On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower closed out his second term and delivered his farewell speech on live TV.
A highly decorated 5-star general, “Ike” Eisenhower became Supreme Allied Commander during World War II.
In charge of the combined Allied Forces that defeated Nazi Germany, he was the most powerful soldier in American history.
He then served two terms as U.S. President.
After 46 years in public service, Ike delivered his farewell address to the American people.
He referenced the 3 wars America had just fought. He expressed pride
in America’s strength and wished the best for his successor, John F.
Kennedy.
But Ike also issued an unprecedented warning that almost no one paid attention to at the time.
He warned of a behind-the-scenes shift in Washington DC that had “grave implications” for America.
He exposed a group of
unelected insiders that threatened to take full control of the U.S. government.
He revealed the
dark side of American power…a shadow government…
And as you’ll soon see, that shadowy group has only grown since
Ike’s time, silently expanding to take over the American money system,
Wall Street, the Pentagon and the White House itself.
This elite answers to no one: not voters, not Congress, not even the President himself.
But today, the shadow government has brought us to the verge of a
historic crisis. Not a military crisis. Not a government crisis. But a
financial crisis…
even worse than the meltdown of 2008…
You see, while these powerful insiders could
control the military, the bureaucracy, Congress, and the banks…there was
one thing they couldn’t understand or control. And now it could be on
the verge of a major blow-up.
In 1961, General Eisenhower continued his prescient warning:
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Just three days after Ike’s farewell speech, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35
th President of the United States.
Kennedy took Eisenhower’s farewell warning seriously, and took on this unelected cabal of powerful insiders.
JFK even wanted to disband a major part of the shadow government for
good before they grew too powerful. Following Eisenhower’s warning, he
threatened to:
splinter them into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds…”
Soon after, JFK was assassinated. There are many controversies around JFK’s murder. Who did it? Why?
All we know for sure is that, since that dark day in Dallas,
no other president has dared challenge that group of unelected insiders. Their power has only grown…
After Kennedy, their influence spread even wider than Eisenhower feared.
In a single, sudden move – on August 15, 1971 – they took control of America’s money. And nobody even noticed.
Then, their tentacles spread through Wall Street as they exerted control over the financial system and the economy…
This forever changed the world’s financial system.
Unfortunately for us all, the powerful group that Eisenhower warned about is more powerful than ever.
They aren’t organized into one federal department. They don’t hold
gatherings or have a single leader. There is no secret handshake or
hidden membership list.
Rather, this shadow government – and its leaders – exists right out in the open.
As Mike Lofgren, who worked in Congress for 27 years, wrote:
There is another government
concealed behind the one that is visible, a hybrid entity of public and
private institutions ruling the country… connected to, but only
intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we
choose.”
And all the evidence points that today, this shadow government
controls almost everything: the military and intelligence services,
homeland security and the TSA, social security, medical care, the
federal income tax system, the U.S. dollar, the banks and the entire
financial system itself.
The financial connection is most important. And truly global.
It’s an open secret that explains why so many of us feel like something “isn’t quite right” in the world…
And once you realize how deep and far-reaching this shadow government
is, the dots begin to connect. Then you will see why things work the
way they do.
And it’s terrifying.
In a moment, you’ll see how this unelected group exerts power over your freedom and finances.
How it has wrested control over how and when you retire, how you
spend your own money, what taxes you’re made to pay, your access to
medical care and even what foods you eat.
Once you know the secret behind this powerful group, you’ll understand:
- Why your vote rarely matters… (And why there will
be little difference between a Democrat or Republican president, despite
what they claim in their campaigns… )
- Why most everyday Americans feel like it’s impossible to get ahead,
despite all of our so-called “progress” over the past 40 years. ( The
average American hasn’t gotten a raise in decades, earning no more than
he did in the 1970s… )
- The reason why, since 1979, the top bracket has experienced seven times more income growth than the middle class…
- Why America keeps waging aggressive and endless wars that are designed to be lost, at great human cost ( and cost to the taxpayer… )
- Why your hold-in-your-hand cash, your privacy, and your core financial freedoms are quickly disappearing in America…
- And how the feds pulled off the biggest legal money grab in
modern history. They stole $8 trillion from savers and retirees – and
transferred it to Wall Street and their crony friends.
You’ll see the whole story when I reveal how the shadow government works later in this video…
You’ll see how the dots connect…the lies, the frauds, the delusions.
You’ll see how they’ve brought us inexorably close to another devastating financial crisis.
But the good news is this: you can take specific, proven steps to protect yourself and your family --
on the individual level -- if you get started soon.
My name is Bill Bonner.
Forty-three years ago I drove into Washington D.C. in my ’53 Chevy pickup.
Like so many others, I wanted to change our government.
Get it back to its roots.
I was naïve…I was young. So I joined an advocate organization called the National Taxpayers Union.
We tried to spread the message: unless these insiders were brought under control, it would bankrupt our kids and grandkids.
We grew our membership to 125,000 like-minded folks.
Obviously, we failed. Since then, the federal debt has more than
quintupled. The debt of the entire nation has increased 10 times.
And the group of insiders Eisenhower warned about has only gotten richer and more powerful.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m not running for office. I’m not asking for your vote or for you to sign a petition.
Instead, I’m warning you about an imminent breakdown in the US economy caused by the corruption of our financial system.
And although I’ll touch on politics in today’s broadcast, I
won’t offer a political solution.
Because there is none.
I learned
that the hard way.
Today’s message is about your money and your future. It’s about your ability to pay your bills and retire comfortably.
It’s designed specifically to help you help your children to live in a safe, prosperous and free country.
That’s why I’ll focus on individual financial solutions you can put in place on your own.
Why the government you vote for is only
“the tip of the iceberg”…
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “just the tip of the iceberg.”
Only 10% of an iceberg appears above the water while the remaining 90% remains unseen, below the surface.
Here’s a good picture that shows that…
This iceberg represents the U.S. government:
The government you elect is only the tip of the iceberg.
The remaining 90%, which controls the real money and power, is unelected and hidden from view.
That picture is a perfect metaphor that describes the cabal of
unelected power brokers that Eisenhower warned about in January of 1961…
The tip of the iceberg – the part that you can see, sitting above the
waterline -- is the elected, visible government. It’s both houses of
Congress, the President, your state and local governments, the judicial
branch…
But the part you can’t see represents the real power.
It’s called the Deep State.
The Deep State doesn’t face elections and isn’t limited by term limits or the public voice. It answers to no one but itself.
It consists of the careerist bureaucrats, the silent intelligence and surveillance apparatus, the Pentagon paper pushers (but
not
the real soldiers), the lobbyists backed by billions of untracked
dollars, Wall Street, crony contractors, the Federal Reserve and the
vast military industrial complex…
All of those seemingly disparate forces form America’s Deep State.
And their main goal is simple: to preserve and expand their own power.
And, just as the portion of the iceberg beneath the water forms
90% of the iceberg’s total mass, the shadowy Deep State exerts 90% of
the American government’s power.
This is why nothing seems to change in Washington DC.
So you can see why so many Americans feel that something’s deeply wrong with the country.
And you can see why tens of millions of Americans have long since given up on “the establishment.”
It is because of the Deep State that Eisenhower warned about over 50 years ago.
Put simply, the Deep State does not share your
concerns or your problems. Often, it intentionally causes many of our
problems because it profits from them.
Most important, it is concerned with its own wealth and power – and it only gets them by taking them from you.
In short, the Deep State is your enemy.
But that’s not the end of the story. It is only the beginning…my
research has uncovered a weak link in the entire chain of the Deep
State’s power and influence…a “fatal flaw” that threatens the whole
system at once.
It has to do with America’s money, and how this shadow government
never really understood how it works. Without realizing it, they created
a system with a ‘doomsday bug’ built into it…
Like a ‘sleeper cell’ this bug will soon spring to life, with
devastating consequences for our entire political and economic system.
The coming crisis promises to be even worse than the financial
meltdown of 2008 -- because since then, the problem has doubled in size,
and so has the threat it poses.
I anticipate that some will find my conclusions unbelievable, perhaps offensive or even “anti-American.”
But I simply followed my nearly four decades of research to its logical and necessary conclusion.
Of course, I could be wrong. And I hope I am. But I’ll reveal the
facts along with every corresponding step of my thinking to you today.
That way, you can see it all for yourself.
I’ll also show you the story behind that fatal flaw – and how it now
threatens your savings and investments – in just a moment. Now, I’ll
share my background so you can see for yourself if I’m a credible
source…
Like I said a moment ago, my name’s Bill Bonner.
I’m not a whistle blower, former CIA operative, ex-military man, or someone who leaks classified government information.
