EU policy as always in the wrong direction

The largest agricultural company in Europe – Agricost Holding – is located in Romania. The 56,132 hectares of farmland belong to Al Dahra, a company from the United Arab Emirates. In this way, the largest EU subsidies for agriculture flow into Arab coffers. This shows how EU regulations are blind and anti-social. Although Romania is one of the largest agricultural states in Europe and has one of the most fertile soils, the tasty, sun-ripened tomatoes from Wallachia or the spicy organic cheeses from Transylvania hardly make it to the export market in the West. The reason is not the weak marketing of the Romanian food producers, but the strength of the farmer lobbyists from Italy and Spain in the EU; they will not allow the prices of their specialties to go down because of the much cheaper competition from Eastern Europe. A natural behavior, but on the flags of the EU stands equality, free trade and the right to free competition. Meanwhile, Brussels is in effect promoting big business from the West and feeding the coffers of the Arabs.

The macrocosm of the EU is transferred to the microcosm in Eastern European countries. “Romania counts about four million farms, no other EU country has such a fragmented agriculture. The smallest part – about 12,000 companies – are former mammoth farms that still cultivate state-owned land of up to 500 hectares and have their customers at home and abroad, mainly for non-processed primary products such as grain, oilseeds and live cattle. Although these companies are economically well positioned, they receive most of the EU direct payments because they have the biggest lobby in domestic politics. But the vast rest of the farms struggle to survive in Romania.”

The EU is interested in this fragmentation of agriculture in Eastern Europe; it simply wants to destroy the small farms there. In the Western Balkans, for example, there are good conditions for the oh-so-fashionable organic farming in the small family farms. But Kosovar, Serbian, Macedonian small producers would represent a strong competition for the established, Western producers, insofar as their governments would adapt to EU standards and accept funds from Brussels.

The number of family farms continues to decline dramatically, not only in Romania, where most young people are leaving for the West and no longer want to farm, but also in Western Europe. Not only because of convenience and because of the easier life in the foreign, western big cities. In the EU, agribusiness has become a high-risk business where loans are almost impossible to service and where profitability depends precisely on the above-mentioned subsidies, or in other words: officials decide from my business.

The paradox has other facets as well: While the EU promotes the preservation of the old vegetable and fruit varieties, huge corporations from the other parts of the world get huge sums for the cultivation of the modern varieties, which taste of nothing and can be an interesting subject of study for a chemist in the laboratory. But buy organic instead! These mammoth farms also buy feed and fertilizers from the remotest regions of the world to “optimize” their production. Wouldn’t it be logical for the EU to base its subsidies not on the size of farms, but on their carbon footprint? You have to stick to your own logic, don’t you?

EU bureaucrats are like drifting drivers, all the time pressing on the gas pedal and applying the brake at the same time. While the countless EU projects for the preservation of the rare vegetable, grain and fruit varieties are running and there is always talk about the promotion of healthy organic food, an agreement is signed with Brazil (Mercosur) by virtue of which meat from GMO-fed cattle should be brought to Europe. In this two-speed Europe, even the Greens in Germany change their minds when something pleases the lobbyists and are probably not as strongly against the agreement as they used to be.

Ask yourself now: Why does it sound: “I am a farmer”, not proud?

Municipality of El Ejido in Almeria, Spain. Huge greenhouses and farms that only function thanks to EU subsidies and cheap Moroccan labor. Is this what the sustainable future of Europe is supposed to look like? Source: Wikipedia, El Ejido.

The battle against cash goes on

People spend the night in front of ATMs with the hope that money will be brought there and they will finally be able to withdraw it after standing in line for many hours. Sometimes the fights break out, even among those waiting in front of the banks. Tensions reach their peak. Branches are set on fire and people all over the country take to the streets….

Scenes from Cyprus 2013? No. Nigeria, Laos, April this year. Old banknotes were invalidated in February and since then no new ones have been printed, only the old ones collected from the market by the central bank and destroyed. At the same time, they introduced central bank digital currency (CBDC), which was not accepted by the people at all. Over 200 million people were deprived of their money overnight. Almost no one wanted to pay or transact with the new e-currency (called eNaira). Thousands of businesses went bankrupt in a short period of time. A paradoxical situation arose in which gasoline could no longer be bought at gas stations in the country, which is one of the largest oil producers in the world.

