The non-ordained self-appointed false prophet Thiel has the catch-all answer to the financial problems in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Of course it is the standard Armstrongite viewpoint that God hates everyone in the world except for the 1,700 people in RCG and the 15 members in Arroyo Grande. Then he tries to end with a word of encouragement. Doesn't it make you want to know his jesus?
This means than a lot even what wealth is left, has actually been debased. Ultimately the US dollar will truly crash.
Until then, it means that economic recoveries will be shaky and that many people will likely not handle the next downturn as well. Furthermore, various tax and other policies from Washington, D.C. are further discouraging the accumulation and preservation of wealth. That too, does not bode well for the economy of the USA.
Unless the USA changes, it will be doomed. However, Jesus will return a few years after that and establish the Kingdom of God. Until then, work, pray, and try to best manage whatever household wealth you may have. Whether you are in the USA or not.
14 comments:
Unfortunately Thiel may be right, although probably not for the reasons he thinks. It's nothing to do with the bible or prophecy, as Thiel is sure to claim.
The more the Fed expands the money supply without an equivalent expansion of the economy (money demand), the more the value of the dollar will fall vis-à-vis where it otherwise would have been valued against other currencies. It's possible for the Fed to fix the situation by tightening the money supply. It's usually thought to be good monetary policy to loosen the money supply during economic downturns and tighten it during economic expansion, and not without good reason. A cheaper dollar makes US goods abroad cheaper, and that revs up the US economic engine. Unfortunately it makes the rest of the world more expensive for Americans. The opposite policy makes sense when the economic engine is starting to overheat.
The risk is, the more we devalue our currency, the more it makes US treasury bonds frozen in China and elsewhere around the world, likely to melt, causing an effective expansion of the money supply that could deluge the Fed's ability to reign it in. For every dollar in the US, there's forty dollars overseas. So it doesn't take a lot of change in the desirability of the dollar to have a pretty profound effect.
The other thing that threatens to crash the dollar is the movement away from dollars to a more diversified basket of currencies in which oil will be priced. If people don't demand dollars to buy oil, they'll have a lot less demand for them.
Although the US economy is still very large and powerful, it is acknowledged by the Obama cabinet and others that our nation and our economy has begun it's descent, and at a noticeable rate. A lot of this has to with our nations values, but I'm not talking about gay marriage. Even though our workforce works harder, we still outconsume our ability to pay for it. Neither the government nor the average American individual seems capable of living within their means. As our nation's debts climb, this chips away at the faith and confidence other nations put in the strength and stability of the US economy, and that of it's dollar.
As a nation, we're taking, IMHO, a LOT of unnecessary economic risks. We've become fat, overconfident, and sloppy, and I don't see any political will, or grassroots movement to take better care of the amazing economic machine our forebears built (and stole).
Perhaps a new book is in order: "The Fall of the Secret Sect".
USA will be the last man standing. The rest of the worlds currencies are in worse shape than ours, and we have "the least dirty shirt" of the bunch.
In fact, as other countries collapse, like Italy, Spain, France, Ireland, Japan,Argentina etc. , there is a flight of capital out of those markets to the safety of the USA.
This allows us to play the game much longer, and although our day of reckoning will also come, we will be last in line.
Sovereign debt crisises lead to war. It happened in the 1930s. The USA again still has the biggest guns, nuclear weapons and the like. In the past , when Nicaragua was in default at times from 1910 to 1935, USA marines simply occupied the ports and literally took a percentage of all trade to cover bond payments.
It would be real interesting to see the Chinese (who have their own serious problems in their economy because of misplaced expansion and inefficient uses of capital) try to take over the USA for failed payment of debts.
Usually what turns around economic cycles at the bottoms is new revolutionary technology. We are no doubt close to , or at a bottom. The computer revolution brought the economy out of the slump of the 70s. Railroads and oil delivered us out of the post Civil War slump. WWII breakthrough technologies of aircraft, atomic energy and medicine broke us out of the Depression.
What will be the breakthrough to carry us for another 30 year cycle? Perhaps biotechnology, fusion energy, or nanotechnology. If Jesus is not coming back soon, the world will indeed somehow stagger along as it always has.
Remember, there are always 5 good reasons on why the world should collapse, and 5 good reasons on why we are entering a new glorious era. Both have ALWAYS been possible to argue throughout history, in both logical and deliberate manners, and both being able to be argued at the SAME TIME!
