Topic: Martin Armstrong Discussion - page 230. (Read 647183 times)

Was interesting with Kerry, especially as it was on election day. Basically flew in and took a further military flight straightaway. Then, due to weather, flew straight out again.

Scheduling seems weird.

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iamnotback

Mmm hmm, Steve (srs) tends toward an extreme position that I do not share.  We HAVE resolved, reasonably well, all of our energy issues to date.  

My *guess* is that we will muddle through and/or use the upcoming Knowledge Age (perhaps I use your term overly broadly here) to find sufficient energy in whatever forms to keep civilization going.  Indeed, I have a geologist (PhD, was an "oil finder" for one of the majors) who told me years ago that "there is plenty of oil" (meaning plenty of recoverable oil).  Energy efficiency will also help.

That is not a certainty though.  N. N. Taleb teaches us that in the life of a turkey all appears well.  He is fed and protected day after day, week after week.  Until the day arrives that the turkey is killed for us to eat.  "Normalcy Bias" is a threat.

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I can confirm your quoted item, at least in the context of Peru (as we have no Chinese cars in the USA):

"Quote from: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autoshow-china-electric-idUSKBN14V1H3?utm_source=34553&utm_medium=partner
That's in part because Chinese automakers are more aggressive in lowering their costs regardless of quality, said an executive at a multinational auto parts firm.

"The lowest price wins (the contract). That's the process, no questions asked," said the executive, who declined to be identified to avoid impacting future contract bidding.

"And when you win, they come back and ask you for another price reduction," the executive added, noting less stringent safety regulations in China also help keep costs lower than in the United States."

Chinese cars are considered crap there.  And Chinese bearings are for the "Precio Nada Mas" (price nothing else) crowd.

Humans leverage tools.

Whilst the energy out is greater than the human energy in, then the EROI is positive. For example, humans might use nuclear power to convert coal to oil at a loss of energy, yet still positive w.r.t. the human energy expended.

In short, the way they are calculating EROI is bullshit.

For as long as humans can produce more per capita, then economic growth continues. And remember that all profitable production will come from creativity.

When you have 10 million humans living in a city of high rise buildings with mass transportation, then oil is insignificant relative to growth in production of creativity.

Those who want to measure everything in physical metrics are dinosaurs entirely missing the computer revolution.

My only quibbles (or clarifications) is that some aspects of the old order may waterfall collapse, so in that sense it may feel like a collapse to some sectors, e.g. as we discussed in the Economic Devastation thread that some jobs may be entirely eliminated by automation.

Also what reasoning do you apply to put Hedonism in Cycle #6 and not #5?

Seems to me the hedonism will head for a peak as the Marxist crap heads for a peak in Cycle #5 because it is the Marxist crap that finances wide-scale hedonism.

According to Armstrong's ECM model, 2032.95 will be the peak of this Private wave meaning moving investment out of government and into private investments. After that will begin a 51.6 year Public wave wherein investment should gradually return to governments (e.g. Asia). Armstrong has stated that 2032.95 is the death of socialism, but what I see is that Asia is ready to fully embrace socialism so I see that 51.6 year Public wave as a growth of socialism in Asia yet it won't yet be bankrupted as it is now in the West.

Your thesis is entirely incorrect.

You had better wake up else you will entirely miss the boat.

Profit margins from mass production are dying. The future profit will increasingly come from creativity.



The only constant is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which informs us that entropy is trending to maximum. The Knowledge Age is all about increasing entropy. You had better make sure you understand this and stop clinging to incorrect bullshit.

He and I used to argue back in 2006 and 2007 when I was a silver bug. He is not that smart. If you are following this charlatan then you are really in deep shit.


I calculated the entire world's oil supply would be the flow of a medium sized river (not even the Mississippi).

There is no peak energy. It is another religious, Malthusian delusion.

Technology (knowledge) always rises to fulfill demand. We can even produce oil from coal if need be.

Besides we are transitioning to an electric, mass transportation future a la Elon Musk's ideas.


Occam's Razor informs you that corruption is the reason. You don't need to invent some elaborate delusion.

There is no need to guess.  The fact they are even bothering with shale oil at all and these mega deep water rigs before that should tell you what's going on.  All these world leaders have been visiting Antarctica recently.  Unless they're building some type of nuclear fallout shelter there, I assume they might be trying to get oil out of there too.  If it's not fossil fuels, I definitely want to know what all these people are doing in Antarctica since it would probably be even more interesting.

Yes, of course.  When the term "Peak Oil" became a meme -- about the time Simmons made "Hubbard's Peak" famous -- I began following the issue.  

Ah, so far there is no really good evidence that the peak is here yet, but the experience with shale oil and shale gas (low EROI) should offer food for thought given time.  Of course oil industry observers have been saying that the easy oil has already been found...  For the past 100 years...

