Trillion dollar defaults in the international banking system - an unknown order of magnitude; an interview with 'them' about the banking system and oil; and, I will never live down this infamous slurping straw analogy.

I'm not sure what will happen, but, imagine there are huge, massive, unthinkable amounts of money, trillions of dollars, which will be defaulted on, in the international banking system. What happens when there are trillion-dollar defaults?

If I owe you a trillion dollars, then you will probably be writing lots of little financial instruments as you're expecting to receive a trillion dollars. You'll be writing little pieces of paper and trading them around because you think you're going to get a trillion dollars on a particular date. We have something kind of like this going on with China. We owe China a lot of money.

When something like this goes wrong, it's usually several orders of magnitude bigger than we imagined it would be, which is why I'm saying trillions of dollars. It could be quadrillions of dollars or it could be a dollar amount that cannot be estimated. It triggers chains of events that lead to unexpected places.

When you default on a huge amount of money, if one day you say, 'Sorry, but I don't have a trillion dollars to give you, and I never will. It sucks to be you. Goodbye,' something happens. (War? Hopefully not, but it could happen.)

Some little line on a chart somewhere will suddenly go down to zero. People who thought that they were rich and getting richer will suddenly have nothing. They would think that their pieces of paper were increasing in value every day, but the next day, they are so worthless that they cannot be sold at all. You can't even sell them for a penny. They are absolutely nothing.

If something suddenly cannot be traded, if it cannot be sold at all, it's as though huge amounts of money suddenly vanished from the earth. It's a sudden deflation, a bubble bursting.

We might think that it would lead to the collapse of the entire world. But instead, somebody somewhere usually finds a way to cover their asses somehow, and they get the financial system restarted again, so that they can continue to create money out of thin air and parasitically steal from trusting, unsuspecting, productive people again. It's not that easy to totally destroy the entire financial system so that they can't print money for themselves and steal products and services of real value.

'Peak money' is sort of like peak oil. We have an apocalypse fantasy, that we wish something in the financial system would collapse and be destroyed once and for all so that the bad guys would finally lose and would become forever unable to print their own money and pay it to themselves and buy things of real value with it. We *wish* something would knock those people down forever. We want to live without parasites taking our money away from us.

But instead, they just have these bubbles bursting, and then, they patch things up, invent some new way to create imaginary money and steal stuff with it, and then get things moving again.

I just don't like any form of money saved in large amounts in any kind of banking system. It doesn't matter what it's called. It could be an IRA - individual retirement account - or any of the other ones that I can't remember the name of. If you are looking at your money on a little chart, and watching that line go up or down on the chart, and all your money is somewhere else where you can't reach it right this instant, then you are vulnerable to a massive trillion-dollar default in the international banking system with all of its interconnected, hard-to-predict chains of consequences.

Massive defaults are intermittent and inevitable. Sometimes, they'll happen in the same old places where they happened before - for instance, another real estate bubble bursting, as though we didn't 'learn our lesson' the LAST time a real estate bubble burst - it won't matter, it will burst again, and a whole bunch of shocked, horrified people will be totally surprised, as though this is the first time in history that this has ever happened. Clueless newbies never stop appearing - an endless supply of fools - and when I refer to them as 'fools,' I don't mean to judge them as stupid or contemptible - they are good people being taken advantage of by an evil system, people being fooled. It is always something, and it doesn't matter at all if it's exactly the same bubble that has already burst dozens of times before, it will burst again and everyone will be just as surprised as they were before.

This is what I mean when I say they are nickel-and-diming us to death. Real value in society is slowly destroyed and wasted, or stolen by financial parasites. I think it's also being taken by computer hackers who control the electronic trading systems, but that's only a theory. If I were a brilliant, evil genius, and if I wanted to get really, really rich, then I would find a way to hack the electronic trading systems and control them so that they would automatically make me 'win' all of my trades. I'm sure there are brilliant evil geniuses out there who are much more ambitious and knowledgeable than I am, as I'm one of those not-so-brilliant, not-so-evil geniuses who gets the number '140' when I take an IQ test, but that's about all that I do. Every dollar stolen from someone electronically is a real couple of minutes of a real, productive, honest person's time. Every dollar stolen is a loaf of bread that somebody somewhere would have been able to buy in the grocery store. Every dollar stolen is an hour longer that I have to work at my job because I don't have enough money to live on.

I haven't been reading anything much lately in the financial world, but, the last time that I read anything, it was about a massive amount of money that the USA owes to China. That's still there, as far as I know.

It's just that people work for years and years, saving their money diligently, and then all of it disappears in a bank failure or a failure of the particular piece of paper that they were putting all their money into. This is real people, people like Rick and his wife, over there in Ukraine, and, after reading all his websites again last night, I'm thinking about them, wondering how they save their money. They are living a frugal life in a place that has a low cost of living, and they are making a decent amount of money, and spending some of it on their hobbies like hiking and traveling. But we know Rick by now. Rick would never just carelessly live life and NOT plan for the future... and therefore, he is setting aside money into some form of savings, and it would be a large amount of money. What form of money is he saving it in if he dislikes gold?

