(Shoebat Sunday Special)
The response of governments around the world to the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in the shuttering of economies and the shattering of business and long-standing trade agreements as well as monetary policy. The most shocking of all the declarations to come from this has been the US decision to spend 40% of her current national GDP by pursuing a socialist policy of giving checks to every American taxpayer with the intention of “stimulating” the economy.
While many have been welcoming the coming “Trump stack” of money to their accounts, I have aggressively warned this is a horrible idea because it will result in the hyperinflation of the currency, leading to the destruction of the US dollar, the implosion of the current state of the global economic paradigm, and the direct creation of conditions for a global war.
In this article, I want to take some time to explain what money is, its relationship to society, and the effects of monetary policy on the political situation around the world. The motivation for this comes from the recognition that we are entering a period in human history not seen since the Great Depression and also the unprecedented bankruptcy of the largest economy in history, and that people need to understand what is happening in an easy to understand but detailed way, as one must emphasize both in what is truly an age we are living in of Biblical proportions.
The Economy – Politics – Culture cycle
All aspects of society can be reduced to three fundamental divisions regardless of place or time, based upon the functions they serve. One part of society deals with the flow of goods and services between peoples and groups. One part of society describes the relationship between peoples and their neighbors. Another part of society pertains to the meaning of society itself and the shared experiences or beliefs that people have. These three parts are, following the above order economy, politics, and culture, and while they tend to flow in a “cyclical” pattern into each other this way, they are all interconnected to each other and mutually influence each other as they change just as the shape of the different parts of a wheel affects how the whole wheel moves.
Let us use a simple example to describe this.
Say that we are living in ancient times, and there are two people from two different families. We’ll call them Ed and Joe.
Ed has a little piece of land where he grows wheat. Ed does a very good job of growing wheat. Joe has a little piece of land where he raises chickens. Joe does a very good job raising chickens. Ed doesn’t raise chickens, and Joe doesn’t grow wheat. It doesn’t matter why they don’t, just that they don’t do such.
One day, Ed and Joe meet. Ed gives Joe a basket full of wheat. Joe gives Ed a cage with chickens.
This is an example of economy- Ed and Joe are exchanging their different forms of value- wheat and chickens -with each other for their mutual benefit.
Now, nothing in life is as ever as simple as this because there are differences between people, capabilities, and societies. Let’s add some spice to the story.
Let’s say that Ed’s wife doesn’t want him to work on Saturday. Likewise, let’s say that Joe’s wife doesn’t want him to work on Sunday. It doesn’t matter why, just that they don’t do such.
Ed wants to trade with Joe on Sunday because he is working, but Joe can’t, and when Joe wants to trade with Ed on Saturday, he can’t. In response, Ed and Joe set up an agreement or a policy that they will only trade with each other on Monday through Friday. This is an example of politics.
Now let’s take this example even further.
Let’s say that Ed and Joe, after they trade with each other, go back to their families and cook with the food. They really like having bread from wheat and chicken stew. They eat this every week with their families. The eating of the bread and chicken becomes a shared experience that, while Ed and Joe are two different people from two different families, binds their families together in something they have in common that distinguished them from other groups who are very different. This is an example of culture.
Now, let’s go for one more step.
Say that over time, they eat each others’ wheat and chickens, and their families grow. Ed needs to buy more chickens, and Joe needs to buy more wheat, so they in turn have to grow more, and they make more money from each other. Likewise, the increased business between each other requires more detailed ways of determining how to distribute said items between each other. This in turn raises the value of the wheat and chicken shared between the two even more in their shared experience to something that is special. Thus the cycle is complete- economy flows into politics, which flows into culture, and back into economics. It is a cycle that has been replicating since the beginning of time.
However, society is far more complicated than just wheat and chickens, just as people are. The dynamics of life are incredibly diverse, just as people are different.
The Trade Problem, and the Money Solution
So let’s take the same example with Ed and Joe, and let’s have some fun with it.
