- Dang It Gold’s Supposed to Go Up! (Report 4 December, 2016)
We’ve gone through a succession of events and processes that were supposed to make gold go up. The following list is by no means exhaustive:
- Quantitative Easing
- Bernanke’s Helicopter Drops
- Janet Yellen’s Keynesianism
- Obama’s Deficits (US government debt is now a hair away from $20,000,000,000—and that’s just the little part of it they put on their balance sheet)
- The election of Trump
- The Italian Referendum (current as we write this)
Each has been good for a little blip that has been forgotten in the noise. We are seeing articles now that have moved on to the next old-new story. It seems that Trump is going to spend a lot on infrastructure. This will require massive deficits. But the market will distrust that the government can pay. So we will see a twin sell off of the US dollar in terms of other currencies, and Treasury bonds in terms of dollars. This will cause the mases to Discover Gold and the gold price is going to skyrocket. Click here to buy our fine gold, we have the very best gold.
We get it. Everyone thinks that interest rates are going up because inflation because more spending. Actually not quite everyone—our view is that the drivers which have caused the interest rate to fall for 35 years are still in full, deadly effect. Nor the folks who are bidding on junk bonds, or stocks for that matter.
But most everyone. Rates have to go up, because they’re lower than ever before history. Right?
And if rates are going up, then so is gold, right?
The Treasury bond is payabl only in US dollars. The US dollar, which is the liability of the Federal Reserve, is backed on by Treasurys. It’s a nice little check-kiting scheme. But besides that, the two instruments have the same risks. If you don’t like the bond, then you won’t like the dollar either. The day will come when en masse, the market decides it doesn’t like both of them, and gold will be the only acceptable money.
With due respect to our old friend Aragorn, today is not that day!
We believe interest rates are headed lower, not higher. But that said, we do not see any particular causal relationship between the interest rate and the price of gold. The former is the spread between the Fed’s undefined asset and its undefined liability. It is unhinged and while it could shoot the moon from Truman through Carter, it’s sailing in the other direction now. Down to Hell.
The price of gold is the exchange rate between the Fed’s liability and metal. So long as people strive to get more dollars—most especially including those who bet on the price of gold, and those who write letters encouraging the bettors—there is no reason for this exchange rate to explode.
Again, to plagiarize the Ranger from the North, the day will come when gold goes into permanent backwardation. But today is not that day!
Today (Friday’s close), the price of gold is down seven Federal Reserve Notes from where it was a week ago.
So where to from here? Are those dratted fundamentals moving?
We will update those fundamentals below. But first, here’s the graph of the metals’ prices.
The Prices of Gold and Silver
Next, this is a graph of the gold price measured in silver, otherwise known as the gold to silver ratio. It fell a bit more this week.
The Ratio of the Gold Price to the Silver Price
For each metal, we will look at a graph of the basis and cobasis overlaid with the price of the dollar in terms of the respective metal. It will make it easier to provide brief commentary. The dollar will be represented in green, the basis in blue and cobasis in red.
Here is the gold graph.
The Gold Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
The price of gold fell (i.e. the price of the dollar rose, green line), and the basis (abundance) fell and cobasis (scarcity) rose just a bit.
Our calculated fundamental price of gold fell about ten bucks, now about $1,200 even.
Now let’s look at silver.
The Silver Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
In silver, we see a 14-cent rise in price but the cobasis is up.
The fundamentals got ever-so-slightly tighter. And our calculated fundamental price moved up to just under $15.
We note that speculators bid silver up this evening (Arizona time) in the wake of the Italian vote, some 30 cents to just under $17. But as of this publication, they couldn’t hold the line and the price fell back and is now a nickel below Friday’s close.
© 2016 Monetary Metals
- Here's My Shocked Face
h/t National Bank Financial
Why is America’s homeownership rate at an all-time low despite rising household formation, record full-time employment and low interest rates? Perhaps, the trauma of the last housing crash is still fresh in the minds of potential home buyers who end up opting for rentals instead ? the rental vacancy rate is at a 31-year low. And prospective buyers who succeed in getting over that psychological barrier are then confronted by other obstacles such as tighter lending standards which pose problems, particularly for first-time home buyers holding student debt. After being burnt by lax lending during the subprime crisis, banks have gone to the other extreme as evidenced by latest data from the New York Fed which shows 58% of new mortgage originations this year has gone to borrowers with credit scores 760 and above. As today’s Hot Charts show, that’s the tightest mortgage standards in over a decade.
