What Hitler and the Nazis copied from America

Nazi salute Indoctrination What Hitler and the Nazis copied from America

October 13, 2014
Santiago, Chile

A man in a uniform dashes up to you with a badge pinned to his chest and says “that man over there is a thief! Quick, help me get him!” What do you do?

You would probably run and tackle the guy down, right?

To get to the rational part of your brain that tells you to hold on, since you don’t even know if the man in a uniform is actually a cop, or if the alleged thief actually did anything wrong, you have to first overcome a whole life of indoctrination telling you that when someone in a uniform tells you to do something, you do it.

Some are able to reach that rational part of their brains, but most are not.

Experiment after experiment has shown us the level of blind obedience that people have to anyone in a uniform—replacing any morality or common sense they might have had in order to comply.

Here in this video you can see some of the terrifying and silly things people do when instructed to do so by someone in a uniform. Mind you this isn’t even necessarily a person of authority, it’s merely someone dressed as one.

That’s what’s scary. Because people will willingly hurt other people for no other reason than the fact that someone appears to be an authority figure.

This kind of obedience is no accident. It starts off as an intentional process from childhood.

In school you were taught to sit down, shut up, and do whatever your teacher said.

The lesson from day number one was to take orders without thinking about them.

If you grew up in the United States, you likely started your day off with your hand over your heart proclaiming your fealty to your nation—whatever that was—and the piece of tri-colored cloth by which it was represented.

Before you could understand what any of the words in the Pledge of Allegiance meant, you knew them by heart.

That was exactly the point.

Which is why on October 12, 1892 the Pledge of Allegiance was made compulsory for all students in public schools.

Aiming to instill patriotism and obedience in children early on, Francis Bellamy, the socialist minister who penned the Pledge, made sure to keep it brief and with good cadence so it would be easily memorized.

Children across the nation recite it every morning:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Even into adulthood, once you could begin to understand the meaning of the words you were saying, there was to be no room for debate.

“Liberty and justice for all”? Who could possibly claim to object to that? Which is exactly what Bellamy wanted.

But in reality, how many people even as adults actually think about what those words mean.

The original Pledge was accompanied by ‘the Bellamy salute’, which was dropped during WWII because the Nazis started using it (they copied the United States’ tactics to instill national pride and obedience).

The Nazi salute and the indoctrination of children? Yep, that was the US’s idea first.

 What Hitler and the Nazis copied from America

Thus, the same blind obedience given to those in uniforms is also given to actions commanded under the name of the American flag.

Just the same, this can lead some to forget all morality and common sense to willingly harm other human beings, whether they be across the planet or within the country itself.

With enough indoctrination, all it takes is a piece of cloth and a few words.

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One simple chart to explain the defining problem of our times

Back2theFuture shmushed One simple chart to explain the defining problem of our times

October 13, 2014
London, England

[Editor’s note: Tim Price is a London-based wealth manager and editor of Price Value International.]

“When sorrows come,” wrote Shakespeare, “they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

True. And Jeremy Warner for the Daily Telegraph identifies ten such sorrows in his ‘ten biggest threats to the global economy’:

1)  Geopolitical risk;

2)  The threat of oil and gas price spikes;

3)  A hard landing in China;

4)  Normalization of monetary policy in the Anglo-Saxon economies;

5)  Euro zone deflation;

6)  ‘Secular stagnation’;

7)  The size of the debt overhang;

8)  Complacent markets;

9) House price bubbles;

10) Ageing populations.

We’ll start with point #7: the size of the debt overhang.

Since this was never addressed in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, it’s hardly a surprise to see the poison of debt continue to drip onto all things financial.

ALL German government paper out to three years, for example, now offers a negative yield. Investors must pay rent to the German government in order to buy its debt.

This has implications. And much of the rest of Warner’s ‘threats’ are inextricably linked to this debt overhang.

Point #8: Complacent markets? Check. (Though stocks have lost a lot of their nerve…)

Point #9: House price bubbles? Check. Since the monetary policy response to having too much debt in the system has been to slash rates and keep them at multi-century lows, it’s hardly a surprise to see property prices in a bubble. Again.

