Insolvent Nation
There is an economic cataclysm afoot in Australia. The signs are there that we are a busted flush. Both on the surface and deep underground.
You wouldn’t know it, if you rely for your news on the corporate media or the public broadcaster. Some of the real “on the ground” stories are reported, of course. They just never get developed into a sticking, higher level narrative. Dots are not being joined, except in the alt-media, including by former insiders from the finance sector who have opened all sorts of cans or worms. They bear heeding.
Other distractions abound, mostly created in a “look over there” feint by those who claim to govern us. The Muslims. The Gaza war. Ukraine. The Aboriginal voice. Brittany Higgins. The climate “emergency”. New footy teams in Papua New Guinea. Pride season. The ogre Peter Dutton. Budgets. New train lines. And the rest. For three years we had a fake pandemic. The ultimate distraction.
Distractions help deflect grim realities. They stop questions being asked. We all do it.
The endlessly clever and flexible Australian Bureau of Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics plays its part in numbing us to the coming economic reckoning. As does the once mighty Treasury – the legendary Sir Roland Wilson would be spinning in his grave.
The now-contract-based and massively remunerated public servants will simply produce the data that the government of the day wants in order to keep it in office and them in power. They contribute to a narrative that pretends that the economy is okay. They hide the real recession that Australia is experiencing, and all of the underlying structural issues. The Budget papers show a surplus. This is astonishing, given ScoMo’s nearly one trillion dollar spend on a non-pandemic. Where did that all come from, and where did it all go, we might wonder? And a four per cent unemployment rate? They do think we are all stupid.
The real picture is more sobering, to say the very least.
Business bankruptcies are occurring by the truckload. Especially in building and construction, but not only there. Think hospo and hotels. And retail. Any downtown business. Wherever there is discretionary spend. Even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is onto it. It reported in April:
Business insolvencies hit record highs with worse to come, warns CreditorWatch.
According to data from debt monitoring firm CreditorWatch, more Australian businesses are now in the hands of external administrators than ever before, rising more than 22 per cent since this time last year.
The pain is coming from all sides.
Construction firms are reeling from a crackdown by the Australian Tax Office, registering the most tax defaults, while also still facing rising building material costs and skilled labour shortages.
CreditorWatch finds smaller sub-contractor businesses in the residential sector are most at risk in the construction industry.
However, overall it is businesses in the food and beverage industries that are the most at risk of failure.
CreditorWatch chief executive Patrick Coghlan says businesses under pressure from higher costs are being starved of revenue from consumers battling with cost-of-living pressures.
There are fresh stories appearing every day. Mortgage failures are growing. The ABC:
Growing number of Australians in mortgage stress amid rise in home loan defaults.
Australians are defaulting on their home loans at growing rates as the number of borrowers at risk of mortgage stress peaks at levels not seen since 2008, when the global financial crisis hit.
Oh, and a rental crisis. The ABC again:
Rental affordability in Australia is as bad as it has ever been, according to new Anglicare Australia report.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-23/anglicare-australia-rental-affordability-report/103754274
Then there are the massively overloaded food banks in Footscray (Victoria, of course). An alarmed Yahoo News reports:
Photos of crowded inner-city streets reflect ‘sad new reality’ in Australia.
A viral photo getting attention this week highlights a worrying community demand that it 'totally out of control', a food charity says.
While it's no secret the cost of living crisis is hitting Australians, charity organisers say the situation on the ground has become increasingly dire.
The reporters are not making this up. The working homeless is now a real thing. People in jobs – sometimes more than one – sleeping in their cars. The Guardian reports:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/03/australia-homelessness-crisis-feature
It is an issue in Byron Bay, playground of the beautiful people, surfers, greens and hippies.
The number of people sleeping rough in Byron Bay has spiked and it remains the NSW council area with the most people sleeping on the streets.
The massive annual survey and count of people sleeping on the streets across NSW was carried out in February.
World-famous Byron Bay hosted 348 people sleeping rough, up 16 per cent on last year. The City of Sydney area had 208 in this year’s count.
Statewide, the month-long count found 2037 rough sleepers.
What of the broader housing affordability crisis, now part of everyday life in Australia? Well, three of our capital cities are ranked in the top ten least affordable housing markets in the world. (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide).
