All of a sudden and out of the blue, all the brokerages seem to be reducing prices on trading.

TDAmeritrade did not give any advance notice, it just popped up per below.
 


Yup, Etrade too.  Again, no advance notice was given.  Both these guys have been $9.99 for a long long time.



Well WTF is going on?  Usually when these guys add service they make a big deal about it in advance.  They don't just begin the "new deal" quietly and without fanfare.  What good is that?  Why take a hit in revenues without making a big deal about how great an outfit you are because of it.  That is bad enough.  But the creepy part is how they all decided to do it at very nearly the same time.  What, did they all just wake up and decide that we deserve a better deal simultaneously?  This all happened as if on cue.

Now if I wanted to draw as much money off the sidelines and into trading accounts as possible, perhaps I would tell all of my subjugated financial institutions like TDAmeritrade and Etrade that they should lower their trading prices across the board.  Hmm, now who would ever care to do that, and why?  Could this video be the reason?

For the past 2-3 months, Jim Rickards has been on an absolute tear going from show to podcast to interview talking about what he calls the big Ice-9 freeze.  Essentially, he's telling us that, based on feedback from his super intelligent AI pattern matching system that he developed with the government and military, that the financial "elites" are coming for us.  They have placed agents in all of the key financial institutions and in government and when the signal is given, ice-9 will be activated and all global financial assets will be frozen.  Some will be confiscated, others just locked up for years.  The goal is to trigger a global economic crisis so that the people will move toward one world money - namely IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR).  Essentially, the banks will replace dollar based capital with SDRs.  We peons will continue to use the dollar but as a dying currency its spending power will wither as we watch helplessly.

Is this getting to sound like a grand conspiracy theory?  To be honest, I was laughing as Rickards rattled off his well rehearsed lines.  I mean, that boy don't pause to take a breath and every word he utters is cogent and meaningful.  I wasn't laughing at the content as much as the fact that if any of it were true and if Rickards wasn't playing a part in it then he would already have been killed for warning people.

Now I am NOT here to tell you Rickards is full of shit.  And for a guy trying to sell a service he sure is giving a lot of stuff away for free.  I must have gotten no less than 50 emails from various sources telling me to claim "my" free copy  before it was too late.  I've pretty much never seen this much of a full court press to sell financial advice before.

In most cases I would just roll my eyes at the desperation.  But Rickards is not some fly by night book salesman.  He's the real deal, been there, done that and he has both the tee shirt and the photos to prove it.  All kidding aside, Rickards knows his shit.  But if he were going around leaking sensitive info like this that the powers that be didn't want him to leak then his ass would be dead already, period.  So I wonder what this is really all about.  I wonder if those running this Ponzi scheme are ready to collapse it and then call for a reset using SDRs just as Rickards is saying.  I mean, it might actually be a good strategy to get the word out before the shit hits the fan such that the shock value is reduced.   After all, you really don't want to scare the heavily armed American public too much - a miscalculation could easily start a civil war at this point.  Additionally, Rickards isn't advising people to take up arms and drag Janet Yellen's fat ugly ass into the street and do a double tap on her.   Instead he's telling people that he can help them profit from the new system.  He's effectively recruiting collaborators.  Get enough people to accept the new system, which will certainly come with some benefits and relief from the Big Freeze, and pretty soon you can lead the herd down this new path of a freshly reset Ponzi.

Face facts people: the world is slogging through low growth which will stay low growth as long as the current debt Ponzi remains in place.  What the elite would like to do is get rid of this debt Ponzi, blow it up in a similar manner to the twin towers.  Collect the newly put in place terrorism insurance (SDRs) just like the twin towers and then rebuild something new.  The elite call it creative destruction.  I just call it a con game.  This can only ever end one of two ways: bad or worse.  I think the elite might just have sent their man Rickards out on this "the elite are coming" awareness tour/media blitz so that people will be able to look on him as a sort of new Paul Revere.

And it's not just that Rickards is a smart guy that makes me truly wonder WTF is going on with all this.  He mentions dominoes falling, one of which was the recent action by the Indian government to suddenly de-monitize a couple of the most popular rupee notes in circulation, and action requiring literally hundreds of millions of people to stop whatever they were doing and go turn their bank notes into the government for re-issuance of new ones IFF the government decided that your wealth was not gained without paying their taxes.  That was a huge move and it was no joke or hoax.  Then we noted that shortly thereafter, again as if on cue by a movie director, Venezuela pulled the same stunt.

Folks whether Rickards has completely lost his mind or is simply an system agent of the coming change or whether he is actually an honest guy who wants to help all of us stand up to "the elites" as he calls them (that strange usage seems to have been done for the express benefit of everyone who is not elite), something is going to give sooner or later because, and I'll say it again if I must, no Ponzi scheme ever lasted forever and no it won't be different this time.

One more thing, whether or not Rickards is in on all of it, I think his portrayal will be pretty accurate when the collapse finally does occur.  The theft of money left in the bank is essentially the mechanism by which someone gets left holding the empty bag.  The fact that gold and silver will be revalued in the process has also been a long term theme of mine.  The fact that there will be riots and crime as people decide to do whatever the Hell they want to since the government is doing whatever it wants to, that part is likely to be correct as well.  In fact the only thing that I laughed about was the fact that he was doing all these interviews about this coming economic coup and he was even giving hints about the identity of others who had disclosed things to him like it was nothing.  Rickards is smart enough to know that banksters hire gangstas to take care of people who try to stop their plans.