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Iran Ditches Rial in Hyperinflation Crisis — Bitcoin Demand Rises

Iran Ditches Rial in Hyperinflation Crisis — Bitcoin Demand Rises

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Iran is set to redenominate its fiat currency, removing four zeros to create a new fiat called toman as demand for crypto is surging.

Ravaged by crippling hyperinflation, Iran’s Parliament has sanctioned the redenomination of its fiat — the rial — by replacing it with a new currency called the toman. According to the plan, each toman will be worth 10,000 rials.

The redenomination plan effectively removes four place values (four zeros) from the Iranian national currency as part of efforts to kickstart an economic recovery from the country. It is a move that echoes steps taken by other countries like Venezuela and Zimbabwe amid huge inflation.

With the United States exiting its nuclear deal with Iran and reintroducing sanctions, the country’s economic situation has been in a tailspin. Virtually frozen from the international scene, Iran has been facing a severe liquidity crunch and foreign exchange shortage.

Typically, people living in countries suffering from an economic crisis turn to cryptocurrency not only as a way of preserving wealth but also as a means of carrying out international transactions. Iran’s case is not dissimilar, with Bitcoin’s (BTC) price even rising to a hefty 300% premium on peer-to-peer exchanges like LocalBitcoins.

Iran’s struggle with hyperinflation

In May 2018, U.S President Donald Trump exited the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal — and reimposed sanctions on Tehran. This decision put enormous pressure on the country’s already fragile economic situation. Commenting on the impact of U.S. sanctions on Iran, Babak Behboudi, the CEO of blockchain innovation firm Synchronium remarked:

“The U.S. sanctions are the major problem facing the Iranian economy in recent years, which have paralyzed a significant part of the economy. In an economy like Iran, where a significant part of the economy is still state-owned, such sanctions prevent economic stability and growth.”

While the deal was in place, Iran’s economy was open to the international scene, benefitting especially from increased oil exports. Indeed, the country’s president, Hassan Rouhani, ran his 2017 election campaign based on programs that would leverage the opportunities afforded by the accord with the U.S.

Iran's inflation rate year-to-year comparison

However, the rial was evidently deteriorating even before the U.S. repudiated the nuclear deal, with the country’s inflation rate more than tripling between 2017 and 2018. Indeed, the lifting of sanctions in 2016 did little to spur any growth in real gross domestic product. Between 2017 and 2018, protests broke out in many Iranian cities with people voicing their dissatisfaction over the rising cost of living among other grievances. By August 2018, Iran’s rial had lost more than 80% of its value in barely a year.

Faced with a rapidly declining economic situation, the central bank began placing restrictions on forex, a move meant to checkmate the foreign exchange black market. The escalating rial devaluation meant the emergence of an expanding bid-ask spread on Nima — the country’s secondary forex market.

At the start of May 2020, the bid-ask spread — the difference between the buying and selling rate for forex — stood at about 9,000 rials. Exporters of non-essential goods in Iran use Nima, and the widening bid-ask spread on the market means having to liquidate overseas earnings at a much cheaper rate that, in turn, harms the profitability of such ventures.

The existence of a secondary forex market is in part due to the inability of the authorities to create a unified exchange rate. The government’s failure in this regard meant that a greater percentage of forex deals moved to the black market where participants could speculate on the unending volatility of the rial–dollar exchange rate.

At the time of writing, while the official government rate is about 42,000 rials to $1, the black market rate is almost four times higher — with $1 selling for 163,500 rials. Indeed, the Nima rate has also begun to approach the black market figures with $1 worth 157,320 rials.

Currency redenomination plans

Iran’s economic situation has also not been helped by the outbreak of COVID-19 with the country’s currency going into a deeper dive since February. The country has been hit hard by the deadly coronavirus with over 6,500 deaths from about 104,000 cases since the first confirmed infection in mid-February. According to an April report from the World Bank due to the dwindling oil revenues, the country’s GDP growth will continue to lag. The report reads:

“Persistence of lower oil prices and export volumes (e.g., due to a significant decline in China’s oil demand) would result in a substantially larger overall shock and fiscal deficit in 2020/21.”

On Monday, May 4, 2020, Iran’s Parliament authorized the redenomination of the country’s fiat, eliminating four zeros and replacing the rial with the toman. According to the plan, each toman will be equivalent to 10,000 rials. The move, more than a year in the making, began with a draft bill prepared by the governor of the Central Bank of Iran. Opting for a redenomination also marks a departure from the usual approach of Iran devaluing its currency — which happened about 3,500 times since 1971.

Rate of rial devaluation over past 10 years

Some commentators like government spokesperson, Ali Rabiei, have said the move will help to simplify financial transactions in the country. However, critics of the plan believe it does nothing to solve the fundamental issues affecting the economy.

