Financial assets are reflecting the evidence of currency destruction. As the US devalues and burns through cash at a record-setting pace, gold continues to gain. Gold has risen 89% in the past five years, compared to a disappointing 0.7% for the US aggregate bond index (as of May 17, 2024, according to Bloomberg). Our guest commentator explains why the government is eroding our purchasing power, and what will happen next. The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold. The money supply is rising again, and persistent price inflation is not a surprise. Price inflation occurs when the amount of currency increases significantly above private sector demand. For investors, the worst decision in this environment of monetary destruction is to invest in sovereign bonds and keep cash. The government’s destruction of the purchasing power of the currency is a policy, not a coincidence. Readers ask me why the government would be interested in eroding the purchasing power of the currency they issue. It is remarkably simple.Save 40% on our limited edition Brain Force Ultra that’s loaded with proprietary super ingredients! Monetary inflation is the equivalent of an implicit default. It is a manifestation of the lack of solvency and credibility of the currency issuer. Governments know that they can disguise their fiscal imbalances through the gradual reduction of the purchasing power of the currency and with this policy, they achieve two things: Inflation is a hidden transfer of wealth from deposit savers and real wages to the government; it is a disguised tax. Additionally, the government expropriates wealth from the private sector, making the productive part of the economy assume the default of the currency issuer by imposing the utilization of its currency by law as well as forcing economic agents to purchase its bonds via regulation. The entire financial system’s regulation is built on the false premise that the lowest-risk asset is the sovereign bond. This forces banks to accumulate currency—sovereign bonds—and regulation incentivizes state intervention and crowding out of the private sector by forcing through regulation to use zero to little capital to finance government entities and the public sector. Once we understand that inflation is a policy and that it is an implicit default of the issuer, we can comprehend why the traditional sixty-forty portfolio does not work. Currency is debt and sovereign bonds are currency. When governments have exhausted their fiscal space, the crowding-out effect of the state on credit adds to the rising taxation levels to cripple the potential of the productive economy, the private sector, in favor of constantly rising government unfunded liabilities. Economists warn of rising debt, which is correct, but we sometimes ignore the impact on currency purchasing power of unfunded liabilities. The United States’s debt is enormous at $34 trillion, and the public deficit is intolerable at nearly $2 trillion per year, but that is a drop in the bucket compared with the unfunded liabilities that will cripple the economy and erode the currency in the future. The estimated unfunded Social Security and Medicare liability is $175.3 trillion (Financial Report of the United States Government, February 2024). Yes, that is 6.4 times the GDP of the United States. If you think that will be financed with taxes “on the rich,” you have a problem with mathematics. The situation in the United States is not an exception. In countries like Spain, unfunded public pension liabilities exceed 500% of GDP. In the European Union, according to Eurostat, the average is close to 200% of GDP. And that is only unfunded pension liabilities. Eurostat does not analyze unfunded entitlement program liabilities. This means that governments will continue to use the “tax the rich” false narrative to increase taxation on the middle class and impose the most regressive tax of all, inflation. It is not a coincidence that central banks want to implement digital currencies as quickly as possible. Central Bank Digital currencies are surveillance disguised as money and a means of eliminating the limitations of the inflationary policies of the current quantitative easing programs. Central bankers are increasingly frustrated because the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy are not fully under their control. By eliminating the banking channel and thus the inflation backstop of credit demand, central banks and governments can try to eliminate the competition of independent forms of money through coercion and debase the currency at will to maintain and increase the size of the state in the economy. Gold vs. bonds shows this perfectly. Gold has risen 89% in the past five years, compared to 85% for the S&P 500 and a disappointing 0.7% for the US aggregate bond index (as of May 17, 2024, according to Bloomberg). Financial assets are reflecting the evidence of currency destruction. Equities and gold soar; bonds do nothing. It is the picture of governments using the fiat currency to disguise the credit solvency of the issuer. Considering all this, gold is not expensive at all. It is exceedingly cheap. Central banks and policymakers know that there will be only one way to square the public accounts with trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities. Repay those obligations with a worthless currency. Staying in cash is dangerous; accumulating government bonds is reckless; but rejecting gold is denying the reality of money. POWERFUL — MUST WATCH: The Globalist System Is Collapsing In Real Time, Warns Bilderberg Expert Daniel Estulin

