Nenner, Nenner, Seven, Seven, Seven

Some guy named Charles Nenner fervently believes that there will be a stock market crash this fall. "Renowned financial and geopolitical analyst Charles Nenner is doubling down on his prediction last year that the financial markets will crash in the fall of 2017. Now, Nenner has additional research that backs up his position, and it involves the number 7."
http://usawatchdog.com/suicidal-to-stay-in-this-market-charles-nenner/

I don't think so.  I think it will happen in the fall of 2018.  Real estate hasn't crashed yet and I think that will happen prior to a stock market crash.

Secret Underground City below Central Park

This complex, known as the Manhattan Project (or MP) was housed in a series of underground caves designed to protect the Union government if the Confederacy started to win the United States Civil War (1861-1865). After the war the project was abandoned until it was later revised and expanded to 300 acres during World War One (1914-1918). Since that time it has been expanded several times to now include over 700 acres in a huge underground city within a city. It is located deep within the bedrock, over 300 feet below the park. This massive city complex is now designed to safely house up to 4,000 central Government personnel in the event of a nuclear strike. It presently houses all United States government UFO activities and was the home for Nazi Adolf Hitler until his death in 1956. This Super-secret location is the site of the main Emergency Government War Headquarters - the hub of the Country's alternative seat of power outside Washington, D.C. http://gothamist.com/2017/01/23/its_not_a_bad_idea_really.php

You had me until you said Hitler.  Good conspiracy theory though.

The Trump Budget

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/budget.pdf

This shows a surplus in 2027.  I don't believe it will pass but one can always dream.  In addition to the political problems with passing the budget, it doesn't have any room for a recession.

My forecast is still for the system to have a full-blown crisis in 2029 because of defaulting on Social Security payments.  Even the rosy Trump budget above shows a $350 billion hole in Social Security in 2027, increasing at the rate of $50 billion+ per year.

I think that there will be another 2008-style recession starting in 2018, and from 2019 on out we will have trillion dollar deficits and rapidly increasing.  I hope I am wrong.

SELL, SELL, SELL

Sell everything, sell the kitchen sink, sell the kids, sell the dog.

Toronto Homeowners are in a Rush to Sell
“In less than one week we went from having 40 or 50 people coming to an open house to now, when you are lucky to get five people.  Everyone went into hibernation.”

Bitcoin is Crashing

What goes up exponentially, falls vertically... or something like that...

Bitcoin has plunged 13% in the last few minutes... no catalyst evident for now...

Disclaimer:  I am not a registered investment advisor, and this should not be construed as investment advice.  Do your own research.

Meltup

We are experience a meltup.

"The Nasdaq composite also notched a new record, climbing over 6,170.16, as Netflix, Alphabet, and Facebook shares all rose. Amazon also rose, nearing the $1,000 per share mark."  http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/25/us-markets.html

Bitcoin has been rising about 10% per day and is at $2700, up from $900 just 2 months ago.

What this means is that the increasing prices of these objects has nothing to do with the fundamentals like price-earnings ratio, but they are becoming alternate currencies, to replace the US dollar.  The vast pool of dollars that have been created has destroyed the value of the dollar, but this breakdown has largely been suppressed.

That's my theory anyway.  The only flaw in it is that gold is not also experiencing a meltup.  But that may be because the price of gold is being heavily manipulated.

So as crazy as this seems, it may not be a bubble, but is instead a response to the Fed's actions.  What the Fed needs to do is to starting doing quantitative tightening to add value to the dollar.  This may then cause a crash and a recession, which will hurt people who don't benefit from the meltup.

The best response may be to just ease into QT, to try to keep the prices from crashing, and to keep a recession from occurring (which is futile because you can't stop recessions from happening, and we are overdue for one).

The Fed thinks they are clever, but the markets are cleverer.

