“What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. There’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad” — Morpheus
The Misuse of the Term Free Market Capitalism
About 10 years ago, I wrote an article about the death of free market capitalism. Given that many politicians don’t realize that free market capitalism has long since been dead and are using a platform of the failure of free market capitalism to gain support of the masses for upcoming elections, I thought that it would be a solid time to bring back that article from the dead, dust it off, and update it for the present day.
By the time you finish reading this article, you may discover that you have many more questions than answers. When I decided to write this article, my objective was not to provide answers but rather to demonstrate to you that many presupposed airtight beliefs held by many members of society-at-large may actually be littered with holes. Rather than to provide answers that may bring curiosity to a halt with the end of this article, my objective is merely to insert many more splinters in your mind that drive you to question existing beliefs about which you may be unsure and may have never questioned before and to seek validation of truths you’ve never before validated. I have previously written articles similar in subject matter to this one, but I decided that like the Hollywood universe of superhero movies, this topic could use a reboot with the injection of some fresh new perspectives to account for the changing and shifting perspectives of the last 10 years.
Today, nearly everyone will acknowledge that all major stock markets in the world are casinos rigged by the banker/government cartel for the benefit of the casino owners only. Among investors, there seems to be a remarkably higher level of awareness today of the rampant fraud inherent in the world’s leading stock markets than during any prior point in history, even if most investors at the retail level fled the rigged casino after the 2008 global financial crisis and did not return. Only those that are absolutely rigid in their thinking, despite the existence of a mountain of credible facts that support the contention of massive fraud being perpetrated in stock markets on a daily basis and those married to the disinformation they learned inside business school classrooms, remain among the segment of the population unable to comprehend the truth. Albert Einstein once stated that unthinking respect for authority is the enemy of truth. Too many of society’s widespread beliefs today were borne out of unthinking respect for authority, as this has been one of the behavioral conditioning goals imbedded into the compulsory schooling system for decades. For this reason, many of us lived the great majority of our lives in absolute darkness, though increasingly more people in recent years have consciously broken free from this darkness and moved towards the light.
I’m going to preface this article by stating that this article contains largely my observations and deductions gathered over decades of experience in the global financial world, though I present supporting facts when possible. Otherwise, I just present my observations. This article also contains many extrapolations and opinions, though my deductions are derived from logic and my extrapolations, from common sense. In this article, I will demonstrate that many universal truths accepted as indisputable today by society-at-large, with origins in the banking/government cartel, are 100% entirely impossible to prove with facts. Furthermore, within the context of this article, I will demonstrate that my opinions often present a stronger argument for truth than narratives created by the banking/government/media complex and presented to billions of people around the world as truth.
Curiosity is the Instigator of Discovering Truth
Admittedly, this article contains very passionate views and strong opinions. However, passion is the twin soul of curiosity and inquisitiveness. I have changed my views on many different topics over the course of my lifetime as the direct result of the accumulation of more knowledge and the greater gifts of deeper wisdom. I would hope that any intelligent man or woman would always be ready to adjust, alter, modify and/or eventually change one’s belief system if he or she encountered compelling new information that ably shed new perspectives on previously held beliefs. When the weight of evidence shifts the balance of judgment towards the probabilities of an opposition view being the correct belief, any intelligent person would grant serious consideration to the opposition view, even if it is a minority and an unpopular one. I don’t ask any of you to believe what I say in this essay just because I state it. That would be the apex of hypocrisy in addition to being antithetical to my belief system regarding how all men and women should arrive at his or her own truth. Instead, I invite all of you to perform your own research and to form your own conclusions about the hypotheses I state in this article. Furthermore, I encourage all of you never to accept a belief just because your neighbor, your brother, your sister, your mother, your father, or your co-worker holds a belief they would like you to adopt.
I encourage each and every one of you to challenge any current belief you hold for the simple and indefensible rationale that because a belief has persisted in society for decades or hundreds of years that it must be true. It is neither the level of our academic achievement or our attendance at an academic institution that makes any of us intelligent. Rather, our willingness to challenge our present belief system, our openness to analyze new knowledge, and our ability to critically think for ourselves independent of authority, are the key criteria that builds intellect. The oft-repeated and very popular saying that knowledge is power is not true. One could memorize thousands of facts about the universe and in terms of critical thinking abilities, still remain largely uneducated. For knowledge to be powerful, one first has to understand what knowledge is worth learning and what knowledge is not. Secondly, once one acquires knowledge worth learning, one still has to understand how to apply this knowledge in the real world to make and effect positive results. If one is missing the link between knowledge and application, one can render loads of valuable knowledge worthless quite easily.
