The world is slowly rolling over.

   During the first wave of the melt down of the global debt Ponzi, Warren Buffet famously said "when the tide goes out we will see who was skinny dipping".  Another way of thinking about this is that the marginal players are always hit the first and the worst.  Another word for margin is "leverage" which can of course take many forms.
   Today we are seeing that France and Iran are pretty much in the same boat: both marginal players in their own special ways.  They are just at different points in their journeys (as are the rest of the countries in this global debt Ponzi).  In the case of France, the EU is in depression with France being a big exporter.  I predicted many months ago that France would hit the skids eventually because its customers are hitting the skids.  At the time everyone was pointing to the PIIGS as deadbeats with France and Germany the powerful overlords.  I knew this was not going to last because France and Germany are in the same sinking ship as the rest of Euroland and in fact as the rest of the world. Germany is keeping a stiff upper lip for now but I assure you, there is great panic in Merkel's insane attempts to bail out Germany's bankrupt, deadbeat debt slaves.  Of course, everyone now understands that she is really trying to allow her own banks to appear solvent when the math says they are already bankrupt.
   In the case of France, the government is attempting to fleece its most productive citizens with ridiculous levels of taxation.  Government doesn't care who worked or how hard they worked.  It only cares about staying in power and it knows that those who didn't work very hard will still know how to protest hard and riot hard.  In fact the poor will always be more disruptive to social order during times like these because they literally feel that they have nothing to lose.  They don't understand a thing about how money works but they do know that they are getting screwed and so they will riot and burn and plunder.  History shows that in extreme cases they will even drag the government and its families into the streets and hang them.  Government is terribly afraid of this and so it is attempting to "spread the money around a bit" in order to quiet the rabble.
   Unfortunately for the French con men leadership, the smart people of France are quick to call bull$hit and they are quickly organizing against the so called "pigeon tax" (pigeon is French slang for "sucker").  How long should anyone expect them to put up with it before coming up with a defensive response?  Not long folks.  It will not take long.  The free market, aided by knowledge and technology, is an unstoppable force and these pigeons know they are getting screwed.  They will quickly figure out a multitude of avoidance strategies that the bureaucrats will not be able to deal with.  As Princess Lea told Governer Tarkin in Star Wars, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. ".   Government's attempts to steal will be thwarted and they will have to make the next big decision: treat people as free entities who rightfully deserve to keep what they themselves earn or consider them slaves and use some new form of force, coercion or government terrorism to get them to comply with government theft.  I can tell you right now that any attempt to enslave the French elite will not work for very long.
   As for Iran, well, if you've bought into the US government propaganda then you probably think they are evil, hate Americans, blah blah blah.  Of course it has nothing to do with us trying to control them and of course nothing to do with stealing from them with our global money scam.  An honest person will admit that if some Iranians become terrorists it is because they feel they have nothing to lose.  It is because they don't know how money works or how to keep the fruits of their labor.  Instead, they buy into the scam of fiat currency even when their government isn't running the show.  Their lives are wasted and they see the future of their children to be a dead end that they believe was not of their own doing.
   Here's the deal.  The wages of ignorance are being paid to the people of Iran who are now suffering from the most recent case of hyperinflation.  They allowed their money to be backed by nothing.  They bought into a scam whereby they have been trading their oil for paper money that was printed up by someone who doesn't respect them.  Had they one Rial of sense, they would have demanded payment for their oil in gold all along and their internal economy would have been gold based all this time.  Now hear this: YOU CAN'T HAVE HYPERINFLATION IF YOUR MONEY IS GOLD OR SILVER.  It cannot happen folks.  So, as hyperinflation hits more places around the world there can be nobody to blame except for the people who allowed their money to have no backing.  In essence, hyperinflation is an ignorance tax.  Do you think those enlightened people of Iran who chose to put their life savings into gold bullion coins are crying right now??  Of course not!  Gold is not hyperinflating, only the fake money can do that.  In fact, anyone with debt denominated in fake money is seeing that fake debt evaporate as long as they have a significant amount of savings in real golden money.  What used to cost a handful of gold coins to pay off will soon be repaid with a fraction of 1 gold coin over there.
   For now, the really bad stuff is hitting others in the world.  The cost of living in the US has risen a bit because of Bernanke's printing press but we are still exporting our inflation to the world because we own the world's money supply.  For now the scam is still working and for now inflation remains tame in the US.  But Bernanke is starting to panic as well with open ended buying of government debt and promises to continue manipulating interest rates low until mid 2015.
   I'll make a bold prediction right now.  It is bold because nobody believes it is possible but that's simply because they mindlessly extrapolate past events into the future without considering that history sometimes changes direction on a dime.  I hereby predict that Bernanke will not be able to control US interest rates through 2015.  Today he seems nearly omnipotent on the global stage but I know he is just a con man running a con and that he is getting nervous and desperate.  I also know that he needs other nations to buy our debt in order to keep rates low.  He can't just buy it all up or people will start to lose confidence. 
   Unfortunately for Ben, other countries are losing their wealth.  And with diminished wealth they will have diminished need to store it in US treasuries.  This fact alone is reducing demand for them which is why Bernanke has been buying 75% of them or more over the past few years.  But government needs to sell more debt every year as this is the nature of a debt Ponzi.  I don't know what the trigger will be but at some point prior to 2015, Ben Bernanke will lose control of his global scam and it will begin to go sideways in a way that nobody will see coming.  The world will lose confidence in the con.  It will have a rapid onset as these things generally do lest many of the patsies escape.  And it will finally hit home in the US.  At that time, most Americans will begin to receive the wages of ignorance.  The defense is and always was to store your long term wealth in gold and to do so in a steady fashion BEFORE the panic begins.