economy – Page 2 – The Faithful Watchman

Oil Spikes After EU Says Russian Embargo ‘Imminent’ As Germany Drops Opposition

Tyler Durden – April 28, 2022

After throughout the whole month consistently rejecting a proposed European Union ban on Russian oil, but while also walking a delicate tightrope of opposing Putin’s demand of payments in rubles for Russian energy, Germany is now ready to pull the trigger on an embargo.

It’s another major Berlin U-turn happening in tandem with the decision to send heavy weapons to Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal is citing Berlin government officials who say “Germany is now ready to stop buying Russian oil.”

The WSJ underscores that this “clears the way” for a wider EU ban on Russian oil imports, given that Germany’s resistance was the chief holdout to imposing an embargo before this point.

Further the report indicates that an embargo now seen as “imminent” but it remains that no target date has been set yet, or at least hasn’t been disclosed publicly. While events earlier in the week made clear that this was coming, preparing markets, oil began surging on the news.

Which is not good news for President Biden as gas prices at the pump are already on the rise.

Germany appears to have lifted its objection based on prior negotiations to implement a phased-in Russian oil embargo, similar to the phased approach regarding the coal ban.

Additionally, other countries particularly in eastern Europe have lately appeared willing to step up in taking the pressure off Germany supply – for example Poland says it’s ready to supply a German refinery via Gdansk which is owned by Rosneft.

https://www.zerohedge.com

World Economic Forum calls for one-world currency; A ‘Tower of Babel’ doomed to collapse, Israeli economist warns

Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz – April 5, 2022

Dr. Phillipa “Pippa” Malmgren, a technology entrepreneur and economist, spoke at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum being held in Davos, Switzerland, this week, dropping a bombshell prediction that the world is well on its way to implementing an electronic banking system that would open every transaction of every person to government scrutiny.

“I was very privileged. My father was the adviser to Nixon when we came off the gold standard in ’71, so I was brought up with a kind of inside view of how very important the financial structure is to absolutely everything else,” Malmgren said.

“And what we’re seeing in the world today is I think we are on the brink of a dramatic change where we are about to – and I’ll say this boldly – we’re about to abandon the traditional system of money and accounting and introduce a new one, and the new one – the new accounting – is what we call blockchain.”

“It means digital,” she continued. “It means having an almost perfect record of every single transaction that happens in the economy, which will give us far greater clarity over what’s going on.”

Unlike current cryptocurrencies, the system Malmgren describes will give the central banks complete control over people’s money. The banks will be able to track every transaction and even control how it is spent, blocking it from being transferred to people or organizations it deems undesirable.

This may sound like a dystopian sci-fi scenario of the distant future, but this was already seen in Canada when, without a court order, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used emergency powers to order banks to freeze accounts of individuals who donated to the Freedom Convoy. Crowdfunding sites were also forced to return millions of dollars that had been collected for the truckers.

The Biden administration also accessed bank records to track bank account debit card or credit card purchases made in Washington, D.C, during the Jan. 6 riot investigation.

https://www.israel365news.com

Deutsche Bank becomes the first big bank to forecast a US recession by 2023

Ricky Scaparo – April 5, 2022

The Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation will spark a recession in the United States that begins late next year, Deutsche Bank warned on Tuesday. The recession call — the first from a major bank — reflects growing concern that the Fed will hit the brakes on the economy so hard that it will inadvertently end the recovery that began just two years ago.

“We no longer see the Fed achieving a soft landing. Instead, we anticipate that a more aggressive tightening of monetary policy will push the economy into a recession,” Deutsche Bank economists led by Matthew Luzzetti wrote in the report.

‘The US economy is expected to take a major hit from the extra Fed tightening by late next year and early 2024,’ the bank’s economists said in a note to clients Tuesday.

‘We see two negative quarters of growth and a more than 1.5 percent point rise in the US unemployment rate, developments that clearly qualify as a recession, albeit a moderate one.’