- Fake News Meme Going Viral
You’ve gotta give them credit. The plot, the plan, the conspiracy – it’s really well thought out, well funded – well executed. Bravo! It’s like a well planned ballet. In ballet, to acheive excellence, complete cooperation and syncrhonicity is required. Look what I found in my Twitter today from some Big Lebowski zombie:
FAKE NEWS @Twitter https://t.co/XoqS64iTfU
— Ross Sclafani (@RossSclafani) December 4, 2016
The ‘fake news’ in question was from a Zero Hedge article “Why the Elite Hate Russia” that was written by Global Intel Hub during the election, in order to counterbalance some of the “Russian Propaganda” coming from the CIA/Illuminati basement in rural Virginia (you know the location).
They are moving so quickly to put the genie back in the bottle it’s alarming. The DOD originally created the internet initially for legitimate military purposes (secure communication) and as an aside wireless technology was developed during world war 2 and actively used in combat (field phones). Anyway once the internet was ‘released’ it clearly was a mistake, but not something they could stop. Even a Rockefeller himself admitted ‘it would be better if the internet didn’t exist:’
I can report that the spokesman was an American man, probably in his thirties or forties, who was well versed in Internet culture and swore enthusiastically. He said that the group numbered about forty people. “I can say we have people who work for major tech companies and people who have worked for the government in different regards, but we’re all acting in a private capacity,” he said. “One thing we’re all in agreement about is that Russia should not be able to fuck with the American people. That is not cool.” The spokesman said that the group began with fewer than a dozen members, who came together while following Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine. The crisis was accompanied by a flood of disinformation designed to confuse Ukraine and its allies. “That was a big wake-up call to us. It’s like, wait a minute, Russia is creating this very effective fake-news propaganda in conjunction with their military operation on the ground,” the spokesman said. “My God, if they can do that there, why can’t they do it here?” PropOrNot has said that the group includes Ukrainian-Americans, though the spokesman laughed at the suggestion that they were Ukrainian agents. PropOrNot has claimed total financial and editorial independence.
Given PropOrNot’s shadowy nature and the shoddiness of its work, I was puzzled by the group’s claim to have worked with Senator Ron Wyden’s office. In an e-mail, Keith Chu, a spokesman for Wyden, told me that the PropOrNot team reached out to the office in late October. Two of the group’s members, an ex-State Department employee and an I.T. researcher, described their research. “It sounded interesting, and tracked with reporting on Russian propaganda efforts,” Chu wrote. After a few phone calls with the members, it became clear that Wyden’s office could not validate the group’s findings. Chu advised the group on press strategy and suggested some reporters that it might reach out to. “I told them that if they had findings, some kind of document that they could share with reporters, that would be helpful,” he told me. Chu said that Wyden’s office played no role in creating the report and didn’t endorse the findings. Nonetheless, he added, “There has been bipartisan interest in these kind of Russian efforts, including interference in elections, for some time now, including from Senator Wyden.” This week, Wyden and six other senators sent a letter to the White House asking it to declassify information “concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election.”
The story of PropOrNot should serve as a cautionary tale to those who fixate on malignant digital influences as a primary explanation for Trump’s stunning election. The story combines two of the most popular technological villains of post-election analysis—fake news and Russian subterfuge—into a single tantalizing package. Like the most effective Russian propaganda, the report weaved together truth and misinformation.
Bogus news stories, which overwhelmingly favored Trump, did flood social media throughout the campaign, and the hack of the Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s e-mail seems likely to have been the work of Russian intelligence services. But, as harmful as these phenomena might be, the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labelled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier. Vasily Gatov told me, “To blame internal social effects on external perpetrators is very Putinistic.”
This PropOrNot is clearly a Soros funded psy-op. But it’s amateurish, it’s pathetic. It’s amazing people really believe this stuff. But this is coming from a group of people who previously, just believed everything they saw on TV. Now that they are ‘surprised’ Trump was elected, they are searching the net for answers, looking at sites they didn’t look before (like Drudge, Zero Hedge, and many others). They still doubt anything they see ‘online’ because clearly, TV is the only real authority for information, not ‘the internets’.
