by Daniel Jupp
The Russian rouble has increased in value.
The Russians have secured ongoing and profitable trade with India and China.
The Russians are still receiving billions from Europe, in roubles rather than dollars.
The Russians have carefully stockpiled currency and vital materials for years, and still possess much of this despite western nations seizing assets.
The US and Western Europe have rampant inflation.
The US and Western Europe have supply chain difficulties.
They have a self manufactured energy crisis and a self manufactured cost of living crisis.
They have outsourced much of their industry and manufacturing to China.
The US has empty shelves.
The US and the West has the most enormous levels of debt ever seen in all human history. There is no mismanagement of any economy for all of recorded history with greater levels of functional debt more deeply spread or more widely spread than ours, today.
The whole thing keeps going on old fumes and fragile confidence, like a circus clown’s jalopy.
Some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the West haven’t made a real profit for years. Others are sustained only by subsidies from massively indebted governments.
The US can waste trillions, but can’t supply baby milk formula anymore.
Government invents money, then pays imaginary money to great corporations, who in turn post imaginary profits. All of which can disappear as soon as the collective imagining of them as real disappears. They made money purely imaginary when they went off a gold standard, and even more illusory when they got rid of large amounts of the national gold reserves that give the promises of nations some actual solidity.
They want to make it even more illusory still as a fully digital currency, which will reference no real thing at all, no thing of value, but actually be a marker indicating compliance with the authorities. Your digital currency is a note from the government telling the government that you are a good boy.
The Chinese and the Russians have been steadily building up reserves of real things, which we have steadily depleted. They demand loyalty too, of course, but they still believe in real things in economics and everything else.
We deal in the currency of lies, and the economics of an illusionist. It’s the Wizard of Oz economy, and the curtain is falling.