The prediction comes as the Fed voted to raise interest rates last month by a quarter-point for the first time in three years to curb inflation, which is at nearly 8 percent and the highest its been in 40 years. It also comes as a 2-year Treasury yield momentarily surpassed the 10-year yield last week, a classic sign that has preceded every US recession.

While the Federal Reserve is aiming to raise interest rates by 2 percent by the end of 2022, Deutsche anticipates the Fed will go beyond that and raise rates to 3.5 percent into 2023.

The central bank projects overall inflation will be up 4.3 percent just this year. Meanwhile, economic growth is projected at 2.8 percent this year, a steep drop from the 4.0 percent growth projected in December.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

What Is The “Great Reset” And What Do The Globalists Actually Want?

Brandon Smith – April 1, 2022

I first heard the phrase “Great Reset” way back in 2014. Christine Lagarde, who was head of the IMF at the time, was suddenly becoming very vocal about global centralization. It was an agenda that was generally only whispered about in the dark corners of institutional white papers and the secretive meetings of banking elites, but now these people were becoming rather loud about it.

Lagarde was doing a Q&A at the World Economic Forum and the notion of the “Reset” was very deliberately brought up; what the project entailed was vague, but the basic root of it was a dramatic shift away from the current economic, social and political models of the world into a globally centralized and integrated system – A “New World Order,” if you will…

It’s important to remember that we had just jumped through the fires of an international credit collapse which started in 2008 and had continued to cause uncertainty in markets for years. The central banks had dumped tens of trillions of dollars worth of stimulus into the system just to keep it on life support. Some of us in the alternative media believed that these actions were not meant to save the economy, only zombify the economy through currency devaluation and inflation. Not long down the road, this zombie creation would turn on us and try to eat us alive, and only the central bankers knew exactly when this would occur.

Think of the crash of 2008 as Stage 1 of the Reset agenda; the globalists were getting cocky and were ready to unveil their plans to the public.

Lagarde’s discussion at the WEF was also held around the time that Klaus Schwab was introducing his 4^th Industrial Revolution concept, which is a little more forward with what the globalists really want. He talks excitedly of a true “global society” and a world in which people turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a better means of governance. He even suggests that laws would eventually be dictated by AI and that courts would be run by robots.

Of course, he admits that this cannot happen without a period of economic deconstruction in which people and governments will have to choose between sacrifice for the sake of stability, or continued pain in the name of holding on to the “old ways.” Look at it this way: The Great Reset is the action or the chaos, and the 4^th Industrial Revolution is the intended result or planned “order.” That is to say, it’s a new order created out of engineered chaos.

https://www.activistpost.com

Biden signs order on cryptocurrency as its use explodes

Fatima Hussein – March 9, 2022

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order on government oversight of cryptocurrency that urges the Federal Reserve to explore whether the central bank should jump in and create its own digital currency.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the effort would “promote a fairer, more inclusive, and more efficient financial system” while countering illicit finance and preventing risks to financial stability and national security.

The Biden administration views the explosive popularity of cryptocurrency as an opportunity to examine the risks and benefits of digital assets, said a senior administration official who previewed the order Tuesday on the condition of anonymity, terms set by the White House.

Under the executive order, Biden also directed the Treasury Department and other federal agencies to study the impact of cryptocurrency on financial stability and national security.

Brian Deese and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s top economic and national security advisers, respectively, said the order establishes the first comprehensive federal digital assets strategy for the United States.

“That will help position the U.S. to keep playing a leading role in the innovation and governance of the digital assets ecosystem at home and abroad, in a way that protects consumers, is consistent with our democratic values and advances U.S. global competitiveness,” Deese and Sullivan said Wednesday in a joint statement.

https://www.twincities.com

World War III Has Already Started, and It’s an Economic War

Brandon Smith – March 9, 2022

In an article I published in April of 2018, World War III Will Be An Economic War, I outlined a number of factors that portend a large scale conflict between East and West and why this war would be mainly economic in nature. I investigated how this conflict would actually benefit globalists and globalist institutions seeking to bring down multiple nations’ economies while hiding the engineered crisis behind a wall of geopolitical chaos and noise.