After all, I’ve never had access to any actual inside information because I’ve always been an outsider.
I’m just a curious citizen who had a nagging hunch many years ago – a hunch that everything wasn’t right in America.
And I’ve relentlessly followed that hunch to its logical conclusion, which I’m presenting to you today.
Here’s the beginning of that story of how I discovered the pin that will prick the Deep State’s bubble…
Around 35 years ago, I assembled a group of analysts – including the
former head of the BBC, and an Oxford scholar… to research, expose, and
even predict massive world shifts.
In 1987, we predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse. A few years later, that’s exactly what happened.
In 1989, I was personally mocked for predicting that the Japanese
stock market would crash. We wrote, “The long-running bull market in
Tokyo may be nearing an end.” Months later, the Japanese stock market
crashed. It has never recovered.
In 1993, we predicted the rise of Muslim terrorism, writing
“especially troubling for many in the West will be the rise of Islam.
This could be the biggest threat to world peace in the next two decades.
The bomb at New York’s World Trade Center is just a small taste of
what’s to come.”
Eight years later the September 11 attacks hit the World Trade Center.
In 2000, I sent out a note warning that a “day of reckoning” was at
hand for the dot-com boom. That very day the NASDAQ began a two-year,
77% decline.
And recently we predicted the crash of the housing bubble in 2008, along with lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Our success has allowed my once small group to grow into the largest
underground research network on the planet, with 2.4 million private
subscribers...
The FBI and CIA have even approached us for help on matters of national security.
But I don’t bring this up to brag.
I’m here because I think we’re about to get hit with another major shock…
in the U.S. money system…
One more important than anything my company has yet dealt with… rivaling and even surpassing the fall of the Soviet Union.
Except that this time it won’t be happening halfway around the world.
We won’t be watching it on CNN or Fox News from the comfort of our
living rooms.
The epicenter of the next great world shift will be right here in America. And the Deep State will be the cause of it all.
As I hinted before, the Deep State consists of the massive domestic
and foreign intelligence apparatus – the CIA, FBI, TSA and Homeland
Security…the huge Pentagon hierarchy…the tens of thousands of
bureaucrats buried in D.C., the lobbyists, the contractors, the
Congress, the President…
But today’s message pinpoints the most powerful segment of the Deep State – the part that controls America’s money.
As you’d expect, their control of America’s money allows the rest of
the Deep State operations to take place. They fund much of the
government…and transfer, literally, trillions of dollars to their crony
friends and privileged industries.
Without money, they can’t do anything. No legislation, no intelligence, no bribes, no foreign policy, no war, no nothing.
And, as it happens, that fatal flaw I’ve been warning you about is hidden within America’s money system. So this flaw will affect each and every American...
Now, I must warn you that some of the facts I’m about to tell you may seem incredible.
Yet, they are all true.
And I’m not about to ask you to sign up for some survival kit. Or ask
you for a political donation… or even get you to sign a petition.
I’m just going to tell you what I’ve discovered.
You can decide for yourself how seriously you want to take this threat.
I’m also going to tell you what my friends and I are doing to prepare ourselves.
And what you can do… for yourself, your family, and your wealth… as we enter an unprecedented moment in American history.
Let me explain…
For the entire time that I’ve been working alongside PhDs, analysts,
political operatives, and journalists to track and predict the greatest
shifts of our time…
I’ve been watching a single trend take shape…
For 35 years I’ve been studying it. And it turns out that General
Eisenhower was right to warn us back in 1961 – he was right about
everything.
In 1993 we warned that it would eventually meet a disturbing conclusion.
And today I think that’s exactly what’s about to happen.
In fact, we’ve recently passed what I believe to be a point of no
return, which means that a monetary crisis is now inevitable and
unstoppable. And it was caused, unwittingly, by the Deep State.
It will start small.
Maybe you’ll try to get money out of the ATM one day and find that it isn’t working…
Maybe you’ll be at a restaurant with your wife and when the check comes your credit card will be denied…
You’ll call your bank. You’ll get a prerecorded message from some government agency you don’t recognize.
As I said, it will start small.
But it will spread to our food supply chain… our gas stations… our banks… our government…
Prices will swing wildly from one day to the next… investments will
be impossible to sell… Social Security checks will pile up uncashed on
your kitchen table…
potential home buyers will walk away… And one by one every service
you and I and every other American has come to rely on will shut down…
paralyzing our country… and changing the course of this nation’s
history.
I realize that must sound unbelievable…
But understand that I, and analysts within my network, have made predictions like this in the past.
I’ve been doubted before. I’ve even come to expect it.
Even when I’m right.
For instance, back in the late 1980s, I became convinced that the Japanese stock market was about to crash.
At that time, the Japanese had just bought New York City’s
Rockefeller Center for $846 million. They had also bought Columbia
Pictures for $4.4 billion.
And American tire maker, Firestone, was also suddenly a Japanese company.
They were selling more cars than we were. They were making better
computers and TVs. On the face of it, it was crazy to bet against them…
Yet on Page 87 of our annual forecast of 1989, we wrote:
In our view, the Japanese stock market is one of the
two most overvalued markets in the world. The long-running bull market
in Tokyo may be nearing an end.”
That year the Japanese stock market was at its highest point in history.
Movies and books at the time were depicting a future with Japan as the No. 1 superpower.
Maybe that sounds foolish now, but back then it was a fact, and
everyone thought we were crazy for predicting the end of Japanese
domination.
I remember in October of that year, one of my friends, a former economist for the CIA named Mark Skousen, made a joke of it.
As a present, he gave me a mockup of a book:
How I Called the Crash in Japan
– by Bill Bonner
I wish I had written that book.
Two months later, the Japanese stock market began a decline that is
still going on today as Japan entered what would later be called “the
lost decade.”
People just refused to believe that big change was on the way and that Japan would fizzle out.
But here’s the thing – the core reason beneath Japan’s spectacular rise…and its decades-long decline… is
the exact same thing underlying the money crisis that’s about to wash over America.
But, obviously, this problem is far larger today in America, because our economy dwarfs that of 1989 Japan…
In addition, in 1987 one of our analysts predicted the fall of the Soviet Union.
At the time, our politicians in Washington had been stockpiling
weapons to guard against what they thought was superior Soviet
technology.
The famous Team B report, commissioned by the CIA years earlier, had
claimed that the Soviet economy was booming and that they wouldn’t
hesitate to attack America.
Yet in 1987, we weren’t fooled. We wrote:
We have no doubt that sooner or later, but probably
sooner, many of the characteristic features of the Soviet system will be
abandoned. Put simply, communism is in its twilight.”
Sure enough, two years later the empire started to break apart.
By 1991 it was all over. Yet politicians and scholars – even a report
commissioned by George H. W. Bush (then CIA director) got it totally
wrong.
People just could not imagine that a world superpower could suddenly
become irrelevant, just as people could not believe that Japan would
ever break down, or that the tech boom would ever stop, or that housing
prices would collapse.
As you might imagine, a large part of what took the Soviet Union down
stemmed from their own, Communist version, of the Deep State.
Unelected, unanswerable apparatchiks buried deep in the Soviet state
eventually ‘managed’ their economy to a standstill…and brought about its
downfall with their secret, harmful policies.
I doubt this time around will be much different. The feds – whether
they are in America or the Soviet Union – always want a growing, healthy
economy. But they also want to control it…and determine who gets what.
You can’t have it both ways.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m just going to tell you what I know in the hopes that maybe it will help you.
But let me pause here for a second, because I sense you may have some questions about me and my company.
After all, you’re probably wondering why you’ve never heard of a news
and research network this big… especially one with an unmatched track
record.
My company is known as “The Agora.” It’s not a business in the
conventional sense. You see, The Agora itself doesn’t actually publish
anything. There’s no big central authority telling anybody what to do.
Instead there’s a vast network of hundreds of different analysts and
mini-media outlets running all across the globe that operate
independently yet are all interconnected.
But at it’s core, they’re all engaged in the same effort: to
understand what is really going on in the world and to help folks like
you prepare for it.
As the kids would say, we were an “open source” network of research and opinion 18 years before the term was invented.
And despite our size, we operate very privately, and our analysts
only share research and news directly with private subscribers. I don’t
tell them what to do. They work completely independently and reach their
own conclusions. And I think that’s what puts us ahead of the curve
every time.
We don’t own a cable channel or a single newspaper. We don’t buy
splashy ads in magazines. We don’t sponsor sports stadiums or anything
like that. We keep a low profile.
Of course our success has not gone totally unnoticed… The CIA once
actually tried to convince me to use Agora as a front for their
international operations. In case you’re wondering, I said no.
