Don’t Open This if You’re an Optimist

Forecast 2023 [The Daily Reckoning] January 07, 2023 [WEBSITE]( | [UNSUBSCRIBE]( Don’t Open This if You’re an Optimist - What the Green New Deal really is… - Will inflation switch to deflation this year?… - Every major American institution has failed us… [The Solution to America's Retirement Wealth Massacre]( By clicking the link above you agree to receive email updates and special offers from The Right Side & Gold and Silver Summit. We will not share your email address with anyone. And you can opt out at any time. [Privacy Policy.]( 2022 was brutal for retirement portfolios. Like it or not, it's about to get a whole lot worse. But there is something you can do about it, and we'll show you all the details at our upcoming Gold & Silver Summit LIVE on Jan 12, 2023 @ 7 pm EST. Most investors will see their retirement accounts decimated further in 2023. You, however, have a chance to weather the storm and come out ahead. [Click Here To Register For Free]( By clicking the link above you agree to receive email updates and special offers from The Right Side & Gold and Silver Summit. We will not share your email address with anyone. And you can opt out at any time. [Privacy Policy.]( Saratoga Springs, New York January 7, 2023 Editor’s note: James Howard Kunstler isn’t particularly known for his cheery outlook. Today’s reckoning will not change that perception. James gives his outlook for 2023, and where he sees the country going generally. [James Howard Kunstler] JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER Dear Reader, It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia and cold sweat. But it is an inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils and candied violets. 2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political and cultural collapse — a hat trick of calamity. And he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180 degrees contra to America’s public interest — cheered on by a thinking class that has obviously lost its collective mind. All you can really say is that the folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin. They’ve tanked whatever’s left of the U.S. economy with an array of surefire idiotic maneuvers. By spending trillions of dollars that don’t exist to buy votes, they’ve inflated away our money’s purchasing power — an Econ 101-level mistake. The Great Green Swindle Meanwhile, the “Green New Deal” is a swindle, an out-front, in-your-face nefarious operation to subvert Western Civ. The “Green New Deal,” based on a combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice, includes the deliberate undermining of what’s left of America’s oil industry by canceling pipelines and drilling licenses on public lands, draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other efforts to sabotage what’s left. There is no way we can run our society as currently outfitted on any combination of alt energies. All the greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course of things. Prediction: In 2023, we’ll hear the first rumblings about “nationalizing the oil industry,” which will be a giant step toward killing it altogether, given the all-around incompetence of government. [SECRET: You won’t see this on Youtube or any government website]( I just released a hidden video that you won’t find on YouTube or any government website… A video that will reveal secrets shared by one of the U.S. Government's most legendary insiders… A secret that I’ve used to predict terrorist attacks on behalf of the CIA. [Click Here To Watch This Video Now]( The strategy of changing out oil-based cars and trucks for electric vehicles (EVs) is a loser on several counts beyond the disruption and instability facing U.S. oil production. One, it’s premised on the fantasy that we can continue living in a suburban sprawl arrangement by other means. Two, the electric grid is too inadequate and fragile to support the charging of so many millions of EVs in addition to everything else we ask it to do. Three, the middle class is being decimated, so there are fewer credit-worthy customers for cars priced out of their shrinking budgets anyway. Four, far less capital will be available for consumer loans. The car industry itself may not survive the repossession orgy coming in 2023 for defaulted auto loans. That shortfall will infect banking, too. The economy is already hurting. The “Green New Deal” will cut its wobbly legs off. “Globalism Is Done” We are exiting the current system anyway, like it or not. This gets to the heart of the conundrum we face. Everything organized at the giant scale is veering into failure: empires, global corporations, huge cities, giant universities, giant farms, you name it. Their business models are broken. The activities these things represent have to get smaller, finer and more regional. As a general proposition, globalism is done. That got underway in earnest with the COVID shutdowns. Now, geopolitical friction gets worse and trade relations deteriorate further. There will still be trade between nations, but much reduced. Global supply chains are already wrecked, especially for specialized mechanical replacement parts and electronic components. It will be harder to fix cars, trucks, turbines, really any sort of machine, including computers and things run by them. A lot of