In my opinion your error here is looking at this situation as one of collapse. The system is not going to collapse just change. We might not like the change and our quality of life especially in the West may decline but our disliking does not equate to collapse. What we are witnessing is not the start of collapse but the undermining of the old order as it is swept away to form the new. I agree there will be a monetary reset and I agree we will not come out of that reset into some form of utopia but into something else entirely. That something else will have its merits and its faults. I believe we are currently on the verge of transitioning from cycle #4 to cycle #5 in the post below.

I dove into this stuff, what was it, like 10 years ago when the term peak oil popped up everywhere?  It is not just the SRSROCCO guy talking about it.  Russian and US energy analysts + many others have been talking about it forever.  The SRSRocco guy doesn't even talk about the natural gas market, but there it is for you to see happening there too.  So it's all just a continuation of the "peak oil" story except where people used to think it would be some type of immediate disappearance in supply, it's evolving in more complex ways.

It leads you into other questions such as, was the carbon tax entirely just an Enron scam?  A plot to try and force people into world govt that has nothing to do with energy?  Or some type of way to attempt to force people to subsidize the energy sector to maintain the status quo of life?  Or all of the above?  The fact that Trump has this Exxon guy as his new right hand man makes me believe this actually is becoming a big problem.

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r0ach

Sounds like you have been reading srsroccoreport.com.

Steve writes about precious metals and energy, and is convinced that the easy (high EROI) energy, especially oil, has been found.  And that things will start getting bad soon.  Offering intelligent commentary on his work is beyond my competence other than he offers up plausible explanations.  He does write that precious metals are a place to hide.

No offense, but your thesis on a so called knowledge age is completely irrational.  When complex systems collapse, they devolve into simpler ones.  They never jump into a higher tier of complexity.  Complex systems also tend to require exponential resource (energy) curves.  Peak conventional crude oil already happened in 2004.  Peak working age demographic already occurred in every nation that matters.

Wealth comes from people doing work in the real world, not shuffling around papers.  That work is either done from things like burning fuel to do the work for you, or humans physically doing it themselves.  With both working age demographic and energy output declining, people will be spending more time and effort doing work for the basic necessities and nobody is going to be overpaying people for shuffling numbers on a computer unless it involves something to do with solving the energy problem.

"Excess" energy is why a day's wage in Rome was a small amount of silver and why it's a larger amount of silver now.  Instead of humans having to dig it up, the work was being done for free by machines, thus devaluing it's worth.  But, the time of arbitraging "free" energy into depleting all resources like metals as fast as possible is over now (that and the fact peak metals is occurring regardless the state of energy).  Unless fusion power solves all these problems (not likely because fusion is actually low EROI), then we already hit peak energy, peak cheap metals, peak cheap food, and this energy arbitrage scheme is ending, possibly in a Seneca cliff.



Here's one example of such a chart.  Remember that all wealth is based on energy output since abundance is really just machines burning fossil fuels to do work for you instead of you doing it.  In the gas sector, the high energy yielding conventional stuff is all cratering, so all they did was grab more of the lower return on investment stuff to try and compensate (same thing in the oil market).  So, as this cycle continues, your civilization's wealth continues to decrease until you get to the point of borderline thermodynamic collapse if it uses as much energy to drive the shale oil to market as it does to extract it (and shale is low return on investment).

So, I hate to rain on your parade, but there is no so called knowledge age unless there's some type of enormous energy breakthrough.  Russian govt energy analysts see things getting really bad by around 2020 and say there is no technological solution in sight.  There is no coming out on the other side of the monetary reset with some type of "utopia".  In fact, one of the reasons it's currently crashing is because it relies on infinite growth and the energy situation prevents that.

Unfortunately Martin Armstrong continues this false reporting on Bitcoin:



The truth is that China's regulators are simply trying to reduce excessive volatility by doing some oversight on margin trading.

But that doesn't at all address the point that I made.

The entire point of gold is to be a hedge against (the bezerk Marxist) government. But if you have no way of trading it without being regulated by the government, then it has lost that function.

That it still has a value is irrelevant. If you are just speculating on the price, then just buy paper gold. Obviously the entire reason you buy physical gold (other than small ornamental quantities) is you expect that you can liquidate it without the government's permission. And I am explaining that you won't necessarily be able to do that. In fact, you can't move it without the government's permission. Crypto-currency doesn't have these deficiencies.

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iamnotback wrote:

"The governments are getting organized so as to prevent anyone from having assets for which they can't show a paper trail indicating that they have paid all their taxes and that the wealth was not ill gotten such as money laundering.

