Author Archives: danijel

Tariffs

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How can you tell which country has the stronger economy?

Economy of scale 101: if you produce for a bigger market, you produce in greater quantities. This reduces production overheads per item, allowing you to have lower manufacturing costs per product. Also, it allows you to keep a lower profit margin per item while still earning more on the overall volume. This makes your product cheaper to the consumer, who will therefore prefer it, all else being the same.

Countries with bigger internal markets tend to have manufacturers who are producing for those bigger markets, and therefore have the lowest prices. When such big countries export to the smaller countries who don’t have such economies of scale, they can keep the prices so low, it completely suppresses the manufacturing in the smaller countries, because they cannot hope to be competitive with the technologically superior and cheaper results of strong competition on a big marketplace; it’s like introducing more highly evolved animals to some island that was geographically separated and shielded from the competition that produced better living things. In order to survive, a small country introduces tariffs to make the imported products more expensive and level the playing ground. The bigger country then complains internationally that free trade is great, freedom is wonderful, there should be no borders that separate people, and all other bullshit that is meant to increase pressure on weaker countries to remove tariffs and allow the invader’s products to dominate their markets and destroy their manufacturing industry. Once everyone’s manufacturing is destroyed, the prices will of course be raised.

I’ve been repeating for years that American whining about free borders and free trade has only one purpose, to pressure weaker countries into allowing America to flood their markets with American products, counting on the fact that nobody can retaliate and flood American markets with cheaper products because nobody can match American economy of scale, because they manufacture for a very competitive market of 300 M people. They didn’t really count on China because they saw it as basically their own offshore factory, with labor and location outsourced in an extension of American manufacturing sector’s effort to keep the prices down. What happened is of course that China learned how to make their own products even cheaper than the China-manufactured American products, while keeping the quality the same, or actually stepping it up, because where there’s manufacturing, there’s also experimentation and research that ends up evolving better technology.

That’s why Huawei is a problem for America. It is now actually a manufacturer of superior 5G technology that America cannot match. The roles have turned and now America is a technologically weaker country whose marketplace is to be conquered by a stronger country’s superior products. Also, a technologically superior country that controls the infrastructure can use said infrastructure for its own nefarious purposes if it so desires. America is used to being in that position, but as soon as it smelled the coffee and understood that China is going to replace it in this position, it started raising hell about unjust this and that and switching from a globalized free market paradigm to a “we must protect our small and weak country from stronger countries flooding our market with their products”. It’s really funny to watch.

It also explains why China is now rooting for free trade, no borders and broader international cooperation and other nonsense. It calculated that it has the technological upper hand and nobody can successfully compete with it on its own market, while it can out-compete anyone else. It’s like the osmotic pressure: you can have a porous membrane that allows two-way flow of liquid, but the liquid will always flow in the direction of lower pressure.

Trump’s statements that China is going to pay those tariffs and not the US citizens is of course a blatant lie. Of course the US citizens are going to pay those tariffs, that’s how tariffs are supposed to work. China is not going to reduce their prices for that amount, that’s impossible. The irony is, China will now benefit from all the open borders and free trade infrastructure that the Americans pushed for when they thought they will forever remain the dominant manufacturing and technological power, and they can’t just say it was all horseshit intended to collapse our borders, destroy our manufacturing sectors and make us American colonies. No, it will be “yellow man bad”.

 

The implausible truth

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I’ve been reading an article about Epstein and his life as leader of an apparent pedophile ring and closely connected to the Clintons and other powerful people. Just look at this:

This is Bond villain-level stuff. A private island with a secret temple. Plans to “seed” DNA into scores of women. Engaging top scientists for transhumanist studies to create a new super race.

What the fuck, you say. Well, Alex Jones who blew the whistle on this kind of stuff doesn’t look so crazy now, does he? Sure, he’s unhinged, but the main reason why he appears to say crazy shit is because you are so sheltered from the truth, it sounds completely implausible and detached from what you perceive as reality. It’s not Alex Jones who’s out of touch with reality. You are. And when reality becomes too obvious to ignore, you’re shocked and say “who could have known?” Well, there are obviously people who could have known. It was just convenient to ignore them and say they’re kooks. So I would recommend removing your heads from your butts and understanding that your sheltered little world in which everything is neatly arranged and you condescendingly dismiss “conspiracy theories” and “alternative news” is actually a lunatic asylum. The “alternative news” is the actual news, and “main stream news” is brainwashing for cattle. And when the Epsteins and Clintons of the world talk about you, that’s how they perceive you.

