Money has to be the most marketable commodity, not lines of code on a hard drive. Investors in the latter are finding that out the hard way.
Bitcoin is now down 24% this year and remains roughly 47% below its October all-time high.
The largest failure so far this year has been Blockfills, a midsize prime broker that halted deposits and withdrawals earlier this month amid the decline in bitcoin prices.
That’s 600 billion, with a ‘B’. How much of the melt-up was driven by leverage, and who’s left holding the bag for those loans?
After topping $126,000 in October, Bitcoin has fallen sharply, briefly wiping out its 2025 gains before stabilizing on Monday.
With gold and stocks near all-time highs, Bitcoin is the “tip of the risk-assets iceberg and melting,” said Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence. “I expect Bitcoin and most cryptos to keep falling.”
If anyone believes that you are “sticking it to the man” by withdrawing all the funds from your bank account in “cash”, think again. Our fiat currency system has got you coming and going. It’s not a bug; it was designed that way.
In fiat, your only real choice is this: if you wish to access credit at all, you must participate in a system where the coercive extension of credit creates an exponentially rising debt doom loop that all must shoulder the burden of.
The final collapse of fiat will occur when the burden of debt exceeds the ability of any debtor, no matter how large their balance sheet, to service it. When lost capital can no longer be replaced with fresh capital from a more creditworthy institution, one can arrive at a situation where bank notes are literally backed by nothing. A bank note backed by nothing can purchase nothing. It will not matter how many are released into the economy at that point. They will be worthless. It will be the Zimbabwe solution in spades.
Years of interest rates at near zero levels will do strange things, like incentivizing investors to throw highly leveraged capital at all manner of “sure things”.
In one stark example, two levered ETFs tied to Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin-hoarding company Strategy, which were together worth more than $5 billion at one point, are down about 40% in three days. Leveraged funds, promising two times the daily performance of Nvidia Corp., Tesla Inc., Amazon.com Inc. have tumbled. Triple-leveraged bets on innovation and semiconductor stocks have slid 20%.
Marc Andreessen: If you’d like to learn more about the Biden administration debanking disfavored people and companies…
More about that here in the Nov.27 Joe Rogan interview with Andreessen, but watch it all when you get time.
With talk of Universal Basic Income appearing to gain steam these days, one of the main objections is the sheer cost of the program. But one advocate of UBI claims to have the answer, and it lies in marrying UBI with its obvious philosophical twin: Modern Monetary Theory. In doing so, he manages to lay bare the utter nihilism behind both theories.
Okay, so you want to start your own country and create your own currency? Congratulations! What’s step one? …. Step one therefore is to create money out of nothing. Choose whatever you want. Want to use shells? Okay. Want to carve notches on rocks or sticks? Okay. Want to use dollar bills? Okay. Want to use ones and zeroes? Okay. Whatever you do, get that stuff to your people. After your people have money, tax some of it back. Don’t tax all of it back. That would leave nothing for them to use on goods and services in the private sector. Tax some percentage of it back. Congrats! You just ran a “deficit”, began your “national debt”, and gave your money value by requiring that people pay their taxes in your currency.
You wouldn’t know this from the press release.
Bank of Canada- Digital Canadian Dollar Public Consultation Report
Since when is “somewhat important” the same as “important”?
With all the talk of a cashless society afoot, it’s worth exploring what the consequences might be. In short, nothing good can come of this.
Now, let’s say that cash has been eliminated by some legal means and that you have angered the powers that be for some reason—probably for opposing them and asking others to oppose them too. All the banks must do is to freeze your bank account or eliminate it entirely. There are two examples of this very thing happening in the recent past.
First, the government of Canada froze the bank accounts of all those participating in the Canadian truckers’ general strike plus those who helped them. Second, British politician Nigel Farage had his accounts closed for political reasons and found that no other British bank would serve him. Without the means to use money, Farage came very close to emigrating. Just think about that for a moment. You could not fuel your car, buy groceries, pay your rent, or do a hundred other things without access to a bank account.
The fact that the idea of parking interest rates permanently at zero gets any academic attention at all, is in itself worrisome. It’s no secret that this was an idea embraced by none other than John Maynard Keynes, who thought it would be the key to effortless financing of whatever projects a central planner might dream up.
If the interest rate were permanently zero, the government’s fiscal levers of taxation and spending would be the alternative means of controlling inflation.
Naturally, this nonsense goes hand in hand with direct central bank control of individual spending decisions:
Also worth mentioning is the current push by the Bank of England towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), in which buyers and sellers would transfer money directly without having to use the banking system. This could enable central banks to encourage or discourage certain spending in more targeted ways, for example by restricting what can be spent by people in certain areas or income brackets. If inflation was controlled using only fiscal levers, CBDCs could be used to reinforce this policy.
Worldcoin builds Eye of Sauron pic.twitter.com/zCuOjc4mSi
— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) July 29, 2023
Is a central bank digital currency actually viable? In reality no, but that won’t stop the central planners from trying it.
They have the means, even now, to monitor your payments and to shut down access to your accounts via their supervision of banks.
As many of those who donated to the Freedom Convoy are well aware of.
But FedCoin would take it to the next level.
FedCoin will be the next degradation of the monetary system. It will be a leap downward into a coercive mechanism to feed the growing maw of government spending. People will fork over their savings to a central bank in order that the central bank give it to the government, to spend. Because this is less unsafe than depositing it in a bank.
Thread: The financial censorship of political enemies is something we’re used to seeing under authoritarian regimes. No one was surprised when Russia froze more than 100 bank accounts tied to opposition leader Alexei Navalny. But Canada did it too…
In the latest iteration of a failed monetary system, Zimbabwe has announced plans to launch a new currency: a “digital, gold-backed token“. It’s likely that anyone who purchases these tokens are probably the same people looking to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
I’m quite certain that if anyone was able to actually look in the vault which allegedly holds all this gold, it would be empty. Since these digital tokens cannot be redeemed for gold on demand, this is about as close to a gold standard as moon rocks are to swiss cheese.
In Zimbabwe, the new tokens “will be fully backed by physical gold held by the bank” and will go into circulation on May 8, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Gov. John Mangudya said. People can buy the tokens and use them as a way to save their money or conduct “person-to-person and person-to-business transactions and settlements,” Mangudya said.
As part of Zimbabwe’s ongoing struggle to stave off a return to the dark ages, it recently began minting and selling gold coins. Some pundits are claiming that this heralds a return to a gold standard, but that would require paper currency denominated in a weight of gold with redemption for gold upon request. So far, these clowns seem to have all that completely backwards. Is there any hope for this train wreck of a nation?
The “Mosi-oa-tunya” coin, named after Victoria falls, can be converted into cash and be traded locally and internationally, the central bank said.
Last week, Zimbabwe more than doubled its policy rate to 200% from 80% and outlined plans to make the U.S. dollar legal tender for the next five years to boost confidence.
Annual inflation, which hit almost 192% in June, cast a shadow over President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s bid to revitalise the economy.
ZeroHedge- Texas Bill Would Create State-Issued Gold-Backed Digital Currency
h/t Scott
“There will be control. You’re right.”
Pranksters Vovan and Lexus posing as Zelensky tricked ECB President Christine Lagarde into disclosing her plan to launch a "Digital Euro" in October that will give central banks control over how citizens can spend money:
"There will be control. You’re right. You’re completely… pic.twitter.com/F1IdexS0Pp
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) April 6, 2023