Point #5: Euro zone deflation? Check. This is less of a threat to solvent consumers, but deadly for indebted governments.

Point #4: Pending normalization of monetary policy in the UK and US? Check.

This threatens the integrity of the credit markets. And it’s worth asking whether central banks could possibly afford to let interest rates rise and risk bankrupting their governments.

We saw one particularly eye-catching chart last week, via Grant Williams, comparing the leverage ratios of major US financial institutions over recent years (shown below).

Major US institutions leverage ratios One simple chart to explain the defining problem of our times

The Fed’s leverage ratio (total assets to capital) now stands at just under 80x. That compares with Lehman Brothers’ leverage ratio, just before it went bankrupt, of just under 30x.

Sometimes a picture really does paint a thousand words.

And this, again, brings us back to the defining problem of our time: too much debt in the system.

In a recent interview with Jim Grant, Sprott Global questioned the famed interest rate observer about the likely outlook for bonds. Grant responds:

“I’m not sure what a bear market would look like, but I think that it would be characterized at first by a lot of people rushing through a very narrow gate. ”

Grant was also asked if it was possible for the Fed to lose control of the bond market:

“Absolutely, it could. The Fed does not control events for the most part. Events certainly will end up controlling the Fed. To answer your question – yeah. I think the Fed can and will lose control of the bond market.”

As we have written on innumerable prior occasions, we wholeheartedly agree. What will drive pretty much all asset markets over the near, medium and longer term is almost entirely down to how credit markets behave.

The fundamentals (again, take one look at the chart) are utterly shocking, as are the implications.

And let us not confuse the prognosis by arguing over the diagnosis.

As Professor Antal Fekete writes in his Monetary Economics 101: The real bills doctrine of Adam Smith–

“Hyperinflation and hyper-deflation are just two different forms of the same phenomenon: credit collapse. Arguing which of the two forms will dominate is futile: it blurs the focus of inquiry and frustrates efforts to avoid disaster.”

Tim Price’s monthly Price Value International investment service is designed to provide safe investment advice and education, as well as actionable recommendations as to where investors can deploy their capital without taking an unnecessary amount of risk in an environment of corrupt central bank and government policies.

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This is the best currency to hold for now (you may be surprised)

shutterstock 191404670 This is the best currency to hold for now (you may be surprised)

October 10, 2014
Santiago, Chile

I just got off a two-hour conference call with the board of directors of our agricultural investment company.

I’m fortunate that our board is comprised of some incredibly smart people, including a senior executive at one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, another investment banking executive, private wealth manager, etc.

These are very intelligent people who understand both finance and agriculture.

Our conversation this morning turned to exchange rates, and we discussed the future of the US dollar.

Bear in mind that we all hold a rather dim view of the dollar’s long-term fundamentals. That is, after all, why we pooled funds to trade paper currency for high quality productive farmland.

But over the coming months, our consensus was that the US dollar is in a favorable position when ranked against other major fiat currencies. I’ll explain why:

There are only a handful of currencies in the world that can handle huge institutional inflows and outflows.

A fund manager moving $100 billion, for example, can’t park that money in the Costa Rican colon, or the Tanzanian shilling.

It would be impossible. That amount of money would practically swallow the entire money supply and wreck havoc on the local economy.

The only currencies right now that are globally liquid and can really handle such massive flows are the US dollar, the euro, and the yen.

The yen is the worst off; the Japanese government is in absolutely abysmal condition spending upwards of 25% of its central government tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt. And the situation gets worse by the day.

In Europe, many interest rates are now in negative territory. If you purchase a short-term German government bond, for example, you have to PAY THEM for the privilege of loaning them your money. It’s nuts.

By comparison, even though the US government’s financial position is absolutely atrocious, the dollar is the least ugly of the three.

To wit, institutional investors have been selling yen and euros in favor of US dollar assets. And we’ve seen this play out via the steady strengthening of the USD exchange rate for those currencies.

The euro, for example, was at $1.39 just five months ago. It hit $1.25 last week—a 10% drop in just five months.

