Doug Casey On The Plague Of Cultural Marxists

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Nick Giambruno: What exactly are Cultural Marxists, and how are they, and political correctness, contributing to the decline of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: Economic Marxism was intellectually debunked decades ago. With the collapse of the USSR, and radical changes in China, the man in the street became aware that the “intellectuals” were fools. And that is reinforced by the ongoing disasters in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. So, since they recognize that there’s nothing to steal if they implement Marxian economic policies, most “intellectuals” no longer talk about them.

Cultural Marxism, however, is just as destructive. It divides people not into economic classes, but cultural classes. You’re no longer an individual—you’re part of a gender, or a race, or some other group. Undoubtedly one being discriminated against by white males who—not just coincidentally—are largely responsible for Western Civilization.

I despise the wave of “politically correct” thought that’s washed over the world like a tidal wave of raw sewage. I remember when I first heard the term used. I believe it was on Saturday Night Live in the early 80’s. At the time I thought it was a joke…

A word Cultural Marxists use a lot lately is diversity. “We’ve got to have diversity.” No, we don’t have to have diversity. There’s zero logical or moral reason why every room should have a quota of blacks, Hispanics, LGBT’s, women, or whatever. It’s extremely stupid to have people qualify for something based upon accidental characteristics. It encourages them to view themselves not as individuals, but members of a group. So it actually foments class warfare.

I occasionally like to go to a men’s club. It’s odd that men are never invited to ladies’ functions - and I don’t care. Everyone should associate with whomever they like. People who use the State to impose their opinions on others, or approve of it, are essentially criminal personalities. I avoid them at all costs.

In fact, birds of a feather usually flock together. This is perfectly natural. You don’t need diversity; it’s not a necessarily positive value, it’s a neutral preference. If you want it in your club, fine. But freedom of association is far, far more important.

I form my friendships based upon neither diversity nor a lack of diversity, although there’s a natural, genetically based tendency to associate with people like yourself. I form my friendships based upon the character and the beliefs that a person has. The attributes that create diversity are stupid accidentals. The fact that diversity is emphasized draws attention to incidentals like race, sex, and gender, and diverts it from important things like character and beliefs. Diversity has become destructive. Cultural Marxists love “diversity” because, in fact, they actually hate people. And themselves. They want to cause conflicts that work to destroy Western Civilization—which they also hate.

Nick Giambruno: How does the migrant crisis in Europe relate to all of this?

Doug Casey: First, let me say that I’m all for immigration and completely open borders to enable opportunity seekers from anyplace to move anyplace else. With two big, critically important, caveats: 1) there can be no welfare or free government services, so everyone has to pay his own way, and no freeloaders are attracted 2) all property is privately owned, to minimize the possibility of squatter camps full of beggars.

In the absence of welfare benefits, immigrants are usually the best of people because you get mobile, aggressive, and opportunity-seeking people that want to leave a dead old culture for a vibrant new one. The millions of immigrants who came to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had zero in the way of state support.

But what is going on in Europe today is entirely different. The migrants coming to Europe aren’t being attracted by opportunity in the new land so much as the welfare benefits and the soft life. When they arrive, they expect free food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment—totally unlike past immigrants. For the most part they are unskilled and poorly educated. And 99% of them will stay that way, because it takes generations to change cultural attitudes. Few of them will ever become self-supporting.

What we’re talking about here is the migration of millions of people of different language, different race, different religion, different culture, different mode of living. If you"re an alien and you"re 1 out of 10,000, or 1,000, or 100, you"re a curiosity, an interesting outsider. But an influx of millions of migrants is only going to destroy the old culture, and guarantee antagonism—especially when the locals have to pay for it. In many ways, what’s happening now isn’t just comparable to what happened 2,000 years ago with the migration of barbarians into the Roman Empire. It’s potentially much more serious.

Nick Giambruno: What’s the welfare state’s role in all this?

Doug Casey: The State now pays for food, housing, schooling, and even cell phones for the “disadvantaged.” The next step will likely be some type of guaranteed income. All these things only serve to relieve the “disadvantaged” of personal responsibility for their own lives, which acts to cement them to the bottom of society—while slowly bankrupting the country as a whole.

The welfare state must be abolished, pulled out by its roots, and debunked intellectually and psychologically. If you want to help a deserving individual on your own, great. But to make it part of the State is idiotic—except, of course, for politicians that need votes.

