Mish: Poland rising or falling relative to the Euro.

Mish asks if Poland is the next Turkey.  I say, not immediately but when red C is done the hyperinflation will begin.  After all, all fiat currency is fake money.  There is no "IF" it eventually blows up, only when.  There is no such thing as a fiat currency that is real money.  All of it is fake, faith based currency.

You have to wonder, though, why they took all the precious and semi precious metals or useful industrial metals out of the money supply (i.e. gold/silver/copper) yet left the nickel untouched.  The nickel is the only denomination of commodity money left standing in the US money supply.  It's actually still made out of nickel and copper, both of which are important and useful industrial metals.  Thus it is real money.  5omeone is saying something to those who can see past their nose.

The coming model for health care.

Doctors have a monopoly on health care.  It sounds so obvious and so right headed that nobody would see this as a problem.  The only problem is that it stops many people from getting needed health care!  The reason is simple: doctors have high investment in self and they do it in order to get paid.  Highly paid.  The whole medical profession is built around keeping out the "riff raff" in order to create a shortage of medical specialists so that the field retains artificially high pricing power.  Not everyone can afford these inflated prices.

If this sounds crazy, go look at the history of other countries, including the likes of Germany where in years past the doctors made normal wages.  And even in the US in the 1950s, doctors made better wages but not 5x-100x of other workers.  So the medical industrial complex has figured out how to keep supply low in an a rising demand environment to thus ensure high prices.

Well, as the old saying goes, the solution to high prices is high prices.  Someone will do something innovative to change things for the better of those using the services.  In the past I have mentioned in these pages that government should offer free basic training to a large number of people. Those who show aptitude should be allowed to practice basic health care.  Those who don't meet the minimum standard should look elsewhere for employment.

In exchange for this free training, the med techs, if you want to call them that, must work for regular wages, $50-60k per year perhaps after they meet a certain minimum internship program requirement for on the job training.  A full doctor of medicine oversees their work and is responsible for not assigning them tasks that are beyond their demonstrated capabilities. 

Thus, if a person comes in needing open heart surgery there is doctor level staff that can handle it but if someone needs a broken limb set, non life threatening wounds to be sutured up, etc. then a med tech with basic skills is allowed to handle the job.  The results are then quickly reviewed by the lead doctor and the patient pays a reasonable cost for right sized medical care.

Of course, there are many possible variants of this.  In extreme cases like India, some people have simply decided to self teach whatever they can learn about healthcare and then to provide low cost service to others based on this self learning.  Of course, the authorities are mortified by all of this because the people using these services seem to love these so called "quack doctors" as it represents a huge step up to what they had before.   If allowed to get too popular then many might begin to ask why a doctor's visit for something basic should cost $175 + cost of meds should they be needed.

I for one know that without much training and only access to google that I could, using similar skills that I employ for debugging a variety of technical issues in my current job, easily diagnose 70% of what people might complain about.  I proved it in my own case recently in correctly diagnosing myself with a case of shingles.  All I did was look for similar pictures online and then researched what caused it.  When I found it could be serious I went right in for medical care.  The doctor starts asking me questions about measles (which is a precondition of shingles apparently) and right away I told him "so I guess I have shingles, right".  He says, "yeah, classic case".  Would I want to rely on this self diagnosis?  Of course not!  But I can say that because I am not dirt poor.  Unfortunately, lots of people are dirt poor.  If you have ever been poor then you will know that something is always better than nothing.

For those that are dirt poor, like many in India, innovative solutions are happening to provide right sized healthcare to the masses.  The status quo over there saw this happening and knew that the medical monopoly was beginning to tumble and so they stepped in provide just enough help to be viewed as being helpful while at the same time trying to retain control of their own elevated status.  Instead of focusing the 100 hrs on medical training it seems a lot of time is spent persuading the participants (and indeed making them promise) to stop calling themselves doctors.  That's how paranoid the medical industrial complex is, and rightfully so, because behind those 20% cases where 12+ years of intensive training is really required in order to do the right thing medically, the other 80% of cases can probably be reasonably addressed with 100 hours of training and a good Internet connection.