All against a backdrop of endlessly printed money that no one has, decaying infrastructure, woeful defence, money laundering as public policy, net zero fantasies, farmers under attack and private and public debt that may never be paid off. How could the USA ever repay its thirty-four trillion in gross federal debt?
Just about the only saving grace down under, if you can call it that, is that many Australians still feel “secure”, based on the inflated salaries they “earn” doing what the late David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” (which make them miserable), the out-sized value of their out-sized houses (built on massive debt accumulated during the great deflation) and the previously unherd of retirement incomes they are accumulating through superannuation (based on an artificially inflated and protected share market). As we shall see, they would be wrong. It is a chimera.
But these are the privileged. The lap-top class, bourgeois bohemians, as David Brooks called them. Working from home, many of them. The rest of us are not so lucky. Outside the multi-culti city downtowns and the affluent suburbs, grim realities are all the more visible. Alan Jones used to call it “struggle street”.
All up, not a pretty picture. Especially when you consider we have a leftist government that, back in the day, might have taken more than a passing interest in all these outworkings of an ever-deepening cost-of-living crisis that affects its former political base the most.
I referred to “look over there” tactics being employed to cover up the economic cataclysm that is emerging. Try “spreading disinformation” as a more accurate description of what they are doing. And the current Australian Government has the gall to put up legislation (so-called online safety bills) banning the rest of us from speaking our dissident minds. They are lying cheats. The pretence that our economic is not teetering on the cliff top amounts to deliberate, calculated falsehood. To borrow a phrase from the American investment banker/lawyer/author James Rickards, “you’re being INSTRUCTED not to notice this”. (Rickards is the author of The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, 2016).
Why would governments and their allies do this?
Obviously enough, to stay in power. But there may be more to the cover-up than merely winning an election. There are far bigger fish for them to fry – or to have fried by their puppet-masters – in the “new economy”, the financialised world we now inhabit, but never voted for and do not understand. This is the giddy world of collaterisation, derivatives, swaps, futures contracts, options, positions, hedge funds, financial harmonisation and securitisation. Where financial services now make up around a quarter of the global economy. And control the rest of it. For example, banks and investors (like private equity companies such as BlackRock) account for a quarter of the world’s assets.
Financialisation has been described as “playing with money” and “voodoo”. And a whole other world. One to which we are all tethered, without knowing it.
So, what are derivatives?
Derivatives are financial contracts, set between two or more parties, that derive their value from an underlying asset, group of assets, or benchmark. A derivative can trade on an exchange or over-the-counter. Prices for derivatives derive from fluctuations in the underlying asset.
Essentially, they are bets. Warren Buffett, an eternally canny investor and himself one of the “controligarchs” written about by Seamus Bruner, says this about derivatives:
In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.
Bets always have losers. And someone has to pay. Those moving all of the chess pieces around are out to make sure it isn’t them.
Buffett’s warning in itself is pretty alarming, given the power and reach of derivatives markets. One estimate of the size of the global derivative market places it at around one quadrillion US dollars. That would be a thousand trillion. More noughts than an Aussie batting card in the mid-eighties. Outstripping the size of the global economy, measured in 2021 at a mere 96 thousand billion, by orders of magnitude.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052715/how-big-derivatives-market.asp
It all suggests that the global economy is something akin to a house of cards. And when it all comes crashing down, as many believe that it will, it will be the heavily leveraged plebs who will lose everything, not the controligarchs. Because … they have a plan.
Which brings us to David Rogers Webb, an American financial analyst living in Sweden. Those familiar with Catherine Austin-Fitts and Ed Dowd (who each have excellent Telegram channels) may already be aware of Webb, and so will be familiar with both his technical expertise and his dire message. He has released a confronting documentary film called The Great Taking.
He has also written a short book with the same title. Published freely in accessible PDF form. And he is no fly-by-night “conspiracy theorist”. He has worked for most of his life in the finance sector, in private equity companies, in mergers and acquisitions, hedge fund management and the rest of it. He might be overstating his case. But he knows his stuff. His insider knowledge is deep and broad.