The internal combustion engine will be dead by 2025

The next generation of cars will be “computers on wheels”. Google, Apple, and Foxconn have the disruptive edge, and are going in for the kill. Silicon Valley is where the auto action is, not Detroit, Wolfsburg, or Toyota City. “We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history,” Prof [Tony] Seba said. “Internal combustion engine vehicles will enter a vicious cycle of increasing costs.” The “tipping point” will arrive over the next two to three years as EV battery ranges surpass 200 miles and electric car prices in the US drop to $30,000. By 2022 the low-end models will be down to $20,000. After that, the avalanche will sweep all before it. “What the cost curve says is that by 2025 all new vehicles will be electric, all new buses, all new cars, all new tractors, all new vans, anything that moves on wheels will be electric, globally,” Prof Seba said.
http://business.financialpost.com/news/transportation/fossil-fuel-vehicles-will-vanish-in-8-years-in-twin-death-spiral-for-big-oil-and-big-autos-says-study-that-shocking-the-industry

Big Oil and Big Autos (GM,Ford, Chrysler) are all finished.  Even Peak Oil is obsolete.  The future is electric.

Pento is rooting for Cathartic Purging

If interest rates mean-revert, we will be seeing $3 trillion annual deficits.  The bubble will pop, the question is when, not if.  Pento thinks this summer will be a watershed moment - tax cuts will not happen, rate hike occurs.  The Fed will not be able to raise rates as they plan, because they will invert the rate curve and cause a recession.  There will be a crisis in confidence in China, in the Fed, in Trump.  The Fed will be lucky to raise rates 2 more times.  When the Fed stops raising rates, the price of gold will spike.

D minus 481

For (morbid) fun, I am going to start a countdown until the world (as we know it) ends.  That date is September 11, 2018.

This is based on 3 factors coinciding.
1.  A 17-year double business cycle.  This comes from Martin Armstrong with my own twist.  The formula for the circumference of a circle is 2*PI*R.  Two Pi times 1000 is 6,283.  So this would indicate a 17.2 year cycle but I a rounding it to 17.
2.  An 11 year crisis cycle.  Every 10 or 11 years we have a major systemic crisis. The last time was in 2008.  Before that, in 1998, and in 1987.
3.  The ongoing collapse of the gold suppression trade, which I just blogged about.

The rise in bitcoin is part of this collapse, as is the attempted impeachment of Trump, as is the fact that we are overdue for a recession.  The world (as we know it) will end September 11, 2018.  As a fat man once said "I guarantee it".

Disclaimer:  I have never yet been right on my predictions, thank God.  I previously predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012 and on September 11, 2015.  So do your own research.

Did the System collapse? Not yet.

Source: http://didthesystemcollapse.com/

I just ran across the website DidTheSystemCollapse.com  The premises here (and I am adding my own take on this) is that:

1.  Only gold (and to a lesser degree, silver) is really money.  

2. Bitcoin may act as a proxy for gold because it is easy to buy, sell, and transfer bitcoin as opposed to gold despite bitcoin's technical problem.  (The technical problems are that the blocksize is limited, which will require a hard fork to fix and that some other cryptocurrency could easily replace bitcoin.  I will just say that for the short-term (up to 2 years), these will not affect bitcoin).

3.  The almighty US dollar is a creation of the Federal Reserve and is accepted by the general public only insofar as it holds its own against gold.  As soon as the dollar starts to drop against gold, then more money will trickle, then flood, into gold in a vicious cycle.

4.  The dollar obviously is heavily manipulated with trillions of dollars created out of thin air, not just by the Fed but by other central banks around the world.

5.  In order for the dollar to maintain its value against gold, then gold has to be artificially suppressed in the Comex and other western gold and silver markets.  

6.  China now has their own gold markets, in which gold can be purchased for renminbi.  The difference is that settlement has to be made in gold, and not in currency.  The markets are the Shanghai Gold Exchange and the Hong Kong Futures Exchange.  See also "Is China Intentionally Making It Harder To Manipulate Gold"?

