In the fall of 2015, the world descended into an economic apocalypse that will transform the globe into a single cashless society. This bold prediction is based on trends in nations all over the earth as shown in the article below.
As we enter 2016, we are only beginning to see this Epocalypse form through the fog of war. The war I’m talking about is the world war waged furiously by central banks against the Great Recession as the governments they supposedly serve fiddled while their capital burned.
The governments and banks of this world advanced rapidly toward forming cashless societies throughout 2015. The citizens of some countries are already embracing the move. In other countries, like the US, citizens fear the loss of autonomy that would come from giving governments and their designated central banks absolute monetary control.
The Epocalypse that I’ve been describing in this series will overcome that resistance during 2016 and 2017 as it wrecks economic havoc to such a degree that cash hold-outs will be ready for whatever holds the greatest promise of saving them from their collapsed monetary systems, fallen banks, deflated stocks and suffocating debt. One has only to think about how quickly and readily American citizens forfeited their constitutional civil liberties after 9/11 when George Bush and congress decreed that search warrants were not necessary if the government branded you a “terrorist.”
If this sounds like some wild conspiracy theory, consider the following: no less Sterling standard of global economics than The Economist predicted thirty years ago that by 2018 a global currency would rise like the phoenix out of the ashes of the world’s fiat currencies:
THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let’s say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today’s national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the last twentieth century. At the beginning of 1988 this appears an outlandish prediction.
As we near their prescient date of 2018, The Economist’s prediction doesn’t appear even slightly outlandish. If it still seems outlandish to you, read on. You’ll see how the cashless movement gained huge momentum throughout the world in 2015 in the articles referenced below where the voices and actions of numerous economists and governments press for the formation of a global cashless society.
It may have been a long time coming, but it’s certainly not hard for anyone to see now that the world’s currencies are, indeed, crashing all around us as we near the coming of this seemingly messianic money that was predicted to resurrect from the ashes of the world’s fallen currencies.
The beast of the Epocalypse
The central banks are now clearly losing their battle against the Great Recession. Instead of saving the world, they have created a raging beast with many heads that are emerging all over the world — commodity price crashes, junk bond crashes, currency crashes, global stock market crashes, hedge fund crashes, bank crashes and national bankruptcies. All of these developed because of the greatest money creation and lowest interest rates in the history of the world.
That last extravagant phrase — “in the history of the world” — is the kind of expression usually said as an exaggeration; but this time, brazen as it sounds, we all know it is not an exaggeration at all. It’s a brave new world that can look a statement like that in the eye and not flinch because it knows it to be entirely accurate. Central banks have truly engaged in the greatest inflation of money supply ever known on a global scale… and the result is going to be the explosion of these many overinflated monetary systems followed by the need to create something new as their replacement.
The Epocalypse, as I call it, is not merely the second dip into the belly of the Great Recession; it is the death of money.
The collapse of national currencies is unfolding as you read this. It can be seen in Greece, Italy, Brazil, China, and Russia, to name the most obvious. China’s crash in the value of the yuan, compared to other currencies, appears intentional, as a way to boost trade by lowering the price of Chinese exports relative to other currencies; but it is not clear that it is intentional because its descent has been repeatedly jarring.
The devaluations of the yuan is likely to ignite a currency war between nations. China is certainly declaring a currency war with the US dollar by unpegging the yuan from the dollar while getting the yuan accepted by the International Monetary Fund as one of the IMF’s few global trade currencies, making it a direct competitor to the dollar for global dominance in the money marketplace.
China intends for its currency to challenge the petrodollar and, so, along with Russia has been (as reported here for a couple of years) divesting from US treasuries to reduce its holdings in dollars so that it is not damaged when the dollar collapses, which it will if it loses its petrodollar status as the world’s main trade currency.
The falling value of most currencies, however, is far from intentional. It is a result of the rising dollar, national economic weakness, slowing trade, and sometimes sanctions. The Russian ruble crashed to record lows this week.
Late last month, we took a look at Russia’s economy and concluded that although the country has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of collapsing crude prices, the outlook is darkening. The ruble has fallen for three consecutive years and is now under immense pressure both from Western economic sanctions and from crude’s inexorable decline…. The ruble has collapsed to fresh record lows and on Thursday marked its steepest two-day decline in nine months. (“Russian Ruble Crashes To Record Lows In ‘Panic’: ‘Some Investors Are Selling At Any Price’“)
Panic selling of the Russian ruble coincides with major bank collapses unfolding this week in Italy. Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse Blog writes,
The Italian financial meltdown that we have been waiting for has finally arrived…. Italian banking stocks continued their collapse for a fifth consecutive day on Wednesday, and nervous Italians are beginning to quietly pull large amounts of money out of the banks. In particular, Monte dei Paschi is a complete and utter basket case at this point. A staggering one-third of their loans are “non-performing”, and the stock price has fallen a staggering 57 percent since 2016 began. (“A Run on the Banks Begins in Italy as Italian Banking Stocks Collapse“)
One doesn’t have to look far back into the unfolding global economic collapse to recall people rapidly pulling money out of banks in Greece. Before that it was Cyprus. Brazil is facing similar problems. Soon it may be Puerto Rico as that government moves into bankruptcy.
The stock markets of eleven European nations have fully succumbed to becoming bear markets. China’s is a bear market. Russia’s is a bear market, and the US is within an easy day’s journey of becoming a bear market. It is now bobbing along on the price of crude oil. Probably the only thing holding the US market’s head above water is the flight of capital from everywhere else in the world.
Because the Epocalypse is a global economic collapse that is creating global currency wars and national currency collapses, it will beg for a global economic and monetary solution. That solution is already in the making all over the world. At the same time central banks have been battling the Great Recession, their many member banks and the governments they are supposed to serve have been waging a war on cash. The People’s Banks of China (PBOC) , for example, has been planning to make the yuan a cashless currency since 2014.
China charts course to become a cashless society
As the war on cash escalates, officials from The IMF to China are seeing the opportunity to control the world’s money through virtual (cash-less) currencies. Just as we warned most recently here, state wealth control is the goal and, as Bloomberg reports, The PBOC is targeting an early rollout of China’s own digital currency to “boost control of money” and none other than The IMF’s Christine Lagarde added that “virtual currencies are extremely beneficial.” (“War On Cash Escalates: China Readies Digital Currency“)
The war on cash is happening openly now in societies that have pushed economic stimulus as far as they can. This is why governments are no longer the obstacle that The Economist thought they would be. Proof that we are entering the Epocalypse that will pave the way for acceptance of a global cashless monetary system can be seen in the now-obvious failure of the zero-interest polices of central banks. When hitting the zero bound failed to lift economies that crashed in the Great Recession, some central banks moved to force negative interest rates on people who save their money in banks.
Charging people to keep their money in the bank is hard to do so long as cash is available, as people may just withdraw all of their money from those banks in the form of the national cash and squirrel the cash away. In order to penetrate the twilight zone of economics, central banks need to abolish cash to terminate this escape route. Then they can force savers to spend, thereby increasing the flow of money through the economy, by raising the cost of holding money in a bank account as high as it takes to get people to spend their money. No sense letting perfectly good money waste away in an expensive bank account.
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