WICKR is a messaging app that was designed to defeat the NSA. It is using encryption for text messages, photos and videos to be sent anonymously internationally. The app allows messages to self-destruct within a time set by the sender, and strips messages of all metadata, leaving no traceable evidence. Messages are deleted from Wickr’s server on delivery. It is rather cool technology showing that necessity is truly the mother of invention.

Hi Mr. Armstrong. My name is Azar and I much appreciate your insight on your blogs especially for the concept of combining history with the cyclical nature of phenomenon. … We have recently coincidentally revived a song made a video that captures the cyclical nature of empires along with the arrogance that they take on, especially during their last oscillations. You are welcome to post it to your blog.

Thanks for what you do.

Azar

QUESTION: Do you believe the Federal Reserve, or any such system as it, is the cause for such extreme boom bust cycles or are those cycles inevitable even if the Fed did not exist?,  or perhaps if it did not exist the amplitude of the swings would at least be lessened

Do you agree the Fed should be audited?

ANSWER: To be accurate, the Fed is NOT the source of all our problems. To be objective and fair, the central bank has been manipulated by Congress. The assumption has been based on the faulty idea that inflation is linked to the quantity of money. It is really linked to the CONFIDENCE in government. But that aside, Congress has accepted this assumption and sold it to the public. Therefore, like blaming deficits and tax increases on the rich for not paying their fair share instead of Congress spending without limit is reflected in the same idea that the Fed is the source of the problem.

If you assume inflation is created by the expansion in money supply, then the Fed has the ability to create elastic money and hence they must be the culprit. This suits the politicians nicely for it misdirects the blame for economic instability to the Fed deflecting any fiscal irresponsibility from them to the bankers.

Now, let us introduce the next fallacy. BEFORE 1971, it was assumed that if you borrowed rather than printed money, then it would be less inflationary. That made sense when you could not BORROW on US Treasury notes, bills, and bonds. Then 1971 changed everything moving to a floating exchange rate system. Suddenly you could trade futures by putting up collateral using US TBills. This altered the entire assumption that has not been considered by those who focus only on the Fed. The Fed cannot be the sole source of inflation for the Treasury issues the debt according to what Congress has spent. That is now money that pays interest.

Since 40% of the US National debt is used to park cash, the elastic creation of money by the Fed is but a tiny fraction. The Fed can control ONLY monetary policy but it cannot control the fiscal policy. The bulk of the money is created not by the Fed, but by the Treasury in the form of bonds, notes, and bills. The actual amount of money in circulation in the form of printed notes has been declining sharply over the years.They use to print $10,000 bills in 1934. Today $100 is the biggest.

Should the Fed be audited? Of course. But so should every branch and department. The banks have manipulated the Fed and lied to them on so many occasions. Right now, the Fed pays interest on excess reserves. The banks argued that the Fed was buying back 30 year bonds so they had no place to park money. That is over $2 trillion and that facility negated in part the entire purpose of QE1-3. That should be ended immediately. It is deflationary, not inflationary, for it created an incentive for banks not to lend and supported the transactional evolution of the banks ending the era of relationship banking.

The Office of Inspector General should be separated from the Department of Justice and be given the real power of a Roman Tribune to charge and prosecute members of government. That should be an elected official in 2 year terms. Then and only then will we ever get some transparency.

The entire premises of Marxism is that government can control the economy. They never get it right and all they do is increase the volatility. They are incapable of altering the business cycle as the ECM has continued to work before and after the creation of the New Deal. If they could manipulate the economy or any market perpetually, then the ECM should have failed.

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong you make very good arguments about markets not being manipulated for long vs the trend, yet then you post that Goldman jailed you and had their programmer jailed so they could manipulate markets.

ANSWER: The Goldman accusation against the programmer who stole code that it could be used for manipulating markets was their allegation and I found it strange that we should expect that Goldman would never use this for such a task.

 

There is a SUBSTANTIAL difference between short-term manipulation and SYSTEMIC manipulation. I really do not get why people insist that only gold is suppressed in such a manner. The only explanation is that this is an excuse for being WRONG and for totally not understanding how markets function.

 

Of course the bankers moved to short-term manipulations. They have been caught in just about every market right up to LIBOR interest rates and don’t forget the Solomon Brothers US Treasury Manipulation of 1991.

