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Aug 17, 2012

Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF



For approximately three years; our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement. We were told that the key was to stomp on the Little People with “austerity” in order to continue making full interest payments to the Bond Parasites – at any/all costs.
Following three years of this continuous, uninterrupted failure; Greece has already defaulted on 75% of its debts, and its economy is totally destroyed. The UK, Spain, and Italy are all plummeting downward in suicide-spirals, where the more austerity these sadistic governments inflict upon their own people the worse their debt/deficit problems get. Ireland and Portugal are nearly in the same position.
Now in what may be the greatest economic “mea culpa” in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine Troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland’s approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.


What was Iceland’s approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail-out the criminal Big Banks – at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing.
The bankers told us that no amount of suffering (for the Little People) was too great in order to make sure that the Bond Parasites got paid at 100 cents on the dollar. Iceland told the Bond Parasites they would get what was left over, after the people had been taken care of (by their own government).
The bankers told us that our governments “could no longer afford” the same education, health-care and pension systems which our parents had taken for granted. Iceland told the bankers that what the country “could no longer afford” was to continue to be blood-sucked by the worst financial criminals in the history of our species. Now, after 3+ years of this absolute dichotomy in economic policy-making a clear picture has emerged (despite the best efforts of the propaganda machine to hide the Truth).
In typical fashion, the moment that the Corporate Media is forced to admit that it has been serially misinforming us for the past several years; the Revisionists are immediately deployed torewrite history:
the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to the country said. [emphasis mine]
In fact, from the moment the Crash of ’08 was orchestrated and our morally-bankrupt governments began executing the plans of the bankers I have written that the only rational strategy was to put People before Parasites. While I wouldn’t expect national policy-makers to take their cues from my own writing, when I wrote out my economic prescriptions for our economies I didn’t base my views on compassion, or simply “doing the right thing.”
Rather, I have consistently argued that it was a matter of simple arithmetic and the most-elementary principles of economics that “the Iceland approach” was the only strategy which could possibly succeed. When Plutarch wrote 2,000 years ago that “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics” he was not parroting socialist dogma (1500 years before the birth of Socialism).
Plutarch was simply expressing the First Principle of economics; something which all of the modern capitalist economists who followed in his footsteps have based their own theories upon. When modern economists produce their own jargon, such as the Marginal Propensity to Consume; it is squarely based upon the wisdom of Plutarch: that an economy will always behealthier with its wealth in the hands of the poor and the Middle Class instead of being hoarded by rich misers (and gamblers).
So when Bloomberg’s Revisionists attempt to convince us that Iceland’s strong (and real) economic recovery was a “surprise”; this could only be true if none of our governments, none of the bankers, and none of the media’s precious “experts” understood the most-elementary principles of arithmetic and economics. Is this the message Bloomberg wants to convey?
What is even more disingenuous here is the congratulatory tone in this exercise in Revisionism, since nothing could be further from the truth. As I detailed in a four-part series one year ago, the campaign of “economic rape” perpetrated against the governments of Europe over the past 2 ½ years (in particular) has been expressly designed to take away “the Iceland option” for Europe’s other governments.
One of the reasons for Iceland being able to escape the choke-hold of the Western banking cabal is that it’s economy (and its people) still retained enough residual prosperity to tough it out — as the banking cabal tried to strangle Iceland’s economy as retribution for rejecting their Debt Slavery. Thus Austerity has been nothing less than a deliberate campaign to destroy these European economies so that the Slaves would be too economically weak to be able to sever their own choke-holds. Mission accomplished!
One can only assume that neither the Corporate Media nor their Banker Masters would have allowed this clear acknowledgment that Iceland was right and we were wrong to appear within its own pages, unless it felt secure in the knowledge that all the remaining Debt Slaves had been crippled beyond their capacity to ever escape this economic oppression.
Indeed, for evidence of this we need only look to Greece: the one other European nation where there had been “rumblings” (i.e. riots) aimed at toppling the Traitor Government which served the banking cabal. After two elections, the combination of fear and propaganda bullied the long-suffering Greek people into choosing another Traitor Government – which had expressly pledged itself to reinforcing the bonds of economic slavery. When the Slaves vote for slavery, the Slave Masters can afford to gloat.
Here, the purpose of this Bloomberg propaganda was not to praise Iceland’s government (when both the bankers and Corporate Media despise Iceland with all of their considerable malice). Rather, the goal of this disinformation was to manufacture a new Big Lie.
Instead of the Truth: that from Day 1 Iceland’s approach was the only possible strategy which could have succeeded, while our own governments chose a strategy intended to fail; we get the Big Lie. Our Traitor Governments were acting honestly and honourably; and Iceland’s success and our failure was yet another ”surprise which no one could have predicted.”
We saw precisely the same Revisionism following the Crash of ’08 itself, where the mainstream media trotted out all their expert-shills to tell us they had been “surprised” by this economic event; while those within the precious metals sector had been predicting precisely such a cataclysm, in ever more-assertive terms, for several years.
The real message here for readers is that when an economic strategy of People before Parasites succeeds that there is nothing the least-bit “surprising” about this. As with all the remainder of the world around us, promoting the health of Parasites is only good for the Parasites themselves.