Keep your powder dry, listen to many viewpoints, and react only to the present, (which is all we ever really have any control over anyway!)
Joe Moeller
Cody, WY
Are you hiding something, Joe? Could it be that Hitler is alive and well and LIVING ON YOUR RANCH?
Some people are just like Jesus, and stock weapons on their ranches to kill those who need a helping hand.
Luv,
Gun-totin' American Jesus
With all due respect, Joe, a fair amount of your analysis doesn't add up.
Yes, it's true, the Euro is in worse shape than the $US at the moment. The Japanese economy never really bounced back from their early 90's implosion, partially due to their Keiretsu system. Latin America doesn't really compete with 1st world economies. But China is in a real position to become the clearly dominant global economic power simply because it has an untapped labor supply. Yes, China has some issues that are going to take about 20 years to chew through, but they are in a position to become absolutely unstoppable in due time as their population continues to move out ancient agrarian civilization and into the 21st century. The US is a sunset power and our dominance is not sustainable. The USA will not be the last man standing for very much longer.
Economic booms and busts are a fact of economies that have been happening since long before the industrial revolution. The further down into economic depression, or the further up into economic overheating you go, the stronger become the balance of trade forces pushing the economy back toward the mean. It's economics that turns around economic cycles, not revolutionary technology. All that stuff about the Civil War, the ending of the Great Depression and the 70's isn't correct. What revolutionary technology brought us out of the recession that began in June 1907? And what's the revolutionary technology that brought us out of the bottom of this latest financial crisis? We're not now at the bottom, we were at the bottom beginning in March 2009. Signs of life are returning even to housing markets now.
Sovereign debt crises do not always lead to war. They usually lead to currency collapse and debt restructuring. That's what happened in Argentina 1999-2002. What happened in Germany in the 1930's was the same thing that was happening everywhere--the Great Depression, but in Germany, they had WWI reparations to pay. In order to pay their debts the government began monetizing it (simply diluting the currency by printing money to pay your bills). Runaway inflation is always caused by a runaway increase in the money supply. WWII was not the result of the Great Depression, it was the result of WWI.
Rome had the biggest guns, nuclear weapons, etc. for their day and age. Yet Rome was not like Sparta. Rome did not fall because of military defeat. Neither will the US. We will collapse, like Rome did, from the inside.
By all means keep your powder dry and don't listen to Bob Thiel.
Head Usher:
Lots of things can happen. Im no prophet, and will take it as it comes.
A big surprise is that we will be energy exporters here in the USA within the next 10 years. There are HUGE amounts of natural gas, coal, oil and the like coming online here constantly, and new discoveries as well. This will strongly support the dollar.
Also, we still continue to be a huge exporter of food. China has now become a net importer of food, with about 4 huge massive freighters of wheat a DAY coming in from the USA. Few know that China is not self food sufficient.
China is now in fact starting to export jobs to even cheaper labor markets, and building factories and the like even in Africa.
My main point here is that although there are many problems, there are many interesting future possibilities that we do not see as well. It has always been this way.
The old Trilateral idea of three power centers does seem to be the future of the world though. China will dominate the far east, Germany in Europe and the USA in the Western Hemisphere.
How this interacts with "End of the Age" and apocalypse is anyones guess. I personally feel that the things described in Revelation, like 200 million man armies are a long long ways away. Also, NO MAN buying or selling, implies universal global cashless society, still an idea that is at least 25 years away on a global basis.
Realize the cost and size of a 200 million man army. The infrastructure needed to supply it, to transport it, to feed it, to train it. No, we are not close to such being possible, even for China.
The USA pulled out of WWII with as high of a debt burden as we do now. We stood on our feet because again, we had the least dirty shirt on the planet. It may happen again, is all Im saying.
I dont marry future ideas at all, and this is all speculation. My ego is not on the line in being right, and in fact, being a trend follower is the safest bet in all of this. If you are correct, and it plays out as you say, hey, no problem with me.
I took my "crystal ball" and drilled some holes in it and it now works great for bowling down at the R&K Super Bowl here in Cody! Again my ego is not on the line about knowing the future. I feel most in the COG of should realize this, and start living life today, and quit banking your whole existence and future on the unknowable future.