Facebook was their first attempt to seize control of the internet as a new social control mechanism, but that is largely failing. Facebook does control a certain marginal percentage of the population but those with above room temperature IQ are not so susceptible for such easy manipulation. So post-election they’re going into overdrive. Fortunately, part of the dichotomy we witnessed during the election was also in parallel with the ‘digital divide’ with those more ‘technically savvy’ people being pro-Trump (although this is a reality the perception in the MSM is the opposite, as Silicon Valley backed Clinton, this was only the billionaire class and liberals, women, minorities, and others – the majority of tech savvy computer users backed Trump). This means that the ‘establishment’ that Trump defeated, they’re not too technically savvy. Sure, they can hire the best and the brightest with their money, but this too was a huge failure, as Clinton hired some unprofessional goons who allowed themselves to be taped in real time speaking about corruption and illegal activities for all to see. So childish. They can’t even decide who is a good subcontractor! Fortunately, globalintelhub.com wasn’t listed on their list, but zerohedge.com is – and we are a major contributor. Actually, ZeroHedge is the best ‘real news’ source of market info, maybe only in the same class as bloomberg (which is, a ‘real news’ agency although biased by a billionaire liberal owner).
In the recent vote about Russian Propaganda, only a small few in the house voted against it.
On November 30, one week after the Washington Post launched its witch hunt against “Russian propaganda fake news“, with 390 votes for, the House quietly passed “H.R. 6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017“, sponsored by California Republican Devin Nunes (whose third largest donor in 2016 is Google parent Alphabet, Inc), a bill which deals with a number of intelligence-related issues, including Russian propaganda, or what the government calls propaganda, and hints at a potential crackdown on “offenders.”
A quick skim of the bill reveals “Title V—Matters relating to foreign countries”, whose Section 501 calls for the government to “counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.”
The section lists the following definitions of media manipulation:
- Establishment or funding of a front group.
- Covert broadcasting.
- Media manipulation.
- Disinformation and forgeries.
- Funding agents of influence.
- Incitement and offensive counterintelligence.
- Assassinations.
- Terrorist acts.
As ActivistPost correctly notes, it is easy to see how this law, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, could be used to target, threaten, or eliminate so-called “fake news” websites, a list which has been used to arbitrarily define any website, or blog, that does not share the mainstream media’s proclivity to serve as the Public Relations arm of a given administration.
Curiously, the bill which was passed on November 30, was introduced on November 22, two days before the Washington Post published its Nov. 24 article citing “experts” who claim Russian propaganda helped Donald Trump get elected.
Anyone who is aware of how the world works (if you aren’t, you can read a list of books here to see how the world really works, or checkout Splitting Pennies) should be extremely ALARMED by this! Everyone has probably heard of the term ‘wire fraud’ -this was a catch all crime used by the FBI for more than 50 years to ensnare virtually anyone they wanted to convict for any crime. Wire fraud is “financial fraud involving the use of telecommunications or information technology.”
Which is a pretty broad, general definition. So many criminals who they couldn’t find evidence for their crimes, they would charge them with ‘wire fraud’ which was the bureaus goto law created for the purpose of convicting criminals without the need of ‘smoking gun’ evidence which was in many cases, like the JFK investigation, IMPOSSIBLE to find.
Fortunately, they aren’t so powerful – they are unpopular, and seem to be a dying breed. But we should prepare – we shouldn’t hope! We have to get on the offensive, this is what going viral is all about!
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Dum spiro spero “While I breathe, I hope“
- Is The US Government Behind The Fake News Media Attacks On President-Elect Trump?
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Eric Zuesse has brought to our attention that US intelligence officials have placed a story in Buzzfeed, “a Democratic party mouthpiece,” that the Russian government used fake news to get Donald Trump elected president.
According to Buzzfeed:“US intelligence officials believe Russia helped disseminate fake and propagandized news as part of a broader effort to influence and undermine the presidential election, two US intelligence sources told BuzzFeed News.
