As we near the end of November, the excitement and preparations for Thanksgiving are kicking into high gear. Who doesn't enjoy sitting down around the table with loved ones and indulging in turkey, stuffing, gravy and green beans? It's the perfect time to express gratitude, engage in culinary traditions, and share new memories with family and friends alike.

However, beyond gratitude and familial bonding, there's a lot more to be learned from the history behind Thanksgiving. You may be thinking, "I already learned about the Pilgrims, Mayflower and Native Americans in elementary school—why should I revisit this particular lesson in history?"

If you understand the importance of preparedness, the story of Thanksgiving is a great example of what to do (and not do) when it comes to survival lessons in tough conditions. Consider for a moment that most of the Pilgrims, the first settlers of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, were city folk. They showed up in the New World extremely unprepared for what was to come. In fact, due to a brutal winter, disease and a rough crossing of the Atlantic, only half of the Mayflower's102 passengers survived the first winter in the United States.

Squanto, a member of a local indigenous Wampanoag confederation, had previously been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Because he spoke English, he was a key ally for the Pilgrims. If it hadn't been for Native Americans like Squanto imparting lessons for survival in their new land, the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims wouldn't have survived and flourished in the way they did.

As Dick Ropp, the chairman of the French Creek Living History Association puts it, "It's well documented that the first Europeans who settled in the New World could not have made it through the first few winters without the assistance and knowledge of American Indians."

Let's take it back to 1621 and cover four key survival lessons that the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims regarding how to prepare for the winter season, colder temperatures, etc.

#1 Exchanging Resources

An "every man for himself" mindset didn't do Pilgrims much good in those days. Arriving unprepared for the cold winter meant they lacked the resources and knowledge for survival—and the consequences were fatal.

One of the things that Squanto did for the Pilgrims was arrange meetings and broker alliances with surrounding Native American tribes. This allowed the Pilgrims to engage in a trading system with the local tribes, exchanging European-manufactured goods such as guns, metal cooking utensils, and cloth for food and other necessary supplies.

This barter and trade system was beneficial for both sides. The Wampanoags were looking to build up their strength against rival tribes such as the Pequot and Narragansett—and needed the weapons and resources to do so.

#2 Using Multipurpose Items

In addition to sharing resources, the Pilgrims learned to be resourceful and find various uses for the same item. As the story goes, the Pilgrims were originally going to take two boats over to America. But, due to an issue with one of the boats, they had to quickly retrofit the Mayflower for passengers. Unfortunately, this meant they were forced to leave a lot of their cargo and supplies behind.

Because they were limited on supplies upon arrival to America, they were forced to be inventive. For example, they used a printing press to undergird a beam in the Mayflower, when rough seas caused it to crack. And because there weren't initially enough homes built on the land to house everyone through the winter, some families lived aboard the Mayflower while preparing additional houses on the shore.

Their houses on the shore were constructed from whatever resources could be found—for example, the wood from trees in surrounding forests.

#3 Planting Life-Sustaining Crops

Many Pilgrims perished during their first winter due to poor nutrition and lack of knowledge of how to grow their own food. The local Native American tribes that had lived in the area for over 10,000 years, such as the Wampanoag and Pokanokets, understood the native crops and knew how to cultivate and harvest them. Once a connection was established with these tribes, the Pilgrims were able to gain important survival lessons when it came to growing crops in the local area. Life-sustaining crops such as corn were commonplace and kept people healthy and strong during the winter months. It's no wonder cornbread has become a staple Thanksgiving feast food!

Pilgrim house-gardens likely included crops such as onions, leeks, sorrel, yarrow, lettuce, carrots, radishes, currants, liverwort, watercress and others. Additionally, the Pilgrims learned how to extract sap from maple trees and gather ground nuts, acorns, walnuts, chestnuts, squashes, beans, fruits and berries.

The Native Americans also taught them what not to eat—such as which plants were poisonous and couldn't be ingested. The Pilgrims probably wished they had some Wild Edible Playing Cards available back then!

Understanding how to plant and harvest your own life-sustaining crops, whether they be in your garden, on your roof (maybe an Urban Garden), or in your house, is a worthwhile survival lesson to begin practicing now.

#4 Hunting and Fishing

Aside from growing produce, the Pilgrims also learned where and how to fish and hunt from the local Native American tribes. Understanding trapping techniques and animal movement patterns is key in knowing how to hunt successfully—and the Native Americans had been doing this for centuries.

According to an account recorded by Pilgrim Edward Winslow, people hunted deer, fowl and wild turkeys—which they stored and served at the first Thanksgiving feast.

They also learned to catch fish such as cod and bass and other seafood such as clams, mussels, lobster and eel. These foods provided important nutrients and nourishment needed to get the Pilgrims through the harsh winter conditions.

Thanks to the lessons in survival from the Native Americans, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock went on to defeat the odds and establish the second successful English colony in the Americas.

Even though you may not be a pilgrim setting out to create a colony, there are certain situations in life that call for the application of these key survival lessons. Taking the time to learn them now will mean the difference between struggling and coasting through difficult times.

Happy Thanksgiving!

As we've seen with the 2008 Great Recession and the stock market ups and downs the past few weeks, our society will never be immune to negative economic outcomes.

Whether it be a stock market crash or a foreign attack on our banking systems, there are a variety of potential situations that could negatively impact our financial well-being as individuals and as a country.

Fortunately, there's a lot we can learn about preparation for economic worst-case scenarios simply by looking at the recent past—the Great Depression, for example.

The Great Depression started when the stock market crashed in 1929 and lasted until 1939. By its lowest point in 1933, roughly 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country's banks had failed.

Thanks to human resilience and creativity, many people were able to survive this tough time in U.S. history.

That's why today I'm sharing ten concrete survival tips we can glean from the Great Depression. Understanding what people did to survive during this tough economic period helps us to prepare in advance for similar situations.

With tightening monetary policies and geopolitical risks, Morgan Stanley analysts have determined that 2018 is on track to be the most volatile since the financial crisis.

There's no better time to read this list and prepare yourself and your loved ones.

And with that, here they are...

#1 Grow your own food

During periods of economic hardship, the last thing you want to do is rely on external systems for your own food sources.

During the Great Depression, the United States' industrial production dropped by half.

Farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops, and bread lines, soup kitchens, and rising numbers of homeless people became fairly common in America's towns and cities.

About 20 percent of the population lived on farms. Fortunately, many city dwellers still had gardening knowledge from their country days. If your family had a cow and a garden, you were considered rich.

Today, with a growing urban population, it's less common to possess basic gardening knowledge. We've lost that skill overall in our culture.

But in the case that grocery stores become too expensive or simply run out of food during a financial meltdown, it will be essential to know how to grow your own food.

Take the time now to learn how to plant and harvest foods—whether in your house, backyard, or on your rooftop.

At My Patriot Supply, we have a product called the Survival Seed Vault by Patriot Seeds, which are perfect for gardens like those grown during the depression.

Containing 21 varieties of USDA Certified Organic Heirloom Seeds, they can last 5+ years in proper storage.

#2 Learn to hunt, fish and forage

Like learning to garden, it's equally important to learn to find and hunt your own animal protein sources...before disaster strikes.

If you have a family member or friend who's experienced, there's no better time than now to ask for a lesson in the basics. Who knows? Maybe you'll discover a new hobby along the way.

During the Great Depression, foraging for edible plants helped many people sustain themselves.

For example, nuts and wild asparagus were common findings for families that would go out foraging for the day. Identify the areas in your local community where you can find and harvest additional food. Keeping a deck of Edible Wild Foods Playing Cards nearby would be of help as well.

#3 Turn to a barter system if banking systems shut down

In the years and decades before the Great Depression, banks were revered. No one ever considered the idea that they could fail and that their money would simply disappear. When many of the banks closed down as a result of the crisis, the only cash people had was whatever they had on hand or stored up at home. This was unfortunate, because the banks would close down with virtually no warning—leaving no time to go make cash withdrawals from accounts. And people were forced to rely on other forms of value exchange.

Bartering is an age-old practice that human civilizations have used for generations—even before banks were created.

During the Depression, payment was often made with eggs, fresh milk or produce. Bartering was also beneficial because it meant that families could add different types of food to their meals—expanding the variety of produce they could consume.

Bartering makes an additional case for learning to grow, hunt and forage for food—it gives you more of a base to use in negotiations and trades. Bear in mind that food isn't the only valuable item—during the Depression, things like wood could be collected, split and exchanged as firewood.

In our modern-day context, everything from additional fuel for camp stoves to ammunition for weapons can be valuable barter items. See our recent Survival Scout article on the Top 15 Items That Disappear When Disasters Strike for more valuable barter items.

#4 Be as resourceful as possible

If you have a grandparent or parent that lived through the Great Depression, you've likely heard or seen them express values of resourcefulness and frugality. They were our last, truly self-reliant generation.

For example, they might tell stories about how they used...

• Pieces of rubber tires as replacement soles when shoes were worn through.
• Anything and everything you might find in the kitchen or that was donated by others to make what became known as "Depression Soup."
• Flour-sacks to make dresses.
• Newspapers to wrap presents.

Knowing how to reuse and recycle everything was the name of the game in those days—and something we can all benefit from.

Challenge yourself to see everything as multifunctional, and get creative with what various items can be used for, in the event that your resources are depleted.

#5 Sleep outside during heat waves

Air conditioning is a luxury many of us take for granted. In the case that it becomes too much to afford or your unit breaks and replacement parts cost you a small fortune, you'll need to find ways to beat the heat.

During the summer months of the Great Depression, it wasn't uncommon to see whole families sleeping on their front lawns or in local parks.

Additionally, they would use other cool-down tactics such as hanging wet sheets over doorways. Hot air was slightly cooled as it passed through the wet fabric.

#6 Strengthen family and community bonds

During the Great Depression, it wasn't uncommon to have grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins living in the same house or vehicle. With so many displaced, it was critical to rely on extended family for help.

The same was true of neighbors, and you'd see people donating meals and money whenever possible. Some communities even organized what they called "surprise parties." They would collect food and necessities (including cash), and then designate a particular family to receive the collection at each surprise party.

This spirit of generosity and community bonds is apparent in many stories from the Depression. The people who did well during this difficult time were often those who depended on family and friends and were able to be depended on by others.

Take the time to establish and strengthen these bonds, with neighbors and your local community, now—don't wait until an economic collapse makes everyone desperate.

#7 Be a jack-of-all-trades

When it came to finding work during the Depression, it helped to be a jack-of-all-trades. These people could often find work when others couldn't.

The following skills will come in handy during periods of hardship:

• Sewing/knitting
• Fixing plumbing
• Home or car repairs
• Gardening, canning/food preserving
• Sharpening or making tools
• Butchering and curing meat
• Metal- or woodworking
• Gunsmithing
• Cheese or candle making
• Recognizing wild edibles

In our knowledge-based economy today, handymen and jacks-of-all-trades are harder to come by. Develop a competitive advantage and learn these skills now. They will certainly come in handy (no pun intended) later.

#8 Stock up on supplies

During the Great Depression, housewives could be judged by how many jars they had "put up" during harvest season.

When things go awry, you can bet that items will be flying off the shelves at local stores. Don't wait until then to stock up on the essentials, or to start canning and jarring your own food. Make sure you have enough stored up to last you for several months, at the very least.

To get you started, at My Patriot Supply, we sell a Three-Month Emergency Food Supply that can provide you with a strong hedge against economic downturn. With a 25-year shelf life, this supply includes delicious meals that average 2,000+ calories per day for one person.

#9 Don't rely on credit cards or loans

Too many of us rely on credit cards and loans from the bank to make big-ticket purchases.

However, during the Depression, many people had to buy their first cars and homes in one lump sum since they couldn't rely on a bank to give them a loan. To do this, they would live with family members and save whatever cash they could as they worked.

Avoid taking out a loan and going into debt—and start saving a supply of cash now.

You should also make sure you have a supply of assets outside of cash or credit. Whether it be houses, land or precious metals, make wise investments into long-lasting items of value. As we've seen with the Great Depression, keeping the majority of your wealth and money stored at the bank isn't exactly the most secure solution.

#10 Remain positive 

Aside from relying on barter systems, growing your own food, and learning to hunt and scavenge, there's a great deal of mental resilience needed to survive tough events like the Great Depression.

According to Murray Hunn, head of global research at Elliott Wave International, "We think the major economies are on the cusp of this turning into the worst recession we have seen in 10 years."

With predictions like this, there's cause for preparation.

And as one woman who survived the Great Depression shared, "Poppy always said the world turns and everything that has happened would happen again. I am sure if he were still with us today he would be warning us to start a garden and buy some chickens."

Take these lessons in stride, and learning from the past makes all the difference when life as we know it changes drastically.

September is National Preparedness Month. There's a philosophy that gets talked about a lot in the preparedness community. It's called the "sheepdog approach." It comes from an analogy that describes humans as either sheep, wolves or sheepdogs as it relates to preparedness.

Here's a brief overview, with the analogy broken down into its parts.

The Sheep

Sheep make up the vast majority of society. Peaceful, kind, gentle. Collectively, they're productive and make up the "greater good" of our world.

This is not to say that the sheep, in this analogy, are by nature weak, fearful, blind or any other negative attributes.

Yet, the sheep are vulnerable to the wolves. The reason sheep are vulnerable is not because wolves are more powerful and cunning. No, the real reason is because sheep deny the existence of the wolves.

Many people understand danger and have a desire to feel safe. For instance, almost everyone knows that a seatbelt can save a life. Yet, these same people often complain about taking their shoes off at the airport.

The difference has to do with denial. Most people are more comfortable with accepting the fact that a dangerous accident can happen versus a violent person carrying out a willful act to injure, maim and kill.

The Wolves

Wolves are characterized by two things among humans: a lack of care for the rest of society and a capacity for violence.

Many people visualize home invaders, terrorists, or enemy combatants as the wolves of this world. Indeed, these are wolves. They are threats to the sheep of this world.

However, it can't be denied that there are often wolves among us. They may be wearing sheep's clothing. They may not carry out violence themselves but put others in harm's way to achieve their ends by violent means. They may swindle sheep out of their peaceful way of living to selfishly make a better life for themselves.

That's why the world needs sheepdogs.

The Sheepdogs

The sheepdog protects the sheep from wolves. It alerts the flock to the wolf, and if necessary, defends against the wolf with equal violence. The sheepdog is capable of violence, but only out of love for people.

In society, the most identifiable sheepdogs are our servicemen and women and law enforcement. They put themselves in harm's way to protect the greater good. They neutralize the wolves, even if a wolf in sheep's clothing sent them to do so.

It's worth noting that all sheepdogs don't have to be capable of violence in order to stave off the wolves.

The armed forces and police make effective sheepdogs because they know how and when to use violence. A lot of people think they are born this way, as natural sheepdogs. But the truth is, no one becomes a warrior or a hero overnight.

Today's sheepdogs are constantly training, constantly learning. As the world changes, so do they. They are sniffing out new threats, becoming better equipped to handle them and so on.

Sometimes, many "sheep" tend to deny the threat of violence because at this moment, they are not prepared to handle it. It's much more comfortable to deny it.

The bottom line is that being a sheepdog is more about mentality than current abilities or capacity to take down the bad guys.

This means that everyone is capable of becoming more sheepdog-like in their everyday lives. More prepared.

There's one last role that is often overlooked.

What about the Shepherd?

One character that is left out in this analogy is the shepherd. Humans are either sheep, sheepdogs or wolves. Now maybe, just as in the biblical version of the analogy, a higher power is the shepherd. This makes sense, since the shepherd is ultimately responsible for the fate of the sheep, wolves and sheepdogs.

Ultimately, the shepherd is a leader who can see the whole picture. They train the sheepdog. They care for both the sheep and sheepdog's needs. And they are careful not to lead either into a place where wolves can prey easily.

People are not destined to be one archetype or another. All of us are part sheep, sheepdog, shepherd and even wolf. Inside us, there is a battle going on to determine who we will become. National Preparedness Month provides us with a moment to consider our position in society.

Our good friend John Rubino over at DollarCollapse.com just released an analysis titled US Housing Bubble Enters Stage Two: Suddenly Motivated Sellers.

He reminds us that housing bubbles follow a predictable progression:

• Stage One: Mania -- Prices rise at an accelerating rate as factors like excess central bank liquidity/loose credit/hot foreign money drive a virtuous bidding cycle well above sustainably afforable levels.
• Stage Two: Peak -- Increasingly jittery owners attempt to sell out before the party ends. Supply jumps as prices stagnate.
• Stage Three: Bust -- As inventory builds, sellers start having to lower prices. This begins a vicious cycle: buyers go on strike not wanting to catch a falling knife, causing sellers to drop prices further.

Rubino cites recent statistics that may indicate the US national housing market is finally entering Stage Two after a rip-roaring decade of recovery since the bursting of the 2007 housing bubble:

• The supply of homes for sale during the "all important" spring market rose at 3x last year's rate;
• 30 of America's 100 largest cities now have more inventory than they did a year ago, and
• Mortgage applications for new homes dropped 9% YoY.

Taken together, these suggest that residential housing supply is increasing as sales slow, exactly what you'd expect to see in the transition from Stage One to Stage Two.

If that's indeed what's happening, Rubino warns the following comes next:

Stage Two's deluge of supply sets the table for US housing bubble Stage Three by soaking up the remaining demand and changing the tenor of the market. Deals get done at the asking price instead of way above, then at a little below, then a lot below. Instead of being snapped up the day they're listed, houses begin to languish on the market for weeks, then months. Would-be sellers, who have already mentally cashed their monster peak-bubble-price checks, start to panic. They cut their asking prices preemptively, trying to get ahead of the decline, which causes “comps" to plunge, forcing subsequent sellers to cut even further.
Sales volumes contract, mortgage bankers and realtors get laid off. Then the last year's (in retrospect) really crappy mortgages start defaulting, the mortgage-backed bonds that contain their paper plunge in price, et voila, we're back in 2008.

Rubino's article is timely, as we've lately been seeing a proliferation of signs that the global boom in housing is suddenly cooling. I've also recently encountered similar evidence that the housing market in my own pocket of Northern California is weakening, and I'm curious to learn if other PeakProsperity.com readers are seeing the same in their hometowns.

The Global Housing Bubble

Housing, as they accurately say, is local. Conditions differ from region to region, making generalizations of the overall market difficult.

That said, the tsunami of $trillions printed by the world's central banking cartel since 2008 clearly found its way into the housing market.

The world real estate market is HUGE, over $200 trillion. That dwarfs the global debt and equity markets. So it's no surprise the central authorities did all they could to reverse the losses the GFC created for property owners.

As a result, many of the most popular locations to live are now clearly in bubble territory when it comes to home prices:

The chart above displays the most bubblicious major cities around the world in red. But it's important to note that the merely 'overvalued' markets denoted in yellow, and even some of the green 'fair-valued' ones, are still wildly-unaffordable for the average resident.

For example, in "yellow" San Francisco, where the median home now costs $1.6 million, prices are well-above the excesses seen during the previous housing bubble:

And in 'fair-valued' New York City, the median household must spend 65% of its annual income on housing alone.

Is it any wonder that 70% of millennials who don't yet own a home fear they'll never be able to afford one?

Signs Galore Of Topping Markets

At the end of a speculative bubble, it's the assets that are most overvalued that correct first and correct hardest.

So we would expect that as the highest-priced real estate markets fare from here, the general real estate market will follow.

When we take a closer look at what's currently going on with the red-hot real estate markets noted in the chart above, we indeed see evidence supportive of Rubino's claim that the decade-long Stage One mania may now be ending.

Here's a spate of recent headlines about these cities:

• Toronto: Prices clearly peaked in early 2017. Prices are now down 3% vs last year.
• Syndey: Compared to last year, prices are now down 5% and supply has ballooned 22%.
• Stockholm & Vancouver: Over a recent 6-month period, prices in the luxury property market fell 9% and 7.6%, respectively.
• New York City: In Q1 2018, prices were down 8% YoY and sales were down 25%. NYC's luxury properties fared even worse.
• San Francisco: After hitting a record price high in January, the city has seen a rare spring decline in prices, while rents across the SF Bay Area are starting to "cool off"

Sure looks like Rubino's predicted Stage Two symptoms of rising supply and stagnating prices.

Local Signs, Too

As mentioned, I live in Northern California, quite close to Santa Rosa.

Things here aren't as nuts as they are in San Franscico; but it's still a moderately-affluent region with lots of second homes. It's one of the semi-frothy areas I'd expect to see cooling off in first should there be a downwards turn in macroeconomic conditions.

Located less than an hour north of San Francisco, residential housing prices here have roughly increased 2x over the past six years as the Bay Area has boomed. Supply has been in chronic shortage, exacerbated by the loss of thousands of structures burned during last October's destructive Tubbs fire.

But recently, for the first time in many years, realtors here are beginning to talk of a softening they're seeing in the local housing market.

Median sale prices dropped from May to June, which is counter to previous years. And several towns are seeing year-over-year declines in median price -- something unheard of over the past 7 years.

Meanwhile, the days-on-market ratio for properties is beginning to creep up.

Of the greatest concern to the realtors in my area: bidding wars are no longer happening. Houses are selling either at or below asking prices now. That's a *big* development in a market where houses have routinely sold for $50-100K+ above the listing price.

In a similar vein, I'm hearing evidence of the softening rents down in San Franscico and the East Bay (Oakland/Berkeley). Wolf Richter has done a good job chronicalling the substantial volume of newly-constructed units that have recently hit the market threatening to depress rents, and I've heard from a multi-family unit owner down there how landlords in the area are now finding their rents ~$500 too high for the market to bear.

This is all early and anecdotal data. It's too little at this point to claim definitively that my local housing market has entered Stage Two.

But I'm curious to hear from other PeakProsperity.com readers. What are you observing in your local markets? Are you seeing similar signs of concern?

Please share any insights you have in the Comments section below. Collectively, we may be able to add clarity, in one direction or another, to Rubino's hypothesis.

Prepping For Stage Two

Whatever the timing, Stage Two is an inevitability for today's ridiculously-overpriced real estate markets. It's not a matter of if it (as well as Stage Three) arrives, but when.

Given the data above, I think Rubino is correct in his assessment. Or at least, correct enough that prudent action is warranted today.

This makes even greater sense when considered along with the current trends of rising interest rates and quantitative tightening. Remember, home prices and interest rates have a mathematically inverse relationship: as rates go up, home prices must go down (all else being equal). And as central banks start withdrawing in earnest the excess liquidity that inflated property values to their current nose-bleed heights, expect further downward pressure on prices.

To drive the urgeny home even harder, we haven't even yet talked about the damage an economic recession and/or a painful correction in the financial markets would wreak on the real estate market. With the current expansion cycle the second-longest on record and our all-time-high markets looking increasingly vulnerable, it seems very unlikely we'll avoid at least one of those crises in the near to mid-future.

Here are worthwhile steps we recommend at this point:

• Consider selling: If you're a homeowner and are not committed to remaining in your property for the next decade+, do some scenario planning. If prices fell 20%, how much of a financial and emotional impact would that have on you? If you have substantial equity gains in your home, Stage Two is the time to protect them. If you have little equity right now, make sure you're fully aware of the repercussions you'll face should you find yourself underwater on your property. What will your options be should you lose your job in the next recession? Whether to hold, or sell now and rent, is a weighty decision; and the rationale differs for each household -- so we strongly recommend making it with the guidance of your professional financial advisor.
• Raise cash: The vicious cycle that begins as Stage Two transitions into Stage Three is deflationary. Lower prices beget lower prices. During this period, cash is king. By sitting on it, your purchasing power increases the farther home prices drop. And when the dust settles, you'll be positioned to take advantage of the resulting values in the real estate market. We've written at length about the wisdom of this strategy given current market conditions, as well as how, while waiting for lower prices, you can get 30x the return on your cash savings than your bank is willing to pay you, with lower risk. Our recent report on the topic is a must-read.
• Educate yourself: Yes, real estate is overpriced in a number of markets. But it has been and will remain one of the best ways available to the non-elites to amass income and tangible wealth. And as mentioned, when the next Stage 3 brings prices down, there will be value to be had -- potentially extreme value. If you aren't already an experienced real estate investor, now is the time to educate yourself; so that you'll be positioned to take informed action when the time to buy arises. Our recent podcast interview on Real Estate Investing 101 is a good place to start.

In Part 2: The Case For Starting To Build A (Small) Short Position, we conduct a similar analysis into the overvaluation and growing vulnerability of the financial markets (which are highly likely to correct much faster, sooner and more violently than the housing market), including the details on a recent short position we've started building.