Say that one say, Ed brings over his basket full of wheat to Joe, and Joe brings over his cage of chickens. Ed looks at Joe’s chickens and says “those chickens are scrawny”. Now Joe has been feeding his chickens and they look fine to him, and he is expecting to get a full basket of wheat for them. Likewise, Joe looks at Ed’s grain basket, and he says “why is that grain moldy”. Now Ed noticed that the seeds have been smaller and darker on his grains, but they taste the same and certainly are not mold, and he also expects to get a full cage of chickens.
What do we do now? Ed does not feel like he is going to get an honest trade with Joe, and Joe feels the same about Ed. They usually trade, and they want to make sure they get their full value with each other and are not deprived either by overpaying or underpaying, since they like each other, but they are not sure how to make this work.
This is where money comes into service. But before we go further, let’s explain what money is and how it works in any culture or society.
The definition of money that I am using is a mutually agreed upon means of storing and/or communicating value between persons and groups. Money is nothing more and nothing less.
This means that money can be anything that you want it to be. It does not have to be pieces of paper and little coins, but it is whatever you want. Rocks, sticks, cookies, t-shirts, pairs of shorts, spatulas, matchbox toy cars, water bottles, metal pipes, giraffes, elephants, houses, human ears, boogers, giant statues of George Washington, are all legitimate forms of money so long as whatever the item in question is a mutually agreed upon means of storing and communicating value.
Now in the above list, I put down some very ridiculous things. Cookies? Maybe to elementary school students trying to barter lunch with each other. But what about boogers? Does anybody really thing that is a good idea? And what kind of freak would want to trade in severed human ears? It is realistic to expect to use giraffes, elephants, or giant statues of George Washington as money? After all, what do you if you want to buy a “one million elephant (for dollar) home?”
As we can see, anything can be used as money, but there need to be limitations on what money is. This is not to say that money CANNOT be anything, but that it has to be able to serve a functional purpose. Some characteristics that define money throughout history, regardless of the culture or time or peoples, is that money:
-Is universally recognizable in a cultural context. For example, a cowrie or shell might be good money to a Pacific Island tribal culture, but if he sailed over to China or Indonesia, it would not be recognized or valuable.
-Is fungible, meaning that it can can be converted into something else quickly. For example, I cannot easily convert a giraffe into something of value for another person. However, I can with a paper bill or a metal coin.
-Has a natural (or in certain cases, carefully manufactured) scarcity to it. This means that the item does not exist in large quantities, and so because there is less of it, those who have it can demonstrate they have value. For example, sand is easy to find, and anybody can get it with no efforts. However, gold is very difficult to get- one has to find nuggets, or perhaps pan in a stream for a tiny flake. This is why gold has much more value when compared with sand.
-Can be easily transferred. One might want to use elephants as money, but how does one get them to the marketplace? However, compare this with a small coin. A coin can be placed into one’s pocket and one can walk away with no problem and trade that coin for a thing that one wants, and the merchant can take the coin and put it in his pocket and bring it back to his place of business.
-Can hold value with time. A TV dinner could be used as value, but it loses value with time because the value storage will rot away naturally, and fast once it is unfrozen. However, a strip of paper (such as a US dollar, European Euro, Turkish Lira, or other forms of currency) are able to generally keep their value with time. Thus “one dollar” can sit in a closet and still have the face value of “one dollar”, but a TV dinner left in a closet would turn into a smelly and gross pile of filth in hours.
People quickly figured out that certain things work very well as money and other things do not. Two of the most common forms of money that developed from this are coins made of specific metals such as gold, silver, copper, brass, and even steel, and pieces of paper with special markings that are difficult to copy, such as bills. This is the reason for the association of “money” with coins and bills, because they are the most effective forms to serve the purpose of communicating value, which is what money is.
However, there are also some exceptions to this, usually for special cases. The “tally stick” of England is perhaps the most famous example of this and was used for centuries in the UK up until the year 1826 and in the case of Switzerland, it was used into the 20th century.
The “tally stick” is exactly what it sounds like. It is a wooden stick split in two parts, with one side held by an individual and the other side by the bank, to indicate debts, payments, and value. It was the only way to pay the royal tax to the English Crown, and while some people may think this is “primitive”, as note above, it was used by the Bank of England and was the basis upon which the British Empire was built.