In our 35 years, we’ve grown into the biggest network of our kind on
the planet, operating across 20 different countries with 2.4 million
subscribers worldwide.
And we’ve done it by exposing, and often predicting, the most important events and trends in recent world history.
After making these predictions over the decades, a single thread
emerged. And that thread nagged at me until I really grasped it.
One entity – one group – appeared to play a major role in each and every one of these major world events.
Eventually I came to see that this group was the Deep State that Eisenhower so presciently warned about.
Each time we’ve been able to accurately call a major world event –
especially a market crash or other type of crisis – we’ve given our
private subscribers an important opportunity to protect themselves.
And that’s what I want to give you and the general public today.
I’ve never actually done anything like this before.
I’ve co-written three
New York Times bestselling books… been interviewed on countless TV shows… I’ve been invited to Washington to meet with political leaders…
Yet, I’ve never released my own private research to the general public in this way before.
But then, this Deep State revelation is possibly the most explosive – and the most urgent situation – of my entire career.
And it’s a story only I can tell. Because I’m the only person in this
business – possibly in this entire industry – who has been watching
this situation from the very beginning.
You see, what most people don’t realize is that in the 1950s, prodded
by elements in the Deep State, the United States began switching over
to an entirely new kind of economic system.
By the 1970s, they made it official…and nobody noticed.
This new system was – on the surface – a great success. It has
allowed us to amass more wealth on paper than any other nation in
history…
Despite the collapse of our industrial sector in the ’70s... Despite
our manufacturing base moving overseas, resulting in lost jobs and
broken towns all over America…
Despite two major market crashes in just the past 15 years…
This new system made our economy what it is.
It’s what keeps our lights on… our grocery store shelves stocked… our
gas stations fueled… our Social Security checks in the mail… and our
investments producing gains.
If you’ve ever wondered how we manage to keep going despite every sign pointing to a coming collapse…
This is it.
The trouble is that over 30 years ago I noticed a fatal flaw in this
system. And as this system keeps growing, so, too, does the doomsday
device buried within it… growing bigger and bigger all the time.
And right now, I believe we’re past the point of no return.
When this house of cards collapses – which it will – a systemic shock
will disrupt our lives in ways you never thought possible. You will
suddenly be locked out of your own bank account, unable to withdraw cash
or deposit a check.
Your stocks will swing wildly out of control. You may not even be able to access your Social Security money.
Like a virus, it will spread to our food supply chain, causing
massive shortages in the cities and suburbs. The same will happen to our
gas network.
America’s highways will become empty and quiet.
And one by one, every service you’ve come to depend on – from your
bank to your grocery store to our federal government – will shut down.
Here’s what will happen first, the first domino to fall, so to speak…
You won’t be able to get cash,
and without cash you won’t be
able to buy food or gasoline.
And what happens to America then?
As a society we are now more than ever dependent on convenience… on
free government services instead of our own hard work… on credit instead
of our own hard-earned cash…
What happens when people can’t use their credit cards? When they
can’t drive to get their checks because there’s no gas? When the only
thing you can count on is cash… and no one seems to have any of it?
Will you be able to rely on your neighbors? Your fellow citizens? Lately, I’m not so sure…
Now I realize that to someone who hasn’t been studying this for 35
years, the idea of a serious crisis like that hitting America might not
seem possible.
After what I’m about to tell you, I think you’ll reconsider.
Literally,
your ATM wouldn’t work. You type in your code, no money comes out. You get your paycheck, you can’t cash it.”
Neel Kashkari
U.S. Treasury insider
Those are the words of the architect of the 2008 bank bailouts, Treasury Department insider Neel Kashkari.
What he’s describing is a crisis that you and I came very close to
experiencing just a few years ago. If it sounds similar to what I was
just describing, it’s for good reason.
Former secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner has stated,
"We came exceptionally close. You could hear the fear and the panic,
because anybody living in that world at that time running a business at
that time knew that they were on the edge of losing the capacity to
function."
Most important, the Deep State itself was in deep trouble. And it pulled out all the stops to protect itself.
This has been confirmed by former secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson as well as two U.S. congressmen.
And while President Obama assured Americans that, “the shadow of the
crisis has passed” in his State of the Union address, I recently came
across video footage of Janet Yellen, the current chairwoman of the
Federal Reserve, openly admitting that the U.S. is still facing a very
real threat.
We could find ourselves in
a devastating spiral.”
Janet Yellen
Federal Reserve Chairwoman
She goes on to assure everyone that the Federal Reserve is fully in control of the situation.
But the truth is that, by their own standards, the feds’ policies have not worked.
In fact, official records indicate that the highest levels of our
government have already spent $4.5 trillion trying to contain this
threat – more than we spent on World War II.
It’s a desperate move. And I don’t think they’ll be successful.
As I write, the U.S. economy is still in a slump.
This is despite the biggest stimulus of new cash and credit in history.
We have fewer real breadwinner jobs today than we did 15 years ago, and the typical household has less income.
But let me back up for a second and explain exactly what it is we’re facing and how we got here in the first place.
By now I’ll bet you’ve already heard more than a few over-the-top
conspiracy theories and wacky ideas from people who either don’t have
all the facts or who intentionally try to mislead you.
Maybe you’ve even watched a few specific dates for the beginning of a crisis come and go.
If so, you’re not alone.
There are a lot of people out there who know deep down that
something’s not right in America, that it’s been a different place since
2008.
Yet, they can’t quite put their finger on what exactly is happening or what’s coming next…
Because it’s not just Obama… or the national debt… or a currency threat… There’s a much deeper problem.
The system itself is corrupt. It was corrupted – not exclusively, but
most importantly – by the people General Eisenhower warned us about.
But it’s so subtle…so clever…so elegant, that you can look right at
it and still not see what is going on. That’s why the hundreds of
Internet experts you’ve probably heard from are usually wrong.
They only point at the symptoms, not the real threat.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media is almost completely ignoring the
danger we’re in. They just don’t understand it. And frankly…neither
they, nor our leaders, want to understand. They benefit from it. They
depend on it.
So it’s no small wonder that the vast majority of Americans still
have no idea about the threat…or even realize that our own government is
spending trillions of dollars trying to contain it
That’s what brings me here today, to tell you the truth as we see it.
And the truth is that what’s wrong with America didn’t start in 2008 or
in the decade before that.
Let me start from the beginning, when I first discovered a terrible secret about our economy.
As I mentioned before, I started out in politics.
In D.C. I ran one of the most influential lobbying groups of its era,
the National Taxpayers Union, all while attending law school at
Georgetown University in the evenings.
We brought one of the largest class-action lawsuits ever against the
secretary of the Treasury, and we lobbied state governments to pass
balanced-budget amendments.
At the time, I didn’t realize that the Deep State even existed. I had
no idea how to fight it. And I didn’t know how impossible it would be
to win. The
New York Times, from March 6, 1981, describes the story of the lawsuit:
The drive to propose a constitutional amendment requiring the federal budget to be balanced
has started up again. The National Taxpayers Union, leading the effort
nationally, said it believed that four more states could be found to
pass the proposal this year.”
While fighting to reduce the national debt, I attended Reagan’s inaugural ball. I was introduced to Ron Paul for the first time.
I gave Grover Norquist – one of the most powerful lobbyists in
America today – his first job in the city. I found myself having lunch
with Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman, together.
But frankly, I was terribly naïve. I knew we weren’t getting anywhere
in our effort to contain government deficits, but I didn’t know why. It
took another 30 years to figure it out.
And it’s not just government debt.
Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s an important issue, and one we’ve been deeply involved with.
For example, our documentary on the subject,
I.O.U.S.A.,
which includes interviews with Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, my friend
Ron Paul, me, and others, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival
and widely praised by critics.
In fact, after seeing the film, Roger Ebert made it one of his top
five documentary films of that year, writing a “letter to our
grandchildren”:
I have just seen a documentary titled I.O.U.S.A. that snapped into sharp focus why your lives may not be as pleasant as ours.”
But while I recognize just how dangerous a broke government can be
and how much damage large government deficits have done to other
nations, I’ve since realized that the government’s debt is really just a
symptom of the disease itself.
In short, our national debt is actually a smaller part of a much larger… and much more dangerous threat…
And now I’m going to prove it.
Here's the obvious and immediate problem: there's not enough real
money in the system. There’s no official record of this, but I estimate
that somewhere between $958 billion to $1.5 trillion changes hands in
the U.S. every month.
People buy milk, pay babysitters. They pay their mortgages and their taxes. Consumer spending alone is $11.2 trillion annually.
But here's the thing: there's only $1.2 trillion worth of actual dollars – physical money – in the entire world.
