[Originally published on Alex Krainer's Substack]
Last week I had the pleasure of joining Jesse Day, the host of the Vancouver Resource Investment channel (VRIC), and Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Economics to discuss the "EU collapse and the slow decay of western supremacy." The core subject of the otherwise broad-ranging discussion is captured in its title. However, if I could boil down the gist of it, it would be that in the West, the powers that be are still scrambling, trying to induce people into compliance with increasingly authoritarian ways of governance through fear and ever closer control.
Part of that agenda includes doing away with physical cash and introducing central bank issued digital currencies (CBDCs). The overreach includes geopolitics, with attempts to tighten central control over all the world's regions and nations. So far however, this has never worked in history, as it pushes larger and larger sectors of the society to opt out of the matrix and transact their business (and personal spending) in black markets.
While the authorities can discourage small numbers from doing so, but if a significant percentage of people opt out, the situation spins out of control, and this is a real risk: in many nations like Venezuela and Argentina, a very substantial portion of economic activity is conducted in the black markets (in both cases close to half).
Herding cats
Once they take root, black markets are extremely difficult to stamp out. They become true magnets for entrepreneurs and for consumers. For entrepreneurs they offer wide open field for profitable activity without red tape or taxes. For consumers they offer a wide variety of goods and services at much more affordable prices. Friends who are familiar with Argentina tell me that you can find anything you want in the black market there.
The problem for governments is that they collect zero taxes from such transactions, so the whole business of tightening the control over the people amounts to herding cats. Ultimately it fails. The same is happening in global, geopolitical terms. BRICS integrations are a reaction of many nations who wish to assert their sovereignty to explore other ways of doing business with the rest of the world, and it is an organically growing trend.
The dedollarization process won't happen overnight and the US dollar won't wither in the short run, but it will no longer be able to remain unchallenged either as a reserve currency or a trade settlement currency. Our full discussion is below:
CHAOS Up Ahead: EU Collapse and the Slow Decay of Western Supremacy
CBDCs: the impossible pipe-dream
During our discussion I mentioned Nigeria’s experience with introducing a CBDC in 2023. In spite of all the efforts, all the preparations including best western technologies and top level consultants that contributed to it, the experiment entirely collapsed in only 108 days. You can find out more about this in the article I posted last October: CBDCs: why their future is not so bright
Liberty is our birthright
In all, our degenerate oligarchy’s undying dream of enslaving humanity and gaining permanent airtight control of society will remain impossible. We are not termites: humans are hardwired with an indelible desire for liberty, which is part of our nature and our birthright.
We can be lulled to slumber through consumption, games and entertainment, and hypnotized to obedience through fear, but that state of stupor dissipates when we sense danger; ultimately our nature will not allow us to be obedient serfs and to surrender our children to that fate. There’s a reason why throughout history rulers feared the people. If you push us past a certain point, we push back.
This is exactly what we saw last week as the American people rejected the steady erosions of their liberties and elected Donald Trump as their President. What his second term will bring remains to be seen, but the important and encouraging point is that it was the people's victory over the entrenched powers of the oligarchy. More encouraging still is the fact that similar pushback happened in every single one of the ten major nations that held elections this year: in all of them, the incumbent governments lost support. It seems that all of humanity has now come together to reject the slide into the Orwellian globalist dystopia. In his 1915 novel, "The Golem," author Gustav Meyrink wrote,
"Once in every generation, a spiritual epidemic spreads like lighting... attacking the souls of the living for some purpose which is hidden from us and causing a kind of mirage in the shape of some being characteristic of the place that, perhaps, lived here hundreds of years ago and still yearn for physical form... You can't hear the note from a vibrating tuning fork until it touches wood and sets it resonating. Perhaps it is simply a spiritual growth without any inherent consciousness, a structure that develops like a crystal out of formless chaos according to a constant law."
Today something along these lines appears to be happening and unlike past generations humanity is now endowed with the internet which connects us in ways that was never before possible. The superorganism has grown its own nervous system, and now it is much more intelligent, faster and more agile than it’s ever been. Now it can move deliberately and purposely in the direction of its choosing!
In that sense, the internet adds a brand new variable to the social development equation, which has never before existed. This further implies that any prediction based on historical precedents is out of the question. As to the outcomes of current developments, all we can do is watch the pageant and see where it goes. Better still, we should do all we can to contribute towards desired outcomes.
Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass investor reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge, no jumping through hoops to cancel. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at
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