As Kris sets off to work on the next issue of Australian Small-Cap Investigator, I’ve got to be honest, I was scratching my head this morning wondering what to write about.
I thought about tackling property (again), but I’ve only just emptied the Money Morning mailbag from yesterday and so didn’t want to create more work for myself by opening that can of worms.
Then I remembered I went out to dinner recently for my birthday [Ed note: That's the seventh time you've mentioned it today and it's not even lunchtime!]. During the course of the evening, work became a brief discussion.
“So Shae, what’s happening in the world of finance?” one of our dinner companions asked.
“It’s pretty interesting at the moment, I mean, the world’s financial system could fall apart if this Greece bailout gets any more out of hand. It’s pretty exciting times.” I said munching on my pad Thai.
“If Australia survived the Asian Financial Crisis, then we’ll survive this. After all, the Asian crisis happened in our back yard. Greece is on the other side of the world,” was the reply.
Er, what? So geography is what will prevent Australia’s financial system from falling apart?
Let’s just say we changed topic. It fell into the ‘too hard to explain’ category of conversation. And besides, it was my birthday. [Ed note: That's the 8th time].
But, I thought I’d use that idea. Now there’s the reader that lived through it, and then there’s the reader that most likely only knows about the Asian Financial Crisis through Wikipedia. You know, as something that happened in the ‘old days’.
What exactly is so different this time?
Firstly, let’s not underestimate it, the Asian Financial Crisis was a huge threat to the Australian economy. Aside from the initial currency devaluation, market confidence was shaken with fear that investors would be stuck holding bad debt.
You see, the high interest rates in countries like Thailand and Indonesia attracted investors from overseas and naturally a large amount of those funds went into the highly speculative property sector. Not long after the financial market collapsed the over inflated property sector blew up too.
As the crisis grew, the IMF decided to step in and offer a USD $40 billion bailout to keep the economies moving along. But the funds came with extremely strict measures. The Asian banking system was torn apart and the new system had to meet the IMF rules in order to obtain the cash hand out.
At the time there was a strong fear of financial contagion, which is much like there is now. However compared to now, you could really only describe the Asian crisis as just upsetting the Australian market. Because right now the market is having an extreme reaction to anything that happens overseas.
So what makes this crisis so much worse for Australia? I mean, after all, didn’t we survive the Lehman brother collapse, the subprime crisis and the worst of the GFC.
Look, Australia did get past all those crises but we did so using borrowed tax payer money. The politicians dragged the country into more debt hoping China and their mineral hungry economy would bring us out the other side. All in the name of ‘surviving’ the crisis.
But yet again the over-spending and over-lending have caught up with us again, and we’re facing another financial crisis. And again, the only solution offered is more debt.
Instead of the IMF stepping in to hand out cash to a failing economy, this time it’s the IMF and the European Central Bank.
It’s obvious why the Euro Zone members have stepped in to save their currency. The bailout has nothing to do with saving Greece from government financial mismanagement.
So why when Australia’s and the world’s debt levels are higher than ever before is more money being handed over? More debt surely won’t fix the problem.
While there were many critics of how the IMF ‘fixed’ the Asian Financial Crisis, the IMF congratulated themselves on a job well done. As far as they were concerned, they ‘saved’ Asia from its own financial crisis, when really they left a massive whole in Asian economies.
Because of the restrictions that went with the hand out, hundreds of thousands of white collar workers in countries like Thailand literally had to go back to the villages they came from. Massive unemployment swept through the country and many private businesses went under as access to capital became near impossible under the new lending regulations.
But now, unlike then, the entire world is being rattled and at the heart of it is the banking system.
Maybe we’ll finally realise we can’t continue to build a financial system on debt as a way to make money.
As I said last night at dinner, it’s an exciting time to be in finance. The world’s financial system is being shaken at the roots. We’re learning some pretty hard lessons that had to be learned. You can’t keep pumping air in to a balloon without expecting it to pop.
It’s the same thing with a global economy. You can’t keep flooding it with debt and expecting that will save it.
Things look pretty bad now, but the worst could be yet to come.
That’s it for me here, now for a look at yesterday’s market action…
60 Second Market Wrap
It was a pretty flat trading day for the market yesterday. The S&P/ASX 200 closed up 3 points to 4,470.70. The move from Germany to ban naked short selling caught the Aussie market by surprise and has opened in the red this morning.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 114 points overnight to close at 10,510.95. The US market was shaken when the Euro reached a four year low against the US dollar.