Nick Giambruno: I recently read an article by arch-neocon Charles Krauthammer. He claimed that the failure of the US to more forcefully interfere in Syria is an indication of the West’s decline. What’s your take?

Doug Casey: I despise Krauthammer, and his ilk. But, that said, I believe he dislikes me much more than I do him. He’s one of those creatures who thrive within the swamp circled by the Washington Beltway. His prescriptions are almost universally wrong-headed. Which is to be expected from a neocon, a fan of both the warfare state and the welfare state.

I’ve debated Charles on three separate occasions. He has a high IQ, but his ideas are quite stupid—if we define stupidity as an unwitting tendency to self-destruction. I recently discovered that he is also a leading bioethicist—which I didn’t know when I did an essay on that pernicious group of busybodies.

Nick Giambruno: Webster’s defines bioethics as “a discipline dealing with the ethical implications of biological research and applications especially in medicine.” What’s so pernicious about that?

Doug Casey: Bioethics is a phony science, recently concocted by people working for pharmaceutical companies, governments, and medical institutions looking for excuses to justify what they have already decided to do.

A bioethicist is someone who"s supposed to determine the right and wrong of these things. I consider them self-appointed censors pandering to dimwits apparently incapable of thinking out psychological/ethical/economic dilemmas on their own.

That’s dangerous enough, but these are not just fools sowing confusion, they are mostly of a particular mindset—that is to say, they are a bunch of collectivists and statists—who pretend to be objective. Worse, they espouse policies with wide-reaching implications, almost universally wrong-headed and disastrous, which are a reeking part of the rotting fabric of what was once American society.

But what really gets me about these bioethicists is that they are not technical experts contributing to debates among scientists—they"re just a bunch of busybodies who want to tell everyone else what to do, based on their own opinions of morality and notions of political correctness. This is especially dangerous, because people make decisions and act based on their ideas of what is right and wrong—on moral grounds. By setting themselves up as the great determiners of what is ethically correct, these supposed experts become a sort of new secular priesthood to guide us all. They"re worse than run-of-the-mill busybodies, however; they want to play the role of Gríma Wormtongue in counseling rulers. They are generally sociopaths who want us to accept their statist, collectivist ethics, and thereby exert control over the direction of society, taking it down paths they deem best.

These so-called ethical experts insinuate themselves into the bureaucratic machinery of the State, into the flow of intellectual and academic debate, into the course material taught at universities, and they exert influence.

It’s especially dangerous because when people read about a consensus of Ph.D.s agreeing that X or Y is ethical, they may be seduced into letting these others do their ethical thinking for them, instead of holding on to the vital responsibility of thinking through ethical matters for themselves.

From the beginning of the Dark Ages up until the early 1500s, the Church of Rome was the arbiter of morality in the West; that was highly problematical, because it substituted the judgment of some priest for that of each individual. It"s one reason that the medieval era was so backward.

Individual responsibility to understand ethics and act accordingly is a cornerstone of Western Civilization, going all the way back to the Greeks. It"s what the play Antigone is all about. This is one reason that Islamic countries are basket cases—they’re at the same stage of philosophical evolution as the West was in the medieval era.

Anyway, the decline of religion in the West over the last century—a trend I applaud for many reasons, but won’t go into now—has left something of a moral vacuum. It’s been partially filled by secular religions like Marxism, but Marxism has been debunked everywhere but on college campuses… so the bioethicists are the latest fad trying to fill the space.

Individual responsibility, rather than diffuse responsibility among classes of people, is a major reason for the individual accomplishments and innovations that led the West to global eminence. Bioethicists are trying to set themselves up as a new priesthood. If they succeed, it would reverse an essential element of Western thought. Bioethicists are irksome because they’re a visible cutting edge of the knife destroying the foundations of Western Civilization, and yet they are given unearned respect and material prosperity.

Nick Giambruno: Can President Trump, or anyone, for that matter, reverse the decline of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: Once an empire starts falling apart, trying to stop it is like trying to stop a tree from falling once its roots have rotted. It can’t be done, and it’s best not to be around when it happens.

The Cultural Marxists and other enemies of Western Civilization are in total control of the education system, so the next several generations of young people are corrupted. They control the media, so they control the prevailing intellectual climate. They control the NGOs, and the “think tanks” that infest DC and other major capitals. They control the Deep State.