Government interventions through central banks are the most destructive and yet the least understood by most people. Central banks’ monetary policies are the most perverse government intervention. Their consequences are dire, last for a very long time, and people don’t perceive them as problems or don’t comprehend the damage they are doing. Monetary policy (monetary expansion and artificially low interest rates) has five main consequences that harm overall living standards. Price Inflation This is the most obvious consequence, and yet, it is very misunderstood by voters. If the money that is effectively circulating in the economy (i.e., M1 and M2, or for a better perspective, the true money supply) increases, price inflation tends to increase. The expansion of the money supply destroys consumer purchasing power and makes people poorer over time. Bigger Government Government spending and indebtedness are intensified due to expansionary monetary policies (since central banks buy government bonds). More resources are allocated to pay for politicians’ and bureaucrats’ luxurious lives and for government programs that, at their best, are more expensive compared to a free market solution. Governments don’t have an incentive to allocate the resources efficiently (since they can just raise taxes, go deeper into debt, or print money), so anything that it does ends up being more expensive than it would have been without monetary intervention. Financial Assets Become Overpriced Monetary policy is behind the major financial crisis and its precedent asset bubbles.Save 40% on Ultimate Fish Oil today and improve your supplement routine & experience the world-renowned powerhouse formula! The stock market is overpriced because artificially low interest rates raise the present value of corporations’ future earnings, making their stocks go higher without having sound fundamental indicators. Artificially low rates also incentivize people to go into debt to buy stocks, which raises their prices. Plus, some central banks (like the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank) have stocks on their balance sheets, which also appreciates their prices due to the artificial demand. Real estate prices are inflated as well. Houses and buildings are what Rothbard would call “higher order” goods due to their very long capital structure. He notes, The supply of funds for investment apparently increases, and the interest rate is lowered. Businessmen, in short, are misled by the bank inflation into believing that the supply of saved funds is greater than it really is. Now, when saved funds increase, businessmen invest in “longer processes of production,” i.e., the capital structure is lengthened, especially in the “higher orders” most remote from the consumer. Overpriced real estate assets also turn houses, apartments, and commercial properties into an asset class (something to invest in and, in theory, protect oneself from the very inflation that caused the real estate prices to go up in the first place) rather than what they would be if it wasn’t for the government’s meddling: houses and apartments for living, and commercial properties for economic activities, either by renting or buying. Economic Inequality This one is linked to our previous argument. Thanks to loose monetary policy, financial assets appreciate without being backed by proper fundamentals. Richer people (the ones who have the most financial assets) get even richer not because their investments are improving companies’ productivity (providing more or better goods and services), but because their assets are being inflated by monetary policy. The financial market turns out to be less accessible for the average Jane and Joe due to the following: Stocks are more expensive and risky and therefore less attractive for one who can’t afford to lose a lot of money.The bond market is also less attractive since their prices go higher due to the artificial demand from the new money supply; hence, its rates go lower. This makes the bonds attractive for people who want to buy them as a speculation on their price (if rates go even lower, their prices go up and the investor makes a profit). Alas, since bonds are expensive, average people can’t afford the risk.Financial markets become more complex since there are a lot more tricky instruments (like derivatives) to deal with market volatility (which would be lower if not for government poking) or to increase returns (not without higher risks). And the use of such instruments by asset managers makes their expenses and fees go higher, which also increases their required minimal investments (excluding the less-fortunate people from the game). Side note: government regulations for financial markets, like the ones of agencies like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (yes, this is a private corporation, but it is a monopoly imposed by the government) and the Securities and Exchange Commission, also increase required minimal investments. So, the average Jane and Joe have fewer tools to get richer. And this keeps getting worse as long as central banks keep up with their dovish monetary policy. Housing also becomes less affordable, and average people must sacrifice a lot more (and for a much longer time) to save for buying a home. What would be a simple task turns into a long and tiresome effort. This diminished the number of first-time homebuyers, and young people had to delay it. But now, even people in their thirties are living with their parents or other relatives. And homelessness is increasing in major cities like Los Angeles and Lisbon (both foreigners and Portuguese