The most authoritative officials of the Roman Catholic Church taught a geocentric view of the world that the sun revolved around the earth to their followers not for decades, but for centuries. During the centuries they taught this lie as indisputable and infallible, anyone that dared challenge this belief risked imprisonment or even death. Copernicus, a scientist that lived from 1473 to 1543, was the first well-known historical figure to challenge the Church with the idea of a heliocentric universe in which the earth revolved around the sun, though he was clearly not the first person to advance this truth. To avoid persecution by the Church, Copernicus only published the heliocentric theories contained in his book, “On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres”, immediately prior to his death so the Church would not jail him for heresy. After Copernicus’s death, Galileo took up further advancement of the theory of the heliocentric universe. However, unlike Copernicus, Galileo dared to openly challenge the Church’s authority, and he was declared guilty of being “vehemently suspect of heresy” and subsequently imprisoned for ten years from 1633 until his death in 1642. It was not until 1758, more than 200 years after the death of Copernicus, that the Church finally revoked a general ban on all books that advocated a heliocentric view of the universe.
However, even after lifting its ban, the Church only allowed public access to heavily censored versions of Galileo’s Dialogue and Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. Surely if a widely accepted lie could persist as the truth among the masses for centuries as a result of those in power suppressing fact, then many similar instances today are possible. Today, the executives at Google (who also owns YouTube) and Twitter have become the modern day equivalent of the ancient Roman Catholic Church by deplatforming, demonetizing and shadowbanning all social media channels that forward any narratives that disagree with their own, even censoring results from internet searches (in the case of Google). In fact, I guarantee you that today, there are millions among us that use everyday products that are dangerous to our health, but as was the consensus view with cigarettes back in the 1940s and 1950s, the vast majority of us believe these products are completely safe simply because we never questioned or challenged the prevailing narratives that surround these products. Twenty years from today, there will be multiple products widely acknowledged as causing cancer that are used regularly and unquestioningly used today. In fact, entire industries today, like banking, are fraudulent, but still are continually embraced by society on a near universal scale.
Fraud is Systemic in the Global Financial System, Yet Universely Avoided as a Topic in Academic Classrooms
“Banking and fraud were born into our global word as Siamese brothers, inseparable since birth. And just like Siamese brothers, if ever separated, they would likely die together as well.”
Today, one may assume that banking and financial fraud is more prevalent than in decades past given the greater visibility of this subject matter provided by the independent media, and to some extent, the mainstream media. Persistent whispers of high-tech fraud in the form of High Frequency Trading programs that control the daily behavior of stock markets with Terminator Skynet-like efficiency and headlines of covert deals made under the shadowy cover of dark pools reach the eyes and ears of the few among us that follow these topics. And while it is true that technological advancements have enabled more efficient fraud in the banking industry in which larger amounts of money can be siphoned from unsuspecting clients, I’m not so sure that the rate off fraud committed by banking industry employees has actually increased over the past few decades, though the magnitude of executed theft and criminal acts almost certainly has grown in scale. There have always been cycles of stock market and real estate market peaks and crashes. The depths of future market lows are only possible because the summits of the market highs were built on the backbone of banker fraud. In the case of banker fraud, history has repeated herself not for decades, but for centuries.
Even Arthur Levitt, the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993-2001, was smart enough to realize that most every banking industry “regulation” that was passed under the guise of dampening criminal behavior was really designed to secretly enable crime. By the time the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was “officially” repealed in 1999 through a collaborative effort between Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill and Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Mr. Levitt himself stated that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, an act that was passed to prevent banker crime, was nothing more than a mere formality. The reality of the banking and investment environment in 1999, Mr. Levitt stated, was that US Central Bankers, at the behest and incessant lobbying of its member banks, had already “almost totally eroded” all regulations of Glass-Steagall for many years prior to its actual repeal.
