From High Above Jackson Hole: The Real Choice is Trump or Dope, Inc.
A note to readers: this is an old post on the archive website for Promethean PAC. It was written when we were known as LaRouche PAC, before changing our name to Promethean PAC in April 2024. You can find the latest daily news and updates on www.PrometheanAction.com. Additionally, Promethean PAC has a new website at www.PrometheanPAC.com.
Simultaneous with Donald Trump’s Georgia arrest, the annual confab of the Federal Reserve was held in the valley of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 24-26. Real economic substance, unmentioned there, is that embodied in Donald Trump’s Agenda 47 and the insurgent Make America Great Again movement he leads.
Trump’s clear and growing leadership of the American people strikes existential fear in the globalist financial oligarchy and their “deep state.” It portends major changes in US policy being brought into being through the US election process in 2024. It can mean the end to the financial oligarchy’s monetarist dictatorship and those whom Trump now accurately terms, ”radical left fascists.”
The formal title of this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy symposium was, “Structural Shifts in the Global Economy.” The central bankers and their acolytes were gathered there to assess their success and failures at maintaining their globalist agenda, including their ongoing restructuring of the world to “green” and fascist “brown.” It was delusional, but behind the verbiage was the reality: their need to now openly turn to Dope, Inc. to prop-up their debt bubble.
Back in the real world, the seismic ‘structural shift’ is that represented by a looming, great second Trump presidency. It portends the end to the global monetarist system and central banking itself. In its place, primacy is to be placed once again on the universal principle of national sovereignty and the “American system” of political economy.
Donald Trump’s campaign, and the campaign to politically destroy him, comes as confidence is lost in the Federal Reserve, the financial oligarchy itself, and the entire Anglo-Dutch monetarist central banking system. For months now, most Americans have struggled to make ends meet and suffer with no end in sight under the oligarch’s “system.”
Jerome Powell and Christine Lagarde Pronounce
The Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium is held annually, sponsored by the Kansas City Federal Reserve. The two highlighted speakers this year were the Fed’s Jerome Powell and the head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde.
The Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell, who keynoted the first session on Friday, August 25th morning session, was mushier than his EU central bank counterpart would be, but direct. He started by stating that inflation is still too high, and that Fed dictated interest rates will continue to be held at a restrictive level. Indeed, he warned, interest rates in the U.S. may need to go higher to tame inflation. This as American industrial production is falling, housing prices outside the range on most Americans, and office space vacated. Attempting to strike a balance, Powell’s message was that, out of an abundance of caution, the tightening of credit which is already squeezing ‘main street’ economic activity, will continue. The Fed Board considers core inflation as too high and able to readily rise again. The labor market is too tight and wages may also get out of hand. “Two percent inflation is, and will remain the goal,” concluded Powell. That was echoed later by Lagarde.
Speaking over lunch, Lagarde, now head of the European Central Bank (ECB) and formerly the managing director of the IMF, was even colder. As Europe lies crippled by skyrocketing energy prices, industry shutdowns and political turmoil, and as NATO promotes an escalating war, Lagarde was emphatic that interest rates will stay high. She could foresee more potential “shocks” that would drive prices up in Europe even further. These included, she said, new geopolitical and energy shocks. For those who thought the ECB might now moderate its credit tightening, Lagarde provided this slap: “If we are in a new age, past regularities may no longer be a good guide for how the economy works."
She was bluntly ideological, supporting the green/brown fascist policies of the financial oligarchy, as embodied in the World Economic Forum. The shift away from fossil fuels is “likely to increase the size and frequency of energy supply shocks,” she insisted. The reader should keep in mind that, even faster than in the United States, standards of living in western Europe have already rapidly declined accompanied by complete de-industrialization. Much of this has been imposed through skyrocketing gas & oil and raw materials prices, due to the EU’s sanctions regime against Russia. It is the captive nations within the European Union that are being gutted.
The conclusion to be drawn from Lagarde’s remarks is that these policies and orchestrated “shocks” will continue, if Lagarde and her ilk prevail. Not only will interest rates remain high and access to credit tighten further, but purchasing power of European businesses and citizens will be further cut to keep down inflation. Resources have been prioritized for NATO wars and the “NetZero” EU regime. There should also be no doubt that the Bank of England is on exactly the same page and in the same “hole.”
