QE

Payments Panic And The Ending Of Fiat Currencies

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By Alasdair Macleod – Re-Blogged From Gold Money

The unilateral response from governments to the coronavirus is to helicopter money to people and their businesses in unlimited quantities. Their priority is to keep the debt-driven Keynesian show on the road, and policy makers are approaching the task with unseemly gusto.

There was evidence that the credit cycle was already on the turn with the global economy entering its regular period of financial and economic crisis even before the coronavirus hit. Thinking it is only a matter of dealing with the pandemic before returning to normal is therefore a common and fatal mistake. The combination of current events is leading to an infinite problem: central banks, and the Fed in particular, are trying to backstop everything and they will undoubtedly fail.

The central issue is the dawning inability of the Fed, in charge of the world’s reserve currency, to keep financial markets under control. The quantities of money required to rescue the US economy and dollar-centric supply chains abroad are potentially far greater than anyone realises and will destroy not just the dollar, but the whole fiat money system of rigged financial markets upon which debt financing depends. The EU is in a similar but more parochial fix with the addition of a banking system visibly on the verge of collapse.

The timescale for the demise of unsound fiat currencies is likely to be very short, by the end of 2020 – exactly three centuries since a similar fiat currency experiment failed in John Law’s Mississippi bubble.

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How Dead Is The Fed?

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By David Haggith – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

You can only be so dead, and that’s just “plain dead.” But there is also Feddy Krueger dead. The kind of dead that keeps on happening like a demonic death that won’t stay dead. It is in that nightmarish Elm St. light that I’m going to review the Federal Reserve’s death.

It’s happened via face-plant failures over past month that I’m going to lay out to show how savagely the Fed is dying a perpetual-motion death.

Let me pause to assure you, I’m not saying Feddy Krueger is down for the count and will not rise again. He always revives by inventing powers over market death never seen before. Feddy will return with extraordinary and permanent powers beyond those he once used to bring counterfeit salvation from the Great Recession. Feddy gets more empowered by scared government politicians each time the economy crashes. You can’t get rid of Feddy. At least, it seems.

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Fed Slashes Rates To Zero And Introduces QE In Response To COVID-19

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By Arkadiusz Sieroń – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

On Sunday, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and restarted quantitative easing to stimulate economy hit by the pandemic of COVID-19. That’s already its second move prior to this Wednesday’s FOMC. What does it imply for gold?

It’s Serious, Really.

Winter is not coming. Winter is here already. The situation does not look too good. Although the epidemic seems on the way out in China and South Korea, the situation in Europe and the US is deteriorating quickly. As you can see in the charts below, the new daily cases are quickly rising, making the total number of infected people doubling each 3-4 days. And please note that the chart shows only confirmed cases – the true number of infected people is almost certainly larger, especially in the US, where shockingly low number of tests have been conducted.

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The Demise Of The Financial System Is Imminent

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By Egon von Greyerz – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

“Next five years is not about winning but surviving.” This is the headline of an article I wrote in early August 2019. At that point I was primarily thinking of economic survival. But now the world is facing multiple threats and multiple failures. As I have already stated, the Coronavirus is not the cause of global market crashes but the catalyst.

But even if I have been totally certain that the world will see an economic collapse greater than any crisis for 100s of years, this is the worst catalyst that anyone could have expected. Yes, a global virus was always one of the potential risks but of all triggers, this one was certainly the most unwelcome and horrible.

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The Bear Is At The Door

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By David Haggith – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

Yesterday was the greatest crash in Wall Street history by one measure, and took down many other milestones. The Dow plunged 2,012 points in its largest single-session drop on record! Percentage-wise it was down 7.8%, which still knocked out decades of lows, leading to “Black Monday” being the hot search term on Google today as people sought a comparison worthy of this Monday crash.

For comparison, the 1929 event looked like this:

The stock market crash of 1929 – considered the worst economic event in world history – began on Thursday, October 24, 1929, with skittish investors trading a record 12.9 million shares. On October 28, dubbed “Black Monday,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly 13 percent. The market fell another 12 percent the next day, “Black Tuesday.” While the crisis send shock waves across the financial world, there were numerous signs that a stock market crash was coming.

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Fed’s Real Mandate: Ever Expanding Asset Bubbles

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By Michael Pento – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

Wall Street hit a new all-time high on February 20th. It was supposed to be smooth sailing from there, riding along the global liquidity wave. But then, that wave crashed into what turned out to be the fastest correction from a new high in the history of the US stock market. Even though the fall was mild in comparison to the record-breaking bull run of the past few years, it was enough to frighten central planners to the core. Hence, we had further confirmation on Tuesday, March 3rd of what we already knew: our central bank has been fully corrupted and co-opted by Wall Street.

The Fed lowered rates by 50bps in an emergency meeting, even though its regularly scheduled meeting was just two weeks away–maybe Trump will now give Powell the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But someone should have informed the White House and the Fed that the 4th rate cut in a rate-cutting cycle has nearly always led to market panics. But to be clear, the only reason the Fed cut rates is that the stock market suffered a brief correction. It wasn’t a bear market or a recession. It wasn’t even runaway deflation or an outright recession scare, …but just an 8% fall in stock prices from an all-time bubble high at the time of its decision.

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Big US Stocks’ Q4’19 Fundamentals

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By Adam Hamilton – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

Stock-market volatility has exploded on COVID-19 fears, shattering the Fed’s QE4-fueled levitation.  The resulting stunning sentiment shift has left investors and speculators wondering where these wild markets are heading.  This is an important time to check the latest fundamentals underlying the big US stocks that dominate market action.  They just finished reporting their Q4’19 results, which illuminate their valuations.

Recent weeks’ stock-market swings have been huge, driven by mounting worries about the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.  For 6 weeks I’ve covered this virus’s daily progression in depth in our subscription newsletters, including many troubling reports out of China that the media ignored.  Before this selloff, I recommended long-volatility and short-stock-market trades that surged to big realized gains up to +145%.

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