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/1ee786fb-3c78-4903-9701-d614892d09d6/taking-feb24-screen2.pdf
His book contains too many gold nuggets to be adequately reported here:
· About the central banks, and their ownership and/or control by private banks;
· The role of Covid in positioning the ruling class for the “great reset” with which readers will be quite familiar;
· A refresher course on the Great Depression;
· And the Global Financial Crisis of more recent memory;
· The structure of international finance, about which readers may be far less familiar;
· The nature of hybrid warfare;
· The importance of economic inflection points;
· The way OUR property and wealth back new financial instruments and asset classes;
· Financialisation and war;
· The origins of bubbles, and their deliberate planning;
· The importance of declines (collapses?) in the velocity of money (VOM);
· The way bankers stay in control through subjugation;
· The role of intelligence agencies in cementing the international banking regime;
· The Fed’s “murky powers”; and
· How those who control the system have collateralised OUR assets such that, come the crisis, we will lose all and they will survive.
A useful summary can be found at the outset of the book:
What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.
We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states but against all of humanity.
Webb sees a coming global economic meltdown, and the sign that this is coming is in the rapidly slowing velocity of money in the real economy. But that is almost not the point. All bubbles burst, eventually. But … when the meltdown arrives, then we lose all of our assets, as a result of global financial structures put in place over time by the world’s central banks and their private sector backers.
In Rickards’ term, a coming liquidity crisis. The worst kind.
The impressive and prolific Bert Olivier at The Brownstone Institute was impressed by Webb’s book:
One of the very best exposés of the covert, very well-hidden, bellicose attempts to rob all of humanity – barring the miniscule number of psychotic individuals comprising the inimical opposition – of their material possessions and their ‘immaterial’ freedom, was published fairly recently. It is accurately titled The Great Taking (2023), and was written by David Webb, one of the most courageous and finance-savvy authors I have ever come across.
It is impossible to overstate the urgency of Webb’s message – everyone who reads this article should download the book (free) at the link provided above, or at least view the documentary based on it at CHD.TV, Rumble and (I don’t know for how long) YouTube. It makes for compulsive reading – a kind of non-fictional, real-world detective story, where you, the reader, are both the victim of the crime and the one looking over the detective’s shoulder at the evidence that he is digging up.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-great-taking-exposes-the-financial-end-game/
On the GFC, Webb states:
In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis it eventually became known that tens of trillions in losses in derivative positions were housed in the biggest banks, which were then bailed out with newly created money. The prime brokers would have failed, but to prevent that they were made banks and also received direct injections of created money from the Fed. No one was prosecuted. On the contrary, the perpetrators were rewarded with enormous bonuses. It was almost as if it had all gone according to plan.
As I say, he knows his stuff. I am not aware of much push-back against Webb’s work by the fact checker class. They probably don’t understand it.
Catherine Austin-Fitts characterises Webb’s book as a warning about only ONE of the threats to our wealth and our lives posed by the great taking. She notes several other real and anticipated takings/threats that she deems to be more worrying that Webb’s specific warning about the taking of our securities. She places financial transaction freedom at the top of the threats. Just ask the Canadian truckers about that. Then there are the other threats – to food, to health, to the banks themselves, which hold our cash and mortgages – FD Roosevelt closed them down in the Great Depression – to real estate, to retirement accounts (superannuation), to all manner of investments.
A telling phrase from Webb’s story resonates with the current Australian predicament. He refers to:
“… the scale of insolvencies that are not being discussed”.
Indeed, they are not being discussed, except by the odd business journalist with open eyes, like the evergreen Robert Gottliebsen and the acerbic Terry McCrann. We are instructed not to notice. We are an insolvent nation.
Small businesses especially have been going to the wall, as a class. Part of the plan for global control by the elites? The facts fit the theory. These small firms have been triple-whammied with Covid lockdowns, the freezing up of discretionary spending as a result of rising interest rates and career uncertainty, and the destruction of downtown businesses squeezed by online retail. Some argue, without any compelling push-back, that the Covid plandemic was intended to shutter small businesses while cosseting the big corporates. It certainly worked out that way.
Which brings us to recent political events abroad.
