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피도, 눈물도, 염치도, 눈치도, 양심도 없습니까?


  문재인 대통령 생일축하 광고가 서울지하철 5·6·7·8호선 광화문역·여의도역·종로3가역·잠실역 등 10개 역에서 오늘부터 2월 말까지 동영상과 축하음악으로 송출된다고 합니다. 서울 지하철역에 현직 대통령의 생일축하 영상과 음악이 나오는 건 역사상 처음이라고 합니다.


정상적으로 하자면 올해 2월 말까지는 박근혜 대통령 임기 중 아닙니까? 촛불혁명으로 박근혜 대통령은 감옥에 보내놓고, 그 임기가 아직 끝나지 않았는데, 자신의 생일축하 영상과 음악을 서울시내 지하철 4개 노선 10개 역에서 50일간이나 떠들게 하고 있다는 게 말이 됩니까?

  피도, 눈물도, 염치도, 눈치도, 양심도 없습니까? 동방예의지국이 언제부터 이렇게 되어 버렸습니까?

  저는 김일성 주체사상의 영향이라고 봅니다. 김일성 주체사상의 핵심인 수령론에서는 “위대한 수령 김일성동지를 충성으로 높이 우러러 모셔야” 합니다. (김문수 트위터 발췌)


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저는 30여 년간 방송인으로서 당당한 삶을 살아왔습니다. 이 정권은 보도국장 시절 200만원 금품수수 의혹까지 거론하며 저를 옭아매려 했지만 결국 실패하였습니다. 이번에는 정부여당 추천 이사들이 수적 우위를 내세워 저를 몰아내려하고 있습니다.권력을 등에 업은 이사회의 해임 시도는 성공할 가능성이 높지만 영원히 성공하지는 못할 것입니다. 정권을 잡았다고 임기가 남은 공영방송 사장을 강제로 해임하고 자기편 사람으로 채우려는 행위에 대해 역사는 방송독립과 언론자유를 짓밟은 폭거로 기록할 것이 분명합니다. 고대영(KBS 사장) 


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선도 보지 않았는데 결혼 날짜 잡자는 격이다!
조갑제


  2. 개헌 내용의 불투명성: 개헌을 하려면 오랫동안 국민들 사이에서 논의가 이뤄져 무엇이 쟁점이고 대안이 무엇인지를 알아야 한다. 지금은 개헌안조차 없다. 이렇게 해놓고 6월 전에 어떻게 국민공론화-국회심의를 할 수 있나? 무엇을 개헌할지도 모르는 데 개헌 날짜를 잡겠다는 것은 선도 보지 않았는데 결혼 날짜 정하자고 하는 격이다.

  3. 자유말살 의도: 권력구조 개편에 대하여서만 논의가 있었다. 내각제, 2원 집정제, 대통령 중심제를 두고도 압도적 합의가 없는 상태이다. 그런데 헌법의 자유민주적 기본질서 조항을 없애고 사회주의적 색채가 짙은 방향으로 바꾸려 한다. 이는 국가의 체제를 변경하는 중대사이다. 우측 보행 하던 나라를 예고도 없이 갑자기 좌측 보행으로 돌리려 한다. 사회주의는 계급투쟁론 때문에 반드시 전체주의 독재로 이행한다. 이것이 개헌의 목적이라면 이는 반역이다.  
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 김진태 논평

남북회담 공동보도문이 김정은 신년사를 베껴 왔습니다.(별첨 대조표 참조)
벌써부터 김정은의 지시사항을 충실히 받아적는 공동정권이 된 겁니까?
아니면 문구 하나도 새로 작성할 능력이 없는 겁니까?

...

이 사실을 알고 있었다면 북측에 휘둘렸다는 것이고, 모르고 있었다면 더욱 한심합니다.
북측은 이 공동보도문에도 만족하지 않고 별도의 북측보도문을 냈습니다.
그럼 공동보도문이라 할 수도 없는데 신주단지 모시듯 합니다.
이러고도 남북 긴장완화의 계기를 만들었다고 자화자찬을 합니다.

