It’s a dark club and you don’t want a part in it!

Thursday, 20 July 2023 — South Melbourne

[7 min read]

Dear Reader,

In November 2005, George Carlin said to his audience in a New York live show Life is Worth Losing that ‘It’s a big club and you ain’t in it’. This statement will be what people will remember him for in future generations.

He revealed the shocking truth about the system that we live in.

You can hear a four-minute excerpt here.

A word of warning though — there’s some confronting and shocking content in this clip. Just so you know, the swearing is the least of the matter!

You know that there’s a bunch of people who own most of the world’s resources, companies and wield an immense amount of power. I’ve talked about this in the past on several occasions (like here).

They’re not as invincible as they used to be after the arrest and mysterious ‘suicide’ of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. And, more prominently, when they lost control of Twitter last October, hence the power to control the narrative.

In fact, the latest bombshell is profoundly destructive to them. So much so that it’s sealed their fate.

I’ve primed you in the past to stomach what’s to come.

Here goes…

Buckle up, this one is dark…

Exploiting the most vulnerable

The Sound of Freedom is a movie detailing the true story of Tim Ballard, a US Department of Homeland Security agent who fought for over a decade to rescue children from international crime syndicates engaging in sex slavery and human trafficking. Released on 4 July in line with Independence Day, it caused much controversy and division.

The controversy wasn’t over how such heinous acts existed in the world. After all, people have grown aware of this going on in their own country.

For example, the Hong Kong public found out last year how gangs tricked tourists to fly to South-East Asia before selling them to slave labour. This prompted calls for the Special Administrative Government to tighten laws to protect people from falling into these traps. They also imposed severe punishments against offenders who were caught.

In January this year, the singer Madonna was in the headlines after a charity foundation, Ethiopian World Federation, accused her of engaging in child trafficking in Malawi. The singer has been a prominent philanthropist supporting child adoption in Africa. She has personally adopted four African children to raise as her own. However, in doing so, she raised concerns within the African countries that she’s opened the doors to child exploitation. Therefore, this accusation has brought to light suspicions about the motives behind her philanthropy.

And just this month, Brazilian celebrity faith healer João Teixeira de Faria, better known as John of God, received a 99-year extension to his jail sentence. Faria had previously been convicted for running a large sex exploitation and trafficking ring that masqueraded as a faith-healing group. He’d been responsible for the rape and murder of several victims, including the whistleblower that led to his arrest, Sabrina Bittencourt.

What’s more disturbing is that many prominent public figures are closely tied to him — most prominently, US talk show phenomenon and businesswoman, Oprah Winfrey, as well as former US President Bill Clinton and the current Brazilian President Luis Lula da Silva.

So people aren’t in the dark about these things.

But how the establishment responded is most mind-boggling.

How deep a hole the establishment plumbed!

You’d think that Hollywood, the media and other public figures — being the social justice advocates fighting for open borders, gender identity, affirmative action and social equity — would express outrage at the mistreatment of children.

No, they went silent…as the Writers Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have gone on strike, conveniently.

Now that they’re on strike, think about how the public will now be left in the dark on social and cultural matters!

Those who spoke up did so… to lambast the movie!

I’m not making this up.

Several news outlets including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Bloomberg and The Rolling Stone came out with hit pieces attacking the movie. They sought to cast it as a cult conspiracy film aimed at the ‘QAnon crowd’.

What’s disturbing is that the author of these hit pieces, Noah Berlatsky, supports certain ideologies and life choices that'd raise some eyebrows.

Now don’t think that I’m trying to smear this man.

But you may want to look at what Andy Ngo found on his Twitter account:

Furthermore, he’s the communication director of Prostasia, an advocacy body claiming to protect children from sexual assault. Except this organisation has a history of publishing articles seeking to normalise ‘minor-attracted persons’ (MAP) and end the stigmatising of paedophilia.

So the mainstream media lets someone like him pen a piece against ‘The Sound of Freedom’. That should set alarm bells ringing.

In his piece for The Washington Post Noah claimed that child sex trafficking isn’t a serious matter.

That flew in the face of an investigation by The New York Times that the Department of Health and Human Services had lost track of over 85,000 children who crossed the US/Mexico border, with many ending up in forced labour.

Don’t forget that The Washington Post’smotto is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’. Ironic!

But wait…it gets worse than that.

Until recently, one could’ve hopped onto Google, and it’d point them to the US Department of Justice website documenting the seriousness of the matter.

Well, that was until the Department of Justice scrubbed that from their site last week.

Yes…let that sink in.

Act now to protect your family, wealth and future

George Carlin said it was a big club and you ain’t in it.

That was before we realised what it is.

You’re now seeing that this is a dark club.

And you and I don’t want to be in it.

We’re past the turning point in the Global Information War. The tide has turned clearly.