Nigeria, with its 22o million people, has long since overtaken South Africa and is the largest economy on the Dark Continent. It is a country with huge raw material resources and a development potential that African mentality and corruption, which is present everywhere, wreck. It can be said that it is a rich country of poor people because almost all the capital is in the hands of politicians. One of them, the head of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefile, said in Davos that his country would soon be cashless and – lo and behold – that might end with blood in the streets. It is hard to believe that in a country where 32% of the people are illiterate, where most people do not have access to electricity, the idea of digital currency comes from below; that the shamans had whispered it in the ears of ordinary people. No, it comes from above and from outside. Third World countries have always been a training ground for Western elites, the grassroots movement of the new authoritarian world without cash. This time they are testing how far and how fast they are able to implement their ideas.

Finally, it should be remembered that the complete transition to cash, would make citizens transparent. Central banks could regulate digital money, depending on how they would like a citizen. It could also be that the validity of the money would be limited in time and could only be spent for certain purposes. Electronically, that’s easy to organize. How embarrassing that would be for the Germans, 58% of whom pay in cash! Nigeria has also been called the “cash king” in Africa.

The virtual world threatens the physical world. More on this in Gefira 73.

Der Kampf gegen Bargeld geht weiter

The virtual world threatens the physical world. More on this in Gefira 73.

The battle against cash goes on

Scenes from Cyprus 2013? No. Nigeria, Laos, April this year. Old banknotes were invalidated in February and since then no new ones have been printed, only the old ones collected from the market by the central bank and destroyed. At the same time, they introduced central bank digital currency (CBDC), which was not accepted by the people at all. Over 200 million people were deprived of their money overnight. Almost no one wanted to pay or transact with the new e-currency (called eNaira). Thousands of businesses went bankrupt in a short period of time. A paradoxical situation arose in which gasoline could no longer be bought at gas stations in the country, which is one of the largest oil producers in the world.

Nigeria, with its 22o million people, has long since overtaken South Africa and is the largest economy on the Dark Continent. It is a country with huge raw material resources and a development potential that African mentality and corruption, which is present everywhere, wreck. It can be said that it is a rich country of poor people because almost all the capital is in the hands of politicians. One of them, the head of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefile, said in Davos that his country would soon be cashless and – lo and behold – that might end with blood in the streets. It is hard to believe that in a country where 32% of the people are illiterate, where most people do not have access to electricity, the idea of digital currency comes from below; that the shamans had whispered it in the ears of ordinary people. No, it comes from above and from outside. Third World countries have always been a training ground for Western elites, the grassroots movement of the new authoritarian world without cash. This time they are testing how far and how fast they are able to implement their ideas.

Finally, it should be remembered that the complete transition to cash, would make citizens transparent. Central banks could regulate digital money, depending on how they would like a citizen. It could also be that the validity of the money would be limited in time and could only be spent for certain purposes. Electronically, that’s easy to organize. How embarrassing that would be for the Germans, 58% of whom pay in cash! Nigeria has also been called the “cash king” in Africa.

The virtual world threatens the physical world. More on this in Gefira 73.

Gefira 74: Nothing new under the sun

The names may be different, but the phenomena remain the same. The Western world, which is so free, especially in terms of freedom of expression, has long since abolished censorship, hasn’t it? No, there is no censorship, God forbid. There are community rules that preclude the expression of this or that opinion, or laws against hate speech that silence someone, but certainly no ban on free speech.

It is much the same with wars. Have you noticed that the good old days when country A officially declared war on country B before bombing it are long gone? But then why should we declare war? We don’t fight wars anymore, we conduct military operations to prevent a demographic or human catastrophe in a particular region. Or we fight terrorism, so sometimes we declare war, but not against a country or a nation, but against terrorism, against evil people or evil ideologies.

Different designations can make us think differently about phenomena that are very similar, not to say identical. Gephira 74 compares the events and characteristics of two instances of such hostilities, separated by almost two hundred years: two wars fought between the West and Russia for world domination, or at least for domination in one region, two wars both connected in one way or another with the Crimean Peninsula. One of these wars took place between 1853 and 1856, the other began in 2022.

We are also examining the American and German economy. Unseen policymakers like Powell and Scholz are attempting to appear optimistic, but the reality is that there are many indications that the decline will persist. Immigration is ongoing and is doing nothing to improve the labor market, the reason that was supposed to legitimize these absurd social policies. Companies and big banks are going into bankruptcy, education standards are dropping, while TV presenters only talk about new challenges, rather than an impending collapse.