We can't be sure how much of that is actually here in the U.S.
Estimates are that some 50 percent to 75 percent of our money is in
overseas bank accounts or held by foreign governments, and a lot of what
is left in the states is called "dead money."
It's stuffed in mattresses and safe-deposit boxes.
In fact, the amount of U.S. dollars being hoarded this way – that is
to say the amount of dead money – is now at an all-time high.
All in all, there might be as little
as 250 billion actual U.S. dollars
circulating here in the United States…
And while that might seem like a lot of money, consider that a single
U.S. company – Walmart – takes in nearly twice that amount in annual
revenue, and our government spends 14 times that amount in just a year…
So if there are only 250 billion physical U.S. dollars in this
country, where are all those trillions of dollars coming from, and what
would happen if they suddenly disappeared?
Let me remind you that those physical U.S. dollars are America's only
legal money – or "tender." There is no digital dollar, at least not
yet, and the average Joe isn't buying his groceries with Bitcoin.
One explanation is that people are just spending the same dollars
over and over so that $250 billion is changing hands so much that you
see trillions of dollars spent at the end of the year.
Only, that can't be possible.
What I've just described is called "monetary velocity," and you can measure it.
And right now monetary velocity is at its lowest point in history.
People aren't spending that $250 billion in actual U.S. dollars. It's
staying put in those mattresses and safe-deposit boxes.
So people are spending something else, and here it is…
The terrifying source of
all our money…
It's our credit system.
Who controls the credit system? Who set it up? Why?
As you can see, for the past 30 or so years it's been growing exponentially.
That's why, although wages have been falling since the 1970s…
…And although we have fewer dollars to spend and our dollars are worth less and less…
…America still appears to be getting richer and richer.
Since the 1970s, the credit system in America has grown to become our biggest and our most crucial asset…
Credit, not real money, is what people spend. Since 1971, the real
money has been taken out of the system. Credit is what we have now.
And every credit dollar has a dark side to it -- debt. And there’s
more debt outstanding now than twice the value of every single home in
America put together, more than three times the value of every single
U.S. bank's assets combined, more than 20 times the trillions of dollars
the U.S. government collects in taxes every year.
Look, if you have $1, it's yours.
It doesn't matter what other people think or what's happening on Wall
Street; it's yours to spend as you like. But credit is different.
It can disappear before you spend it, because at some point all that
credit can only exist if people believe they'll get paid back, that is
if they believe there's enough money in America to pay back all that $60
trillion in outstanding credit.
But here's the truth: there isn't. Our credit system is insolvent.
And when it fails, which it surely will do, it could wipe out more
wealth than any other crisis in history.
To put that in context, $10.2 trillionvanished during the financial meltdown of 2008.
This next crisis will wipe out six times that amount. I'm not talking
about a few credit cards getting denied. I'm talking about the whole
system shutting down. And that will be a disaster that goes way beyond
just a matter of money.
In modern America, long, complex chains of production and distribution put food on your table and gas in your car.
Eight out of ten people live in cities or suburbs. Almost no one, not
even the farmers themselves, can survive off of food they grow
themselves. Instead, they all depend on credit. First, the farmer gets a
loan from the bank to buy his farm.
Then he uses credit to buy supplies, fuels, fertilizer, seed – everything.
After the crops are sown, the wholesaler, who got a loan to build his
warehouse and processing center, uses credit to buy the raw food from
the farmer so he can process it and package it.
Then a trucker, who got an auto loan to buy his truck, uses credit to buy fuel so he can haul the food to a retailer.
The retailer needs credit to keep the lights on and the shelves stocked and the stores open.
Each part of this chain can afford to take on that debt because they
know that eventually the consumer will buy that food, mostly likely
using a credit card.
If any one, crucial piece of that chain stops working…
Suddenly suburbs and cities are
cut off from their food supplies…
Businesses can't run. Paychecks don't go out.
When the credit system starts to implode, it not only destroys the
mechanism that runs our economy, it shuts down our access to our own
money.
Imagine what happens as lenders try to redeem $60 trillion worth of credit and there's only $250 billion to go around.
You go to your ATM; you ask for cash, but there isn't any cash left. Suppose you have a $10,000 line of credit on your card.
If the credit system doesn’t work, you might as well be flat broke.
Dollars become ultra scarce. Prices skyrocket. Banks go under.
In fact, it would only take about three hours for our entire country to shut down.
I know that must sound impossible, but I know this for a fact. You
see, the last time our credit system came to the verge of collapse,
that's exactly what nearly happened. I know. I was watching. So was my
whole network of analysts and researchers all over the globe.
Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to
draw out everything it will let you take”
Senator Richard Burr (N.C.)
Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
One Friday in 2008, he called his wife, Brooke, to tell her that he
wasn't coming home that weekend; he had urgent business in D.C.
He also gave her one very important instruction: "Go to an ATM. Take out everything you can."
I'll bet that sounds extreme, but what you may not know is at the
time, the U.S. was just hours away from a total systemic shock.
At 11:00 AM, the Federal Reserve had noticed hundreds of billions of dollars starting to disappear from the American economy.
A massive loss of faith in the system had prompted big players to get their money out while they still could.
In response, the government began injecting billions to, quote,
"liquefy" the system, and it watched helplessly as that money vanished
without a trace.
Congressman Paul Kanjorski remembers panicked meetings with Secretary
of the Treasury Hank Paulson and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben
Bernanke behind closed doors in Washington that day.
He would later admit that if not for one last-ditch effort…
The entire United States of America would have gone dead in the water by 2 p.m. that afternoon…
Shocking, I know, especially because most people still don't realize how close we came to a full-scale shutdown…
Or how close we are still…
You see, this situation never actually got resolved. Instead, it got
worse. A McKinsey study tells us that there's $57 trillion more global
debt in the world today than there was in 2007, and it's growing.
In fact, it's being artificially pumped up by the Federal Reserve and other central banks.
As you can see from the chart below, our current U.S. credit system
started around 1950. In the late '70s, traditional American industries –
such as cars, steel, televisions, radios, even computers – moved
overseas.
Credit came in and replaced traditional wage increases as a way to
prop up our economy. That's what triggered the massive growth phase. It
entered around that time.
We warned in 1993 that it would begin to unwind, that the credit cycle would come to an end.
That nearly happened in 2000 when the credit system first stalled out
and the dot-coms went bust. But then housing was there to support it.
All that credit rushed into the housing market, which then shot up to
meteoric levels.
But when housing collapsed, there was nothing else to keep us going.
That's when the Federal Reserve started buying up bonds and mortgages.
Starting with a balance sheet of $700 billion before the crisis, the Federal Reserve is now on the hook for $4.5 trillion.
That's how much new cash and credit it has put into the system in the last seven years.
Our lender of last resort, the Federal Reserve, has become too big to fail.
Unfortunately, if it does, there's no higher entity that can step in, save our credit system. It has simply gotten too big.
And all it takes is just one small loss of faith. A few big players
start taking their money out while they still can, and then people start
lining up at ATMs, and a systemic shock will paralyze the nation.
Even former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, is sounding the alarm.
Unless we come to grips with this problem… I’m afraid we’re going to run into some kind of
political crisis…”
Alan Greenspan
Former Federal Reserve Chairman
In the 38 years we’ve been providing subscribers with information,
we've seen countries get hit with financial shocks like this again and
again.
In just the last century, I can name at least 38 events very similar
to what I'm describing, but none of them has even come close to the
scale of the potential collapse here in America.
That's because none of these countries has ever been able to borrow
so much or become so dependent on credit. We're going to see just how
dependent we've become, and I'm not looking forward to it.
America's unique status as the world's superpower has enabled us to
keep borrowing at unheard-of levels, all on the assumption that we're
good for it, but we're not.
And at some point, someone will realize that.
When Americans can no longer use their credit cards, when grocery
stores are hoarding food rather than selling it, when we become stranded
in our homes because there's no gasoline, when our retirements vanish,
when our government benefits are cut off…
What will happen to America as a country?
I'd like to be able to say that we'll band together and take care of each other, but will we?
In the 1970s we had a near miss with a very similar kind of crisis.
Our steel and auto industries began to fail; gas prices soared; riots
broke out in major cities, like Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago.
One woman, a teenager at the time, remembers:
Working at a country gas station, she remembers being swarmed by an angry mob one day after the gas station ran out of gas.
In terms of economic crisis, it was tiny compared to what we're facing today yet it took America to its very foundation.
Can you imagine a full-blown collapse in today’s America?
Where anger at police is reaching a boiling point…?
Where teenagers can use the Internet to summon “flash mobs” in just minutes…?