commercial activity will just stop. The Financialization of America Here at home, America’s economy largely hinges on finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity. In real life, prosperity requires producing things of value, not just trading increasingly abstract financial instruments purporting to represent money. Suffice it to say we’ve run out the string on this stunt. All we’re left with now is the debt markers, documents that purport to represent wealth. The collateral is all the stuff we produced previously that is still standing: buildings, developed properties, public works. A lot of this stuff is deteriorating quickly, losing its value — for instance, the tens of millions of suburban houses built with shoddy, short-lived materials like strand board and vinyl. Financialization led to the current inflation in our debt-based money system. More borrowing becomes more money going into existence, chasing a declining amount of goods as production falls off and supply lines choke. Services also suffer. People can’t afford to eat out, get acupuncture, visit hairdressers. [Response Requested 1/1000th of an ounce of gold available for you]( As a The Daily Reckoning reader, Jim Rickards is offering you 1/1000th of an ounce of gold when you upgrade your account. It will come in the form of a “Gold Back” - a new type of gold currency that’s starting to spread across America. If you have not responded to Jim’s offer yet, and want to know how to claim yours… Please click the link below for details. Thanks! Amber Anderson Customer Service [Claim Your New Gold Back Currency]( Will Inflation Switch to Deflation? When the inflation is bad enough, say more than 10% annually, it will cause enough economic damage to provoke a big contraction in activity, bringing on a deluge of loan defaults on mortgages, car payments and corporate obligations. Loan defaults cause money to disappear from the system. This flips inflation into deflation. The bond market is blowing up as this occurs, because bonds are debts and they’re not being serviced or paid off. The imploding bond market infects the stock markets and they crash, too. Before long, nobody has money, except people who invested in gold and silver. Prediction: The change-over from inflation to deflation comes in summer of 2023 and gathers momentum into the fall. The implosion leads to economic conditions worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s because our social and family arrangements have disintegrated along with our towns and cities. Civil disorder ignites. The government attempts lockdowns, but this time without a disease to blame it on. It’s no longer safe to be a politician. America at the Crossroads America is at a crossroads, a threshold, a tipping point. Every vital institution in the land has been at least partially wrecked, most especially the ones in charge of the rule of law, which was the best thing we had going for us. The Deep State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against the nation itself. Yet, it’s certainly not just an American thing; it’s happening across Western Civ. The USA, Great Britain, Canada and Australia took such special pride in being open societies and now they are consumed in censorious lunacy. Continental Europe had a sketchier history with liberty, the enlightened individualism of Everyman, though they actually birthed its principles. But now the whole works is infected and ailing. I think we’ll simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make new arrangements for daily life. For some years, I’ve been calling this process a long emergency, and now we seem to be right in the thick of it. How it ends, who knows? Regards, James Howard Kunstler for The Daily Reckoning [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:feedback@dailyreckoning.com) Editor’s note: For the past few days, our customer support team has been working nonstop with new members to upgrade their accounts with [the CIA-based market timing tool Jim Rickards has developed…]( They say they’ve never seen anything quite like this… and they’ve been flooded with calls from people who don’t want to miss out on this exciting new development. These Americans are getting [a simple upgrade to their accounts]( that will give them the information they need to stay on top of markets. Hundreds of subscribers have already locked in this upgrade. Are you one of them? If not, it’s time to change that because you could really be missing out. [Click here now to discover how to upgrade your account immediately.]( Thank you for reading The Daily Reckoning! We greatly value your questions and comments. Please send all feedback to [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:feedback@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. [Paradigm]( ☰ ⊗ [ARCHIVE]( [ABOUT]( [Contact Us]( © 2023 Paradigm Press, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202. By submitting your email address, you consent to Paradigm Press, LLC. delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your The Daily Reckoning e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from The Daily Reckoning, feel free to [click here.]( Please note: the mailbox associated with this email address is not monitored, so do not reply to this message. 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