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김미영

여러분 시간 나시면 2012년 영상 한 번 보십시오.
제가 미국으로 건너가기 며칠 전에 창립하여
당시 박애니 간사에게 운영을 부탁하고 떠난 세이지37포럼 영상입니다.
이런 영상이 있는지도 몰랐습니다.
지금보다는 풋풋한 변희재 대표도 볼 수 있습니다.

저는 5년 후쯤 국가보안법 7조를 없애고 헌법 3조를 제거하여
북한의 국가 정통성을 확립해 주고 대한민국을 조용히 역사의 뒤안길에
수장시킬 세력이 등장할 것을 예측하고 헌법 3조의 3, 국가보안법 7조의 7을 따서 37포럼을 만들었습니다.
이번 개헌에서 헌법 4조의 자유라는 단어를 제거하면 자동으로 국가보안법 7조는 사라집니다.

상위 규범이 헌법 4조이기 때문입니다.
김일성 찬양의 자유가 자동으로 열립니다.
주사파들이 이런 짓을 벌일 것은 10여년 취재로 예상이 가능했습니다.
4조의 자유를 제거하면 3조의 영토조항 삭제는 식은 죽먹기입니다.
이런 짓을 벌이는 주사파를 청와대에 채워넣고도 지지율 70프로입니다.

실화인가요? 국가 자살입니다.
저희는 보수나 우익 대신 정통이라는 단어를 썼습니다.
민족사 이단 김일성 세력이 한반도를 오랫동안 갉아먹고 있음을 알고 있었기 때문이지요.

 

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18년1월11일 박근혜 탄핵되면 천국올줄 알았지?

https://youtu.be/t0fNKBZPTlM

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가격은 수 천, 수 만 개인들의 노력을 보이지 않게 조종하는 신호라는 생각은 원래 현대 사이버네틱스의 이론이었는데, 내 이론의 기본 생각이었다.

현대 문명의 기초는 사람들이 자신의 지식에 기초해 자신의 목적을 추구하며, 타인들의 목적에 구애받지 않는 것이다.

 

The Moral Imperative of the Market

 

 

•Friedrich A. Hayek

 

 

 

[This article originally appeared in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon (1986). It has never before appeared online. An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Nathaniel Foote, is available for download.]

 

"You cannot improve a signal if you do not know what it signals."

 

In 1936, the year in which (entirely coincidentally) John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory, I suddenly saw, as I prepared my presidential address to the London Economic Club, that my previous work in different branches of economics had a common root. This insight was that the price system was really an instrument which enabled millions of people to adjust their efforts to events, demands, and conditions of which they had no concrete, direct knowledge, and that the whole coordination of the world economy was due to certain practices and usages which had grown up unconsciously. The problem I had first identified in studying industrial fluctuations — that false price signals misdirected human efforts — I then followed up in various other branches of the discipline.

 

Inspiration of Ludwig von Mises

 

Here my thinking was inspired largely by Ludwig von Mises's conception of the problem of ordering a planned economy. My early investigation into the consequences of rent restriction showed me more clearly than almost anything else how government interference with the price system completely upsets human economic efforts.

 

But it took me a long time to develop what is basically a simple idea. I was puzzled that Mises's Socialism,1 which had been so convincing to me and seemed finally to show why central planning could not work, had not convinced the rest of the world. I asked myself why this was the case.

 

Prices and Economic Order

 

I gradually found that the basic function of economics was to explain the process of how human activity adapted itself to data about which it had no information. Thus the whole economic order rested on the fact that by using prices as a guide, or as signals, we were led to serve the demands and enlist the powers and capacities of people of whom we knew nothing. It was because we had relied on a system which we had never understood and which we had never designed that we had been able to produce the wealth to sustain an enormous increase in the world's population, and to begin to realize our new ambitions of distributing this wealth more justly. Basically, the insight that prices were signals bringing about the unforeseen coordination of the efforts of thousands of individuals was in a sense the modern cybernetics theory, and it became the leading idea behind my work.

