by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
Discuss this edition of Gonzo journalism at the Collapse Morning WakeUp Call Table inside the Diner
More than many weeks that I have spent observing the Collapse of Industrial Civilization, this week (and the weeks before too!) have proven to be above and beyond merely awful, they have been downright DISASTEROUS! The decent into Dante’s 7th Circle of HELL began more or less with the latest in Climate Disasters, the FLATTENING of Grand Bahama by Hurricane Dorian, a massive Cat 5 Hurricane that hovered over the islands for a couple of days with sustained winds of 185 MPH. This place will not be a Tourista Destination again for a very long time, if ever before the planes start flying there.
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Following up on this climate disaster, we had the further emergence and promotion of Greta of Stockholm, the 16 year old modern Joan of Arc who is battling with the Big Boys on Twitter over Climate Change, including the biggest Twit-Shit blowhard of them all, the Denier-in-Chief, Donalditry Trumpovetsky. So far, Greta hasn’t Blinked, which is of course not unusual for somebody diagnosed as Autistic, which she likely is. So in the Battle of DSM V Diagnoses on Twitter, so far Greta’s Autism is Trumping Donalditry’s Megalomania, Narcissism and Misogyny.
Greta clearly has a HUGE promotion machine behind her, but for the Climate folks this is an excellent Propaganda Maneuver. Nothing sells better than a cute girl in the Ad Biz. Nobody listens to what your typical academic dweeb Scientist has to say on this subject, but drop a cute autistic 16 year old in front of the UN General Assembly, and everybody all of a sudden takes notice! Isn’t that special?
As big as the Climate action was over the last few weeks though, it pales in comparison to what is going on both in Geopolitics and in Economics, two of the main fronts we focus on here on the Doomstead Diner. As Sam Mitchell of Collapse Chronicles and I discussed in our recent conversation (which BTW took place quite some time before all this action arose), although longer term the Climate problem is the greater Existential Threat we face here trying to survive on Planet Earth, there are more proximal problems which threaten our existence also percolating, and if we can’t resolve them there will be plenty of Dead People filling up the Cemeteries even before the oceans swallow up Miami Beach, Hong Kong, the City of London and Wall Street.
First up on the Geopolitical Hit Parade is the buffoonery ongoing with Brexit across the pond in Jolly Old England. As it currently looks, BoJo is likely to get a No Confidence vote in Parliament, possibly paving the way for the Socialist Jeremy Corbin who heads up the Brit Labour Party to ocuppy 10 Downing Street as a Caretaker Prime Minister while they delay Brext still further (aka, Kick-the-Can). A comparison here would be like Trumpofsky being kicked out and replaced by Pelosi to run the country on this side of the Hurricane filled Atlantic Basin. Assuming he does get the nod as the new, new PM for a while AND the Eurocrat Globalists in Brussels agree to yet another extension, this gets followed up by another new,New, NEW election in the UK, along with ANOTHER referendum on Brexit. If you haven’t figured this out by now, referendums are quite meaningless. Once you Check In to a Union like this, you can’t Check Out. Well, you can Check Out, but you can Never Leave. It’s the Hotel California on the pollitical level.
Nobody in power really gives a Flying Fuck about what the Plebes want or don’t want, this is just part of the sham and window dressing of “Democracy”, which works OK when there are plenty of resources around and everyone (including the poor) are reasonably well-fed with roofs over their heads. It doesn’t work so great though when the resources run thin and segments of the population start getting cut off from the Bennies of being part of a large political structure like this. When this occurs, the Rich want to maintain their perks and privilege inside the society, and the Poor want to…SURVIVE.
Poor folks mainly will accept their fate as long as they have full bellies, but once they start going hungry they tend to get a little tired of Marie Antoinette munching on Cake in Versailles while they can’t afford the bread at the local bakery. This level of existential problem hasn’t really hit yet in force in the Western Industrial Economies, but is already playing itself out in many of the peripheral countries in Africa, South & Central Amerika and SE Asia. It will arrive on the shores of OECD countries though in due time.
Crossing back over the pond to the Political Kabuki Theater ongoing with Trumpty-Dumpty here in the FSoA, it’s starting to look like the Dumbkopf-in-Chief has at last crossed a Bridge Too Far. Even his base of foaming at the mouth neo-Nazi supporters have a tough time swallowing the bullshit he was trying to pull off in Ukraine, trying to get some good dirt on his perceived main Political rival of Uncle Joe Biden, who of course also does take time off between his Senior Moments to do a few shady deals, this time involving his son wheeling & dealing in Ukraine. Uncle Joe is rapidly losing credibility amongst Demodopes who have considered him the most “Electable” candidate and the best Knight in Shining Armor to take on the Black Knight of Trumpovetsky.
Recent polls have Bankster Slayer Elizabeth Warren as the candidate for the Demodopes most popular, particularly in the early primary/caucus states she appears to have Moe Mentum, the 6’11” Power Forward First Round draft choice of all political candidates, it’s even more valuable than money, although you do need plenty of FRNs to sprinkle around on the media to keep that momentum up. It’s still up in the air as to how well Liz will do given her quasi “Socialist” agenda, but the further Trupovetsky shoves his foot and leg and penis down his mouth, the greater the probability Liz gains more traction. The rule with Trumpovetsky is to give him a lot of rope, because he is certain to hang himself with it. The oncoming parade of witnesses to appear in front of CONgress looks to be the best Kabuki yet this side of the pond, easily rivaling the Brit Brexit show and perhaps surpassing it in hilarity, though that would be hard to do. Watching a bunch of Eton educated Stiff Upper Lip Brits convulse on the floor of Parliament is a tough act to follow. lol.