The goal? To convince the masses that national sovereignty was a plague that only leads to mass death, and that the “solution” is a one-world system – conveniently managed by the globalists, of course.

One issue which I used to get a lot of arguments over was the idea that countries like Russia and China would end up so closely aligned. People claimed there were too many disparities and that the countries would ultimately turn on each other in the middle of a financial crisis.

Well, it’s four years later and now we’re going to see if that is true or not. So far, it looks like I was correct.

My position has long been that certain nations have been preparing for a collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency (the primary currency used in the majority of trade around the world). My belief is that America’s top economic position is actually an incredible weakness; the dollar’s hegemony is not a strength, but an Achilles heel. If the dollar was to lose reserve status, the whole of the U.S. economy and parts of the global economy would implode, leaving behind only those who prepared – those who saw the writing on the wall and planned ahead.

The dollar crash coalition

There are four nations that have been actively positioning for the crash of the dollar. They include: China, Russia, India, Brazil, and in part South Africa (also known as the BRICS). The BRICS are rarely mentioned in the mainstream media anymore, but there was a time around a decade ago when they were discussed regularly.

My fascination with the BRICS back then was primarily due to their economic behaviors. Specifically, their bilateral trade agreements which cut out the dollar as a reserve currency, and the fact that they were stockpiling tons upon tons of gold.

It was as if they had some kind of inside information that an economic war was coming, and they were getting ready to decouple from the dollar and the global supply chain.

https://www.birchgold.com

‘Global Food Crisis’ Ukraine War Will Have ‘Catastrophic’ Effect on Global Food Supply – Agri Org

Peter Caddle – March 8, 2022

The world is heading into a global food crisis thanks to the war in Ukraine, according to the head of one major Agri organization.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine is going to have a ‘catastrophic’ effect on the world’s supply of food, the head of one of the world’s leading fertilizer companies.

Both Russia and Ukraine account for a significant portion of the global grain supply, with both nations also having significant roles within the supply of fertiliser, as well as its raw materials.

However, with trade grinding to a halt as a result of the latest stage in the ongoing conflict, the head of one major fertilizer company is sounding off alarm bells.

“Half the world’s population gets food as a result of fertilizers… and if that’s removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%,” Svein Tore Holsether, who heads up agri company Yara International, told the BBC.

“For me, it’s not whether we are moving into a global food crisis – it’s how large the crisis will be,” he went on to say.

Holsether emphasized that there was already significant supply difficulties before the start of the current conflict, with the BBC noting that the increased cost of gas prices was already resulting in a steep rise in the cost of fertilizer.

The Yara International boss also is reported to have pointed out that around a quarter of key nutrients used in food production come from Russia, with sanctions now looking likely to further constrain in supply.

“At the same time we’re doing whatever we can do at the moment to also find additional sources,” he emphasized. “But with such short timelines it’s limited.”

https://www.breitbart.com

Why does this influential, unelected globalist entity really exist?

Rachel Marsden – February 26, 2022

When Canadian parliamentarian, Colin Carrie, of the Conservative Party, asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government this week how many Canadian ministers were actually “on board with the World Economic Forum agenda” — before his connection “broke up” in the video conference — he and the Canadians he represents deserved an honest response rather than accusations of spreading “disinformation”, as left-leaning New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus did.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), colloquially known as “Davos”, for those familiar with the annual pilgrimage by the international elite to the eponymous town in Switzerland, has been on the tips of many tongues over the past two years — notably within the context of the Covid-19 crisis. Just before the Covid pandemic, on October 15, 2019, the organization announced that it was holding a “live simulation exercise to prepare public and private leaders for pandemic response.” If that sounds oddly coincidental, buckle up, because it only gets weirder.

