There are many in Spain who just outright disagree with any right of Catalonia to be independent. History, culture, language, nothing really matters. Some have said it is the Spanish Constitution and all of Spain should vote to let Catalonia leave or stay. All of that said if Madrid had just allowed a fair referendum then whatever the vote was should have stood.
This is all about saving the EU and not Spain. It was the oppression that probably made others vote to leave. All of Spain cannot vote against one region. London did not vote on Scotland and neither did Toronto against Quebec. California has people pushing to separate and that is not a right to be decided by me in Florida.
Separatist movements are now rising throughout Europe. We see Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the UK all have separatist movements. There is even talk in Bavaria among friends I have there and Prussia wants more autonomy. Then there is Normandy and Brittany in France. There is a long list starting with Moravia, Lombardy, Insubria, South Tyrol, Carinthis, Friule-Venezia, Hungarian minorities, Savoy, Liguria, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Rijeka Istria, Veneto, Padania, Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, Sandzak, Serbian Republic, Vojvodina, Szekely Land, Gagauzia, Transnistria, Donbass, Crimea. Latgale, Ingria, Skameland, Samogita, Bornolm, and don’t forget Northen Cyprus. Some of these are asking for full independence and other more autonomy.
It is the economic issues intermixed with the refugee crisis that is sparking these movements today.
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; I read you One-World-Currency report. It was truly fascinating. From an academic perspective, what came first in the formation of civilization; agriculture or cities? Where does money fit into this historical perspective?
Thank you;
FD
ANSWER: There has been a fair amount of assumption that went into the history we were all taught in school. What has emerged since is a different perspective, to say the least! There are megaliths atGöbekli Tepe which were erected by hunter-gatherers around 9000 BC or about 3,000 years before history starts to be recorded. Göbekli Tepe is a stone-age mountain sanctuary. It has turned everything upside down insofar as it was assumed that the city came first and then agriculture. It appears that agriculture came first which enable people to create cities.
Göbekli Tepe proves that there was a shift from animism, a belief that attributes a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena inasmuch as there is some supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe, to centralized religion. In other words, there was a shift from an egalitarian society all people are equal to a hierarchical society arranged in order of rank. Clearly, there had to be a profound economic change and yes there would have to be some sort of monetary reward in the form of some resource to create such a shift from an egalitarian to a hierarchical society.
Göbekli Tepe is extremely important despite its obscure purpose and meaning. It is not the meaning that we need argue over. The incredible fact is that such a monument was constructed in the first place 9000BC. The simple fact of its existence proves historical assumption dead wrong. It matters not whether these pillars that are carved were some religious rite or just a decoration. More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known and only 5% of the site has been excavated. The astonishing fact is economic. Producing more than 200 pillars took a lot of man-hours. That means the workers needed a stable food supply and therefore agricultural cultivate MUST have been existence BEFORE cities were carved out of stone.
The construction of Göbekli Tepe would also have required some division of labor among overseers, technicians, and workers and management. Therefore, this required a hierarchical society. Therefore, social development in creating such structures must have precipitated, rather than resulted from, the shift to agriculture.
The assumption was that cities came first and then cultivation. Obviously, you had to feed the people to construct the cities first. My bet is on cultivation came first and food became money. Money moved from food to clothing. We see the first use of metal as money being Bronze imitating a sheepskin, which was the standard of value; i.e. Jason and the Golden Fleece.
Even the early Roman bronze Aes Signatum (5 pounds of bronze) pictures a bull. Cattle were also a main monetary unit of value prior to metal
First of all – THANK YOU for all you do, for your guiding light.
As I’ve read your blog, (a must daily), the post “Global cooling is killing penguins – not global warming”, especially the last two sentences “We are headed into a serious decline in temperature and that is when civilization declines significantly. The worst appears to be hitting after 2032. This is really no joke.”, makes me to ask you if there is one of your reports that would shed more light on the changes in climate and weather, and what do we expect, what we should prepare for in the future?
How the weather, climate will change towards 2032 and how it will affect different parts of the world – Western Europe, USA, Russia? Please kindly let me know if there is such a report and if it can be purchased?
It is a family planning for us and is the most serious matter.
