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Category Archives: News you can use
Source: Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
For a few years now, since at least 2014, the phrase “global economic reset” has been circulating in the financial world. This phrase is used primarily by globalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to describe an event in which the current system as we know it will either die out or evolve into a new system where “multilateralism” will become the norm. The reset is often described in an ambiguous way. IMF banking elites will usually mention the end results of the shift, but they say little about the process to get there.
What we do know is that the intent of the globalists is to use this reset to create a more centralized monetary system and micro-managed global economy. At the core of this new structure would be the IMF along with perhaps the BIS and World Bank. It is a plan that has been supported openly by both western and eastern governments, including Russia and China.
As noted, the details are few and far between, but the IMF describes the use of open borders and human migrations during the reset as a means to transfer capital from various parts of the world. It is a novel if not utterly insane way to transfer wealth that only makes sense if you understand that the globalist goal is to deliberately conjure a geopolitical catastrophe.
The IMF also asserts that blockchain technology will make capital transfer easier and more efficient in this future environment, which explains the enthusiastic globalist support for developments in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies despite the notion in cryptocurrency circles that blockchain would somehow make the bankers “obsolete”.
The IMF also acknowledges that in the meantime a slowdown in capital flows has occurred, and that this slowdown is ongoing since the crash of 2008. What they do not explicitly admit is that the crash of 2008 never ended, and that the decline we are witnessing today is merely an extension of the recession/depression that started ten years ago.
Certain facts have become obvious to anyone with any sense over the past year. First, as the Federal Reserve began tightening stimulus policies by raising interest rates and cutting assets from their balance sheet, the global economy began to return to steep declines not seen since the credit crisis. I predicted this outcome in my article ‘Party While You Can – Central Bank Ready To Pop The Everything Bubble’, published in January of 2018. The plunge has started in almost every sector of the economy, from housing, to autos to credit markets to retail. Now, even jobs, numbers which are highly manipulated to the upside, are beginning to falter.
The assertion in the mainstream media is that this recessionary downturn is new. This is not the case. What began in 2008 was an epic implosion of multiple national economies, and what we are seeing in 2019 is the final culmination of that process – The end game.
It is not a coincidence that the downturn started right after the Fed began tightening stimulus measures in 2017. With only a minor increase in interest rates and moderate cuts to their balance sheet, all the conditions the economy suffered in 2008 are suddenly returning. What this tells us is that the US economy and parts of the global economy cannot survive without constant and ever expanding central bank stimulus.
The moment the stimulus goes away, the crash returns.
Does this mean that central banks will try to keep QE going forever? No, it does not. So far, the Fed has not capitulated at all from the path of tightening. In fact, the Fed nearly doubled its normal balance sheet cuts from January 30th to the end of February, dumping over $65 billion in a 30 day period. The Fed also has not changed its dot plot projections for two more interest rate hikes this year. This means all the talk the past two months of the Fed going “dovish” was nonsense. Setting aside their rhetoric and looking at their actions, the Fed has been as hawkish as ever.
The only people who might find this to be news are most stock market daytraders, who ignore all other failing indicators and seem content to base their economic projections on equities alone. Set aside the fact that stocks plunged in December into near bear market territory. The bounce in January and February has convinced them that the Fed is stepping in and will not allow the economy to tank. But the “plunge protection team” is about to pull the rug out from under their feet after training them like Pavlovian dogs to salivate at the sound of the word “accommodation”.
Their mindset is based on a host of incorrect assumptions.
To be clear, while the Fed paid lip service to “accommodation” in their public statements, it was not the central bank that stepped in monetarily to stall falling stocks. That was actually the Chinese central bank, pumping billions in stimulus into global markets at just the right moment.
Chinese stimulus coupled with pension fund buying at the start of this year saved stocks from losses beyond 20%, but markets have met resistance on the way up. Without renewed stimulus measures from the Fed, equities have topped out multiple times and refuse to move towards their previous highs. This suggests that the two month bounce is over, and that stocks will now fall back down to December lows and beyond. If the projections I made in January are correct, then the Dow will fall into the 17,000 – 18,000 point range from the end of March through April.
