Amsterdam Has Retaken Financial Capital of Europe? Was this Cyclically on Time?

 

Posted Feb 17, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

EURONEXT has now beaten out London retaking back the financial capital insofar as stock trading is concerned thanks to Boris Johnson and of course BREXIT. The numbers are in and Amsterdam surpassed London with an average of €9.2bn shares a day traded on Euronext in January 2021, which was been a 400% increase over December compared to London trading which dropped to €8.6bn retaking its historic position that existed before the Dutch lost it to London.

In 1689, the English Parliament declared that James II had abdicated by deserting his kingdom which was to exclude him and his Stuart heirs because they were all Roman Catholics. Parliament declared that “it hath been found by experience that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom to be governed by a papist prince”. Thereafter, the Sovereign was required in their coronation oath to swear to maintain the Protestant religion. Parliament in turn offered the throne to William (reigned 1689-1702) and Mary (reigned 1689-94) as joint monarchs.

They had to accept a Bill of Rights drawn up by a Convention of Parliament thereby restricting the Sovereign’s power and reaffirmed Parliament’s claim to control taxation and legislation. Hence, therefore, this Bill ensured Parliament could function free from royal interference forbidding all future sovereigns from suspending or dispensing with laws passed by Parliament in addition to maintaining a standing army in time of peace without Parliament’s consent. Moreover, the sovereign was also forbidden to impose taxes without Parliamentary consent. It was the lack of representation in Parliament by the American colonies which gave rise to the no taxation without representation slogan of the American Revolution.

One of the Dutch William’s main reasons for accepting the English throne was to reinforce the struggle against Louis XIV of France. William’s foreign policy was dominated by the priority to contain French expansionism. England and the Dutch joined the coalition against France during the Nine Years’ War, 1689-1697. Eventually, France was compelled to recognize William as King of England under the Treaty of Ryswick (1697),

The Bank of England was established in 1694 as the expertise from Amsterdam was imported to London. The Bank of England was used at first to raise money for the war by borrowing. It did not circumvent the King’s financial reliance on Parliament, as the national debt depended on parliamentary guarantees. Yet, William’s Dutch advisers were resented in London. In fact, in 1699 his Dutch Blue Guards were forced to leave the country.

The Royal Exchange had been founded by English financier Thomas Gresham and Sir Richard Clough on the model of the Antwerp Bourse. Gresham represented the English crown in Antwerp. Gresham convinced the Crown to open the Royal Exchange in London in 1565 using the Antwerp model. However, it was first known as “the Bourse” until Queen Elizabeth I, after a visit on January 23, 1570, changed its name to the Royal Exchange. It was opened by Elizabeth I of England in 1571. Gresham saw the need for a central place where foreign exchange dealers could meet and conduct business. He recognized the deplorable state of the money supply and that this now made foreign exchange dealers a necessity for trade. He constructed the London Exchange between 1566-1568. It finally received royal recognition and thus it became known as the Royal Exchange in 1571. Unfortunately, it was completely destroyed in the Great London Fire of 1666.

Actually, during the 17th century, stockbrokers were not allowed in the Royal Exchange because they were regarded as rude huxters. Stockbrokers were seen as a lower class compared to foreign exchange and debt. They were confined to off-exchange establishments such as Jonathan’s Coffee-House. Where Llyod’s Coffee House emerged as the place for insurance eventually becoming Lloyd’s of London, the stockbroker began in a coffee house administered by John Castaing who first began listing the prices of a few commodities, such as salt, coal, and paper in 1698. This eventually moved to Garraway’s Coffee House where public auctions began to emerge. They would last based on the length of a tallow candle that could burn. They became known as “by inch of candle” auctions. As the activity grew, the trade began to attract more companies forming which became an IPO market to raise capital.  These are the earliest evidence of organized trading in marketable securities in London which was the resurrection of stock trading from Ancient Rome.

The Royal Exchange established by Thomas Gresham was destroyed in the Great Fire of London which was a major event that swept through the central parts of London from Sunday, September 2nd to Thursday, September 6th, 1666. The fire actually destroyed the medieval City of London which was inside the old Roman city walls. Eventually, the Royal Exchange was rebuilt and re-established in 1669. It was at this time that the stockbrokers joined the Royal Exchange bringing an end to the coffee house period. However, the second Royal Exchange also burned down, on January 10th, 1838. It had been used by Lloyd’s insurance market, which was forced to move temporarily to South Sea House following the 1838 fire.

The current Royal Exchange building was constructed in 1840 and stands opposite the Bank of England. Gresham’s Royal Exchange surpassed Antwerp first because of the fire in 1583 which destroyed the Bourse. Yet it was immediately rebuilt to the same plan. Then came the Siege of Antwerp (1584-1585) and the surrender to the Spanish Army which killed the Dutch trade. Antwerp was simply unable to compete with Amsterdam and London.