Consequently, we must not mistake the illusion that is often sold to us as reality. Goldman Sachs bankers did not just become the Rolling Stone investigative journalist Matt Taibbi nicknamed “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” from 1998 to 2008. Goldman Sachs bankers had always engaged in morally questionable behavior thought sought profits at the expense of sucking the souls and destroying the dream of others, behavior ironically labelled by former CEO Lloyd Blankfein as “God’s work” for decade after decade, ever since it was founded in 1869. The notorious Italian-American gangster Lucky Luciano, after learning of the corruption of Wall Street, allegedly stated his remorse over his choice to become a underworld gangster versus a corporate gangster banker spending a day on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1940s. Before being deported to Italy due to crimes he committed as a street gangster, Luciano allegedly confessed, “I suddenly realized I had joined the wrong mob.”
Predicting Market Behavior is Only Possible by Understanding How Markets Really Operate v. Understanding How They are Supposed to Operate
Below is just a very small sampling of the voluminous amounts of articles which I’ve written regarding the fraudulent state of markets in the period of time that immediately preceded and followed the 2008 global financial crisis, including many predictions that I made entirely based upon an understanding of systemic fraud in the banking and investment industry, and not based upon anything I had ever learned in an academic classroom, especially the information I had learned during my graduate level MBA “education” that was especially worthless. Note that I started warning of a building crisis in the US stock market about 13-months before it actually precipitated and that just a couple of weeks before it struck, I provided one final warning that a US stock market crash was imminent. Finally, you will note that the last article in this list was titled, “A Market Rally in Monopoly Money”, in which I issued a warning of the unsustainable house of cards that Central Bankers would create in future years, due to their chosen “solution” to the 2008 global financial crisis of perpetual creation of US dollars out of thin air in tandem with an enforced Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP).
“The Short-Term May be Rosy, But Beware the Financial Crisis that is Building Steam”, March 21, 2007
“The Coming Dollar Crisis & Subsequent Gold Boom”, January 31, 2008
“Will US Markets Crash Now or Later?” April 23, 2008
“Recent Anomalies in US Stock Markets — Proof of Free Market Intervention?” May 11, 2008
“The Biggest Stock Market Scam of the Century, the Nuclear Option, is Being Unleashed” March 23, 2009
“Can Rising Stock Markets Serve as a Sign of a Crashing Economy?” June 10, 2009
“A Market Rally in Monopoly Money”, September 9, 2009
In the article entitled, “The Biggest Stock Market Scam of the Century, the Nuclear Option is Being Unleashed,” I basically predicted that Central Bankers would create the current conundrum that exists today in which they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t in regard to all decisions about cutting interest rates, meaning the following. If they continue to cut interest rates, then they risk creating a Venezuelan like melt-up in US stock markets, but if they don’t cut them, then they risk creating another melt-down that will surpass the 2008 meltdown. In fact, it should be deeply concerning that every single point I raised in that article would be just as relevant had I not written it in March of 2009 but in July of 2019. In fact, I linked that article to two other articles I had written back then titled, “Why the U.S. Fed’s 0.50% Rate Cut Won’t Save the U.S. Markets” and “The 0.75% Federal Reserve Interest Rate Cut: A Recipe for Future Disaster”, both of which could eerily be headlines written in 2019 instead of more than 10 years ago.
But bankers were not the only ones that created an aggressive world of illusion after the 2008 global financial crisis. Corporation executives across the globe took advantage of allowances granted them by national accounting regulatory agencies of significant changes in accounting laws that allowed them to create Alice in Wonderland fantasy balance sheet and financial sheet data. These changes in accounting laws allowed for the creation of massively deceptive financial statements that allowed corporate executives to report financial data that falsely indicated that all was okay in Wonderland, even when it wasn’t, with no threat of any legal punishment for falsifying the data they reported to the media. Furthermore, they engaged in massive share buyback programs in order to keep their stock prices elevated and rising, not based upon financial robustness of the firm, but based upon deception, sometimes even taking out multimillion dollar loans to fund their buyback programs.