Germany’s temporary ban on naked short and naked credit default swap includes the short selling of 10 banks shares. It was this move that led Michael O’Rourke, a strategist at BTIG LLC, to say, “It makes it look as if the Germans are worried about something behind the scenes that the market’s not aware of. It almost looked panicked, which further undermines confidence in the markets.”
The FTSE was up 44 points to close at 5,307.34. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in at 3.7%, which was much higher than anticipated. The high CPI number is treated as a general indicators for inflation, however the Bank of England (BoE) governor Mervyn King said that he expects the inflation to be temporary and return to normal next year.
The Nikkei dropped again overnight, losing 146 points, ending the session at 10,096.25.
The price of spot gold in Australian dollars is trading at $1,433.06 while in US Dollars it is trading at $1,222.33. The price of silver in Aussie dollars is $22.07 and in US Dollars it is $18.80.
The Aussie dollar versus the US dollar is USD$0.8519 and against the Japanese Yen JPY79.04.
Crude Oil closed at USD$68.37.
For the biggest movers on the market yesterday click here…
That’s all I have for you today, see you tomorrow.
Shae.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
On May 5th, Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and a number of other “super wealthy” Americans gathered for a secret meeting in Manhattan. Reportedly the goal of the meeting was to consider how their combined wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population.
There was a COMPLETE blackout by the American news media of this clandestine gathering. They reportedly met at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and the president of Rockefeller University. The secret meeting was supposed to be so discreet that many of the billionaires’ aides were only told they were
at “security briefings”.
However, some details about this secret meeting have emerged.
According to one major U.K. newspaper, one person who attended the meeting said that “a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”
The same news article includes some incredibly disturbing quotes about the meeting from that same anonymous source…..
“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers.”
“They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”In other words, these rich elitists are the ones who will provide the “big-brain” answers that the rest of us morons are not capable of coming up with.
The truth is that this secret meeting is just the latest example of the obsession that the global elite has with population control.
It seems that now there is almost a non-stop propaganda campaign in the western world to promote abortion, sterilization, family size limits, lower birth rates and other even more draconian population control measures.
One of the most recent shocking comments on population control came from the U.K. government’s “green guru”.
The chair of the U.K. government’s Sustainable Development Commission, Jonathon Porritt, said that parents who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an “unbearable” burden on the environment.
Porritt also says that curbing population growth through abortion and contraception are absolutely necessary in order to fight global warming.
When government officials begin talking of limits on family sizes it is time for alarm bells to start going off.
The truth is that the freedom to marry and reproduce and to raise a family is one of the most cherished and most basic of all human freedoms.
But the global elite have become absolutely obsessed with population control, and their sick obsession is starting to reveal itself in society in a thousand different ways.
For most of human history, the thought of the government or anyone else restricting how many children one could have was absolutely unthinkable.
However, today there are many, particularly in the Western world, who are been convinced by government propaganda to willingly restrict their own reproductive capabilities.
One 27 year old woman named Toni Vernelli told the Daily Mail why she decided to get permanently sterilized: “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”
Some activists have even gone to the absolute extreme by forming “The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” which seeks to reduce the presence of humanity on earth as much as possible.
Their motto is: “May we live long and die out”.
Doesn’t that sound lovely?
So is the ballooning population of planet earth a huge threat to the environment?
Do we need to implement strict population controls for the good of mankind?
The reality is that the world has more people than it ever has had in all of recorded history. Some countries have implemented population laws that are quite strict (such as China’s one child policy), while other nations do not have any mandatory population regulations yet. Lately, however, we have started to see some population control measures begin to pop up in the Western world…..
*Women in the Netherlands who are deemed by the state to be unfit mothers will be sentenced to take contraception for a period of two years, according to a new bill before the Dutch parliament.
*In the U.K., one influential think tank says that it is an “eco-crime” to have too many children and that we really need to examine the impact our large population is having on the earth.
*In South America, the government of Peru goes door to door pressuring women to be sterilized and they are funded by American tax dollars to do this.
Did you know that was what your tax dollars were doing?
The truth is that the desire by the global elite to limit the population of the earth has been around for a long, long time. Between 1798-1826, English economist Thomas Malthus published six editions of his work entitled “Essay on the Principle of Population”, which argued that population growth inevitably outstrips food production.
The primary argument advanced by Malthus was that the English working class was poor not because they were exploited, but rather because there were too many of them. Malthus opposed welfare and higher wages because he believed they would allow the poor to survive and breed, thus compounding the overpopulation problem and leading to more poverty. Of course Malthus was terribly wrong about all of this, but nonetheless his theories gained wide acceptance among the English elite of his day.