Tehran late to the party

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Ali Beikverdi, the CEO of crypto exchange deployment service bitHolla, remarked that Iranians have already been redenominating the country’s fiat to suit different purposes. According to Beikverdi: “Currency denomination in any country doesn’t solve any financial or economic issues. The only thing it does is inflation. However, I must say in Iran this has been a matter of debate for quite some time.” Explaining the confusion caused by multiple rial benchmarks in the country, Beikverdi added:

“While banknotes use Iranian rial, people already drop one zero and call it toman. So, one toman = 10 rial today. To add more to that confusion, people even drop three more zeros from toman to make the numbers smaller, and that is very confusing if you are not familiar with it. So, the currency denomination has already happened among people for simplicity, and this is nothing new.”

With multiple forex benchmarks existing within the country, the government’s redenomination plan might struggle to achieve the desired results especially given the historical precedence surrounding such actions. For Behboudi, it is still too early to determine the effectiveness of the government’s plan, arguing that taking four zeros of a currency will not have much effect in itself:

“Such an effort can be a good small step for a serious, wider, and more effective series of reforms, including well-planned privatization of the economy, decreasing the monetary system expenses, and ease of banking operations.”

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Finance derided the plan to create a new fiat currency for the country, declaring:

“Everybody in the country knows that redenomination has no effect on inflation. Most economists think it is not a sustainable time for redenomination. Due to coronavirus and oil prices, the revenue of the government has fallen sharply, and at the same time, the costs have grown. So, we expect high inflation.”

Bitcoin comes onto the scene

Amid the backdrop of the plans to revamp Iran’s currency, Cointelegraph reached out to Areatak, a blockchain solutions provider based in Tehran. Back in May 2019, Cointelegraph reported that Areatak — in partnership with the Informatics and Services Corporation of Iran’s central bank — was developing Borna, a national blockchain project aimed at transforming the country’s banking and financial sector. In a message to Cointelegraph, Areatak CEO Saeed Khoshbakht revealed the latest updates with the project, stating:

“Borna infrastructure and platform is passing the first phase of test and it will be ready soon to launch. As mentioned in the whitepaper, Borna can host central bank cryptocurrency, and maybe it is used in this economic evolution. But the decision is for the central bank and ISC.”

While the government tries to solve the growing inflation problem, crypto stakeholders in Iran say the situation favors a more broad-based adoption of cryptocurrencies. Indeed, high ranking officials within the country’s government and military have called for the use of digital currencies to evade crippling U.S. sanctions. Commenting on the growing adoption levels of crypto in Iran, Khoshbakht remarked:

“If we analyze the adoption of cryptocurrency usage in the world we find two types of countries are in front of the list. Countries with a lack of digital payment systems and countries with high inflation. Because of High inflation in Iran, people don’t trust to national currency and try to buy everything such as real estate, gold, stock, other currencies like the U.S. dollar and cryptocurrency.”

Tehran’s stance on crypto mining has noticeably softened with the authorities allowing Bitcoin miners to set up shop in the country. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Iran has issued about 1,000 licenses to crypto miners in the country.

Related: Five Countries Where Crypto Regulation Changed the Most in 2019

Earlier in May, the country’s Ministry of Industry, Mining and Trade also gave the go-ahead to Turkish crypto mining firm iMiner to establish a 6,000-rig facility in the Semnan province. Iran has also given tax breaks to crypto miners on the condition that they repatriate all foreign earnings. According to Behboudi, crypto is primed for even greater adoption in Iran, adding: 

“Mining, holding and trading of cryptocurrencies, especially BTC and ETH, is widely adopted in Iran. I’m sure in next months we will see more investment by the public, especially the middle class, in cryptocurrencies like BTC.”

For Beikverdi, the economic crisis in the country is only setting the stage for more people to choose cryptocurrencies. “Once you see your currency loses its value more than five times in about two years, as an investor, you seek alternatives as a store of value,” remarked the bitHolla CEO.

Indeed, Bitcoin P2P trading data shows significantly higher BTC premiums in Iran since the start of 2020. On LocalBitcoins, Bitcoin has steadily sold for between 300% and 400% of the global average spot price.

For example, while Bitcoin traded at around $7,800 in early January, the quoted price for BTC on LocalBitcoins was the equivalent of over $25,000. While BTC recovered from the Black Thursday flash crash of March 12, the cryptocurrency seemingly traded for $21,000 while the global average hovered above $5,200.

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super…

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.

(Left) President Joe Biden delivers remarks on canceling student debt at Culver City Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 21, 2024. (Right) Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 27, 2024. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; David Becker/Getty Images)

With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.

The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.

Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).

Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.

When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.

High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.

There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.

Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.

The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.

More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.

St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.

Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.

In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.

2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.

Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.

Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 23:20

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The…

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

Doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Washington in a file image. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.

There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.

President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.

President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.

“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.

Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.

By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.

The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.

“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.

This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”

The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.

A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.

Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 22:10

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now…

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.

The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.

Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.

In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.

The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.

When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.

If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.

We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.

My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.

It goes like this:

1) lockdown,

2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,

3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,

5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,

6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,

7) businesses flee the city

8) cities fall into decay, and that results in

9) more surveillance and police state.

The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.

It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.

But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.

It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.

Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.

As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.

The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.

Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.

By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.

The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.

Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.

The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.

The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.

But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.

What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.

As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.

The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.

Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 16:20

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