The tranquil "free ride" the financial and housing markets have had for nearly a decade are ending. The string of easy gains with little effort are over now that the central bank money spigots are turning off at the same time the "greater fools" pocketbooks are tapping out.

For a brief time, prices will waiver, as investors remain in denial and refuse to sell at lower prices. But soon that denial will turn to panic, and prices will plummet.

Make sure you're positioned prudently before then.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

It's been a while since I've covered the precious metals in an article. They've been range-bound for much of the past year, with few notable sector developments to report.

But I feel compelled to write about them today for two reasons:

1. The probability of an upwards re-pricing of the precious metals is rising, and
2. Both gold & silver are quite over-sold right now, technically-speaking.

With technical and fundamental indicators flashing green simultaneously like this, now is an advantageous time to consider increasing your PM exposure (I did so myself yesterday).

The Human Factor

Before I go into further detail on the current conditions of the PM market, here's a recent personal experience that underscores how few people have any real familiarity with gold & silver as an asset class, let alone own any (beyond, perhaps, a bit of jewelry).

A good friend moved and needed help transporting some bullion from his old town to his new one. Most of it was silver, several thousand ounces worth.

That much silver is pretty friggin' heavy.

So we huffed and strained, hauling that load out of one bank vault, into his car, and from there into the vault at his new bank. While we did our best to be as discrete as possible, our sweaty, grunting 2-man production was hard for the bank staff to ignore.

Managers at both banks figured out what was going on, as it was pretty obvious. And both separately asked us out of genuine curiosity, "Is that real silver?".

My friend briefly handed over a 100-oz bar so they could see for themselves, sparking conversations about the merits of owning physical bullion.

It turns out that neither manager had ever held a bar of silver before. This was pretty shocking to me. Even though they know that the safe deposit boxes in their own vaults very likely store some bullion, neither own it personally, nor even come into contact with it. It's just not a part of their world.

Anyways, later on I mentioned this story to another buddy who shared my surprise. "Man, if the bankers aren't familiar with silver and gold, then who the heck is?", he asked. A very good question, I agreed.

But then he jolted me by asking: "So, one of those 100oz bars -- what's it worth, anyways? $150?"

This is an otherwise intelligent, math-competent person. But like most folks, as well as those bank managers, he doesn't own any precious metals and so his knowledge of them is pretty limited. Limited enough to underestimate the price of silver by over 90%.

This reminded me of Mark Dice's videos, which show just how woefully ignorant the average person is when it comes to the value of bullion. In this one, street passersby decline a free gold coin in favor of a Snicker's bar:

Simply put: gold and silver, in the West at least, are underappreciated assets. As Grant Williams famously put it in his excellent synopsis, when it comes to public and institutional sentiment of the precious metals, "Nobody cares."

Which is a big factor why the prices of PMs have languished for the past seven years. And why the flow of bullion has been uni-directional from West to East over that period.

Time To Care

But there are gathering signs that it's now time to start caring again.

Looking at the just techinical side for a moment, both gold and silver have been in a prolonged downtrend for the past two months. They're now at extreme undersold levels.

Both RSI and MACD indicators are signalling that the recent declines have likely been played out at this point:

And both metals have now broken below their Bollinger bands (a sign of extreme oversold conditions). Here's gold:

While a break below the Bollinger bands could indicate that something fundamental has suddenly changed in the PM market to merit a materially lower repricing, there just don't appear to be any credible candidates for that argument. Yes, the dollar has risen over this period; but there are solid reasons that the USD and gold/silver need not always trade inversely to one another. And as we'll get to in a moment, conditions are actually becoming more PM-favorable.

Technically-speaking, it seems much more likely that the current downtrend is long-in-the-tooth and that, as prices dip down to 18-month lows, a recovery is soon due. In fact, we may be seeing the start of such today, the first material up day for the PMs in a while.

Fundamentally-speaking, world events are providing more and more reasons to own gold and silver -- from stratospheric asset bubbles threatening to burst, to a long-overdue return of market volatility, accelerating de-dollarization, slowing global economic growth, increasing credit market risk in both Asia and Europe -- the list goes on and on.

The full set of PM-positive drivers are covered in our recent excellent interview with Ronald Stoerferle summarizing the insights of his exhaustive 230-page annual report titled In Gold We Trust. If you haven't listened to it yet, carve out 49-minutes to do so soon:

To the many reasons Stoerfele gives in support of his conclusion that gold is "dirt cheap" right now, we can add the multiplying macro data points predicting market turmoil and economic recession later this year, as well as the building uncertainty of further rate hikes by the Federal Reserve -- all potential developments that should lead to higher PM prices.

Remember, right now, nobody still cares about the precious metals. Which is why it's estimated that only 1-3% of US households own any (jewelry aside).

So even if you only hold a few ounces, that's still more than 97-99% of everyone else -- which may make a tremendous difference to your prospects when the world starts caring again.

Back in January of 2016 we saw what appeared to be, and in my opinion should have been, the end of the Everything Bubble blown by the word's central banking cartel.

The carnage started in the emerging markets. Highly-leveraged positions and carry trades began to unwind. That's a fancy way of saying that all the big, sophisticated investors -- who were busy borrowing heavily in countries with cheap money (the US, Japan, and Europe) and using that debt to speculate in markets offering higher yields (junk debt, emerging markets, stocks, etc.) -- began to reverse their trades.

It quickly devolved into a “Sell everything!” scramble. We saw the dollar spike and stocks fall -- with emerging markets taking the full brunt of the carnage as their stock markets rapidly fell into bear territory, their currencies fell, and their bonds were destroyed.

Until...

Very early one morning in February of 2016 everything U-turned and rocketed higher. Suddenly and magically, the panic was over. This wasn’t the invisible hand of the market at work; it was the very-visible hand of central bank intervention.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now have a clear picture of what happened. The central banks huddled together, a bold (desperate?) plan was hatched, and key printing presses around the world were sent into overdrive. In the months to follow, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) went on a record-breaking money printing spree:

(Source)

The red arrows in the charts above mark this moment when the “markets” were saved.

Or, more specifically, when the portfolios the ultra-wealthy were "saved", as the assets within were boosted higher (yet again) by the central banks printing money from thin air:

(Source)

Addicted To Money Printing

So what caused the weakness in early 2016 that spooked the system so much? The central banks themselves.

After many years of force-feeding stimulus into the global economy to create a "recovery", the central banks have become increasingly concerned that asset prices have become too dependent on said stimulus. So in late 2015, the banks took their feet off of their monetary gas pedals for a bit to see what might happen.

They were hoping that the markets could be gradually weaned off of their stimulus dependence with few ill effects. They wanted to engineer a "soft landing", where if priced declined, they'd come down gradually and not too much.

That didn't happen.

Instead, the cheap-money-addicted markets instantly started expressing massive withdrawal complications.

To re-acquaint you with how quickly things were devolving back then, these are news headlines pulled from an article I wrote back in the middle of January 2016:

• Wal-Mart closing 269 stores, 154 in the US.
• Business inventories to sales at new cycle highs
• U.S. freight volume falls for first time in almost three years
• US retail sales fall 0.1% in December
• Empire State index weakens to recession lows.
• South African rand hits new all-time lows in 2016
• Brazil’s Real Falls Sharply Against Dollar
• Brazil Unemployment Rate Rises to 9%
• Canadian Dollar Hits 13 Year Low Against US Dollar
• U.S. Energy Junk Bond Spreads At Record Width
• Nigeria’s Currency Plummets On Open Market
• Mexico’s Peso Hits New All-Time Low
• Chinese Stocks Enter Bear Market (again)
• European Stocks Enter Bear Market

Sound familiar at all? It should. These sound exactly like the headlines in the news today, here in May of 2018.

We are still paying the price from 2008, when the central banks committed a massive error by not allowing the markets and their bad debts to actually clear. Yes, it would have been acutely painful; but we would have been through the worst within a year or two and in the process restored the system to a much healthier and sustainable state.

Instead, the bad actors were protected (and rewarded!) and the root fundamental problems were literally 'papered over', left to continue to fester unobserved ever since. Similarly in early 2016, the central banks once again committed the same sin by rescuing everything with another wall of fresh, thin-air money.

To drive home how much, below is a chart showing the yearly change in world central bank balance sheets. The relative ‘area under the curve’ of each major period of money printing gives us a sense of the scale. To help you eyeball it, I’ve placed similar-sized orange rectangles in each area. Key to note is that central money printing has been increasing -- not decreasing -- the further out we've gotten from the Great Financial Crisis:

(Source)

If we've been in "recovery" for years now, as the central banks have been touting, then why has 2016-2108 seen the most stimulus ever injected into the system?

History has taught us that we should trust or leaders' actions far more than their words. And their actions at this time indicate panic.

What is it that has them so worried? We should all ponder that question long and hard. I’m convinced that they know as well as we do that, once the over-inflated ““markets”” created by the central banks can no longer be sustained at their current nose-bleed heights, the damage will be extraordinary and unstoppable.

The End Of Stimulus? (And The Start Of The Crash?)

The pain of the 2008 crash will seem like a mere flesh wound compared to the devastation the next deflationary wave will wreak.

Of course, the central banks have no interest in seeing that happen and will, once more, do all they can to "rescue" the markets.

But will they act in time? More to the point, given all of their very public commitments to raising rates and reducing their balance sheets, will they allow a market correction to happen in the near term? (presumably, so they can ride to the rescue soon after as "saviors")

Politically, the prospect of showering even more wealth on the 0.001% is going to be a tough sell. This is especially true in Europe -- in Italy, Greece and Spain where the populace is suffering mightily already and is in no mood to further enrich the ultra-wealthy.

So it would seem that the central banks, at least publicly, have to stick to their stated plans to reduce their levels of money printing/balance sheet expansion.

As of right now, they are on track to end worldwide simulus in early 2019, when their collective net change in assets will dip below $0 for the first time in many years:

(Source)

Given the importance of central bank purchases and market interventions, the above chart is probably the most important one in existence for divining where financial asset prices are headed.

If global monthly stimulus indeed drops to $0, then Watch out below!

Who know if the future will plays out anything like the projections given above? The central banks have proven weak-kneed at every tiny moment of market wobbliness. To date, they've chosen to print and pent and then print some more at every opportunity where the "“markets”" might have corrected.

But we all know that this charade cannot continue forever. Sooner or later it has to stop. Given the blow-ups we're now seeing in the emerging markets, there’s clearly serious trouble brewing somewhere in the system.

In Part 2: The Breaking Point Is Upon Us we provide plenty of data to support that claim.

The currencies and bonds of five countries are now in the danger zone, and many more teeter on the edge. My analysis is that the central banks will resort to their usual money printing to resolve the issue, but for reasons I explain in Part 2, these efforts will fail at some point in the next year -- and spectacularly so.

When today's Everything Bubble bursts, the effect will be nothing short of catastrophic as 50 years of excessive debt accumulation suddenly deflates.

Given the dangers involved, you should expect the central banks to 'go nuclear' in thier deflation-fighting efforts by sending “money to main street” -- likely in the form of a universal basic income, or a check from the Treasury refunding your last 3 years of tax payments, or maybe even an electronic deposit directly from the Federal Reserve into your bank account.

That's when the inevitable fiat currency crisis will begin in earnest. At that time you’ll need to run, not walk, to buy anything with intrinsic value that can't be inflated away -- before your currency becomes worthless.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Six months ago, I alerted readers to the very attractive benefits that the TreasuryDirect program offers to investors who are defensively sitting on cash right now.

Since then, those benefits have continued to improve. Substantially.

Back in November, by holding extremely conservative short-term (i.e., 6-months or less) Treasury bills, TreasuryDirect participants were receiving over 16x more in interest payments vs keeping their cash in a standard bank savings account.

Today, they're now receiving over 30 times more. Without having to worry about the risk of a bank "bail-in" or failure.

So if you're holding cash right now and NOT participating in the TreasuryDirect program, do yourself a favor and read on. If you're going to pass on this opportunity, at least make it an 'eyes-wide-open' decision.

Holding Cash (In Treasurys) Now Beats The Market

There are many prudent reasons to hold cash in today's dangerously overvalued financial markets, as we've frequently touted here at PeakProsperity.com.

Well, there's now one more good reason to add to the list: holding cash in short-term Treasurys is now meeting/beating the dividend returns offered by the stock market:

"Cash Is King" Again - 3-Month Bills Yield More Than Stocks (Zero Hedge)

'Reaching for yield' just got a lot easier...
For the first time since February 2008, three-month Treasury bills now have a yield advantage over the S&P 500 dividend yield (and dramatically lower risk).
Investors can earn a guaranteed 1.90% by holding the 3-month bills or a risky 1.89% holding the S&P 500...

The longest period of financial repression in history is coming to an end...

And it would appear TINA is dead as there is now an alternative.

And when you look at the total return (dividends + appreciation) of the market since the start of 2018, stocks have returned only marginally better than 3-month Treasurys. Plus, those scant few extra S&P points have come with a LOT more risk.

Why take it under such dangerously overvalued conditions?

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em

In my June report Less Than Zero: How The Fed Killed Saving, I explained how the Federal Reserve's policy of holding interest rates at record lows has decimated savers. Those who simply want to park money somewhere "safe" can't do so without losing money in real terms.

To drive this point home: back in November, the average interest rate being offered in a US bank savings account was an insutling 0.06%. Six months later, nothing has changed:

(Source

That's virtually the same as getting paid 0%. But it's actually worse than that, because once you take inflation into account, the real return on your savings is markedly negative.

And to really get your blood boiling, note that the Federal Reserve has rasied the federal funds rate it pays banks from 1.16% in November to 1.69% in April. Banks are now making nearly 50% more money on the excess reserves they park at the Fed -- but are they passing any of that free profit along to their depositors? No....

This is why knowing about the TreasuryDirect program is so important. It's a way for individual investors savvy enough to understand the game being played to bend some of its rules to their favor and limit the damage they suffer.

Below is an updated version (using today's rates) of my recap of TreasuryDirect, which enables you to get over 30x more interest on your cash savings than your bank will pay you, with lower risk.

TreasuryDirect

For those not already familiar with it, TreasuryDirect is a service offered by the United States Department of the Treasury that allows individual investors to purchase Treasury securities such as T-Bills, notes and bonds directly from the U.S. government.

You purchase these Treasury securities by linking a TreasuryDirect account to your personal bank account. Once linked, you use your cash savings to purchase T-bills, etc from the US Treasury. When the Treasury securities you've purchased mature or are sold, the proceeds are deposited back into your bank account.

So why buy Treasuries rather than keep your cash savings in a bank? Two main reasons:

• Much higher return: T-Bills are currently offering an annualized return rate between 1.66-2.04%. Notes and bonds, depending on their duration, are currently offering between 2.6% - 3.1%
• Extremely low risk: Your bank can change the interest rate on your savings account at any time -- with Treasury bills, your rate of return is locked in at purchase. Funds in a bank are subject to risks such as a bank bail-in or the insolvency of the FDIC depositor protection program -- while at TreasuryDirect, your funds are being held with the US Treasury, the institution with the lowest default risk in the country for reasons I'll explain more in a moment.

Let's look at a quick example. If you parked $100,000 in the average bank savings account for a full year, you would earn $60 in interest. Let's compare this to the current lowest-yielding TreasuryDirect option: continuously rolling that same $100,000 into 4-week T-Bills for a year:

1. Day 1: Funds are transferred from your bank account to TreasuryDirect to purchase $100,000 face value of 4-week T-Bills at auction yielding 1.68%
2. Day 28: the T-Bills mature and the Treasury holds the full $100,000 proceeds in your TreasuryDirect account. Since you've set up the auto-reinvestment option, TreasuryDirect then purchases another $100,000 face value of 4-week T-Bills at the next auction.
3. Days 29-364: the process repeats every 4 weeks
4. Day 365: assuming the average yield for T-Bills remained at 1.68%, you will have received $1,680 in interest in total throughout the year from the US Treasury.

$1,680 vs $60. That's a 27x difference in return.

And the comparison only improves if you decide to purchase longer duration (13-week or 26-week) bills instead of the 4-week ones:

Repeating the above example for a year using 13-week bills would yield $1,925. Using 26-week bills would yield $2,085. A lot better (34x better!) than $60.

Opportunity Cost & Default Risk

So what are the downsides to using TreasuryDirect? There aren't many.

The biggest one is opportunity cost. While your money is being held in a T-Bill, it's tied up at the US Treasury. If you suddenly need access to those funds, you have to wait until the bill matures.

But T-Bill durations are short. 4 weeks is not a lot of time to have to wait. (If you think the probability is high you may to need to pull money out of savings sooner than that, you shouldn't be considering the TreasuryDirect program.)

Other than that, TreasuryDirect offers an appealing reduction in risk.

If your bank suddenly closes due to a failure, any funds invested in TreasuryDirect are not in your bank account, so are not subject to being confiscated in a bail-in.

Instead, your money is held as a T-Bill, note or bond, which is essentially an obligation of the US Treasury to pay you in full for the face amount. The US Treasury is the single last entity in the country (and quite possibly, the world) that will ever default on its obligations. Why? Because Treasurys are the mechanism by which money is created in the US. Chapter 8 from The Crash Course explains:

As a result, to preserve its ability to print the money it needs to function, the US government will bring its full force and backing to bear in order to ensure confidence in the market for Treasurys.

Meaning: the US government won't squelch on paying you back the money you lent it. If required, it will just print the money it needs to repay you.

So, How To Get Started?

Usage of TreasuryDirect is quite low among investors today. Many are unaware of the program. Others simply haven't tried it out.

And let's be real: it's crazy that we live in a world where a 1.68-2.09% return now qualifies as an exceptionally high yield on savings. A lot of folks just can't get motivated to take action by rates that low. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't -- money left on the table is money forfeited.

So, if you're interested in learning more about the TreasuryDirect program, start by visiting their website. Like everything operated by the government, it's pretty 'no frills'; but their FAQ page addresses investors' most common questions.

Before you decide whether or not to fund an account there, be sure to discuss the decision with your professional financial advisor to make sure it fits well with your personal financial situation and goals. (If you're having difficulty finding a good one, consider scheduling a free discussion with PeakProsperity.com's endorsed financial advisor -- who has considerable experience managing TreasuryDirect purchases for many of its clients).

In Part 2: A Primer On How To Use TreasuryDirect, we lay out the step-by-step process for opening, funding and transacting within a TreasuryDirect account. We've created it to be a helpful resource for those self-directed individuals potentially interested in increasing their return on their cash savings in this manner.

Yes, we savers are getting completely abused by our government's policies. So there's some poetic justice in using the government's own financing instruments to slightly lessen the sting of the whip.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

NOTE: PeakProsperity.com does not have any business relationship with the TreasuryDirect program. Nor is anything in the article above to be taken as an offer of personal financial advice. As mentioned, discuss any decision to participate in TreasuryDirect with your professional financial advisor before taking action.

Do you have the nagging sense that our empire is in decline?

If so, don't be embarrassed by it. Historically speaking, we're in very good company. Far larger and longer-lived empires than ours have come and gone over the millennia.

This was hit home for me on a recent trip. I scored a major "dad win" by taking my youngest daughter, Grace, to England for her 18^th birthday (we live in Massachusetts, USA).

All on her own, Grace developed an abiding love of mythology at a very young age: Greek, Roman, Norse, Native American, Aztec…you name it. She's read the Iliad four times, a different version each time, as each has the biases of the translator subtly woven throughout.

Naturally, her dream mini-vacation involved going to the British Museum where the Rosetta stone lies, along with Viking horde treasures and every possible Roman, Greek and Egyptian artifact one could hope to see.

The British empire came of age at the perfect time to muscle in and “retrieve" the cultural treasures of many different countries. Such are the spoils of empire.

Who knows, perhaps one day we'll see sliced off segments of the Palace of Westminster on display in Cairo's main square. History ebbs and it flows. Back and forth. Victors and losers swapping places over and over again.

If the British Museum reveals anything it's just that. The long sweep of human history shows us that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

The treasures on display at the British Museum also show us that every race and culture has revered beauty. The most intricate and delicate and objectively beautiful jewelry and adornments were worn by kings and queens, priestesses, nobles, and warlords alike.

Sutton Hoo

Consider the find of the Sutton Hoo burial mound. An eminently important and revered individual (possibly Raedwald) was buried sometime around the year 740, with an enormous ship 89 feet in length serving as his burial chamber.

Just imagine how many people it took to dig a hole in the ground that held the ship to its gunnels, and then bring forward enough earth to cover the whole affair in a gigantic mound of earth more than ten feet high in the middle. As a gardener, I can tell you that dirt is heavy stuff that really resists being moved by hand. Hundreds of people must have labored for a very long time to create this burial mound.

Whoever this person was, he was revered enough to be buried with an astonishing collection of wealth. And, perhaps more amazingly, none of it was looted.

Here's the sword belt, made of an intricate lattice of pure gold and polished garnet:

Isn't that a beautiful work of art?

Again, nobody came back and looted this afterwards. Maybe they killed the workers who built the gravesite, but surely folks still knew a very rich ruler had been buried in the area. And yet nobody looted the site. To me, it's hard not see that as a sign of how much the man buried there was respected by his kinsmen.

Here's a close up of the dragons head from that sword belt:

If you've ever worked with garnet, you know just how devilishly hard it is (a 7.5 on a scale of 10) and how much work it must have taken to polish up even one of those tiny panels, let alone all of them, and into such careful shapes.

Similarly, these shoulder clasps meant to secure an article of clothing (like a cape or cloak) are also magnificent:

Again, the detail and workmanship are impressive. But what struck me most was how these works of art are so … beautiful. And from a time of early medieval history referred to 'the dark ages' and popularly described as a period of bleak survival.

If they were, somebody still had the resources to churn out works of extraordinary precision and beauty. That much is clear.

The rest of the artifacts are similarly extraordinary -- especially the helmet, shields, and coinage. Just take a look at this purse lid:

Taken together, I see a culture where reverence mattered. Sutton Hoo's buried leader was revered enough that his tomb was not looted afterwards, promptly or otherwise. The items buried display a reverence for his authority as well as for beauty.

These burial artifacts were by no means trivial items. Each one could have supported a family for many generations at a time when resources were scarce, only obtainable through the hard labor of many.

And yet they were left untouched. Who among today's leaders would be honored enough as a leader that their tomb would not be looted for massive personal gain? Where can you see that our culture reveres beauty to the same degree, being willing to place so much collective effort into its creation?

The Taranto Scepter

Everywhere else in the British Museum were similar displays of honoring the feminine -- the women and the goddesses of the world. Many of the Egyptian displays caught my eye, as did the Greek, but one piece stood out so much that I came back to it three times, so amazed was I by the beauty of it and the message I took from it.

It came from “The Tomb of the Taranto Priestess" and dated from 350 – 340 BC. Since kings did not rule Taranto during that period, it is believed to have been the property of a priestess.

First, her scepter is truly extraordinary:

The entire scepter is perhaps 18 inches in length and capped in extraordinary gold adornment. But what really caught my eye is the gold mesh you see running down the shaft (lost to history, thought to have been bone?). It consists of extremely fine gold wire wrapped in even finer gold wire, and is woven into a meshwork of little diamond shapes with tiny circles at their corners. Each of these circles contained a tiny gem or enameled treasure of some sort (most, again, lost to history).

Here's a close up:

The gold wire used is finer than hair. This scepter speaks of power and delicacy in equal balance, one reinforcing the other. Only the lightest of touch could hold the scepter without breaking strands of gold that fine. That made me think of the woman who wielded it with such a delicate touch.

Again, this person was revered to such an extent that an object of such immense value and beauty was entombed with her, and not robbed at a later time by someone who knew what the tomb contained.

Power, honor, reverence, and beauty. All attributes that show up again and again all throughout history.

The entire British Museum is packed to the rafters with such expressions. I came away both elated to have gotten back in touch with these better expressions of humanity, but also saddened because I can't locate their equivalent in today's world.

One missing element from today? Reverence for the goddess, for the feminine. I cannot think of a single western homage paid to the feminine. No temples to the goddesses and no elevation of feminine attributes.

This is important to note, not because we wish to bash the masculine, but because anything out of balance requires rebalancing. In fact, re-elevating the feminine will actually bring honor and meaning back to the masculine.

Our world is caught up entirely in money, and power, and wars, and force. We revere power over rather than power within.

So the questions I'd like to leave you with are these.

• Where do you have beauty in your life? Do you consciously manifest it?
• What do you revere?
• How honorable are you?
• Do you instill a sense of loyalty in those around you? Who would rob your grave and how quickly after you passed?
• Who do you honor, and how? Also, why?
• How important is it for you to be surrounded by people you can trust, and whose opinions you trust?
• Where and how do you respect, honor and encourage the feminine in yourself (whether you are male or female), in others, and especially in nature?