Thank you,
V L
ANSWER: Well the past three years it has been getting colder in Europe. This past summer they called the year without a summer in the Arctic as ice has expanded. Our models on weather show that we are headed into a very cold winter this season even in the USA. This will progressively get worse and after 2032 we will be headed back to the cold period that existed during the 18th century. So buy some long-underwear this year. You may need it.
Western Europe will suffer the most, but the USA will also feel it this year. Siberia is warning so we have a shift. I moved to Florida for I am tired of shoveling snow, ice scraping, and potholes after losing 3 tires.
I will put together all the various models we have on weather and do a report on that in early 2018. This will have an impact on food prices. In general, we so see a commodity cycle coming for the next 8.6 year ECM wave.
Firstly, thank you – I’ve learned more from your blog and models that high-school would ever have hoped to teach me. And even after a year I am a still at the start-line of knowledge.
I am also been a follower and investor/gambler on crypto for over a year.
I concur with your findings that Govt’ will ultimately try to ban or regulate to tax crypto currencies. It really is all about tax. nothing else. I really don’t see how it can have anything to do with terrorist funding and the need to track all transactions, considering that as far back as 1996 the Federal Reserve that “ about $200 billion to $250 billion of U.S. currency was abroad at the end of 1995, or more than half the roughly $375 billion then in circulation outside of banks.” So how do the track this cash? or do they really care?
But what happens if the people just ignore the gov’t(s) attempt to ban crypto? What then?
Is it likely, or even remotely possible that most gov’ts would work jointly and simultaneously to ban crypto currencies?
Will there always be several countries that will ignore / not join this movement to benefit from the flow of currency – even if this inflow is crypto currency or not hard currency?
What will happy if the people just revolt and ignore the gov’’s efforts to tax crypto or ban it?
Some insight on how and what happened with previous alternative currencies who help shed some light on this. Could you also recommend some reading in this area.
Thanks again for your patience and skill in translating your work into digestible English so people like myself can benefit from your knowledge
D
ANSWER: This is a battle to the death. A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure the transactions and to control the creation of additional units of the currency. However, this idea has also falsely embraced the notion that a cryptocurrency will be a store of value and hence defeat inflation. That has proven to be absolute nonsense. The rise of cryptocurrency is a reflection that people do not trust government. Those in power know that and see this as unacceptable. Edward Snowden has pointed out that BitCoin is not as safe as everyone believes. He said:
“Obviously, Bitcoin by itself is flawed. The protocol has a lot of weaknesses and transaction sides and a lot of weaknesses that structurally make it vulnerable to people who are trying to own 50 percent of the network and so on and so forth.” … “Focusing too much on bitcoin, I think is a mistake. The real solution is again, how do we get to a point where you don’t have to have a direct link between your identity all of the time? You have personas. You have tokens that authenticate each person and when you want to be able to interact with people as your persona in your true name, you can do so.”
Zcash is far better than BitCoin for to remain equally interchangeable, units of Zcash are unlinked from their history so that one unit is as good as any other unit and this makes them really fungible in the to cryptocurrency world. They have unlinked shielded coins from their history on the blockchain. This means they can be used for tax avoidance and the government can use its Terrorist Card. They will not allow cryptocurrency to defeat taxes and BitCoin is not secure enough in that manner.
The rise in cryptocurrency has another side to it that is not being mentioned. Many of the people cheering BitCoin, are the dollar-haters who also tend to be the goldbugs. The interesting question that arises from this is very blunt. Has the introduction of cryptocurrency been displacing gold as the alternative currency?
This is a subject that requires a lot more space for analysis than a blog post. We also have central banks looking at creating their own cryptocurrency and that raises the possibility that private cryptocurrency will be banned.
There is absolutely no question that we are heading into a new Monetary System. The Monetary Crisis Cycle turns up next year. We saw what happened as soon as the ECMpeaked in 2007 and we forecast new highs in the Dow back in 2010 (See Barrons), the War Cycle turned up in 2014 and our Political Cyclethat pinpointed the political change in 2016 produced Trump, the ECM peak in 2015.75 marked the day of the Russian invasion of Syria that began the Refugee Crisis in Europe, our Models of Britain forecast BREXIT, and those onCatalonia forecast the separatist movement would rise 2 years in advance – just to mention a few.
We will issue a special report on the coming One World Currency. There is just too much to address in a blog post and this will be food for thought as we move forward through the end of this current cycle wave on the ECM
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; I know you use to live here in London and in Berlin, you said you still had your British driver’s license. Everyone knows you were friends with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and that you are the one they called when Britain had to face its disaster in joining the ERM. If you were to advise Prime Minister Theresa May, what would you tell her right now?