Again, people living in western countries will say, "yeah man, you go right ahead.  I will take a real doctor for all my medical needs.".  But these people do not stop to think that they are not smarter than working class people in India even though we westerners  make far more money.  The US and other western nations live so lavishly up and down our economic chains for one reason and one reason only:  People are stupidly loaning us money at cheap interest rates.   We will never repay it because we do not have the means to but while it lasts it pumps up all of our lifestyles far past what we have earned relative to other nations which do not have access to these massive loans.  That is why it is cheaper for westerners to retire in other nations than the one they made their money in.  And that is why it cannot last forever.  It used to be said back in the 1930s that "that guy is rich like an Argentine".  No, really, it's true.  Go to Google search and type in "rich like an" and this is what you get:

Of course, they fucked it all up with wild spending habits that depleted their cash and then similarly stupid debt based consumption and socialism (stealing from the productive to give to the unproductive) and now it is a failed nation state only 80-100 years later.   That's only one person's lifetime folks.  As a result, parts of Argentina today remind us of a scene from Mad Max.  It's a truly fucked up place.

The things we think we deserve today and the lack of abject 3rd world style poverty in the US are both driven by our ability to trick people of other nations into loaning us the money to consume beyond our collective lifestyles.  Those days are now numbered.  Many of my readers will live long enough to experience a change of heart about who their healthcare provider is.   Not because they want to, but rather because they are left with no other choice.

How can you win when someone else is losing for you?

These are dangerous times for the markets.  They are all leveraged to the hilt and the next time they implode the government is not going to be able to step in and pay off the losses like they did, globally, last time.  The people of the world are simply tired of being patsies to the scam of privatizing gains and socializing losses (PGASL).  The herd simply is not going to pay the debt of wild gamblers going forward.  The financial markets are still allowing highly leveraged gambling as if they were backstopped by government, but now the cracks are showing in the PGASL scam.

In any gambling bet, someone has to pay and the only ones who might possibly pay are those with the ability to pay even if they did nothing wrong in order to be targeted for payment.  I learned this lesson a long time ago during my first divorce where the judge told me I had to pay for her Palm Beach lawyer (may he burn in Hell) even though she was getting all the benefit and even though she was the recognized cause of the divorce (adulteress/infidelity).  He simply told me I would be paying for everything because I had a good high tech job and thus I had the ability to pay.  Talk about your moral hazard rising.

Well that has been the template for decades now during the rise of liberalism and it is still raging both on Main St and on Wall St. even if the trend is now changing.

On Main St, if you are a man and you get a divorce (or she divorces you even) in the states of NJ or FL and others you will be facing LIFETIME alimony.  Yes, lifetime.  As  in bonded slavery for life.  And if you don't pay, men with guns will come and take your property and then put you in jail.  And if you resist hard enough they will kill you where you stand.  Don't roll your eyes; these are the plain facts.  You have to be INSANE to get married in any of these states OR to move there after marrying in another state like TX where alimony is actually reasonable.  And yes, there are cases where the woman was the bread winner and the man gets the alimony.  But as an engineer I don't like to waste my time talking about the 0.01% case just for the sake of political correctness.  That is where liberal fools spend the vast majority of their time, acting like the small minority case is the biggest issue deserving our time.

On Wall St., well, we saw what happened in 2009.  All world government banded together in order to bail out their leveraged gambler banking buddies.  They printed up tons of new cash to pay the bill and to make the debt Ponzi appear solvent.  So in response to seeing that, everyone has leveraged up yet again (AKA moral hazard) in the belief that government has no choice but to save the system; the gamblers think they are too big to be allowed to fail.  I laugh at this notion because if the herd doesn't agree then it's not going to happen. The first time around the herd was threatened with global disaster, martial law and civil war and it had people very fearful.  But as they saw this bad behavior rewarded, fear grew into anger.

It is no accident that peak globalism happened in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse and the 2009 bail out of the corrupt system.  People who had confidence that leaders were doing the right thing lost confidence.  Critical mass of confidence was lost and so we saw things like Brexit, Trump getting elected and the like.  So anyone who still thinks that the people are going to bail out the next Wall St collapse is crazy.  If someone threatens the herd now with martial law and civil war, a good 20% of the population will say "Hooray!!  Anarchy!!".  The fear is gone and the next time this crap is pulled by government there will be a shooting battle.  People will die and it will be of historic importance. You can read it in the comments of many articles, Youtube vids, etc.  People are PISSED.  They are seething.  Their current prosperity and future prospects SUCK.  And they look around at those who are still doing well and they are not happy.  Many of these people would just commit suicide but they are waiting for the shit to hit the fan so they can suicide someone else before they die.