Finally, are you ready for the massive changes that are coming?

Our Empire Of Debt

The British museum is a testament to the fact that empires have been rising and falling for thousands of years. The common elements of every empire include its own appreciation for works of extreme beauty and human craftsmanship, along with strict hierarchy. They all expressed a strong connection to the divine, however they felt it, each with their own mythologies and attendant religions to make sense of it all…and help cement the rulers place(s) at the top, of course.

Each empire had a mythology by which it self-organized and people bought into that belief system. Looking back they seem like such obvious mental traps it's easy to scoff and wonder how people could have been so blinkered.

Here's the thing about hierarchical societies in every era…in every single one there were always a very few haves and a whole lot of have nots. How were the masses kept in line? Why did the vast bulk of humanity in every empire live in relative poverty and misery, never lifting a finger in revolt except under very rare circumstances?

The connection to yourself is this; each society has a set of reasons in place that explain to the people on the lower levels why they belong there. In some prior cultures the explanation was that authority was invested the royal blood line. You either had it or you didn't.

In other societies, the rulers were said to be closer to the gods, if not descended directly from them. To go against the rulers meant you were assaulting or dishonoring the very gods you prayed to and on which you utterly depended.

While the mythologies in place “explaining" the hierarchy differed, the results did not. They always resulted in a few at the top and an expanding pyramid of population and entitlement laid out below them.

The middle management in this story, those that had relative advantage were the necessary keepers of the systems in each culture and each system. They had more to lose than to gain through revolt and so they stayed true to the system through their entire lives.

The people on the very bottom, despite having a vast numerical advantage, had the limiting belief that they had no power. So revolts almost never happened. Systems of hierarchy persisted until the empire had run its course, almost always failing because it ran out of resources to maintain itself and its growing complexity.

The lessons of history are absolute; nothing lasts. Everything changes, especially who's in charge.

So what are our explanations today that keep us all in line? What keeps us from revolt? To what do we bow our daily collective heads in fealty to?

The answer is Money.

What we call “money" today was a wicked genius invention that popped up right around the same moment in history when humans were working out other keen, life-altering inventions such as clocks, and printing presses.

“None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
~ Goethe

A person in debt is a person controlled. But they think it was their own decision. Hence the Goethe quote above. A nation in debt is a nation controlled. The debt trap is especially insidious, and it relies on the illusion of free will combined with the full weight of 'the law.'

By attaching a stated rate of interest to a loan, a person's future output was yours if you were the holder of that note. What a stroke of pure (evil) genius! Set the rate high enough and the term long enough and you can get all of your money paid back plus another 100% of that amount or more, every bit of which was actually the future productive output (i.e. time) of the borrower.

Conjure up a promissory note out of thin air and then you get to skim the true productive output of that person, regardless of outcome. Whether they succeeded or failed in the endeavor, you still won. If they paid you back, the win was obvious. If they failed you often had collateral on the back end protecting your “investment." No matter what, you won.

And even if that wasn't the case? Well, you lost the amount of effort on your end that it took to draft up the note. In other words, nothing really.

I've yet to find this laid out in any museum even though the introduction of debt-based money was arguably the most course-altering invention of the past thousand years. It transformed millions of human slaves kept in check by threat of power and physical coercion (if not death) into billions of humans perfectly willing to hand over their labor to a very few elites at the top who did little to no work themselves.

Before this transformative invention money was always a very concrete thing – you either had a stash of silver or gold or you didn't. Afterwards money became abstract. You could loan someone something you never had, written on a slip of paper, and the belief invested in that idea was sufficient to enslave that person until that debt was repaid. “Your" money might never be seen or handled by you at all, which is true for most people today. It exists as digits on a statement or computer screen. Yours, but utterly intangible. A powerful force, never actually seen or handled. In other words, a shared idea. A mythology imbued with tremendous power by a culture that served to enforce the current system of hierarchy.

There is a vast empire now spanning the globe but the mystery of it all is that it's not based on or in any one country. It is an empire of debt. Those issuing the debt are harvesting the output of entire nations, no different in final effect than the Romans enforcing the practice of tithing from extant countries in AD 100.

We now live in a world of, by and for bankers, and other financial elites. Where once it was your royal lineage, or direct connection to the sun god Ra that assured your place at the top, today it's your proximity to the temples of money.

But what happens when the economic pie is no longer expanding, yet the keepers of the system seem unable to turn off their own desires to grab more, more and yet more from that same pie?

That is where we find ourselves today. The economic oxygen is being sucked from the middle and lower classes and the social and political pressures are building.

Meanwhile more and more claims (currency and debts) are being piled on top of this stagnant economic pie thereby increasing the pressure on a creaking system. Someday that all gives way rather spectacularly and ends very badly. History says it ends with a lot of social anarchy and quite possibly another world war.

In Part 2: What History Tells Us Will Come Next, we provide a detailed analysis of how late-stage empires always collapse as the elites exhaust the resources of the masses. We are seeing clear signs of that today.

As we progress from here, the disparity between the haves and have-nots is only going to intensify, with debt (and our debt-based money system) being used as the primary weapon for controlling an increasingly dispossessed public.

Are you prepared?

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Update: Three hours after the initial posting of this report, the US, the UK and France conducted a missile air strike against Syria

The events of the past few days involving Syria, the US and Russia are highly concerning.

Currently, the US is busy readying to drop just dropped ~120 missiles on Syria to punish it for an alleged poison gas attack on its civilians. I say "alleged" because no on-the-ground investigation has been conducted.

At this point, we don't really know with confidence what was done by whom. But America's war machine is straining hard against it's chain, eager to strike. And this poison gas atrocity may just be the excuse the West needs to unleash it.

Whodunit?

We do know that Syria at one time indeed had stockpiles of chemical weapons. But they handed them over to international inspectors some years back. Could they have kept some stocks hidden? Sure.

But we also know that the rebel jihadists in Syria have been caught making and using chemical weapons many times in the recent past. Russia has repeatedly brought forth evidence of chemical manufacturing sites (very crude basement laboratories, really), located in areas recently recaptured from Syrian jihadists and mercenaries. So it easily could have been the jihadists that conducted the gas attack.

Are these so-called “moderate rebels" morally capable of using poison gas on civilians, children especially? You bet they are. These are proven head-choppers, supported by the US, who have publicly posted numerous videos of themselves beheading children. Morals are not part of their framework or this war.

Plus, the gas war crime certainly serves their interest more than it does Assad's at this time.

Between the two suspects, it's far more likely that the increasingly desperate jihadists, who are clearly losing the fight at this point, would use any and every method at their employ to their advantage.

The West's response right now feels like a bad detective movie. Imagine the lead investigator of a grisly murder choosing to focuses first on the neighbor down the hall, while ignoring the spouse with a past history of domestic abuse and who recently took out a very large life insurance policy on the victim. The current "Blame Assad!" narrative seems a poorly written script where you have to overlook a lot of gaping plot holes to get through the movie.

So there hasn't been an independent investigation to clarify with confidence who is the guilty party here. But that hasn't stopped a swift verdict from circulating throughout the western press: "Assad's government did it, and must be punished."

Keep in mind that US-made cluster bombs are busy killing children in Yemen. And nearly 130 Yemen children die every day from starvation thanks to the combined actions of Saudi and US forces blockading that nation's access to world markets.

Suddenly, children in Syria matter a lot to the West, while Yemen's child victims are rarely ever mentioned. Suddenly there's an urgent moral issue being rushed through the court of public opinion.

This has all the hallmarks of the prior propaganda campaigns we've seen before. Scant evidence, immediate assignment of blame, and a quick rush to military action before anybody can really properly question the train of events.

The Rising Risk Of War

Which leads us to where we are now: the US and several NATO countries may attack just attacked Syria very soon with cruise missiles launched from ships (highest likelihood) and possibly airplanes.

Any such attack, it needs repeating, would be illegal under world laws if it happens without prior UN Security Council approval. Receiving such approval will be highly unlikely, because Russia sits on that council and has veto vote power. So any attack will, by definition be illegal, and not a sanctioned affair.

However, the US and its allies have been operating illegally in Syria for many years. They haven't shown much concern to-date for securing international approval of their actions. It's unlikely to expect that to change anytime soon.

But the US isn't the only one on the schoolyard who can throw a punch. Russia, which has been supporting the Bashir al-Assad regime in Syria, is now taking a much harder line.

After years of being increasingly painted as the West's favorite villain (the latest campaign instantly blaming Putin for the poisoning of ex-spy Skripal was particularly hamfisted), Russia has made it clear: they are done being provoked. They won't backpedal any farther. If/when the US launches missiles at Syria, Russia has promised to shoot them down and fire a counter-strike at the launchers.

This is serious folks:

Russia will shoot down all US missiles and sources of fire, Russian Ambassador says

Russian Ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin said in an interview with the Lebanese TV channel Al-Manar that Russia would shoot down all missiles in case of US military aggression against Syria, RIA Novosti reports.

Russian air defence systems will be used to destroy both the weapons and the sources of fire.

Earlier, The New York Times reported that US presidential aides recommended the head of the White House to inflict a series of fierce attacks on several targets in Syria in response to the alleged chemical attack in the city of Douma, even though the fact of the chemical attack itself was never proved.

If Russia shoots back at the “sources of fire", that means the US ships and planes used to launch the cruise missiles

I'd personally be worried sick if someone I loved was on the USS Donald Cook right now. This is the “source of fire" most likely to be employed.

Oddly, it's all alone there in the Mediterranean. Other US ships appear to be days away. Perhaps it's "odd" in the same way as when the best ships in the seventh fleet were conveniently out of harm's way when Pearl Harbor was attacked, leaving only older less seaworthy ships to be sunk, and giving President Roosevelt the casus belli he needed to get America into WW2.

Will the USS Donald Cook be the neo-cons' sacrifice as they endeavor to get their war with Russia kicked into a higher gear?

The US, for its part, is apparently busy communicating with the Russians, communicating it will seek to avoid killing any Russians if at all possible should it strike Syria. This will limit the range of targets, but the risks are still very, very high:

A strike against Syria will likely come in the form of missiles, as was the case last year.

The United States would not want to risk putting manned aircraft over Syrian air defenses — a shoot-down would send the conflict spiraling in unforeseeable new directions.

The USS Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, is within easy striking range of Syria, as is a French frigate with its own cruise missiles.

These two ships, possibly aided by a US submarine, are likely to play a role in a strike.

What are the risks?

The reaction from Assad backer Moscow is unpredictable and Russia has threatened retaliatory action against the United States if missiles are fired at Syria.

The Russian army on Wednesday accused the White Helmets civil defense organization of staging a chemical weapons attack in Douma, where observers say more than 40 people died in a gas attack.

NBC News reported Tuesday that Russia has learned how to use GPS jammers to limit the capabilities of US drones operating over Syria.

“The US has to be very careful not to accidentally strike Russian targets or kill Russian advisors," Ben Connable, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told AFP.

“That significantly limits the number of options available to the United States, because the Russians are embedded in many cases with the Syrians."

Connable warned that if the US accidentally or purposefully kills uniformed Russian soldiers, there would potentially be a dangerous escalation between the two nuclear powers.

(Source)

The plan here is for Trump get to appear tough, garnering the praise of the war party in the US (which is solidly bi-partisan) and the war press (the entire MSM), while not killing any Russians and, frankly, not doing too much actual damage to Syria.

This is pretty much from the same playbook as last year's false-flag gas attack in Syria, when we fired 59 Tomahawk missiles.

But this time, Russia has made it clear that any repeat of last year's missile attack will have consequences. It has moved its key naval assets out of port and into strike positions:

APRIL 12, 2018: RUSSIA STARTS EXERCISES OFF SYRIAN COAST, VOWS RESPONSE TO US STRIKES

The Russian Navy has launched live-fire exercises off the Syrian coast as the US is still preparing for a possible military action against the country's government.

The Russian exercises will be held from April 11 to April 26, the period when, according to some experts, the US strike will be most likely if the administration of US President Donald Trump decides to attack Syria.

On April 10, Russia's envoy to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin once again confirming that Russian forces are ready to shoot down missiles and target the launchers in case of an escalation in the war-torn country.

Ali Akbar Velayati, the top adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, vowed to support the Damascus government against any attack of the US and its allies.

So now we have Russian ships in the Mediterranean on live-fire exercises, bumping around a smallish sea with US naval assets, with everybody on pins and needles as NATO-Russia relations break down and tensions rise.

What could possibly go wrong?

Again, sane people ought to be asking why we are even in this position in the first place. Exactly what US interests are at risk in Syria? Whatever they may be, is defending them worth risking a hot confrontation with a nuclear power over? So far, I've seen zero compelling explanations on this front.

A Dangerous Advertising Campaign?

Looked at from a different angle, here's an interesting article from a Russian newspaper (translated by Google so please read past the choppy writing…) which posits that the attack will be proven a useful test of Russia's latest anti-missile systems.

If successful, Russia may well get to sell lots of them in the future. Great news comrades! We're getting the chance to showcase our products!

The S-400 and "Pantsiri" are preparing for a grandiose exam in Syria

"Russian air defense systems in Syria have an opportunity to show everything they are capable of," a source close to the Russian Defense Ministry noted in a comment to the newspaper VZGLYAD. Such a check is worth a lot, the interlocutor notes.

"For the military all over the world, this will be an extremely important lesson - the analysis of this blow and its reflection will long be handled by the headquarters of all the leading military powers of the world," the general believes. The subject of analysis will also be how the electronic warfare complexes (EW) will work when reflecting missile strikes.

The number of downed enemy missiles is not an end in itself, Lieutenant-General Alexander Gorkov, head of the air defense missile forces in 2000-2008, remarked in conversation with the newspaper VZGLYAD. He stressed: "The air defense forces are designed to completely conserve the object. Therefore, if only one of the 100 rockets is shot down, but the one that flew exactly to the target, and because of this the object survived, this is considered a success. "

But there are objective criteria for anti-aircraft gunners.

This indicator means the probability of a target being hit by one missile. The number of intercepted targets is divided by the total number of missiles fired. For example, less than 0.7 means low efficiency; 0.8 and above - good, 0.9 - excellent, explained earlier to the portal " Economy Today " Lieutenant General Aitech Bizhev, former deputy commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force on the CIS Joint Air Defense System.

"If we are talking about cruise missiles going at extremely low altitudes, then the efficiency should be at least 0.85-0.90,

As an example, Bezhev cited the result of the Syrian air defense forces, which recently repulsed the attack of Israeli aircraft. F-15 planes fired eight missiles, the Syrians intercepted five of them. Thus, the coefficient was 0.6, that is 60% of the shot down missiles. This result is not very pleasing, Bezhev complained.

However, the expert of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (ACT) Vasily Kashin believes that the destruction of 50-60% of US missiles would be a huge success for Russian weapons. In fact, he added, even the destruction of 30% can be considered a great success, if we bear in mind both Russian and Syrian air defense forces.

It should be taken into account that the Syrians used old complexes, notes Bizhev. And the newest S-400 air defense systems are located at Russian facilities - the Khmeimim base and in Tartus. According to the Lieutenant-General, the efficiency of the S-400 for unobtrusive speed targets is 0.9, that is "magnificent", 90%.

In turn, Kashin recalls: in addition to our ground-based air defense in Syria will be two Russian frigates with the complex "Shtil-1", which stand off the coast of Syria. "Each of them has a vertical launch for 24 anti-aircraft missiles," the expert reminded VZGLYAD.

Potential buyers of weapons following the outcome of this conflict will draw conclusions about which weapon systems are more effective - American cruise missiles or Russian air defense systems. For a correct assessment, it is important to consider how many missiles are fired at the covered targets. "If the enemy will use a huge number of missiles, for example, more than 200, then you do not know exactly how many missiles will be on the target. Miracles do not happen, "Kashin said. He adds that it is impossible to completely repulse such a blow.

"For example, there are 100 air targets, for each we spend two anti-missiles. With this amount you need to have a very high ammunition. Is there such a number of missiles in the ammunition of the grouping deployed in Syria? "Asks General Alexander Gorkov.

"The combat component of the S-300 division is 32 missiles (if there are eight launchers) or 48 missiles, if 12 units are available," the interlocutor points out. "If two rockets are used for each shooting, the ammunition will be enough for 16 or 24 launches, respectively." If the coefficient of 0.9 is shown in these shootings, this will be evaluated as a success, including potential buyers of Russian weapons.

Even if that was a little long and technical for you, just know I find it possibly comforting. If Russia is looking for a 'grandiose exam' of its war matériel, and the US is going to attack mainly to satisfy internal politics (and Russia knows this), then that may contain any military exchange to a relatively small skirmish (for now).

But if not, and Russia is truly backed into a corner, tired of the West's vilification and NATO's encroachment, it will show it claws. History has long shown that the Middle East is a powder keg where conflicts can easily escalate quickly. Where escalation might lead in this case is very worrisome indeed.

Time To Prepare For War

There remains, as yet, no evidence proving Assad's government was behind the alleged gas attack in Douma.

All that's been presented to the world are video clips showing what appear to be stricken people. However, we have long learned that such videos prove to be fraudulent. The same White Helmets who released these clips have been caught many times before using crisis actors and staging events that look just like the videos released -- shaking cameras that sweep and lurch in tights shots over closely spaced bodies, poor lighting, etc.

Moreover, the US and NATO blamed Assad and Russia within hours of these release of these videos, well before any actual evidence could have been collected and confirmed. As of course, they've similarly done time and again over the past years. Clearly, there's an eagerness on the West's side to find a reason to take harder action against Russia.

Will this one be it?

While the prospect of a kinetic (shooting) conflict between the West and Russia is obviously of greatest concern, the war could happen in one or several of many other forms (cyber, financial, trade, etc.) which I've written about extensively in the past.

We need to prepare ourselves for the prospect of war, even if this situation merely turns out to be an S-400 marketing blitz. Because at the current trajectory, even if this event turns out not to be the flashpoint that ignites a larger confrontation, the odds of one that does happening soon is just too damn high.

It's very clear that the US has embedded neocons that want a unipolar world where the US is top dog and gets to boss around China and Russia. That makes war “highly likely" in our future.

China and Russia quite rightly believe that they deserve to be treated on more equal footing and have their own national pride and internal political realities with which to contend, meaning they cannot appear to be pushed around by the US. Saving face is important.

In Part 2: What To Prepare For we assess the most likely paths the current standoff may take, the probability of each, and what the ramifications of each would be. Knowing tomorrow's likeliest outcomes will help you best prepare today.

An escalating conflict between the US and Russia, even if limited to a proxy war in Syria, will result in tremendous casualites -- of life, of geopolicital relations, and of markets. Protect yourself, those you love, and your wealth from becoming part of the collateral damage.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

This marks our our 10th year of doing this. And by “this", we mean using data, logic and reason to support the very basic conclusion that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

Surprisingly, this simple, rational idea -- despite its huge and fast-growing pile of corroborating evidence -- still encounters tremendous pushback from society. Why? Because it runs afoul of most people's deep-seated belief systems.

Our decade of experience delivering this message has hammered home what behavioral scientists have been telling us for years -- that, with rare exceptions, we humans are not rational. We're rationalizers. We try to force our perception of reality to fit our beliefs; rather than the other way around.

Which is why the vast amount of grief, angst and encroaching dread that most people feel in western cultures today is likely due to the fact that, deep down, whether we're willing to admit it to ourselves or not, everybody already knows the truth: Our way of life is unsustainable.

In our hearts, we fear that someday, possibly soon, our comfy way of life will be ripped away; like a warm blanket snatched off of our sleeping bodies on a cold night.

The simple reality is that society's hopes for a "modern consumer-class lifestyle for all" are incompatible with the accelerating imbalance between the (still growing) human population and the (increasingly depleting) planet's natural resources. Basic math and physics tell us that the Earth's ecosystems can't handle the load for much longer.

The only remaining question concerns how fast the adjustment happens. Will the future be defined by a "slow burn", one that steadily degrades our living standards over generations? Or will we experience a sudden series of sharp shocks that plunge the world into chaos and conflict?

It's hard to say. As Yogi Berra famously quipped, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." So, it's left to us to remain open-minded and flexible as we draw up our plans for how we'll personally persevere through the coming years of change.

But even while the specifics about the future elude us today, “predicting" the macro trends most likely to influence the coming decades is very doable:

Rising trends:

• Populism in politics
• Federal debt levels
• Geopolitical tensions
• Interest rates

Falling trends:

• Funding levels for pensions
• The numbers of insects world wide
• Confidence in the future among the younger generations
• Wealth and income equality

Trends can be expected to continue until they change. Therefore making "predictions" on trends is like making a "prediction" about which way an already tossed ball will travel. It's not really a prediction at all, but a statement of observed data.

These two lists bring to mind another great Yogi Berra quote:

No, the future certainly isn't what it used to be.

Once it was a place in which you could invest towards your hopes and dreams, confident that conditions would be better for your children than they were for you.

That's no longer the case. The defining trends in play are all working to degrade, rather than enhance, our future prospects.

Which is why it's little surprise that millennials aren't saving for retirement. Here's the dim view many of them hold:

“In general, I regard the future as a multitude of possibilities, but most of them don't look good," Elias Schwartzman, 29, a musician, told me. “When I'm at retirement age, around 2050, I think it's possible we'll have seen a breakdown of modern society." Schwartzman said that he saw the future as encompassing one of two possibilities: an apocalyptic “total breakdown of industrial society," or “capitalism morphing into a complete plutocracy." “I think the argument can be made that we're well on the way to that reality," he added.
Wood, 32, a political consultant, told me via Twitter that she felt similarly. “I don't think the world can sustain capitalism for another decade," she explained. “It's socialism or bust. We will literally start having resource wars that will kill us all if we don't accept that the free market will absolutely destroy us within our lifetime [if] we don't start fighting its hegemony," she added.
(Source – Salon)

As someone who tracks economic, environmental and energy data closely, these views are neither surprising nor really debatable. They are merely trend extrapolations, which are difficult to dismiss.

What the older generations don't yet understand is that the economic and social models that rewarded them so richly are not doing the same for younger folks. In fact, those old models are visibly breaking down. And confidence in them is failing, too.

Younger people are increasingly seeing that the model of extractive, exponential growth (which is often errantly termed “capitalism" when, as practiced, it should be termed “corporate socialism") has no future. And of course, they are right.

But regardless of age, anyone with an open mind should be able to identify that something is wrong with the story of "endless growth". The evidence is pretty much everywhere we look:

(Source)

If we're willing to entertain the possibility that infinite exponential growth is impossible, and we extrapolate from there, what sort of economic trajectory would we expect to see as growth peters out? Exactly the sort we see in the above chart. Lower and slower growth that finally peters out and then slips into reverse for the rest of the story.

Sociologically, we'd expect people to be nervous, anxious, and scared as their dominant cultural narrative is increasingly revealed to be no longer viable. Ask yourself: is the world becoming calmer or more volatile? The rash of mass shootings, anti-establishment election victories, prescription drug epidemics, and returning nuclear war fears make the answer sadly obvious.

Biophysically, we'd expect to see key resources and species populations depleting at alarming rates -- which we are. This is due to diminishing returns: nearly every planetary resource is getting harder and more expensive to obtain. Mars anyone?

In a desperate attempt to mask the costs of of slower and lower growth, the world's central banking cartel has deployed its “one weird trick": lowering interest rates to historic rock-bottom levels. This has allowed for more debt to be crammed into the system for a few more years, to keep the mirage of the party continuing for just a little bit longer.

Because of that hail Mary, we have ended up in this very bizarre situation where our debt has been growing at twice the rate of our income -- which clearly will end up in a solvency crisis:

Perversely, the central banks are doing everything in their power to defend and propagate this unsustainable status quo, even though fourth grade math tells us it will surely end in ruin. How is it possible that this very simple observation eludes so many of those in positions of power? You'd have to be an intellectual yet idiot to hold the view that debts can forever compound at faster rate than income.

Further, we find that when the US government's deficit spending is stripped out from GDP growth, there actually hasn't been any economic growth at all for years:

(Source)

The US has been going deeper and deeper in debt simply to maintain the appearance of "economic growth". This whole illusion is being limped along for just a little while longer.

For what purpose? And why? Both excellent questions without a good answer. You should be asking yourself what "success" looks like here. What's the eng game? More growth? Okay, then what? More growth? Keep going along that line of thinking. Take as much time as you need.

Clearly there's an end to that story somewhere. Growth ceases. Presumably smart people in power get this, too, although they'll never admit it publicly so as not to spook the herd. Looking at the number of very well-connected and wealthy elites busily arranging bolt-hole properties to retreat to 'just in case', they're already well ahead of the general public in preparing for the tribulations to come.