So, no, Trump can’t reverse it. Among other reasons because he himself doesn’t have a philosophical or ethical core. He’s just a businessman; his object is just to make things more efficient. Like Mussolini, to make the trains run on time, as it were. He’s a good influence in that he hates the Cultural Marxists, and they hate him. But it’s not like he can offer a positive alternative for people to believe in.

Nick Giambruno: What’s the bottom line here?

Doug Casey: I always like to try to turn a lemon into lemonade. But it’s impossible if someone drops a 500-pound bomb on your kitchen, and follows it up with a poison gas attack. That said, I like to do what I can. Not because I expect success, but because it’s the right thing to do. And that is as important, from a personal viewpoint, as anything in the world.

Nick Giambruno: Thanks, Doug, until next time.

Doug Casey: Thanks, Nick.

*  *  *

There’s major turmoil ahead for Western Civilization... and it could be catastrophic for global currency and stock markets. We expect the fallout to be far worse than 2008. Most investors can’t handle that sort of chaos. But Doug Casey and his team know how to turn it into huge profits. They’re sharing need-to-know information about the coming global economic meltdown in this time-sensitive video. Click here to watch it.

Doug Casey On The End Of Western Civilization

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Nick Giambruno: The decline of Western Civilization is on a lot of people’s minds.

Let’s talk about this trend.

Doug Casey: Western Civilization has its origins in ancient Greece. It’s unique among the world’s civilizations in putting the individual—as opposed to the collective—in a central position. It enshrined logic and rational thought—as opposed to mysticism and superstition—as the way to deal with the world. It’s because of this that we have science, technology, great literature and art, capitalism, personal freedom, the concept of progress, and much, much more. In fact, almost everything worth having in the material world is due to Western Civilization.

Ayn Rand once said “East minus West equals zero.” I think she went a bit too far, as a rhetorical device, but she was essentially right. When you look at what the world’s other civilizations have brought to the party, at least over the last 2,500 years, it’s trivial.

I lived in the Orient for years. There are many things I love about it—martial arts, yoga, and the cuisine among them. But all the progress they’ve made is due to adopting the fruits of the West.

Nick Giambruno: There are so many things degrading Western Civilization. Where do we begin?

Doug Casey: It’s been said, correctly, that a civilization always collapses from within. World War 1, in 1914, signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Of course, termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. It’s been on an accelerating downward path ever since, even though technology and science have been improving at a quantum pace. They are, however, like delayed action flywheels, operating on stored energy and accumulated capital. Without capital, intellectual freedom, and entrepreneurialism, science and technology will slow down. I’m optimistic we’ll make it to Kurzweil’s Singularity, but there are no guarantees.

Things also changed with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Before that, the US used gold coinage for money. “The dollar” was just a name for 1/20th of an ounce of gold. That is what the dollar was. Paper dollars were just receipts for gold on deposit in the Treasury. The income tax, enacted the same year, threw more sand in the gears of civilization. The world was much freer before the events of 1913 and 1914, which acted to put the State at the center of everything.

The Fed and the income tax are both disastrous and unnecessary things, enemies of the common man in every way. Unfortunately, people have come to believe they’re fixtures in the cosmic firmament. They’re the main reasons—there are many other reasons, though, unfortunately—why the average American’s standard of living has been dropping since the early 1970s. In fact, were it not for these things, and the immense amount of capital destroyed during the numerous wars of the last 100 years, I expect we’d have already colonized the moon and Mars. Among many other things…

But I want to re-emphasize that the science, the technology, and all the wonderful toys we have are not the essence of Western Civilization. They’re consequences of individualism, capitalism, rational thought, and personal freedom. It’s critical not to confuse cause and effect.

Nick Giambruno: You mentioned that the average American’s standard of living has dropped since the early 1970s. This is directly related to the US government abandoning the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. Since then, the Federal Reserve has been able to debase the US dollar without limit.

I think the dollar’s transformation into a purely fiat currency has eroded the rule of law and morality in the US. It’s similar to what happened in the Roman Empire after it started debasing its currency.

What do you think, Doug?

Doug Casey: All the world’s governments and central banks share a common philosophy, which drives these policies. They believe that you create economic activity by stimulating demand, and you stimulate demand by printing money. And, of course, it’s true, in a way. Roughly the same way a counterfeiter can stimulate a local economy.

