As I mentioned yesterday, Tom Luongo and Alex Krainer held a fascinating—and very long—Round Table discussion with Gonzalo Lira. However, the title is deceptive:
The Roundtable #33: Alex Krainer, Tom Luongo
A conversation about the current state of the global economy.
In fact, this is a discussion of geopolitics as viewed through the prism of central bank policy. Lira helped make this discussion a big success by pressing Luongo for specifics and/or expanded explanations from time to time. What follows is my summary cum transcript—it’s a summary, but it largely follows the actual wording. The summary is almost entirely of Luongo’s remarks, with the exception of two passages from Krainer, marked “AK”. It will come across, perhaps, as done in shorthand in places, due to the oral nature of the original, but the points are clear enough. My comments are within parentheses.
I found this to be the clearest explanation of Luongo’s Theory of Everything that I’ve come across, and the excursions into US politics comes at a perfect time. I find this theory compelling. See what you think.
The point of the rate hikes is to break the Old European Money.
One year ago (in June) Powell raised the Reverse Repo Rate, which meant draining the world of offshore dollar liquidity. The offshore dollar market is orders of magnitude bigger than the domestic dollar market. Once that started it broke the Euro bull market--the Euro started dropping. That followed Powell telling the rest of the world bankers that he was not going to coordinate monetary policy to "fight climate change" (the key Christine Lagarde thing). However, Powell wasn't able to start the rate hike cycle until he was reconfirmed in March (because much of the US political class, in the Dem controlled government, were Davos lackeys who were opposed to a second term for Powell).
The offshore dollar markets are run by the Old European Banks, so they're the ones must vulnerable to rate hikes. (Offshore dollars, not the Euro—which the ECB destroyed—are the true source of European power as it remains.) The ECB has held deposit rates at -6% for eight years, destroying the Euro as a reserve currency. $14 trillion of European sovereign debt was trading at a negative yield. Meanwhile, the EU created a narrative that the US was beset by political instability, in an effort to prevent capital from fleeing to the US.
Davos' plan for a CBDC etc. was designed to do away with commercial banking. You can't have technocratic European style communism without destroying the two tiered monetary transition system--central banks to commercial banks to retail money users. Davos wants to collapse that two tiered system by removing the commercial banks via CBDC.
The Fed works for the biggest commercial banks in the world. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup, etc. The most powerful political lobby in the world is the same guys. Same guys control the Southern District of NY. Same guys control Fed policy. I asked guys who had literally been bankrupted by Dimon and Blankfein and the rest: Can you really see Dimon turning the keys of JPMorgan over to Klaus Schwab?
The source of the WEF's real power is the ability to lever up offshore dollars to buy political influence, to buy governments and their budgets, etc. The Fed is intent on screwing the Europeans to put a stop to this. Putting an end to European internecine wars is fine, but doing it by developing a technocratic USSR just with more Germans is a bad idea.
Europeans have destroyed their own economies, which were built on cheap stuff from China and cheap energy from Russia. This destruction was ongoing even before the sanctions war, which has simply accelerated the process.
The whole Amsterdam electricity and natural gas pricing market screwed the European energy system by getting out of long term energy contracts. They screwed up before sanctions. This change from contracts that were as long as 30 years, and the switch to spot prices, destroyed stability in the energy market. The directors are corrupt, from a clearing board in London. Energy prices have gone through the roof. But this is part of a plan.
What's behind all this is the need to default on European debt. The problem: How can you get the fiscally conservative German middle class to go along? The European banks are bankrupt, and they can't get cheap money from the Fed anymore. This: bankrupt the German middle class through sky high energy prices, blame Putin for it, then tell the public--we're going to nationalize the energy companies that are screwing you the public (already underway in Germany and being proposed in the US), then offer subsidies to the public. It's a backdoor QE.
European countries need to default on sovereign debt because it can't be paid. The pension systems are broke. Soros has laid out the plan. They'll default on the debt, issue perpetual bonds, then issue a digital Euro. The European middle class is faced with a Hobson’s choice: You can either have debt forgiveness, or freeze/starve to death. Living standards will collapse. Political and economic control will be rolled into the EC and collapsing the member banks into the ECB and requiring them to turn over their gold.
AK: What's behind this is a structural energy crisis--all the West's militaries are convinced they're running out of oil. They envision total economic collapse, as stated in position papers. They know they can't control the main energy producers, so they plan on setting society on a totally different energy basis. The mad schemes being implemented are part of the agenda to transition to a nuclear/hydrogen economy. We'll move to a U-233 cycle. Brexit and Trump accelerated the transition.
Trump understood what was going on, in his own Trumpian way. He's savvy, but not that savvy. But Davos lost control of the process the day Trump put Jay Powell in charge of the Fed. Powell started the process of decoupling the Fed from the EU system.
The overall goal of Davos is world government through the UN and the IMF--that's been clearly stated. The commercial banks in the US saw that they couldn't stop this process (which would result in their destruction) through the normal political process because the US political classes were in the pocket of the WEF. Thus Powell's war on Europe. (Thus, for Davos to push their scheme through, they must bring the Fed and NY commercial banks to heel by bankrupting the US through massive deficity spending and importation of millions of illegals. See below. Trump had upset the Davos applecart.)
AK: Leaving the gold standard made the collapse of paper currencies to zero inevitable. To avoid the discipline of gold, the plan is CBDC. Keep people in a digital slave colony. The fracture in the plan happened when the NY commercial banks and the Fed refused to go along. The result is fractures within the ruling elites--especially in Europe, with conflicting interests. Their plans aren't working out, and they're having to improvise, leading to disarray.