 

Yet this bullshit about explaining why gold is down BECAUSE of such schemes is made up by people who either have a hidden agenda or are outright ignorant of how markets trade. Bankers switched from relationship banking to transactional. They sold this idea to repeal Glass-Steagal. They argued that they would NOT hold positions, just originate them and resell them. If they do not want to hold positions like that on their books, WHY in hell would have have perpetual short positions that they would never take a profit on? The argument is insane.

Short-term manipulations have bee the name of the game. I monitored everyone and had tapes backing up every such manipulation and who was behind each one from silver, interest all the way to platinum and rhodium.  What is so hard to understand that they are only interest in PROFITS on a quarterly basis.

The US Treasury held gold auctions all the way into the 1980 desperately trying to stop the rally and the fall in the dollar. They could not stop that rally with all their sales. The market took the new price at the auction as confirmation it was worth that and rallied further. It was the paper-gold that led the way.

The code allegedly stolen from Goldman perhaps could be used to manipulate markets short-term – never SYSTEMICALLY long-term. If this nonsense were true, then Bretton Woods would not have collapsed, Soros would not have been famous from the break in British pound peg, and just recently the Swiss PEG should still be in place. NOTHING but NOTHING can be SYSTEMICALLY manipulated. It is called the free markets. By this constant harping that gold is SYSTEMICALLY manipulate is pure Marxism. It was Marx who argued government can manipulate society to create the perfect economy eliminating the business cycle.

The business cycle has withstood countless attempts to manipulate it. QE1-3 just failed to produce inflation. Two former Fed Chairmen have stated that the business cycle always wins. If you want to believe in gold, then why bother if it can never go up? Why not buy something that is then not manipulated and you can make money on? Why hold on to positions that you lose money and then whine you always lose because it is manipulated by some giant conspiracy? You just do not grasp that everything has its time and place.

In Ukraine the currency keeps declining despite loans from the West. Why? The people have lost confidence in the government and then there is war. There are food riots in Kiev. People are running out any buying food because they now feel that the price of food will only go higher.

It is always about confidence. The best manipulations have ALWAYS failed. The bankers would not run to government for bailouts if they could SYSTEMICALLY control anything. So if you are happy losing money and having someone to blame, then you do not need to read this blog.

The month of March has changed the lives of three very different people, who in their own way have decided to fight with the System (“Goldman Sachs – FRS”).

1. Sergey Aleynikov, a former employee of Goldman Sachs, the developer of the trading platform, has received 8 years in prison for the transmission codes of the trading platform to third parties (Germany) last summer. According to an extract from a court order (p. 8, lines 3-7) “…… due to the fact that the software is associated with a variety of markets and exchanges, banks (Goldman Sachs) indicates that knowing trading platform it can be used to manipulate the markets unfairly “. http://www.scribd.com/doc/17191934/USAvSergeyAleynikov-7409-Full
2. Bernard von NotHaus, founder NORFED «National Organization for the abolition of the Fed and the Internal Revenue Code,” the United States (or “Liberty Services”) and architect of the monetary system “the Liberty Dollar” was found guilty of:
a) for the manufacture, storage, sale and distribution of silver coins Liberty Dollar, similar to US coins,
b) for the production and distribution of these coins to arrange payment and
c) for conspiring against the United States.
The accused can get a 15-year prison sentence, 250 thousand. Dollars in fines and confiscation of the whole issue Liberty Dollar (weighing 16,000 pounds) of the market value of 7 million. US dollars. http://charlotte.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel11/ce031811.htm
3. March 8, 2011 Martin A. Armstrong, former head of the Princeton Economic Int, founder of Pi-cyclical model of the world (countries, corporations, markets, assets, more than 13,000 models), the main US political prisoner, an active supporter of the gold (but not the gold standard) moved from prison to house arrest after 10 years in prison. Upon his release, Armstrong pointed to his first victim – Goldman Sachs (Alan Cohen), the originator of his imprisonment and his first goal – to protect the bullish trend in gold on the new 8.6 years, P-loop.
Goldman Sachs (with the support of the Federal Reserve and the Bush family), to seize the Princeton Economic in the early 2000s and received partial access to the P-model (the key to the computer Armstrong-and was destroyed), proceeded to the modeling world, issuing in 2001 the first the idea of ​​BRIC ……. According to Pi-model this year syndicate Goldman Sachs and FRS can:
1) turn the QE program in connection with the end of a 4-year cyclical downturn of the economy in June 2011, followed by a 4-year-old natural cyclical US GDP growth until 2015.
2) complete the controlled growth of quotations of gold in 2012 with the change in the bearish trend until 2015. To do this, according to Armstrong will need to model a certain combination of a sharp rise in share price on the tired 11-year trend, for example, by achieving new highs in June 2011 and January 2012 (2500 dollars per ounce). In any case, the Fed will act quickly and decisively, because according to the Pi-cycle of its active phase unpunished behavior ends at the end of 2012. http://www.martinarmstrong.org/files/release%2003-08-2011.pdf . By the end of June 2011, we once again return to this topic. For more information on the Russian can be found at http://www.mikf.ru/analitic/pi-circle