This is a result of institutional money flows. The dollar is being viewed, despite its deep, fundamental problems, as the safe haven currency. And institutions are buying.

Now, while this outlook will likely persist over the coming months, the long-term outlook for the dollar remains clear. And China’s renminbi is a big part of that.

The international use of the renminbi rises with each passing month.

Institutions, central banks, large corporations, and even governments are beginning to use the renminbi more and more. They’re holding it as an official reserve, and they’re even cutting oil deals in renminbi.

We’re seeing commodities contracts traded, priced, and settled in renminbi. And renminbi trading hubs are being rapidly established in Western financial centers, notably London and Zurich.

Plus, the Chinese government is gradually loosening the renminbi’s restrictions, allowing convertibility on a global scale. Bottom line, they WANT the renminbi to be a global currency.

This will provide a critical fourth option for institutional capital flows.

And while China is saturated with challenges on multiple fronts, the renminbi’s fundamentals are far more attractive when stacked against the dollar, euro, and yen.

Over the coming years, we can expect more and more institutional capital flows into the renminbi.

But for now, at least until another looming US government shutdown spooks investors, we can expect the dollar to reign.

It’s a sad statement of the global financial system when a country that has accumulated more debt than any other nation in the history of the world appears to be the ‘least bad’ choice.

That said, there are options.

The Hong Kong dollar is currently pegged to the US dollar at a rate of 7.80 HKD per US dollar and trades within a very narrow band.

This means that if the US dollar maintains its strength, or if it appreciates further, the Hong Kong dollar will strengthen along with it.

But if the US dollar were to devalue sharply… or experience a sudden, terminal decline, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority could de-peg the Hong Kong dollar.

In this way, your downside risk is protected, yet you maintain your upside potential in case the dollar improves further. And you practically eliminate exchange rate fluctuation in the meantime.

Of the available options, the Hong Kong dollar is a strong choice to consider.

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Koreans are getting in on the trend — renminbi deposits in Korea surge 55-fold

china financial risk Koreans are getting in on the trend    renminbi deposits in Korea surge 55 fold

October 9, 2014
Santiago, Chile

The Bank of Korea — South Korea’s central bank — released data that says South Korean domestic deposits have reached 16.19 billion Chinese renminbi in July this year, which is a 55-fold increase from the same period last year when renminbi deposits accounted for only 290 million.

According to data from South Korean banks, the proportion of foreign currency deposits held in renminbi was 0.4% at the end of 2012. That number reached 13.7% at the end of last year, while at the end of July this year the renminbi accounted for 25.9% of all foreign currency deposits in South Korea.

That’s an incredible, exponential increase.

Since Korean interest rates continue to be low and follow closely those of most Western countries, Koreans realize that if they continue to hold their money in bank accounts denominated in won, their savings are steadily and surreptitiously being diminished by inflation that’s higher then their paltry returns.

With a lack of good investment opportunities in a zero-interest rate environment and with frothy equity markets, Koreans are at least diversifying their currency exposure, with domestic capital rapidly flowing into renminbi deposits that yield much higher at around 3.25% per year.

Coupled with the continued strength of the renminbi, the attractiveness of diversifying their capital in foreign currencies, and the renminbi in particular, is clearly a firm trend among Koreans.

This is a well known scenario. Just as Europeans from countries with weaker currencies and economic prospects used to safeguard their savings by holding them in Deutschmarks and Swiss franks, we see the same trend happening today.

Individuals, companies and even governments are diversifying their currency exposure — mostly on the account of the US dollar. Renminbi denominated bonds are now being issued by businesses all over the world– heck, even McDonald’s issued a renminbi bond.

And now the UK will become the first country in the world other than China to issue renminbi denominated government debt. In fact, just this morning the UK Treasury announced that it hired Bank of China, HSBC and Standard Chartered to arrange the sale, with the bond issuance likely happening next Monday.

This follows last week’s announcement from the People’s Bank of China that renminbi and euro are now directly tradable, without the need to use the US dollar as a conduit.

