Could be so massively bankrupt, says Bill Bonner.
"We have a mountain of debt... nearly $100 trillion of it... every penny of which is counted as an “asset” on the creditors’ balance sheets. Probably only about half of it is ‘money good.’ The rest may go ‘poof’ in the credit cycle’s downturn.
The safest part of this pile is US Treasury bonds. And yet, in gold terms, we’ve seen that they lost 30% of their value in the last four years... and 75% since 1999.
And we have a GDP that is largely fraudulent... with as much as half of it directed, controlled or be-muddled by government, rendering it unfit...
It’s not just Treasury bonds that pretend to have value they don’t actually have. All across the fixed-return world, there are unrecognized losses and make-believe wealth.
Here’s the FDIC warning:
'Unrealized losses on available-for-sale and held-to-maturity securities increased by $39 billion to $517 billion in the first quarter. Higher unrealized losses on residential mortgage-backed securities, resulting from higher mortgage rates in the first quarter, drove the overall increase. This is the ninth straight quarter of unusually high unrealized losses since the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates in first quarter 2022. '
Banks were required to hold US Treasury bonds as ‘reserves.’ That, they were told, would make them more antifragile. But it did just the opposite. Treasury bonds proved to be a terrible form of ‘reserve.’ They went down, in nominal terms, by about 20% since 2020. In gold terms, they lost half again as much.
The banks also had plenty of private debt that went bad. They lent heavily to real estate developers and speculators, for example. But now, commercial real estate is not worth what it was a few years ago.
In addition to the loan losses, there are the losses on the collateral itself. Green Street reports that the ‘all-property commercial index’ is down more than 20% since 2021."
Zelenskyy can insult the President to his face in the Oval Office, and all Trump does is keep inviting him back. Relying on false intel about Russian casualties, the Russian economy, and the Russian polity, Trump keeps trying self-defeating, self-sabotaging escalatory tactics with Russia, playing Russian roulette but mistaking it for American poker.
Trump threatens 500% sanctions on Russian-oil purchasing nations today, threatens long-range missiles into Moscow that Russia could think are nuclear-armed, and sends arms to Ukraine laundered through NATO. All this does is enrage the Russian populace and get us closer to triggering a world war between two nuclear powers. As a Russian once advised me: “we’d rather eat dirt than surrender.” Russian history proves it, whether in dealing with the Mongols, Napoleon or the Nazis. Just revisit the history of how the people of St. Petersburg held out during what they called The Great War.
At the same time, Russia holds escalatory dominance...
Satanic social engineers have tried to starve the world of spirituality for 400 years (since the satanic “Enlightenment”) in order to turn us all into skeptical materialists, constantly analyzing ourselves, worrying, and diagnosing ourselves so that we lose sight completely of the Kingdom of Heaven and the job we have as servants. They want us to either abandon faith, or cling to the empty shell of “religion” instead of serving the Living God with fear and trembling. That way, once they reveal their parlor tricks, we’re supposed to be blown away by the acknowledgment that something more is out there.
Fear creates an altered state of consciousness, and that’s a key to Satan’s...game. Psychedelic drugs, brain chips, subsonic frequencies, DNA modification, hoaxes, cult rituals, everything to make us abandon a calm, rational, biblical worldview. It is a Christian’s duty to be unimpressed with this world, no matter how insane it gets.
-- Terry Wolfe