5/31/23: DIALING DOWN THE DOLLAR W/ ALAN JOHNSON

We’re not living the American dream. We’re living a financial nightmare. The US government is funding its existence with a credit card.

The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $31 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033. That translates to roughly $246,000 per taxpayer or $94,000 for every single person in the country.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in. The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

I don’t think it’s farfetched to say that we, the people of the United States of America, have been gaslit. We have been manipulated, and treated like children, and now we will be punished for the overreach and overspending that comes with the political hypocrisy of the debt ceiling.

It is just one more piece of drama that our government thrills in — because it again is part of the gaslighting project that seems to be underway in our nation today.

I am always worried that even when you are prepared for some sort of disaster, you can’t be prepared enough, especially when looks as if the world is deliberately dialing down the dollar

Losing your income and becoming dependent on handouts doled out by the government is bad enough but complaining and taking out your frustrations with boycotts and bank runs are one more step in these gaslighting programs meant to drive you crazy and make you poor.

It is sad that when you try to warn people you are treated like a crazy conspiracy theorist who should be punished because of the harm you’re causing to others because you are pushing fear porn and hyperbole.

When you look at it this way, it feels like the entire US government and media have colluded to abuse the people. a lot of evidence has been produced that shows the Biden family may have received money from influence-peddling, but the media tells us not to believe it.

And like good little victims, it seems like a hefty portion of the country is refusing to believe the evidence, instead believing in the good intentions of their abusers. They’ve been gaslit, brainwashed, and unable to break free of the manipulation.

America finds itself in an era of criminal capitalism, and the practice of gaslighting has made us all victims of one of the greatest financial swindles of all time,

Each and every major financial swindle has had a perverse ripple effect throughout the entire economy. This is especially the case where the negative consequences have spread downward through local banks, local manufacturing and service industries to employees, students and the self-employed.

The Money situation is so depressing that people are probably more concerned about trying to hold families together with what little money they are getting.

Many are buying lottery tickets — but those are not sure things –many things aren’t these days.

The sharks are closing in — and a lot of Americans are hemorrhaging money.

There was a time when you earned or received a lot of money it was exciting because you could dream about all of the great things you can do with it.

But now money seems to be more of a burden because you know it is not going to go as far as it used to– or it is not going to go to all of those pleasures you used to use it for besides the obvious bills and taxes.

For example, Las Vegas used to be a great place to go on vacation– but the last time I was there I noticed that something had changed. You used to be treated like a King and you could get value with hotel stays and food. Now you walk off the plane at the airport and it seems you have to pay to breathe in that city.

Not only that but more people are losing in the casinos than winning and now Black Jack payoffs have been reduced and minimum bets have increased.

In 2022, blackjack players lost $1 billion at the tables on the Strip, according to Nevada state data.

Minimum bets to play blackjack are higher while payouts for winning hands are lower, and placing bets in roulette is riskier on the Las Vegas Strip.

Over two-thirds of blackjack tables on the Strip have shifted from 3:2 payouts to 6:5. Tables that pay out at 6:5 give the winning gambler $12 for every $10 bet as opposed to winning $15 in a 3:2 payout.

Bets at the roulette tables on the Strip are also getting harder to win thanks to a triple-zero iteration of the game that favors the house rather than the gambler.

So even at some of the many prestigious casinos on the strip your dollar is worth a lot less — and it is time to realize that literally, the chips are down — in this bust economy.

Rivalry with China, the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine and wrangling once again in Washington over the U.S. debt ceiling have put the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currency under scrutiny.

The dollar share of official FX reserves fell to a 20-year low of 58% in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to International Monetary Fund data.

The dollar share of the central bank’s foreign reserves in the final quarter of 2022 did hit a two-decade low, but the move has been gradual and it is now at almost a similar level as in 1995.

While there may not be a single-dollar successor, mushrooming alternatives could create a multipolar world.

Global central banks are looking at a wider variety of assets, including corporate debt, tangible assets such as real estate, and other currencies.

On May 24, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies released a critical new analysis of the militarized budget in the United States, “The Warfare State: How Funding for Militarism Compromises our Welfare.”

The new report found that this past year, out of a $1.8 trillion federal discretionary budget, the U.S. spent a staggering $1.1 trillion – or 62% – of that budget on militarism and war.

Threats to cut spending for vital domestic programs have featured prominently in the debt ceiling debate in recent weeks, but spending on militarism has been almost entirely exempt from the discussion.

When we invest so heavily in militarism at home and abroad, we deprive our own communities and people of solutions to problems that pose immediate security threats.

We are suffering as the value of the dollar plummets and inflation continues to take a bite out of American incomes.

All this serves the profits of a wealthy few war profiteers, at everyone else’s expense.

It is criminal but yet we will not acknowledge how this administration has put  Americans in a very bad situation financially.

So what happens if the dollar falls?

For starters, foreigners don’t need as many dollars. Meaning there are extra dollars nobody wants. This makes the price of the dollar fall—it gets weaker.

It’s usually slow at first, then picks up speed if it keeps going, a progressive rush for the exits. This is because the first ones out only lose a little bit, but the longer they waited, the more they’ll lose.

Who’s left holding the bag as the dollar becomes increasingly worthless?

Easy: Americans.

The only people on earth who are actually obligated to use the US dollar, thanks to an obscure law passed in 1862 as a wartime emergency that nevertheless managed to stick around for 151 years.

So Americans have no choice: unless you swapped your dollars for gold, or silver, Bitcoin or Pork bellies, you go down with the ship.

It is that simple and that desperate.

A falling dollar drives up the price of everything that comes into America. But it also drives up the price of anything traded on world markets. Meaning the raw materials and imported components that drive American factories and sustain American consumers.

The first to jump would be gasoline, heating fuel, and food prices—all of those are world markets. Along with prescription medicines since China has a creeping stranglehold thanks to our idiotic over-regulation—indeed, this is more or less true for every consumer product that China dominates: we shot ourselves in the foot, and now it’s coming back to bite us.

Next, those expensive commodities and input prices pour out through the supply chain. Yanking prices up in industry after industry—cars, construction materials like steel or concrete, clothes, furniture, TVs, computers, and medical devices.

Gone are the days of affordable luxuries—now you gotta work for them.

If foreigners get nervous, they sell not only dollars, they sell assets denominated in dollars. Starting with the most liquid: stocks, bonds, and treasuries.

About 40% of American stocks are owned by foreigners and about one-third of corporate bonds. If foreigners start fleeing, both plunge. This could cut your 401k almost in half, and it could drive up borrowing costs for companies to impossible levels.

Leading to mass bankruptcies on top of the wave of bankruptcies the Fed’s already engineering to try and stop the inflation it started.

It doesn’t stop there: one-third of US treasuries are owned by foreigners—over $8 trillion in bonds. If foreigners start dumping those, it will either send US government debt service soaring by potentially hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Or, much more likely, it forces the Fed to step in and buy up all that foreign demand, flooding yet more trillions into the economy.

This would flip inflation overnight marching up towards double- or triple digits.

Your cost of living goes up.

There are ways to stop this. But given the Washington clown show with the debt ceiling yet again, paired with their obsession with sanctions that scare foreign countries off the dollar, Washington isn’t remotely close to the serious thinking it will take to keep the ship from sinking.

Losing reserve currency status would savage the American economy, and it would savage the American people. No country needs reserve currency status—after all, it doesn’t benefit the people. But, like climbing a cliffside with no gear, once you go halfway, you better not let go.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be jailed for fraud.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.