The facade is slowly but surely melting away, not just in economics, but everywhere. I predicted both the success of the Brexit vote as well as Trump’s win in 2016 based on the theory that the globalists would allow or even help populists to gain a political foothold, only to crash the economic system on their heads and then blame them for the disaster. So far my theory is proving correct.
Trump’s trade war continues unabated despite claims by many that it would be over quickly. Currently, there are no plans for a March summit between Trump and Xi, and the possibility of a summit anytime soon has come into question as Trump’s negotiations with North Korea fell to shambles last month. The negotiations are a farce and are not meant to succeed. I continue to hold to my position that the trade war is a planned distraction and that Trump is playing a role in a globalist scripted drama.
The facade of Donald Trump as a “populist candidate” is quickly ending. His cabinet is loaded with think-tank ghouls and banking elites, so this should come as little surprise. But there are still some analysts out there that naively believe that Trump is playing “4D chess” and that he is not the pied piper he now appears to be. What I see is a president that claimed during his campaign that he would “drain the swamp” of elites, then stacked his cabinet with some of the worst elites in Washington D.C. What I see is a president who argued against Fed stimulus measures and the fake stock market during his campaign, and who now has attached himself to the stock market so completely that any crash will now be blamed on him no matter the facts. What I see is a willing scapegoat; a president that is going to fail on purpose.
In terms of the Brexit, I still predict that there will be a “no deal” event, and that this is by design. The Brexit deal with the EU is slated to be decided in the next few weeks. A “no deal” outcome would be a perfect excuse for a major financial crisis in Europe, which is why I think it will happen. While sovereignty movements in the US will get the blame for the crash through Trump, sovereignty movements in the UK will get the blame for a crash in Europe through Brexit.
It is important to remind the public that this narrative is entirely false.
The economy has been in a state of animated death since 2008. Central bank stimulus acted as a kind of fiscal formaldehyde, keeping the visible signs of the crash at bay for 10 years but also creating a bubble even larger and more destructive than the one before. The “Everything Bubble” has now been primed to explode with maximum damage in mind.
The Fed started the tightening process for a reason; the establishment is ready to start the “global economic reset”, and they have their populist scapegoats in place. The crash in fundamentals returned in mid-2018, and I believe that crash will finally be acknowledged publicly by the media in mid-2019.
The point of it all is described in the very IMF interviews and documents I linked to above – Total centralization of the global economic framework, managed by the IMF. They describe it as “multilateralism” or a “multipolar world order”; this is meant to fool us into believing that the reset is about “decentralization”. It isn’t. They intend to move us from one unipolar economic structure to another unipolar economic structure that is even more centralized. That is all.
The crash itself is simply a means to an end. It is a tool to gain fiscal and psychological leverage against the public. The everything bubble was created for a reason. The Fed has tightened into economic weakness over the past year for a reason. The timing of Trump’s trade war and summit failures have happened for a reason. The timing of the Brexit chaos is happening now for a reason. The globalists are pulling the plug on economic life support today; the crash is engineered, and sovereignty movements are supposed to take the blame.
The best option at this time is to continuously force the issue of central bank culpability. Liberty activists have to keep the focus on them and their criminal participation in economic sabotage, and we cannot assume that any government or political leader will be friendly to our cause. The globalists have started the crisis, and we must finish it by making sure they are held accountable.
Source: The Global Economic Reset Begins With An Engineered Crash | Zero Hedge
We’ll say it straight — every aspect of Big Radio’s latest campaign to maintain its profit margins is deceptive.
So why is the National Association of Broadcasters touting this resolution so aggressively if it actually doesn’t protect local radio or promote the value of music? It’s quite simple – Big Radio doesn’t want to pay music creators for airplay of their work.