The signs are clearly all there. Everyone realizes that the present system is on its way out and are taking appropriate measures. The Germans, the French, the Brits, the Canadians, the Koreans…

Don’t you think it’s time to step up and do something about it too?

The situation today looks a lot like one big game of musical chairs. Investors and “hot money” desperately looking for yield in a zero interest rate environment are pushing prices of practically all assets sky high and diversifying into markets and currencies with brighter prospects.

Make sure that you’re not the one left stranded when the music stops.

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The US ranks #36 in the world for respecting property rights. Is this freedom?

statue of liberty The US ranks #36 in the world for respecting property rights. Is this freedom?

October 8, 2014
Santiago, Chile

In 1863, the United States of America was in the midst of a devastating civil war.

Thousands of people had just lost their lives at Gettysburg, and Sherman was preparing for his march to the sea, laying waste to Atlanta in the process.

New York City was embroiled in the most violent riots in its history.

The southern economy was in shambles with the prices of staple food items skyrocketing, and citizens of the Union were stuck paying income taxes for the first time ever.

Much of the country had still not recovered from the Panic of 1857. And just when it seemed that things couldn’t be any more chaotic, the President would be assassinated soon.

All in all, it seemed that the whole world was on fire. This was United States in the 1860s.

And had you been born at this time amid so much chaos, death, and pessimism, most people would have thought your future prospects would be pretty dim.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, that would have been an incredible time to be born.

Rather than floundering in its rubble, the United States became the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world in the fifty years that followed.

Indeed, the latter part of the 19th century was an extraordinary time to be alive.

Economic freedom abounded in the US. There was no insane government regulation. No income tax. No gun-toting agents ready to kick in your door, shut down your lemonade stand, tell you what to put in your body, or arrest you for collecting rainwater.

Personal responsibility was valued. Everyone accepted that there was danger in the world. And it wasn’t up to the government to ‘protect’ people from every last one of them.

Yet despite so much ‘danger’, this was one of the greatest periods of wealth creation in history, simply because people were free to make things happen.

People were free to enter, compete, and make choices in the market. Their freedom and property rights were protected by a clear rule of law.

However, just 50-years later, this positive trajectory was cut short with the establishment of the Federal Reserve.

It was a remarkable turn of events.

In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves. Five decades later the Federal Reserve Act placed an entire population under the control of a banking cartel.

The 100 years that followed through today have simply been about tightening the chains and leading the country down a path of gradual decline.

At first, the decline was subtle. The US remained prosperous and relatively free throughout the twentieth century.

According to the newest Frasier Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index (released yesterday), the US ranked as one of the world’s freest economies from 1980 through 2000.

Since then the decline has hastened.

The US dramatically slipped to 9th in 2005 and its decline has continued ever since, to the point where the United States is now rated less economically free than Jordan.

This is no accident.

The mushroom cloud expansion of regulation has stifled small business and innovation.

Even more significantly, property rights and respect for rule of law that once defined the country have eroded.

From an alarming increase in government seizure of private property under the guise of eminent domain, to blatant disregard for the property rights of bondholders during bailouts, the US has plunged to #36 in the world in respecting property rights.

The decline of economic freedom in the US has destroyed opportunities, growth, and wealth creation along with it.

Is this as bad as Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, or Venezuela? No. But it’s not about where you’re at. It’s about where you’re going. And the trajectory is clearly negative.

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Presenting the ‘Hookers and Blow’ GDP component for select European economies

Hookers Blow Presenting the Hookers and Blow GDP component for select European economies

October 7, 2014
Santiago, Chile

Now that European Union countries are required by law to keep tabs on illegal activities as part of their economic indicators, we decided to look at some select European countries more closely.

The new accounting rules mandated by the EU’s statistics office, Eurostat, include revenue from illegal activities related to drugs trafficking, prostitution and cigarette smuggling.

Of course, there’s no actual reliable data to measure these illegal activities, so it’s all guesswork. But hey, whatever floats your boat—or boosts your GDP.

For example, to figure out how prostitution contributed to the country’s economy, Spain’s national statistics agency counted the number of “known prostitutes” working in the country and consulted sex clubs to calculate how much they earned.