That system is built on fake money, lies, blackmail and dark deeds.

So what should you do to stay ahead of them?

We’ll stand for everything they’re not.

Start with protecting your wealth. I do so with precious metals and mining stocks. You can find out how to do that with my investment service, The Australian Gold Report.

More importantly, protect your family and especially your children. They’re our future.

God bless,

Brian Chu,
Editor, The Daily Reckoning Australia

Dear Reader,

Yesterday, the morning trading on Wall Street took a now-familiar form: stocks went up. By the end of the day, the Dow was up another 1%.

What are we to make of it? Is it ‘risk on’ again? Is it time to load up on stocks?

The answer is ‘no.’ And today we give you ‘no-plus,’ the real secret to Wall Street’s boom-y-ness.

‘Don’t fight the Fed’ has been one of the most successful formulae on Wall Street. But it’s not foolproof. And not complete.

When the Fed switched from enabling inflation with zero rates in 2020…to trying to curb it by increasing rates in 2022…an investor would have been well advised to switch too — from buying the dips to selling the bounces. Stocks went down.

Doom, gloom and boom

But then, they didn’t go down. The ‘bounce’ has now gone on for nine months. It has created a whole new group of rich people — the AI Millionaires. And it has produced what looks to many like a new bull market…with the best six months for the Nasdaq in history…and more to come.

Not only that, but the US economy, too, has so far resisted its long overdue rendezvous with the business cycle. Where’s the recession? Where’s all the doom & gloom we promised?

A broader question worth asking: did the geniuses at the Fed finally get the hang of managing a $24 trillion economy…so that their own errors disappear, without pain or embarrassment? The Fed put interest rates far too low and left them there far too long, resulting in far too much debt throughout the world economy. What happens next? Economists argue over a ‘hard landing’ or a ‘soft landing’…but what if there’s no landing at? What if the party never ends?

Maybe so. But buckle your seat belts, turbulence ahead. Here’s a headline story from Bloomberg: ‘A US$500 Billion Corporate-Debt Storm Builds Over Global Economy’:

‘Fears of a credit crisis have receded. But a wave of corporate bankruptcies is building now that an era of easy money has come to an end.’

And here’s another: ‘The US$785 Billion Junk-Bond Maturity Wall Has Never Been So Close’:

‘The world’s riskiest borrowers are starting to run out of easy-money era financing and feeling the pinch as they return to a tougher market shadowed by aggressive central banks.

‘Junk-rated companies staring down a US$785 billion maturity wall are in a race against time to replace debt that they secured when major central banks across the world slashed rates and boosted quantitative easing programs to keep economies afloat in 2020. On average, these companies now have 4.7 years to put fresh financing in place, the least amount of time ever, according to a Bloomberg global index.’

Bloomberg is not letting up. The stewards should take their seats: ‘The World’s Empty Office Buildings Have Become a Debt Time Bomb’:

‘From San Francisco to Hong Kong, higher interest rates and falling property values are bringing the commercial real estate market to a perilous precipice.

‘In New York and London, owners of gleaming office towers are walking away from their debt rather than pouring good money after bad. The landlords of downtown San Francisco’s largest mall have abandoned it. A new Hong Kong skyscraper is only a quarter leased.

‘The creeping rot inside commercial real estate is like a dark seam running through the global economy. Even as stock markets rally and investors are hopeful that the fastest interest-rate increases in a generation will ebb, the trouble in property is set to play out for years.’

US$300 trillion overhang

Remember that we are in a transition period, from one primary trend to another. After four decades of lower and lower interest rates…which reached ridiculous lows after the 2009 crisis in housing finance…the world now has a US$300 trillion overhang of debt. Some government debt. Some corporate. Some household.

All this debt is subject to interest rates…that are now going up.

Debt does not get refinanced overnight. It takes time. But when it is time to go back to lenders, debtors find their interest charges approximately twice what they were a few years ago.

Meanwhile, households are still running down their savings — which were built up during the Trump/Biden stimmie giveaways. And the US Government — the world’s biggest consumer, as well as its biggest debtor — is now spending more than US$2 trillion more than it receives in taxes, each year. That too must be financed…at rising cost.

So far, the giant balloon is still floating along nicely. Full employment. Rising stock prices. Joe Biden crows about what a great economy he has created. But the real secret is that the ‘tightening’ has hardly begun. There are lots of ways of measuring inflation. The most reliable is the ‘trimmed mean’ index…which puts today’s inflation at about 5%. Interest rates have moved up dramatically. Inflation has come down. But so far, the real, after inflation cost of credit (money) — based on the Fed Funds rate — is still only about zero. The Fed is not exactly fighting inflation tooth and nail, in other words.

But interest rate hikes are only a part of the inflate-or-die picture. While monetary policy sobers up, fiscal policy turns to the bottle.

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Daily Reckoning Australia