Where half of the population pays no taxes and depends on aid from the federal government…?
Where students crippled by college loans can’t get jobs…?
Given what we saw in Baltimore, in Ferguson, New York, Oakland, and
other cities, with people seizing just about any excuse to loot stores
and break windows…
How long do you think those same people will refrain from stealing and violence when they can’t get a meal?
My feeling is not very long.
All this must seem incredible, but I've seen these types of crises play out again and again all over the world.
Because of the nature of my business, I've lived on three continents and visited probably 100 countries.
I was an economic adviser to Belarus in 1992 just before a crisis turned the country into a socialist dictatorship.
I recommended that they establish a firm system of private property
rights, auction off state-owned property, and let the free market do the
rest…
But the Soviet-era bosses who controlled the country weren't willing to let go their own power.
They chose an opposite course.
Few years later, I witnessed one of our most powerful rivals undergo a
similar collapse. People desperately tried to find cash as ATMs went
dark.
Debit cards stopped working, and banks shuttered and disappeared altogether.
Millions of seniors were cut off
from their pensions, without warning.
The government made it illegal to withdraw money from your own bank account.
They shut down the stock market after it plummeted 10 percent in 40
minutes.People couldn't get rid of their investments for any price.
Flour, butter, rice, and sugar disappeared. Hospitals ran out of
medicine.
Elderly women were forced to dig through trash bins for food. The
situation grew so severe that the government organized a special SWAT
team to conduct tax raids on the homes of its citizens to get every last
dime it could out of them.
And I'm not talking about ancient history, either. This happened in
1999, and there are plenty more examples where that came from.
For instance, most people think of Argentina as a poor country.
What they don't know is that before America became the dominant
superpower on the planet, Argentina was one of her main competitors.
It was a lot like the U.S. with similar resources, a similar
population and similar spirit of free enterprise and liberty. In fact,
Argentina was actually growing faster than America. Buenos Aires, its
capital, was settled by immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Germany.
It combined the rich agriculture and industry of Chicago with the boulevards, parks, and buildings of Paris.
A few years ago, I bought an isolated cattle ranch up in the Andes
Mountains of South America, so I pass through Buenos Aires regularly on
my way there, and I know the country pretty well.
Walking down the streets, you'd see decaying subway trains – state of
the art many years ago – big, beautiful buildings covered in graffiti,
windows broken, old cars – top of the line in their day – sitting junked
by the side of the road.
It's was if a war had broken out.
Why? It was a financial crisis, very similar to what I see coming in the U.S.
In fact, when you look at the damage that events like this can cause,
it's no small wonder our government has already put $4.5 trillion –
that is more than it cost to liberate Europe – towards stopping it.
For example, in the 1990s riots killed 1,500 people and destroyed
4,000 buildings when a country in Asia got hit with a similar economic
disaster.
But worse than the property damage… the violence… even the food shortages…
Events like this have a strange power, greater even than wide-scale
physical disaster, a power to not only make your wealth and the
stability you've grown accustomed to disappear, but also your very way
of life – the traditions, the values, things passed down for
generations.
For example, when a violent monetary trauma hit Germany's first republic, thousands of years of tradition disappeared overnight.
Worse than the financial damage was the social damage.
Families collapsed as the young turned on the old.
Women were forced into prostitution.
Mothers begged to keep their children fed. Political gangs assassinated one another in the streets.
A young man recalls:
It was dreadful to watch… It was more than disorder that smashed over people; it was something like daily explosions; if anything survived one explosion, it got into another the next day….”
Another writer, Kurt Kersten, recorded the downfall as it happened:
German culture, as much as it existed, is perishing…
The middle class is worn out... one has only two choices: either slowly
perish or join the [leftwing] revolutionary party.”
Imagine that in today’s America… when our very culture is already
under attack… where the young already seem to be at war with our
traditions…
Imagine for a second…
- Truckers can’t get the gas for their rigs…
- Grocery stores’ shelves start to go bare…
- Homebuyers can’t get loans… and prices crash…
- Bonds become worthless… IRAs and 401(k)s can’t be cashed out…
- Stocks fall dramatically before the markets close altogether…
- Prices swing widely out of control…
- People take to the streets demanding action from the government…
- Strikes paralyze our industries…
- Rioting destroys homes, shops, even entire neighborhoods…
I'm not saying you'll wake up tomorrow and suddenly America will no
longer be a superpower or that tonight someone will try to kick down
your door looking for cash and valuables.
But what I am saying is that when this does start, things will go bad very quickly. You never think it'll happen to you.
In fact, no one ever does. It's human nature.
Your brain actually won't let you believe that a disaster can happen.
Even when the evidence is clear that a major upheaval is on its way,
even when it's a simple matter of common sense that danger is near, most
people convince themselves that it can't happen.
I’m from Southern Maryland… I grew up in a poor family and as soon as
school let out, we’d go work out in the tobacco fields (this was in the
’50s, back when that sort of thing was still allowed).
Every year in mid-spring, my Uncle Edward would get my cousin, my
brother, and me to sit on the back of his old tractor and plant tobacco
while he drove up and down the fields.
Now imagine that my uncle wasn't sure summer would come that year – that he wasn't sure the tobacco crop would grow.
Well, I can tell you Uncle Edward would've sat on his porch with a
six pack instead. You see, human beings need to believe that things will
happen more or less as they always have, that the sun will come up
every morning, that plants will grow, that the rains will come.
If we didn't, we couldn't plant food or buy houses or start businesses or do much of anything.
Of course, believing nothing will ever change is actually a form of
delusion; totally irrational, but it's necessary for our survival.
The problem, though, is that sometimes things do change big time, and
we are unprepared when really big changes are about to strike.
People refuse to believe what's often right in front of them.
Lawyers call this “willful blindness”… psychologists call it the
“normalcy bias”…
That's why, while I was warning our subscribers about the dot-com
bubble, for example, plenty of people thought it would never end.
A famous book at the time – Dow 36,000 – argued that the stock market
was cheaper than ever. An article published in The Atlantic read:
"Stock prices could double, triple, or even quadruple tomorrow and still
not be too high."
Then suddenly the NASDAQ started falling and eventually wiped out 77 percent of its value.
Today I’m seeing the same “willful blindness” here in America.
People believe that our credit economy can just keep going forever,
that we can keep borrowing and spending money that really isn't there.
They think debt can go up faster than income indefinitely, even though it's mathematically impossible.
And now our highest government officials are still locked in a
desperate struggle to keep this system going, and the fact of the matter
is they've already used up all the tools they have.
They've kept credit cheap by reducing interest rates to near zero.
People believe that our credit economy can just keep going forever, that we can keep borrowing and spending money that
How much lower can they put the rate if the system runs into trouble?
They've already expanded the fed's balance sheet by 542 percent in just
a few years.
How much more can they do?
History is full of people who thought they were the exception, just like most Americans believe today.
These stories always play out the same way.
People think the rules don't apply to them. They think they can get away with something that no one else has.
Our credit economy is no different. The rules still apply.
Credit is not real money. It's just the flipside of debt.
You run up too much debt and you go broke, and many, many Americans are about to learn this eternal truth the hard way.
We can’t build the
biggest credit system
in world history and expect it
to stay standing forever…
Eventually someone loses faith.
In fact, we've seen this before, right here in America. In 1819,
people in America started noticing that banks were always trying to get
out of honoring cash deposits.
They give you an IOU instead, supposedly as good as real money.But
attempts to redeem those notes for actual money were actually blocked or
stalled in some way.
Suddenly, cash started to skyrocket in value, with banks desperately
trying to cover up the fact that they couldn't actually honor their
deposits.
They didn't have enough money.
When the American public along with foreign creditors caught on to this…
A third of America’s money vanished into a black hole…
The Western Territories ran out of cash completely. They had to
switch to a barter system using grain. Real estate and land prices
dropped off a cliff, as did income from rents.
You couldn't sell anything, because no one had the money to buy it from you.
And no one would risk a loan, because there wasn't necessarily enough cash to get it back.
Nearly half of all the money in the country disappeared. The
resulting economic collapse stretched on well into the following decade.
And we were lucky, because we were young and the collapse happened before the problem was bad enough to do permanent damage.
And back then most families were self-sufficient, and the whole economy worked on cash, not credit.
Today, it's a different story.
We have a credit system, worth more on paper than the national wealth
of most countries, and it's already starting to come apart.
Ever since that 2008 morning when the Treasury noticed billions
disappearing from the U.S. economy, the Federal Reserve has been locked
in a desperate struggle to keep this event at bay, and it hasn't worked.
They've even been flooding the U.S. economy with more new money than ever, to try to make up the shortfall.
