Three Major Imbalances – Financial, Trust and Geopolitical

But greed is a bottomless pit
And our freedom’s a joke
We’re just taking a piss
And the whole world must watch the sad comic display
If you’re still free start running away
Cause we’re coming for you!

– Conor Oberst, “Land Locked Blues”

It’s hard to believe 2020 is just around the corner. If the last ten years have taught us anything, it’s the extent to which a vicious and corrupt oligarchy will go to further extend and entrench their economic and societal interests. Although the myriad desperate actions undertaken by the ruling class this past decade have managed to sustain the current paradigm a bit longer, it has not come without cost and major long-term consequence. Gigantic imbalances across multiple areas have been created and worsened, and the resolution of these in the years ahead (2020-2025) will shape the future for decades to come. I want to discuss three of them today, the financial system imbalance, the trust imbalance and the geopolitical imbalance.

Recent posts have focused on how what really matters in a crisis is not the event itself, but the response to it. The financial crisis of ten years ago is particularly instructive, as the entire institutional response to a widespread financial industry crime spree was to focus on saving a failed system and then pretending nothing happened. The public was given no time or space to debate whether the system needed saving; or more specifically, which parts needed saving, which parts needed wholesale restructuring and which parts should’ve been thrown into the dustbin. Rather, unelected central bankers stepped in with trillions in order to prop up, empower and reward the very industry and individuals that created the crisis to begin with. There was no real public debate, central bankers just did whatever they wanted. It was a moment so brazen and disturbing it shook many of us, including myself, out of a lifetime of propaganda induced deception.

It’s ten years later and central banks still can’t walk back anything they did over the past decade. It’s why the ECB is pushing lower into negative interest rate territory and restarting QE. It’s why the Federal Reserve is increasing its balance sheet as if we’re in the middle of a depression.

Recent actions by the ECB and Federal Reserve make it clear that, despite protestations to the contrary, the financial system is more sick and vulnerable than ever. A system with a healthy, functioning structure doesn’t require such interventions, but keeping this financial Potemkin village afloat is crucial to maintaining the key source of power and privilege for corrupt plutocrats, so no expense is spared. Nevertheless, these interventions makes the system weaker and more fragile than before, since they merely cover up ever increasing levels of corruption and fraud and permit more destructive behavior to continue surreptitiously under the surface. The current financial asset bubble on a global basis is likely the largest and most deadly in human history, and central bank actions of late seem to indicate they know this to be true.

While massive and global, the financial system imbalance is just one of several. Another big one is a trust imbalance, which manifests as a widening disconnect between established institutions and the people living under them. As the ruling class has been forced to resort to increasingly desperate measures over the past decade to keep their gravy train going, they’ve exposed themselves more explicitly. What was once derided as conspiracy theory rapidly becomes conspiracy fact, and an increasingly significant number of humans have begun to simply assume (for good reason) that whatever comes out of the mouths of authority figures like intelligence agencies, politicians, mass media, corporations and think tanks, etc., are lies.

This situation isn’t getting any better either. It seems every day we wake up to new in your face revelations of how craven and dishonest the ruling oligarchy and its institutions really are. For example, this past weekend we learned how a Newsweek journalist quit because his bosses at the paper refused to let him publish about OPCW whistleblowers who dispute the official conclusion that Assad launched a chemical attack in Douma, an event that increasingly looks like a false flag event which led to the U.S. bombing Syria.

It was a busy weekend, as we also heard Nancy Pelosi admit she knew the George W. Bush administration lied the country into the Iraq war, but she somehow doesn’t consider that an impeachable offense.

Finally, just yesterday we learned government officials have been lying about progress in the Afghanistan war over the course of multiple administrations.

The interviews were carried out by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction for their “Lessons Learned” intuitive; the head of SIGAR concluded that “the American people” were “constantly lied to” about the conflict to make it seem like America was making real progress in fixing the country. The Post report noted that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all conveyed these lies to ensure that the public perception of the Afghanistan war remained as positive as possible.

The national security state has forced the public to spend over $1 trillion murdering people abroad in the longest war in U.S. history based on government lies. The depressing thing is this isn’t even shocking or surprising.