The headline from the National Association of Broadcasters’ (NAB) call to action states “Encourage Congress to support local radio!” advocating for the Local Radio Freedom Act. However, at its core, both the call to action and the resolution (that’s right LRFA is a resolution, not a piece of legislation) are not as they appear. As they do year after year, NAB will spend millions, wasting resources and time, just for this motion to (rightly) not become law. We’ll give them that – NAB is persistent in its fight to avoid giving just compensation to music creators.
Let’s discuss all the reasons why The Local Radio Freedom Act is not what it seems – and the real motives behind the National Association of Broadcasters lobbying for it so aggressively.
First, the name of the resolution, “The Local Radio Freedom Act,” is disingenuous. While the name proclaims protection of local radio stations, the National Association of Broadcasters is actually doing the bidding of Big Radio corporations in this resolution. Across the industry, ten radio corporations own hundreds of stations in the U.S. These ten corporations are responsible for half of the revenue generated by the $17 billion radio industry. The usurpation of local radio stations means a drowning out of local voices. Media conglomerates mean fewer choices for music across the country. Never mind that the NAB is actively seeking to further consolidate the industry. Big Radio means local and indie musicians lack access to the airwaves, and music fans don’t benefit from diverse voices. If local radio will ever truly be “free,” it needs to be protected from large media conglomerates that deny them a healthy marketplace or the diversity of music that draws people to radio in the first place. Which leads us to our next point.
Radio has been struggling for years to remain innovative in the streaming era, where consumer choice is thriving. Even the images NAB uses in its marketing – images of young women listening to music in their car – are misleading. Data tells us those young women are probably not listening to the radio. With the meteoric rise of smart speakers and the proliferation of streaming services, millennials just aren’t tuning into AM/FM radio anymore. And with media conglomerates eliminating the prospect of discovering new music on the radio, especially the local ones, do we blame them? Think about it – when’s the last time you discovered new music on the radio?Usually, these songs have been streamed for weeks, maybe even months, before they actually hit the airways. There isn’t the same promotional value for airplay of songs on the radio as there was before the digital age. Still, the NAB uses the tired excuse that the LRFA recognizes the “promotional value” of music aired on “free, local radio stations.” For this promotion to exist, valuable audiences actually need to be listening to the music. They’re not.
So why is the National Association of Broadcasters touting this resolution so aggressively if it actually doesn’t protect local radio or promote the value of music? It’s quite simple – Big Radio doesn’t want to pay music creators for airplay of their work.
read the rest at the link below to be truly disgusted by Big Radio -dg
Source: LRFA: The Champion of Deception | musicFIRST Coalition
Big Data
The volume of data in the world is increasing exponentially. By some estimates, 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years, and it is projected to increase by 40% annually. A large share of this output is “data exhaust,” or passively collected data deriving from everyday interactions with digital products or services, including mobile phones, credit cards, and social media. This deluge of digital data is known as big data. Data is growing because it is increasingly being gathered by inexpensive and numerous information‐sensing, mobile devices and because the world’s capacity for storing information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s.
The Data Revolution
The data revolution — which encompasses the open data movement, the rise of crowdsourcing, new ICTs for data collection, and the explosion in the availability of big data, together with the emergence of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things — is already transforming society. Advances in computing and data science now make it possible to process and analyse big data in real time. New insights gleaned from such data mining can complement official statistics and survey data, adding depth and nuance to information on human behaviours and experiences. The integration of this new data with traditional data should produce high-quality information that is more detailed, timely and relevant.
Opportunities
Data is the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability. Today, in the private sector, analysis of big data is commonplace, with consumer profiling, personalised services, and predictive analysis being used for marketing, advertising and management. Similar techniques could be adopted to gain real-time insights into people’s wellbeing and to target aid interventions to vulnerable groups. New sources of data, new technologies, and new analytical approaches, if applied responsibly, can enable more agile, efficient and evidence-based decision-making and can better measure progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a way that is both inclusive and fair.