You see, the Fed's goal is to hit 2 percent inflation. When that happens, they’ll know what they're doing is working.
Except inflation won't budge. They're already doing everything they
can…As I explained, the Deep State depends on it; it is funded on
credit. That’s how it got so big and so powerful.
But now they’re running
out of time…
By last summer, the Federal Reserve was already supposed to be
raising interest rates. Here it is, a year later, and the latest GDP
numbers show the economy's still not healthy.
But it’s not healthy because it is corrupt. It doesn’t create wealth. But here’s the essential thing:
It is a credit system…not a wealth system.
Everybody has debt. And everybody depends on somebody else to pay…
Otherwise, the whole thing collapses.
If the economy ever stops growing…or the amount of credit outstanding ever stops increasing—it’s over.
Without extra wealth -- growth! -- all those trillions of debt can
never be repaid. And that’s why they can never raise interest rates…or
taxes… And they can never reduce debt.
It’s too dangerous.
In one recent week, $7.2 billion disappeared from U.S. stock funds, the ninth major withdrawal in the previous ten weeks.
Just one fund saw $38 billion pulled out. To compare, the previous record for withdrawals was set in 2009 with just $20 billion.
And Wall Street's already on edge. A note from a Bank of America
analyst is now warning, "Correction risk will grow in the absence of
fresh inflows in the coming weeks."
It's not clear where this money is going, but billionaires are
thought to be hoarding an average of around $600 million in cash each.
As we get closer and closer to this crisis, I expect more and more
restrictions on your ability to deposit, to withdraw, and to use your
own cash.
Here's what will happen: you'll go to your ATM, but your account will
be frozen. The bank will tell you it noticed a suspicious activity.
What suspicious activity? You tried to take out your cash.
In fact, we're already seeing this in Europe.
Just recently a Swiss pension fund tried to withdraw a very large
amount of cash from its bank, with the idea of storing that cash in a
guarded vault instead. The bank refused to give the fund its money.
And when the pension fund complained, the government backed the bank.
In fact, it admitted that it had been, quote, "recommending that banks
with cash demands act restrictively."
And it's already starting to happen in the U.S.
From Florida to New York,
states have been moving to
restrict citizens from accessing
and using cash…
In fact, Louisiana just made it illegal to use cash to buy any precious metals... including gold from a second hand dealer.
Even some in the mainstream media have started to notice what’s going on. Bloomberg has reported:
"There's a surge of creativity around ways to drive interest rates
deeper into negative territory. As this new world takes shape, cash
becomes pivotal."
Am I just being paranoid? I hope so. Maybe it won't happen.
Maybe it won't be so bad. But as you'll see in a moment, something
must give. The credit economy cannot last, and it's anyone's guess just
how bad it will be when it finally gives way…
America on the verge of
being ripped apart
In America today we're seeing protests, rioting, young people fighting with police and turning their backs on American values.
A majority of people in the U.S. now favor taking some people's money to distribute to others.
A majority also favor higher taxes.
It's already beginning to look like a very different America from the one you and I grew up in.
Today one in five Americans
do not think the U.S. will
remain a single country
going forward
There have already been secession movements in Texas and Hawaii. In
fact, a consultant for the Pentagon revealed plans by the Chinese to
provide arms to these Hawaiian separatists.
And Chinese officials have actually threatened the U.S. secretary of
state, saying they would not hesitate to assert their territorial claims
over the islands.
According to at least one source, the U.S. military even has
contingency plans in place for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from
Hawaii.
Meanwhile, a recent report by Pew Research finds Americans more
divided than ever. But frankly, you don't need a scientific study to
prove that…
- From the violence that ripped through Baltimore last April…
- to the complete dysfunction of our Congress…
- to the massive decline in marriage rates for our young men and women…
- to the increasingly vocal and sometimes violent opposition to traditional American values…
I'm not sure how well America, at least as I know it, could withstand
food shortages; banks closing; bonds, retirement accounts, and benefits
becoming worthless.
In short: there's not enough real money, real cash – real wealth --, to support the standard of living that we're used to.
Realize that if you collected every single dollar bill in this country…
You’d have
less money than the
GDP of Finland…
And not much more than the GDP of Greece.
Our economy runs on credit, not cash.
And in a credit crisis, which is certainly ahead, credit is the first thing to disappear. The second thing that goes is cash.
And then you have even more problems.
I've seen cases where economic shocks like this last year's, where…
- people are cut off from their bank accounts for months at a time,
- prices swing wildly out of control,
- strikes cripple services and shut down highways,
- hospitals can't get medicine,
- governments become increasingly desperate and violent…
Whether this will happen today or tomorrow or a month from now, I
don't know. Nobody knows. But I do know that no country in history has
ever maintained the course that America is on now. I know that no one
gets away with creating fake wealth. Credit can't be free; there's
always a price to pay.
Many of my closest friends and colleagues, some of the richest, most
well-connected people I know, are already preparing themselves.
Some are buying gold and silver. Some are moving to foreign countries or even renouncing their U.S. citizenship.
All of them are stashing away cash.
Pretty extreme, I know.
Myself?
I already mentioned my isolated and entirely self-sufficient mountain
ranch, and I've also amassed a good deal of gold, silver, and other
currencies as a hedge against this scenario.
Of course, I hope I won’t need them.
And I realize that most people can't do measures like these. So in
just a moment, I'm going to let you in on a couple things I've put
together to help you.
But before I do, there's just one thing I haven't told you yet.
All that I’ve just mentioned
in this message…
is only Act One…
You see, the story doesn't end with the shutdown of our credit networks and the massive systemic shock that comes along with it.
What I've just warned you about is merely the run-up to an event that
will change the course of world history and bring the American era to a
shocking conclusion.
Now, I know that you've already given me a lot of your time, and I
appreciate that, so I won't go into the second part of the story right
now.
But I've laid it all out in
"The Great American Credit Collapse," a never-before-published exposé on this crisis. It's not that long, only 15 pages. You can read it fast and get ready quickly.
And it's not some boring textbook on economics.
It's written as a thrilling, easy-to-read account of what the future
holds for America, what the collapse of our system will look like, and
what the government will do in response.
It details...
- Your day-to-day life in the post-credit economy
- The SHOCKING SECOND ACT of the story that I haven’t told you yet (the Deep State won’t give up its source of funding readily)
- The DESPERATE policies our government will try and why they won’t work
- HOW food shortages will break out across the country and WHERE YOU should be when they hit
- WHERE the money and the opportunities will be in the post-credit economy
- WHY I do NOT believe we’re going into a 30-year depression…
- And much, much more.
The fact of the matter is, the failure of our credit system won't
just push down profits and produce a few layoffs. I’m not talking about
another ‘recession.’ Or a business slowdown. Or just higher
unemployment.
The crisis I fear will change everything about how you live in
America and how you get around to the stores you shop at and the brands
you buy.
Now, I've co-written or written two New York Times bestsellers, and
about five books in total. You can go online and buy any of them.
But I would recommend that you read "The Great American Credit Collapse" before anything else.
Only you won't be able to find it at any bookstore. In fact, I didn't even give it to my book publisher.
That's because it's not for sale or intended to make me any profit.
I've prepared "The Great American Credit Collapse" to be the definitive
resource in understanding how this collapse will unfold.
That's why you're about to get the opportunity to claim your own free
copy in just a moment. It's the first step you can take right now to
get protected. I've already put measures in place to protect myself and
my family.
In fact, let me show you what I've done.
I’m currently writing this
from a mountain cattle ranch,
about the size of Rhode Island…
9,247 feet above sea level…
And a six-hour trek,
with a 4-wheel drive vehicle,
from the nearest city…
My laptop is running on solar power. And when the satellite I use to
access the Internet comes up over the mountain, I'll send this out to my
offices back in Baltimore.
It sounds odd, I know, and maybe I am a little eccentric.
But I learned a long time ago that you can't just follow the crowd
and do what everybody else does and hope to get different results.
And actually, I don't live here full time. But it's nice to know I
have a safe haven somewhere, especially as my six children get older and
move away.
I like knowing that they have a place to take shelter should the worst happen.
We grow our own vegetables here. We keep our own livestock. In fact,
here at the ranch I even have a vineyard so I can drink my own wine.
Meanwhile, to keep my money safe I recommend that everyone have a stash of gold somewhere.
But I realize, that you may not be able to take the same actions I’ve taken…
And frankly, I wouldn’t recommend that you do…
Maintaining international properties when you're not around to fix things is very expensive.
And I have an army of consultants, lawyers, advisors, and friends all
over the world to make the connections and investments I need to pull
this off. But you don't have to.
All the information and advice you need is available for free.