Recall Hitler’s Central Banker: Hjalmar Schacht
Jerome Powell did not have a word to say about “Bidenomics.” Mentioned only obliquely at Jackson Hole was the fact that, on both sides of the Atlantic, the equivalent of trillions of dollars of resources and manpower are being ruthlessly funneled, top-down, into inflationary, entropic, destructive directed investments into wind, solar storage batteries and more. Through financial restructuring and environmental decrees, de-industrialization is destroying the broader base of the physical economies of the trans-Atlantic nations. Simultaneously, over one and one half trillions of dollars equivalent of resources and manpower are being directed in the military-industrial complex within NATO, built upon the approximately $1 trillion committed by the US.
It must be pointed out that Hitler’s central banker, Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht (1877-1970), would agree with “Biden” policies. Germany was virtually bankrupt when Hitler came to power in 1933. Hitler appointed Schacht to the Presidency of the Reichsbank in 1933 and then acting Minister of Economics in 1934. By secret decree, Schacht was appointed General Plenipotentiary for the War Economy in May 1935. With quiet assent from London, New York and Basel, Schacht oversaw the Nazi regime of monetary policies, export & import controls, and resource controls that built-up Hitler’s war economy. Those policies are echoed by the oligarchy’s central banking policies today. Schacht thereby played the dominant role in the economic planning of, and preparation for, Hitler’s wars of aggression. This was, and is today, criminally insane.
A Brief Visit to the Land of Laputa:
Who will buy U.S. Treasuries?
Laputa is a flying island described in the hilarious 1726 book, Gulliver's Travels, written by the great republican conspirator Jonathan Swift. The floating island is inhabited by empiricist ‘scientists’ and ‘philosophers’ who believe in astrology and worry constantly that the sun will go out. One fellow is attempting to derive sunbeams from cucumbers, reminding one of the ‘scientists’ who today obsess over the carbon stored in plants and methane farted by cows.
Given the growing financial crises, and loss of confidence in the Federal Reserve and monetarist central banking, there is today an obsession with rapidly rising US Treasury bill & bond rates. When the U.S. government runs a budget deficit, it borrows money by issuing Treasury debt. For if the federal debt is not financed by vacuuming up existing dollars, it must be paid by even greater inflation –what Powell and the Lagarde say they will defeat!
Trillions of dollars of Treasury notes are being issued for sale to finance the insanely costly “shocks” of the Biden collective’s and Lagarde’s “new age.” As interest rates on US Treasuries rise to attract enough buyers, interest rates for real economic activity also go up, and the availability of credit to businesses shrinks.
There has also been the cumulative impact of the UK, EU, and U.S.-driven sanctions policies. As seen with the growing membership of the BRICS grouping, nations are choosing to increasingly trade in their own sovereign currencies and “decoupling” from the U.S. dollar. In part due to currency swaps within and among the BRICS members, they require fewer dollars in trading and as a backstop against speculative runs. They therefore don’t need to park dollars in U.S. Treasuries, where they might now also be seized. As of January 2023, foreign countries own roughly 24% of total US debt – over $7 trillion, most held by foreign central banks and other government entities. For comparison, in FY 2018, some 36% of US debt had been held by foreigners.
Recall the noisy but inconsequential Congressional debt-ceiling brawl in May, over financing the exploding federal debt. In this same time frame, federal regulators scrambled to enforce increased bank capital reserves, following the wave of bankruptcies that started with Silicon Valley Bank. Also draining liquidity from markets is the Fed’s continuing sale of assets, including Treasuries, in its $8.2 trillion balance sheet.
We are at only the beginning of what the Wall Street Journal called the Treasury's "coming debt deluge," singling out weaker tax revenues and the systemic impact on the Fed's "primary dealers."
Now in the dog-days of August, all of this pressed on those gathered in the modern day island of Laputa, Jackson Hole. Consider as an example professor Darrell Duffie of Stanford University and the New York Fed, one of the first chosen speakers to follow Powell’s keynote. He was among a selected set of 15 speakers or panelists. Duffie’s topic was, by implication, that mass of US Treasuries in the queue, which is growing, and must be sold.