In other words, fraud and deceit became the norm, not just in the banking industry, but also among accounting firms, credit rating agencies like Fitch, Standard and Poors, and Moodys. During this time, fundamental analysis of corporate financial statements literally became a completely useless endeavor as financial statements were so egregiously falsified that analyzing them provided zero value. The deceit was so radical that after dozens of changes were made to allow for deceit to become the modus operandus for corporations, even a Goldman Sachs banker admitted, “the economy is not the market”, meaning that the market could continue rising even if a sickly economy persisted for years. And this is exactly what happened for the decade that followed 2008.
“Every business school in the world should have a class titled The Empire of Illusion 101 so business students can learn that economic theory and economic reality are creatures that reside at the opposite side of the spectrum and whose paths infrequently cross.”
For this reason, I’m going to take you down a new rabbit hole that remains relatively unexplored — the rabbit hole of the commodity world. I don’t believe that there is a single global commodity today, traded in futures markets, that is sold at a free market established price or even remotely determined by the free market forces of supply and demand that every economics professor from here to Timbuktu falsely teaches are the determinants of asset prices in their Economics 101 class. Bankers rig the prices of all global commodities traded in futures markets by rigging paper markets that are disconnected from physical markets and control prices for their benefit only to the detriment of the wealth of their nation’s citizens. The price of all commodities, not just the ones most important to bankers such as precious metals, currencies, energy resources, and food, is always determined through banker price manipulation. Even commodities whose asset prices are not artificially determined in fraudulent paper futures markets in London and New York, like diamonds, are still controlled by cartels that regulate diamond prices through their monopolistic control over the perception of a diamond’s value among the general public. In the end, bankers also deliberately and artificially lowering prices of commodities not just for personal financial gain, but also for political reasons, in which they artificially manufacture price dumps in commodities upon which a nation’s economic health and its citizens’ ability to survive depend upon the price of a commodity that nation produces in large quantities.
In every business school around the world, every year, business professors indoctrinate a new batch of naive, impressionable young adults into the Empire of Illusion, in which they deceive millions of business students into believing that perception is reality. They teach students that prices of commodities are set by the free market principles of supply and demand, though they indisputably are not. Practically all of us have seen the supply and demand chart that is the staple of Economics 101 classes around the world. Supply goes up, demand is constant, price falls. Supply diminishes, demand is constant, price increases. Supply is constant, demand falls, price falls. Supply is constant, demand rises, price increases. And eventually, business school professors teach millions of students over time that supply and demand forces meet at a theoretical point of price equilibrium and this is how prices of assets are determined. These are all complete myths, for bankers manipulate numerous asset prices in fraudulent paper markets, and numerous asset prices are never set by free market forces in real physical markets.
Every business school in the world should have a class titled The Empire of Illusion 101 so business students can learn that economic theory and economic reality are creatures that reside at the opposite side of the spectrum of real world mechanics and whose paths infrequently cross. Perhaps a decent analogy to help people understand the illusion of free markets is the illusion of the political world. In the United States, The Powers That Be (TPTB) designed the two-party Republican/Democratic system to give its citizens the illusion of hope that accompanies change and the illusion of choice that in reality, does not exist. In fact, in 2019, the division that has been created between these two parties may be at its apex during my lifetime, in which even congressmen and women that support certain initiatives for ethical and moral illusions will refuse to support that initiative if it is one raised by a member of the opposition party for fear of being ostracized politically by their own party. This is such a cowardly position to assume because in reality, bankers control both parties, and play both parties against one another like puppets on strings as is clearly substantiated by the fact that there has been zero change in fiscal policy in the United States for decades during which George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all served as Presidents. Since the political system is corrupt and the same small elite group of bankers control the fiscal policies of the office of the Presidency regardless of the President’s political affiliation, the process of national elections is nothing more than a charade that only ensures that those in charge of the political process behind the scenes have a different face to parade before the public as someone that represents change, hope, and a “different” way of doing things.