Unfortunately, they ignore that, and completely ignore that the way a person or a society becomes wealthy is by producing more than they consume and saving the difference. That difference, savings, is how you create capital. Without capital you’re reduced to subsistence, scratching at the earth with a stick. These people think that by inflating—which is to say destroying—the currency, they can create prosperity. But what they’re really doing, is destroying capital: When you destroy the value of the currency, that discourages people from saving it. And when people don’t save, they can’t build capital, and the vicious cycle goes on.

This is destructive for civilization itself, in both the long term and the short term. The more paper money, the more credit, they create, the more society focuses on finance, as opposed to production. It’s why there are many times more people studying finance than science. The focus is increasingly on speculation, not production. Financial engineering, not mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering. And lots of laws and regulations to keep the unstable structure from collapsing.

What keeps a truly civil society together isn’t laws, regulations, and police. It"s peer pressure, social opprobrium, moral approbation, and your reputation. These are the four elements that keep things together. Western Civilization is built on voluntarism. But, as the State grows, that’s being replaced by coercion in every aspect of society. There are regulations on the most obscure areas of life. As Harvey Silverglate pointed out in his book, the average American commits three felonies a day. Whether he’s caught and prosecuted is a subject of luck and the arbitrary will of some functionary. That’s antithetical to the core values of Western Civilization.

Nick Giambruno: Speaking of ancient civilizations like Rome, interest rates are about the lowest they’ve been in 5,000 years of recorded history. Trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds trade at negative yields.

Of course, this couldn’t happen in a free market. It’s only possible because of central bank manipulation.

How will artificially low interest rates affect the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: It’s really, really serious. I previously thought it was metaphysically impossible to have negative interest rates but, in the Bizarro World central banks have created, it’s happened.

Negative interest rates discourage saving. Once again, saving is what builds capital. Without capital you wind up as an empty shell—Rome in 450 A.D., or Detroit today—lots of wonderful but empty buildings and no economic activity. Worse, it forces people to desperately put their money in all manner of idiotic speculations in an effort to stay ahead of inflation. They wind up chasing the bubbles the funny money creates.

Let me re-emphasize something: in order for science and technology to advance you need capital. Where does capital come from? It comes from people producing more than they consume and saving the difference. Debt, on the other hand, means you’re living above your means. You’re either consuming the capital others have saved, or you’re mortgaging your future.

Zero and negative interest rate policies, and the creation of money out of nowhere, are actually destructive of civilization itself. It makes the average guy feel that he’s not in control of his own destiny. He starts believing that the State, or luck, or Allah will provide for him. That attitude is typical of people from backward parts of the world—not Western Civilization.

Nick Giambruno: What does it say about the economy and society that people work so hard to interpret what officials from the Federal Reserve and other central banks say?

Doug Casey: It’s a shameful waste of time. They remind me of primitives seeking the counsel of witch doctors. One hundred years ago, the richest people in the country—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and such—made their money creating industries that actually made stuff. Now, the richest people in the country just shuffle money around. They get rich because they’re close to the government and the hydrant of currency materialized by the Federal Reserve. I’d say it’s a sign that society in the US has become quite degraded.

The world revolves much less around actual production, but around guessing the direction of financial markets. Negative interest rates are creating bubbles, and will eventually result in an economic collapse.

Nick Giambruno: Negative interest rates are essentially a tax on savings. A lot of people would rather pull their money out of the bank and stuff it under a mattress than suffer that sting.

The economic central planners know this. It’s why they’re using negative interest rates to ramp up the War on Cash—the push to eliminate paper currency and create a cashless society.

The banking system is very fragile. Banks don’t hold much paper cash. It’s mostly digital bytes on a computer. If people start withdrawing paper money en masse, it won’t take much to bring the whole system down.

Their solution is to make accessing cash harder, and in some cases, illegal. That’s why the economic witch doctors at Harvard are pounding the table to get rid of the $100 bill.

Take France, for example. It’s now illegal to make cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting them properly.

Negative interest rates have turbocharged the War on Cash. If the central planners win this war, it would be the final deathblow to financial privacy.

How does this all relate to the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: I believe the next step in their idiotic plan is to abolish cash. Decades ago they got rid of gold coinage, which used to circulate day to day in people’s pockets. Then they got rid of silver coinage. Now, they’re planning to get rid of cash altogether. So you won’t even have euros or dollars or pounds in your wallet anymore, or if you do, it will only be very small denominations. Everything else is going to have to be done through electronic payment processing.