Many years later, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, vigorously promoted this type of twisted thinking in the United States. The following is one of Margaret Sanger’s most infamous quotes:
“The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
Remember, that quote came out of the mouth of the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Unfortunately, the sick theories of Malthus, Sanger and other population control advocates did not die out. Rather, they seemed to gain steam as the population of the world absolutely exploded in the 20th century.
U.S. environmentalist Paul Erlich, in his 1968 book entitled “The Population Bomb”, argued for very strict population control measures, especially in the poorer areas of the world. He warned that if we did not implement such measures we would be facing catastrophic problems very quickly.
Dr. Arne Schiotz, World Wildlife Fund Director of Conservation, said this in 1984:
“Malthus has been vindicated, reality is finally catching up with Malthus. The Third World is overpopulated, it’s an economic mess, and there’s no way they could get out of it with this fast-growing population. Our philosophy is: back to the village.”
Unfortunately, the philosophies of Erlich, Schiotz and other population control advocates have garnered a substantial following even among powerful members of the United States government. Just check out the following shocking quotes…..
“There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it….”
“Our program in El Salvador didn’t work. The infrastructure was not there to support it. There were just too goddamned many people…. To really reduce population, quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females….”
“The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease like the Black Death….”
–Thomas Ferguson, State Department Office of Population Affairs
The quotes above are typical of the mindset of the global elite. The call for radical population control has grown louder than ever before. College professors are given standing ovations by their students when they call for a 90 percent reduction in the human population of the planet. Ted Turner said, “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal,” and the global elite applauded him for it. The Georgia Guidestones which call for us to “maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature” are increasingly cited by our leaders as an important, and perhaps even necessary, goal.
What in the world is happening?
How in the world did it become a good idea to get rid of 90 to 95 percent of us?
It seems as though for the global elite, every major crisis these days is an opportunity to further one of the key pillars of their agenda…..
Population reduction.
Problem #1: Gas costs too much and we are faced with “global warming”.
Answer: Get rid of a whole bunch of people and we will use less gas and we will produce less “greenhouse gases”.
Problem #2: Medical costs are soaring out of control.
Answer: Get rid of a whole bunch of people and kill off the elderly and we will have fewer medical costs.
Now Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, has the perfect solution for the “food crisis”:
Get rid of a whole bunch of people……
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3908588.eceThe following is one of Prince Philip’s most famous quotes about world population:
“You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realize this is a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world…. Every new acre brought into cultivation means another acre denied to wild species.”
Do you realize how the global elite sees us?
They see us as a “flock of sheep” that must be culled from time to time.
How sick is that?
Prince Philip, the “Eco-Warrior”, also once said that he would like to come back to earth as a disease after he died to help reduce the human population.
But he is far from alone on this issue. The call for human depopulation is coming from a myriad of other sources:
John Guillebaud, professor of family planning at University College London has said this: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.”
He also made this shocking statement: “The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.”
Now there are influential think tanks in the United Kingdom that are even advocating that the U.K. adopt a “2 child” policy to help fight “global warming”.
The infamous Club of Rome certainly is clear about who they think the enemy is…..
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
–Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, 1991
Mikhail Gorbachev made the following stunning statement about the population of the earth: “We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
The reality is that we are getting increasingly closer to the kind of world where the “useless eaters” that Henry Kissinger talked about will be “eliminated”. Is this the kind of future that we want for us and our children?
The truth is that the world is not experiencing runaway population growth. While the earth’s population is growing, the rate of growth is definitely slowing. The population of the world grew by 140% between 1950 and 2000. However, authorities predict a rise of only 50% between 2000 and 2050, and a rise of just 11% in the 50 years after that.
The truly frightening thing is that many of you who will read this article actually agree with this radical depopulation agenda.
Many of you actually think it is a good idea to exterminate 90 to 95 percent of us.
Many of you have embraced the radical eugenics philosophy promoted by some of the wickedest men of the 20th century and you don’t even realize it.
I challenge anyone who believes in radical population control to post a comment below defending your position.
For the rest of us, we need to understand what the global elite intend to do before the time comes when they actually start doing it to us.
etch…were you abducted by the same flying saucer as fitch and me??
i believe that one should not bring children into the world if you have no means of caring for those children with your own resources.
To simply breed like rockrabbits, and expect other people (through taxation and other forms of theft) to support you and your offspring is a form of tyranny of the worst kind…
@ 2 -not lately
.they’ve been pretty much booked out .
free tours to cheap land sales on Mars
but ZACHAERY Smith did ring other day & said to say “greetings every-one”here on this forump……………………..