 

It forced me inevitably to investigate the relationship between current political beliefs and the preservation of the system on which the wealth of which we are so inordinately proud depends. Although Adam Smith, like Marshall 150 years later, had basically grasped the point that the success of our economic system was the outcome of an undesigned process coordinating the activities of a myriad of individuals, he never fully convinced the leaders of public opinion of this truth.

 

This has become my chief task, and it has taken me something like 50 years to be able to put it as briefly and in as few words as I have just attempted; even 10 years ago I could not have put it as succinctly. It seems obvious, once it is stated, that the basic foundation of our civilization and our wealth is a system of signals which informs us, however imperfectly, of the effects of millions of events which occur in the world, to which we have to adapt ourselves and about which we may have no direct information.

 

Improving the Market System

 

This insight has extraordinarily important consequences once its truth has been accepted. Either you must confine yourself to creating an institutional framework within which the price system will operate as efficiently as possible, or you are driven to upsetting its function. If it is true that prices are signals which enable us to adapt our activities to unknown events and demands, it is evidently nonsense to believe that we can control prices. You cannot improve a signal if you do not know what it signals.

 

It is not inconsistent to admit that the price system, even in the theory of a perfectly competitive market, does not take account of all the things that we would like to be taken into account. But if we cannot improve upon the system by directly interfering with prices, we can try to find new methods of feeding information into the market which have not previously been taken into account.

 

There is still ample room for progress in this direction. Furthermore, beyond what the market already does for us, there is ample opportunity for using deliberate organization to "fill in" what the market cannot provide. Thus we get the best out of the market only if we try to improve the framework within which it operates. We have to go outside the market system to make provision (through government and other organizations) for those people who are not in a position to look after themselves.

 

Socialism: An Intellectual Error

 

This line of argument raises some very serious intellectual and moral problems. In the first instance, it seems to me that the ambitions of socialism reflect intellectual error rather than different values. Socialism is based on the lack of understanding of what it is to which we owe the available wealth that socialists hope to redistribute. This objection raises certain other issues which I began to sketch out in a lecture I gave in 1978 at the London School of Economics. The central problem was the conflict between our inborn emotions about laws acquired in a primitive small society, where small groups of people served known fellows for common purposes, and the changes in morals which had to take place to make possible the worldwide division of labor.

 

Indeed, this small development, which took mankind over 3,000 years gradually to effect, involved very largely a deliberate suppression of very strong emotional feelings which we all have in our bones and of which we cannot entirely rid ourselves. I shall illustrate this briefly with reference to the idea which still prevails about solidarity. Agreement about a common purpose between a group of known people is clearly an idea that cannot be applied to a large society which includes people who do not know one another. The modern society and the modern economy have grown up through the recognition that this idea — which was fundamental to life in a small group — a face-to-face society, is simply inapplicable to large groups. The essential basis of the development of modern civilization is to allow people to pursue their own ends on the basis of their own knowledge and not be bound by the aims of other people.

 

Mirage of Social Justice

 

The same dilemma applies to the basic desire of socialism for distribution according to principles of justice. If prices are to serve as an effective guide to what people ought to do, you cannot reward people for what are or were their good intentions. You must allow prices to be determined so as to tell people where they can make the best contribution to the rest of society — and unfortunately the capacity of making good contributions to one's fellows is not distributed according to any principles of justice.

 

 

"The world's population has grown to a size where it can be fed only by adhering to a market system."

 

People are in a very unequal position to make contributions to the requirements of their fellows and have to choose between very different opportunities. In order therefore to enable them to adapt themselves to a structure which they do not know (and the determinants of which they do not know), we have to allow the spontaneous mechanisms of the market to tell them what they ought to do.

 

It was a sad mistake in the history of economics which prevented economists, particularly the classical economists, from seeing that the essential function of prices was to tell people what they ought to do in the future and that prices could not be based on what they had done in the past. Our modern insight is that prices are signals which inform people of what they ought to do in order to adjust themselves to the rest of the system.