Known prostitutes? Do they have a Facebook group?

And how about if these “known prostitutes” move around the borderless Schengen area? Their contribution to GDP is probably counted several times then.

So, using these scientific methods Spain’s statistics agency announced that illicit activities accounted for 0.87% of GDP.

(Perhaps this is one of the reasons why a whopping 547,890 people left Spain last year, most of them to Latin America, according to the national statistics agency.)

This compares similarly to the UK where Britons, according to its own statistics agency, spent 12.3 billion pounds on drugs and prostitutes in 2013, or 0.79% of GDP.

That’s more than they spent on beer and wine, which only amounted to 11 billion pounds.

And you probably thought Britons were heavy drinkers. Turns out they enjoy hookers and blow even more.

On the more uptight and conservative spectrum of Europeans, Slovenian households spent 200 million euros last year on prostitutes and drugs, or 0.33% of Slovenia’s GDP.

Curiously enough, Slovenia’s Finance Minister just announced today that the country’s budget deficit will be 200 million euros higher than previously thought. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

On the more libertine extreme, in Germany estimates suggest that prostitution and drugs amounted to as much as $91 billion in 2013—or an incredible 2.5% of the total economy.

This is the sign of the times. Governments are so desperate to maintain the illusion of growth that they’re turning to desperate, comical measures.

Across the entire continent, Eurostat estimates that gross EU GDP is larger by 2.4% if all illegal activities (not just prostitution and drugs) are accounted for.

Funny thing, they also report that total real GDP growth in 2013 (the year they started counting illegal activities) was just 0.1%.

In other words, illegal activities are now the difference between economic growth and economic recession in Europe.

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British government refuses to accept its own currency

shutterstock 41783455 British government refuses to accept its own currency

October 7, 2014
Santiago, Chile

Chris Rose was dying from terminal heart disease. He didn’t have long, and before he passed, he wanted to make sure that his 18-month old son received his British passport.

When he went to pay the application fee at the British consulate in Hong Kong with cash, they told him, “Sorry we only take credit cards.”

The English teacher who had been living in Hong Kong for 20 years doesn’t have a credit card, and thus has no way of paying the passport fees for him and his son.

So they rejected him. They rejected a dying man from paying for his son’s passport with the very currency that they themselves issue. It’s obscene.

Facing intense bureaucracy and several months of waiting with no guarantee of success, he gave up on the hope that his infant son would be able to visit his grandparents back home.

It was only after the story was publicized in the local press in Hong Kong that the requirement to pay with a credit card was ‘waived on compassionate grounds.’

Think about how ridiculous this whole situation is for a moment.

First the government makes it mandatory that you have a passport in order to be able to move across arbitrary borders on the map that they have created.

Then they charge you money for the privilege of having a passport. In other words, if you want to leave the country, you have to pay up.

But then they won’t allow you to pay for it with the pieces of paper they force you to use as money.

Instead, they force you to use the government-regulated (and protected) banking industry, whether you want to or not.

Everywhere you look you can find examples like this of how politicians view people as government property to be exploited like cattle.

The Brazilian government imposes a tax of 6.38% on all purchases made by Brazilians with credit cards abroad.

This rate rose from the previous 2.38% in 2011 with a federal mandate in an effort to curb the rising trend of Brazilians traveling abroad to make purchases that are often cheaper than back home.

They don’t even try to hide the fact that they don’t want Brazilians to spend money outside of the country.

The message they are sending is quite clear: stay put and pay through the nose for inferior products produced by companies that have paid us off for a monopoly.

Of course, we’re starting to see protests around the world, proving that people are increasingly aware of being screwed by their governments.

But these protests are flawed.

Going out into the streets doesn’t change the system. And going to the voting booth only changes the players… not the game.

Every single election cycle people fill themselves with hope. They delude themselves into believing that everything will get better if they vote the right guy into office.

Of course, the right guy very quickly turns into the last guy. And nothing changes.

That’s because it’s the system itself that’s flawed. It’s not about any single individual.