Yes, the British Empire was built and funded upon wooden sticks as money.
Another wonderful thing about money is that, one may have noticed from this, it has the ability to fix values of goods and services in a given culture. Thus any object can be assigned a “value” equivalent to a certain amount of money for which one can exchange for any particular object.
This is the power of money and its importance as a means of value. Money is critical to a society, as it allows for the smooth interchange of goods and with it the smooth social intercourse between people, allowing for relationships to grow and blossom and great things to be constructed from them, from local communities to empires that go around the whole world.
Having considered this, let’s return to our example of Ed and Joe.
Ed and Joe now have money- let’s say it is a little gold coin. Both men have a few little gold coins. Likewise, let’s say that the price of a chicken is one gold coin, and the price of a basket of wheat is four gold coins, and three chickens fit in a cage. Ed gives Joe his basket of wheat, and Joe gives Ed four gold coins. Likewise, Joe gives Ed his chickens, and Ed gives Joe three gold coins.
Did Ed “cheat” Joe? Absolutely not! Why? Because 1 chicken = 1 gold coin, and Joe had 3 gold coins in his cage. Likewise, 1 basket of wheat = 4 gold coins. Their problem with a difference in trade based on their perception was solved by the employment of money, allowing them to make an equal exchange between each other with ease.
But what if Ed did not want to buy Joe’s chickens, or Joe did not want to buy Ed’s wheat? It is not a problem, because either man can walk away with no problem, and if each man wants to, go and trade with another.
Now let’s say that Ed does buy the chickens and sells his wheat. He now has four gold coins. As he is walking back to his home, he sees a man who he does not know selling vegetables. Ed does not know who he is, or if the man could trade some of the chickens he has for vegetables. However, Ed has money. He goes to the man and offers to trade chickens, but the man says that he does not like chicken (maybe his wife doesn’t like it, or he has an allergy, or the taste is unappealing to him-the reason is not important) so he does not want a trade. However, Ed knows that a basket of vegetables costs 2 gold coins. Ed gives the man two coins instead, and the man gives him vegetables. Thus it is the problems caused by trading objects are eliminated through the use of money.
When money goes bad
Money is a great thing, but what happens when problems with money happen? I’m not talking about simple overspending, but when the money itself begins to become ineffective? This can happen in many ways, but the most common and most troubling is when it breaks down because of human manipulation, usually done by people who want to manipulate value so they can steal from others under the cover of legality.
Let’s introduce another character to our story with Ed and Joe. We’ll call him Aaron.
Aaron is a rich man but is also dishonest. He sees that Ed and Joe use gold coins for money. Aaron buys a bunch of round, coin-shaped discs and some gold-colored paint. He starts painting the metal discs gold. He works all night, until he has a box filled with lots of little gold-colored metal discs, almost unable to be distinguished from a gold coin.
The next day, Aaron gets up and goes to see Ed. He buys wheat from Ed, and pays him with the gold-colored discs. Ed, thinking that the discs are money, doesn’t realize the trick that Aaron is playing on him. Aaron then goes to Joe and buys chickens in the same way, using his gold-colored discs as money and tricking Aaron into thinking they are real coins. Eventually, he starts selling the very things that Ed and Joe once sold to each other for real money from them, while still paying both with his pseudo currency. Because of the problems, Ed and Joe trust Aaron more than each other and will buy from him while Aaron pays them in fake money while getting real money in return.
This cycle continues for a while until Ed and Joe discover, somehow, that Aaron was selling them fake money while taking real money in return. He tries to deny it, but when the truth is revealed, that Aaron was stealing wealth, both men put him to a miserable death.
This story never happened as a separate tale in its entirely unto itself, but it is a story that repeats throughout many cultures where some people try to manipulate the currency or means of exchange of a society for their own gain at the expense of the masses to the point of causing social crises and wars. This manipulation can take many forms but all involve the abuse of the means of exchange itself by turning the pursuit and acquisition of it into an end unto itself to the point where it takes on a life of its own as opposed to being a means of exchange for real goods. It is a quality related to sodomy, since while the sodomite makes an act which is fertile into something that is sterile, this makes the sterile nature of money into something that is unnaturally fertile. This sin is called usury, and has been commonplace throughout the Western world and now is the basis of the worldwide financial system.