You just have to connect the dots sometimes. Or you can let my team help you and make it simple.
That is, I want to give you access to everything my team has pulled together on the end of credit in America.
Consider it your personal intelligence briefing on the subject, from
the very head of a multinational research and news organization.
And if you're imagining complex charts, data tables, and things that look like bank statements, don't worry.
That's NOT AT ALL what I have in mind. Let me show you what I mean.
Let's start with where you can find money you can trust.
The Deep State, Exposed:
What it is, how it affects you, and how to protect your wealth and privacy...
In 1961, president Eisenhower said that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the Deep State.
And his warning has never been more urgent than it is today…
Because, as you’ve seen in this very letter, the Deep State holds immense – and growing – power over you.
And the economic crisis the Deep State brought about has never been a bigger threat to your wealth, freedom and privacy.
That’s why I just put the finishing touches on my report called “
The Deep State Exposed: How a Group of Unelected Insiders Brought America’s Financial System to the Brink of Collapse.” It’s one part expose, one part prep guide, and I want you to get your hands on it right away.
After all, the Deep State’s tentacles reach into almost every part of
your life – including into areas you probably wouldn’t expect.
I reveal how they’ve insinuated themselves into the far reaches of
the American government, using that power to radically alter our money
system, the banks, the dollar, and the stock market itself.
But it doesn’t stop there. Because the Deep State has also extended its control into the U.S military and intelligence services.
When you dig into these shocking facts, you’ll start to see why
America constantly gets involved in aggressive overseas wars that have
nothing to do with self-defense or the America’s national interests.
You’ll see why America can’t seem to end these wars even though they bear no benefit to the taxpaying public.
And you’ll also see how the Deep State gets rich -- in money
and power -- from these endless interventions and nation-building misadventures.
The Deep State has an extreme amount of control over the public
school system, too. And the implications of that are as terrifying as
they are astounding. In many ways, education has become yet another
extension of the government.
Even private schools and homeschoolers must comply with certain Deep State laws, so it’s almost impossible to escape this…
It’s not a topic generally discussed, but the Deep State has enormous
influence over the medical system in the United States, as well. You
need to know these facts before you schedule your next doctor visit…
And they’ve crept into American farms, ranches and the food supply,
too. From the FDA to the various farm cartels enforced by the
government, the Deep State has infiltrated your dinner table and the
local grocery store. So they can exert control over the foods you eat,
if you’re not careful.
I lay all of this bare in “
The Deep State Exposed” and I want to send you a personal copy right away. It’s an urgent, if alarming, primer on just how bad the Deep State has grown…
Now, let's turn to where you can find money you can trust…
Where to Find Money
You Can Trust
The fact of the matter is, you should not trust money you can't hold
in your hand. In the beginning of this crisis, before people realize
what's going on, I expect physical dollars to become very scarce.
Numbers on a screen will do you no good in a credit collapse.
That's why if you ignore everything else from this presentation, I
would hope that you maintain an emergency cash reserve at home, one
month's worth of expenses at a minimum.
But cash dollars aren't the only kind of money I would recommend you
have during a crisis. Now, the truth is that I'm a bit of a gold bug.
I've made good money investing in gold ever since issuing my trade of
the decade back in the year 2000: buy gold, sell U.S. stocks.
In fact, I believe there's a very good possibility that the price of
gold will rise dramatically. But please don't buy it to make money.
It's also an excellent store of value, like an indestructible savings account.
But gold is not actually that practical for day-to-day transactions,
once dollars become scarce and electronic forms of payment are no longer
working.
We saw this back in 2001, during Argentina's financial collapse.
Argentines found themselves using radically different new forms of
money. And the interesting part is that they weren't rare gems or coins.
In fact, what becomes valuable in a crisis will shock you.
Many times it's stuff you already own in your own home, wealth you
never thought you had. And there's often no one type of money that
dominates in the aftermath of a major collapse.
You may need different types of currency for different transactions.
That's why I've had my team assemble a guide on the types of money
you want to have readily available when our $60 trillion machine finally
breaks down.
For example, this one small item you can buy at Wal-Mart, or almost
any department store, that during a crisis becomes an incredibly
valuable currency for everyday goods. You may even have some in your
home already.
And there are plenty more examples. You'll find full details in
"The Crisis Money Guide: The Money You Need to Have in Times of Crisis."
As part of your full briefing on our credit threat, I've decided to
include this guide with every copy of "The Great American Credit
Collapse." And no, neither of these are for sale or available through
any other of our services. . But that's just the beginning.
How and Where to
Get Your Own Homestead
Have you ever dreamed of having a safe, self-sufficient spot you can get away to?
Imagine sitting down to a meal of your own meat and vegetables, never
spending another second stuck in traffic on your way to Wal-Mart.
But having your own homestead with your own food supply is about more than just living better.
When the credit system fails and shuts off our supply chain, I expect the cities and the suburbs to be hit hardest.
They depend the most on shipped goods.
That's why now is the time to look into getting a homestead, a hideaway.
Call it a safe house. Don't worry, travelling to foreign countries is
not required. According to my team of top researchers, there are still
many ways to get beautiful property right here in the U.S., even on the
cheap, and sometimes for free if you use the right approach.
In fact, some of the most beautiful land in America is up for grabs
if you know where to look. You'll find it all in "How to Get Your Own
Homestead on the Cheap."
I actually used one of the techniques you'll read about to secure my
very first building in Baltimore for just $1.00. And more recently, I
built a house – for peanuts – that is completely off-the-grid.
It needs no heat, no electricity, and virtually no maintenance. I even designed my own hot water heater, with no moving parts.
But you don't have to move away from your home and your friends to take advantage of what I've done.
In fact, when you receive your own copy of
"How to Get Your Own Homestead on the Cheap,"
you'll discover what you can do to gain all of the advantages of having
your own off-the-grid haven without ever leaving your own neighborhood
and the friends you know so well.
You see, being prepared is not just about hoarding money or moving
out to the wild. There are many things you can do without taking such
drastic steps. In fact, here's one of them.
Five Straightforward Ways to
Protect Your Cash
We’ve all heard the stories of people using worthless paper money to start fires or wallpaper their homes.
But that’s not what happens here…
Instead, it will be more like what physicists call an “event horizon.”
That sounds like science fiction I know, but it’s actually quite simple. And very real.
When a massive star collapses and creates a black hole, the event
horizon is the closest you can get without being sucked into its center
and destroyed.
Once past the event horizon, it does not matter what you are or what you do – you will disappear into the black hole.
In the same way, when the credit system collapses it will create a pull that money will be unable to resist.
This is how real dollars become so scarce so fast in a crisis like this. This is our own financial “event horizon.”
With no real money around, prices begin to crash. Businesses fail. Jobs vanish.
Anything connected to money – your house, your retirement portfolio, and even your gold – is exposed to these powerful forces.
Thankfully, we have some idea on how to survive events like these… where entire nations come against a financial event horizon…
Because they’ve happened before. To Japan… even America in its early days.
My team has studied how people were able to survive these events. And
they’ve put together a list of 5 essential strategies you should know
about.
They’ve discovered what assets don’t lose value… and how to keep your money safe.
I recommend you see their findings for yourself. You’ll get the exact steps you can take in
Five Straightforward Ways to Protect Your Cash.
Even if the global credit system collapses… or the U.S. government
wages a “War on Cash”...you can protect, and even grow, your capital
with these valuable tips.
But before I can give you access to this, I want to make sure that
you really are getting filled in on every single crucial aspect of this
developing story.
That's why I'm including something a little bit different in the library you're about to receive.
You see, part of the reason I've been observing this growing credit
system for so long is that it has shocking similarities to other
large-scale disasters I've observed in history. It shares a very
important common thread with almost every single failure and disaster
I've seen.
But what's more intriguing is that this same thread pops up
everywhere, even in places you'd least expect. It's a very simple
phenomenon. It's been recorded by scientists, and yet most people don't
realize it exists.
That's astounding 'cause everything, from the national debt and
American credit, to war, to making money and getting rich, to success in
business, or how you interact and get along with other people, to
almost any task we undertake, even your own projects and life's
ambitions, are deeply affected by this one thing.
Had Napoleon understood this, his family might be still ruling half
of Europe. If that seems incredible, it's precisely why I find this one
thing so fascinating. It's everywhere. It's behind more than one
specific form of cancer and many preventable diseases.
It's behind mental health problems too. If Americans understood it,
we'd be leading much healthier, longer lives, with much less government.
It's so exceptional, I've actually written a book about it called
Hormegeddon.
If I say so myself, it's the best book I've ever written, and it's
probably the last book I'll ever write, because I consider it to be the
final word on everything I've spent the last 40 years building.