Thank you for your guidance in Britain
PH
ANSWER: Well the first thing, Theresa May should run to Las Vegas and take a course of playing poker and observe the game. You can win with a losing hand if you know how to project confidence and look like you have a winning hand. In law, I could get you on the witness stand and then ask when was the last time you beat your spouse. You will now have to deal with that agenda. You will swear you never beat anyone and you will want to call your spouse to say you never beat them. I will say that’s irrelevant because they will lie fearing you will beat them again. I have just set the agenda and you will be on defense the whole time. Forget everything else. You will leave the stand and people will think where there is smoke there is fire and surely I would have never asked that question without a reason.
This is what Brussels is doing to Britain. They have ABSOLUTELY no interest in actually negotiating any sort of a reasonable deal because their agenda is all about punishing Britain to set an example that nobody else will follow Britain out the door.
It is painfully obvious to anyone who is from the non-political world what is going on here. Britain has not yet realized there is no negotiating with the EU. The Brussels bureaucracy is protecting their jobs and it has NOTHING to do what is best for the people of Europe. So Theresa May is actually negotiating with herself. She offers a deal, the EU declines but makes no counter-offer, and she runs back trying to sweeten the offer. She is trying to fit a square block into a round hole. Hello! The EU negotiators Michel Barnier, Jean-Claude Juncker and assorted company, are NOT negotiating in good faith because it is NOT in their best interest to do so.know four things that Britain’s team doesn’t seem to grasp.
As long as they can keep the uncertainty in play, they hope to see the pound collapse and that will make the British see they should stay. But the lower the pound declines, the better the British economy for exports are doing better. Companies I have talked with in Britain who were against BREXIT, are now saying it’s not so bad.
Juncker responded to Theresa May’s Florence speech saying of if she would stay until 2021, the Britain had to surrender sovereignty to the European Courts, which have consistently ruled against Britain just about every single time. The demands for a huge divorce payments is to fill the pension funds of the Brussels bureaucracy. This is a divorce where they want everything and Britain gets nothing in return.
Their refusal to make any counter-offer demonstrates their lack of good faith in any negotiation. This whole thing is a joke and Britain should refuse to pay anything and just leave. Do not forget, if Germany cannot sell cars to Britain, watch the economy in Germany collapse very fast. About a fifth of all cars produced in Germany last year, or around 820,000 vehicles, were exported to the UK, making it the single biggest destination by volume. The trade deal works both ways, yet you would think it is a one-way street according to Jean-Claude Juncker and his gang of self-aggrandizing bureaucrats.
May holds the winning hand in the game and she seems not to understand even what it is. First, I would say find, (1) negotiations are over since there is never any proposal from Brussels, (2) there will be no divorce payment at all, (3) I would exit NATO and let Europe spend to defend itself, and (4) join NAFTA and cut my own trade deals with China.
END OF NEGOTIATION!
Then, and only then, will you see Jean-Claude Juncker suddenly lose 2 stone (28 pounds) as his phone melts down from German Industry screaming you IDIOT!!!! May holds the winning hand because Britain pays the most for the defense of Europe and they are the biggest market for German exports in Europe.
Donald Trump launched his Real News to combat the Fake News. Interesting turf battle. What I can say is that many people in Florida are very upset with CNN and their whole coverage. The frightened people so much that they were paying $7,000 for a flight out of town. There was no 15-foot wall of water and make see it now as FAKE NEWS not just with respect to politics, but everything is exaggerated to get people to watch
The Political Turf War in Europe and why Britain is Considering Joining NAFTA
Posted Oct 13, 2017 by Martin Armstrong
QUESTION: Marty; There is talk that Britain will join NAFTA rather than the EU. Does that make sense? What do you think?
ANSWER: The EU is in a death spiral. Every law they pass is to preserve their own power – not for the good of the people or Europe. Once again, the government solution always runs counter-trend to the Free Markets setting the stage for the next crisis. The EU banking rules allow them to just seize everything and shareholders get zero. This is what they did when Spain’s Banco Santander bought rival Banco Popular for €1. The bank which was valued in the collapse at €1.6 billion yet it was sold for €1. Now, banks are finding it extremely hard to raise new share capital. That will only result in more bank seizures. Hello! It would be nice to have someone in government with common sense.