Primary Dealers Can’t Deal
Following the near-bankruptcy of Bear Stearns in March 2008, the Federal Reserve established the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF). The facility allowed primary dealers -- currently two dozen banks and securities broker-dealers, to borrow copious amounts from the New York Fed, as part of the desperate bailout of the system and its “banksters.” In the real world, millions of Americans lost their homes, as well as their livelihoods amidst the banksters’ bailout.
As poor professor Duffie recounts, “Since 2007, the total size of primary dealer balance sheets per dollar of Treasuries outstanding has shrunk by a factor of nearly four.” That is, that the amount of Treasuries outstanding (federal debt) has already grown four-fold relative to primary dealer regulated ability to “intermediate” trades.
There followed the “the dash for cash” at the end of 2019 and into 2020. As the Covid lockdown began in March, then-again nearly bankrupt banks and major trading entities rushed to get liquidity by cashing out their US Treasuries. As Duffy recounts this near implosion, “the safe-haven roles of US Treasuries were tested” in 2020.
Anything Goes: “All-in-All Trading”
Cutting to the chase, what Duffie proposes – again this being openly and prominently presented to the world’s central bankers -- is to throw the Treasury market open to anyone - “all-to-all trading” - “including ‘dark pools’ of money,” to maintain Treasury market liquidity!
“Dark pools” are private stock exchanges reserved for the largest traders, including hedge funds, money-market funds, and mutual funds who are in turn major parts of the “shadow banking” system. These ‘trading platforms’ —which are formally called automated trading systems—keep orders hidden. FinTech and technical innovation relating to ‘products,’ AI, and electronic payment services are incorporated. There are reported to be some 30 such dark pools for stocks trading, with the largest (as of 2019) reported as run by UBS Group AG, Credit Suisse Group AG and JP Morgan Chase & Co. On any given day, these ‘dark pool” trades account for some 40% of all stock market trades through major exchanges -- but these are not trades on the trading floor. In turn, nearly 50% of all global assets are now held in shadow banks according to the IMF and the globalist Financial Control Board (FSB) in Basel.
Professor Duffie quotes a fellow academic and Fed intimate that, “when dealers’ capacity to intermediate trades is limited, large-scale asset purchases can improve wider market liquidity and mitigate the risk of a broader tightening in financial conditions that might disrupt the monetary transmission mechanism.” [Italics added – BL]
Shadow banks are fueled by “investors,” many of them located offshore. So where do these hedge funds and the like – many of them with offshore branches or based offshore – get their money? It is reported that the Cayman Islands is the leading jurisdiction for establishing offshore hedge funds and offshore mutual funds. It is estimated that over 70% of the world’s offshore funds are located in the Cayman Islands. It is the heart of money laundering for the international drug trade, along with criminal funds garnered from human and arms trafficking.
The Shadow Banked
While there is the shadow banking system, there is also the shadow banked.
The ‘shadow banked’ is illegal flows from drug money, human trafficking, tax evasion, arms trafficking, and so on. Crypto has received a lot of attention, but crypto is often the means to launder money into and through a shadow bank platform. The relationship of illegal flows of drug money and other illicit funds to shadow banking is known, and while empirical economic literature has been “negligent,” it is the subject of investigations. (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3) Such large financial flows represent exactly the “large-scale asset purchases [which] can improve wider market liquidity,” delicately referenced by Duffie and colleagues at Jackson Hole.
In his 56 page paper, Professor Duffie and colleagues have suggested other measures that could also be developed, including an expansion of “central clearing” to back-stop virtually all Treasury transactions with more, increasingly tenuous, federal guarantees. However, the example of all-in-all trading makes the point to be made here.
Dope Inc. and everyone else must be brought in to help primary traders manage the flood of Treasury securities to be sold, to find willing buyers, and prevent US treasury yields from going through the roof and driving disintegration, as interest rates go up everywhere.
Cascading Effects
So why all this brouhaha about back stopping the US treasury market at Jackson Hole? The short answer, is because the central banking system and the once-sovereign government treasuries they now control, are running out of buyers and Treasury rates are on the way up, pushing other rates up as well.