The con men running this con game are aware of what the herd thinks.  Highly aware.  And they know they have to care even though they come off devil-may-care about it.  A cowboy is always monitoring the herd watching for signs of a stampede.  And they have been taking some action.  General Electric, for example, has been all but dismantled and will, as I predicted long ago, either BK or be broken up completely at some point.   Other steps have been taken as well and perhaps the most important one is the so called bail in.

In a bail in, participants of the system are self insured against losses which are incurred by any individual member that the system itself cannot cover.  This of course is a total scam and only 1% of the people out there understand what is going on.

What would you say if you went into a casino which did not post any visible rules but which had a rule book somewhere.  You are playing the slots and actually winning this time.  Sure, you normally lose but this time you are winning big and you are elated about it.   You have a big pile of money coming to you when you cash out.  But then you hear a big uproar on the other side of the casino.  Some big leveraged gambler placed a highly leveraged, 20:1, $140 million dollar bet on a "sure thing" spin of the roulette wheel.  Now, this gambler didn't actually have the money to place this bet!  He asked the casino for a marker in order to place it.  The casino generally would not accept such a bet because it would be too large for them to cover but, hey, business has been down and so they found it difficult to turn down such a big opportunity.  So they go out and get external credit to fund the bet.

Well the gambler loses his bet and with a loud "FUCK"! he gets up from the table and just starts heading for the front door.  The casino calls security to stop him.  They easily catch up to him and take him to the back office where payment is demanded on the lost bet.  But the gambler is broke (something that should have been obvious to the casino and would have been had they not needed the money).  He literally has nothing to take.  And there is no debtor's prison so there is no option but to let him walk free.

But someone must pay off the failed bet with the external credit source (they want their 15% fee!!) and the casino doesn't have the money (which also should be obvious since they had to borrow it in the first place) and so they begin looking around for someone with the ability to pay.

The only ones left to take anything from are the other gamblers, including you.  You have unrealized gains.  That means you have won money in the casino but have not yet left the building with your winnings.  And in the fine print of their corrupt little rule book the casino has a clause that says they can take your unrealized winnings to pay for bad bets if the casino can't cover it.  Oh, you didn't know about that??  Sorry!! Ignorance is no excuse!

So on your way out you bring your markers to the window and they give you some money but it's 18% shy.  You start to get pissed and you ask them why they are holding back the remainder.  They explain to you in their little bureaucratic voices that a bet went bad, the casino can't cover it and you are among those with the ability to pay.  So that's all you are getting, take it and be happy we did not take it all, fuck you very much and have a nice day.

You start to lose your fucking mind, yelling at the lady behind the window and so she presses that red button.  Two casino employees the size of Volkswagens and who carry themselves in a way that exposes their clear military background cruise up to either side of you.  Flanking you are also two on-duty cops, who are paid by the public but who work full time in the casino and are thus shadow employees thereof.  All four men are large in stature, armed with guns and have a license to hurt and/or kill you if you do not follow policy.

If that sounds jokishly crazy, the joke is on you for not understanding what a total scam the system is because this just happened in the Bitcoin futures market.  You can read about it here but the bottom line is that the market maker could not cover the loss of a large bet which they should never have allowed and so they stole 18% of the unrealized profits of the other participants.

Now, let's apply this to your bank account.  Whether you realize it or not, your bank deposits are legally considered to be a loan to the banking system.  If you don't believe that, do some research because it is true.  So you are participating in the banking system by willingly loaning them money and in exchange you get essentially free banking services; these "free" services are how they are remunerating you for the loan of your money. Now, the banks are leveraged gamblers by definition.  They have a certain amount of deposits which are their monetary base and then on top of those deposits they are allowed to create new money out of thin air called credit, and the ratio of base money to credit starts at 10:1 and just goes up from there.

So now you know that you are in the casino with all of your hard earned money thinking you are doing the right thing.  Sooner or later the debt Ponzi is going to collapse and when it does the system is going to look for those with the ability to pay.  It's called a bail in and it already happened to others like Cyprus.  Eventually it will happen to all the big banks because they got big by leveraging up so when the Ponzi collapses they will be the hardest to crash.  But this time, instead of stealing from everyone using money printing and QE, those who have deposits with the failing institutions will be targeted and labeled as "as those with the ability to pay".

It's coming folks.  And when it arrives there will be no time to react.  Think about this now while there is still time to do so.