Speaking at a United Nations video conference in the fall of 2020, Justin Trudeau raised eyebrows, with a hint of a potential link between the global pandemic and the Forum. “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset,” Trudeau said. “This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts, to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change,” he added, evoking a “reset” concept much promoted by the WEF from the onset of the pandemic, that frames the crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally change the way that developed societies function.

Then in August 2021, Dutch MP Gideon van Meijeren asked Prime Minister Mark Rutte about a letter he wrote to WEF Founder Klaus Schwab in which he said that Schwab’s book, “Covid-19: The Great Reset,” published on July 9, 2020, within the first few months of the pandemic, “inspired him to build back better.” The phrase also happens to be the name of US President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, which includes increased wealth transfer into the murky black hole of climate change and “social spending.”

It would be easy to chalk it all up to creepy rhetorical coincidence if there wasn’t an actual link between Schwab, Davos, and elected officials like Rutte and Trudeau.

https://www.rt.com

US Inflation Soared 7.5 Percent Over Past 12 Months, Biggest Spike Since 1982

Newsmax – February 10, 2022

Inflation soared over the past year at its highest rate in four decades, hammering America’s consumers, wiping out pay raises and reinforcing the Federal Reserve’s decision to begin raising borrowing rates across the economy.

The Labor Department said Thursday that consumer prices jumped 7.5% last month compared with 12 months earlier, the steepest year-over-year increase since February 1982. Shortages of supplies and workers, heavy doses of federal aid, ultra-low interest rates and robust consumer spending combined to send inflation accelerating in the past year.

When measured from December to January, inflation was 0.6%, the same as the previous month and more than economists had expected. Prices had risen 0.7% from October to November and 0.9% from September to October.

Inflation to Continue

There are few signs that inflation will slow significantly anytime soon. Most of the factors that have forced up prices since last spring remain in place: Wages are rising at the fastest pace in at least 20 years. Ports and warehouses are overwhelmed, with hundreds of workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s busiest, out sick last month. Many products and parts remain in short supply as a result.

The steady surge in prices has left many Americans less able to afford food, gas, rent, child care and other necessities. More broadly, inflation has emerged as the biggest risk factor for the economy and as a serious threat to President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats as midterm elections loom later this year

https://www.newsmax.com

DC Asks Shoppers to Start Rationing Food: Is This Just the Beginning?

Jeff Thompson – January 25, 2022

It’s begun.

We’ve kept our fingers on the pulse of supply chain issues for years now here at The Organic Prepper. Just last week we wrote about all of the impending supply chain issues which were plaguing America. Shortly after that piece was published we saw further edicts be given which banned particular Canadian truckers from coming across the border.

Say goodbye to your maple syrup.

And lo and behold, after massive inflation games, after tampering with the free market, after the deliberate creation of supply chain issues, now we have Washington DC running short on food. What’s the solution to these food shortages?

Why, telling people to not buy as much, of course.

That’s exactly what DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management is now asking residents to do, as they face a problem with keeping their grocery store shelves stocked. Self-imposed rationing is the solution.

You have to love the notion that “there is no need to buy more than you normally would.” There’s just a nationwide supply chain issue, right? It surely won’t make it so that you won’t be able to buy what you need? And is there not a taint of “the government will take care of you here” as well? Aren’t these the same people who are deliberately causing these problems?

Bare grocery stores are becoming more and more common throughout America at the moment. Keep tabs on your own supermarket. What have you seen over the past few months? What have you found is difficult to find at the moment? There are very few who could likely say their grocery store shelves remain the same as always.

There’s a reason that Americans throughout the country are posting pictures online of barren stores, food items spaced out to give the illusion of stocked shelves, and posters of food being where soup should be.

Farmers are being paid to not produce, are being ordered to dump their product to rot on the side of the road, meat is being regulated out of existence, people are being banned from trucking food into the country, and food processing plants are coercing people out of their jobs (and then facing inexplicable labor shortages).

America seems to now be facing a food shortage.