Prophecy only makes sense AFTER the fact. It is meant to draw to repentance, not be some kind of crib sheet.
Luv,
Joe Moeller
PS- (In response to above) Yes Hitler is down on my ranch here. He lives in the barn , and shovels it clean at least once a week. He claims to have been severely misunderstood in his day, and having a bad childhood. When he is on his meds he is a hell of worker, and is a great pinochle player when we play cards on Friday nights after dinner.
I have to agree with the first Anon post; the US is indeed doomed. It's just a matter of time when it is finally is replaced by another world power, just like what happened to every other empire in the past since the beginning. As for the details of how and when, we simply do not know in advance. There are countless false prophets like Bob Thiel who predict overall the same thing but differ on the details. It's in the details where they get it wrong not the actual prediction. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. It doesn't mean the clock can always be used to display the correct time, and of course it's not.
I wish we could export our false prophets to China and doom their country like Thiel and the rest of the hacks have been doing for decades.
Its their turn to deal with religious fools.
First, Armstrongism always assumes worst case scenario. That rarely occurs, although there are notable exceptions. Doomed, as in totally doomed? Or, doomed as in diminished? For Armstrongism to work you have to have doomed as in totally doomed. Greater impact when you explain it to proselytes, and it makes what you later discover to be an awful solution (life in an ACOG with everything else defined as being hopeless) seem almost palatable by comparison.
The good news? People are very resourceful creatures. They seem to have done quite well in diminishing the impending doom factor during the years following 1975. In a way, Thiel and his ilk are actually making a positive contribution by exposing what could spell out doom, bringing it into the public consciousness so that the problem solvers amongst us can come up with solutions.
When God decides to pull the plug, these 3-5 year guys will remain clueless. They have no special insights as has been proven over, and over, and over again. Not one of them has been able to rise above as any kind of breakaway, although each of them tries to demonstrate that they are the one. It's all words and hot air, but perhaps we should liken this to the ultimate automotive truth test, and tell them "Show me the Church FAX. Frankly, that's us, here, where we list the failures, trainwrecks, horrible breaches in ethics, and just plain wrong doctrinal approaches.
BB
Phooey. We should all be preparing for the next ice age coming in 10,000 to 15,000 years. Hear tell that glaciers 1 mile high will bury New York. Now THERE'S a DISASTER! If humanity survives, it will be greatly diminished.
Of course, in 10 million years earth will be hit with radiation form a neutron star and all life on earth will die.
Closer to home, if economic times get really really tough (they just might), at first, no doubt this will act as CONFIRMATION (!) of the false prophecies, but THEN as time goes on, it will either be feed yourself and your family, or pay tithes. What will it be? Are the people in the ACoGs really that committed to it when push comes to shove and the chips are down?
I'm not seeing it.
Byker Bob is making a good distinction. I'm definitely not saying that the US is doomed, just that it seems inevitable to me that we're going to be diminished. I am not aware of any world powers that have entered decline, that recovered and went on to another golden age.
If the US did go on to another golden age, nobody would be happier than me. If we were still in our prime, we wouldn't need to strike it rich in new oil and natural gas. If that happened, it wouldn't make us rich, it would compensate for some of the things we've been doing wrong because our success has gone to our heads, we've taken our wealth for granted, and we've become sloppy. We haven't been content with the wealth we've had. It hasn't been enough. We've wanted to imagine that we were even wealthier than we are. It's gutting out our national capital. We're spending the principle of our trust fund. That is the national "sin" that is making us into a sunset power. It wouldn't take a miracle to turn it around, it would just take a collective, national will to do so. But when in history has such a thing ever happened?
But it's not just about the US, it's about the entire global picture, and relative competitive advantages. We're not in a position to dig ourselves out of this hole as we were in 1945. We're not as competitive now as we were after WWII relative to other nations, when half the industrialized world suddenly wasn't industrialized anymore because it was bombed to smithereens.
Power is always economic. If you don't have money, you're not powerful. Rome fell because it couldn't afford to field an army anymore.
Speaking about Hitler has anyone come across that doco "Grey Wolf" that purports to tell the truth that Hitler actually fled to Argentina & died a painful death there?
LOL, Hitler is ALIVE and will take over Germany again so they can invade the USA and hang everybody from meat hooks, because God's rear-end prophet says so, LOL!
Post a Comment