people). Higher Time Preference Equals Less Economic Growth and More Indebtedness Artificially low interest rates destroy the incentive for savings. In many cases, even if price inflation is low, the return on savings does not compensate for the time that people didn’t use the money. The overall time preference gets higher. People are not willing to wait to spend their money. If there is no return, they might as well party right away. Indebtedness also increases for consumption instead of being used for investments that would increase productivity and economic growth. This also makes prices go higher than they would be because higher productivity tends to lower prices, and this process is, best-case scenario, delayed by lower savings. In other words, governments don’t let deflation (which would make prices go lower over time) happen. Price inflation itself also creates an incentive to spend right away (since the purchasing power gets lower every year), and artificially low interest rates make the money market (which would be an easy tool people could resort to for parking their savings) not attractive. And, since overall time preference is higher, most people don’t settle for just preserving their purchasing power (which sometimes can be achieved with gold). They want a fast and high return, a dangerous combination. So, they go to the stock market, which is overpriced thanks to a loose monetary policy, which was covered earlier. Conclusion Government interventions through central banks are the most destructive and yet the least understood by most people. It is a bad enough problem to deal with on its own, and even harder to do so when people fail to perceive its damage. Central banks are the source of most evils in the economy. POWERFUL — MUST WATCH: The Globalist System Is Collapsing In Real Time, Warns Bilderberg Expert Daniel Estulin

We must first address the reasons why international public health is now about profit and centralization, rather than the health of populations. It would be easier to ignore the World Health Assembly’s (WHA) deliberations in Geneva this week, but the opening address of the Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, deserves a response. Both the WHO and its director are completely divorcing themselves from reality, illustrating how dangerous and unfit for purpose the WHO has become. There is clearly no way that any vote should proceed on anything of importance that the WHO may be required to implement in the coming week of WHA deliberations. Tedros’s emphasis was on pandemics, and the faltering agreements intended to address their risk, the new Pandemic Agreement, and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). While these are watered down and the Pandemic Agreement may not even get to a vote, his continued justification for centering greater coordination and power at the WHO speaks volumes about the problem we face. The Covid-19 period has resulted, as Tedros notes in his address, in up to 20 million additional deaths. WHO-supported policies achieved this, for a virus whose mortality mostly occurred in chronically sick people over 75 years of age. The WHO notes that a little over 7 million are directly attributable to the virus. Many of these other 13 million occurred in low- and middle-income countries, in populations where less than 1% of people are over 75 years old and half are under twenty, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa. This is a staggering, appalling, incompetent, and entirely predictable achievement. However, it is going to get much worse. The policies the WHO promoted closed supply lines, shut down the workplaces of tens of millions of day laborers, stopped travel and tourism income on which millions of low-income people rely, closed markets, and pushed over hundreds of millions into severe poverty. They increased the indebtedness of nations globally, with direct effects on child mortality and the ability to grow future economies.URGENT! Keep Alex Jones in the fight against the NWO! Please pray & contribute at DefendJones.com today! As predicted by the WHO itself, malaria and tuberculosis deaths have increased, and they will stay higher as the impact of increased poverty bites. Funding for essential sanitation and nutrition programs has dropped as the WHO pushed for a shift in funding to mass vaccination in countries with young populations for a disease of the elderly to which they were already immune, supported with frankly idiotic slogans with more to do with advertising than public health, such as “No one is safe until everyone is safe.” In closing schools, for up to two years in some countries, the world has cemented in intergenerational poverty and inequality, overwhelmingly harming hundreds of millions of children at most future risk. Child labor has increased, and up to ten million additional girls are being forced into child marriage with the poverty and abuse that entails. When Tedros states in his opening WHA speech that “the whole world was taken hostage,” this should be what he is referring to. The world was taken hostage by the appalling people who took over public health, used the WHO as a tool with its leadership’s consent, and made hundreds of billions of dollars in profit through these harms foisted on others. Indeed, as Tedros notes, “covid has affected everybody.” Amidst all this rhetoric, the WHO is completely ignoring, and knowingly misrepresenting, what their own data tells them on the risk of natural pandemics. Whilst deliberately misleading countries and the media with claims that the risk of pandemics is rapidly increasing, they