creation rescues the favored troubled financial institutions. A bail-in is when the depositors’ assets are used for the rescues.

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For parts 2,3, 4 see links after the fold. ABN

Continue reading “The Great Dispossession Part 1 — Paul Craig Roberts” →

Big Tech Offloads Office Space, Putting Commercial Landlords in Flux

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Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things mindset now extends to leases. 

Big Tech companies — some of the more reliable office building tenants— are reversing course by letting leases expire or subleasing space across major cities, leaving commercial landlords with empty square footage and growing losses, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

Downsizing

Everybody remembers the ghost towns that bustling cities like New York and San Francisco turned into after COVID-19 left streets, shops, restaurants, and office buildings empty for months on end. For companies that could make the transition, especially tech firms, employees easily switched to remote work. The hope was that those workers would eventually return to the office and downtowns would thrive. 

And while that happened to a degree — New York City’s return-to-office rate is at 80% of pre-pandemic levels thanks to its banking and finance sectors, Bloomberg reported — Big Tech is headed in the opposite direction. Amazon, Meta, Google, and more are seeing less need for office real estate as they hold on to remote work practices and decreased headcounts: 

  • In the fourth quarter of last year, US tech companies were leasing roughly 7.4 million square feet of office space, the WSJ reported. That’s nearly double what the sector held a year earlier, but it’s still a dropoff from the 10.5 million square feet rented in 2021. That empty space is causing headaches for commercial real estate owners. As of December, offices accounted for 41% of the value of distressed commercial properties in the US, which stood at roughly $86 billion, MSCI reported. 
  • Salesforce occupied 900 million square feet of office in San Francisco as of January, not even half of what it owned or leased a year earlier. Amazon paused construction on a new headquarters in Virginia after a massive round of layoffs. CoStar reported that once Meta’s lease at a building on Manhattan’s Broadway ends in June, it plans to give up 275,000 square feet of space.

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Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for multi-billion dollar FTX fraud

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NEW YORK, March 28 (Reuters) – Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a judge on Thursday for stealing $8 billion from customers of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded, the last step in the former billionaire wunderkind’s dramatic downfall.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan handed down the sentence at a Manhattan court hearing after rejecting Bankman-Fried’s claim that FTX customers did not actually lose money and finding that he lied during his trial testimony. A jury found Bankman-Fried, 32, guilty on Nov. 2 on seven fraud and conspiracy counts stemming from FTX’s 2022 collapse in what prosecutors have called one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.

Kaplan said Bankman-Fried had shown no remorse.

“He knew it was wrong,” Kaplan said before handing down the sentence. “He knew it was criminal. He regrets that he made a very bad bet about the likelihood of getting caught. But he is not going to admit a thing, as is his right.”

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The Hertz Meltdown Reveals Scale Of The EV Debacle

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The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has revealed its ambition: to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles (EVs). Incredibly, this announcement comes as we are flooded with overwhelming evidence that EVs are a market loser.

Indeed, the artificial boom and then meltdown of the EV market is a modern industrial calamity. It was created by government, social media, wild disease frenzy, far-flung thinking, and the irrational chasing of utopia, followed by a rude awakening by facts and reality.

CEO of Hertz Stephen Scherr has been booted out due to a vast purchase of an EV fleet that consumers didn’t even want to rent. The company has now been forced to sell them at a deep discount and in a market where consumers are not particularly interested.

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Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food

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“The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.” ~Andrew Nikiforuk

…The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

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The Case for Building Wealth with Richard Werner

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link to video, 77 min, w audio file

This interview is from CA Fitts Solari Report, and is available to the public for free. ABN

UPDATE: Just finished watching this. It’s a terrific discussion, very informative. Don’t miss it! Essential for understanding what the basic banking/ economic problem in USA is, how to fix it, and why Central Bank Digital Currency will be a disaster for everyone except the central bankers who will control everything. ABN

Lord Jacob Rothschild: Financier dies aged 87

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Financier, philanthropist and head of the renowned Rothschild empire, Lord Jacob Rothschild has died aged 87.

His family confirmed his death in a statement on Monday and described the patriarch – who has held a number of senior financial and philanthropic roles – as a “towering presence”.

The Rothschilds have an estimated fortune of around £825m, according to last year’s Sunday Times Rich List, and give away a reported £66m to Jewish causes, education and art each year.

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China Evergrande ordered to liquidate in landmark moment for crisis-hit sector

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  • Evergrande unable to offer concrete restructuring plan – court
  • Ruling likely to further jolt already fragile Chinese markets
  • Trading in shares of Evergrande and units halted
  • Decision sets the stage for complicated process

HONG KONG, Jan 29 (Reuters) – A Hong Kong court on Monday ordered the liquidation of property giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK), opens new tab, dealing a fresh blow to confidence in the country’s fragile property market as policymakers step up efforts to contain a deepening crisis.

Justice Linda Chan decided to liquidate the world’s most indebted developer, with more than $300 billion of total liabilities, after noting Evergrande had been unable to offer a concrete restructuring plan more than two years after defaulting on its offshore debt and following several court hearings.

“It is time for the court to say enough is enough,” Chan said in court on Monday.

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