What is most curious is that 2021 is precisely 314 years from the birth of Great Britain. The events from the year 1707 created on May 1st the Treaty of Union and its ratification by the 1707 Acts of Union. The fact that Amsterdam has retaken the lead in stock markets seems to be right on schedule. Boris Johnson has destroyed the British economy and produced just about a 10% decline in GDP for 2020 – the worse collapse in 300 years! So here we have Amsterdam overtaking London in 2021 which is 314 years from the birth of Great Britain. It is amazing how rapidly Boris Johnson has wiped out the British economy.

Federal Reserve & Fake Conspiracies

 

Posted Feb 16, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

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QUESTION: I found your history of the Federal Reserve very insightful which nobody else has put together. Can you explain your comment that the ECB could go bankrupt but not the Fed?

Thank you very much.

HB

ANSWER: Here is a full set of $1 bills with each issued by its respective branch. I would like to t5han Kohn C for having this framed and sent to me as a gift. The Federal Reserve is independent whereas it has its own authority to increase or decrease its power to create elastic money. I understand that many see this as evil, but it was absolutely essential. During an economic crash, people hoard their cash and do not spend it. Consequently, banks start to fail because they lent money out long-term as in mortgages but the demands by depositors are immediate. That is why a bank would fail in the midst of a run. Its assets are tied up in loans which they then recall and cannot sell the real estate to get liquid.

Right now we have had that problem where the velocity of money has been declining from 2007 until Trump was elected, but then it took a nose-dive in a waterfall event thanks to COVID lockdowns and rising unemployment. The Fed’s “elastic” money means they can create money in electronic form purchasing in debt which in theory injects cash into the system. However, because Congress has been so corrupt, the requirement to buy government debt has not directly helped the economy as it was originally intended to do in 1913 when it would only by corporate debt. That prevented companies from going bust and laying off people because they did not have the immediate cash.

The ECB requires the approval of all member states whereas the Federal Reserve does not need to go back to Congress to beg for money. Not all central banks are created equal. Yes, the banks were the shareholders because the Fed was supposed to be a bailout for the banks and that was not to involve taxpayer’s money.  However, the politicians could not keep their fingers out of the cookie jar. The government began to take over the Fed and the chairman was then appointed politically and the control of private banks has been reduced. The fake quote that people use that Rothschild said “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” The problem with this quote is a simple fact it was made up in 1913.

I am unaware of any banknote issued by Rothschilds in the United States or Britain. This quote, which is widely used, appears in a letter of  T.C. Daniel (1857 – 1923) to President W. Wilson dated May 8, 1913. I cannot find any source where Mayer Rothschild ever said such a thing nor can I find any paper money issued by the Rothschild Bank. I would love to buy one if anyone ever discovers it.

Nonetheless, the Bank of England issued banknotes beginning in 1694. In 1921, the Bank of England gained a legal monopoly on the issue of banknotes in England and Wales, a process that started with the Bank Charter Act of 1844 when the ability of other banks to issue notes was restricted. I have an extensive collection of monetary instruments that are historically important. There are no Rothschild notes that I am aware of during this period. Consequently, I cannot find the source of this Rothschild quote, nor can I even find an example of a Rothschild banknote from the period in question. So I fail to see where Rothschild would have made such a boost when he did not have control of any nation’s money supply.

This is the problem. People simply hate bankers, as I have fought against, but at the same time, they are making up things that are not true and I have to wonder if this is deliberately done to create misinformation.

Fake News

 

New York Times Called for “Reality Czar” to Imprison Anyone they Claim is Stating Fake News?

Posted Feb 5, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

The New York Times has called on President Biden to create a “Reality Czar” to shut down all dissent, which they immediately label conspiracy theories without any real investigation. In 1924, the New York Times was pushing that we were heading into a new Ice Age. Was that disinformation? CNN has called on cable companies to drop Fox News.

The New York Times cheered Stalin and constantly reported that this was the way to the future. They are supporting once again this move to a Marxist Utopia. The New York Times hid the truth about Stalin. His great economic miracle was achieved by taking all the food from Ukraine to pretend Communism was working in Russia causing over 7 million to starve to death.

I strongly recommend you watch the movie Mr. Jones. This exposes the TRUE STORY of how the New York Times tried to support Communism in the United States back then, with their top journalist, Walter Duranty (1884-1957), who was their main man in Moscow. The New York Times promoted him to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on how Communism was Utopia and our future. When Gareth Jones (1905-1935) in March 1933 reported this was all a lie, the truth finally began to appear.

It took the New York Times until 1990 to admit that their reporting covered up the truth about Stalin and the massive starvation in an effort, like Schwab, once again, to sell “equality” as our salvation. The New York Times covered up the more than 7 million people who died of starvation in the Ukraine famine. The New York Times wrote that their reporting on the Russian Revolution constituted “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” They never revoked his Pultizer Prize for writing fake news about Stalin.