This is a huge disaster for the average person: absolutely everything that you buy or sell, other than perhaps a candy bar or a hamburger, is going to have to go through the banking system. Thus, the government will be able to monitor every transaction and payment. Financial privacy, even what’s left of it today, will literally cease to exist.

Privacy is one of the big differences between a civilized society and a primitive society. In a primitive society, in your little dirt hut village, anybody can look through your window or pull back the flap on your tent. You have no privacy. Everybody can hear everything; see anything. This was one of the marvelous things about Western Civilization—privacy was valued, and respected. But that concept, like so many others, is on its way out…

Nick Giambruno: You’ve mentioned before that language and words provide important clues to the collapse of Western Civilization. How so?

Doug Casey: Many of the words you hear, especially on television and other media, are confused, conflated, or completely misused. Many recent changes in the way words are used are corrupting the language. As George Orwell liked to point out, to control language is to control thought. The corruption of language is adding to the corruption of civilization itself. This is not a trivial factor in the degradation of Western Civilization.

Words—their exact meanings, and how they’re used—are critically important. If you don’t mean what you say and say what you mean, then it’s impossible to communicate accurately. Forget about transmitting philosophical concepts.

Take for example shareholders and stakeholders. We all know that a shareholder actually owns a share in a company, but have you noticed that over the last generation shareholders have become less important than stakeholders? Even though stakeholders are just hangers-on, employees, or people who are looking to get in on a shakedown. But everybody slavishly acknowledges, “Yes, we’ve got to look out for the stakeholders.”

Where did that concept come from? It’s a recent creation, but Boobus americanus seems to think it was carved in stone at the country’s founding.

We’re told to protect them, as if they were a valuable and endangered species. I say, “A pox upon stakeholders.” If they want a vote in what a company does, then they ought to become shareholders. Stakeholders are a class of being created out of nothing by Cultural Marxists for the purpose of shaking down shareholders.

*  *  *

There’s major turmoil ahead for Western Civilization.  We expect the fallout to be far worse than 2008. Most investors can’t handle that sort of chaos. But Doug Casey and his team know how to turn it into huge profits. They’re sharing need-to-know information about the coming global economic meltdown in this time-sensitive video. Click here to watch it now.

Doug Casey Warns, The EU's Collapse Is Now "Imminent"

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

On April 23, French voters could drive the entire European Union into its grave.

Doug Casey and I recently discussed this historic election—and why it matters to US investors.

Nick Giambruno: Doug, you predicted the fall of the European Union a few years ago. What has changed since then?

Doug Casey: Well, what"s changed is that the entire situation has gotten much worse. The inevitable has now become the imminent.

The European Union evolved, devolved actually, from basically a free trade pact among a few countries to a giant, dysfunctional, overreaching bureaucracy. Free trade is an excellent idea. However, you don"t need to legislate free trade; that’s almost a contradiction in terms. A free trade pact between different governments is unnecessary for free trade. An individual country interested in prosperity and freedom only needs to eliminate all import and export duties, and all import and export quotas. When a country has duties or quotas, it’s essentially putting itself under embargo, shooting its economy in the foot. Businesses should trade with whomever they want for their own advantage.

But that wasn"t the way the Europeans did it. The Eurocrats, instead, created a treaty the size of a New York telephone book, regulating everything. This is the problem with the European Union. They say it is about free trade, but really it’s about somebody’s arbitrary idea of “fair trade,” which amounts to regulating everything. In addition to its disastrous economic consequences, it creates misunderstandings and confusion in the mind of the average person. Brussels has become another layer of bureaucracy on top of all the national layers and local layers for the average European to deal with.

The European Union in Brussels is composed of a class of bureaucrats that are extremely well paid, have tremendous benefits, and have their own self-referencing little culture. They’re exactly the same kind of people that live within the Washington, D.C. beltway.

The EU was built upon a foundation of sand, doomed to failure from the very start. The idea was ill-fated because the Swedes and the Sicilians are as different from each other as the Poles and the Irish. There are linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, and big differences in the standard of living. Artificial political constructs never last. The EU is great for the “elites” in Brussels; not so much for the average citizen.

Meanwhile, there’s a centrifugal force even within these European countries. In Spain, the Basques and the Catalans want to split off, and in the UK, the Scots want to make the United Kingdom quite a bit less united. You"ve got to remember that before Garibaldi, Italy was scores of little dukedoms and principalities that all spoke their own variations of the Italian language. And the same was true in what’s now Germany before Bismarck in 1871.