 

I am now profoundly convinced of what I had only hinted at before, namely, that the struggle between the advocates of a free society and the advocates of the socialist system is not a moral but an intellectual conflict. Thus socialists have been led by a very peculiar development to revive certain primitive instincts and feelings which in the course of hundreds of years had been practically suppressed by commercial or mercantile morals, which by the middle of the last century had come to govern the world economy.

 

The Decline of Commercial Morality

 

Until 130 or 150 years ago, everybody in what is now the industrialized part of the Western world grew up acquainted with the rules and necessities of what are called commercial or mercantile morals, because everyone worked in a small enterprise where he was equally concerned with, and exposed to, the conduct of others. Whether as master or servant or member of the family, everybody accepted the unavoidable necessity of having to adapt himself to changes in demand, supply, and prices in the marketplace. A change began to happen in the middle of the last century. Where previously perhaps only the aristocracy and its servants were strangers to the rules of the market, the growth of large organizations in business, commerce, finance, and ultimately in government, increased the number of people who grew up without being taught the morals of the market which had been developed in the course of the preceding 2,000 years.

 

For probably the first time since classical antiquity, an ever-increasing part of the population of the modern industrial state grew up without learning in childhood that it was indispensable to respond as both producer and consumer to all the unpleasant things which the changing market required. This development coincided with the spreading of a new philosophy, which taught people that they ought not to submit to any principle of morals which could not be rationally justified.

 

I think it was true that, with the exception of a few men like Adam Smith (and with him to only a limited extent), nobody before the middle of the 19th century could really have answered the question: Why should we obey these moral principles which have never been rationally justified? The failure of a large number of people to accept the moral principles which form the basis of the capitalist system was supported by a new intellectual trend which taught them that these morals had no rational justification.

 

Ideals versus Survival

 

This dichotomy explains the increasing opposition to the market system that has expanded far beyond the specifically socialist parties of the last century. In the course of history almost every step in the development of commercial morals had to be contested against the opposition of moral philosophers and religious teachers — a story well enough known in its outlines.

 

We are now in the extraordinary situation that, while we live in a world with a large and growing population which can be kept alive thanks only to the prevalence of the market system, the vast majority of people (I do not exaggerate) no longer believe in the market. It is a crucial question for the future preservation of civilization and one which must be faced before the arguments of socialism return us to a primitive morality. We must again suppress those innate feelings which have welled up in us once we ceased to learn the taut discipline of the market, before they destroy our capacity to feed the population through the coordinating system of the market. Otherwise, the collapse of capitalism will ensure that a very large part of the world's population will die because we cannot feed it.

 

This is a serious problem, and one which has not had to be solved in the past. The world's population, and not even the leading minds in anyone country, will never be persuaded by theoretical argument that they ought to believe in a certain kind of morality. We can nonetheless demonstrate that unless people are willing to submit to the discipline constituted by commercial morals, our capacity to support any further growth of population other than in the relatively prosperous West, or even to maintain it at its existing numbers, will be destroyed.

 

I would not agree that the process of selection by which the morals of capitalism have evolved, producing what a few textbooks acknowledge as its "beneficial effects on society at large," consists wholly in assisting the growth of population. Many of the world's peoples would probably be much happier if population growth had not been stimulated to the degree that it has. Nonetheless, the world's population has grown to a size where it can be fed only by adhering to a market system. Attempts to replace the market demonstrate — most graphically in Ethiopia — the folly of imposing an alternative.

 

As prosperity has led the more advanced peoples voluntarily to restrict the growth of population, so those peoples who are only very slowly beginning to learn this urgent lesson may come to see that it is not in their interests to grow more rapidly. At this critical juncture for the kind of civilization that we have built up, the most important contribution an economist can make is to insist that we can fulfill our responsibility to sustain our existing population only by continuing to rely on the market system, which brought this enlarged population into existence in the first place.

 

 

This article originally appeared in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon (1986).