Britain should run away from the EU and slam the door shut and then nailed it to be sure. The British should abandon the EU altogether and undeniably join the NAFTA trade agreement. If they do not, Britain will find itself being dragged down with the sinking ship.
A free trade agreement with the USA would be a slap in the face for the EU and even that will never cause the EU to look in the mirror. Like Hillary, they will blame everyone other than themselves.
The government data on British GDP clearly demonstrates that Britain has NOT benefited from joining the EU because of the secret agenda to federalize Europe to eliminate European War. This theory of one government in Europe, The United States of Europe, will end a possible war is just absurd.
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This narrative that the entire purpose of the federalization of the EU is to stop any war was stated bluntly by Hollande in the European Parliament. You cannot get more one-world government than this theory. But this spills over into economic power and the surrender of all sovereignty to Brussels.
Margaret Thatchers Burges Speech was spot on about the European Project. It was clear behind the curtain back on September 21, 1988, that this was all about the federalization of Europe and the surrender of national identity. The Guardianran the story: Thatcher sets face against united Europe. Let me make this very clear. Maggie was thrown out of office by a coup orchestrated by her own cabinet. They were eager to surrender sovereignty to Europe and bought into the whole idea of the United States of Europe.
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The new government headed by John Major took the Pound into the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) the same month that German unification began. The monetary policies of Germany were starkly different from Britain. I was called when the attack on the Pound unfolded and was asked what our model said about the Pound because they knew I was a friend of Thatcher. I relayed its analysis that the Pound had to be devalued. I was told that was impossible that John Major had said even the week before the Pound would be maintained in the ERM. I then said that the Pound must be suspended if not officially devalued. The pressure was intense. I explained that a fixed rate is a GUARANTEED trade. I can bet billions and if wrong, nothing happens and I get my money back. That finally made the point.
Black Wednesday, September 16th, 1992, was when the UK Conservative government that had thrown Thatcher out of power to take the Pound into the coming Euro was forced to withdraw from the ERM. While everyone blamed George Soros for making over US$1 billion from this GUARANTEED trade, the truth of the matter this is the only thing that SAVED Britain. Britain was headed into the Euro and the elite Conservatives would not listen to Margaret Thatcher.
Now that BREXIT is in play, the British should be on their hands and knees and be kissing their ground that they are not connected to continental Europe. There are many national and regional sensitivities that must be taken into account when it comes to trade. The British want to conclude agreements with India, Turkey, and China, that are not on the same page with the EU.
The government in London is targeting a free trade agreement following the BREXIT to limit disadvantages that people think exist for the domestic economy after the EU exit 2019. The EU is more interested in punishing Britain as an example of other member states that they better not leave the EU or else. This is all about punishment – not economics.
The British government is under pressure, as the EU will only negotiate the free trade agreement in London if the BREXIT divorce talks have made sufficient progress. Donald Tusk has been playing hard-ball to punish Britain and actually said the EU was negotiating in good faith without any evidence whatsoever to prove that statement. He said in turn: “We hear from London that the UK government is preparing a ‘no deal’ scenario. I would like to say very clearly that the EU is not working on such a scenario. “
There has been little tangible results in trying to negotiate with the EU. British Prime Minister Theresa May is expecting the conclusion of the BREXIT talks only before the departure from the EU in March 2019. Clearly, the British government is also preparing for a situation where no agreement is reached with the EU on exit and contingency plans are being put into place for this likelihood. Keep in mind that the EU will NOT make easy for they fear other states will take the same option.
This is a matter of pride for the EU. A hard BREXIT would hit especially the German economy. The representatives of the German economy are already nervous because of the slow negotiations. The German Federation of German Industries (BDI) has already warned the government that German companies had to “take precautionary measures for a very hard departure.” The Association of German Machinery and Plant Engineering (VDMA) said: “A tough Brexit is a conceivable but not acceptable scenario for the economy.”
Why is German industry getting nervous with its politicians seeking revenge? Britain is the world’s fourth-largest international market with an export volume of €7.4 billion euros last year for German products. Conversely, the Britain delivered 2016 machinery construction products worth €2.4 billion to Germany.
The problem is purely political and has become a turf war and pressure builds against the dreams of the centralized federalization of Europe.