In Italy 89% of the Venetians voted to separate a couple of years ago. The Italian South Tyrol region, where 70% of the people speak German, has a strong independence movement. There are movements in Corsica and a half dozen other departments in France. Even in Belgium, the home of the EU, the chances are excellent that Flanders will separate at some point.

The chances are better in the future that the remaining countries in Europe are going to fall apart as opposed to being compressed together artificially.

And from strictly a philosophical point of view, the ideal should not be one world government, which the “elite” would prefer, but about seven billion small individual governments. That would be much better from the point of view of freedom and prosperity.

Nick Giambruno: How does Brexit affect the future of the European Union?

Doug Casey: Well, it"s the beginning of the end. The inevitable has now become the imminent. Britain has always been perhaps the most different culture of all of those in the European Union. They entered reluctantly and late, and never seriously considered losing the pound for the euro.

You"re going to see other countries leaving the EU. The next one might be Italy. All of the Italian banks are truly and totally bankrupt at this point. Who"s going to kiss that and make it better? Is the rest of the European Union going to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to make the average Italian depositor well again? I don"t think so. There"s an excellent chance that Italy is going to get rid of the euro and leave the EU.

If Marine Le Pen wins the elections, France will leave as well. That would be a smart move. She would also want to deport the migrants from Africa that are living in tent camps and cardboard boxes everywhere. Another good move. These people aren’t self-supporting, and are acting to destroy what’s left of French culture. Then again, Le Pen herself is no prize. She wants to continue the welfare state, and increase regulations and taxes. The French have zero good alternatives, at least if you care about either free minds or free markets. But that’s true everywhere in Europe. The very concept of liberty is dead in Europe.

Nick Giambruno: Why should Americans care about this?

Doug Casey: Well, just as the breakup of the Soviet Union had a good effect for both the world at large and for Americans, the breakup of the EU should be viewed in the same light. Freeing an economy anywhere increases prosperity and opportunity everywhere. And it sets a good example. So Americans ought to look forward to the breakup of the EU almost as much as the Europeans themselves. Unfortunately, most Americans are quite insular. And Europeans are so used to socialism that they have even less grasp of economics than Americans. But it’s going to happen anyway.

Nick Giambruno: What are the investment implications?

Doug Casey: Initially there"s going to be some chaos, and some inconvenience. Conventional investors don’t like wild markets, but turbulence is actually a good thing from the point of view of a speculator. It’s a question of your psychological attitude. Understanding psychology is as important as economics. They’re the two things that make the markets what they are. Volatility is actually your friend in the investment world.

People are naturally afraid of upsets. They"re afraid of any kind of crisis. This is natural. But it"s only during a crisis that you can get a real bargain. You have to look at the bright side and take a different attitude than most people have.

Nick Giambruno: If you position yourself on the right side of this thing, do you think you can profit from the collapse of the EU?

Doug Casey: Yes. Once the EU falls apart, there are going to be huge investment opportunities. People forget how cheap markets can become. I remember in the mid-1980s, there were three markets in the world in particular I was very interested in: Hong Kong, Belgium, and Spain. All three of those markets had similar characteristics. You could buy stocks in those markets for about half of book value, about three or four times earnings, and average dividend yields of their indices were 12–15%—individual stocks were sometimes much more—and of course since then, those dividends have gone way up. The stock prices have soared.

So I expect that that"s going to happen in the future. In one, several, many, or most of the world’s approximately 40 investable markets. Right now, however, we"re involved in a worldwide bubble in equities. It can go the opposite direction. People forget how cheap stocks can get.

I think we"re headed into very bad times. Chances are excellent you"re going to see tremendous bargains. People are chasing after stocks right now with 1% dividend yields and 30 times earnings, and they want to buy them. At some point in the future these stocks are going to be selling for three times earnings and they’re going to be yielding 5, maybe 10% in dividends. But at that point most people will be afraid to buy them. In fact, they won"t even want to know they exist at that point.

I’m not a believer in market timing. But, that said, I think it makes sense to hold fire when the market is anomalously high.

The chaos that’s building up right now in Europe can be a good thing—if you"re well positioned. You don"t want to go down with the sinking Titanic. You want to survive so you can get on the next boat taking you to a tropical paradise. But right now you"re entering the stormy North Atlantic.