All of which brings us to the very real prospect of war, as that has long been the favored path of politicians seeking to deflect public ire from their own policy failures. I worry that a major military conflict is dangerously close at hand. The ridiculous UK government narrative around the Skripal poisonings (which remains utterly illogical from start to finish) used to seriously degrade relationships between Russia and NATO has all the hallmarks of contrived political operation.

Added to the brewing geopolitical risk is the very likely prospect of the bursting of The Mother Of All Bubbles. When (not if, sadly) that happens, it will be truly catastrophic to every financial market in the world, and especially damaging to the western economies.

So the race is on. Will the bubble burst first? Or can the political class engineer a massive military distraction beforehand?

Regardless of who “wins" that race, you need to be physically, emotionally and financially prepared for these outcomes. PeakProsperity.com's (free) What Should I Do? guide is an essential resource for those not yet fully prepped, as well as is our Self-Assessment.

Yes. Things are that serious.

If you're not yet an enrolled subscriber to PeakProsperity.com, please consider becoming one now. 2018 is looking to be the shoo-in candidate for "The Year Everything Changed". Interest rates are finally rising. Volatility is finally returning to the financial markets. Oil prices are threatening to finally return to the critical $70/bbl range. The populace is finally waking up to the extent of the abuse perpetrated on their safety, personal data, and civil liberties. The crypto bubble has finally burst.

So many long-term trends that have defined the (false) sense of 'prosperity' over the past eight years are ending now. What ensues will be fast-paced disruption.

By enrolling, you'll stay abreast of developments and be able to position yourself (and your wealth) accordingly, benefiting from our daily work to harvest and synthesize all the complex information so you don't have to. You'll support will also help our ongoing efforts to bring Peak Prosperity's alternative message and insights to a greater percentage of the general public, who desperately need this information to counter the "Don't worry, everything is awesome!" narrative prevalent in our captive mass media.

In this vein, in Part 2: Everything Is Suddenly Deteriorating, Fast we analyze the recent whipsaw volatility that has broken out in the financial markets and explain why it, along with other markers we've been watching out for, indicates that the markets are poised to fall dramatically further from here -- whether war breaks out or not.

But even if this is as far as you're going to read, please get your preparations in place and get ready to hold fast. Things are only going to get bumpier from here.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Most experienced investors know the four most dangerous words are: This time is different.

It never is.

And yet one of my key predictions here at Peak Prosperity is that The next twenty years will be completely unlike the last twenty years.

So am I saying that things really will be different this time?

Yes, I am. But to understand why, you have to look closely at the unprecedented moment in history in which we live, as well as how the Three E's – the Economy, Energy and Environment – all tie together now in a way they never have before.

For those who prefer their conclusions right up front, the simplest summary I can provide is that everything we think we know about "how things work" is just plain wrong.

This explains why, among many other grotesque distortions, the stock and bond markets are spectacularly overpriced and overvalued right now.

This danger is important to be aware of because when things correct, as they inevitably must, the next crash will be incredibly damaging. It could be as profound as that which dethroned Spain as a world power, permanently.

Peak Prosperity user Gyurash put this risk in context within his comment to our recent podcast on Economics for Independent Thinkers:

The mention of Paul Volker was interesting. I remember listening to a lecture given by Mr. Volker played on public radio in the mid 80s. He talked about the Spanish empire in the 16th century and the easy money train they had coming from South American gold and silver. He said that although it seemed to create great wealth it also made for a false economy in Spain. In addition to creating price bubbles, the Spanish did not use it to build much of anything other than big villas, built by itinerant foreign labor by the way, so when the gold and silver flow slowed when the biggest mines were effectively depleted, their economy crashed so hard that it never recovered, even up to today. (Source)

Delusional Thinking

What's worse than wishful thinking? Delusional thinking.

The sort of ideas that harm rather than help those who hold them.

Of the many current policy delusions I could rail about, perhaps the greatest of them all is the quite-impossible belief that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet.

I know, I know, refuting this is so brain-dead easy to debunk that it seems pedestrian, if not childishly so, to raise it here again. It's quite an impossible proposition.

Even the most cursory of reviews of mining data (just one of many possible examples), show that many critical ores and minerals are vastly more difficult and expensive to extract and bring to market than they were just a few decades ago. And the trendlines keep getting worse.

But let's go through this once again, because it's such an important point. For those of you already on my side of the boat, please bear with me. Perhaps something new will emerge for you on this next go around.

The Harsh Math

Exponential expansion requires not just some new minerals coming to market, but exponentially more.

It works out like this. Suppose that 100 units of copper were produced in year 1, and output (as demanded by economic growth) was expanding at a 3% rate. How long would it take for production to double? The answer is that after 24 years we'd find that 203 units were being produced. So a 3% growth rate means that it takes only 24 years to fully double production.

However, the more interesting fact is that over that same 24-year stretch, if we add up each year's production into a cumulative total we discover that 3,546 units of copper had been produced. How much copper would you guess was produced over the prior 24-year stretch (the one that got us to 100 units in the first place)?

The answer is just 1775 units. In other words, half the amount produced during the next doubling. Going back further and adding up all of the doublings of copper production throughout all of history we'd discover that each new doubling produced (and consumed) as much as the sum total of all the prior doubling periods combined.

You can prove this to yourself by looking at a doubling sequence such as 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc. Note that 4 is larger than (0.25 + 0.5 + 1 + 2) and that 8 is larger than (0.25 + 0.5 + 1 + 2 + 4) and that 16 is larger than (0.25 + 0.5 + 1 + 2 + 4 + 8) and so on -- into infinity.

Again, each new doubling involves an increase that is larger than the combined values of all the prior doublings in history.

For the visually-minded, here's that same idea expressed in an image:

How Many More Doublings Can We Possibly Have From Here?

Only the most delusional would argue that we can dependably double our extraction of key natural resources forever.

Every two decades (or so), will we always be able to use twice as much farmland, twice as much fish in the sea, twice as much oil in the ground, as has been used before throughout all of human history?

Of course not. Planet Earth is a finite system.

This is why I claim that everything we think we know about "how things work" is wrong. Our entire economic and financial systems, their associated monetary models and their current financial asset prices, are predicated on the principle of continuous growth. And not just any sort of growth: Exponential growth. Predictable doubling -- forever.

Look, it's ridiculously easy to prove that there won't always be twice as much copper (or nearly any other key natural resource) as has been extracted throughout all of prior human history. Things run out. They deplete. They become more dilute as the high grades are exploited first.

At some point, doubling becomes impossible. That's when you're past the point where half has been extracted and half still remains in the ground. After that, there are exactly zero doubling periods remaining! That's just elementary math.

Why care?

Because once the doubling periods are over, every single economic model and financial asset that is predicated on continuous expansion breaks. Our systems stop steadily growing; and instead start increasingly shrinking.

This not a hard concept to grasp, intellectually, for most people with an open mind. But in practice, because it challenges our comfortable understanding of the world, because it collides with an entire Disney World of incompatible social belief systems, it's pretty much impossible for the many people to even begin to wrestle with. Forget about a mainstream economist or central banker, whose salary requires them to adhere to the status quo.

The warning here is that we our deluding ourselves as a society. We are herding ourselves, lemming-like, straight towards the cliff ledge.

Think Critically!

Our mission here at PeakProsperity.com is to Create a World Worth Inheriting. While we help people make informed decisions to imbue their lives with greater abundance and satisfaction today, it's our dedication to the long-term picture that shapes everything we do.

Very few voices are standing about waving their arms in the air like we are, warning of the approaching cliff. We're aware that the point of no return might still be several decades out into the future, but we also realize that it could already be behind us. It's nearly impossible to know right now given the complex system that is our planet -- but given the existential risks involved, our opinion is that everyone should be mobilizing in response to this arriving (arrived?) crisis.

We often get labeled as narrow-minded “Malthusians". Or accused of failing to account for human ingenuity. (Neither is accurate, we think.)

But in reality, we're simply data driven. The facts are what they are. Logic is what it is.

And we get it. It's both a factual and a logical nightmare for the infinite growth crowd that the earth is finite.

But as Einstein famously quipped:

And as you wrap your brain around the limits to growth, remember that you're subject to the same comprehensive programming that envelops us all. The messaging that constantly reinforces the idea that endless growth is what we need, and what we can expect.

This programming is subtle, reassuring and ubiquitous; which makes it hard to resist. Here's a prime example:

(Source)

To an economist like Bernanke, there are only virtuous expansions. Of course, the sort of expansion he refers to is exponential growth. Which is absolutely destined to fail in the long run (and now, maybe, the short).

And when that happens, the fallout will be spectacular and highly destructive to the hopes and dreams of literally billions of people.

Make Your Choice: Change By Pain Or Insight

What's unclear to me is if there can be any meaningful recovery from this next crash, whenever it happens and however long it takes.

To return to the opening piece of this article, while I know that this time is different are dangerous words for investors to believe, the impending collision between delusional infinite growth thinking and resource limits and other realities will appear to the average observer like a gigantic change. But, in fact, it simply will mean that humans are subject to the same limits as any other life form on earth.

In other words, it really won't be different this time.

In boy-meets-girl story form, the plot line of the natural process for all forms of life is:

1. organism finds tasty energy source
2. organism expands exponentially into that energy source
3. energy source dwindles even as organism continues into population overshoot, and then
4. happy times turn into tough times, and organism population plummets

Given that literally everything we hold dear and take for granted, such as well-stocked supermarkets, 24/7 electricity, and an appreciating retirement portfolio are all themselves dependent on an economic model that requires perpetual exponential expansion, several questions emerge.

How can I protect myself, my family and those I care about? How can I secure a prosperous future? What do I need to do to develop the right mental models and belief system to deal effectively with the coming challenges?

You can either address these questions head-on now, while the world still works the way we're accustomed to. Or later, under crisis conditions.

We've learned that there are two ways that people change their beliefs and then their actions: by pain or by insight.

Most people go the pain route. And in the process, they waste a lot of valuable time that could have been spent constructively. It's only after the heart attack, the divorce, the backing over the family dog while drunk—moments of extreme pain—that most people will begin to actively face the idea that they need to make different decisions in life.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Part of the beauty of being human is that we can learn from observation, reflection and experience, and can adapt. Critical thinkers have this ability to change by insight. They use new information to put new behaviors into practice until those practices become new habits. And with better habits, we achieve better destinies.

So which route will you choose? Pain or insight?

The story told by the Three Es is loaded with the potential for plenty of painful moments over the next few decades. Sadly, a lot of people will not take precautionary steps far enough in advance to matter. They're just not focusing on the risks right now. As a result, much of the world will be forced to change its behavior via the pain route.

Use this awareness as a sense of urgency to prepare now. To secure your future prosperity, as well as to help those regretting that they didn't follow your lead.

In Part 2: Steps For Changing By Insight, we lay out our prescriptive guidance what what to do now, in a world saddled with record debts, and a debt-based system of money that itself is utterly and completely dependent on infinite expansion, where something's got to give

If you believe in eternal infinite growth, then sure, stay invested in stocks and bonds and go ahead and buy the dips.

But if you don't, take steps today to change your life by insight, secure your future prosperity, and serve as a model for others.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

I hate to break it to you, but chances are you're just not prepared for what's coming. Not even close.

Don't take it personally. I'm simply playing the odds.

After spending more than a decade warning people all over the world about the futility of pursuing infinite exponential economic growth on a finite planet, I can tell you this: very few are even aware of the nature of our predicament.

An even smaller subset is either physically or financially ready for the sort of future barreling down on us. Even fewer are mentally prepared for it.

And make no mistake: it's the mental and emotional preparation that matters the most. If you can't cope with adversity and uncertainty, you're going to be toast in the coming years.

Those of us intending to persevere need to start by looking unflinchingly at the data, and then allowing time to let it sink in. Change is coming – which isn't a problem in and of itself. But it's pace is likely to be. Rapid change is difficult for humans to process.

Those frightened by today's over-inflated asset prices fear how quickly the current bubbles throughout our financial markets will deflate/implode. Who knows when they'll pop? What will the eventual trigger(s) be? All we know for sure is that every bubble in history inevitably found its pin.

These bubbles – blown by central bankers serially addicted to creating them (and then riding to the rescue to fix them) – are the largest in all of history. That means they're going to be the most destructive in history when they finally let go.

Millions of households will lose trillions of dollars in net worth. Jobs will evaporate, causing the tens of millions of families living paycheck to paycheck serious harm.

These are the kind of painful consequences central bank follies result in. They're particularly regrettable because they could have been completely avoided if only we'd taken our medicine during the last crisis back in 2008. But we didn't. We let the Federal Reserve --the instiution largely responsible for creating the Great Financial Crisis -- conspire with its brethern central banks to 'paper over' our problems.

So now we are at the apex of the most incredible nest of financial bubbles in all of human history.

One of my favorite charts is below, which shows that even the smartest minds among us (Sir Isaac Newton, in this case) can succumb to the mania of a bubble:

It's enormously difficult to resist the social pressure to become involved.

But all bubbles burst -- painfully of course. That's their very nature.

Mathematically, it's impossible for half or more of a bubble's participants to close out their positions for a gain. But in reality, it's even worse. Being generous, maybe 10% manage to get out in time.

That means the remaining 90% don't. For these bagholders, the losses will range from 'painful' to 'financially fatal'.

Which brings us to the conclusion that a similar proportion of people will be emotionally unprepared for the bursting of these bubbles. Again, playing the odds, I'm talking about you.

How Exponentials Work Against You

Bubbles are destructive in the same manner as ocean waves. Their force is not linear, but exponential.

That means that a wave's energy increases as the square of its height. A 4-foot wave has 16 times the force of a 1-foot wave; something any surfer knows from experience. A 1-foot wave will nudge you. A 4-foot wave will smash you, filling your bathing suit and various body orifices with sand and shells. A 10-foot wave has 100 times more destructive power. It can kill you if it manages to pin you against something solid.

A small, localized bubble -- such as one only affecting tulip investors in Holland, or a relatively small number of speculators caught up in buying swampland in Florida -- will have a small impact. Consider those 1-foot waves.

A larger bubble inflating an entire nation's real estate market will be far more destructive. Like the US in 2007. Or like Australia and Canada today. Those bubbles were (or will be when they burst) 4-foot waves.

The current nest of global bubbles in nearly every financial asset (stocks, bonds, real estate, fine art, collectibles, etc) is entirely without precedent. How big are these in wave terms? Are they a series of 8-foot waves? Or more like 12-footers?

At this magnitude level, it doesn't really matter. They're going to be very, very destructive when they break.

Our focus now needs to be figuring out how to avoid getting pinned to the coral reef below when they do.

Understanding 'Real' Wealth

In order to fully understand this story, we have to start right at the beginning and ask “What is wealth?"

Most would answer this by saying “money", and then maybe add “stocks and bonds". But those aren't actually wealth.

All financial assets are just claims on real wealth, not actually wealth itself. A pile of money has use and utility because you can buy stuff with it. But real wealth is the "stuff" -- food, clothes, land, oil, and so forth. If you couldn't buy anything with your money/stocks/bonds, their worth would revert to the value of the paper they're printed on (if you're lucky enough to hold an actual certificate). It's that simple.

Which means that keeping a tight relationship between 'real wealth' and the claims on it should be job #1 of any central bank. But not the Fed, apparently. It's has increased the number of claims by a mind-boggling amount over the past several years. Same with the BoJ, the ECB, and the other major central banks around the world. They've embarked on a very different course, one that has disrupted the long-standing relationship between the markers of wealth and real wealth itself.

They are aided and abetted by both the media and our educational institutions, which reinforce the idea that the claims on wealth are the same as real wealth itself. It's a handy system, of course, as long as everyone believes it. It has proved a great system for keeping the poor people poor and the rich people rich.

But trouble begins when the system gets seriously out of whack. People begin to question why their money has any value at all if the central banks can just print up as much as they want. Any time they want. And hand it out for free in unlimited quantities to the banks. Who have their own mechanism (i.e., fractional reserve banking) for creating even more money out of thin air.

Pretty slick, right? Convince everyone that something you literally make in unlimited quantities out of thin air has value. So much so that, if you lack it, you end up living under a bridge, starving.

Let's express this visually.

“GDP" is a measure of the amount of goods and services available and financial asset prices represent the claims (it's not a very accurate measure of real wealth, but it's the best one we've got, so we'll use it). Look at how divergent asset prices get from GDP as bubbles develop:

(Source)

What we see in the above chart is that the claims on the economy should, quite intuitively, track the economy itself. Bubbles occurred whenever the claims on the economy, the so-called financial assets (stocks, bonds and derivatives), get too far ahead of the economy itself.

This is a very important point. The claims on the economy are just that: claims. They are not the economy itself!

Yes the Dot-Com crash hurt. But that was the equivalent of a 1-foot wave. Yes, the housing bubble hurt, and that was a 2-foot wave. The current bubble is vastly larger than the prior two, and is the 4-foot wave in our analogy -- if we're lucky. It might turn out to be a 10-footer.

The mystery to me is how people have forgotten the lessons of prior bubbles so rapidly. How they cannot see the current bubbles even as the data is right there, and so easy to come by. I suppose the mania of a bubble, the 'high' of easy returns, just makes people blind to reality.

It used to take a generation or longer to forget the painful lessons of a bubble. The victims had to age and die off before a future generation could repeat the mistakes anew.

But now, we have the same generation repeating the same mistakes three times in less than 20 years. Go figure.

In this story, wishful thinking and self-delusion have harmful consequences. It's no different than taking up a lifelong habit of chain-smoking as a young teen. Sure, you may be one of the few who lives a long full life in spite of the risks, but the odds are definitely not in your favor.

The inevitable destruction caused by the current froth of bubbles is going to hurt a lot of people, institutions, pensions, industries and countries. Nobody will be spared when these burst. The only question left to be answered is: Who's going to eat the losses?

This is not a future question for a future time; it's one that's being answered daily already. Pensioners are already taking cuts. Puerto Rico will not be fully rebuilt. Shale wells drilled when oil was $100/barrel, but being drained empty at $50/barrel, represent capital already hopelessly betrayed. Young graduates with $100,000 of student debt face lost decades of capital building. The losers are already emerging.

And there's many more to follow. This story is much closer to the beginning than the end.

The bubbles have yet to burst. We're just seeing the water at the shore's edge beginning to retreat, wondering how large the wave will be when it arrives. Hoping that it's not a monster tsunami.

The End Is Nigh

History's largest bubbles have had the exact same root cause: an expansion of credit that causes leverage to go up faster than the income available to service it.

Simply put: bubbles exist when asset price inflation rises beyond what incomes can sustain. They are everywhere and always a credit-fueled phenomenon.

(Source @hussmanjp )

Look at the ridiculous trajectory of the S&P 500, especially since Trump got elected. I don't know about you, but pretty much everything that has happened in the US over the past year has been either a diplomatic clown show or a financial cruelty to the average citizen. And yet prices have risen at their highest pace in two decades?

My view is that the Trump election was a totally unexpected black swan shock for the global central banking cartel, and it freaked out. With the Dow down -1,000 points in the late night hours following Trump's surprise win, the central banks dumped gobs and oodles of money into the equity markets to prevent carnage.

All that money calmed investors and sent prices roaring higher over the following months. The resulting 80-degree rocket launch will hurt a lot when it comes back to earth. Good going central banks!

This is all happening when we're as close as ever to a military (if not nuclear) confrontation with North Korea, Russia is busy beefing up its war machine, Saudi Arabia has pivoted away from the US towards China and Russia, and most of our European allies are inching away from us.

Meanwhile, the FCC is about to rule against the vast majority of the public and allow US corporations to turn the internet into a pay-for-play toll road -- completely undermining the core principle of the most transformative and useful invention of the millennium. By eliminating net neutrality the FCC has ruled 'against' you, and 'for' the continued usurious profits of the cable companies.

Worse, heath care premiums continue to increase by double-digits each year. They're going up by a horrifying 45% in Florida and 57% in Georgia, to name just two unfortunate states out of many.

And to really rub salt in the wounds of the nation, the DC swamp is busy passing a tax change that will further drive an enormous gap between the 0.1% and everybody else by lowering taxes on corporate profits (already the lowest in the world if you measure both tax on profits and value-added taxes).

How to pay for the massive cost of this deficit-exploding bill? Easy, just eliminate deductions for average people (such as the state and local tax deductions) and begin taxing the waived tuition of graduate students. That's right, the government helped to massively bloat tuition fees via massive lending to students and then wants to squeeze the poorest and hardest-working among them.

I wish I were kidding here. But like a cruel joke re-told at the wrong moment, the GOP is busy destroying the meager and precarious financial situation of our citizens just so it can toss a few more dollars into the already-bloated wallets of the richest people in the country.

The long rise of the ultra-wealthy is not some mystery. It arose as a predictable consequence of the financialization of, well…everything that began in the 1980's:

The above chart speaks to a deeply unfair system that punishes hard working people in order to give more to those who merely shuffle financial instruments around or own financial assets.

This is the system that the Fed is working so hard to preserve. This is the system that Washington DC is working so hard to sustain.

It's flat out unfair and punitive. It both punishes and rewards the wrong folks, respectively. Debtors are provided relief while savers are punished. The young are saddled with debts and face impossible costs of living mainly to preserve the illusion of wealth for a little longer for the generation in front of them.

For so many reasons, folks, none of this is sustainable. If the system doesn't crash first under the weight of its excessive debts or the puncturing of its many asset price bubbles, the brewing class and generational wars will boil over if the status quo trajectory continues for much longer.

In Part 2: When The Bubbles Burst... we detail what to expect as the unraveling starts. When these bubbles burst, as they inevitably must, the aftermath is going to be especially ugly.

Understand the likely path the carnage is going to take and position yourself wisely ahead of the crisis -- so that you and those you care about can weather the turmoil as safely as possible.

Remember: the role of bubble markets is to injure as many people as badly as possible when they burst. Don't be one of the victims.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

While turbulent during the best of times, gigantic waves of change are now sweeping across the Middle East. The magnitude is such that the impact on the global price of oil, as well as world markets, is likely to be enormous.

A dramatic geo-political realignment by Saudi Arabia is in full swing this month. It's upending many decades of established strategic relationships among the world's superpowers and, in particular, is throwing the Middle East into turmoil.

So much is currently in flux, especially in Saudi Arabia, that nearly anything can happen next. Which is precisely why this volatile situation should command our focused attention at this time.

The main elements currently in play are these:

• A sudden and intense purging of powerful Saudi insiders (arrests, deaths, & asset seizures)
• Huge changes in domestic policy and strategy
• A shift away from the US in all respects (politically, financially and militarily)
• Deepening ties to China
• A surprising turn towards Russia (economically and militarily)
• Increasing cooperation and alignment with Israel (the enemy of my enemy is my friend?)

Taken together, this is tectonic change happening at blazing speed.

That it's receiving too little attention in the US press given the implications, is a tip off as to just how big a deal this is -- as we're all familiar by now with how the greater the actual relevance and importance of a development, the less press coverage it receives. This is not a direct conspiracy; it's just what happens when your press becomes an organ of the state and other powerful interests. Like a dog trained with daily rewards and punishments, after a while the press needs no further instruction on the house rules.

It does emphasize, however, that to be accurately informed about what's going on, we have to do our own homework. Here's a short primer to help get you started.

A Quick Primer

Unless you study it intensively, Saudi politics are difficult to follow because they are rooted in the drama of a very large and dysfunctional family battling over its immense wealth. If you think your own family is nuts, multiply the crazy factor by 1,000, sprinkle in a willingness to kill any family members who get in your way, and you'll have the right perspective for grasping how Saudi 'politics' operate.

The House of Saud is the ruling royal family of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (hereafter referred to as "KSA") and consists of some 15,000 members. The majority of the power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of roughly 2,000 individuals. 4,000 male princes are in the mix, plus a larger number of involved females -- all trying to either hang on to or climb up a constantly-shifting mountain of power.

Here's a handy chart to explain the lineage of power in KSA over the decades:

(Source)

We'll get to the current ruler, King Salman, and his powerful son, Mohammed Bin Salman (age 32), shortly. Before we do, though, let's talk about the most seminal moment in recent Saudi history: the key oil-for-money-and-protection deal struck between the Nixon administration and King Faisal back in the early 1970's.

