Silicon Valley Bank went bust on Friday, March 10, 2023. On Sunday, Signature Bank was been shut down by regulators. They are the 2nd and 3rd largest bank failures in US history, respectively. This happened because the Federal Reserve (Fed) has been raising interest rates for the past year, drying up the supply of affordable low interest rate loans. The only way for the depositors to be made whole is for the government to bail them out, using the Federal Reserve as the lender of last resort. Soon, everyone will want to be bailed out.

Lately, Republican politicians have been calling for a national divorce. This has led people to draw parallels to the Civil War (but the political parties reversed). We don’t need states to secede from the United States to have a union of free and independent states, we just need the Constitution to be the supreme law of the land. The USA need to declare independence from the British (Anglo-American) Empire, which coopted our government during the World Wars via the Military Industrial Complex.

On February 3, 2023, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. It was carrying hazardous materials, such as vinyl chloride, as trains often do. Some of those chemicals have been seeping into the gourd and water. On February 6, the Ohio Emergency Management Agency did a controlled burn, releasing deadly chemicals into the atmosphere. How bad this turns out to be has yet to be determined, but it aint lookin’ good.

The Nord Stream II Pipeline runs under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, delivering natural gas to Western Europe. On September 26, 2022, it blew up. According to award winning journalist Seymour Hersh, the US government did it. If so, then it is an act of war.

One of the phrases best associated with Karl Marx is, “Religion is the opium of the people.” Socialism is a religion and the application of it as policy violates the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. Socialism is an involuntary church with a holy book, numerous denominations, political messiahs, televangelists, tithing your fair share because no religion would take care of people otherwise, vows of poverty for mother earth, mask burkas, and eucharistic vaccines that cause people to go to heaven. We should separate church and state. Combining charity with extortion doesn't get more charity. It gets more extortion (taxes).

Signature Bank is cutting off Binance and any of its crypto exchange customers from trading cryptos priced under $100,000 on the SWIFT and Signet trading systems. Having crypto speculators lose access to these networks could cut off crypto from much of its demand, further suppressing the dollar price of the cryptos and the exchanges which trade them. The FTX dominoes are falling.

“See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.” -Milton Friedman, 1991 interview with Randy Paige on America’s Drug Forum.

The Praetorian Guard was a unit of elite Roman soldiers who protected the emperor. They eventually grew so powerful that they controlled, selected, and executed emperors. The FBI (including the CIA et al) is America’s Praetorian Guard.

Gold is being sought after by major market participants. Central banks have been buying a record amount of gold, the Dutch Central bank made hints at revaluing gold in case of insolvency, and the Australian Wealth Fund has bought more gold. Gold is useful during inflation and the fracturing of the global geopolitical order.

The lockdowns in China have resulted in riots and unrest. The catalysts seem to be the World Cup, the Foxconn riots, and the burning to death of 10 people locked inside their apartment for quarantine. This is the largest unrest since the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

A confidence game is any swindle in which the swindler, after gaining the confidence of the victim, robs the victim by cheating at a gambling game, appropriating funds entrusted for investment, or the like. On the day of the midterm election, FTX went bust. It is a crypto currency exchange that was running a confidence game: People thought they had invested into cryptos, but the owner, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), took the money and spent it on other things, such as electing Democrats and investing in research which discredited ivermectin. It appears that Democrats may have also been laundering money through Ukraine and FTX. This has led to several other crypto exchanges going bust as the house of cards collapses. The confidence games are ending.

A confidence game is any swindle in which the swindler, after gaining the confidence of the victim, robs the victim by cheating at a gambling game, appropriating funds entrusted for investment, or the like. Today is the midterm election. The Democrats are going to lose power as people lose confidence in big government. But Republicans won’t be able to cut the size of the government without millions of Americans losing their source of income. If they don’t cut spending, then people will lose confidence in the dollar as the government prints money because there are not enough taxpayers to afford the size of big government. This is the end of the Progressive Era.

“The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” -Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, pg. 570.

1848 was the year of Revolutions in Europe. The Revolutions were the result of hunger, impoverishment, and revolutionary ideas left by conquering French armies under Napoleon a generation prior in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). Ideas like replacing your king with a Republic. Hunger and poverty are motivational. History repeats.

Taiwan, the Republic of China, has never been part of the People’s Republic of China, commonly referred to as China. Taiwan was conquered from Qing China by the Empire of Japan in 1895. Taiwan became an independent country in 1945 when the USA conquered Japan. Today, it is a major producer of semiconductor computer chips. It also serves as a convenient excuse for China to put tanks and soldiers in the street as they prepare for riots as their banking and real estate market collapses.

BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. They are a group of countries with significant enough populations and resources to create their own reserve currency, replacing the dollar for trade between them. They seem to be doing so.

Some people think that people are causing the climate to change and that the government can stop it. The climate does change but it is largely due to the precession of the earth’s axis and variation of the earth’s obliquity.

Updates on current events.

“All judgements of value are personal and subjective. There are no judgements of value than those asserting I prefer, I like better, I wish.”

-Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History, page 22.

The Federal Reserve is supposed to sell US government bonds to raise interest rates tomorrow, June 15, 2022. The Bank of Japan is trying to keep the Yen from inflating as they inflate the Yen. This can be done by selling the US government bonds that they own. The Fed may not be able to raise interest rates for long without the bond market crashing because the US (Fed and Social Security) and the Japanese are the biggest buyers of US debt.