This system awards a tiny elite with the power to kill. Steal. Wage war. Confiscate anyone’s property in their sole discretion. To tell people what they can/cannot put in their own bodies. To conjure trillions of currency units out of thin air.

But this current system can’t last.

It requires economic stability to self-sustain. And it’s already at the point where those in power have to resort to desperate tactics.

Their desperation has them coming up with ever-more creative ways to conjure economic growth. Plus they’re feeding on the tax revenues from entire generations that won’t even be born for decades.

This simply cannot sustain. Whether it happens today, tomorrow, 10 days from now, 5 years from now… is irrelevant. What’s important is the trend. It’s happening.

This is fundamentally good news. Yes, every shred of evidence suggests that the old system is on the way out. And that’s a bit scary. The unknown is always uncertain.

But what will come out on the other end will be better, brighter, and more free.

If you take a hunk of coal and put it under extreme pressure, you end up with a diamond.

Our entire civilization is being put under intense pressure. And what will come from this eventually is just as precious: a system where the individual has the power and freedom to choose. Where we are no longer viewed as government property.

In the meantime, it’s going to be a bumpy (and high-pressure) ride.

So for now, look at the objective data. Trust your senses about what’s happening. And don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

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This one chart shows exactly how undervalued gold is right now…

gold bars vault This one chart shows exactly how undervalued gold is right now…

October 6, 2014
London, England

[Editor’s Note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in the UK and frequent Sovereign Man contributor, is filling in for Simon today.]

For the benefit of anyone living under a rock these past weeks, Bill Gross, the so-called “Bond King” and manager of the world’s largest bond fund (PIMCO), jumped ship before he could be shoved overboard.

PIMCO’s owners, Allianz, must surely regret having allowed so much power to be centralized in the form of one single ‘star’ manager.

In a messy transfer in which nobody came out of well, Janus Capital announced that Bill Gross would be joining to run a start- up bond fund, before he had even announced his resignation from PIMCO (but then again Janus was a two-faced god).

This was deliriously tacky behavior from within a normally staid backwater of the financial markets.

Some financial media reported this as a ‘David vs Goliath’ story; in reality it is anything but.

The story can be more accurately summarized as ‘Bond fund manager leaves gigantic asset gatherer for other gigantic asset gatherer’ (Janus Capital’s $178 billion in client capital being hardly small potatoes).

This writer recalls the giddy marketing of a particularly new economy-oriented growth vehicle called the ‘Janus Twenty’ fund in the UK back in 2000.

Between March 2000 and September 2001, that particular growth vehicle lost 63% of its value. Faddish opportunism is clearly still alive and well.

We discussed this last week, highlighting this seeming anomaly that even as there has never been so much debt in the history of the world, it has also never been so expensive.

This puts the integrity of markets clearly at risk. And we have long sought alternatives that offer much lower credit and counterparty risk.

The time-honored alternative has been gold.

In fact, as the chart below shows, gold has tracked the expansion in US debt pretty handily (editor’s note: the correlation between the two is a strong +0.86).

chart1 This one chart shows exactly how undervalued gold is right now…

You can see in 2011, the rise in the gold price became overextended relative to the rise in US debt. Then it decoupled and went in the opposite direction.

This is a similar trend to what occurred in the early 1980s. And if one expects that relationship to resume (we do), then gold looks anomalously cheap relative to the rising level of US debt.

A second rationale for holding gold takes into account the balance sheet expansion of central banks:

chart2 This one chart shows exactly how undervalued gold is right now…

If one accepts that gold is not merely an industrial commodity but an alternative form of money, then it clearly makes sense to favor a money whose supply is growing at 1.5% per annum over monies whose supply is growing up to 20% per annum.

A third rationale for owning gold is best summed in perhaps the most damning statement to capture our modern financial tragedy.

“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

This is from Jean-Claude Juncker, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and current President-Elect of the European Commission.

It’s clear there is a vacuum where bold political action should reside. Elected leaders continue to kick the can down the road and ignore dangers to the system.

And in this vacuum, central bankers have stepped in to fill the void via bond yields that are below the rate of inflation.

