Hi,
I subscribe to a whole lot of various newsletters; particularly about investing. There is a website shadowstats.com The guy who owns it is a former Bureau of Labor Statistics employee who calculates the CPI and unemployment numbers they way they were when Social Security was indexed for inflation. You can click on the site and see the numbers on the first page.
I have his special report "Hyperinflation 2012" which is a very heavy read. He says we are already past the brink, BO has seen to that. No later than 2014 it is going to really hit the fan. I mean he is talking about survival, not sure what is going to happen. He compares other countries that have gone into hyperinflation and they all had other things in place, like a black market, so the society had ways to function. When the dollar goes south and people are doing anything and everything to get rid of them while they can get something, anything, for them we have no backup system. Commerce will come to a screeching halt. In Zimbabwe and Yugoslavia they had virtually no food on the shelves of grocery stores and the system went to barter. His comment was that Zimbabwe already had an effective black market and Yugoslavia had US dollars; neither of which we have in the US.
Not sure where what form it will take but his message is we should all be well prepared.
Not so sure the muskets choice is not the one we will be faced with whether we like it or not. It can happen in the US despite the millions of people that think that crap happens only in third world countries. Once the oil starts trading in something other than dollars foreign countries have no need for dollars and will dump them as quickly as they can. Once the dam bursts, so many folks will be selling dollars the collapse will be here. It will happen almost in a split second.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news; my message is be prepared. I hope I am wrong. If I am, is it so bad to have some stored food, water and ammunition on hand in case of a natural disaster???
Regards
5412
This is all very close to my line of thinking on the whole thing. If we do see the misfortune of a Soetoro second term, even under the "best" possible conditions of a republican controlled House and Senate with a lame duck White House we are still well and truly effed. As Sarge pointed out, on Supreme Court appointments alone we may actually see the demise of the republic as we know it.
With a Soetoro second term coupled with dem majorities in the House and Senate for the next four years, the "worst" possible conditions, then I foresee the very real possibility of mass unrest such as the L.A. riots but in every major population center from coast to coast, perhaps even to the point of a second civil war.
With the majority of Americans being decent hard working people of good moral character I sense there is a lot of lip biting out there and a widespread sense that we can survive '08-'12 and then right the ship. If it turns out to be '08-'16 though, that will be the tipping point, no more stoic steady as she goes tomorrow will be better sentiment holding sway any longer.
This country has not been more divided since the 1850's. In a broader sense I feel the world is a very unsettled and dangerous place these days, likely even more so today than in the 1930's. The thing that will cause it all to hit the fan, nationwide and indeed worldwide will be the U.S. Dollar doing the dead guppy float. When that happens -and it IS coming- things are going to get very ugly.
I recall reading several years ago that the real reason, the most pressing and urgent reason that we went into Iraq in '03 was because Saddam was making moves to trade his oil in Euros. Up until that point according to USMC General Zunni Saddam was effectively contained under the sanctions and did not pose a military threat in the region.
Once he threatened to move away from the dollar on oil that tore it, he sealed his fate right there.
"With speculation mounting over the possibility of a US- or Israeli-led military attack of Iran sometime later this year, it has been suggested that real motivation for US antipathy towards the Iranian government has little to do with concerns that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons. Some commentators have instead suggested that Iran’s real Iranian threat to the US and its economy is that, in defiance of the US administration, it is attempting to establish an oil ‘bourse’ (exchange) in March of this year which would enable oil to be traded in euros. This would move oil sales away from their usual denomination in dollars and would, it is argued, undermine the American currency with grave consequences for the US economy. (1,2) This internet-based debate is reminiscent of what occurred before the invasion of Iraq when several observers, myself included, hypothesised that Saddam Hussein’s decision to sell Iraqi oil in euros was perhaps one of the reasons the US wanted ‘regime change’. (3,4) The US decision after the invasion to return Iraqi oil sales to dollar denomination and to convert back into dollars all Iraqi foreign currency reserves, which had been in euros prior to the war, was certainly entirely consistent with this theory."
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/12463Now very recently we have India and others showing interest in trading for their oil in gold, this is not good.
http://rt.com/news/iran-india-gold-oil-543/Thank you for citing shadowstats, very revealing site.