Risks
Fundamental elements of human rights have to be safeguarded to realize the opportunities presented by big data: privacy, ethics and respect for data sovereignty require us to assess the rights of individuals along with the benefits of the collective. Much new data is collected passively – from the ‘digital footprints’ people leave behind and from sensor-enabled objects – or is inferred via algorithms. Because big data is the product of unique patterns of behaviour of individuals, removal of explicit personal information may not fully protect privacy. Combining multiple datasets may lead to the re-identification of individuals or groups of individuals, subjecting them to potential harms. Proper data protection measures must be put in place to prevent data misuse or mishandling.
There is also a risk of growing inequality and bias. Major gaps are already opening up between the data haves and have-nots. Without action, a whole new inequality frontier will split the world between those who know, and those who do not. Many people are excluded from the new world of data and information by language, poverty, lack of education, lack of technology infrastructure, remoteness or prejudice and discrimination. There is a broad range of actions needed, including building the capacities of all countries and particularly the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Land-locked Developing Countries (LLDCs), and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).
Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity.
You’ve probably seen this effect—perhaps you are a victim of it. You feel alienated from mainstream culture and want to make a statement that you are not part of it. You think about wearing different clothes, experimenting with a new hairstyle, or even trying unconventional makeup and grooming products.
And yet when you finally reveal your new look to the world, it turns out you are not alone—millions of others have made exactly the same choices. Indeed, you all look more or less identical, the exact opposite of the countercultural statement you wanted to achieve.
This is the hipster effect—the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same. Similar effects occur among investors and in other areas of the social sciences.
How does this kind of synchronization occur? Is it inevitable in modern society, and are there ways for people to be genuinely different from the masses?
Today we get some answers thanks to the work of Jonathan Touboul at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Touboul is a mathematician who studies the way the transmission of information through society influences the behavior of people within it. He focuses in particular on a society composed of conformists who copy the majority and anticonformists, or hipsters, who do the opposite.
And his conclusion is that in a vast range of scenarios, the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream. In other words, the hipster effect is the inevitable outcome of the behavior of large numbers of people.
Toubol’s model of society is relatively simple. It consists of conformists who follow the majority and hipsters who do the opposite. Crucially, the model also takes into account the time needed for each individual to detect changes in society and to react accordingly.
This delay is important. People do not react instantly when a new, highly fashionable pair of shoes becomes available. Instead, the information spreads slowly via fashion websites, word of mouth, and so on. This propagation delay is different for individuals, some of whom may follow fashion blogs religiously while others have no access to them and have to rely on word of mouth.
The question that Touboul investigates is under what circumstances hipsters become synchronized and how this varies as the propagation delay and the proportion of hipsters both change. He does this by creating a computer model that simulates how agents interact when some follow the majority and the rest oppose it.
This simple model generates some fantastically complex behaviors. In general, Touboul says, the population of hipsters initially act randomly but then undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state. He finds that this happens for a wide range of parameters but that the behavior can become extremely complex, depending on the way hipsters interact with conformists.
There are some surprising outcomes, too. When there are equal proportions of hipsters and conformists, the entire population tends to switch randomly between different trends. Why isn’t clear, and Touboul wants to study this in more detail.
It can be objected that the synchronization stems from the simplicity of scenarios offering a binary choice. “For example, if a majority of individuals shave their beard, then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to new, synchronized, switch to shaving,” says Touboul.
It’s easy to imagine a different outcome if there are more choices. If hipsters could grow a mustache, a square beard, or a goatee, for example, then perhaps this diversity of choice would prevent synchronization. But Touboul has found that when his model offers more than two choices, it still produces the synchronization effect.
Nevertheless, he wants to study this further. “We will study in depth this question in a forthcoming paper,” he says.
Hipsters are an easy target for a bit of fun, but the results have much wider applicability. For example, they could be useful for understanding financial systems in which speculators attempt to make money by taking decisions that oppose the majority in a stock exchange.
Indeed, there are many areas in which delays in the propagation of information play an important role: As Touboul puts it: “Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding synchronization of nerve cells, investment strategies in finance, or emergent dynamics in social science.”
Source: The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same – MIT Technology Review