It is possible that in a Marxist global collapse (or even only your own country which claims you as a tax slave for a wealth tax), the governments go bezerk and basically confiscate all wealth. This would be a Dark Age if it were global."

That is one of Armstrong's greatest pair of observations.

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I would not write-off gold yet though.  Just because it has no monetary role does not necessarily mean that its value will be unrecognized in the future.

Interesting comment about GATA people being "FOS", I will re-visit some of their recent work and judge for myself.  My *hunch* (FWTW, which is near zero), I doubt massive manipulation of gold & silver.

While I do share iamnotback's general observations on the direction ahead re Marxist(s) and the types of governments we can expect, I cannot accept that we can know with any (or much) specificity what will happen, there really is too much entropy out there...

[I accept that I understand entropy far less than iamnotback and CoinCube who have both explored the topic at length on other threads]

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Re investments, I also share above comments about "dollar cost averaging", whether for gold, Bitcoin and anything else that one would invest in -- as long as one has a basic understanding of the investments and their risk/return profile.

The governments are getting organized so as to prevent anyone from having assets for which they can't show a paper trail indicating that they have paid all their taxes and that the wealth was not ill gotten such as money laundering.

It is possible that in a Marxist global collapse (or even only your own country which claims you as a tax slave for a wealth tax), the governments go bezerk and basically confiscate all wealth. This would be a Dark Age if it were global.

This problem was quite easy to solve with cash, you would open a business then spend you cash as a customer at your own business thus laundering the cash and making it legit. (note I am not advocating illegal activity, but rather just stating what others did)

But governments are eliminating cash.

And gold can't serve this function, because nobody pays for anything with gold any more.

This is why a crypto-currency that has a high amount of use for payments on the Internet for the Knowledge Age (think of micropayments for example) can serve a function that gold used to provide (but no longer does) as being a way to preserve assets. Decentralization will be a crucial feature of such a crypto-currency and nobody has shown such a technology yet.

Until the world government has a 666 id on every human on the planet, then there is no way they are practically going to be able track every micropayment. We are still some decades away from that 666 result.

Remember my thesis is the monetary systems of the world will bifurcate into a usurious fiat system seving the dying Industrial Age and a crypto-currency system serving the fledgling Knowledge Age. Let the Marxists have their dying system with SDRs and national currencies enslaved to the SDRs. That is not for us. We are moving forward. It is very likely that the Marxists are going to cull themselves. We should not subscribe to their system.

Tinfoil hats are living in some archaic delusion and are going to miss the boat.

Armstrong did predict that deadcat bounce. And I wrote about that in this thread last week or week before that.

Don't worry, it is still going much lower.

But your biggest problem with gold is not the price, but the fact that no one uses it as money any more and thus it is very easy for the government to cut off all your avenues for converting it to something you can spend for real goods & services.

No one will ever use gold and silver again to pay for anything. Ever.

Sorry gold is dead. And it isn't coming back. The Internet has changed everything.


You are punch drunk on GATA Koolaid. You are delusional. Get out of your armchair and go get some real world experience.


The man has real world experience with outwitting the manipulators and he has explained they can't manipulate it permanently to the downside.


Btw, I have spoken to the guys at GATA and they are not that smart.

I recognize intelligence when I see it. Armstrong is very intelligent. These charlatans at GATA are not.


He is not buying for a rational reason of buying low and selling high. For him, it is a religion against paper gold.

Whenever religion is involved, then you might as well be preaching to a stone. He can't hear you. His mind controlled by his prophet GATA.

His entire identity is locked up in there being truth to the GATA story. And that Jews cause all the world's problems. Etc. It is a religion, so don't expect him to be objective.

You are asking him to admit his entire thesis for his life is an error.

So what if it was forced into these reversal? The case is if you followed his blog, right then as I did you would save a lot of money. What is the point of buying gold around 1500+ d/oz line, when everone in the market said gold would be bullish, when now there is a chance it will go lower. Why not buy gold at maybe even 800's double the amount of gold bought and maybe even making money in the proces following the sell signals, (thus comming out and have more gold than before)compared to as in if you bought it in high price range.

Isn't this the whole point buying more gold?

Lol, a long time ago I went and back tested when the media was claiming gold was a "barbarous relic" and noticed when they were saying that, it was actually the floor and they were all buying with both hands.  The second you see CNBC say to dump something, buy all of it.  Armstrong is probably in on the CNBC scam and was buying while telling everyone it's going to crash.  Now here we are and it's up $70 instead.

I dont think armstrong is in the incrowd he just thinks he is one of them by what your saying.. armstrong tries to encapsulate black swans with pi but so far my astro financial predictor has been better than him at med term trends... armstrong predcited a turn for the worst against govts and i think that is happening but we wont see it in markets for a while until.cnbc and the likes pick it up.