The Vigilantes Are on the Loose

The Game Is On Were you forwarded this email? [Sign-up to The Daily Reckoning here.]( [Unsubscribe]( [Daily Reckoning] The Vigilantes Are on the Loose - A path to financial suicide… - The “barbarous relics” aren’t relics after all… - An economy in freefall… Recommended Link [Truth behind V-shaped recovery]( [Read more here...]( On March 16, exactly one week BEFORE this V began to take form… An extraordinary decision was made behind closed doors to rig markets higher. It’s why a former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs says, “every American needs to see what’s really going on behind the scenes.” Her urgent warning is now available to the public... [Click Here To See It]( Upstate New York February 6, 2021 Editor’s note: The vigilantes are coming for silver, now that the GameStop excitement is winding down. Today James Howard Kunstler shows you why it’s a war of the vigilantes against the big banks. Who wins? [James Howard Kunstler] Dear Reader, After their successful prank with GameStop, the subreddit vigilantes are aiming to send the price of silver to the silvery moon now, and, in the process, drive hedge-fund privateers and bankster short-sellers into insolvency, even if it wrecks the financial system. It’ll be a lot harder to pull off than GameStop, but they have a lot of people nervous. But the system, led by the clueless and feckless Federal Reserve, was already beating a path to financial suicide. Two decades of trying to paper over America’s broken business model with money-from-nowhere, and failure of the authorities to regulate the games being played around that, switched off the price-discovery mechanism of markets. Price-discovery is the main function of markets: to send correct signals as to the true price of everything, soybeans, iron ore, stocks, what-have-you, and, most importantly, the exact price of money itself, borrowed over a period of time: that is, term interest rates, meaning the cost of debt. The price of silver (and of gold, too) have been among the most manipulated, suppressed, and perverted for many years because the rising price against paper currencies would signal the falling value of money, which would inform the people that their standard-of-living is falling — and nothing stirs up political anger like that. So, the regulatory authorities looked the other way when their cronies in big banks such as J.P. Morgan played games to suppress precious metal prices with a revolving short-selling scheme that regularly knocked down the price to discourage buyers from investing in precious metals. The “Barbarous Relics” Aren’t Relics It’s been fifty years since precious metals enjoyed any official peg with the U.S. dollar, but for five thousand years previously gold and silver were money itself and paper currencies became mere representations of that money. That relationship ended in 1971 when President Nixon closed the “window” that allowed foreign countries to redeem gold in exchange for dollars they accumulated from the commercial trade of goods — and, our dollar being the world’s supreme reserve currency, the rest of the world’s currencies followed. Despite all efforts since then by banking authorities to denigrate the value and the role of gold and silver in financial affairs, the “barbarous relics” retained a persistent influence in men’s minds because of their intrinsic qualities. These were: the vested energy they represented from mining and refining, their physical durability, portability, and divisibility, their freedom from counterparty obligations, and, especially in modern times, their vital usefulness in electronics and other industrial applications. The latter quality is greatly reinforced by the powerful wish to transition from a fossil fuel economy to an alt-energy economy of solar cells and wind turbines — a wish that probably won’t come true. Recommended Link [WARNING: New Rule to Impact 1,200 Banks in America]( [Read more here...]( Please take one minute to review this URGENT letter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC is the agency that regulates about 1,200 banks in the U.S. And it just issued a letter announcing a major change to our banking system that could impact 234 million Americans. If you have any money in the bank... [See How This Could Impact You]( Some of the vigilantes frankly express the desire to wreck the degenerate banking system altogether, a great purge of evil to restore something like God-fearing accountability, moving toward a fresh and honest re-start of markets and banking. I’m not convinced that we would get any such orderly re-start in the sense that global banking could be reconstructed along pre-2020 lines. Rather, wrecking the banks in a daisy-chain of shattered obligations would be an express ticket to the Palookaville of neo-medievalism, and probably in a sharp, disorderly, violent, and deadly episode of losing everything that has made us civilized. But let’s think about something more pleasant, like the freefalling economy... Freefall Outside the razor-wired DC perimeter, with its bomb-proof bureaucracy, the economy is in freefall. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 779,000 people filed for first-time unemployment the week ended January 30. The news media called that “a beat” because it was under the 830,000 expected. It’s been that way week-after-week this year of Covid-19. Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 4.8% in the fourth quarter of 2020, the largest quarterly decline in the measure since the second quarter of 1981. Yes, forty years ago, when the U.S. population was 226 million (it’s now 330 million). The stock market responded by smashing new all-time highs. Bad “optics?” How do you think the value of shares manages to go up, up, up, and away, day-after-day, while the value of the economic activity goes down, down, down day-after-day? Must be Modern Monetary Magic, like the Federal Reserve purchasing $80-billion a month in U.S. Treasury bond issues and another $40-billion in mortgage-backed securities for a grand total of $120-billion a month. The real monetary magic, of course, is that it’s possible to have a Wall Street boom while the economy collapses. The nation’s assets have already been stripped, so where is all this “value” actually coming from? Answer: from the false expectation of enormous future American productivity. It’s false because it’s based on the creation of debt that can’t possibly be paid back… ever. It’s not based on investment in future productive enterprise. The economy won’t be fixed by policy because the things that have to happen to fix it will be resisted to the death by the parasitical entities feeding on what little remains. Recommended Link [A Storm is Coming]( [Read more here...]( The clock has already started on the biggest financial shift in 20 years, according to one former hedge fund manager. He says, “Fortunes will be made and lost – and the decisions you make now could affect your wealth for the next decade.” [Here's Exactly How To Prepare]( Walmart For instance, Walmart. Do you think it’s unhealthy that all the profit in American commerce is funneled into Bentonville, Arkansas? It used to be distributed in hundreds of thousands of small businesses in tens of thousands of U.S. towns and cities. What do you think will die first: Walmart or the organism it’s feeding on? Since the dynamic at work is emergent and non-linear, other forces can come between these relationships and change things. We are already in conflict with China, the land that supplies most of the merchandise in Walmart. The conflict right now is mostly playing out in the capture of U.S. corporate and cultural enterprise, and in cyberwarfare, and it’s liable to hotten up around the continued sovereignty of Taiwan (America’s China). It’s difficult to assign intentions to another country but it appears that China’s China wishes to cancel the USA as the fading hegemon on the world stage, at least neutralize us, and perhaps dominate us. Mr. Trump is no longer in place to resist that, and the country might be forced to consider all those deals that our new president, “China Joe,” enjoyed from the Biden family’s business ventures there over the years. Emergently, then, the Big Box business model could fail, and in fairly short order, which would at least give Americans a chance to self-reorganize the production and distribution of goods in our own country. It sure won’t be like 1957 again, but it would give an awful lot of idle people more to do when they get up in the morning. Wait for it, and plan accordingly. Regards, James Howard Kunstler for The Daily Reckoning Editor’s note: There’s [something highly unusual happening in the gold market right now]( that you need to be aware of. It has nothing to do with Reddit or anything like that. But Jim Rickards says it has potentially enormous implications for your own personal wealth and your retirement. That’s not hyperbole. But Jim says shocking details about this rare occurrence are being ignored. What exactly is going on, and how could it impact you directly? A [“Gold Window”]( is opening. And Jim’s found a little-known investment play that [moved 21 times higher on average than the price of gold bullion itself during the last Gold Window!]( It’s an amazing story, something you won’t hear anywhere else as far as we know. Jim says this might be the most important information he’s ever released. He thinks you’ll agree when you [go here to see it.]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for reading The Daily Reckoning! We greatly value your questions and comments. Please send all feedback to [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:dr@dailyreckoning.com) [James Howard Kunstler][James Howard Kunstler]( is perhaps best known for his 2005 book [The Long Emergency]( which predicted the financial meltdown and the implications of the peak oil problem. His 1993 book, [The Geography of Nowhere]( about the fiasco of suburbia, is a campus cult classic among the architecture and urban planning students. Add feedback@dailyreckoning.com to your address book: [Whitelist us]( Additional Articles & Commentary: [Daily Reckoning Website]( Join the conversation! Follow us on social media: [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter]( [RSS Feed]( [YouTube]( The Daily Reckoning is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to Paradigm Press delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your Daily Reckoning e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from The Daily Reckoning, feel free to [unsubscribe here.]( Please read our [Privacy Statement](. For any further comments or concerns please email us at [feedback@dailyreckoning.com](mailto:feedbackdailyproof@dailyreckoning.com). 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