 

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최저임금 상승과 근로시간 단축으로 공단 경제가 초토화되고 있다.
다들 익히 알고 있겠지만 공단의 현실은 참혹하다.
임금 상승 폭탄이 소비심리마져 급격히 얼어붙게 하고 잇다고 봐야한다.
임근상승 부담감도 버티기 힘든데 일감이 없는건 더욱 처절한 고통이다.
공단의 중소업체들 대부분 일감이 없어 라인 세워놓고 손까락 빨고 있다.
원래 1월달이 비수기인 것은 맞지만 그래도 지금까지 이정도는 아니었다.
공단의 중소기업 사장님들 말이 사장이지 사실 돌려막기 하며 근근이 버티고 있는 실정인데 이대로 몇개월만 더 간다면 다들 손들고 사업을 접어야 하지 않을까 생각된다.
반월 시화공단 땅갑이 평당 400~500만원 수준인데 사업주들에게는 100% 대출 다나오고 매출실적 좋으면 운영비까지 덤으로 대출해준다.
금리 오르고 이자 부담에 세금오르고 전기세 오르고 인건비 오르고 근로시간 다축되고 일감없고 5중고를 겪도록 만든게 문재인 정부의 소득주도성장이다.
내가 입주한 건물에 5개 업체가 있다. 
모두들 거의 놀고 있다. IMF 저리가라다.
문닫은 식당도 많이 늘고 있다.
이 상태로 몇달이 지나간다면 거의 민란 수준의 민심 폭발이 일어날 것이 불의 보듯 뻔하다.
북한이 망하기 전에 한국 경제가 먼저 망할 지도 모른다.
경제 폭망시킨 문재인은 얼마 못간다.
정치는 경제적 안정과 성장 이다.
개돼지 궁민들이 문재인을 투표한 것도 경제적 안정과 성장을 이뤄 달라는 국민적 열망이 담겨져 있기에 이러한 이러한 욕구를 만족시켜주지 못하고 안하무인 격으로 날뛰고 있는 문재인은 아마 성난 촛불 민중들로부터 끌어내려질 것이 눈에 보인다.
이정권 절대 오래 못간다.

[출처] 경제 아작, 시화공단 공단 현실 전한다.

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현재 한국이 가고 있는 길


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새로 발견한 좋은 책. 이미 1985년에 출판되었다. 아래는 위키피디아에서 가져왔다.

저자인 스크루턴은 칼 막스의 이론은 이미 막스 베버와 미제스, 하이에크 등에 의해 거짓임이 드러났는데, 뉴레프트들은 이에 대한 학문적 반박은 하지 않은 채, 단지 이들을 조롱하는데 그치고 있다고 말하고 있다.

아래는 아마존의 책소개


From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. In addition to assessments of these thinkers' philosophical and political contributions, the book contains a biographical and bibliographical section summarizing their careers and most important writings.
In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton asks, What does the Left look like today, and how has it evolved? He charts the transfer of grievances, from the working class to women, gays, and immigrants, asks what we can put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world. Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?
Writing with great clarity, Scruton delivers a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.

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http://www.theconservative.online/


<conservative>라는 보수 우파들을 위한 영국의 온라인 잡지를 위의 주소에서 읽을 수 있다.


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위엔화의 상승과 페트로 달러의 종말 속에서 달러화는 살아남을 수 있을까?

 

2018년에는 에너지와 기타 주요 산업 상품에서 달러의 우월적 지위가 도전받을 것이고, 그 여파로 달러 잉여 사태가 발생할 수도 있다.

 

Will the Dollar Survive the Rise of the Yuan and the End of the Petrodollar?

 

 

01/10/2018•Alasdair Macleod

 

 

This might seem a frivolous question, while the dollar still retains its might, and is universally accepted in preference to other, less stable fiat currencies. However, it is becoming clear, at least to independent monetary observers, that in 2018 the dollar’s primacy will be challenged by the yuan as the pricing medium for energy and other key industrial commodities. After all, the dollar’s role as the legacy trade medium is no longer appropriate, given that China’s trade is now driving the global economy, not America’s.

 

At the very least, if the dollar’s future role diminishes, then there will be surplus dollars, which unless they are withdrawn from circulation entirely, will result in a lower dollar on the foreign exchanges. While it is possible for the Fed to contract the quantity of base money (indeed this is the implication of its desire to reduce its balance sheet anyway), it would also have to discourage and even reverse the expansion of bank credit, which would be judged by central bankers to be economic suicide. For that to occur, the US Government itself would also have to move firmly and rapidly towards eliminating its budget deficit. But that is being deliberately increased by the Trump administration instead.