This pivotal agreement allowed KSA to secretly recycle its surplus petrodollars back into US Treasuries while receiving US military protection in exchange. The secret was kept for 41 years, only recently revealed in 2016 due to a Bloomberg FOIA request:

The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America's spending.
It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country's Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret," according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.
“Buying bonds and all that was a strategy to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S.," said David Ottaway, a Middle East fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. But politically, “it's always been an ambiguous, constrained relationship."
(Source)

The essence of this deal is pretty simple. KSA wanted to be able to sell its oil to its then largest buyer, the USA, while also having a safe place to park the funds, plus receive military protection to boot. But it didn't want anybody else, especially its Arab neighbors, to know that it was partnering so intimately with the US who, in turn, would be supporting Israel. That would have been politically incendiary in the Middle East region, coming as it did right on the heels of the Yom Kipper War (1973).

As for the US, it got the oil it wanted and – double bonus time here – got KSA to recycle the very same dollars used to buy that oil back into Treasuries and contracts for US military equipment and training.

Sweet deal.

Note that this is yet another secret world-shaping deal successfully kept out of the media for over four decades. Yes Virginia, conspiracies do happen. Secrets can be (and are routinely) kept by hundreds, even thousands, of people over long stretches of time.

Since that key deal was struck back in the early 1970s, the KSA has remained a steadfast supporter of the US and vice versa. In return, the US has never said anything substantive about KSA's alleged involvement in 9/11 or its grotesque human and women's rights violations. Not a peep.

Until recently.

Then Things Started To Break Down

In 2015, King Salman came to power. Things began to change pretty quickly, especially once he elevated his son Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to a position of greater power.

Among MBS's first acts was to directly involve KSA into the Yemen civil war, with both troops on the ground and aerial bombings. That war has killed thousands of civilians while creating a humanitarian crisis that includes the largest modern-day outbreak of cholera, which is decimating highly populated areas. The conflct, which is considered a 'proxy war' because Iran is backing the Houthi rebels while KSA is backing the Yemeni government, continues to this day.

Then in 2016, KSA threatened to dump its $750 billion in (stated) US assets in response to a bill in Congress that would have released sensitive information implicating Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9/11. Then-president Obama had to fly over there to smooth things out. It seems the job he did was insufficient; because KSA-US relations unraveled at an accelerating pace afterwards. Mission NOT accomplished, it would seem.

In 2017, KSA accused Qatar of nefarious acts and made such extraordinary demands that an outbreak of war nearly broke out over the dispute., The Qatari leadership later accused KSA of fomenting 'regime change', souring the situation further. Again, Iran backed the Qatar government, which turned this conflict into another proxy battle between the two main Gulf region superpowers.

In parallel with all this, KSA was also supporting the mercenaries (aka "rebels" in western press) who were seeking to overthrow Assad in Syria -- yet another proxy war between KSA and Iran. It's been an open secret that, during this conflict, KSA has been providing support to some seriously bad terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other supposed enemies of the US/NATO. (Again, the US has never said 'boo' about that, proving that US rhetoric against "terrorists" is a fickle construct of political convenience, not a moral matter.)

Once Russia entered the war on the side of Syria's legitimate government, the US and KSA (and Israel) lost their momentum. Their dreams of toppling Assad and turning Syria into another failed petro-state like they did with Iraq and Libya are not likely to pan out as hoped.

But rather than retreat to lick their wounds, KSA's King Salman and his son are proving to be a lot nimbler than their predecessors.

Rather than continue a losing battle in Syria, they've instead turned their energies and attention to dramatically reshaping KSA's internal power structures:

Saudi Arabia's Saturday Night Massacre
For nearly a century, Saudi Arabia has been ruled by the elders of a royal family that now finds itself effectively controlled by a 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman. He helms the Defense Ministry, he has extravagant plans for economic development, and last week arranged for the arrest of some of the most powerful ministers and princes in the country.
A day before the arrests were announced, Houthi tribesmen in Yemen but allied with Iran, Saudi Arabia's regional rival, fired a ballistic missile at Riyadh.
The Saudis claim the missile came from Iran and that its firing might be considered “an act of war."
Saudi Arabia was created between the two world wars under British guidance. In the 1920s, a tribe known as the Sauds defeated the Hashemites, effectively annexing the exterior parts of Saudi Arabia they did not yet control. The United Kingdom recognized the Sauds' claim shortly thereafter. But since then, the Saudi tribe has been torn by ambition, resentment and intrigue. The Saudi royal family has more in common with the Corleones than with a Norman Rockwell painting.
The direct attack was undoubtedly met with threats of a coup. Whether one was actually planned didn't matter. Mohammed Bin Salman had to assume these threats were credible since so many interests were under attack. So he struck first, arresting princes and ex-minsters who constituted the Saudi elite. It was a dangerous gamble. A powerful opposition still exists, but he had no choice but to act. He could either strike as he did last Saturday night, or allow his enemies to choose the time and place of that attack. Nothing is secure yet, but with this strike, there is a chance he might have bought time. Any Saudi who would take on princes and clerics is obviously desperate, but he may well break the hold of the financial and religious elite.
(Source)

This 32 year-old prince, Mohammed bin Salman has struck first and deep, completely upending the internal power dynamics of Saudi Arabia.

He's taken on the political, financial and religious elites head on. For example, pushing through the decision to allow women to drive; a provocative move designed to send a clear message to the clerics who might oppose him. That message is: "I'm not fooling around here."

This is a classic example of how one goes about purging the opposition when either taking over a government after a coup, or implementing a big new strategy at a major corporation. You have to remove any possible opponents and then install your own loyalists. According the Rules for Rulers, you do this by diverting a portion of the flow of funds to your new backers while diminishing, imprisoning or killing all potential enemies.

So far, Mohammed bin Salman's action plan is par for the course. No surprises.

The above article from Stratfor (well worth reading in its entirety) continues with these interesting insights:

The Iranians have been doing well since the nuclear deal was signed in 2015. They have become the dominant political force in Iraq. Their support for the Bashar Assad regime in Syria may not have been enough to save him, but Iran was on what appears to be the winning side in the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah has been hurt by its participation in the war but is reviving, carrying Iranian influence in Lebanon at a time when Lebanon is in crisis after the resignation of its prime minister last week.
The Saudis, on the other hand, aren't doing as well. The Saudi-built anti-Houthi coalition in Yemen has failed to break the Houthi-led opposition. And Iran has openly entered into an alliance with Qatar against the wishes of the Saudis and their ally, the United Arab Emirates.
Iran seems to sense the possibility of achieving a dream: destabilizing Saudi Arabia, ending its ability to support anti-Iranian forces, and breaking the power of the Sunni Wahhabis. Iran must look at the arrests in Saudi Arabia as a very bad move. And they may be. Mohammad bin Salman has backed the fundamentalists and the financial elite against the wall.
They are desperate, and now it is their turn to roll the dice. If they fall short, it could result in a civil war in Saudi Arabia. If Iran can hit Riyadh with missiles, the crown prince's opponents could argue that the young prince is so busy with his plans that he isn't paying attention to the real threat. For the Iranians, the best outcome is to have no one come out on top.
This would reconfigure the geopolitics of the Middle East, and since the U.S. is deeply involved there, it has decisions to make.

So given Yemen, Syria, and its recent domestic purges, Saudi Arabia is in turmoil. It's in a far weaker position than it was a short while ago.

This leaves the US in a far weaker regional position, too, at precisely the time when China and Russia are increasing their own presence (which we'll get to next).

But first we have to discuss what might happen if a civil war were to engulf Saudi Arabia. The price of oil would undoubtedly spike. In turn, that would cripple the weaker countries, companies and households around the world that simply cannot afford a higher oil price. And there's a lot of them.

Financial markets would destabilize as long-suppressed volatility would explode higher, creating horrific losses across the board. That very few investors are mentally or financially prepared for such carnage is a massive understatement.

So..if you were Saudi Arabia, in need of helpful allies after being bogged down in an unwinnable war in Yemen, just defeated in a proxy war in Syria, and your longtime 'ally', the US, is busy pumping as much of its own oil as it can, what would you do?

Pivot To China

Given its situation, is it really any surprise that King Salman and his son have decided to pivot to China? In need of a new partner that would align better with their current and future interests, China is the obvious first choice.

So in March 2017, only a very short while after Obama's failed visit, a large and well-prepared KSA entourage accompanied King Salman to Beijing and inked tens of billions in new business deals:

China, Saudi Arabia eye $65 billion in deals as king visits
Mar 16, 2017
BEIJING (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's King Salman oversaw the signing of deals worth as much as $65 billion on the first day of a visit to Beijing on Thursday, as the world's largest oil exporter looks to cement ties with the world's second-largest economy.
The deals included a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between giant state oil firm Saudi Aramco and China North Industries Group Corp (Norinco), to look into building refining and chemical plants in China.
Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC) and Sinopec, which already jointly run a chemical complex in Tinajin, also agreed to develop petrochemical projects in both China and Saudi Arabia.
Salman told Xi he hoped China could play an even greater role in Middle East affairs, the ministry added.
Deputy Chinese Foreign Minister Zhang Ming said the memorandums of understanding and letters of intent were potentially worth about $65 billion, involving everything from energy to space.
(Source)

This was a very big deal in terms of Middle East geopolitics. It shook up many decades of established power, resulting in a shift away from dependence on America.

The Saudis arrived in China with such a huge crowd in tow that a reported 150 cooks had been brought along to just to feed everyone in the Saudi visitation party.

The resulting deals struck involved everything from energy to infrastructure to information technology to space. And this was just on the first visit. Quite often a brand new trade delegation event involves posturing and bluffing and feeling each other out; not deals being struck. So it's clear that before the visit, well before, lots and lots of deals were being negotiated and terms agreed to so that the thick MOU files were ready to sign during the actual visit.

The scope and size of these business deals are eye catching, but the real clincher is King Salman's public statement expressing hope China will play "an even greater role in Middle East affairs."

That, right there, is the sound of the geopolitical axis-tilting. That public statement tells us everything we need to know about the sort of change the Salman dynasty intends to pursue.

So it should have surprised no one to hear that, in August this year, another $70 billion of new deals were announced between China and KSA. The fanfare extolled that Saudi-Sino relations had entered a new era, with “the agreements covering investment, trade, energy, postal service, communications, and media."

This is a very rapid pace for such large deals. If KSA and China were dating, they'd be talking about moving in together already. They're clearly at the selecting furniture and carpet samples stage.

As for the US? It seems KSA isn't even returning its calls or texts at this point.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet...

All of the above merely describes how we arrived at where things stand today.

But as mentioned, the power grab underway in KSA by Mohammed bin Salman is unfolding in real-time. Developments are happening hourly -- while writing this, the very high-profile Prince Bandar bin Sultan (recent head of Saudi Intelligence and former longtime ambassador to the US) has been arrested.

The trajectory of events is headed in a direction that may well end the arrangement that has served as the axis around which geopolitics has spun for the past 40 years. The Saudis want new partners, and are courting China hard.

China, for reasons we discuss in Part 2 of this report, has an existential need to supplant America as Saudi Arabia's most vital oil customer.

And both Saudi Arabia and China are inking an increasing number of strategic oil deals with Russia. Why? We get into that in Part 2, too -- but suffice it to say, in the fast-shifting world of KSA foreign policy, it's China and Russia 'in', US 'out'.

Maybe not all the way out, but the US clearly has lost a lot of ground with KSA over the past few years. My analysis is that by funding an insane amount of shale oil development, at a loss, and at any cost (such as to our biggest Mideast ally) the US has time and again displayed that our 'friendship' does not run very deep. In a world where loyalty counts, the US has proved a disloyal partner. Can China position itself to be perceived of as a better mate? When it comes to business, I believe the answer is 'yes.'

In Part 2: The Oil Threat we couple these developments with China and Russia's recent efforts to drop the dollar from trade, especially when purchasing oil, and clearly see the unfolding of the biggest new driver of the world's financial, monetary and geopolitical arrangements in 50 years.

We also explain why, unless something very dramatically changes in either the supply or demand equation for oil, and soon, we can now put a timeline in place for when the great unraveling begins. Somewhere between the second half of 2018 and the end of 2019 oil will dramatically increase in price and that will shake the foundations of the global mountain of debt and its related underfunded liabilities. Think 9.0 on the financial Richter scale.

Let me be blunt - you have to have your preparations done before this happens. You really, really want to be a year early on this (at least). When it starts happening, the breakdown will progress faster than you can react.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

More and more, I'm encountering people who are simply infuriated with how our "leaders" are running (or to put it more accurately, ruining) things right now. And I share that fury.

It's perfectly normal human response to be infuriated when an outside agent hurts you, especially if the pain seems unnecessary, illogical or random.

Imagine if your neighbor enjoyed setting off loud explosives at all hours of the day and night. Or if he had a habit of tailgating and brake-checking you every time he saw your car on the road. You'd been well within your rights to be infuriated.

Or to use a much more common example from the real world : When your politicians repeatedly pass laws that hurt you in favor of large corporations -- that, too, is infuriating. Especially if those actions run directly counter to their campaign promises.

There's a lot of be infuriated about in the world today, so go ahead and embrace your rage. By doing so, you'll be in a better mindset to understand things like Brexit, Catalonia, and Trump, each of which is a reflection of the fury of your fellow citizens, who are finally waking up to the fact that they've been victims for too long.

An easy prediction to make is that this simmering anger of the populace is going to start boiling over more violently in the coming years. Welcome to the Age of Fury.

'Over The Top' Dumb

Do you ever get the sense that, as a society, we're being dangerously reckless? Perhaps so dumb that we might not recover from the repercussions of our stupidity for many generations, if ever?

There are economic and financial idiocies in motion that are, by themselves, unsolvable predicaments without a peaceful solution. But when combined with resource depletion and declining net energy, they're positively intractable.

Take for example the hundreds of trillions of dollars-worth of underfunded entitlement and pension promises. Those promises cannot be kept and they cannot be paid. Everybody with a basic comprehension of math can conclude as such.

Yet we continue to operate as if the opposite were true. We comfort ourselves that, somehow, all the promised future payouts will be made in full -- even though the funds are insolvent, their returns are much lower than the actuarial projections require, and payout demand mercilessly rises each year.

Spoiler alert: This isn't some future disaster lying in wait. It's unfolding right now.

Take these headlines spanning the past several years:

• Congress approves plan to allow pension cuts (Dec 2014)
• 273,000 union workers and retirees brace for pension cuts (May 2, 2016)
• In unprecedented move, pension plan cuts benefits promised to retirees (Jan 27, 2017) -- note the laughable use of "unprecedented" here
• Teamsters face 31 percent pension cut (Mar 7, 2017)
• New York State Teamsters pension fund cuts approved (Sept 13, 2017)

When it comes to broken retirement promises, the future is now. It will be with us for a very long time.

Why? Because the math simply doesn't work. It's broken, it's been broken for a long time. You can't put too little in the piggy bank at the start, then raid it over time, and still expect to have enough at the end.

And yet we, as a society, have preferred to pretend as if that weren't the case. Which, it turns out, was a terrible “strategy."

But if you think that's bad, you're going to positively hate this chart:

The pension liabilities now blowing up are contained within the thin green smear in the middle of this chart. Think on the nation's inability to handle that single crisis, and now reflect on how overwhelmed it's going to be by the far larger predicaments that lie elsewhere on the chart.

The Infuriating Plunder-fest That Is Health Care

The Medicare liabilities (the orange and largest band on the above chart) are immense, and will only become more so as our largest demographic, the baby boomers, further ages. But they become especially infuriating when seen in the larger context of the racketeering that drives the health care system in the United States.

Instead of doing anything constructive about the high number of IOUs building up within Medicare, Washington DC politicians are sidestepping the most obvious elements that contribute the most to the problem. Enormously wasteful, the “healthcare" system is entirely out of control and spiraling deeper into an abyss that threatens to literally destroy the most productive segment of the US social structure: the middle and upper middle classes.

That should be a topic of serious discussion in the halls of power. But none is being had.

Literally each day brings worse news on the skyrocketing costs of healthcare. But, as with most topics, the media mostly focuses on the symptoms (prices) rather than the causes of the issue.

The real culprits here are the insurance cartel and a hospital system that has the most unfair, incomprehensible, and inhumane billing process ever devised. One easy to grasp feature of both the insurance companies and conspire to pay the executives far more than they actually deserve or are truly worth.

Health care premiums for 2018 set to go up by as much as 50 percent
Oct 5, 2017
Several states have announced rates for health insurance premiums on the Obamacare exchanges for 2018. Topping the list is Georgia, with rates that are 57 percent higher than last year, while Florida said some premiums will be 45 percent higher.
Among the reasons for these increases is the uncertainty about the future of the Affordable Care Act. President Donald Trump has vowed to repeal and replace the health care law, which was passed under his predecessor President Barack Obama.
Insurers are raising premiums in the face of repeated threats from President Trump to stop funding so-called cost-sharing reductions, payments to insurers that cover out-of-pocket costs for some low-income consumers. Trump previously referred to these payments as “bailouts" for insurance companies and threatened to stop making the payments so as to “let Obamacare implode".
(Source)

That's the story the health insurers are going with: they have to raise rates because they're uncertain whether they will get AS MUCH LOOT under the new rules being considered as they did under the utterly disastrous Obamacare provisions.

How much loot are we talking about? Look at this chart of the stock price of United Healthcare (UNH) since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare):

If this chart showing massive near-4x gains in just 5 years, coupled with your steep annual premium increases, doesn't infuriate you, you are just not getting it.

Even if your employer pays for your health care (somewhat obscuring the true impact of premium increases), the cost to you is fewer and lower pay increases, as well as steady yearly reductions in covered services along with higher co-pays and deductible amounts.

Still not infuriated? Ok, maybe this will do the trick. Here how much executive compensation at the major insurers was last year:

(Source)

The average family health care insurance premium in 2016 was $18,764, meaning that Mark Bertolini from Aetna alone required 100% of the premiums from more than 2,200 families just to pay him in 2016. Of course, the “C-suite" of these health care insurers are loaded with other high-paid parasites who are just as busy gouging the young and old alike.

This is a complete travesty and joke. Congress and the Senate, sitting on their deservedly low approval ratings, pretend they cannot do anything about it. Too complicated they say. Bullshit I say. Go after the obscene pay packages and profits of the insurance industry as a first matter of business. Then make it a crime for hospitals to bill people differently for the exact same services.

That's a no-brainer. Can you imagine if your mechanic had a secret pricing formula for every customer that was, literally, based on their maximum ability to pay? Nobody would stand for it, it's disgusting that we tolerate this when it comes to something as vital and necessary as our health and even lives.

Fury, not tolerance, is what's needed now.

Conclusion (to Part 1)

The future has arrived. The pension losses are here and just getting started and the future will have a lot more of those sorts of broken promises.

The health care insurance crisis has been with us for 20 years or so now and Obamacare just put some extra accelerant on that fire, which is now consuming middle class households by the tens of thousands.

Both the pension and health care crises are infuriating and self-inflicted wounds. We could have avoided them by making wiser choices in the past. We didn't. We could limit their damage by making better choices today. We almost assuredly won't.

Current conversations and proposals are thinly disguised sleight-of-hand movements whose purpose is to deflect attention from the thefts underway. Anybody who studies the system and its math comes to the same conclusion: the corporations have all the power and they are misusing it for private gain.

Why there aren't more politicians willing to call a spade a spade and actually protect their constituents is a real mystery. But the next wave of populist candidates certainly won't be. People are sick and tired of being asked to give more and more while corporations and wealthy elites keep taking more and more.

It's simply infuriating.

But that's not the worst of it. The mistakes we are making right now in terms of energy policy and ecological destruction are far more dangerous to your personal health, liberty and future prospects than a simple market crash.

In Part 2: It's Time For Action, we uncover the hidden downside risks in today's financial markets and explain how, as destructive as a coming market crash will be, the longer-term damage to society and risks to your well-being are rooted in the potential breakdown of the systems we depend on to live.

As with pensions and health care, we are pursuing similar dangerously misguided policies in our farming & food systems, extraction of industrial resources, and ecological management -- to name just a few.

There's an appropriate time for fury. And that time is now -- provided we use the anger to spur us into constructive action. Get your fury on.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

It seems as if Mother Nature is waking up. Either she's trying to send humans an important warning, or perhaps she's just out to kill us all.

Massive storms across the globe, earthquakes, and collapsing ecosystems all combine to remind us that we are indeed intimately connected to our planet's natural systems. And that our well-being rests on staying on Mother Nature's good side.

Well, Mother Nature has seemed pretty pissed at us of late. Her recent punishments should be taken as a disciplinary wake-up call: It's time.

It's time to prepare, everyone. Way past time.

And it's time to recognize that there are multiplying failure points across the many systems we depend on for our way of life -- both natural and man-made. For example:

• The wealth gap between the rich and the poor is now grossly obscene and yet still growing wider.
• Our industrially-farmed soils are being depleted of their nutrients.
• Species are going extinct every single day.
• Global oil consumption ticks higher every year.
• Stock price overvaluation is about the highest it's ever been.
• Bonds have never been more expensive (i.e. yields have never been lower) in all of recorded history.
• Debt levels have never been higher (both globally and, in most cases, locally).
• The planet's population continues to explode (7.5 billion today, 10 billion by 2050) while key resources deplete at accelerating rates.

Only the foolish, or the seriously self-deluded, would think that these observations and trends will be consequence-free.

Which means we have to begin doing things very differently. We have to change who we are, the actions we take, the investments we prioritize, and even our most fundamental values and priorities.

However most people simply will not prepare, not notice, and not change anything until they are forced to by crisis. And even then, some will resist any notion of change until they've lost everything.

The recent destructive hurricanes have been literally and figuratively instructive in this regard.

When To Stay And When To Go

The first lesson we learned from the hurricanes was this: Stay if you can, leave sooner than everyone else if you cannot.

Evacuating has a host of problems for those caught up in the exodus. Traffic jams, lack of fuel along the route, and having to drive for many hours only to end up in a distant hotel in a town probably not ready for a massive influx of people are just a few of the stresses. Living out of hotels and away from your job is also very expensive, especially for a nation where more than 75% live from paycheck to paycheck.

As the people of the Florida Keys learned with Irma, once you've evacuated, you're then unable to return until authorities have decided you can, creating enormous stress for people who want to check on their properties and (possibly) pets left behind, put tarps over damaged roofs, etc. The lesson many claimed to have learned from that experience was to not evacuate in the first place.

After reading enough accounts of people who regretted evacuating, coupled to the relatively low loss of life even in places like Dominca that took the full brunt of a Cat 5 hurricane where people live in less-than-ideal structures (flimsy, wood frame, tin roof affairs), it would take quite a lot for me to decide to not ride out a storm.

I'd have to have some special mitigating factors to impel me to evacuate -- like tall trees next to my house, being in a flood plain or near a flimsy dam or dyke, or having special needs people under my care who might need electricity or other services to remain alive.

I've never sat through a Cat 5 storm, so perhaps I'd change my mind if I ever did. All reports are it's an extremely terrifying experience: loud, violent, and seemingly endless. But I'm pretty confident that I'd choose to wait out a Cat 3 or lower in my house.

That said, I'd have a pre-arranged and well-defined evacuation plan in place, just in case. The experiences shared below have convinced me of the high value of doing so.

Getting Prepared Beforehand

We've had several PeakProsperity.com members write in who were in the direct paths of Harvey and Irma and came out from the storms OK. One best practice they shared in common was they were already fully stocked with emergency provisions well before the hurricanes even began forming way out in the Atlantic. These were folks who had prioritized being prepared for *whatever* future disaster might arise.

Despite this, they still experienced some surprises. No matter how well prepared you think you are, reality has a way of exposing your overlooked weaknesses.

