UPDATE: A podcast version of this report is now available. To listen Click Here.

(There’s extra material in the podcast, as the report is expanded upon in various spots by Chris Martenson)

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Executive Summary

• The perverted bond market (nearly $20 trillion in negative yielding debt) is signalling an epic coming crisis
• A painful global recession is increasingly guaranteed in the coming 12 months. But that’s not the largest risk…
• A massive global currency crisis is brewing. One that could very well topple a number of today’s nations.
• Why hard assets offer one of the best defenses against how all this will unfold

If you have not yet read Part 1: The Hard Truth, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

The long sweep of financializaton begins back in the first few years after Nixon slammed the gold window and set the world adrift on August 15^th, 1971.

This kicked off the great wave of financialization that has created a lot of very financially wealthy people, entire classes and even generations of losers, and its pain has yet to be felt.

Financialization allowed corporations, the government and households to go deeper and deeper into debt and it has extended the day of reckoning by pulling forward a lot of demand. The other phrase for that is “kicked the can down the road.”

Look, there’s nothing wrong with debt as long as it’s put to productive uses. Things like cash-flowing rental properties, expanding plant capacity, or gaining a new skill offering higher future income streams.

Those are all fine. Well, with the caveat that the future arrives, exponentially larger, as expected. As I wrote in Part 1, that may not be such a solid bet anymore. If the future is smaller, then being on either side of debt, as borrower or lender, could be a big financial disappointment.

Fair Compensation

Even under the best of circumstances debts should come with some sort of a discount, that is a rate of interest, applied. This reflects three things; the risks involved, the value of money over time, and inflation.