*  *  *

There’s more turmoil ahead as French voters decide the EU’s fate on April 23—and it could be catastrophic for global currency and stock markets. We expect the fallout to be far worse than 2008. Most investors can’t handle that sort of chaos. But Doug Casey and his team know how to turn it into huge profits. They’re sharing need-to-know information about the coming global economic meltdown in this time-sensitive video. Click here to watch it now.

Will Donald Trump Reverse The War On Cash?

Submitted by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

I recently sat down with my friend Jason Burack from Wall St for Main St.

Jason and I had an in-depth discussion on the decline of globalism, the War on Cash, and more.

I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.

*  *  *

Jason Burack: It seems that globalism may be on the retreat. What’s your opinion about that, in light of Brexit, Donald Trump winning, and the Italian referendum failing?

Nick Giambruno: I think you’re right, Jason. Right now globalism is on the decline. But let’s define “globalism” before I explain why. This word gets thrown around a lot. But most people don’t really know what it means.

It’s very simple. Globalism is the centralization of power into a couple of global institutions: the EU, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, NAFTA, NATO, and so on. It’s really just a polite way of describing world government, or what George H.W. Bush termed the New World Order.

I think globalism and the centralization of power is always a bad thing. People who value individual freedom and economic freedom… really, freedom in general, should oppose it.

It’s an interesting moment in history. Those three things you just mentioned—Brexit, Trump, and the failure of the Italian referendum—are clear signs that globalism is losing steam.

Whether it’s a sort of one step back, two steps forward thing or the ideology of globalism is really on its way out remains to be seen.

Jason: Look at what’s going on with Brexit. The elites in London and Brussels are still fighting it. You had your boots on the ground in Italy. How angry were the people you talked to there about the referendum? Are they actually serious about leaving the EU?

Nick Giambruno: Well, here’s the thing. Most Italians didn’t know what the referendum was about. They just knew a “Yes” vote was a vote of confidence in Matteo Renzi’s pro-EU, pro-globalist government.

In short, the referendum was about taking power away from Italy’s regional and city governments and concentrating it more in the country’s central government. So it was worth opposing on that basis alone.

Most Italians didn’t understand the complex and arcane constitutional changes written into the referendum. So it took on a life of its own when Matteo Renzi promised to resign if it failed. That’s a vote everyone can understand.

When Renzi made that promise, he thought it was a safe bet. It’s similar to what happened to David Cameron with the Brexit vote.

But after I spent a few weeks in Italy—I’m also an Italian citizen—it was clear the referendum was no slam dunk. That’s why I predicted it would fail, and that Renzi would resign, months in advance.

Jason: So, what happens next, now that Renzi’s government has collapsed?

Nick Giambruno: There’s a rising populist party in Italy called the Five Star Movement. It’s actually led by a comedian. The party basically started out as a joke a few years ago.

Italians are so frustrated with so-called “mainstream” political parties that they’ve deserted them en masse for the Five Star Movement and other anti-establishment populist parties like the Lega Nord. The Five Star Movement is basically leading the polls as the most popular party in Italy.

All of Italy’s populist parties want a referendum on ditching the euro for Italy’s old currency, the lira. I think it would pass.

Italy hasn’t had any real economic growth since it joined the euro in 1999. That’s pretty profound. The Italian economy is in the same place it was 17 years ago. A lot of that is because the euro makes Italy uncompetitive with countries like Germany.

The next Italian government could be a coalition of anti-EU populist parties. If that happens, there’s an excellent chance Italy could leave the euro.

Keep in mind that Italy is a core member of the euro. If it leaves, France would probably leave, too. And if that happens, the euro is finished.

Jason: Without the euro, what’s left holding the EU together?

Nick Giambruno: Almost nothing. The euro is the main glue. Without it, the whole EU could unravel.

We’re still early in the process. But it doesn’t look good for the globalists and the Eurocrats. I think historians will look back at the failure of the December 4 Italian referendum as a crucial tipping point.

With globalism failing, I’m not sure what happens next. No one does.

We could see a rise of nationalism, which wouldn’t be a good thing. Or political power could diffuse even further, which would be a better outcome. Decentralization is good for individual and economic freedom.

So, instead of a rise of nationalism—which would strengthen the existing nation-states—European countries could split apart. Italy, for example, has only been a “country” since the mid-1800s. There are a number of serious secessionist movements in Italy and other European countries. I think there’s a very good chance some European nation-states will break apart—not just in our lifetimes, but in the intermediate future.