‘They’re doing this continuously, that’s a known fact,’ one US intelligence official said, requesting anonymity to discuss the sensitive national security issue.
‘This is beyond propaganda, that’s my understanding,’ the second US intelligence official said. The official said they believed those efforts likely included the dissemination of completely fake news stories. …
One intelligence official said, ‘In the context, did Russia attempt to influence the US elections; the aperture is as wide as it can possibly be.’” ‘The real unanswered question is, why did they do it?’ the second US intelligence official said. ‘Is it because they love Donald Trump? Because they hated Hillary Clinton? Or just because they like undermining Western democracies?’”
Who are these US intelligence officials who are portraying the president-elect of the United States to be a “Putin stooge, a tool of Russia”? Once in office, Trump must investigate these hostile elements in US intelligence who are working to discredit the US president and the American people who voted him into office.
As one reader pointed out, those who debunk “conspiracy theories,” that is, explanations that they do not like, now have a conspiracy theory of their own: Vladimir Putin used independent American websites to elect Trump with fake news. Only voters living in a few large coastal cities were immune to the fake news.
In other words, the presstitute media has lost control over Americans’ minds to Putin.
With an opponent this powerful, neoconservatives better think a dozen times before fomenting any more tension with the Kremlin.
Open the link above to Zeusse’s column and look at the cover of Time magazine. This cover delegitimizes the presidential election. Which US intelligence agency planted this cover on Time? President Trump must have the Secret Service investigate this attack from inside the US government on the US President. Congress, both House and Senate, should immediately summon Time magazine to hearings under oath. This interference by US intelligence in American political life is illegal. Those responsible must be discovered, indicted, convicted, and sentenced. Otherwise fake news will displace facts as Americans are wrapped in a Matrix inside a Matrix.
Three hundred and ninety opponents of the US Constitution, who sit in the US House of Representatives, just passed a bill that voids the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Title V of the bill establishes an interagency executive branch committee “to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence.” Russian manipulation of US media (a routine practice of the US government) to spread disinformation (fake news) is one of the “active measures by Russia” to be countered. In other words, websites that do not participate in the demonization of Russia and President Putin will be subjected to McCarthyite suspicions and accusations. Countering is an open-ended activity that easily extends to enforcement actions against suspected parties.
If this bill becomes law, it can be used to discredit and destroy truthtellers as agents of foreign intelligence.
In other words, the message is: if you dispute our lies you are a foreign agent and subject to arrest or elimination.
This is the state of democracy in America today.
More than any other country, the United States needs to be liberated. Can Trump do it?
- EU Demands Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft Cede to Their Anti-Hate Speech Laws
There’s so much hate out there. The EU has decided they’re going to do something about it, god damn it. All of the damned, fucking, voters running astray this year must have the autocrats going apeshit trying to figure out ways to suppress populism. As such, the EU is demanding that US tech giants comply with their demands to curtail ‘hate speech’ else be literally forced to do so — according to law. The laws are designed to protect migrants streaming into the EU, raping and pillaging along the way.
Europeans, you must comply.
source: Reuters
The European Union (EU) executive’s warning comes six months after the companies signed up to a voluntary code of conduct to take action in Europe within 24 hours, following rising concerns triggered by the refugee crisis and terror attacks.
This included removing or disabling access to the content if necessary, better cooperation with civil society organizations and the promotion of “counter-narratives” to hate speech.
Such as propaganda, like the correct the record shills? Counter-narratives.
The code of conduct is largely a continuation of efforts that the companies already take to counter hate speech on their websites, such as developing tools for people to report hateful content and training staff to handle such requests.
The EU Justice Commission wants tech companies to censor speech at a much faster pace than the current 80% after 48 hours. Permitting 20% of speech that is deemed hateful to be disseminated after 48 hours is 20% too much, according to the Commissioner Vera Jourova.“If Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft want to convince me and the ministers that the non-legislative approach can work, they will have to act quickly and make a strong effort in the coming months,” Jourova told the Financial Times.
Jourova’s report showed an uneven pace across the 28-country bloc, with the removal rate of racist posts in Germany and France above 50 percent, but just 11 percent in Austria and 4 percent in Italy.