Understanding banks and usury
Banks rose out of a need to balance the ability to safely store and manage large sums of money. Consider our example of Ed and Joe again, and with the involvement of Aaron’s cousin David.
Say that Ed and Joe trade with each other but also with other people, and they both earn a lot of gold coins from doing it. A natural question arises- Where can Ed and Joe safely keep their gold coins?
Let’s say that David happens to own a really big vault with armed guards. David says that he can keep your money- and others too -safe in his heavily armed vault for a small fee. Ed and Joe think this is a great idea- and it is a great idea -so this is what they do.
However, there is also another problem that we have. David, being a cousin of Aaron, while he is not as wretched as Aaron is, still has some of his tendencies. David is tempted to go into the vault and take some money for himself, but he does not. However, sitting on all of that money gives David an idea- can I loan out the money in the vault to other people, so that they pay me back as well with a usage fee for the use of the money in my vault? Nobody needs to know how much is actually in the vault, because the assets are recorded on paper. The only issue would be if everybody tried to get their gold coins back at the same time.
This is the creation here of not just modern banking, but the concept of the “fractional reserve”, which means that a fraction of the money- usually only 10% -is in a bank at any time while 90% is on loan.
What this means is say you have an account with 1000 dollars in it at your bank. This means that $900 is being loaned out, and $100 actually allocated to you is there. Now this does not mean you cannot go to your bank, close your account, and get all $1000 back. You CAN- but just because other people have their accounts open. If all or a lot of people tried to get their money back, it would collapse the bank because there would not be enough money in the vault to pay them all, and historically speaking, David would meet the same fate as his cousin in the previous example.
Why would David loan money out? Because while he makes money from fees, it is very, very little. Banks make most of their money by making loans, and if David is not making loans, he is not making profits for the most part.
Banking is essential to society, but this is one of its weak points. It can be manipulated easily to take advantage of people by making loans that are unable to be paid for any number of reasons. Banking, while critical to a nation, is also a tremendous social responsibility for society but also the lender.
In the case of a bank, or other money house lender, the lender has a moral and a social obligation to make good loans and attempt to provide the best security to see that he would be paid back in full. There are several parts to this, which include the fact that:
-All loans are a risk
-Money loaned will be tied up for a time (i.e. unusable, since it is on loan)
-It is a business service, and legitimate services require fees for maintenance and profit
The question with usury is never one of seeking to say that lenders do not have a right to try to protect their investments, to earn money, and to try to balance risks while making a reasonable profit. Rather, the problem is that money is compiled on top of money loaned with fees that compound on top of fees that are calculated as a part of the original balance– it does not matter if they are high or low, but that money is being charge on the principle (the original borrowed amount, for our purposes) plus the fees from previous pay periods -as a total sum that prevent a loan from being paid off in full to the detriment of the borrower to often questionable borrowers. Thus the bank goes from being a provider of a good and socially important service into a vehicle of intentional or unintentional enslavement and social anarchy.
Let’s revisit the examples again, but this time with David and Aaron together. Aaron wants to still make fake money by counterfeiting, and David wants to run his lending-funded-by-savings operation he calls a bank. David tells Aaron that he has to work with real money, and Aaron tells David that as a bank, if he cannot issue his own currency yet (note the yet), he can set the “usage fees” for money lended to whatever he wants, based on his own standards. Sure, David can use a “standard” that he sets, but it is based solely on metrics determined by David, and because it is being done as a “legal” contract, David can make not just a usage fee, but charge fees for money use which the next month includes the fee plus the amount borrowed.
For example, David loans Joe $1000 with a monthly fee of $50 as a percent of use. Thus next month, Joe does not owe $1050, but $1050 PLUS the percent fee, which based on how David calculates it, it is now $52, for a total of $1102 ($1050 + $52). The reason why the fee is $52 and not $50 is because the fee is calculated not as a fixed amount based on the actual amount loaned, but a percent of the total value, meaning loaned money plus fees.