Jeff Nielson is from Canada and is a writer/editor for Bullion Bulls Canada www.bullionbullscanada.com. He has a personal background in law and economics. Bullion Bulls  Canada provides general macro-economic and political commentary,  since the precious metals markets are among the most complex (and  misunderstood) in the world.
Bullion Bulls Canada also provides basic coverage of Canadian precious metals mining companies. Canada is the global leader in mining exploration, and Canadian-listed mining companies (on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Venture Exchange) are responsible for the majority of the world’s most-promising discoveries.

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Financialization's Self-Destruct Sequence

From Zerohedge:
Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds


We are in the latter stages of financialization's self-destruct sequence.
Like all systems that follow an S-curve of growth and decay, financialization cannot return to its growth phase. I addressed the impossibility of reflating asset and credit bubbles in Let's Pretend Financialization Hasn't Killed the Economy (March 8, 2012).
But there is another dynamic at play: a self-destruct sequence triggered by central bank and Central State efforts to reflate asset and credit/leverage bubbles. All central bank and State policies aimed at driving capital into risk assets boil down to reflating phantom assets purchased with debt by issuing more debt that is based on newly issued phantom assets.
Phantom assets purchased with debt cannot be reflated by issuing more debt that is based on newly issued phantom assets. Piling more debt/leverage on a sandpile of phantom assets (CDS, bonds that cannot possibly be paid back, empty condos in the middle of nowhere, etc.) only heightens the probability that the unstable pile will collapse.
The implicit Central Planning campaign to trigger "mild" inflation is part of the self-destruct sequence. Central planners metaphorically fight the last war, or at best the last two wars, and so they remain blind to any dynamics that did not exist in their case studies.
In the 1970s, central bank easing and Central State stimulus sparked a nasty bout of accelerating inflation. This reduced the weight of debt because wages inflated along with goods and services.
Now that labor is in surplus globally, wages are not keeping pace with inflation. This completely changes the dynamic of "mild" (3%) inflation: as the purchasing power of earned income declines, servicing debt becomes more burdensome. Inflation only renders debt less burdensome if wages rise at the same rate as the cost of goods and services.
In a decade of "mild" inflation and stagnant wages, households will experience a very real-world 30+% decline in their income. Meanwhile, their debt payments remain unchanged.
"Mild" inflation in an era of stagnant earned income will crush households, forcing liquidation or renunciation of debt. What happens as debt service costs rise as a percentage of real net income? There is less cash for consumption, and so the consumer-dependent economy spirals down. Credit is poured into the banking sector, but little trickles down to high-debt, stagnant-income households. This is deleveraging writ large.
What happens when central bank financial repression--lowering the yield on cash to near-zero--causes pension plans to fail and savings to earn negative real returns? Households must save more income to compensate for the destruction of yield by Central Planners.
These mutually reinforcing dynamics feed the self-destruct sequence's inevitability. Add up the self-destructive forces: declining purchasing power, negative real returns on savings, rising debt based on newly issued phantom assets, and promises unbacked by real assets or based on declining national surpluses.
As Central Planning reflation of phantom assets fails, the credibility of the Status Quo institutions that promised success will crumble. I have described the dynamics of Heightened Expectations and the Collapse of Credibility and discussed The Keys To Understanding the Collapse of the Status Quo: Credibility and Expectations.
In the euphoric blow-off top phase of financialization, expectations of security and wealth were raised by political Elites anxious to mask the systemic looting of national wealth by financial/political Elites. Promises were even easier to issue than paper money.
But issuing promises, credit and leverage did nothing to expand the national surplus or the resources that ultimately back the promises and credit.
We can characterize the sudden, explosive convergence of fantasy (phantom assets and promises) and reality as Snapback! (October 9, 2008). The entire project of Central Planning (central banks and States) is to "extend and pretend" the Status Quo in the hopes that the gargantuan divergence between fantasy and reality will magically close as the result of "aggregate demand" or a new business cycle, or some other version of renewed "animal spirits."
But "animal spirits" require trust in the transparency and fairness of markets and Status Quo institutions. As markets are rigged and manipulated to manage perceptions and enable vast skimming operations to continue, the credibility of the markets, politicos, State oversight agencies and the financial sector is eroded.
As central bank/State reflation of phantom assets fail, the credibility of the entire political/financial Elite and the institutions they control will be irrevocably lost.
Financialization's self-destruct sequence has been triggered, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. The workings of the machine are opaque, and the interactions complex. We cannot know when the sandpile will collapse, or what the proximate cause of the collapse will be, but we can know that the unstable pile will collapse under the weight of the system's illusory assets, fraud, collusion, embezzlement, corruption and corrosive dependence on artifice and lies.
We also know that self-serving vested interests will continue their pillaging until the destruct sequence's final implosion brings the entire rotten edifice down in heap of empty promises.
In a word: Snapback!

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Protect Your ASSets: Buy Gold or Silver NOW - If you wait you will be late.
(He who panics first, just may salvage something.