7.  This is a very "soft" attack on the western financial facade.  This East is calling the West's bluff.  The System is now under attack, but this is not a brutal attack.  This is death by 1000 duck bites.  The attack is that the price of gold is too low in dollar terms, and the East is slowly buying it up.  Both the attacker and the victim have an interest in maintaining appearances.

8.  The price of gold must rise, but the West won't raise it. "If the West were to raise the price of gold, it would kill the dollar completely as it would prematurely instigate the inevitable mother of all safe haven panics."

9.  The East won't raise the price either, except by setting the price a few dollars more than in the west. "If the East were to raise the price of gold, it would drain the West's gold reserves due to arbitrage. This would expose the West's fake gold market and kill the dollar. Doing this prematurely means the East could no longer buy gold for themselves at heavily undervalued prices for their post-collapse monetary dominance."

10.  This slow-mo attack is going on right now.  "The eventual endgame is that the price of gold skyrockets and the dollar permanently collapses along with the global banking system and modern society as we know it. Black Friday will be everyday as the masses murder each other for a peach pit. This is sure to happen anytime between now and the end of 2018."

11.  Bitcoin is in a bubble now and the price is going straight up.  But it may not be a bubble, instead it may be a harbinger of the dollar's collapse.  When did it start? On 3/23/17, bitcoin was at $942.  Yesterday (5/18/17) it is at $1807.  The price of bitcoin has almost doubled since March.  

12.  The attempted impeachment of Trump will speed the process along.  Trump is the only thing keeping the system together now.  If Trump is impeached, then the whole thing will fall apart.

12. Let's have some fun and pick a date.  The seven-year cycle theory is disproved, but still a date around Rosh Hashanah is reasonable.   So here it is, Friday, September 11, 2018.  The system will collapse on that date.  

Polish woman travels solo to the South Pole

 In Nov 2016 to Jan 2017, Malgorzata Wojtaczka, a Polish woman, supposedly traveled 1300 km (808 miles), by herself, from the Hercules Inlet in Antarctica to the South Pole in 69 days.  She pulled a 100-kg (220 lb) sled in -30 degree Celsius (-22 F) weather.  The pack she was hauling included a tent, communications equipment, and a microwave oven.  By the way, her elevation went from sea level to 2800m/9300 ft.

Wojtaczka set off on 18 November 2016 (after two days of acclimatization) from the edge of the continent, from the Ronne glacier flowing into the Weddell Sea. On the last day she marched non-stop at minus 34 degrees Celsius. She previously reported that she has remaining food supplies to last her a maximum of two days.  "I’m nervous if I’ll make it in time. I am thoroughly tired. The air temperature is below minus 30 deg. C, and this also quickly saps my energy. Also the wind, during the night at 5 degrees on the Beaufort scale (approx. 40 km / h), in the morning around 4 B. This combination makes the perceived temperature feel like minus 46 degrees Celsius. There is still a lot of fresh snow. I don’t manage to go faster than about a kilometer an hour. Now that the sweets have run out, during the breaks I eat warm cereal from my thermos. It gives me energy,” she relayed.  The Wrocław-native hauled a 100-kg heavy sledge packed with equipment, food and special fuel for use in her microwave, so-called white gas (normal fuel cannot be used in these latitudes, because it freezes). She ended their march in the last hours of activity of the Antarctic Base ALE (Antarctic Logistics Expeditions) in the South Pole.  https://poland.pl/sport/sport-champions/malgorzata-wojtaczka-south-pole/

Matt Lee vs John Kirby on John Kerry's trip to Antarctica

Jump to 2:45.  I find it interesting that Matt Lee asks about the route that then Secretary of State John Kerry took to Antarctica.  Even though it is a diplomatic mission, no other "foreigners" are allowed to accompany Kerry to the South Pole.  (Only Americans are allowed). Somehow he spends the next 8 minutes talking about the trip without saying much more than that Kerry will talk to scientists about climate change and its importance to national security, blah blah.