Capital markets operate in exactly the same manner as the illusory political process. Many people fail to understand that the banking class also has controlled the curricula of business schools for centuries, and consequently ensure that millions of students are falsely taught that free markets exist and free market capitalism is the dominant economic model that exists in G8 nations that dominate the world economy. Because of this belief that is 100% false, advocates of socialism and democratic socialism like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have been able to accrue massive support upon the false premise that free market capitalism has failed. When we make a claim that free market capitalism has failed, we can’t intellectually critique a grotesque form of capitalism that has stripped most essential elements of free market capitalism out of the model and then argue that the model of free market capitalism has failed. Such criticisms are tantamount to critiquing current dominant academic models that are more intent on socially conditioning students to become compliant and obedient and claiming that the teaching of intellect has failed. Since academia in its current dominant form today shows no interest in shaping intellectual young adults, the claim that teaching intellect has failed is not relevant to an academic system that does not have this as one of its goals. It is quite clear that the economic models in place in nearly every nation has failed, and failed miserably, and I agree that a radically different economic model needs to be considered in order to replace the current dominant one and provide the mythical level playing field and equal opportunity preached by the wealthiest echelons of every nation that simply do not exist. However, replacing our current model, which is a highly manipulated, rigged and controlled economic system with a free market capitalism model would be a radical change.
Business school curricula like to create an illusory belief that we have some level of control in setting prices in capital markets. However, in the end, the reality in the political markets and the commodity markets is exactly the same. Though without an understanding of how these markets truly operate, we imagine we are in control, bankers manipulate all scenarios in setting prices in capital markets. Furthermore, there are no free choices offered in either scenario, as all the “choices” always funnel back into the same singular outcome. Bankers further utilize the forum of compulsory schooling to spread lies far and wide about money, inflation, the banking system and the false notion of equal financial opportunity for all. Bankers, through fostering massive speculation in futures markets as well as releasing fake supply numbers, play an enormous role in dictating the perceived value of every commodity on earth, and thereby maintain control over artificially dictating commodity prices that would never exist under principles of free market capitalism (JP Morgan bankers were fined, in the words of a US regulatory agency, for reporting fake gold futures trading data that “contained hundreds of errors throughout the period from February 1, 2013 to February 2014”. As there are only 251 trading days a year in US commodity markets, this statement may have meant that JP Morgan bankers reported deliberately falsified gold trading data to regulators nearly every single day for an entire year). More recently, Merrill Lynch bankers paid a paltry, non-punitive $25M fine for manipulating prices of gold and silver “thousands of times” over a period of six years.
The mechanisms by which free market capitalism forces are permanently shuttered and prevented from setting prices, in which bankers have used technological advancements and fiber optic cables to more efficiently spoof and frontrun and create artificial price runs and crashes with the use of high frequency trading software should be the most important class taught in every business school in the world today, but search the curricula of the top 100 business schools in the world and you will not find a single class that offers an in-depth exploration of these topics.
This lack of honesty in business school curricula regarding real world operational utility was one of the main reasons I developed my 20+ course skwealthacademy curricula in order to address such topics in the detail that they deserve. That said, I still believe this article to be among the most important of the more than 800 articles I’ve written about gold, silver and financial topics over the last 10 years. Why? The answer is simple. If this article can open the eyes of many wide enough to eventually develop the ability to spot the déjà vu black cat moment in the matrix, and thereby cultivate the ability among many to understand when they are residing firmly within the matrix of banker created illusions, then many will be able to connect the dots on one’s own to see the big picture that is coming, an invaluable skill to possess before the second phase of this global monetary crisis rears her ugly head at some point between now and 2024.
Click here to learn more about the bigger picture of my upcoming launch of skwealthacademy, in which I present plenty of solutions for the great moral decay of the economy and how we can actually revive free market capitalism as the solution to equal economic opportunity for all instead of continuing to wallow in a completely broken economic system that masquerades as free market capitalism but is nothing of the sort.
About the author: J. Kim is the Founder, Managing Director, and Chief Education Officer of skwealthacademy, the culmination of a ten-year long passion project consisting of a complete online academy of 20 courses that specifically address essential pillars of education largely absent in dominant institutions of academia as well as emphasize a radical reconstruction of societal constructs of wealth and success from narcissistic pursuits into humanitarian and holistic pursuits. Among the elements critical to education, addressed by skwealthacademy are the following: (1) the reinstatement of critical thinking development; (2) the return to ethics in the pursuit of business profits; (3) a clear understanding of the differences between unsound fiat currencies and sound money, and how this misunderstanding contributes to the persistence of great suffering in the form of global poverty and hunger; and (4) the elevation of life purpose as a viable goal to replace materialistic pursuits that create elevated levels of loneliness, anxiety and opioid dependence.
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