 

Alasdair Macleod is the Head of Research at GoldMoney. 발췌

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2018년의 10대 위험 요소들

These Are the Top Risks We Face in 2018

 

 

01/11/2018•Peter Diekmeyer

 

 

A decade ago, Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, launched one of the geopolitical world’s greatest marketing coups: an annual list of key global risks.

 

2018 version is finely balanced to generate maximum interest among the consultancy’s global banking, defence and government sector clients. China, Russia, North Korea and Iran all figure highly, as do terrorism, Islamic- and cyber- threats.

 

Naturally, it has made Bremmer a favourite among the plutocracy and Bilderberg set. But what would the list look like if it targeted the needs of ordinary Americans?

 

Following are our suggestions:

 

1. The Krugman con

 

The biggestthreatto America (and the rest of the world) is the coming implosion of the Krugman Con . This “con” gets its name from the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist who (like most of the economics profession) has spent decades advocating the continuous growth of government spending, taxation, borrowing and money-printing at a pace that is faster than economic growth.

 

The policies—camouflaged in terms like “fiscal stimulus,” “multiplier effect” and “Phillips curve”—are worse than a Ponzi scheme. They are a Ponzi scheme any grade 10 student can understand.

 

2. Governments, businesses and ordinary Americans powerless to act.

 

A couple of years back, McKinsey group published a study which showed that global government, business and private sector debts had reached 289% of GDP. However, few public sector officials have grasped the implications of this key statistic: if everyone is strapped, there is no one left to bail anyone out. That means even the slightest tremor could bring down the entire system.

 

A couple of examples suffice. First, economists say that things could never get as bad as in Japan, now capping two “lost decades” of economic growth. In fact, things could get much worse, because Japan’s “lost” two decades were cushioned by massive exports to still-growing US and European economies.

 

In a similar fashion, China helped prop up the rest of the global economy following the 2008 global financial crisis by borrowing and printing tens of trillions of dollars and importing a lot of stuff—a move that created jobs both in China and elsewhere. But if the entire global economy goes down together, there won’t be any Martians who will boost their imports to bail us out.

 

3. Free markets are dead, but will be blamed for the coming crisis

 

As the late Murray Rothbard pointed out in his magisterial workAmerica’s Great Depression , the US government and the Federal Reserve largely fueled the 1929 stock market bubble, crash and ensuing depression through massive monetary expansion. But free markets got blamed.

 

The same thing is happening right now with the Krugman con . The Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policies have sparked “everything” bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate. Worse, the US public sector, juiced by free printed money, now controls more than half the economy (particularly when you include the hidden $2.4 trillion Powell Tax ).

 

When the inevitable collapse occurs, politicians, bureaucrats and regulators will duck responsibility. They will instead blame capitalism and ask for more powers. If past is prologue, they will get them.

 

4. Faulty signals

 

Massive central bank interventions have butchered price discovery to the point that Americans can no longer make effective economic and financial decisions.

 

Why have stock prices tripled since 2009? Should you borrow to go back to school or to buy an overpriced house? Is it better to save, spend or pay down debt? What is the true cost of government?

 

The US Federal Reserve’s money-printing has so skewered economic signals—ranging from GDP to inflation and business earnings data—that Americans have no good metrics they can use to effectively answer these questions. It’s like driving around New York with a GPS map of Botswana.

 

5. Blowback

 

By now, Americans have forgotten all about the seven Muslim countries that the Trump Administration bombed in the three months after the last US election. But the families of the tens of thousands of civilians killed by those bombs have not.

 

The CIA has a term for the damage those survivors could cause:Blowback. If the US eventually gets hit with a sizable “terrorist” response from its bombing victims, average Americans will never know what caused it. The US government will thus be able to blame any enemy it chooses.