Antarctica Anomalies

True or False.  The only way to get to the South Pole is through Christchurch, New Zealand.

I am trying to disprove this statement.

What about these statements?
All personnel and cargo going to or coming from Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station first pass through McMurdo Station.  TRUE.  (Source)
As a matter of practical convenience the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station keeps New Zealand Time. TRUE.  (Source).
Operation Deep Freeze, which is the name for the US military resupply mission to the Antarctic bases, operates out of Christchurch, New Zealand.  TRUE (Source)
There are only Americans stationed at the South Pole.  POSSIBLY TRUE
No commmercial airlines fly over Antarctica.  TRUE  (Source)

to be continued

Strategic Air Command

Mom, Apple Pie, Baseball, Fireworks, and long-range Strategic Bombers.

Arcologies

David Stockman predicts bloodbath in the bond market this fall

Stockman thinks we will have a crash between August and November. He's smarter than me, but I think it will happen next year, not this year. The budget and debt limit will be no big deal because Trump will just cave.

The Atlantic Alliance

This film was made in 1983. I find the NATO propaganda fascinating, with the authoritative male voice with the British accent. Of course this was during the Cold War, but I think this was one of the last of its kind - documentary, with an explanation of the western ideals.

Stop the evil of Esperanto-ism

NATO Propaganda

This is a very strange retro-futuristic file from the 1960s urging the protection of "something of value", which was a belief in freedom and the values of NATO-ism.

Social Security is evil

He likes saying the words "fiscally conservative".  He probably says it at least 20 times during the video.

The argument against cutting Social Security payroll taxes

The “contributory” nature of Social Security, through which beneficiaries pay for their eventual benefits via the payroll tax, dates back to its very origins in 1935.  The most commonly quoted defense of the payroll tax comes from Franklin Roosevelt, who called the feature “straight politics” and explained: “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions. … With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”  As FDR foresaw, endowing Social Security with its own revenue stream has protected it over the years from grasping politicians, who have aimed since 1935 to eviscerate the program. The weekly or bi-weekly payroll deductions that go to the program have given workers a proprietary interest in benefits that has been hard to undermine.  Scrapping the payroll tax would make it easier for Congress to cut Social Security benefits under the guise of saving the government money.  http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-social-security-tax-20170410-story.html

The nation of Seguridad

I have a crazy theory that there is another nation within the United States called the nation of Social Security.  I will call this hypothetical nation "Seguridad", (the Spanish translation of Security).  A "nation" is a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history.  For instance, the Navajo Nation is a nation within the United States, that the US Government recognizes as sovereign for some purposes.

Seguridad is also sovereign for some purposes.  The "president" of Seguridad is the Social Security Commissioner, currently Nancy Berryhill.  Social Security begin in 1935 with the Social Security Act signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  It was specifically designed to be a social contract and not a welfare program.  The difference is that a welfare program is funded each year and it can be arbitrarily cut if Congress wants to.  Everyone receiving Social Security today also paid into it and feels like they have "earned" the benefits, even if they receive far more than they paid in.

Social Security became "Seguridad" in 1983 with the passage of the amendments recommended by the Greenspan Commission.  The exact date was April 20, 1983, when the Great Communicator, President Ronald Reagan, signed the amendments into law.  This was a proclamation that granted Seguridad independence.  Note that Social Security is "off-budget" and has a separate funding source and dedicated trust fund.  Also note that there is a cap on Social Security taxes so they are only paid on the first $127,000 of taxable income.  This is only fair because there is also a maximum benefit that can be paid and this reinforces the idea that benefits are "earned".

The effect is that Seguridad, although formed by acts of Congress, has become independent of it and can't be abolished by it.  Seguridad has assets of about $2.85 trillion, which are owed by the U.S. Treasury and which collect interest of about 2-3% per year.