Thus David is not only charging Joe for variable fees on the money loaned, but fees on top of fees in a never-ending cycle that makes it very hard for Joe to pay off his original loan, and allows David to make disproportionate profits from a small amount by the abuse of business fees.
Thus our character for this part, David, just invented the traditional definition of usury as it applied to the prohibitions and repeated condemnations of interest on loans in both the Catholic Faith and Islam. This is the reason why usury is considered a sin, because it goes far beyond the call for justice to a lender and turns the lender into an enslaver of one’s economic livelihood. The “borrower is the slave of the lender” as is stated in Sacred Scripture not just by borrowing money, but because what is owned unnaturally grows and takes great efforts to stop it, if it can be stopped at all, and is why practices such as “interest free loans” have developed, for they try to balance the needs for profit and business maintenance and risk with against the anarchy and absolute enslavement that usury inclines to by its nature.
How “fiat” currency works
In the examples I have used, I have spoken of money tied to a physical form of wealth, which in this case is a gold coin. But as I noted, wealth is not necessarily something that is intrinsic to one form, but is a recognized means of exchange between peoples that is portable, fungible, has scarcity, and holds value. It can be anything which does this.
Fiat currency is a great thing because it allows for the money supply to expand and contract, thus allowing a government to control the access to credit and theoretically, to expand borrowing powers. However, there are always two problems with fiat currency:
1) It must be used for the public benefit as it requires a high level of trust and can be easily abused
2) It almost always must be replaced by another currency in about 40 years maximum due to intrinsic tendencies to devalue
The danger of fiat currency is in that because it can be printed as one chooses to (fiat), it requires self-control as well as a great amount of personal responsibility in order to see that it does not drive the values of one’s money to nothing by overprinting. This is a common problem throughout history, and is greatly exacerbated when there is no moral control in society because a bad actor who has control over a fiat money press can print himself enough money to purchase the entire world and yet enough to impoverish it at the same time.
Since fiat currencies allow for credit expansion as well as contraction, the human tendency is to overprint, and as a result, the historical average lifecycle for a fiat currency is about 40 years (the US is currently at year 47). After this point, the old currency would have to be “retired” and a new one created, any previous debts written down, and the value of the previous wealth transferred to the new monetary unit at a fixed rate. For example, 1 new dollar = 1.1 old dollars.
This is also why gold, silver, and other metals are trusted throughout history, because they cannot grow in value, but tend to preserve value when transitioning between different means of communicating the same value.
The American Case
Having explained these basic concepts in a simple way, let’s now understand why America is in the awful fiscal shape that she is.
The US dollar is NOT under the control of the US government. The proof is on the money itself with the words “Federal Reserve Note”. The Federal Reserve is a private corporation- it is as “federal” as Federal Express. It has been this way since its creation in 1913. It is not bound to the government.
The US government does not print money. Rather, she “borrows” money from the Federal Reserve Bank that she then prints (yes, the government has to print her own money that she borrows from another private entity) on which she is charged usury.
This about this. If there are $100 US dollars in existence that are literally borrowed into being, how does one pay back the Federal Reserve with usury?
The answer is not about making enough money or not. The matter is that there does not exist enough money in the form of US dollars to ever pay back the Federal Reserve. It is not about if somebody takes Pesos, Rupees, Yen, Rubles, Euros, Yuan, Lira, or any other currency and converts them to dollars. The fact is that there are only so many dollars in existence, and one can only convert to what exists.
The only way to “pay” any interest is by borrowing more money, but since usury is charged on that, it becomes impossible to pay, and the balance just increases.
The currency was designed this way- so that it could never be paid back so that in time, the stockholders of the bank could claim ownership over the government itself.
Up until 1973, the US dollar was pegged to a value against gold and silver. If one looks at a dollar before this period, one will see written on the bill that it was a “silver certificate” for which a person could exchange (theoretically) for a dollar worth of silver on demand.
Since 1973, the dollar was based on the faith and credit of the US government to pay its debts (which are as noted above by their very nature unpayable), this was the second and possibly an even greater scam. It is also why around that time the US opened relations with China, because the long-term plan was to undermine and destroy China in the future. It is also why manufacturing was immediately outsourced.