Some Americans support this Davos plan--Bank of America and Bank of NY Mellon are the prime examples. They went to Davos 2022. Notice that JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citgroup, Wells Fargo, didn't go to Davos 2022. They didn't even send VPs. Mary Erdoes from JPMorgan didn't go. Jamie Dimon certainly didn't go--that's a big tell.
If you read what the Davos crowd are telling you, they're telling you flat out they want to control the world. Read Christine Lagarde, Klaus Schwab, George Soros, Mark Carney--they're the lieutenants for the people who actually control things. It's really the cartel of banks that have been running the world for a long, long time. We now have a struggle between two different groups of bankers for control of the West, of capital. On one side: JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and--I think now--Morgan Stanley are aligned with the Fed. These are also the primary shareholders in the NY Fed. On the other hand you have Larry Fink of Blackrock, Bank of America, Bank of NY Mellon and a few others, plus the European banks. Then there are some caught in the middle, such as Credit Suisse--cause they're clearly going after the Swiss, and Swiss privacy.
The key is: Who is most vulnerable to a rate shock? American monetary policy for most of the post WW2 period was controlled by the offshore dollar markets, the Eurodollar markets, through LIBOR. Up until this year Eurodollar debt was indexed to LIBOR (London banks)--not to any index that had anything to do with American banking health. SOFR (Secure Overnight Funding Rate), instituted under Powell, changed that. All US debt is now indexed to SOFR. Europe can "catch a cold" but that no longer necessarily affects American banks.
The institution of SOFR to decouple US rates from European rates (based on LIBOR) is what has made it possible for the Fed to keep raising rates without unfairly affecting US markets. The Fed will keep raising to break Europe, because if they don't the US as a functional society will collapse. The US rates are sucking liquidity out of Europe's giant Eurodollar market (Europe is forced to raise rates to try to stop this, but it won't work because they're already bankrupt and can’t afford the huge increases in debt payments to finance government deficits). This will provide the US with a softer landing, despite the high interest rates. The US won't be starved of liquidity, but Europe will be broken because they can't afford the higher rates.
The US is owned by foreign powers--not China, but Old European Banking Money, which controls the Zhou administration.
Read Murray Rothbard--the history of US foreign policy is largely the history of British foreign policy. Removing the US from LIBOR is why Trump had to be removed from power--the US was finally declaring independence. A Dem majority government had to be put back in place to push through the Great Reset in the US immediately (Zhou campaigned on this under the slogan Build Back Better).
"Now, this will bake your noodle."
With the failure of Build Back Better, which was another attempt (after Covid) to force the Fed to monetize $6 trillion dollars worth of debt, the Fed got the room to further its agenda. This is why Davos is pushing so hard to get the US involved in a war with Russia. The new plan to bankrupt America is to force the Fed to finance the war and reverse interest rates and thereby neuter the Fed--Davos' enemy. Danielle DiMartino Booth has been saying for months that Jay Powell is trying to do a controlled demolition of the leveraged loan market--she won't openly say that this demolition is aimed at 'in the offshore dollar markets', she can't say that out loud. So, with the end of the Covid Regime and the failure to fully fund Build Back Better, Davos’s dilemma was how to find a mechanism that would force the Fed to finance another $6 trillion? The answer was the war on Russia, and the means to draw the US further into this insane war is being provided by the escalating series of UK inspired and led provocations. These “false flag” events staged by the Brits—Kerch Bridge, Nordstream, Sevastopol, constant nuclear hype—are designed to get the US into the UK’s war. (For further confirmation just look at the non-stop propaganda emenating from the UK media.)
The Zhou admin and the State Department are Davos' useful idiots.
So true! The tail is wagging the dog.
I know smart people from Chicago who are happily planning their springtime trip to Europe. The NYT and WaPo are their fodder, and they cannot be persuaded to look elsewhere.
I am reminded of the end of WWII when Emperor Hirohito came on the radio, and Japanese people were shocked to just hear his voice. Then he told them they had lost the war...another great shock since throughout the war their media had proclaimed them occupiers of the moral high ground and the clear winners (so your sacrifices are worth it). Finally, he described the Americans swarming ashore as monsters, and so for many citizens of the more delicate sort, it would be preferable to take their own lives.
Propaganda is the oxygen of all wars. How can people forget that!
Hey Mark, what do you think? I have a really hard time believing Powell was not aware of the pandemic plan. https://brownstone.org/articles/maybe-the-fed-too-was-trolled/
And Jeffrey Tucker skips lightly over the near collapse of the repo market, and other bigger things that went bump in the night of Fall of 2019 quite aside from Event 201.
"On September 17, 2019, interest rates in the overnight repurchase agreement ('repo') market spiked to nearly 10%. That is to say that banks would not take 5, 6, or even 7 percent interest to lend out cash to other banks that was fully collateralized with Treasury bonds, which are generally called 'as good as cash' or 'risk free'.... More than $200 billion was injected as a backstop into the market to ensure liquidity.... But something else happened around that time, and most people never knew about it, or quickly forgot about. The Federal Reserve also loaned $4.5 trillion to just three banks.... It was only on December 31, 2021 that the Federal Reserve quietly released the names of the three banks: JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank." ~ Mathew Crawford, Monetary Wars.