Here's an account from one of our readers (Rector):

We live south of Corpus Christi and Harvey just missed our area. We began the usual fire drill of preparing for the hurricane, but it veered north just in time. Bizarrely the follow-on weather was delightful - sunny, crisp, and breezy - while the rest of the gulf coast became an apocalyptic nightmare. As I watched the news I was painfully aware of how close we came to being flooded, displaced, and disrupted. As a card-carrying member of the Peak Prosperity Preparer's Club - I came to the realization that Chris articulated - nothing can prepare you for this kind of Black Swan event. No matter what - losses will occur. My takeaways after being grazed by the Harvey bullet are (so far):
1. Be prepared to accept refugees. Family members are on the way (I think). At this point they are without resources and fractured. Dad is a cop and cannot leave Houston. We are happy to accept them into our home - but it wasn't exactly planned. In a wider emergency the same might happen and I will say yes then too. I need to expand my preparations for the likelihood of more people camping out with us. Turning everyone away outside of a pandemic scenario is not an option (really). What's the point of all this anyway if you can't help people?
2. Being 5% prepared is WAY better than zero. As I watch people in Houston it has occurred to me that I need a boat. I live on a body of water which has flooded before and will flood again. I built my home well above the flood plain - but Harvey just made a joke out of that math. As I watch people wade in chest deep water while others float by in boats; I'm buying a boat. Today.
3. Being prepared is great! I needed to do NOTHING to get ready for the hurricane at my home. Turns out that was really helpful because my time was spent getting other people and places prepared. All of my employees (save one) asked for the day off (to get their homes ready) leaving me alone in my preparations. Thankfully I didn't have to waste time at the gas pump, ATM, or the grocery store.
4. Evacuation plans are a real priority for me now. With four kids my mental default position has been to "hunker down". "We don't evacuate for hurricanes here" has been the attitude because we are prepared and have always done well. Harvey has demonstrated this is NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE.
I will now focus my considerable prepping energy to developing a viable evacuation strategy. Not an overland hike in ghilli suits - but a real strategy to get this group of people somewhere else quickly and safely. Routes in every direction. A list of destinations. Checklists for packing, securing, and evacuating. Documentation, asset relocation, etc. I am even going to develop a plan to go into Mexico. I had a day and a half between threat presentation and expected landfall. Some events may present even less time.
5. I need to be able to execute a plan at less than 100%. As luck would have it, I pulled a muscle at CrossFita week before and would have needed to do all the above while limping around in pain. I represent the lion's share of muscle power for the family - but can they execute in my absence or incapacity? Hmm. . . not ready for that.
6. It is possible for two bad things to happen at the same time. The financial crisis could begin, North Korea could strike, or any of the other crap I worry about could commence at any moment. WHILE LIVING IN A FEMA SHELTER because I hadn't planned on evacuating. Am I ready to execute trades, etc. while in that shape? Hmm. . . not ready for that either.
I am thankful that we were spared the apocalypse but it has (again) identified holes in my plan that are the result of false premises. Challenge yours because you just can't make this stuff up.
Rector
(Source – Peak Prosperity)

So many lessons packed into that experience! Huge thanks to Rector for sharing that all with us. The part that really caught me and made me rethink my entire levels of preparation centered around just how unprepared I would be if I had to completely bug out and leave my home behind.

Harvey (and Katrina) showed that sometimes you have to do just that. So has Maria, which is going to leave parts of Puerto Rico without power for possibly several months, maybe as long as half a year.

Would you be willing to live without power in a tropical climate without power for 6 months? I wouldn't. Just keeping food from spoiling would be a hard challenge, but just one of many -- including sleeping without A/C or fans (or rather trying to sleep I should say).

The other important lesson to take from Rector and other like him is that if preparing beforehand is comparatively easy. But during a crisis? It becomes very hard and sometimes impossible. Another reader account, this one from Morpheus who was in the direct path of Irma for time, confirms this:

I live in Palm Beach City Florida and right now both the US and European forecasting models have a Cat 4/Cat-5 eyewall slamming right into my house. Maybe not as bad as a currency collapse, but it will be worse for me. Anyways, to make a long story short, we think that we are well prepped, at least we thought so.
But crisis' of this magnitude get you to think even deeper than you normally would. And boy o' boy, I wish I had thought deeper.
We're better prepped than 99% of the population out there but now all that procrastination over the years is grating on me like sandpaper.
Ohh the easy things that I could have done a month ago, 6 months, a year ago.
(Source – Peak Prosperity)

The message is clear: Even for those who think they are well-prepared, a true emergency can shine a harsh light on your shortcomings. The best time to prepare is as far beforehand as you can manage.

The vast majority of people will ignore this message. Take this story that made the rounds during Irma:

Like many Floridians racing to buy food and supplies before the arrival of Hurricane Irma, Pam Brekke found herself miles from home today, desperately hoping to score a generator. According to ABC affiliate WFTV-TV, Brekke, a Sanford, Florida, resident, had spent days waiting for empty shelves to be restocked and searching for a generator.
She said today that she'd traveled more than 30 miles to Orlando to a Lowe's Home Improvement store that had received a surprise shipment of a little more than 200 generators.
Within two hours, however, the generators were sold out and Brekke, who had been next in line, was empty-handed.
A heartbroken Brekke then began to cry. Ramon Santiago, who had gotten one of the generators but had not purchased it yet, noticed and insisted that she take his.
"She needs the generator," Santiago told WFTV-TV. "It's OK."
Brekke shared with Santiago that it was her ailing father who needed the generator to power his oxygen supply.
(Source)

A heartwarming story to be sure, and we can all applaud Mr. Santiago for his actions, but it's also an instructive tale that reveals the extent to which many people fail to think through their plans until forced to.

An imminent hurricane should not be a required prompt to begin thinking about scoring a generator. Look, if I had an ailing parent that required electricity in order to survive, hurricane threat or not, you can bet I would have back-up power already on site and thought through. Hey, sometimes the power goes out. Hurricane, blown transformer, or errant squirrel. It's insane to think it will always be available, uninterrupted, 100% of the time.

So while this story had a happy ending, it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

People should be prepared to take care of themselves through any reasonable and foreseeable emergency. Some are. Most are not.

Preparing in a rush while an emergency is approaching or underway is difficult, and not advised. In Puerto Rico, this was immediately apparent even before Maria landed:

"This storm promises to be catastrophic for our island," said Ernesto Morales with the U.S. National Weather Service in San Juan. "All of Puerto Rico will experience hurricane force winds." Puerto Rico has imposed rationing of basic supplies including baby formula, water, milk, canned food, batteries and flashlights.
(Source)

That is, once a disaster is on the way, it's too late to stock up! Don't get caught having delayed too long.

Preparing Is A Selfless Act

The entire topic of "prepping" seems to have gone dead over the past few years. But, trust me, it's going to come back into style again soon.

Right now, many people have a negative reaction to the idea of 'preparing' and denigrate it as some sort of loony act. This is really just a psychological evasion, a coping technique that allows them to ignore their own lack of resilience.

We all expect our corporations and governments (federal state and local) to be ready to easily predictable emergencies, and we get quite irate when that proves not to be true -- even though most of us have taken zero steps in our own lives to prepare for these "easily predictable" events.

This passage from our book Prosper! provides our views on what it means to prepare responsibly:

Selfless, Not Selfish

Another objection we hear to the prospect of preparing and becoming more resilient is that those actions could be seen by others as being selfish. Instead we see them as being selfless. Those who are not prepared when an emergency strikes are a drain on critical resources, while those who are prepared can be of assistance.
To be among those who can be in a position to render assistance, or at least need none of their own, means that your prior acts of preparation have selflessly removed you from the minus column in an emergency and placed you on the plus side. Anyone who has flown in an airplane is familiar with this model. During the emergency-procedure review prior to takeoff, you're reminded to put on your oxygen mask first before assisting others or your own children. The reason for this is obvious: if you lose consciousness, then you'll be of no help to anyone and become a burden on others.
The first steps toward preparedness usually involve addressing your own needs or those of your loved ones, but many people then go beyond that and prepare for others who may not be able to do so, or have not done so, or maybe even will not do so.
But let us put an important qualifier on that: preparing before a crisis hits is responsible and selfless, but trying to accumulate necessary items during a crisis is an act of hoarding. We do not and never will advocate hoarding. Responsible preparations begin long before any trouble appears. Anything else stands a good chance of making things worse, not better, and may earn you some enemies.
The news has been full of stories of how people behave when scarcity strikes, and these are often quite distressing tales of bad behavior and fragile civility. People in Boston fought over bottled water just hours after a water main broke in 2010. Nasty fights, too, given that the water main had broken just hours earlier.
In Venezuela, as of the writing of this book, desperate people are attempting to buy anything and everything that might remain in the stores as their national currency devalues by the day. Looting and violence are on the rise and hunger and hopelessness are taking hold. This has brought forth all sorts of stopgap government-mandated counter measures that are typically making things worse for average families.
In the process of becoming more resilient, time is your most valuable asset. Be aware that many things that are easily available now may be difficult or impossible to obtain later. Now, before any big crises have hit, it's very easy to pick up the phone, or click a mouse button, and have the big brown truck of happiness roll up to your doorstep a few days later with your purchase.
Everything you could ever want to buy is currently available and stores are abundantly stocked (in most countries). However, we can imagine a large number of possible futures where such access to consumer goods and desired items is either much more restricted, much more expensive, or even impossible. For those without monetary resources, some of your most important assets—such as Social and Emotional Capital—require no money at all…but will take time to develop.

Preparing beforehand -- and thereby being in a position to help those around you in the event of an emergency -- is selfless. Preparing in the midst of a crisis, grabbing what you can, is selfish.

Why Bring All This Up? The Coming Financial Storm

The recent hurricanes are merely reminders that sometimes things happen that are out of our control. They remind us that risk still exists.

Our longstanding view is that there's a financial storm coming. One that is going to be larger and more destructive than all the others that came before.

Just as the hurricanes in the Atlantic basin were fueled by ocean temperatures a full 1.5 degrees warmer than average, the coming financial storm will be fueled by the most excessive pool of "hot money" created in all of history.

In 2016, the stock market had convincingly rolled over and formed a very reliable head-and-shoulders top indicating an approaching correction. In response, the world's central banking cartel (led by the ECB and Bank of Japan in this case) went on the most aggressive money printing spree the world had yet seen, flooding the markets to drive prices back higher. Here's what happened to the Dow Jones industrial average in response:

While that “rescued" the stock market, it has only served to drive it to a higher level that will be far more destructive when it finally corrects. Such 'help' always turns out to have come with a long-term cost far greater than the short-term benefit.

History shows that every bubble experiences a final blow-off top phase. They all do, whether the object of fascination is a railroad, swamp land in Florida, tulip bulbs, or today's financial assets.

The final spurt on the above monthly chart of the Dow certainly looks like that moment of central bank panic of 2016 has finally resulted in the blow off-top we've been looking for. One that has been long in coming.

Another feature of bubbles is that they require prices to depart wildly from their underlying fundamentals. Well, we need look no further than small cap stocks in the US, which have just hit a brand new record high as earnings have been in terminal decline:

Yes, Virginia: stocks hitting new highs as earnings expectations hit new lows is very telling. It means that the crazy liquidity experiment of the central banks now has a life of its own. It's crazy for stocks to be behaving this way, especially since this is our third (and biggest) asset price bubble in 20 years.

Stock prices now shrug off the risk of nuclear war, despite the escalating saber-rattling between the US and North Korea. They are also immune to the increasing trade tensions between the US and China, and a host of other generally deteriorating geopolitical trends.

In short, they are in bubble land and are now in search of a pin.

The situation is now so obvious that even "mainstream" media outlets like MarketWatch are reporting on the dangerous repercussions of the Federal Reserve's behavior:

“I'll admit that it feels a little surreal that this Federal Reserve with its addiction to manipulating markets is actually trying to kick the habit. The unwinding of the balance sheet will dominate markets for at least the next two years and cements our outlook for higher rates," said Bryce Doty, senior portfolio manager at SIT Investments, which manages some $7 billion. (Source)

I suppose it's gratifying to finally see in print the same things we've been saying for years: The Federal Reserve and rest of the world's central banking cartel are addicted to manipulating markets. But the world eventually catches up.

At the same time it's a little unnerving to see these ideas going mainstream, because that means we're much closer to the end of this experiment than the beginning. All it takes is a critical mass of people to lose faith in the central banks for things to really get started to the downside.

Once they do, we predict the financial turmoil will take on a life of its own and we'll all be damned lucky if that doesn't spread into wider and more destructive geopolitical conflicts.

In Part 2 -- Crisis Preparation: What To Do, we detail out, point-by-point, the most important steps concerned individuals should take now -- before another disaster arrives -- to safeguard their investment capital, their property, and the personal security of their families.

Because whether caused by Mother Nature or man's own recklessness, we are due for more crisis. Don't be caught unprepared.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

A few months ago, we told you about attorney Jim Ferraro and his decade-long courtroom battle against chemical giant DuPont. Jim’s first-hand account of this landmark case is detailed in his new book, Blindsided. Since its launch, the book has made it on the USA Today and Los Angeles Times Best Sellers lists.

Blindsided tells the story of Ferraro’s fight to bring justice and hope to the family of a young boy born with no eyes after his mother, Donna Castillo, was doused by a chemical fungicide while pregnant outside a local u-pick farm. The chemical she was exposed to is believed to have caused her son's birth defect and the birth defects of many other children.

Nearly everyone but Ferraro deemed the legal battle against DuPont unwinnable. After all, it involved one of the world's most powerful industrial giants. In the process, it was a fight that changed the landscape of tort law forever. Before it was over, Castillo v. DuPont would go down in history as the first and one of the most important cases of its kind, setting precedent and also sparking a crucial debate over the questionable use of what is known as the "junk-science defense."

Today, the story of Castillo v. Dupont is still highly relevant. Change hasn’t happened at the level needed to protect individuals from a similar occurrence. Events continue to happen at a great cost to the people who are affected. Blindsided brings with it the purpose of awareness. This is a story that needs to be told.

READ MORE

Wyatt Myall from Flower Mound, Texas began attending the center after experiencing a "head on black-out knock-out" during a football practice in May of 2016. Having played football since he was 8 years old, Myall, now 17, spent months suffering the harsh effects of his brain injury. He dealt with anxiety, headaches, constant fatigue and declining grades in school --- all symptoms of a brain injury that progressively worsened with each passing month.

"I was still hurting, like, I always got headaches every single day. Always tired. Wanted to nap every chance I could," Myall told Fox 4 News.

Everything changed when he began treatment at Cerebrum Health Centers. After just two days of therapy, Myall's balance and focus improved dramatically.

RELATED: How Cerebrum Helped Glenn Beck Overcome Serious Brain Health Issues

Head injuries are a leading issue for football players of all ages. In a recent study of deceased football players, 99 percent of the brains studied were shown to have been impacted by brain disease, specifically, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which affects athletes ranging from high school to NFL players.

Learning the dangers of brain injuries is never an enjoyable topic, but clinicians from Cerebrum Health Centers are now helping those who have to learn the hard way.

Dr. Brandon Brock, a clinician at Cerebrum Health Centers who worked closely with Myall, shared with Fox 4 News some of the hopeful insights he'd gained from working with CTE patients.

"I think we may have altered the trajectory of their future, but we don't know. All I know is this, that we have a patient that feels better," Brock said.

If you or someone you know is suffering from ongoing symptoms of brain injury, there is hope at Cerebrum Health Centers.

Cerebrum now accepts most major insurance plans. Call 1-800-885-HOPE or visit GlennBeckHope.com now to speak with a Patient Advocate.

One thing is clear: These aren't your daddy's markets anymore

Why? Because about 10 years ago the Rise of the Machines (aka high frequency trading algorithms) completely altered the terrain of what we call the 'capital markets.'

Let's look at this as a before and after story.

Before the machines, markets were a place that humans with roughly equal information and reflexes set the prices of financial assets by buying and selling. Fundamentals mattered.

After the machines took over, markets became dominated -- in terms of volume, liquidity and pricing -- by machines that operate in time frames of a millionth of a second. The machines and their algorithms use remorseless routines and trickery -- quote stuffing, spoofing, price manipulations -- to 'get their way.'

Fundamentals no longer matter; only endless central bank-supplied liquidity does. Because such machines and their coders are very expensive and require a lot of funding.

The various financial markets are so distorted that I first resorted to putting that word in quotes – “markets" – to signify that they are not at all the same as in the past. In recent years I've taken to putting double quote marks – “"markets"" – in attempt to drive home their gross distortion. Not only are todays “"markets"" something the human traders of a generation ago would fail to recognize, they're no longer a place where human actions of any sort have much of a remaining role.

Why care about this? Two big reasons:

1. Such “"markets"" are easily manipulated by central banks and other state actors by virtue of their automated responses to liquidity injections. Are the markets going down when you don't want them to? Just use any one of several highly leveraged means of signaling to the computers that it's time to buy instead of sell. Common leverage points include the Japanese Yen-to-USD price level, selling VIX to lower volatility, and buying massive quantities of index futures 'all at once.'
2. These manipulations will work until they don't. When they fail, they may well fail spectacularly -- resulting in shattered markets that have to be shuttered until the damage can be assessed. Investors will not be able to access their capital, either to buy or sell, while things get sorted out. When the markets finally do reopen, valuations will be a whole lot lower due to the loss of the huge block of (phantom) volume previously supplied by the now-shut down algos.

The main predicament were facing is that by jamming the “"markets"" ever higher, the central banks have created an enormous gap between current prices and reality.

An easy to see example of this is the housing market in San Francisco, where average income earners cannot afford average houses -- at all. The only way the SF housing market can re-balance to a sustainable level is either for salaries to shoot up massively (while house prices remain flat) or for house prices to fall.

Equities are no different; their prices current suffer from a similar "reality gap". The same is true for bonds.

Obvious Price Manipulations

Just to show that I'm an equal opportunity critic and don't just think gold and silver are manipulated -- and they have been and continue to be, which is now a matter of fact -- I warn that the same dynamics that infest the precious metals "markets" at the COMEX indeed happen elsewhere.

My conclusion is that the HFT computer algos are in complete control of the "market" action, and play with and off of each other to create massive sudden price movements that have nothing to do with anything except book order saturation.

Today's recent example comes to us courtesy of the WTIC oil market on the NYMEX:

Starting around 6:30am, oil futures started drifting slightly lower. A little volume came in around 6:40 a.m. and then -- BAM! -- right at 6:44 a.m. EST, a super spike of volume to the downside occurred. I happened to be watching this in real time and began counting off seconds. Before I got to 3 seconds it was over. (These are one minute bars so those three seconds are obscured in a full sixty second long bar).

So...8 thousand contracts in 3 seconds. Staggering.

For fun, amortize this out over a full trading year. It's a preposterous figure.

The point being, these volume spikes (especially to the downside) have an intensity that is simply overwhelming for the market structure.

Which is entirely the point of the operation. That's the very essence of price manipulation.

Let's try to look at this rationally. Let's define intensity as "volume of more than 2 standard deviations above the recent 1-hour average, divided by the duration of the volume event."

If we do this, an analysis of the oil chart above would go like this:

Say the average volume was 200 contracts/min. The normal 'intensity value' would be 0, because there are no moments above 2 std before the big volume spike (0/0)
Making a guess of a std of 300 for the normal period, at the height of the spike, the value would be ~7,400. Then divide the 3 second episode (expressed in minutes) and you get 148,000.
So from an intensity value of 0, thing spiked up to 148,000 in a matter of seconds.

Is that a useful number or way to look at this? I think so, because it expresses the idea that these volume spikes, combined with their extremely short duration, have an intensity that is far outside of the normal trading bounds. And it's that super out-of-range characteristic that just clobbers the price of whatever is being traded (in this case oil, one of the most widely-traded commodities on the planet).

These blasts destroy the market bid/ask structure in those moments. You have literally zero chance of trading that event as a human, even and especially if using 'insurance' like stops.

This means that the "markets" have a barrier to entry where the cost is the price of a very expensive arrangement of hardware and software capable of operating at the micro-second level. Humans need not apply.

These are not your daddy's markets. They belong to the big players (aka big banks and hedge funds) and their very expensive machines.

Understanding Volume vs. Liquidity

What we're really describing here is a sudden spike in volume that basically destroys the current market book of orders.

What that means is this. Imagine that you are selling eggs at the farmers market along with nine other vendors. There are 500 people wandering the market looking for eggs and other produce. The average sales rate for all 10 egg vendors and all 500 customers is 5 dozen eggs per minute.

The price you can sell your eggs for is set in accordance with the other prices around you. Yours are organic, but small. The vendor next to you has large eggs that are conventional, but larger. And third has small colored eggs from heritage breeds that are free range. Let's say that the range of selling prices is from $4/doz to $5.50 per dozen. This is the market structure for eggs at our farmers market in this thought exercise.

All of a sudden, a giant semi-truck backs up. It's filled with eggs matching every description of those being sold at our small little market. A bullhorn speaker rises from the roof of the truck and announces that 10,000 dozen eggs are now available for the next 1 minute for whatever price anyone is willing to give him for them.

What do you think happens to egg prices over that one-minute window? That's right, the price gets completely crushed. And what do you think happens to demand for eggs among the 500 potential customers at our market? It's completely satisfied. So future demand is eliminated and sales volumes decline accordingly.

In other words, the “"market"" for eggs got ruined, right there and in an instant. You and the other 9 original egg merchants got thoroughly hosed.

The volume of eggs on offer shot up massively all of a sudden, but once all 500 potential egg buyers had been satisfied, the number of buyers dropped away rapidly. Liquidity dried up.

This shows how it's possible to have a market with tons of volume, but no liquidity. There are lots and lots of eggs for sale, but no buyers. All volume, no liquidity.

I know this is a little complex, and possibly arcane, but the points are important to understand. You see, even the most liquid of all possible markets, the US Treasury market, er “"market"", suffered an amazing flash crash back in 2014. It's been pretty well studied, but the culprits were the HTF machines that now dominate that “"market.""

This next chart by Eric Hunsader of NANEX (whom we've interviewed numerous times over the past years) shows the relationship between price, liquidity and volume on that fateful day, when yields plunged and prices spiked (remember in bonds yield and price move oppositely).

Note the first event which was a sudden loss of liquidity, seen at the yellow arrow:

At the same time that the liquidity dried up, you can see volume ticked up pretty strongly and this caused prices to rise. For whatever reason, in HFT land the rules seem to be:

• High Volume + High Liquidity = small price movements
• High Volume + Low Liquidity = big price movements
• High Volume + HFT only Liquidity = flash crash

The point here is this: The computer bots now are the market.

They operate according to a set of pre-programmed parameters. If or when those parameters are exceeded, they simply vanish in less than an eye blink. When that happens, prices go wonky as the remaining few algos go wild. Their resulting erratic trading spikes volumes and prices all over the place.

Why This Matters

Maybe you're thinking, “So what?" Maybe you aren't a trader and think the hows, whens and whys of the computer algos in the Brave New Market isn't really of any concern to you.

But it really is. And here's why.

The flash crash in May 2010 gave us an indication, but the mini flash crashes we see almost daily in various other markets -- ranging from the tiny to the US Treasury market -- tell us that it's entirely possible that someday all the worlds computer algos might suddenly stop operating because an event occurs that is out of their programmed operating state.

We've seen these flash crashes numerous times. The biggies were the 1,000+ point plunge in the Dow on May 6, 2010, the Treasury flash crash of October 15, 2014, the ETF flash crash of August 24^th 2015, and the dollar flash crash on the last trading day of 2016.

There have been innumerable smaller flash crashes in specific equities and commodity contracts as well. But the biggies show us that nothing is safe. When you can have flash crashes in the entire equity market index universe, ETFs, the Treasury market, and even the US Dollar, then you know there's no safe place.

Everything is under the control of the computers.

A long-running discussion between Dave Fairtex, myself and others, concerns the idea of whether or not markets as big as the ones just mentioned can be manipulated by government/central banking forces to stop, limit, or even reverse a price decline.

My view has always been “yes", because it should be child's play to fool the algos into going this way instead of that way by simply injecting a relatively small amount of capital at the right place and time.

I would love to know, for example, why central banks have an incentive program at the CME -- where the exact sorts of highly leveraged, electronically traded products that would be best suited for market manipulation -- are traded.

By virtue of its existence, we know that central banks are highly active traders on the CME platforms. Otherwise an incentive program offering steep volume-based trading discounts would not exist.

Not one single central bank (yet) reports anywhere in their financial disclosures of being the proud owners of any of the accounts traded on the CME. So the details of the situation remain a mystery.

But dependably, every single market decline that began over the past several years has been reversed -- usually in the dead of night, and in the futures market -- by mysterious injections of capital that then get the HFT algos to follow the trend. So inquiring minds would like to know.

Back to the story: Dave had an opportunity to meet recently with a super smart HFT developer and operator who confirmed that algos are easy targets for such a manipulation scheme should the central banks wish to engage in such a thing.

So I went off to my afternoon meeting with the HFT trading guru and, well, because of too many ciders I forgot most of the questions. But the one I remembered most clearly did get answered.
I asked him, "Do you think that someone could manipulate the market by figuring out what the bots were coded to trigger on, and then taking action to encourage them to do just that?"
Short answer: yes.
(Source)

So, yes, such a thing is possible. And because it's possible, and there are seemingly no consequences for getting caught, and because the Fed is fighting any sort of audit tooth and nail, and because the CME has a central bank incentive program, and because the “"market"" mysteriously self-corrects at odd moments usualy with a flood of intense futures buying, my inner prosecutor thinks he could win a case in front of a reasonable jury here.

The big issue, however, is what might happen if (or rather when) things get 'out of hand' and the computer bots cannot be cajoled back into the market because the parameters are just too far out of whack. 'A major market accident' is the likely answer.