David Webb’s breathtaking documentary (and book) and his recommendations for popular fightback coincide with some movement in the political tectonic plates. I am sure that much of the rise of the contra parties in the recent European Union elections can be put down to far more visible problems than the coming financial cataclysm foreshadowed by Webb. Much of what he describes is hidden from popular view and requiring a fairly sophisticated understanding of the workings of the international central banking cartel, and knowledge of the aforementioned derivatives, collateral, bubbles, securitisation, dematerialisation, the declining velocity of money, and the whole financialisation process. Why should the voting public know and understand all this? I didn’t. But they do understand the surface economic issues, and the distractions to which they have been subjected. Big time.
Yes, the stirrings are there, and the popular instinct is generally on the (pretend) money. The punters smell a rather large rodent. The British political scientist Matt Goodwin’s theory on the rise of populism, most recently seen at the leftist train-wreck that was the EU election. The ruling classes are clenching buttocks, all of a sudden. Goodwin’s own rise in popularity as an online pundit is itself coinciding with the sudden re-appearance of Nigel Farage and the threat posed by Reform UK to (mainly) the British Tories. It is quite a story in an otherwise hitherto boring UK election.
Goodwin names four reasons for the rise of right-of-centre grumpiness and push-back – the loss of trust in government and other key institutions, fears over the future and over the loss of national identity and the people’s traditional way of life, relative deprivation (not just by individuals but by groups as well), and the general de-alignment from traditional parties and the associated volatility in the electorate. In Europe, there is push-back against leftist Brussels. In Britain, it is, according to Farage, all about immigration, legal and otherwise, and the impact of immigration on British life. Goodwin would not disagree. He describes what he is seeing as a “perfect storm” for the dissident parties. It was a great week for we-the-people.
The British authors John Kay and Mervyn King (yes, a former central banker) have written a book about radical uncertainty. They talk, among other things, about “black swan events” of the kind that Nassim Taleb made famous. The problem, as they describe it, is dealing with an unknowable future. True enough. This is all the more reason to tune in to those with insider knowledge of the financial system, a helicopter view of global economic events AND integrity. Observers with something pretty drastic to say to us.
Here, again, is Bert Olivier, writing this time on nihilism, the great philosophical curse of our age:
Consider this: if we were not able to imagine an alternative to a certain state of affairs – such as the fraught present – and the courage to change it, things would stay as they are, or get worse.
https://brownstone.org/articles/nihilism-strikes-with-a-vengeance/
This message is highly relevant to his earlier review of David Webb’s book, to the collapsing Australian real economy and to the recent electoral events in Europe.
Catherine Austin-Fitts (The Solari Report) and David Webb both suggest strategies to counter the state of affairs in which we find ourselves. It behooves us to sit up and take notice. Perhaps the political events in the UK and in continental Europe over recent days show that, at last, and in very limited ways, the peasants are revolting. Now, they need to hold to account the new breed of European politicians, to ensure they keep their own promises and perform. That they actually roll back the power of Brussels and of Geneva. More importantly, the peasants also need to get acquainted with finance 2.0. To find out what all the big words used by Webb and his peers mean. To wise up about the ways in which the global economy has changed, massively and forever, over the last half century, and what that all means for our own financial security and our property rights, in the event of an inevitable economic depression. To cut through the complexity and opaqueness of it all. And the utter bullshit at its core.
As David Webb says:
To not know is bad. To not want to know is worse.
And again, more alarmingly as we know to have been the outcome of half a century’s relativism in education and with the replacement of political debate with ideology and propaganda:
A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe …
The masters of the universe are running the show. But, at bottom, many of them, even those high up the tree, don’t have a clue. Certainly, our elected leaders don’t. The thirty-somethings running the formerly great agencies of state don’t. Only the “heads of the snake” know it all. And they aren’t telling us about what they have constructed, over time, and with intent. They are giddy with power. Their ultimate consolation is that they know that we don’t have the slightest knowledge about the system they have built, this house of cards, and what its inevitable collapse will mean for us.
We can’t say we haven’t been warned, now. If it all comes to pass, we will own nothing, but I don’t think we’ll be happy. To re-coin a phrase.
Paul Collits
14 June 2024
Also this is so true;
The now-contract-based and massively remunerated public servants will simply produce the data that the government of the day wants in order to keep it in office and them in power.
Scary
This is a great article, thanks. Since it is so widely and well referenced, I do gently wonder if you have recently become any more skeptical/discerning regarding the Israeli arm of the military industrial complex....?