There is sort of a painful contradiction going on, and I have to point this out... If he is saving, and using, any form of money that comes from the international banking system, then he is depending on gold whether he likes it or not, because gold is behind everything in the money system somewhere. And... he is also vulnerable to the vanishing papers phenomenon, the bubbles bursting, the trillion dollar defaults, unless he is saving paper money in a jar in his bedroom, and he's got thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars saved in a jar. I doubt that he has tens of thousands of dollars sitting in a jar in his house. He's got to be putting it somewhere. If he isn't saving his money in the form of physical gold and silver coins and bars, and hiding it where only Indiana Jones can get to it, then his paper money could become worthless.

We will never have a total absence of paper money. They will just stumble along for a few years, and have wars and battles over who gets to control the money system, and who gets to use the printing presses first. The particular TYPE of paper money will change, and it will get a new name, and instead of being called 'dollars' they'll be called 'Ameros' or 'Obamas' or whatever, or they'll invent some totally new thing out of nowhere. One type of paper money will become utterly worthless, and another type will be invented to patch up the collapsing system, and in a few years, the patch will get us going again, after lots and lots of suffering in the good people who actually WORK to earn their money and have lost it all.

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(this is me talking to 'them' - it's like the multiple personalities are doing an interview kind of thing)
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If the money system cannot be trusted, as it does not reflect the true value of things, then how do you know that we are not taking too much oil and that we are nowhere near running out of oil? How do you know that we are taking only a tiny drop off the surface of all the oil there is in the world? The economic system is supposed to regulate how much oil we take. The price of oil will rise as we take too much, which causes us to respond by reducing how much we use. It remains profitable to run an oil well and to go looking for new oil. But if the prices are a lie because of the banking system and its parasitic manipulative inscrutable processes... then, how do you know -

Are you expecting something to happen suddenly, like tomorrow, all at once? All of a sudden, tomorrow, all at once, all of the oil wells will simultaneously draw their last drops of oil, without expecting it beforehand?

Is it like sucking the last soda out of the cup with the straw, and the soda makes a slurping noise in the bottom of the cup, as the bubbles go up the straw - imagine the oil wells like that. You would notice variations in pressure. You would notice that it was 'bubbling.' It wouldn't literally be 'air bubbles.' You would notice that the pressure in the oil well was getting lower and lower. Everyone forever is going to remember this stupid soda straw analogy from now on, and you can blame it on me, but, you would notice that it was getting harder to get any oil out of the well if the pressure was declining and there wasn't anything left down there.

Isn't that what they are already saying is happening? That's what all the charts are about, the ones about less oil being extracted.

Those charts don't provide enough information about WHY less oil is being produced. There could be a million reasons why, and it isn't necessarily because of the soda straw slurping at the bottom of the oil well.

(I will never forgive myself for the soda straw slurping analogy. This analogy will be floating around forever because of me.)

They're expecting 'gradual decline,' not all at once tomorrow. The only disagreement could be about whether or not we are already past the 'peak.' You could argue that the 'peak' hasn't occurred yet. You could argue that the earth is producing huge amounts of new oil using an unknown process. You could argue that new types of fossil fuels will become profitable eventually when they are needed.

So tell me, how do you know that we are only taking a tiny drop off the surface of all that there is and all that is currently being produced? Are you saying that the natural processes that create new oil are much faster than we thought?

How is it that we can almost completely agree about the lifestyle choices that need to be done to protect ourselves against these things, but totally disagree about the cause of the gradual decline?

Could the economy gradually decline, EVEN IF there was plenty of oil? In a world of plentiful oil, limitless oil, the economy could still be bad and they could nickel-and-dime us to death, because of the government, because of the banking system, because of the parasites. Economic declines have occurred in many times in history and have destroyed civilizations, and they were because of people messing with the money systems, and taxing their citizens to death, and having other problems in their society (I always want to point out that, supposedly, the Roman empire had water pipes made out of large amounts of lead, and I don't want to imagine how much lead poisoning there was in their cities because of that).

It's possible to live in a world where resources are extremely plentiful and abundant, but we still suffer a decreasing quality of life because of the economic system and the government. What little resources we get from the world, somebody takes them from us, somebody steals them parasitically, somebody does tricks on pieces of paper and in the computer systems so that large amounts of our resources are vanishing and being stolen. There's plenty of 'stuff' out there in the world, but it's being taken from one person and given to a thief. Those thieves are happily sitting around living a wealthy lifestyle while everyone else starves to death, all the other slaves. Those plentiful, abundant resources are going to the thieves, the hackers, the parasites. The system makes it possible for them to do this.

Just remember this concept: a world where resources are plentiful and abundant, but, because of the way the system works, those resources are stolen from productive people and transferred to thieves and parasites. The resources are still abundant, but the system is taking more and more of those resources away from the slaves. The system has intermittent bubbles and busts, and there are battles between the various groups of people who control the systems. The types of financial paper, and the methods of transferring money from one thief to another, are so complex and hard to understand that few people can figure out exactly what is going on and who's doing it and where the money really is.

They just want to know the answer to the question, how do I know that we are merely taking a tiny drop off the surface of all the oil that there is - is the natural process of making new oil a faster process than we thought it was?

But this interview seems to be over. Apparently, this is something that I know nothing about.