As government expenditures grow, as with the Inflation Reduction Act that will ultimately cost more than one trillion dollars, the more the Biden collective spends the greater the volume of Treasury securities that must be sold. As such borrowing increases, the U.S. government must increase the interest rate (yield) to induce further purchases. Consequently, to attract investors, any bond riskier than a Treasury bond – say a corporation -- with a comparative maturity must then offer an even higher yield! Central Banks like the Fed are now quickly losing control of their monetarist system.
The rapid rise in Fed interest rates, further fueled by now-rising Treasury rates, is then creating what a Reuters story calls “a toxic cocktail of corporate distress" for highly leveraged (zombie) financial institutions and businesses as the collateral debt obligations market dries up “and aggressive rate hikes bring tougher borrowing conditions and uncertainty.”
There is a broader impact on lending. As another Reuters article admits, “an increase in government borrowing drains reserves from the banking system, and because banks absorb the new issuance, they have less money to lend.”
There are also other features to this crisis, witness the Silicon Valley Bank (SLV) bankruptcy and crisis in US regional banking. Rising bond prices work against existing bondholders, like these banks. When Treasury yields rise, prices of current bond issues fall. SLV was caught with old, low interest Treasuries bought before the Fed rate increases. Of course, as the Fed increases rates, the market prices of existing bonds – almost all outstanding bonds -- immediately decline, and someone loses.
The Global Debt Bomb
Overhanging all of this is the ticking global debt bomb -- three hundred trillion dollars. That is the record debt which global governments, households, financial corporates, and nonfinancial corporates owed in June 2022, as estimated by the Institute of International Finance. Of that, global public debt reached an all-time high and was $92 trillion of the $300+ trillion total global debt in 2022. US federal debt is about one-third of that total, and so is U.S. total debt.
That $300 trillion is equivalent to 349% of global GDP, and that $300 trillion works out to $37,500 of debt for every person in the world, compared to a GDP per capita of just $12,000. (GDP is a lousy figure as it is derived by adding up the final sale of everything sold, useless or not, but the ratio to debt still makes the point.)
Conclusion
So now it has come to this. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, wrote the wise John Winthrop, for his Massachusetts Bay Colony sermon of 1630. The renewed building of that city upon a hill has begun, as Americans grasp that it is in their hands to rebuild our sovereign nation, as others may build theirs.
It is past time to overthrow the oligarch’s monetarist insanity, which once again has polluted nature’s wondrous Jackson Hole.
That which has been shared here underscores the existential nature of Donald J. Trump’s U.S. presidential campaign, the defense of the U.S. Constitution, and the revolutionary insurgency that grows around Trump’s leadership. Trump himself exclaimed, in recent interviews, that he is struck by the humanity, the love for the nation and for fellow citizens, expressed in this revolution.
The means of eliminating Laputa – the criminal insanity of British Empire ideology and its imperial monetarist system – starts with putting the Federal Reserve system into bankruptcy and restoring national banking and nation credit, Statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche likewise proposed, in 2007 and 2008, a four powers agreement among the U.S., India, Russia and China to overturn, once-and-for-all, the Anglo-Dutch Monetarist System, with such an agreement leading to a New Bretton Woods.
The BRICS conference referenced earlier and about which there is much prattle concerning the implications of its growing membership actually seeks an end to this system as well, although many ignorantly characterize it as a battle against the United States.
It is the constitutional republic of the United States still, acting as a fully sovereign nation -- as Lyndon LaRouche emphasized -- that is the keystone in creating a new architecture for “a community of sovereign nation states” as uniquely envisioned by our John Quincy Adams. President Donald Trump called for just such sovereign relations among nations in his historic anti-globalization speech to the United Nations in 2018. For that reason and more, we can understand that if Donald Trump had been not been defrauded in 2020, we would not be today in a tragic war in Europe or desperately seeking to make ends meet as the real economy crashes all around us.
Yet now, our world is being once-again transformed -- “old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (II Corinthians 5:17).With Trump’s Agenda 47, as perhaps never before, we have much work to do!