 

6. Trump picks on the wrong guy

 

The US government has distracted the American public from its economic hardships by attacking various “enemies” for so long, it’s hard to remember a time when it was not the case.

 

The big challenge facing the Trump Administration is that Americans are no longer distracted by small wars, in which the US Air Force annihilates the enemy with drone strikes from afar. Therefore, there is a huge threat that President Trump, in his quest for a good newsworthy opponent, might pick on the wrong guy.

 

North Korea, for example, which Trump has been trash-talking lately, just might have the tools to defend itself. Worse, China has quietly drawn a red line and said it would come to North Korea’s defence if that country is attacked.1

 

7. Trump’s “yes men”

 

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Trump Presidency is the obsequiousness he demands from his aides, who have been forced to smile, stand by and thus tacitly endorse racist, misogynist and borderline psychopathic rhetoric. The upshot is that most of Trump’s closest staff is comprised of either family, generals and … “yes men.”

 

This is particularly dangerous during an Imperial Presidency in which the Oval Office has acquired increasing powers. If Trump ever does veer off course, don’t expect his advisors to contain him.

 

8. Complex societies and clueless experts

 

Warren Buffet’s golden rule is: never invest in a company you don’t understand. Taking that example a step further, who would invest in the US dollar, when government actions have made American monetary policy impossible to comprehend?

 

One example suffices. As hard as it is to believe, the US government has printed so much money, it does not know how much is out there. As a result, the Federal Reserve does not publish conclusive statistics about the total money supply (M1 and M2 are only base estimates).

 

Innovations such as fractional reserve banking, the financial stability board, derivatives, the Fed’s secret trading desk—which we know exists, but government officials won’t fully disclose its activities—and the Euro dollar market mean a variety of players can expand or contract the money supply.

 

Like Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies (which can fork and expand effortlessly), the US dollar is fraught with huge risks because holders can’t value the asset if they don’t know how much of it exists.

 

More broadly: the fact that Buffet is heavily invested in the US dollar (even though he almost certainly understands the risks) should provide huge cause for concern about the valuations of all other asset classes.

 

9. Derivatives and interconnected markets

 

Foreign exchange, interest rate and equity-linked derivatives are the most complex, opaque and sizeable markets. Yet few American experts (let alone politicians, media and ordinary folk) know what they are, how big they are, or understand the risks involved—despite the fact that the failure of a derivatives player, AIG, caused the last global financial crisis.

 

The Bank for International Settlements recently estimated the total notional value of over-the-counter derivatives at $542 trillion—roughly eight times global GDP. But the market is actually larger because much of the trading was done off the books.

 

There are only two things you can be sure about derivatives:

1.A failure in any one of the major counterparties will bring the entire system down, and

2.Because AIG clients were bailed out last time, there were no incentives to remove bad actors and faulty practices.

 

10. An unaccountable accounting profession

 

US and global corporate financial statements run hundreds of pages. But experts neither understand nor trust them. Current rules enable corporations to massage profits and hide much of their debts off the balance sheets—making it impossible to assess operational performance.

 

The wealthy would never trust a corporate financial statement. They always hire their own experts to perform due diligence prior to investing serious money in a firm. Despite this, politicians allow US accountants to publish more, and increasingly complex, rules—so they can charge ever-greater fees to interpret them.

 

The problem is larger than it appears. The fact that Americans can’t trust or rely upon corporate data means they can’t trust the CEOs who run those businesses, either.

 

Therefore, when politicians blame the private sector (and capitalism) following the coming crisis, there will be few CEOs with any credibility left to defend it.

 

A final note. While risks abound, there are some short-term positives. Public officials can mitigate or deal with many of the threats listed above if they muster the courage or the political will.

 

Furthermore, while the US and global economies are being run as quasi-Ponzi schemes, the hedging community has been warning of the risks for more than two decades. While an implosion is inevitable, it is by no means imminent.

 

That said, the “Krugman con” Ponzi is a like a “sword of Damocles,” which—while not always visible—hangs over the actions of all states, businesses and individuals.

 

Peter Diekmeyer is a business writer/editor with Sprott Money News, the National Post and Canadian Defence Review.