It's like the blueprint on which every prediction we've made and most
of what I believe is based. And it has played a role in much of my
life, just as it does in yours, even if you don't realize it. Of course,
Hormegeddon is not a self-help book.
But it's almost impossible to truly understand what's about to happen
to us without understanding what the word "Hormegeddon" means.
Here's what bestselling
Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University, had to say about
Hormegeddon:
This is a must-must-must-read… It is deep, illustrative, witty, pleasant to read.”
And contrarian economist Marc Faber, aka “Dr. Doom,” said,
I am seldom jealous of anybody, but I truly envy
Bill Bonner’s writing and intellectual skills… It is funny, cynical,
sarcastic, highly informative, beautifully written, entertaining, and
most importantly, written by a man who is not afraid to tell the truth,
and stand up for it. I do not say this often, but when I read his
Hormegeddon, I was truly in awe.”– Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report,director of investment advising firm Marc Faber Ltd.
Another reviewer writes:
This is a book that works on so many levels… and it’s the kind of advice you wish your dad would have given you.”
Another says:
Hormegeddon is simply brilliant… This book offers
a detailed analysis of the major problems of our day and exposes the
fallacy that is collective central planning in a way that is undeniably
logical. The true treasure contained within this book is not the
micro-analysis, however, but something even more important…”
You can buy a hardcover copy online.
But just to make it easier, I've decided to include a free electronic copy of
Hormegeddon with the intelligence reports I've already mentioned.
You see, I'm a businessman. No one within The Agora is publicly
funded, and we're all independent of any bank or corporation or large
media company.
This is important.
We're not saints or do-gooders. We're not smarter either. We're just
not beholden to Wall Street or the government or Big Business.
So we don't pretend not to see this huge credit bubble getting ready to pop. We're all out here on our own.
We owe all our success to individuals just like you, not Big Brother or Big Money.
So you can see why I would want to tell you about what I believe to be the defining collapse of America.
We're all in the same boat.
And right now, I'm worried about what might happen to you and to
other hardworking Americans when the credit markets seize up and the
ATMs stop working.
So maybe it's time, before I let you go, to tell you what exactly is
going to set off the largest financial collapse in world history.
“What’s the flashpoint here?”
Well, the truth is that major events like this rarely have big triggers or flashpoints.
For example, the Arab Spring, a revolution that toppled four
governments, sparked civil wars, and led to mass protests and riots in
at least 12 other countries, began when a fruit vendor set himself on
fire.
When the right set of conditions are all aligned, as they are right
now in the U.S., it doesn't take a big event to set off a historic
implosion.
It's almost always something small, unexpected.
Think about World War I, in which millions of Germans, British, and Americans died in trenches in France.
It started with a shooting more than 1,000 miles away by a Bosnian.
And if you're aware of what's going on in America today, if you've
seen the unrest in our cities, if you've noticed that something's not
quite right with our economy, then I don't think it will take much to
set off an irreversible breakdown in our way of life.
That's why I want to give you everything we've got on this crisis,
because the most important thing I'm going to offer you is something I
haven't even mentioned yet.
It's a pass into a very special group… the newest independent research service within The Agora…
Because, this investigation isn’t over yet… What we’ve uncovered is just the tip of the iceberg…
This is what we do every day: try to connect the dots.
So I don't want to leave you without offering you a way to stay in
the loop about this growing threat and keep up to date with what's going
on.
It's like a passport into our world, one that's not governed by
political correctness or the official line or partisan media networks.
You see, the story of what comes next – in our country, in economics,
in our leaders – is far from over, and there's still plenty to
discover.
I've issued hundreds of financial reports over the last 40 years, yet this is the only one I've allowed to carry my name.
I call it The Bill Bonner Letter.
It's not an investing service, although I will occasionally cue my readers in to an actionable tip if I think it's worthwhile.
It's definitely not a trading service or a self-help guide. I don't even get paid for doing it. That's because for me,
The Bill Bonner Letter is a personal project.
But for you, it's a front-row seat to some of the biggest economic changes of our time.
This is a service for people who want more than what they see on
cable television, who want to tune out all the guff we're constantly
bombarded with and tune into something fresh.
It's for people who know there's another point of view out there, and they just need a way to tap into it.
So far, the select group who receive my letter have discovered…
- how to invest in a world of negative interest rates
- where to get a house on the pristine Mediterranean Sea for just one euro, no kidding
- the very worst investments in the world today, including the story of a house in Florida selling for $139 million.
And those are just some of the topics we've covered. There are a lot more. And here's what some of my readers have had to say:
Fred M. writes:
All I can say is The Bill Bonner Letter isn't simply a breath of fresh air. It's a full-blown gale of it.
…subscriber Scott D. writes:
Bill, incredible read this month… Very sobering, but I believe the truth. Very, very impressed with this first letter.
…subscriber Joe W. writes:
While nothing is guaranteed, the future you
present seems to be the logical conclusion to current macroeconomic
trends. Bill does a great job of demonstrating this in a rational and
humorous way.
…subscriber Rostislav S. writes:
I feel that subscribing… was a step in my life in
the right direction… Not for profit but for the wisdom [Bill] passes on
to people who are interested. One of those people is me. Once again,
thank you for that this too…not as strong as some of my testimonials…I
have some real doozies…hope someone saved them..
…and subscriber Will H. writes:
Bill & Company: That was the best read I’ve
had in a long time. It read like a preface to a world-class book that
needs to be completed… As far as I'm concerned, “Well said. Well
spoken.” Excellent job. Now, please don’t lose momentum and tear the
established nonsense we’ve witnessed apart until the reality of it all
is seen.
This is the first time I've ever opened up a service to share what I
know with likeminded people. It's not something you'll find anywhere
else.
But fair warning: this is only available to serious people, because
I'm not about to give away a whole bunch of free stuff, no questions
asked, or indulge any tire kickers.
Right now the sun is going down over the mountains, and I expect I'll lose satellite connection soon.
If you've been waiting for me to make a recommendation about what you should do now, then here it is.
Don't wait.
Today I'm inviting you to join The Bill Bonner Letter and claim everything I've mentioned so far, including digital copies of…
- The Great American Credit Collapse
- The Deep State Exposed: How a Group of Unelected Insiders Brought America’s Financial System to the Brink of Collapse
- The Crisis Money Guide: The Money You Need to Have in Times of Crisis
- How to Get Your Own Homestead on the Cheap
- Five Straightforward Ways to Protect Your Cash
- and my last book, Hormegeddon (electronic copy)
You may have seen things like this sell for $500.00 or even
$5,000.00, but I truly want to get this message out to as many people as
possible.
That's why the price for an all-access 12-month pass to
The Bill Bonner Letter is just $79.00.
However, as a thank-you for hearing me out,
I want to give you a substantial discount,
so I’m cutting that down to just $49.
And you can try it at my risk…
I will give you a full 60 days to try out everything you’re about to get…
And if you're not totally satisfied, if you are in any way
underwhelmed, then you can just call in and get a full refund during
that 60-day period.
You risk nothing and, frankly, there's a lot to be gained. Just click the button below to get started.
In the weeks that come, I expect the government will grow
increasingly desperate in the Fed's battle against the fall of America's
credit system…
We've already seen how it is taking steps to limit your access to and
use of cash. We've already seen how attempts to contain this problem
have not worked.
No nation has ever succeeded in cheating the natural laws of sound money, at least not for long.
And the choices you make today will decide where you'll be on the day
our dollars disappear, our banks shut down, and our way of life
collapses.
The risk is all on me.
You'll have 60 days – that's two full months – to make a decision about whether this is for you.
If you decide it's not, all you have to do is let us know. You'll
receive a 100 percent full refund. That's my guarantee. But the decision
is yours. After all, it's your money, your life, your call. Please
click below to get started immediately.
Sincerely,
Bill Bonner
Editor,
The Bill Bonner Letter
P.S. By the way, in case you missed any of that, here’s what you’re getting today:
Five special intelligence reports on the state of our credit system and its impending collapse…
- The Great American Credit Collapse
- The Crisis Money Guide: The Money You Need to Have in Times of Crisis
- How to Get Your Own Homestead on the Cheap
- Five Straightforward Ways to Protect Your Cash
Urgent New Report:
- The Deep State Exposed: How a Group of Unelected Insiders Brought America’s Financial System to the Brink of Collapse
My book:
And a 12-month subscription to my ongoing investigation into America and the world:
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P.P.S. A special gift for you and your family.
When you click to subscribe, I’d also like to offer you a special gift in addition to everything else.
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In fact, it’s the type of thing you can share with your kids and grandkids and pass down to younger generations.
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