Dave continues:

Two weeks ago I went to this lecture by a guy (a physics PhD) on unsupervised machine learning techniques called "reinforcement learning". In the past, the lecturer had worked for JP Morgan and others on HFT applications. He's now got this startup, and he was (more or less) recruiting AI/ML people to come work for him.
The sense I got from his lecture is that there was a big initial move using machine learning to harvest pennies, but that the market is very efficient now at that particular thing, and so its tough to make a living these days by using that approach. Another thing he said was that, there are bots out there that try to find your bots, and then trick them into losing money. Enemy bots, as it were.
One interesting question was asked by an audience member: "how do you train your bots for market problems or exceptional conditions?" His answer, informed by years of work in constructing market maker bots, was: "the vast majority of time is spent in 'normal markets' and as such, that's how we train our bots." Basically, when things get dicey, they just turn them off. I've heard that before too, but it was fun hearing it from the horse's mouth.
And, of course, that's why we have flash crashes. Also my sense is, there aren't really enough humans left to make markets in an emergency, since the profits have been all eaten up by the bots - no money to pay the human traders, which would spend 99.5% of their time sitting and looking at the bots doing their work. And the bots have only been trained on "normal situation" operations.
It makes sense. Why train a bot for exceptional situations, when a huge pile of money can be made just on the day to day fluctuations. Not only is finding enough data to train a bot to run during crash situations difficult, testing is problematic, and then of course you have to wait for a crash and see if it actually works. And if there's a bug, losses could be catastrophic. Better to pull the plug when things get iffy.
(Source)

So, why does this matter to you? Because today's "market" structure is so completely broken now that a flash crash can happen in any sector, no matter how large. That's not speculating, that's established fact.

Once a crash really gets under way, for whatever reason, getting the computer bots back online cannot be accomplished until and unless the markets are within certain operating ranges. That's just how they are built and designed. So as long as everything is within a certain set of parameters, the bots will participate. But as soon as they aren't, they'll all just disappear. When they do, they'll take literally 99% of the market quotes away and 70% of the trading volume. In an instant.

So I'll add one more 'rule' to that list above:

• No quotes + no volume = no market.

Someday parameters will be exceeded and the “"market"" will crash. Unless the central banks can manage to become such dominant buyers in the “"market"" that they become the market. Japan's central bank has already achieved this status in its country's government bonds and ETF markets.

Who knows? Maybe this is the goal of every major central bank. But if so, then we should be having a robust discussion about how this is no different than printing up money and handing it directly to the very wealthiest individuals and most powerful corporations.

That's not monetary policy. That's social engineering.

Conclusion

Patently obvious price manipulations happen daily now in all electronic markets. Oil, gold, silver, indexes, individual equities, options – you name it – all are subject to overt price manipulation tactics being run by the largest and most well-connected Wall Street and private trading firms.

The algos are now the dominant force in the markets in terms of both quote and trade volumes.

Further, the central banks can and do easily use these same lightning-fast programs to halt and reverse market price declines.

This level of micro-management of the “correct" pricing is ruining the core function of the financial markets, which is to set prices by aligning the collective needs and wisdom of millions of individuals and entities.

By ruining this, the central banks have bought some temporary market price stability at the expense of legitimate price discovery. Without that mechanism, mal-investments are now accruing, as they always do when speculation is rewarded over hard work.

Making a sound investment decision requires smarts, effort and risk. Feh! Who want's to go through all that when you can borrow at 1% and retire stock in your company yielding a 2% dividend?

Who wants to figure out how to satisfy all those state and federal regulations involved in opening a new business when you can earn more by playing the speculation game in the financial "markets"?

As my business partner Adam Taggart wrote recently:

When [the market correction eventually] happens, those who decided to look like an idiot early on and refuse to join the party (i.e., positioning their capital defensively), are going to look like geniuses. They will avoid the heartbreak of loss, and they will have capital to deploy when the dust settles, purchasing quality assets at (potentially historic) bargain prices.
It's not an easy choice to make, or to remain steadfast in. It takes foresight, courage, and resolve. But it's a smart choice.
Of course, cash savings is just one of a number of options for positioning your financial wealth defensively right now. For those looking to learn more about other ways to do so, we recommend the following progression:

1. If you haven't yet read it, read our free report The Mother of All Financial Bubbles to understand the full nature of the situation we're living through today
2. Read our report How To Hedge Against A Market Correction, to understand the most common strategies for protecting your portfolio from downside risk
3. For those interested, I've shared how my own personal portfolio is positioned (Note: this is not intended as personal financial advice, but as an example to evaluate)
4. Schedule a review focused on downside risk management with your financial adviser. If you're having difficulty finding one experienced on this topic, we can suggest one to consider.

It's unknowable exactly how much longer our unsustainable markets can remain at their record levels. But there is one thing we know for certain: we're closer to their day of reckoning than we've been at any point over the past seven years. A recession is due soon by historical standards, and long overdue by fundamental ones.
When it happens, do you want to look like an idiot? Or would you rather choose to look like one now, so that you can look brilliant then?
Choose wisely.

Good luck everyone. This is the most unusual period in all of economic, financial and monetary history. Perhaps this time they've got it right.

But if not: Look out below.

Recently I spent a month in Buenos Aires. I went there to study the culture and the economy of a formerly prosperous land, filled with kind well-educated people.

One key lesson was this: Given enough time, bad policies will eventually ruin any advantage.

While not as bad off as it was in 2002, when the masses took to the streets banging pots and pans in protest of their nations ruined economy, the city of Buenos Aires is still clearly depressed. As are most of its people.

More than that, all hope has been lost. Every time a new politician is elected, things are promised to get better, but they don't. Argentina's current woes are the result of far too many successive political regimes that made terrible decisions. It's a clear as simple as this: Bad policies lead to bad outcomes.

As we learned in our interview with Daron Acemoglu on Why Nations Fail, what matters most for widespread prosperity is that the political and economic institutions be fair and inclusive. From the podcast:

It all depends on incentives and opportunities. If people have opportunities to become rich, to open businesses, be innovative, do things that are going to further their interests and at the same time the nation's GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and they have incentives to do so, that's going to lay the foundations of economic prosperity.
It sounds extremely simple but the thing is that most nations don't provide those sorts of opportunities and incentives to their citizens and therein lies the big divide. How do we summarize those opportunities and incentives?
It's the institutions, the rules, formal and informal regulations, and organization of society that determines what sort of opportunities are available to different people, to people from different walks of life, and what sorts of incentives they function under.

In Argentina, after having been economically disappointed so many times, any sense of economic vitality and entrepreneurial spirit has long since disappeared.

Old buildings there display a grandness in the quality of their architecture. Newer construction is clearly blocky, rushed, and low-grade.

“Basuras" are everywhere. They're the street-side dumpsters located all throughout the city. Sometimes I would notice people rummaging in them as I walked about during the day. But after dark, formerly middle-class people can be seen in the basuras, usually from the knees down with their feet waving in the air, as they rummaged through looking for anything of value to glean:

How did Argentina get here? How did a nation -- once the most prosperous in the world on a per capita basis -- stumble to a place of forlorn hope and such diminished prosperity that economists sometimes joke that there are first world economies, developing economies, and Argentina?

The answer is: Poor policies.

A long succession of flawed governance, coupled to some crucial mistakes in apportioning the spoils of the land to too-few wealthy families at the outset, has seved to erode the prospects for nearly all Argentinians.

Now rapid inflation is again back in the news. Having seen this movie before (and not that long ago, either) everyone dreads what's coming next.

Argentina is instructive for us living in the rest of the world, because it is a real-time case study in how bad polices lead to bad outcomes. And in applying this same logic to central banks, we can conclude: Bad models lead to terrible outcomes.

So we should all very much care when our institutions, both political and economic, are becoming less inclusive and more extractive (and/or oppressive). Because if we continue down that road far enough, eventually the majority of us will find ourselves similarly waiting for night to fall as we slink off to tip headfirst into a basura.

On Delusions & Rackets

The longer this massive delusion of the viability of perpetual economic growth goes on, the more entrenched I find myself in a foxhole half-filled with dread. And I really don't like it.

I'm ready for meaningful change. I want to be able to once again focus on the positive. I want to find ideas and people in leadership positions in whom I can believe. I'm sure you do as well.

I find myself thinking: Let's just rip the Band-Aid off already! Let's count the losses up now, apportion them fairly, and move on having learned some painful but useful lessons about living within one's means as a society.

But that's just fanciful dreaming. The powers that be are doing (and will continue to do) everything in their considerable power to prevent this from happening.

And so the list of things in which I have lost faith in in the US is large and growing:

• The rule of law. Laid bare as a complete joke by Eric Holder under Obama, and now under Sessions/Trump.
  
• Financial “markets." These are now the playthings of machines that apparently cannot produce a single losing day for their owners as if they were legitimately money-making machines. But pay no attention to the fact that central banks are pouring $200 billion a month into these same “markets." Further, try to ignore that it is the taxpayers on the hook for the “assets" the central banks are accumulating to legitimize the farce and remember to bust out your best 'surprised face' when the Wall Street machine operators get to keep their 'winnings' while taxpayers have to foot the eventual bill.
  
• Politicians. Always a suspect crowd, their complete fawning subservience to banks, bankers and corporate money in general has led to an even more profound, almost final collapse in public confidence in them.
  
• Sick care. Misnamed 'healthcare' this racket is so obviously a cesspool of corrupt, price gouging activities foisted upon desperate captive hostages in the throes of a medical emergency that it beggars belief that not one proposal out of DC has yet included the simple application of existing price-gouging laws that already protect you from hikes in the price of plywood during an approaching hurricane.
  
• Foreign policy. Sure this is a complex sea of ever-changing interests and alliances but I am going to throw up if I hear one more State Department person talk about “democracy" in whatever country we're bombing or secretly funneling arms into while saying nothing at all of Saudi Arabia's grotesque violations of every principle that the State Department swears we hold dear. Bombing and creating chaos everywhere is a really bad policy, yet it's somehow gotten entrenched and I am beyond tired of it.
  
• Environmental/ecological policy. Anybody who thinks the US already went through and achieved something with the environmental movement in the 1970's either hasn't read the papers carefully lately, been outside in enough places, or both. 500,000 chemicals, many of them far more toxic than ones previously banned, have been released and done their damage. Insects are now gone from thousands of square miles subjected to neotnicotinoid pesticides. Obama's administration punted as long as possible and then when the bad data was inescapable opted for “more study." Trump will be worse. There's another Silent Spring upon us. Shame is too light a word.
  
• Main Stream “News." Could it get any worse for the MSM? Apparently it can. Caught firmly between the proverbial rock and a hard place, those being declining viewership and public hostility towards their lies, the MSM response has been to double down and manufacture clearly fake news to serve a truly awful set of craven purposes. At a time when we desperately need clear analysis and proper context, the MSM has stampeded off in a different direction.

I could keep going, but why bother? This list of ridiculous awfulness will serve as a rocket fuel for the speed and the depth of the coming big reset when it finally arrives.

Don't worry, there will be good news on the other end of the correction. But only once we finally get that Band-Aid pulled off. We should already be imagining that next world, and everything that we want to find in it. Which is why we need to understand how to adopt better models than the ones we're currently navigating by.

Bad Models = Terrible Outcomes

The main predicament at the core of everything is that economics is the primary way we organize ourselves. If your economic models are seriously flawed, meaning they will eventually fail, then your very society is at risk, as Argentina's neighbor Venezuela is currently demonstrating. Money is a critical part of our social glue, it is a central part of the narrative that we live by, and this is why we find it so deeply disturbing when that narrative is obviously beginning to fall apart.

That feeling in the air right now? The one making folks angry, hostile, anxious, and scared?

That's just the herd appropriately sensing an approaching storm.

The big issue here is that the central banks have seriously flawed models that guarantee even worse outcomes for everyone. This is no different than, say, if NASA were calculating a trip to Mars and used miles instead of kilometers for part of the atmospheric approach calculations and burned up a $125 million orbiter -- as indeed happened in 1999.

Whether or not you have the right numbers, the wrong model will always give you a bad outcome.

In Part 2: A Better Model For Predicting What Happens Next, we detail how today's bad models will literally destroy financial and economic markets for generations to come when that pesky thing called "reality" finally intervenes.

Debts do matter, because debts are a claim on future production. As we have repeated over the years, GDP growth is now way below past periods of GDP growth -- leading us to conclude that future resource constraints will not only prevent the economy from ever again returning to its prior rates of rapid expansion, but force it to face the prospect of shrinking instead.

Click here to read the report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

When Jim Ferraro was approached early in his law career to take on the chemical giant DuPont, he knew it was going to be an uphill climb. All of the larger law firms before him --- all with much more financial support --- had turned down the case, and no lawyer in history had ever successfully prosecuted a chemical company for causing a birth defect. But as Donna Castillo sat in Jim’s office sharing her heartbreaking story of how her child was born with no eyes after she was accidentally doused by a chemical fungicide while pregnant, Jim knew he had to stand up and take the case.

After the decade-long courtroom battle, which took millions of dollars, 15 scientists and endless, sleepless nights for Jim, justice prevailed and he won. Jim’s first-hand account of this case is detailed in his book, Blindsided, available in bookstores everywhere now. His powerful message can also be seen in the video below:

The Castillo-vs.-DuPont case still goes down in history as the first and one of the most important of it’s kind, because it set the precedent for stricter environmental laws and the questionable use of the “junk science defense” in the courtroom.

Donna Castillo was merely walking past a strawberry u-pick-it farm, when her exposure to DuPont’s chemical changed the course of her and her unborn child’s life --- forever. This could have happened to any one of us, and Jim’s mission is to spread awareness about the toxic chemicals that we are exposed to without sufficient warning every day.

In the midst of current cases like the Flint water crisis, unregulated asbestos exposure, and frightening chemical exposures like the one the Castillos suffered, Jim is on a crusade to change the laws that allow these dangerous chemicals to exist. Now more than ever, with critical regulatory changes happening with the EPA, it’s time for us to stand with Jim and fight for our environment and our health.

"The chemical giants of the world will continue to compromise our safety and our environment for the sake of making money—unless we put an end to it," Ferraro said. "If I can singlehandedly defeat Dupont, imagine the change we could make if we all make a stand together."

READ MORE

Global macro economic data has been weak for many years, but there's now a very real chance of a world-wide recession happening in 2017.

Why? A dramatic and worsening shortfall in new credit creation.

The world's major central banks have, again, done the world an enormous disservice. Instead of admitting that maybe/perhaps/possibly the practice of issuing debt at more than twice the rate of underlying economic growth was a very bad idea over the past several decades, they instead doubled down and created an even larger debt monster to be dealt with.

The resulting global asset price bubble -- or, more accurately, set of nested and incestuously intertwined bubbles -- can collectively be called the Mother Of All Bubbles (MOAB). None has ever been larger in history.

As with all prior bubbles, it shares the collective delusion that there's such a thing as a free lunch. History has seen many attempts to eat this elusive meal, with each generation convinced that they were the chosen ones who could finally crack that nut.

So, dutifully, our central bankers have tried, and tried again, to deliver that free lunch -- i.e. to print up prosperity.

But, alas, prosperity cannot be printed out of thin air. All that can be accomplished by central bank slight of hand is a transfer of wealth. Central banks steal from the many to give to the few. They are the reverse Robin Hoods of our day.

They also encourage everyone to steal from the future, which is what excessive borrowing really represents. It's future consumption taken today at the expense of tomorrow.

The most charitable thing that can be said about the central banks is that perhaps they actually believed their own BS, but I seriously doubt it. Even the most dense of observers has noticed by now that we are 9 years into the 'emergency measures' and nothing even remotely close to healthy economic growth has emerged.

One year of emergency measures is already a bit too long. 3 years is embarrassing. 9 years tells you that the Fed isn't in this for the reasons they state. Instead, they are orchestrating the largest wealth transfer in all of history, from the many to the few.

Once you realize this is their goal, then they've succeeded amazingly. Mission accomplished!

We have the widest wealth and income gaps in all of history. The big banks have complete control of the political and financial machinery of every country of the world. And the corporate controlled media simply cheerleads the whole thing, convincing most people it's all been for their own good.

Honestly, from a planning and execution standpoint, I have to give the central banking cartel very high marks for pulling off such a magnificent heist almost completely undetected by the average person.

Of course, they needed lots of assistance from a complaint media.

Economic Propaganda

Propaganda – noun - information, especially of a biased, emotionally charged or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.

Let's turn now to exploring the ways that the media serves to deliver propaganda instead of providing useful context and essential information.

People are anxious these days. One explanation for this is that their personal lives are getting harder and more difficult on multiple fronts. Wages are flat (to down) and expenses are skyrocketing. There's no sense of safety, and everybody can sense the massive injustice of the reverse Robin Hood policies of the central banks and governments.

Injustice, of course, makes us very unhappy. That's true of all social creatures, ranging from primates to dogs. Fairness matter -- a lot. And when systems or individuals operate unfairly, then the other participants tend to withdraw and/or give up. If things become bad enough, however, the victims get angry and will eventually retaliate.

To keep this unfairness from boiling over, a couple of tricks of the government's trade are to first get the afflicted parties blaming the wrong people -- preferably each other, as opposed to the actual perpetrators of the unfairness. This works great; we see it in police pitted against protesters, even though they both are being unfairly treated in similar ways by the system. Ditto for the left vs. right protests that have been erupting all over the world.

A second trick is to simply confuse everyone, to try and convince them that nothing unfair has actually happened in the first place. This is achieved through lies, either by omission or commission, and this is now daily fare in the leading mainstream news outlets. And I use the term 'news' very, very loosely.

What results when we are told (and/or believe) one thing but our experiences indicate another, is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance -- noun - the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.

The creation of 'inconsistent thoughts or beliefs' is now an entrenched industry with hundreds of billions of advertising dollars at its disposal. It's now so thoroughly part of the societal fabric that many of its most advanced practitioners have no idea that they are even carrying out a sophisticated program of deception with savant-like precision.

Born, bred and raised within the system of delusion, they're unaware of their own role, or why they're playing it.

Let's pull an example I found, easily enough, in this morning's news cycle (6-16-17).

Today's propaganda headline from Bloomberg is a classic:

This U.S. expansion may be moving like a tortoise, but it's on its way to win the race.
Widely disdained for its relatively weak growth and pay gains, the expansion is about to complete its eighth year -- and it's headed to become the longest on record, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists. Respondents put a 60 percent probability, based on the median estimate, on the growth streak running through at least July 2019 and thereby reaching 121 months, topping the 10 years of gains during the 1990s.
“The U.S. economy looks pretty healthy right now when you think in terms of sectors that could blow up," said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at New York-based Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC. Having avoided any “violent bounceback" during the recovery, “most sectors seem to have room to run," signaling continued moderate growth, he said.
A strong job market, subdued inflation, low borrowing costs and healthier finances will be a tailwind for consumer spending while business investment, a laggard so far, is expected to join the drivers of growth. Even trade may become less of a drag.
(Source)

This Bloomberg article is a really strong effort by the media to spin things as being much rosier than they are. Many people's direct experiences will be completely counter to the happy-talk put forth in this article, which basically readsl like the intro to Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone radio program, which told of a magical place “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

In other words, a fantasy land where the supporting data provided cannot possibly be correct.

So let's review the amazing list of data, shall we?

• Economists agree, this expansion will become the longest on record
• The US economy looks pretty healthy right now
• Most sectors have room to run
• There's a strong job market
• Inflation is subdued
• There's also something called 'healthier finances'

Given all that, you'd be a total loser to think anything other than "Everything is awesome!"

But is that true?

Well, once you take a closer look at each of these authoritative claims, they are anything but clear-cut and certain. If you question any of them, or even just dig slightly into them, questions swirl up like flies from a knocked-over garbage pail.

To begin, if we choose to question the “strong jobs market", we quickly come across charts such as this one:

(Source)

In this less-than-"amazing" chart we see that the “strong job market" is actually the most horrifically weak one in the entire data series. The illusion of “strength" has been manufactured by the hocus-pocus of excluding people off of the unemployment rolls, so they simply aren't counted in the “strong" number.

It's an old trick. If you're counting the unemployed, then the best way to have a rosier number is to not count people who don't have a job as 'unemployed.' You call them something else ("out of the labor force") and revise them away.

If you don't count them, they don't exist, right? That then allows the media to trumpet the Fed's victory in creating today's “strong job market."

If this wasn't so patently, ridiculously Orwellian, and didn't create so much human misery, it would be funny.

How anyone can, with a straight face, claim that this is a “strong job market" is beyond me. It's not. And the record number of homeless people showing up in every major and minor city in the US validates the data in the chart above.

So that's cognitive dissonance area #1: Being told we have a strong job market while your own eyes see homeless people everywhere, and people looking for jobs report extreme difficulty landing anything beyond a part-time, minimum wage gig.

Next we turn to the idea that “inflation is subdued." While we've shredded this idea mercilessly in such areas as our Crash Course chapters on Fuzzy Numbers and Inflation, as well as in our podcast with Ed Butowski, the creator of the Chapwood Index, you can just as easily use your own personal observations and a few pieces of data to destroy this farce of 'subdued inflation.'

Let's start with car prices. According to the BLS, new cars have not gone up in price at all over the past ten years. In fact, according to their calculations, a new car costs exactly the same today as it did back in 1997, a full twenty years ago:

But your own eyes and personal experience may have noticed something different. If you've made a car purchase over the past 20 years, you've probably observed that actual out-of-pocket costs to purchase a new vehicle have steadliy risen from just over $19,000 in 1997 to over $33,000 today:

(Source)

Where the US government is convinced that cars costs exactly as much as they did 20 years ago, your personal experience might be that they are not terribly far away from costing 100% more.

The explanation for the difference is that the BLS has decided that today's automobile is vastly improved compared to that of 20 years ago. It believes that your dollar buys you nearly 100% more "car" than it did before, so the whole thing is a wash.

This is the magic of “hedonic improvements" which I am not entirely unsympathetic to. If things improve and we pay the same amount for them, then that's a gain in living standards, of a sort.

But the idea that “inflation is too low" is anchored in the idea that we are paying the same for things today as we were yesterday. The very essence of cognitive dissonance is being told that things cost twice as much but they haven't gone up in price.

That the issue at play here. While the Fed frets about inflation being too low -- you struggle to afford rising new car costs, as well as the skyrocketing associated fees like maintenance and insurance.

Another prime area for "fuzzy numbers" is in living expenses related to housing. According to the government ,housing costs have been modestly rising by an average of less than 3% per year for a decade:

However, these charts from Charles Hughes Smith show that the experience of homebuyers in many major metropolitan areas is anything but subdued:

(Source)

Add all this up and what do you get?

A very different impression of the state of 'the economy' than Bloomberg is working hard to present.

And even more egregious than the misinformation is the complete inappropriateness for the media to praise economic 'strength' while ignoring the role of debt in bringing about the growth being celebrated. If the 'prosperity' is simply due to a drunken debt-binge, it should be criticized, not lauded.

The Pin To Pop This Mother Of All Bubbles?

Which brings us to a very important risk factor to the over-leveraged global economy: declining credit impulse.

Unfamiliar with the term? You won't be for long.

Defined as net new credit to GDP, credit impulse is one of the best statistical predictors of recession. As of today, credit impulse has gone negative across the world for the first time since the start of the Great Recession.

In Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About The Credit Impulse, we lay out the evidence for why there's a credit impulse-driven recession on the way. It will come whether or not the underlying economy is recovering or not.

Why? Because the amount of debt creation was absolutely massive across the globe, particularly in China. The excessive debt service will simply overwhelm the economy -- it won't even be a close fight.

Click here to read the report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by Chris Martenson with PeakProsperity.com.

The only real constant to be found in both European and US politics is war. A steady feature of both regions for the past 20-plus years has been small, lucrative conflicts waged against countries unable to effectively defend themselves. This time with North Korea. Why?

It doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office in the US --- Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal --- there’s a war machine constantly running. My concern is that there's a building risk that one day that war machine is going to bust apart. And when it does, the long relative peace that the US and Europe have enjoyed (even as they’ve visited a lot of death and destruction elsewhere) will be shattered.

As I’ve written extensively in the past, as was the case with Russia last fall, this push to war includes a series of carefully-crafted talking points being endlessly repeated over the print and airwaves. It’s an ever-present condition of living in our manufactured reality, where what we are told to care about is beamed at us around the clock in a rather tediously but emotionally-manipulative way on the “news.”

For a short historical review, recall that it wasn’t that long ago that we were asked to be in a near state of panic about:

• Ebola

• Iran’s nuclear capabilities

• Libya’s terrible strongman (who turned out to be way better than the thugs who replaced him)

• Terrorists

• Russia

How many of those are now front and center in your concerns? Probably none. Today's big ‘bogeyman’ is North Korea. Have you wondered why?