For the most part, I don’t disagree. Beings who doubt existence of God but believe what they see on CNN and MSNBC are cattle, or even less than that. I just have a different opinion on who the elites are. In my opinion, people who orient their material lives around spiritual realities, aware of the transcendental and perceiving themselves to be inherently of the transcendental, are the worthy ones. The materialists, atheists, hedonists, the ones who don’t perceive the spiritual realities or even doubt their existence, the ones preoccupied only with their sensual pleasures, striving for social influence and thinking the ability to influence other people is power, they are either the enemies of God who took refuge in this world because it’s the farthest from God they could get, or non-entities, the empty shells devoid of soul and any transcendence, living truly like cattle. Epsteins and Clintons of the world are cattle. They are no better than cows or pigs, and probably much worse, because you would really have to work to find a pig that is as evil.

 

Soft-landing of the economy?

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There is a “soft landing” scenario that actually seems to be where the central banks are going, but I don’t give it much long-term chances for success.

Basically, the central banks lowered the interest rates to the point where a large percentage of bonds are now yielding negative interest. Negative interest on bonds is technically called a default. Also, Basel III magically reassigned gold from a level 3 security (valued at 50% nominal) to a level 1 security (valued at 100% nominal). Before that, only the bonds were level 1. This means the central banks can now legally swap bonds for gold, and they are actually doing that for quite a while. If they reach more than 20% of monetary emission backed by gold, and more likely 40%, we are then technically on a gold standard, although the public might not even realize. There are, however, problems with this. According to my estimate, dumping bonds for metal will deflate the economy, in a process very similar to what’s going on in a refrigerator, when the compressor liquefies the gas, and bleeds extra energy into the environment. This will basically bleed bullshit from the economy and solidify assets into smaller volume but greater reality and reliability. As this takes place, the states will lose the ability to convert debt into monetary mass, since the market will be saturated by their unwanted, negative-yielding debt. Also, all sorts of imaginary n-th order derivatives will evaporate, they will collapse into nothing, or at least very minor percentage of their overall volume will be converted into solid assets.

Eventually, as the monetary mass is converted into real assets, monetary metal will appreciate at least by a factor of 10, but that is a conservative assessment. Silver might actually over-correct and appreciate by a factor of 100. Basically, if you don’t want some asset-class to evaporate, you will need to convert it or back it with solid assets. The central banks will buy the most of monetary metal on the market before anyone else smells the coffee, so the fiat currency might actually survive the impact with purchasing ability relatively intact, but money might be quite scarce. The rest of the asset-holders will fight for scraps and try to buy whatever monetary metal and other solid assets on the market for extremely high prices and in very small quantities.

During this process, there will be a huge social crisis due to the reduced availability of money, where the populist politicians will rally the mob against the central banks “that hoard gold while people starve”, and they will successfully pressure the governments into printing money to throw at the mobs wielding pitchforks, at which point the system will collapse and civilization will die in a hyperinflatory explosion. The alternative is for the government to figure out how to kill off a significant portion of the population that is currently in debt, creates no solid income and is reliant on government aid. Basically, either those people die, or everybody dies. My assessment based on game theory is that everybody dies.

Where to trade metal?

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I know I provoked interest for buying precious metals, and I also know that, for most, buying physical gold might be impractical because the premiums for small quantities are prohibitive, and buying silver comes with VAT in the EU, and the buy/sell spread is painful.

However, there is an in-between solution, buying vaulted metals online that can actually be delivered to your address if you pay a certain premium, you can liquidate them instantly if you need cash, and is a very solid protection against inflation: it’s called BullionVault. This is a good way to both have your cake and eat it: you can protect your liquid assets against inflation, and you can still use them quickly without paying a painful premium for physical metals. You’re not protected against a “lights out” situation where some big disaster would temporarily or permanently block access to everything you don’t have in your home, and therefore it’s not something I would recommend as survival-insurance. However, as something that will save money on your bank account from suddenly losing significant portions of value due to currency fluctuations, I not only recommend it, I actually use it. You can put your savings there, and when you collect enough for a 100g gold bar, you can order it to be sent to your home address. That way you have medium-strength protection at all times, and you can gradually convert it into high-strength protection as it grows.