Foreign Exchange has been a critical component that those in government fail to comprehend. What has taken place in Europe is reflected in the total incompetence of those in government to grasp the nature of the world economy in which we live. They have never understood what the floating exchange rate system altered and they still operate upon old theories and assumption from the fixed exchange rate era.

In my own case, the original criminal complaint filed against me strikingly illustrated how those in government are clueless about currency. In our case, the notes were in Japanese yen. They converted the yen to dollars to make the allegations and then said I overpaid some people to entice them to buy more.

The government, Allan Cohen and Tancred Schiavoni did not grasp that the yen rose into 1995 and then fell from 75 to 147. When they saw yen coming in during 1995 and we were paying off a note in 1998, half the dollars bought the same yen. They assumed that was a fraud. When they went back to the Japanese saying I obviously cheated them, the Japanese said no, they received the same amount of yen back. This then turned into I manipulated the yen TO MAKE THEM THINK THEY MADE MONEY. You just cannot make up this level of stupidity.

Now look at Greece. Here we see the very same problem. We can see that the Euro rallied to the 160 level doubling from the major low. That had the reverse impact upon the southern member in the EU. Their national debts doubled in REAL terms and their economies simply had to collapse. It was not that Greece was totally mismanaged. The problem was whatever it owed historically had now doubled and any repayment was extracting income from Greece strip-mining the nation

This is why Europe is being torn apart and it is why bailouts will just never work. They are NOT dealing with the problem. Borrowing in different currencies can be converting debt to a performing asset as we did with the yen for we had to repay in a currency that fell in half. However, if you are on the other side of that move, you suffer a tremendous loss. Corporations would be sent into bankruptcy. Governments move into crisis mode and they try to use paper-clips, propaganda, and chewing-gum to hide reality.

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; Your command of history is really amazing. There appears to be no area you have left unexplored. You bring everything together tied in a neat bundle that makes it all come to life. I showed your account of Julius Caesar and specialists in history have said they have never seen someone pull together the contemporary writers and bring them to the surface as you have. How do you do this? What do you see when you look at history for your command is strikingly different and revealing.

Thank you so much for taking a boring subject and bringing it to life.

SH

ANSWER: Actually I get this question a lot and have received letters from historian professor on that piece. I have thought a great deal about my approach trying to bring it into words. Instead of looking at someone like Hitler, for example, I look not at the person, but at the pattern of the actions. It is wrong to try to attribute the actions of any individual in history to a personality. Instead, look for the common bonds between such characters rather than attempting to explain the action of the individual attributing to some event in his personal life. When you look at patterns, then you will see the connections. That is the key to understanding history and how it repeats.

It is totally wrong to assume that we have advanced as a society. We have only advanced technologically while human nature remains unchanged. The transition from game hunting to agriculture and stock-raising marks the start of the neolithic period, that is, the late stone age. In 2005, a necropolis around 4,600 years old was found in Eulau near Naumburg (Saxony-Anhalt); there were 12 graves, each of which contained up to four burials. Detailed laboratory analyses showed that all those buried had suffered a violent death. Yet we have families buried together and the bodies were all positioned facing south for some religious or cultural reason. What this illustrates is that human nature has not changed – only technology.

So look for the patterns not the facts about an individual assuming every event is unique. You will then see judges were corrupt in Athens, Rome, and ancient China. You will see those in power sellout to the highest bidder as routine. You will see the commonality in a debt crisis between Solon and Caesar and you will see how Tiberius, facing a debt crisis in 33AD recalls Caesar’s resolution. You will see the similarities between the Financial Panic of 354BC and the 2007 Crisis.

Look for the commonality and patterns and then you can see history repeats.