Jason: If Italy returns to the Italian lira, do you think it would prevent bailouts of the troubled Italian banks?

Nick Giambruno: The Italian banking system is a mile-high house of cards that’s getting wobblier by the day. As I mentioned, the Italian economy has stagnated for years. It hasn’t really grown since it joined the euro. This has translated into big problems for Italy’s banking system.

Italian banks have made hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of loans to Italian individuals and businesses—loans that have soured along with the economy. They’re like an insatiable black hole that’s swallowing all the capital in Italy’s banking system.

Returning to the lira wouldn’t herald an era of sound economics. It just means the Italian government could recapitalize the banking system by turning on the printing press. It can’t do that with the euro.

On a somewhat related note, this example relates to the seemingly eternal inflation/deflation debate. I think it shows that ultimately, in a fiat money system where the government can create as many new currency units as it wants, deflation will always lose out to inflation.

Things are very different than they were in the 1930s. Back then, the last remnants of the gold standard meant most governments couldn’t print money to bail out failing banks. This limited their ability to create new currency units. Of course, that’s not the case today.

It’s completely predictable what any government with its back against the wall will do. They always choose the easy option, the option that preserves their own power… money printing on a massive scale.

That’s why inflation always wins out in the end.

Jason: That brings me to my next point. It seems like the elites are really pushing for a cashless society. Do you think Donald Trump is able to or would even want to stop this?

Nick Giambruno: I think the War on Cash is directly related to the world’s unsound banking systems. Thanks to the magic—or more accurately, institutionalized fraud—of fractional reserve banking, most banks only keep a small fraction of their depositors’ money on hand. It’s a very unstable, shaky situation.

One of the biggest mistakes the average person makes is thinking the money he puts in his bank account is his. It’s not.

Once you deposit money in the bank, it’s no longer your property. It belongs to the bank. What you own is a promise from the bank to repay you. Technically, you’re an unsecured creditor. That means you’re on the bottom of the totem pole if the bank goes bust. And you’re very likely to get burned if the bank gets in trouble.

Money in a bank is a very different beast than cash stuffed under your mattress. Yet 99.9% of people conflate the two.

Many people think the FDIC or some government safety net will rescue them if and when their bank fails. But the FDIC has only a couple of pennies for every dollar it supposedly insures. It wouldn’t take much to wipe out all of their reserves. So it’s really a false sense of security.

The average person is not even dimly aware of the enormous risks inherent in the banking system.

Jason: How does this all relate to the War on Cash?

Nick Giambruno: The War on Cash is a prop. It forces people out of cash and into banks. So it’s no surprise the war is ramping up as banking systems deteriorate.

Then you have what Nassim Taleb would call the “Intellectual Yet Idiot” from Harvard—people like Ken Rogoff and Larry Summers who’ve made a cashless society their mission. And it all starts with eliminating the $100 bill.

These people get prominent space in the mainstream financial media. They create an echo chamber of calls for a cashless society. It’s creepy and totalitarian. I mean, what kind of a person wakes up in the morning wanting to do things that would extinguish many of our remaining liberties?

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It"s necessary to protect human dignity, which is essential to a free society. But unfortunately, a lot of people have forgotten that.

Also, in a cashless society, the government can concoct an unlimited number of new ways to confiscate your wealth.

The War on Cash is a mortal threat to individual and economic liberty. I think its advocates are clearly sociopaths and enemies of the common man. Unfortunately, I don’t see the war slowing down. I see it heating up.

Just look at what happened in India recently. On the day of the US election—when the whole world was distracted—the Indian government ambushed its citizens. Instantly, and without warning, it declared certain high-value currency notes invalid.

They said, “Oh, well, tax evaders, drug dealers, and terrorists use cash so we have to get rid of it or make it harder to use.”

It’s completely ridiculous. Anybody who can think critically and independently can see right through this. It’s simply a clumsily executed power grab. It’s done nothing but create chaos and harm the Indian economy.

Yet, when I read about it in the mainstream financial media, I often come across articles praising the Indian government for its bold reforms. It’s quite strange, like we’re living in a bizarro world.

Instead of resisting, the Indian people sheepishly accepted their government’s blatant power grab. This will likely embolden other governments… and the Intellectual Yet Idiot class, of course.

It means we should expect the War on Cash to accelerate in 2017. I haven’t seen any evidence suggesting Trump would reverse any of this.