The Homeland Security and the FBI both said that Russia’s hack of the DNC did not involve altering the vote. In fact, it was his own paper that reported on November 25, 2016: “The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people.” So was four years of stating the Russians put Trump in the White House not misinformation?

The constant lies the press has spun about Russia invading the US elections in 2016 and manipulations seem intent upon creating war, exactly as took place with the Spanish American War. We have returned to yellow journalism, which is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Pulitzer and Hearst went head to head. I remember grade school history class blaming the Spanish American War on fake news. There is one such story that male Spanish officials were strip-searching American woman tourists in Cuba looking for claimed messages from rebels. This was the front page of Hearst’s newspaper showing what has become known as “yellow journalism” whereby the illustration was by Frederic Remington published in the New York Journal, February 12th, 1897.

Hearst’s New York Journal was called out for this fake news by its rival Joseph Pulitzer’s, New York World,  reporting that this story was erroneous and its graphically illustrated strip-search of a woman aboard U.S. passenger steamer was fake. The Journal article was written by Richard Harding Davis, who reported that Spanish authorities boarded the U.S. steamer, the Olivette, as it prepared to leave Havana and searched several passengers for contraband. Among the passengers was a young Cuban woman named Clemencia Arango, whose brother was a leader in the insurgency against Spanish rule. The Journal’s article was ambiguous, implying the woman was strip-searched by men, which was created by the accompanying illustration of Frederic Remington.

The New York World attacked the Journal’s fake news, quoting Arango as denying that men had strip-searched her. That task, she said, had fallen to a matron, or “inspectress.” The Journalist Davis, in a letter to the World, then blamed Frederic Remington for having drawn “an imaginary picture” and insisted his dispatch had not reported that men had conducted the search.

Nevertheless, this story of the strip-search discredited the Journal as being unreliable and prone to publishing “fakes” and other thinly documented reports. Welcome to the present where the New York Times and Washington Post seem to be carrying on in the same unreliable manner as well as ABC, CBS, NBC, and of course – CNN.

 

Fake news is not limited to the United States. The press has joined the governments 100% around the world.  Journalism is dead. It is now all about just indoctrination. The very foundation of democracy is to encourage a debate. But now, they just label the opposition as a conspiracy and condemn them. Since the New York Times supported Stalin and that whatever he did was for the greater good (see: film “Mr. Jones”), we should expect mainstream media to advocate terms of imprisonment for anyone who disagrees with their political views or objectives. This is shredding the Constitution and eliminating everything America once stood for. The press is finished.

Switzerland - DIRECT DEMOCRACY

 

Posted Feb 5, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong,

You wrote a few times in both blogs about “trying Direct Democracy” lately.

I can see how powerful technology capacity currently available can support such change.

What I have problems to envision is how the mechanic would work integrating local, city, regional, county, provincial, state, and country various levels of concerns.

What most jurisdiction have today is some form of top-down approach which leaves the people out of any decision.

Direct Democracy would be a revolution by itself turning around the whole thing 180 degree!!!

Could it possibly work for the entire planet to address issues such as climate change, poverty, rogue regime, migration, etc. ?

Time permitted, I would like to read your thoughts about the concept in the 21st century.

Thanks for your enlightening work,

LT

Toronto, Canada

REPLY: If we can buy online with no problem, we should be able to vote the same way. You then cross-reference each vote to the tax database. If they never filed a tax form, then they cannot vote. Locally, it can be linked to your local tax records since we have direct taxation. Those who do not have a computer can do so from their phone or go to the public town hall. Without direct democracy, there will be no trust in government ever again. That is a death blow to the system we now have.

Switzerland has the closest thing to a direct democracy so far.

There are three instruments of direct democracy; all types of referendums: mandatory, popular initiative, and optional. A vote must be held on any amendment to the constitution resulting in a mandatory referendum. A double majority, meaning the consent of a majority of the people and of the cantons, is required to amend the country’s constitution.

Citizens can launch a popular initiative to demand a change to the constitution. Any Swiss citizen who is eligible to vote can sign a popular initiative and a group of at least seven citizens (the initiative committee) can launch their own popular initiative. Before a vote is held on a popular initiative, the initiative committee must collect 100,000 valid signatures in favor of the proposal within a period of 18 months.

The Federal Council and Parliament will recommend whether the proposal should be accepted or rejected. For the proposal to be accepted, a double majority is needed. If it is accepted, new legislation or an amendment to the existing legislation is normally required to implement the new constitutional provision.

Other nations can change their constitutions on a vote of the representative and the people never are even asked. That to me is a very dangerous distinction. For example, in Canada, they passed an act whereby the representatives can cancel all currency at their pleasure and force the people into digital currency. The people are NEVER consulted. That is not democracy. It is tyranny.