are fully aware that deaths from infectious diseases, and pandemics, have decreased over past centuries and are decreasing now. The databases and citations of reports from the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 High Level Independent Panel attest to this. The causes of infectious disease deaths predominantly revolve around poor nutrition, sanitation, and supply lines for basic medicines. All these, improving before 2020, are now put at risk. Pretending that new diagnostic technologies that allow us to distinguish small virus outbreaks from the declining background constitute increased risk is a public health fallacy that must surely be deliberate. When Tedros states that the drafting teams of the pandemic texts “operated amid a torrent of mis- and disinformation,” he is correct, but it was not from the source he suggests. So, when we are told that the “world was unprepared” for Covid-19, we should understand that we were unprepared for the hijacking of the WHO and public health policy, not for a virus that had an infection fatality rate in most countries little different than influenza. Pretending that deaths from ‘lockdowns’ were due to Covid adds to the current denial of reality. Lockdown was and should remain a term describing imprisonment. In public health it has been promoted by those who ended up gaining from the Covid debacle; private and corporate funders and their followers. There is a reason why public health previously stressed honest messaging and individual choice. If the world is to actually address the risk presented by a repeat of Covid, then it had better address its cause – which looks increasingly likely to have been a laboratory leak from gain-of-function research. Nothing in the texts of the proposed Pandemic Agreement or IHR amendments even refers to this. Spending tens of billions per year on a surveillance network for natural threats will impoverish millions and divert funds from diseases of far higher burden, but do nothing to address the problem of research laboratories being paid to enhance virus virulence in humans. The proposed PABS scheme in the Pandemic Agreement in which the WHO will oversee increased passage of pathogens between laboratories and WHO-partnered pharmaceutical companies will likely do more to raise risk than reduce it. We can all be relieved that the proposed pandemic texts are watered down from their egregious original versions and the Pandemic Agreement is unready for this WHA session. However, any increased coordination of power in the hands of the WHO, in its current state, is dangerous. The world has undergone enough damage in the past four years through misdirection and deliberate misinformation from an international agency that always knew better. Until the root causes of this are addressed, including ever-increasing influence on the organization of private individuals and corporate entities, and the glaring conflicts of interest in related public-private partnerships such as Gavi and CEPI, the world does indeed remain at increasing risk of the repeat of the disaster to which it was recently subjected. We must first address the reasons why international public health is now about profit and centralization, rather than the health of populations. This won’t happen under the current version of the WHO, and does not appear on the WHA agenda. We are facing a mass denial of reality by the WHO and its leadership. Until this is rectified, any WHA votes that grant further powers or oversight to the WHO are unlikely to be in the interests of the world’s population, or the countries within which they live. POWERFUL — MUST WATCH: The Globalist System Is Collapsing In Real Time, Warns Bilderberg Expert Daniel Estulin

"Why do they do that? Why do they use sigils and insignia of darkness in such an extraordinary and astonishing way?" he asks. Actor and podcaster Russell Brand reacted to Alex Jones’ breakdown of King Charles III’s portrait embedded with demonic imagery when mirrored several ways. “If you are King Charles, don’t have a weird satanic portrait done of yourself,” Brand joked Saturday before playing Jones’ analysis. “I mean, that is a little demonic.” Russell Brand: Alex Jones Sees Something in King Charles Portrait That No One Else Sees.HD Images of King Charles Satanic Portrait added for clarity.https://t.co/KfYsWPgxeMhttps://t.co/fekvpUHWbw pic.twitter.com/VSfYtWjYr2— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) May 28, 2024 “Why do they do that? Why do they use sigils and insignia of darkness in such an extraordinary and astonishing way?” Catch up on Alex Jones’ full breakdown of Charles’ hellish portrait:URGENT! Keep Alex Jones in the fight against the NWO! Please pray & contribute at DefendJones.com today! Learn more about King Charles and the Royal Family’s links to the occult: Watch Brand’s full segment:

by Dr. William Makis, Global Research: May 2022 – Mother, 36, most likely died from Covid Pfizer vaccine 11 days after dose, inquest told – Pathologist said the mother-of-two may still be alive had she not had the Covid vaccine A family listened in shock as a pathologist revealed his belief that a 36-year-old mother-of-two […]

from RT: The presumptive Republican nominee pledges to end US involvement in “other people’s wars” Former US President Donald Trump has reiterated his promise to swiftly end the Russia-Ukraine conflict if re-elected in November. The Republican frontrunner argued that by financing “other people’s wars” the US is increasing the likelihood of a global war, and […]

from SettingBrushfires: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/