Meanwhile, nobody believes Epstein killed himself.

The trust imbalance between rulers and the ruled has become so massive it’s all but guaranteed to detonate in a variety of unexpected and consequential ways in the years ahead. The election of Donald Trump was just the first pubic manifestation of this well deserved lack of trust.

The reason the corrupt oligarchy must constantly lie to the public is to convince us we live in a world that doesn’t exist. We’re not supposed to recognize the U.S. doesn’t function as a constitutional republic, but as an imperial oligarchy. This knowledge is the forbidden fruit of empire the public must never taste.

As William S. Smith explained in his excellent article, Welcome To The Potemkin Village Of Washington Power:

Tufts law professor Michael Glennon points out in a recent essay in Humanitas that the Cold War brought something new and ominous in military-civilian relations. The national security bureaucracy became so large and omnipotent that the Madisonian branches of government became something like the British House of Lords, symbolically important but in reality without much power. The executive, legislature, and judiciary became a kind of Potemkin village, with real national security power lodged in, as Glennon describes it, “a largely concealed managerial directorate, consisting of the several hundred leaders of the military, law enforcement and intelligence departments.” As this bureaucracy grew, Glennon argues, “those managers…operated at an increasing remove from constitutional limits and restraints, moving the nation slowly toward autocracy.”

Glennon also points out that, prior to Trump, there was an unwritten pact between the bureaucracy and the Madisonian government: never publicly disagree. While national security policies have long been crafted and maintained by deep state bureaucracies, everyone played along and told the public these were the result of “intense deliberations.” Yet a few people noticed that, whether under Republican or Democrat administrations, national security policies never really changed, intelligence operations were never disrupted, and even peacenik-seeming presidential candidates became warlike presidents. For decades, neither elected officials nor bureaucratic leaders publicly acknowledged that American national security policy was being run by what Glennon describes as a “double government,” with elected officials largely impotent. 

Not exactly what you were taught in school, and as more people start to recognize the disconnect between what they’ve been told and how things actually work, the trust imbalance grows. It’s already at highly charged levels, and like financial system imbalances, could blow at any moment.

The other major imbalance I want to highlight is the geopolitical one. It’s something I’ve been writing about a lot lately as it’s come into clearer focus that the nexus of this tension will center around the U.S. and China. At the root of this imbalance is a U.S. national security state desperate to turn back to clock to the 1990s when the U.S. was the world’s sole superpower and could essentially call the shots on all matters of international significance with little to no pushback. Certain foreign power centers, led by China and Russia, have made it explicit they will not be rewinding the clock and are have focused their foreign policy around ushering in a multi-polar world. Like the other imbalances, the geopolitical imbalance becomes more volatile and less manageable with each passing day.

Many writers and thinkers are doing a lot of good work analyzing these imbalances in isolation, but they need to be seen as interconnected parts of the same macro trend of paradigm disruption. These imbalances play off one another, and it’s highly likely that when one blows the others will follow soon after. In other words, it’s likely a future severe economic downturn will be coupled with civil unrest and heightened geopolitical conflict happening simultaneously. What sparks the chain reaction is unknown, but the 2020-2025 period is when it will likely occur.

Everything being done today centers around propping up and extending a decrepit paradigm in order to further enrich and empower a ruling class that has lost the respect of the people. As the actions taken to sustain such a system become more desperate and mendacious (“this is NOT QE”), the more the veneer of credibility disappears. The more the veneer of credibility disappears, the more unstable these major imbalances become. Generational change is on the horizon, keep your eyes wide open.

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– Michael Krieger

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12 thoughts on “Three Major Imbalances – Financial, Trust and Geopolitical”

  1. I put less sovereignty and liberties in the hands of the people than what they believe they have. Most people are caught up in manufactured spectrum politics and have little real knowledge of a range of ideologies that they think they do. I certainly wish my knowledge base larger.