Where I am going with this is that Seguridad will face a "war" with the U.S. in about 2029 unless something drastic changes.  And these proposals are off the table:

• Benefits cannot be cut.  Congress has no authority to cut benefits, any more than King George could tax Boston tea after the American Revolution.  (Well, legally they could cut benefits a little, but this wouldn't be enough to make a difference, and this would be a breach of the social contract).
• Social Security taxes cannot be raised.  They are already at 12.4% (when both employee and employer rates are included).  Actually they could be raised slightly, but they couldn't be raised enough to make a meaningful difference.  People would rebel if they were raised much higher.
• The United States cannot contribute to make up the shortfall.  They can't for two reasons:  First, Social Security is supposed to be independent, and if general fund taxes are contributed, then this would make Social Security into a welfare program.  Second, even if it is clear that this is a "gift", the US cannot afford to pay enough to make a difference.  We are talking about $500 billion per year and rising rapidly.  And this is at a time when it will be facing massive deficits due to interest and rising health costs.

Note that I am excluding Medicare and Medicaid from this analysis because I believe that they are ultimately welfare programs and can be cut (even though there is a Medicare trust fund).  Note there is no cap on Medicare taxes, and there is even a Medicare surtax on incomes above $200,000.  Social Security benefits are paid to the recipient.  Medicare is paid to the healthcare provider.  I think this is a fundamental difference.

We are headed for a disaster, and I mostly blame the fools who got us into this mess, namely FDR and Reagan.  Yes, Reagan was a fool - he should have made it clear that the 1983 amendments were only a temporary fix.

============================
Here are remarks from a speech Reagan made on April 20, 1983 (emphasis mine):
This bill demonstrates for all time our Nation’s ironclad commitment to Social Security. It assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half a century ago. It assures those who are still working that they, too, have a pact with the future. From this day forward, they have our pledge that they will get their fair share of benefits when they retire . . . . Our elderly need no longer fear that the checks they depend on will be stopped or reduced. These amendments protect them. Americans of middle age need no longer worry whether their career-long investment will pay off. These amendments guarantee it. And younger people can feel confident that Social Security will still be around when they need it to cushion their retirement.
Source: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v46n7/v46n7p3.pdf

============================
People in the American territories - Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands - are part of the Social Security System.  However, they don't pay income taxes to the U.S. Treasury.  Hmm, think about that.

Millenium Bonds and Edmond Safra

Safra Republic Holding SA issued a 1,000 year bond in 1997.

CHICAGO, Oct. 8 [1997] /PRNewswire/ -- Duff Phelps Credit Rating Co. (DCR) has
 rated the $250 million subordinated notes of Safra Republic Holdings S.A.
 (Safra Republic) 'AA' (Double-A).  These notes are due October 15, 2997, have
 a coupon of 7.125 percent and were priced at 99.161 for a yield to maturity of
 7.185 percent.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/duff--phelps-credit-rating-co-rates-safra-republics-1000-year-bonds-aa-77468667.html

Safra Republic Holdings announced that in October it will issue $250 million of millennium bonds that mature in 2997.  Safra Republic Holdings SA (SRH) $250 million issue of 7.125% subordinated debentures, due October 15, 2997, is rated 'AA-' by Fitch.
http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/financial-reporting-and-analysis-5th-edition-chapter-11-solutions-9780078110863

In 1999, Edmond Safra was murdered.  Billionaire banker Edmond Safra was killed early Friday [December 3, 1999] when fire engulfed his Monte Carlo home, following an attack by two hooded men, according to Monaco's official press office.
http://money.cnn.com/1999/12/03/worldbiz/safra/

See also "The strange case of Edmond Safra".
Billionaire Safra key to HSBC Swiss bank origins

How bizarre.  But I still want to know about the millenium bonds.  Were they bought out by HSBC, or are they still outstanding?  If so, who owns them?