Coincidentally, the Italians just told the EU to fuck off this evening, voting against the referendum. I suppose they’re all a bunch of racist bastards.EU justice ministers will meet in Brussels to discuss the report on Thursday. They are also expected to ask the companies to clarify issues including taking down “terrorist propaganda” and helping provide evidence to convict foreign fighters.
How nice of them to also include the censorship of terrorists. Kiss your free speech goodbye Europe. The EU has gone full Soviet Union with the aim to suppress freedom of expression.Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com
- "Pizzagate" Explodes After Man Arrested In Comet Restaurant Shooting
Pizzagate took a turn for the even more bizarre on Sunday, as a man with an assault rifle walked into Comet Ping Pong to "self-investigate" the Baltimore, Maryland, pizza parlor that internet conspiracy theorists say is at the center of an international child sex ring run by prominent Democrats. 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., reportedly fired the rifle at least once inside the restaurant but no one was injured.
As HeatSt.com reports, Washington, D.C., police arrested the man Sunday afternoon, after restaurant employees saw a man, described as being in his early 20s and carrying an “assault rifle,” work his way through the dining room and then attempt to enter the staff work area at the back of the building.
#Breaking : Major police presence near #comet pizza in #Northwest DC near the corner of Connecticut and Nebraska. Man arrested. pic.twitter.com/RrqaBt2kKR
— jeffgep (@jeffgep) December 4, 2016
Restaurant workers acted quickly, getting staff and patrons—including a number of children—to safety and dialing 911. Authorities were quick to respond. They subdued and arrested the man and secured the restaurant. No one was injured.
The Washington Post noted that the incident caused panic, with several businesses going into lockdown as police swarmed the neighborhood after receiving the call shortly before 3 p.m.
Police said 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., walked in the front door of Comet Ping Pong and pointed a firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee. The employee was able to flee and notify police. Police said Welch proceeded to discharge the rifle inside the restaurant.
The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” the election-related conspiracy theory.
Police said in addition to the assault rifle, they also recovered two firearms inside the restaurant; an additional weapon was recovered in Welch’s car. Bomb-sniffing dogs and at least one armored vehicle were present at the scene.
He has been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon.
DC Police Press Release on the arrest…
.@DCPoliceDept press release on arrest of Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Salisbury, NC for assault w/dangerous weapon at Comet restaurant. pic.twitter.com/IkSJUeHM2y
— Deputy Mayor Donahue (@SafeDC) December 5, 2016
One can't help but wonder, as Congress considers a bill “to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence,” whether this is yet another false flag to raise awareness of what is a possible outcome of "fake news"?
- Don't Want A Muslim Registry? Abolish The Census
Submitted by Alice Salles via The Mises Institute,
As President-elect Donald Trump met with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — a potential pick for head of the Department of Homeland Security — the internet lit up with the leaked contents of their meeting, triggering another round of talks concerning a possible “national registry” of Americans or immigrants who subscribe to Islam.
While Kobach’s plan involves the George W. Bush-era National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) — a system that remained in place under President Barack Obama until 2011 (only to be replaced with a more comprehensive program) — few caught up to the fact NSEERS only involves the collection and crosschecking of data pertaining to immigrants coming to the United States from Muslim-majority countries. But as news sources ran with the story that Trump could eventually turn this into a registry of American Muslims and immigrants already living in the country, the president-elect’s spokesman Jason Miller reassured the public that no, a registry system targeting Muslims was not in the cards for the Trump administration.
Nevertheless, there is one event in our country’s history that serves as a precedent for a system that could effectively single out and help report on specific Americans and immigrants. But the US government would never be able to put it in place if it wasn’t for the presence of the Census Bureau, an agency that costs billions of taxpayer dollars yearly.
In a recent piece for USA Today, explained that the Census Bureau sends “its hefty American Community Survey to more than 3 million households a year,” collecting personal information regarding the resident’s religion, ethnic background, employment history, and even if the resident in question has “difficulty remembering, concentrating or making decisions.”