The news about North Korea is at a fever pitch. Again, we have to ask, why now?

Trump says 'major, major' conflict with North Korea possible, but seeks diplomacy

Apr 28, 2017

The Trump administration on Wednesday declared North Korea "an urgent national security threat and top foreign policy priority." It said it was focusing on economic and diplomatic pressure, including Chinese cooperation in containing its defiant neighbor and ally, and remained open to negotiations.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday a major conflict with North Korea is possible in the standoff over its nuclear and missile programs, but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome to the dispute.

"There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely," Trump told Reuters in an Oval Office interview ahead of his 100th day in office on Saturday.

Nonetheless, Trump said he wanted to peacefully resolve a crisis that has bedeviled multiple U.S. presidents, a path that he and his administration are emphasizing by preparing a variety of new economic sanctions while not taking the military option off the table.

"We'd love to solve things diplomatically but it's very difficult," he said.

In other highlights of the 42-minute interview, Trump was cool to speaking again with Taiwan's president after an earlier telephone call with her angered China.

He also said he wants South Korea to pay the cost of the U.S. THAAD anti-missile defense system, which he estimated at $1 billion, and intends to renegotiate or terminate a U.S. free trade pact with South Korea because of a deep trade deficit with Seoul.

U.S. officials said military strikes remained an option but played down the prospect, though the administration has sent an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered submarine to the region in a show of force.

Any direct U.S. military action would run the risk of massive North Korean retaliation and huge casualties in Japan and South Korea and among U.S. forces in both countries.

Okay, let’s parse all that out:

• There are no direct negotiations between the US and North Korea

• Trump is talking tough

• Kim Jong Un is insane

• Trump wants South Korea to pay for a $1 billion US piece of hardware

• Trump wants to renegotiate or terminate the trade pact with South Korea

• If things ‘go hot’, a lot of casualties are expected

• Both China and North Korea are very alarmed by the THAAD anti-missile system the US has installed in South Korea

• The US is maneuvering military assets into the region, including an aircraft carrier and sub, among other displays of suggested force

Let’s see here…what could possibly go wrong?

How about everything?

Here’s some more on the THAAD anti-missile defense system, which wasn't well received by the locals in South Korea who, for some reason, have no interest in being dragged into a war with their immediate and heavily-militarized neighbors by a careless US administration:

US sets up missile defense in S. Korea as North shows power

Apr 26, 2017

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — In a defiant bit of timing, South Korea announced Wednesday that key parts of a contentious U.S. missile defense system had been installed a day after rival North Korea showed off its military power.

The South's trumpeting of progress on setting up the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, comes as high-powered U.S. military assets converge on the Korean Peninsula and as a combative North Korea signals possible nuclear and missile testing.

About 8,000 police officers were mobilized, and the main road leading up to the site in the country's southeast was blocked earlier Wednesday, Yonhap reported. About 200 residents and protesters rallied against THAAD in front of a local community center, some hurling plastic water bottles.

North Korea conducted live-fire artillery drills on Tuesday, the 85th anniversary of the founding of its million-person strong Korean People's Army. On the same day, a U.S. guided-missile submarine docked in South Korea. And the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier is also headed toward the peninsula for a joint exercise with South Korea.

The moves to set up THAAD within this year have angered not only North Korea, but also China, the country that the Trump administration hopes to work with to rid the North of nuclear weapons. China, which has grown increasingly frustrated with its ally Pyongyang, and Russia see the system's powerful radars as a security threat.

I consider having to deploy 8,000 police officers to deter possible protestors as a strong sign of just how unpopular a move it is for the THAAD system to be installed. North Korea is rattling its sabers, the US is moving assets in, China is both alarmed and trying to be helpful at the same time, probably preferring to let a sleeping dog lie.

This is an incredibly volatile moment, especially considering that Kim Jong Un has been anything but rational his entire life. So, again, we have to ask: Why now? Why has beating North Korea into submission become such a sudden national priority?

Before address that, it bears repeating that most of what passes for “news” in the West is actually well-crafted talking points put out by self-interested people who have discovered a fantastic way to remain in power and accumulate wealth. Read more about this in our prior report: We Are Being Played.

Well, that's true at least as long as we consent to follow along and dutifully remain ignorant of these tricks of persuasion by propaganda. There’s really no good excuse for being fooled, except mental laziness. The tricks of this trade are neither subtle nor difficult to spot.

Meanwhile, the actual things that are deteriorating alarmingly are not even talked about -- ever -- in the main news outfits. Alarming species extinction rates, the loss of phytoplankton in the oceans, the loss of terrestrial soil fertility into oceanic dead zones, and the largest wealth gap in all of history created on purpose by central banks -- very real crises like this are nearly completely ignored.

These are all very dangerous to our future, but they aren't talked about because doing so won't sell more weapons. Nor will it advance any political careers, or goose banking profits next quarter.

So for a system that demands continuous conflict in order to function, to manufacture a new war you need a good sales agent, and none are so closely tied to that racket than the New York Times. Here they are recently using the same dumb tricks that worked the last time, and the time before that…and so on:

NYT’s ‘Impossible to Verify’ North Korea Nuke Claim Spreads Unchecked by Media

Apr 26, 2017

Buoyed by a total of 18 speculative verb forms—five “mays,” eight “woulds” and five “coulds”—New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad (4/24/17) painted a dire picture of a Trump administration forced to react to the growing and impending doom of North Korea nuclear weapons.

“As North Korea Speeds Its Nuclear Program, US Fears Time Will Run Out” opens by breathlessly establishing the stakes and the limited time for the US to “deal with” the North Korean nuclear “crisis”:

Behind the Trump administration’s sudden urgency in dealing with the North Korean nuclear crisis lies a stark calculus: A growing body of expert studies and classified intelligence reports that conclude the country is capable of producing a nuclear bomb every six or seven weeks.

That acceleration in pace—impossible to verify until experts get beyond the limited access to North Korean facilities that ended years ago—explains why President Trump and his aides fear they are running out of time.

The front-page summary was even more harrowing, with the editors asserting there’s “dwindling time” for “US action” to stop North Korea from assembling hundreds of nukes:

From the beginning, the Times frames any potential bombing by Trump as the product of a “stark calculus” coldly and objectively arrived at by a “growing body of expert[s].” The idea that elements within the US intelligence community may actually desire a war—or at least limited airstrikes—and thus may have an interest in presenting conflict as inevitable, is never addressed, much less accounted for.

The most spectacular claim—that North Korea is, at present, “capable of producing a nuclear bomb every six or seven weeks”—is backed up entirely by an anonymous blob of “expert studies and classified intelligence reports.” To add another red flag, Sanger and Broad qualify it in the very next sentence as a figure that is “impossible to verify.” Which is another way of saying it’s an unverified claim.

Unverifiable “evidence,” anonymous sources, and the broad appeal of “many experts.” Sound familiar? It should, it’s the exact same playbook used by the war machine to bomb and invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and, someday soon, Iran and Russia.

It brings to mind this quote by Arundhati Roy:

What I'm saying is that it’s the exact same trick used over and over again. Either the New York Times is the stupidest crew of reporters and editors ever with completely flat learning curves, or they are in on the racket. More likely the latter than the former, I'm convinced. The New York Times hasn't seen a war it couldn’t support (especially in the oil-rich Middle East).

Why Now?

So the big question is ‘why now?’ Why is North Korea suddenly such a concern? They’ve been peskily doing what they do for a very long time; developing crude nuclear devices and lobbing test missiles into the sea.

If you happen to be the ocean around North Korea, you have to absorb a wayward rocket now and then. But there’s not much of a threat beyond that at the moment.

None of the articles I’ve read have given any credible insight into why North Korea is considered a clear and present danger to US interests at the moment. More than that, no analysis has been proffered to explain how any potential military action doesn’t just end in a bloodbath for the poor people of South and North Korea.

The conventional military capabilities of North Korea are pretty staggering if you live in Seoul South Korea, at least:

When it comes to soldiers based on the North Korean border, the US only has about 20,000 troops permanently stationed in South Korea, as well as about 8000 air force personnel and other special forces. There were also about 50,000 military personnel based in Japan.

Compare this to North Korea, which has 700,000 active soldiers, but a whopping 4.5 million reserves.

Prof Blaxland said North Korea had also massed about 20,000 rockets and missiles on the border with South Korea, and when you are playing a numbers game, technology doesn’t always win.

“There’s a saying ‘quantity has a quality all of its own’,” he said.

“North Korea has massed artillery and missile capability adjacent to the demilitarised zone, close to Seoul, which puts it in range of a population about the size of Australia — it’s pretty scary.”

As a reminder, Trump campaigned on a peace platform. So this sudden belligerence has to be coming form some heavy internal pressure; or he’s simply flip-flopped (or wasn’t honest) on a very important matter.

He’s done so much flip-flopping that this tweet struck me as funny:

Continuing with the mystery of Why now?, we note that the potential consequences of a kinectic conflict for South Korea are staggering. The simple fact is that, no matter how many jets and cruise missiles a carrier group launches, or what countermeasures South Korea and embedded US military bring to bear, there’s little chance of them wiping out anything but a very small percentage of North Korea’s conventional artillery and rocket capabilities.

Think of 500,000 rounds of artillery landing in a major, packed capitol city that has the population of Australia and you can begin to appreciate the scale of the catastrophe that could ensue:

Trump, who clearly and unequivocally campaigned on a peace platform, is now sending a “very powerful armada” to the coast of the DPRK. Powerful as this armada might be, it can do absolutely nothing to prevent the DPRK artillery from smashing Seoul into smithereens. You think that I am exaggerating? Business Insider estimated in 2010 that it would take the DPRK 2 hours to completely obliterate Seoul. Why? Because the DPRK has enough artillery pieces to fire 500,000 rounds of artillery on Seoul in the first hour of a conflict, that’s why. Here we are talking about old fashioned, conventional, artillery pieces. Wikipedia says that the DPRK has 8,600 artillery pieces and 4,800 multiple rocket launcher systems. Two days ago a Russian expert said that the real figure was just under 20,000 artillery pieces. Whatever the exact figure, suffice to say that it is “a lot”.

The DPRK also has some more modern but equally dangerous capabilities. Of special importance here are the roughly 200’000 North Korean special forces. Oh sure, these 200,000 are not US Green Beret or Russian Spetsnaz, but they are adequate for their task: to operate deep behind enemy lies and create chaos and destroy key objectives. You tell me – what can the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group deploy against these well hidden and dispersed 10’000+ artillery pieces and 200,000 special forces? Exactly, nothing at all.

Clearly that’s a very unsettling prospect for South Korea. Just imagine a favorite major city of yours with a completely unstable leader within artillery range just to its immediate north. It’s a frightening prospect.

Again, I cannot find a single credible reason for Why now?. And so, we have to simply speculate.

Possible reasons range from an itchy military industrial complex that is disappointed that it cannot seem to goad the US into war with Russia and North Korea just happened to be next on the list, to the idea that Trump is really seeking trade deal concessions from South Korea and is using the North Korean situation as leverage.

The latter is not out of the realm of the possible, with Trump having said he wants South Korea to pay for the THAAD system being installed and that he wants to renegotiate our balance of trade with them, too.

Who says stuff like that at a time when war might break out? Someone who doesn’t really appreciate the gravity of the situation, I'd suggest. I mean, if it’s a negotiating tactic, it’s one that could end up with a lot of people losing their lives and a ruined economy. If it’s a negotiating tactic stapled to a crisis, it’s still an odd thing.

Conclusion

Tensions with North Korea are about as tight as can be right now. And the wild card is the apparent instability of Kin Jong Un. Who knows what he might do?

Any equally-perplexing mystery, which for now I'll have to file under “central banks control the markets” is why the KOSPI (South Korea's stock index) is up so much on the outbreak of these very serious tensions?

Central banks are propping it up here to keep the masses calm, or the central banks are to blame for pouring so much liquidity into world markets that even the risk of obliteration is insufficient cause for a stock market to go down. So take your pick: either it’s a controlled market or it’s a sign of just how outrageous the bubble mentality across the world has become.

One feature of bubbles is the inability to entertain the idea of an asset ever going down in price. So they go up; news and data be damned.

I just find it extremely strange that the South Korean stock index is powering higher through all of these tensions. It's very, very strange. Stocks are not supposed to like uncertainty. The post-French election stock buying spree was explained on that very basis: the French elections removed uncertainty and therefore stocks went up.

But now we're being forced to accept how stocks are going up as uncertainty increases.

Since it really makes no sense, other ‘reasons’ are being given. But it’s just too strange for the rational mind to believe them. It’s just not normal; and therefore we don’t live in a normal world anymore.

If a full shooting war breaks out with North Korea, there will be massive casualties on all sides. To think that peace depends on Trump negotiating with Kim Jong Un is a particularly comic-book-worthy plot line. It seems absurd. But here we are.

If you live in Seoul, you should consider getting out for a while. Take a vacation, or work remotely, and bring your family. Just for a while -- maybe a couple of weeks.

If you can’t do that, then be sure all of your loved ones know the rally points and basement shelters that apply. Review your basic contingency plans and then hope that they won't be required.

Remember, any outbreak of war is going to be a very bad thing for the globe at this particular moment in history. Debt levels are stretched to the limit, GDP is weak, and it won’t take much to upset the economic and financial market apple carts.

For everyone else, read our report How To Prepare For War that was prepared for the possibility of a war with Russia.

It’s not a pleasant topic, nor one I like to keep raising. But there’s a crew in charge in DC that is intent on starting wars, and they are not about to stop now. I believe they span administrations and they are very influential.

I also happen to believe that they will eventually pick a fight we all regret very much.

So be prepared.

An average incident of road rage turned into a nightmare when Bill found himself under arrest and charged with “making terroristic threats.”

It was a normal morning. Bill was driving to work when another car cut him off, and then chased him down the street. It was an ugly case of road rage.

RELATED: Ten Chances to Win $1,500 to Finally Buy the Gun of Your Dreams

But what happened next will blow you away...

Watch the video below to find out what happened when the police arrived.

Bill, a legal concealed carry permit holder, was the one handcuffed and arrested --- just because he had a legally owned firearm in his vehicle.

Unfortunately, cases like this come up all the time...

READ MORE

The night Buddy Sheppard was arrested, he was simply defending his family and property with a gun. As an Army veteran and former law enforcement officer, he was highly experienced and well trained with the use of a firearm. That didn't keep him from going to jail --- even though he never fired a single shot.

RELATED: Ten Chances to Win $1,500 to Finally Buy the Gun of Your Dreams

Watch Sheppard explain the chilling details:

While shocking, Sheppard's story is nothing new to Tim Schmidt, President and Founder of the U.S. Concealed Carry Association (USCCA).

"Unfortunately, cases like this come up all the time. You know, the deck is already stacked against you as a responsibly armed American," Schmidt said. "But the good news is, there’s something you can do about it."

READ MORE

Aches and pains can occur in several areas of the body at the same time. Pain can be felt deep in the muscles, joints, organs or other soft tissue, and while generalized aches and pains are usually dull, in some cases they can be far more severe and debilitating. Even when body aches are mild, the constant aching can drain your energy and leave you feeling weak, exhausted, frustrated and wondering if you will ever find relief.

RELATED: Claim Your 3-Week QuickStart Advantage Over Chronic Pain for Only $19.95

The cause of all over pain can be the result of an acute illness, injury or an ongoing condition such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, neuropathy, diabetes, hypothyroidism, cancer and many others. Living with constant aches and pains can be difficult, but there are ways to reduce your suffering. Follow the tips below to soothe your pain and start living better today.

Rest and Recover

When your body is constantly aching all over, make sure to get plenty of sleep. While it can be extremely difficult when you’re in pain, there are ways to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep throughout the night. Focusing on your breath can help take your mind off of your pain and help you to enter into a state of relaxation. Box breathing is one technique that has been proven effective in helping people to fall asleep quickly and sleep more deeply.

The technique of box breathing can be easily learned with a little bit of practice. Start by breathing in for four counts, hold your breath for four counts, exhale for four counts and hold for another four counts. Repeat this exercise several times (or until you fall asleep) and your brain will enter a meditative state which will help to reduce the amount of pain your mind perceives.

Dial in Your Diet

When you suffer from chronic widespread pain, eating a high sugar diet is like throwing gasoline on the fire. Sugar rapidly increases inflammation everywhere in the body, and combined with any number of other factors that are causing your pain, your aching will only get worse. Lowering your sugar intake can help reduce your inflammation and help soothe your aching muscles and joints.

In addition to cutting back on sugar, eating foods that are high in Omega-3 fatty acids can also help you to stop or reduce pain-causing inflammation. Foods that are high in Omega-3 include fish, spinach (or other dark leafy greens), walnuts, chia seeds, flaxseed or a fish oil supplement. Make sure to eat these foods regularly to help you in your quest to find pain relief.

Seek a Medical Professional

If you are experiencing widespread aches and pains on a regular basis, and it seems like the pain is only getting worse, seek medical help right away from your primary care physician. A physician can help to diagnose the root cause of your pain and recommend specialized treatments or surgical procedures, prescribe pharmaceutical solutions or steroid injections to help you to manage your pain, or refer you to a more specialized care provider that can help you with your unique situation.

Relief Factor

General aching in the body is often caused by extensive bodily inflammation. Diet, exercise, sleep and other treatment options don't always soothe away these aches, but Relief Factor can help. With four key 100 percent all natural ingredients, including Omega-3, known for their anti-inflammatory properties, you can get the relief without the harmful side effects that come with commonly prescribed pharmaceutical treatments. With your Relief Factor three-week QuickStart for only $19.95, you can begin to reduce chronic pain right away. Call 800-500-8384, or click here to learn more about resolving general aches and pains.

References:

http://drlumbago.com/body-aches-pains-hurt-all-over/

http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/pain-and-sleep

Several members of Glenn's staff, including Brad Staggs who frequently appears on Glenn's TV show, have experienced great results from an all-natural product designed to relieve joint and muscle pain --- Relief Factor.

"Relief Factor has worked for me and a lot of others here at Mercury Studios. I’ll bet it’ll work for you, too!” Brad said. "The only thing you have to lose is the pain."

RELATED: Claim Your 3-Week QuickStart Advantage Over Chronic Pain for Only $19.95

For Brad, it relieved pain in his hands after a day in the shop. He described the product as "tough on pain and easy on you." As an organic natural supplement, Relief Factor suppresses inflammation --- the center of aches and pains --- offering a healthy alternative to prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

Relief Factor employee Tim Burke added his perspective and invitation to others dealing with chronic pain.

"So many incredible people are unnecessarily slowed down. Don't be one of them," he said. "Let Relief Factor make the difference for you!"

Find out stories of others overcoming aches and pains with Relief Factor.

Ankle pain is something almost everyone deals with at some point in their lifetime. Sprains, tendonitis, arthritis and other injuries can make even the simplest actions, such as walking, especially painful. The problem with ankle injuries is that healing can sometimes require crutches, bed-rest or at least a temporary reduction in the amount of time spent standing, walking, jogging or running until the ankle can properly heal.

RELATED: Claim Your 3-Week QuickStart Advantage Over Chronic Pain for Only $19.95

Ankle pain can occur with an accident or injury, or it can develop over time due to repetitive stress and poor posture. Whatever the cause of your ankle pain, follow the tips below to say goodbye to ankle pain forever.

Prevent Ankle Pain

Many types of ankle pain are the direct result of calf and Achilles tendon inflexibility. To increase the range of motion in your ankle, sit on the ground with your legs straight out in front of you and stretch the ankle by pulling your big toe towards your body until you feel a nice stretch in your calf. Hold this position for 10-15 seconds, then release. Switch ankles and repeat the exercise. Perform 3-5 repetitions on each ankle daily.

Pain in the ankle can often originate in the sole of the foot. Knots can develop due to repetitive stress or wearing shoes that do not properly fit your feet. To alleviate tension in the sole of the foot, place a golf ball on the floor, put one foot on the ball, and place as much weight on the ball as you can without making it too painful. Begin moving your foot in a circular motion for 20-30 seconds. Switch feet and repeat this exercise. Perform this exercise 3-5 times per week.

Seek a Medical Professional

Sometimes ankle injuries can only heal through surgery or extensive rehab. If pain in your ankle is persistent or becomes too much for you to manage, seek help from your primary care physician or a licensed physical therapist. Your primary care physician may refer you to an ankle specialist who can make you special support braces, develop a rehab protocol and teach you specialized stretches and exercises to heal your specific injury.

Relief Factor

Ankle pain often stems from inflammation. Stretching and other treatment options don't always soothe these aches and pains, but Relief Factor can help. Relief Factor features four key 100% natural ingredients known for their anti-inflammatory properties. With your Relief Factor three-week QuickStart for only $19.95, you can begin to reduce pain right away.

Call 800-500-8384, or click here to learn more.

Today, I want to talk about an interesting "trend" that was brought to my attention recently.

It's about the super-rich, and their renewed rush to get prepared.

I wanted to get to the bottom of this... What do they know that we don't? What does it mean for hard-working everyday Americans like you and me?

RELATED: Enter to Win a Free 3-Month Emergency Food Supply --- $497 Value!

In the past few weeks, several news outlets, from Fox News to The New Yorker, have been covering reports of the super-rich investing heavily in emergency preparedness. Everything from luxury condos built in missile silos to bug-out locations in New Zealand. Sounds nice, right?

Before I dive into those stories, I want to point out that I believe this is nothing new, but something that conveniently fits into the current news cycle. The very rich have always had the resources to invest in things like preparedness, just as much as they can splurge on lavish dinners and vacations.

Yet, we know that a preparedness plan is not just another "nice thing to have." Luckily, it doesn't require a fortune to get prepared --- and that may be an advantage we have --- more on that later.

Nonetheless, these new reports sparked my curiosity. Why are the super-rich surging to get prepared right now? I decided to dig deeper.

READ FULL ARTICLE

Touch is one of the most powerful senses in the human body. With touch, we know, interact with, and manipulate our world. To control our society’s abundant technology, we must constantly swipe, tap, and click. We need the feeling and muscle control in our hands and fingers to be reliable. With such high demands on our hands, it's not surprising many of us deal with frequent or prolonged hand pain.

Aching in the hands and wrists is not only caused by repetitive motion; hand pain also stems from conditions like tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and arthritis. Your pain may be due to accident or injury. We all want to put an end to the discomfort that limits our daily activities. 

RELATED: Claim Your 3-Week QuickStart Advantage Over Chronic Pain for Only $19.95

Here are a few ways to wave goodbye to hurting wrists.

Stretch and Strengthen

We use our hands a lot, but rarely exercise this body part. Stretching and strengthening exercises can help reduce tension and build support for delicate bones, tendons and ligaments in the wrist.

During long sessions using a computer or mobile device, frequently shake your hands out loosely. Bend your hands forward and back, pulling on the fingers to stretch. These simple stretches can help alleviate tension and soreness in the wrists.

To work on hand strength and flexibility, place a foam ball in your palm and make a fist, squeezing firmly. Continue squeezing for a two-count, then relax. Repeat a dozen times per session. Do not overdo this exercise; two to three times a week is sufficient, with a couple of days in between each session. As with any exercise, check with your physician before starting, and discuss any prior or existing hand injuries with them.

See a Professional

If hand pain persists or becomes more intense, you should seek help from your primary care provider or physical therapist. A physician can diagnose issues and refer you to hand specialists, who can make you braces, teach you stretches, and help to rehabilitate your wrists.

Relief Factor

Different types of hand pain can be attributed to inflammation. Stretching and other treatment options don't always soothe these aches, but Relief Factor can help. Relief Factor features four key 100 percent natural ingredients known for their anti-inflammatory properties. With your Relief Factor three-week QuickStart for only $19.95, you can begin to reduce pain.

Call 800-500-8384, or click here to learn more.

Now more than ever, being a cop is dangerous.

Every year in the United States approximately 50,000 law enforcement officers are the victims of line-of-duty assaults.

Law enforcement officers are often the first to respond to an accident. While most people assume officers are equipped with everything they need to respond to emergency situations, too often this is not the case. Carrying the right equipment is vital to their ability to save injured citizens or themselves.

Some communities aren't leaving it up to fate --- or government bureaucracy --- to support their local first responders. Instead, they're stepping up to protect and take care of those who put their own lives on the line to protect us.

One example is Kits For Cops, a partnership between citizens, communities and law enforcement to give them the desperately needed safety a first aid kit provides.

Anyone can fund part of a kit, a full kit or multiple kits; every contribution counts. Officers everywhere have already signed up and are waiting to show their appreciation for each gesture of support.

Learn more at Kits4Cops.org.