The explanation is simple. Make Chinese manufacturers dependent on US product purchase, and if the US pulls out, the Chinese economy would collapse. This is creating a forced co-dependency. Then, purchase as many goods as possible from China using the US Dollar’s good credit. Give China promises to pay in dollars in exchange for goods. Eventually, once the debt balance in high enough, the US can find a reason to declare bankruptcy and since she is the world currency standard, she is accountable to no one. She will have pulled off one of the biggest robbery in history, getting lots of stuff cheap, providing a reason to go to war with China, and inciting nationalism in her people while leaving China with a pile of worthless promises to pay that she cannot collect on.
As for the common man in the US? Did the true owners in finance, business, and now data ever care about the common man? America has a long history of eugenics, and those people do not care even if millions suffer so long as they earn their money for what they view as a future and long-term investments.
A similar situation happened with Germany in Europe involving the Euro. Say what one wants, but the German dominance over the Euro as a creditor nation was intended to entice the nations of southern Europe to buy cheap goods from Germany and eventually do so on credit. When they could not pay the loans back, Germany could point to them and scream they were “cheated” and after the Euro would naturally crash, Germany could revive either a new Euro or perhaps even a Deutschmark, and then having rallied the anger of her people, could justify expropriating assets from southern Europe up to and also military invasion.
The dollar was meant to die. The Euro was meant to die. They were not set up to help people, but to economically enslave others. Russia has tried to do similar but with much less success, and France currently does this to the nations of West and Central Africa by way of the West African Franc and the Central African Franc, for while her former colonies are “free”, she uses financial control over them to ensure her geopolitical relevance in the world. It is the reason why in spite of all of the talk about the “sissy” French, they have the fifth most powerful military in the world and the second most powerful Navy in the world.
Government does not exist for you. It exists to make wealthy people who hate you even wealthier who control the functions and resources of government. These people view you as a farm animal for them to exploit as they please.
Trump’s Money Printing
Following the lessons I gave above, Trump’s money printing by way of the Families First Coronavirus Stimulus Act is 40% of the US GDP. This will destroy the economy because as explained above, as the prevalence of money increases (more common/less scarce), the value of the money (what it is worth) goes down. Thus a cup of coffee may increase in price from $3 to $5, and this is not because a cup of coffee itself is worth more, but because the value of the money has debased.
A lot of people have praised Trump for this, but Obama is the one who is going to get the last laugh. There are many things that Obama has done that are not good, and many have said he was the worst president yet. However, Trump will go down as even worse by the fact that he signed this bill because there is a very strong chance it is going to destroy the US economy and thus give Trump his biggest bankruptcy yet- the complete bankruptcy of the US dollar.
This seems to be a major reason why the Democrats are acting in such a way so as to lose the 2020 election. They could win, but they do not want to because Trump is going to be the person on whom the historical blame of “destroying the dollar” will take place.
If you think economic turmoil is bad right now, watch what happens as prices rise.
The idea then would be to bring in a Democrat in 2024 as a new FDR figure, which Shoebat.com has concerns about that this person may be a woman, sodomite, or both.
But politics aside, money printing always leads to devaluation and if done enough, the complete loss of value cause by printing that leads to very high prices but with the ability to purchase very little, or hyperinflation.
This is what the problem is, and where Trump’s money printing venture is going.
It existed long before him.
It was built by design to fail based on principle of economics that exist throughout history.
It was expected to fail ,but to have the ability to survive long enough so that its failure could be controlled for political leverage.
It is failing now on Trump’s watch, as expected.
You are living history.
You cannot stop this from happening.
What you can do, if you choose is to be smart and to use these principles to position yourself for the inevitable currency “reset.”
Don’t think Mad Max- think reset -because all social functions have to go on as they always do, even in war-torn zones throughout the world.
Money may be the root of many evils, but it is just a means to an end, which is commerce and wealth that leads to power and the evils that one may choose to do in the name of continuing one’s own power.
The choice is and always was yours.