More than all of those late breaking Collapse Storiez though is the ongoing MELTDOWN of the Fed Repo Market. It is getting some coverage in MSM financial websites, but overall most Amerikans aren’t the least bit aware or concerned with this clusterfuck. I’ve been writing on this and covering the progress Inside the Diner, and of all the vectors for Collapse threatening our civilization RIGHT NOW, this one holds the most potential for creating extreme havoc of them all. Sorry Greta, as important as your issues are, this bullshit is going to hit hard long before we drown under rising Sea Levels. Here’s one response I wrote to one of the Diners trying to explain in a reasonably short post WTF is going on here:
When Da Fed does QE, it doesn’t just sprinkle free money around and get nothing in return for it. They don’t make unsecured loans, you have to trade good collateral for the freshly printed FRNs. What is “good collateral”? Loans made to credit-worthy customers. But what happens when there aren’t enough credit worthy customers out there to make loans to? What happens when the collateral they do have is non-performing loans (NPLs)?
What happens is what the BoJ does, which is the CB buys the Bonds issued by Da Goobermint directly. This finances Goobermint spending, but it doesn’t make money for the banks, which are in the bizness of making loans to make money, If banks aren’t making money making loans, how do they make money? By using the cash they do have speculating in equities. But what happens when everybody is expecting a stock crash? They all want to get out of stocks, but they can’t sell them without driving forward the crash. So they try to take out more short term loans to cover the shortfall in expected earnings. If everybody is doing this, you get a liquidity crisis, which is what they got at the moment.
Da Fed is TRYING to push more money into the system to ease this crisis, but apparently even $75B/daily isn’t enough to do the trick. If they can’t inject more cash into the system, you’ll get a liquidity lock-up, which is very Bad Newz for everybody, right down to J6P. That’s the kind of thing which makes all the ATMs go down at the same time.
For some more detail, Max Keiser’s most recent Keiser Report video outlines the problem in more detail (I’m not ripping off Max here, I got my analysis up before he published his. However, he does flesh it out more completely.):
The BIG QUESTION here of course is precisely WHO is going Tits Up on a financial level, and whoever(s) it is has to be a very big financial institution(s). Like with Lehman though, we won’t know who it is until the traders are walking out of the building leaving their Bloomberg terminals behind, hopefully wiping their hard drives clean and boxing up incriminating evidence to set a Bonfire with in the backyard of the suburban McMansion they occupy on Long Island or Germany or Britain or wherever the fuck this shit is currently centered.
I was asked still another question Inside the Diner asking for some kind pf prediction on what is likely to occur here. Making these sort of predictions is a dangerous game, but I decided to take a flyer and speculate on this one:
Quote from: AJ on Today at 03:22:22 AM
Thanks again RE. This was a good video about repo (until he lost me on bitcoin). The question becomes is a bankruptcy of Deutsche Bank going to bring down the entire dollar fiat money system or just give us a GREAT depression OR the collapse of civilization?? Tell me oh wise one.
AJ
That is really on the outside limits of Nostradamus prognostication. I will do a reach on this, but don’t get on my case if I don’t have it precisely correct. I’m not even sure yet that it’s Deutche Bank that is getting the run yet. It might actually be a run on multiple banks.
However, let us look at the case where it is JUST D-Bank getting hit on here. DB is VERY big, with counter-party relationships with all the other TBTF Banks, aka JP Morgan Chase, Goldman etc. So if DB goes BK, they’re gonna carve up whatever assets they have (not too many I am sure) and divvy them up in some way to keep the counter parties from ALSO going BK. This is what as known as Financial Cross Contagion. See David Korowicz for more detail on this phenomenon.
Now, the issue here is that whatever is left in the vault of DB isn’t NEAR enough to cover the derivatives they wrote, essentially insurance policies on BKs of various institutions and goobermints. To make up the shortfall here, SOMEBODY (Da Fed, Da ECB etc) will have to step in and cover those losses, elsewise the capital structure of those banks also collapses. Then you have your “Great Depression” scenario. See the collapse of Credite Anstaldt (Austrian Bank) prior to the GD to understand how this works.
I *think* the “smartest guys in the room” are quite aware of this, hell fucking Ben Bernanke made his career on looking at this stuff. So I do not think they are unprepared for it entirely, but then again it’s different now than the financial system in place when the GD Collapse of the banking system went down. The amounts of notional money and complex financial instruments is much larger, and really NOBODY knows how big they actually are.
So to try and answer your question, it’s a fucking SHIT STORM waiting to happen. If it does cross over to the counter parties, then yes it is the absolute end of this monetary system, and HELL will follow.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
RE
Finally to tidy up here, you might be wondering WHY I headed up this article with a snippet from my recent trip down to the Lower 48 to plant the SUN Monument (also my Tombstone) in the middle of Flyover Country in Springfield, MO. If you are familiar with my Gonzo take on all this shit, you probably grasp that it is a metaphor of Collapse and of Resurrection as well. While the Civilization around me is collapsing, I too am collapsing. It was my goal to get this final statement planted for the rest of Eternity before, in the words of Leonard Cohen…
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it Blows
Everybody Knows
I got it done before I finally have another meeting with the Grim Reaper that he wins instead of me. That will happen of course, the Reaper always wins in the end. But he can’t destroy my stone tablet, at least not without a decent amount of explosives.
Originally published on The Doomstead Diner 29 September 2019.
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