While the agency threatens those taking the survey with a $5,000 fine for failing to comply with its demands, it never had to answer to its blatant disregard for the law in the 1940s, when the US government had access to information on Japanese Americans thanks to the data collected by Census workers. With detailed information in hand, the Army eventually rounded Japanese Americans up, throwing them in internment camps and making this period in the history of the country one of the most infamous legacies of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In his piece, Bovard added that the detentions are now “widely recognized … as among the largest civil liberties violations in modern U.S. history,” prompting Congress to vote to compensate victims in 1988. But despite the shame often associated with this episode, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that research unveiled documents proving that the Census Bureau had been an important part in this charade, prompting the agency to admit culpability — but only to a certain extent.
To this day, the Census Bureau claims it never provided names and addresses of all Japanese Americans. But despite the bureau’s claims, a study carried out by William Seltzer of Fordham University and Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee proved the Secret Service had access to, at least, all the names and addresses of individuals of Japanese ancestry in the Washington, D.C. area thanks to the bureau.
So if you are concerned that the United States government could — under a Trump administration or a future administration — round up any group of Americans and immigrants based solely on their religion or another particular characteristic, tackling the power and inquisitiveness of the US Census Bureau would be a great first step, helping to trim the government’s power and ensure the privacy and Fourth Amendment rights of all individuals are being properly protected.
- And Then There Was One
So much has changed in just the 8 months since April 25, 2016, when this “White House Photo” of the day was taken.
As Will Jordan notes, the photo showed a meeting of the world’s top political leaders, President Barack Obama talking with European leaders before their meeting in Hannover, Germany.
From left: British Prime Minister David Cameron, the President, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
As of this evening, of the five, just one remains on the global political scene. The real question is for how much longer.
- These Countries Have Nearly "Eliminated Cash From Circulation"
The cashless society is catching up to all of us. As SHTFPlan.com's Mac Slavo notes,
Most of Europe has shifted that way, and now India is forcing the issue. In the United States, people are being acclimated to it, and may soon find that no other option is practical in the highly-digitized online world.
Once that takes hold, the banksters, bureaucrats and hackers will have total information on all your transactions, purchasing behavior, profiles about consumers, political and social background history and even predictive behavior, allowing them to control the population with ease.
If/when a major crisis hits, nothing will work if the grid goes down; nothing will take place that isn’t strictly authorized – apart from a barter and precious metals exchange system that will be marginalized to the pre-digital ghetto.
In fact, as The Daily Coin's Rory Hall explains 1 out of 3 people in the world never uses cash…
We recently learned how serious these criminals are about stealing the sovereignty of every person on planet earth. Actually, most people are willingly handing over their sovereignty to the banks/government and have no idea what they are actually doing.
When India banned (made illegal) the 500 and 1000 rupee banknote this move effected every 1 out of 7 people on planet earth. That means that every 7th person, anywhere and everywhere, you come in contact with may have been effected by this cash ban.
Our individual sovereignty is tied directly to our ability to move freely about. When every step we make is tracked by the bank/government our sovereignty is gone forever. Freely trading commerce is one of the cornerstones of human sovereignty. Without the ability to conduct business with whom we wish, when we wish we are nothing more than cattle to the overlords of the land.
An expat living in Thailand sent me an email last week, at the height of India blowing apart because the idiotic decision by Prime Minister Modi to eliminate the two most used bank notes in India. The email was to inform me that Thailand would be implementing a new policy in the early part of 2017 to completely eliminate coins from circulation. South Korea has already taken measures to eliminate coins from circulation.
Here is a google translation from the Korean website wikitree.co.kr (once you arrive you will need to translate from Korean language)
From next year, you can get the change of cash that you bought and paid at a convenience store on your transportation card.
In the mid to long term, not only transportation cards but also remittance to credit cards and accounts will be promoted, and the industry will be expanded to retail sector such as marts and pharmacies.
The Bank of Korea announced on the 21st [November] that it will provide a service to charge prepaid transportation cards at convenient stores from the first half of next year (2017) as the first stage of the demonstration project to realize “a society without coins”.
What’s happening in Thailand? Well, the government doesn’t even bother with trying to cover up the “scheme” to move people onto the tax farm – currency enslavement awaits for all that enter the great Bangkok Baht giveaway!!!