They say that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

To a central banker facing the prospect of outright deflation, the answer to everything is the printing of ex nihilo money and the manipulation of financial asset prices.

This makes it incredibly difficult to shake off the suspicion that navigating the bond markets over the coming months will require almost supernatural powers in second-guessing both central banks and one’s peers.

For what it’s worth this is a game we won’t even bother playing.

Our pursuit of the rational alternative – proper forms of money and compelling deep value in equity markets – continues. More to follow on this.

[Editor’s note: Stay tuned this week for more information about Tim’s new monthly investment service, Price Value International.]

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Boots on the ground from Hong Kong [PHOTOS]

IMG 1046 Boots on the ground from Hong Kong [PHOTOS]

October 3, 2014
Santiago, Chile

Some of our team members at Sovereign Man are on the ground in Hong Kong and are witnessing first-hand the turmoil that’s been going on there for the past two weeks.

1 1024x768 Boots on the ground from Hong Kong [PHOTOS]

It all started on September 22 with grievances over the decision from the Chinese government in Beijing not to allow the people of Hong Kong to have free and fair elections in 2017.

Events reached a new stage over the previous weekend when the police used pepper-spray, batons and tear gas against unarmed and peaceful protesters standing up for freedom.

Today, protesters forced the government complex to shut down by setting up barricades around it, as a response to Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s refusal to step down.

IMG 0891 1024x768 Boots on the ground from Hong Kong [PHOTOS]

What’s remarkable is how peaceful and courteous the whole thing is.

There are signs on closed roads and subway stations that apologize for the inconvenience caused. Protesters are collecting their own trash and are even recycling it—even though the government’s cleaning department is reportedly refusing to cooperate and collect it. They have well-organized centers in each of the occupied sites with essential supplies—from water to medical assistance.

Nobody is using this as an opportunity to be violent or cause trouble.

IMG 1031 1024x768 Boots on the ground from Hong Kong [PHOTOS]

Most of the protesters are students and there’s a clear divide between the young and the old currently. Most young people are very enthusiastic and support the protests, while many older people think the young are being manipulated by third parties to push their own agendas.

But most are just irritated because their businesses and traffic have been affected.

A lot of older people have also resigned themselves to accept that the eventual takeover of Hong Kong from Mainland Communists is inevitable—something the energetic young are clearly very opposed to.

IMG 1251 1024x768 Boots on the ground from Hong Kong [PHOTOS]

In the last days there has been some turbulence caused by anti-protesters who oppose the student-led campaign. It’s rumored that thugs have been paid HK$800 (about USD$100) each to stir chaos and trouble by starting fights with protesters to give the police an excuse to use force against otherwise non-violent protesters.

The government is even using advanced propaganda tactics to sway the sentiment against the “rioting” students. Independent media outlets have revealed fake photoshopped images and reports of broken police cars and other alleged damages of rioting.

The government’s strategy is to largely wait for the protests to wane. And indeed by 8:30 pm local time today many occupied areas were cleared up.

Despite that, violent clashes between protesters and anti-protesters have intensified, however. The police, ironically, is not doing anything to restrain troublemakers. Instead, they’re using this as an excuse to arrest everyone and kick the protesters out.

On the ground it looks like the movement is ebbing. In Tsim Sha Tsui, one of the main shopping areas in Hong Kong, the police carried away an old man—the single remaining protester occupying the site.

IMG 1259 1024x768 Boots on the ground from Hong Kong [PHOTOS]

The latest is that the protesters have canceled planned talks with the government, blaming authorities for failing to protect them from violent opposition attacks.

To be continued…

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020: The light of liberty is going out all over the world. But we shall see it lit again soon.

020 Podcast 020: The light of liberty is going out all over the world. But we shall see it lit again soon.

People around the world are now being sparked into action, sick and tired of limitations on their freedoms.

We have a number of members from our team with boots on the ground in Hong Kong, where people are politely, but fiercely protest ing the state. They are not alone.

Globally, the system has to change. History shows us that this always happens.

World super powers, the prevailing social contract and the monetary system––none of these can last indefinitely.

We are now living in a unique time in history where all three of these systems are on the way out.

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