Podcast
by
Chris Martenson
Executive Summary
- The gigantic predicament we all face
- What you should do, as a concerned individual
- What WE should do, as a society
- Contributing to the new narrative
If you have not yet read Part 1: Mad As Hell available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
It simply has to be said; there appears to be little to no public appetite for facing reality.
At least not without some sort of a calamity or forcing function to press the issue that will wake up enough people and call out what leadership actually exists to finally step up and begin to deliver.
The many predicaments and extreme complexity require astonishingly great leadership to address and there’s really none of that to be found anywhere at the moment.
So we must adopt a two prong approach in our lives to both deal with the coming calamities and lay the groundwork for the next stage of things.
As it stands right now, the central banks are mainly interested in propping up the asset markets which is only serving to enrich the already stupendously rich with a few minor scraps for enough upper and middle class people to keep them content to play along. While this is being done, enormous imbalances are being created even as the underlying structural issues remain unaddressed.
Some of these are even dead simple, single factor financial issues, which should be among the easiest to detect and address yet these to remain unexamined and unaddressed. Examples include exponentially increasing debt-per-capita in Japan (goosed by demographics) and pensions being utterly gutted by too-low interest rates.
If the simple math of these situations is still too difficult and complex to allow for any sort of proper response, we have to then conclude that the more subtle and intractable and larger issues we face are even further out of reach.
Here I am talking about needing to…
Fixing The Future
PREVIEW by Chris MartensonExecutive Summary
- The gigantic predicament we all face
- What you should do, as a concerned individual
- What WE should do, as a society
- Contributing to the new narrative
If you have not yet read Part 1: Mad As Hell available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
It simply has to be said; there appears to be little to no public appetite for facing reality.
At least not without some sort of a calamity or forcing function to press the issue that will wake up enough people and call out what leadership actually exists to finally step up and begin to deliver.
The many predicaments and extreme complexity require astonishingly great leadership to address and there’s really none of that to be found anywhere at the moment.
So we must adopt a two prong approach in our lives to both deal with the coming calamities and lay the groundwork for the next stage of things.
As it stands right now, the central banks are mainly interested in propping up the asset markets which is only serving to enrich the already stupendously rich with a few minor scraps for enough upper and middle class people to keep them content to play along. While this is being done, enormous imbalances are being created even as the underlying structural issues remain unaddressed.
Some of these are even dead simple, single factor financial issues, which should be among the easiest to detect and address yet these to remain unexamined and unaddressed. Examples include exponentially increasing debt-per-capita in Japan (goosed by demographics) and pensions being utterly gutted by too-low interest rates.
If the simple math of these situations is still too difficult and complex to allow for any sort of proper response, we have to then conclude that the more subtle and intractable and larger issues we face are even further out of reach.
Here I am talking about needing to…
by
Chris Martenson
Historian and economist David Fleming undertook the writing of Lean Logic a grand vision that projected out the likely path of collapse for our currently unsustainable way of life, as well as the key success factors society will need to cultivate to come out the other side.
Following his death, his writing partner Shaun Chamberlin distilled the book's prime conclusions into the more accessible Surviving The Future: Culture, carnival, and capital in the aftermath of the market economy. Shaun, who has also been deeply involved with Rob Hopkins in the Transition Movement since its inception, stresses that localized communities that pursue developing as much independence from the central economy as possible will be the foundations for entering a sustainable, enjoyable future.
Shaun Chamberlin: Surviving The Aftermath Of The Market Economy
by Chris MartensonHistorian and economist David Fleming undertook the writing of Lean Logic a grand vision that projected out the likely path of collapse for our currently unsustainable way of life, as well as the key success factors society will need to cultivate to come out the other side.
Following his death, his writing partner Shaun Chamberlin distilled the book's prime conclusions into the more accessible Surviving The Future: Culture, carnival, and capital in the aftermath of the market economy. Shaun, who has also been deeply involved with Rob Hopkins in the Transition Movement since its inception, stresses that localized communities that pursue developing as much independence from the central economy as possible will be the foundations for entering a sustainable, enjoyable future.
by
charleshughsmith
Executive Summary
- Why No Nation Truly Has Full Control Over Its Currency
- Why Sovereign Efforts To Control Currencies Is Driving Capital Into Digital Currencies
- The Driver's Of Digital Currency & Value
- Calculating Bitcoin's Fair Value
If you have not yet read Part 1: Why The U.S. Dollar And Bitcoin Keep Rising available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we reviewed the dynamics of demand and utility that drive the valuation of any tradeable good, service, commodity and currency. We established that it’s impossible to understand how a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar can retain a value above its tangible value of zero unless we accept its utility value and its non-tangible sources of value, i.e. the wealth and wealth generation of the issuing nation and state.
We now turn to the second half of the question posed in Part 1: Why isn’t the market value of a digital currency such as bitcoin zero?
Or perhaps more interestingly: How high might the price of bitcoin go?
To answer this question, we must investigate another question: Can any state control the value of its currency and its place in the global economy? I suggest the answer is no. Beneath a surface veneer of status quo continuity, nations and states are losing the ability to control their role in the global economy and thus the utility of their currency.
To understand why, we turn to socio-historian Immanuel Wallerstein.
Who Controls a Rapidly Changing World-System?
Wallerstein is recognized for advancing the concept of world-system, his term for what I call a global Mode of Production, i.e., the political, social, financial and economic system that governs the relations of power, labor, capital, trade and resources (broadly speaking, our understanding of Nature and the extraction of its resources). In a recent essay China is Confident: How Realistic?, he observed that "countries (have lost the ability) to control what happens to them in the ongoing life of the modern world-system."
These two paragraphs get to the essence of his analysis…
Estimating Bitcoin’s Fair Value
PREVIEW by charleshughsmithExecutive Summary
- Why No Nation Truly Has Full Control Over Its Currency
- Why Sovereign Efforts To Control Currencies Is Driving Capital Into Digital Currencies
- The Driver's Of Digital Currency & Value
- Calculating Bitcoin's Fair Value
If you have not yet read Part 1: Why The U.S. Dollar And Bitcoin Keep Rising available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we reviewed the dynamics of demand and utility that drive the valuation of any tradeable good, service, commodity and currency. We established that it’s impossible to understand how a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar can retain a value above its tangible value of zero unless we accept its utility value and its non-tangible sources of value, i.e. the wealth and wealth generation of the issuing nation and state.
We now turn to the second half of the question posed in Part 1: Why isn’t the market value of a digital currency such as bitcoin zero?
Or perhaps more interestingly: How high might the price of bitcoin go?
To answer this question, we must investigate another question: Can any state control the value of its currency and its place in the global economy? I suggest the answer is no. Beneath a surface veneer of status quo continuity, nations and states are losing the ability to control their role in the global economy and thus the utility of their currency.
To understand why, we turn to socio-historian Immanuel Wallerstein.
Who Controls a Rapidly Changing World-System?
Wallerstein is recognized for advancing the concept of world-system, his term for what I call a global Mode of Production, i.e., the political, social, financial and economic system that governs the relations of power, labor, capital, trade and resources (broadly speaking, our understanding of Nature and the extraction of its resources). In a recent essay China is Confident: How Realistic?, he observed that "countries (have lost the ability) to control what happens to them in the ongoing life of the modern world-system."
These two paragraphs get to the essence of his analysis…
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