According to Bangkok.Coconuts.co (published in July 2016):
“Want to win a million baht? Go for e-payment,” says Thailand’s junta, offering a lucky draw as an incentive to use the new online payment scheme “PromptPay.” The government wants to encourage citizens to use the service for business, in an effort to bring some of the massive informal Thai economy onto the books and boost tax revenues.
As Southeast Asian economies struggle and tax income misses budget targets, Thailand’s finance minister is hopeful that a nationwide e-payment scheme can add tax revenue of THB100 billion a year to the coffers.
Finance Minister Apisak Tantivorawong has estimated the move will save banks and businesses a combined THB75 billion a year, though other policymakers expect it could take some time for businesses to change their habits. Cash and checks now make up 80 percent of transactions.
A coup in May 2014 ended months of political unrest, but the generals have struggled to revive Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy as exports and consumption remain weak.
What about the most populace country on the planet: China? Well, they are, currently, in fourth place in use of digitized currency behind the U.S., Europe and Brazil. While none of these countries have eliminated cash from circulation, the banks/government make is sound “trendy”, convenient and oh so cool to never use cash. Why force a policy change when you can convince the people to hand over their freewill?
Although China still has some way to go before it catches up with countries such as the US and Sweden, the speed at which China has made the shift from cash towards cashless has surprised many. Non-cash payments have been growing by around 40 per cent a year and last year China moved into 4th place in the world for non-cash payments after the US, Europe and Brazil.There are many reasons for China’s rapid transition away from cash. One is urbanisation, as non-cash payments are becoming both easy and popular. This is especially the case in top-tier cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing where it is both trendy and convenient to pay without using cash.There is a huge variety of choices when it comes to making cashless payments and China UnionPay has definitely helped to encourage this, particularly in the case of debit cards, which outnumber credit cards in China by 10 to one. China has more than 4 billion cards on issue – almost enough for each adult to have about three each.Mobile payments have also taken off in China – it has the largest proportion of people in the world using their mobile phones to make payments, online and physically. SourceThe purpose of going cashless is not for our “convenience”, it is specifically for the purpose of “saving the banks” and tax collections. Governments and banks could care-less about what is convenient for us. They are only concerned with how much of our wealth they can extract from every person who has any currency.
The population of South Korea is 50.22 million people or said another way about 1/6th the size of the United States. India, on the other hand, is populated by 1.33 BILLION people while there are 7.4 BILLION populating the world. With Thailand making moves to remove cash/coins from the people we need to add their population to the mix as well. With more than 68.22 Million people this brings the number of people that are being forced by their government to use digital currency to a whopping 1.45 BILLION people. If you add 40% of China’s population of 1.35 BILLION that equates to approximately 540 million people the number of people currently living within a cashless society breaches 2 Billion people or said another way 1 out of every 3.5 people we come into contact with everyday. Every 4th person you greet has nothing to do with cash. This does not take in account the top 3 nations using digitized currency for their transactions. If the U.S., Europe and Brazil were calculated we would be well below 1 out of 3 people never using cash for any transaction.
Some people that are reading this are telling themselves “so what?” those are distant far off lands that have nothing to do with the U.S. and this will never happen here. Well, not so fast.
Larry Summers, who is like an embedded tick at the Treasury Department of the United States, has called for the elimination of the $100 bill. With the elimination of the largest denominated bank note from circulation this would effectively kill the use of cash. Why? Because it would eliminate most of the total cash value from circulation in one-fell-swoop.
With $1.2 trillion in cash in circulation, as of July 2013 (now three year old information), not just in the United States but around the world, removing the $100 bill would deal a serious blow to the cash balance in circulation. Maybe not the amount of pieces of paper, but the cash value removed would be huge. Imagine going to a casino and hitting a blackjack table for $2,000 and the cashier hands you bundles of $50 bills (40) or worse, bundles of $20 bills (100)! $2,000 payout at a casino is not that a big deal. Having to handle the sheer volume of bank notes could potentially be a problem for the person receiving the windfall of paper.
If you have any misguided notion that a cashless society is not coming, just keep telling yourself that every time you use a debit card, credit card or your phone for your next purchase. With the elimination of cash we effectively hand over our individual human sovereignty to the banks and the government.
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Finally we leave you with Harvard's latest study on which nations would 'benefit' the most from going cashless…
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