    Financially a one world system already exists, centrally controlling all the disparate parts with big moves towards more centralization to be expected in Krieger’s time frame given here. Geo-politically it can be difficult to determine where the world of greed and the even more desirable, the world of control, leaves off and the people’s liberties begin. Of course it is much easier with some corporate national jurisdictions. And while the people certainly in aggregate should not trust their rulers and the system they rule through it has been my observation that the majority have been programed to operate on a level of not questioning very much when confronted with an instigated problem, their manufactured reaction and willingness to accept a solution without further questioning in whose interests this premise is being operated. It is all fairly simple to keep a logical analysis process in mind but few seem to want to put such into use and practice in their daily lives. Whatever you believe in if it is not being used in your daily life for reference and guidance and providing workable solutions then it should be questioned for its validity.

    Reply
  2. How does the ‘spiral’ theory figure into the current moment, Michael? (And thanks for lining this up so clearly that even MSM-zombies might recognize reality… and thanks for the link 😉

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    • Those are all good names, AP. Bernays showed elites how to manipulate regular people, while Milgram and Zimbardo showed how regular people allow themselves to be manipulated.

    • The world will not end anytime soon, what will end is human existence on the world. The world and the universe (multiverses?) will carry on without humans quite nicely.

      The irony is the potential that a nuclear conflagration will be returning humans to the basic energy that constitutes the universe.

  3. Each & every morning I awake, then hope and pray , interest rates are at 35% .
    Some morning I hope, pray my prayers will be answered!

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  4. I found this set of descriptions of the current human condition to be very well articulated but no more so than dozens of other positings that I have read over the last so long.

    It is another take on the “what” while ignoring the “what next?”. Stick a fork in it, Gracie; she’s pumpin’ mud and I feel fine.

    So, waste not your time. As Perry Arnett postulated a long time ago, to the effect, it’s in nobody’s best interest to spread awareness of the collapse when it is underway in earnest.

    Reply
  5. Enjoyed this article. Even though I read a lot of “news” this is why it gets boring sometimes. We know how this banker ponzi will ultimately end, it’s only the path to the inevitable destination that remains unclear.

    It’s an odd feeling waiting for a sure outcome, sort of like sitting through a sporting event where you already know the final score but nothing else.

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  6. Thanks to Mike and all the commenters on Liberty Blitzkrieg, I respect and enjoy your viewpoints. Mike had touched on solutions before and I wholeheartedly agree that decentralization is a big part of the story. For those of us who have been doing what we can to understand the current situation, it can feel like a bit of a rehashing, constantly bombarding ourselves with the “what’s so fucked up with our world” input of data.
    I’m doing my best to get my family out of the game, it’s a slow and arduous task but everything in my instincts tells me to stop participating in this machine. I’m turned on, tuned in and dropping out, minus the acid and flowers in my hair. Heading off grid, to low population density and farmable, affordable simple living. Hopefully one or more of you and others like you will be our neighbors. Building decentralized, sustainable, purpose liberty based communities full of hardworking self determined cooperative people. What ever goes down good luck plan well and take appropriate action for the global paradigm shift.

    Reply
    • You have an excellent plan for you and your family….farming being both an entrepreneurial and natural a way of life. I can remember my family’s stories from the Great Depression in the 1930s and how much food they grew on a city lot and the trade between neighbours for the different foods they might grow….My best hopes for you and yours. No illusions, eyes wide open, no fear.

  7. I expect there is an undeveloped or as-yet-misapplied technology or set of technologies that will shift the grand paradigm so momentously that we will amend how we demarcate our chronology, a la, B.C and A.D.

    Bitcoin isn’t it, tho blockchain theory may prove a stepping stone to something greater…

    My top 4 contenders are:
    1.) too easy, a practicable source of no/low cost energy, like nuclear fusion or efficient solar, that can both scale and be trivially and effectively miniaturized;

    2.) an advance in computational power or equivalent breakthrough in cryptology that renders all encryption laughably futile;

    3.) true integration of the microprocessor and the human mind allowing effortless utilization of computational capacity, memory access, and global communication;

    4.) a singularity event resulting in a sentient AI

    Meaningful contact with another form of intelligence (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) or a mass-accepted spiritual/religious event (real or not) would also do the trick.

    Meanwhile, we’ll tread water for longer than you or your children will think possible… until then, grow your net worth and be good and fair to those around you… the most important job we all share is to make life better for another person.

    Reply

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