Gefira Financial Bulletin #74 is available now

The Second Crimean War 2022 – 202?
The real state of the US economy – How the FED is warping reality
Germany continues to do away with itself
Just as in the USA, there are many indications of a recession

The Greatest Threat to America

Those who lived in a so-called communist country – i.e. a country, where Marxsism-Leninism was the state ideology – remember it very well: party leaders of all calibres when delivering speeches would constantly bring up a few topics and these were class struggle, bourgeois anti-values, capitalist enemies, sanctity of the working class, historical materialism, the inevitability of the victory of Marxist and Leninist ideas, and the like. All speeches contained these phrases and got across these messages. It was like a ritual: everybody expected that and nobody was surprised. It was like saying good day or goodbye, it operated like a reflex, like responding with a not-at-all or my-pleasure upon hearing a thank-you.

Much the same we can observe nowadays when we listen to the speeches delivered by Western politicians. Surely, the set of words and phrases is different, but the ritual of repeating them now and again, here and there, without rhyme or reason is precisely the same. The words and phrases that we have mentioned at the beginning of this text have given way to words and phrases like systemic racism, democracy, human rights, right to choose, transgenderism, tolerance and a few others. Be it Rishi Sunak or Macron, von der Leyen or Biden, we may sum up their speeches even without listening to them. In general: using these words and phrases they all opt for the greatest good and are opposed to evil; by the way, just as their Marxsist-Leninist predecessors.

Still, President Biden’s speech recently made at Howard (one of the HBCUs or Historically black colleges and universities) was a bit of a surprise. Not in that he said that climate change was a problem (the usual clap-trap), not in that he said that blacks are the future of the United States (but they are! they are! – who else?), not in that he said that women have the right to choose (but of course!), but in that the most serious threat to the United States of America is – make a guess! – white supremacy! Literally, the president of the United States called on people to stand up against the poison of white supremacy which is the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland. You see? It is not China, after all, not even Russia, nor the hundreds of thousands of immigrants crossing the southern border, nor recession, nor the impending de-dollarization of world economy, nor the ever-present shootouts in American cities but white supremacy.

America’s future

Where can he see it? In American government? In American movies? In American advertisements? In American mass media? In American whites taking the knee before their black co-citizens? In American affirmative action? In American de-segregated schools? In the rules of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?

President Biden said, racism has long torn us apart. It’s a battle that’s never really over, which reminds one of the sentence Comrade Stalin said many, many years after the Bolshevik Revolution had been completed that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount. You see? You develop socialism and the bourgeois element is becoming stronger and stronger; similarly, you build a raceless society and all of a sudden racism (only white racism is understood, no other) is gaining momentum!

But then American elites are known for such discrepant statements: do you remember the pandemics of the unvaccinated, repeated by TV anchors ad nauseam? Due to the overwhelming propaganda Americans mostly subjected themselves to the global medical experiment and despite that fact the number of those who did not want to take part in the national stampede… grew! That’s at least the understanding of the word pandemics: the number of the infected – in this case infected with the stubborn disobedience not to be vaccinated – kept rising. How could the number of unvaccinated spread if more and more people were getting the jab?

Biden’s ghost-writer should really have resorted to this term: America is threatened by the pandemics of white supremacy or supremacists! Or he should have copycatted Comrade Stalin and formulated something like: resistance to raceless society increases as its successes mount.

FED in a china store

We have recently seen a significant increase in the price of gold, which today is approaching the mark of $ 2,000 per ounce. The appreciation we predicted in the recommendations of our bulletin was largely fueled by the liquidity crisis, which was only exacerbated by the expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and a small rate hike (25 pts) by Jerome Powell and his colleagues. It is worth noting that the market was expecting a 50 basis point hike even before the Silicon Valley Bank problems.

The Fed’s head insists that the $297 billion increase in total assets is the result of a completely unique situation related to banks’ liquidity needs. What is crucial, however, is not the reason, but the fact that further substantial funds were created out of thin air – and this is directly related to another dose of fuel for inflation, which continues to show no signs of abating. So the risk of stagflation caused by an economic slump remains.

The last notable example of an exit from stagflation in the U.S. occurred in the 1970s. In response, Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates above 19% to restore confidence in the economy. The positive real interest rates achieved at that time (with inflation at 13.5%) are out of reach for central bankers today.

An economic crisis will happen sooner or later for one reason or another. History simply shows that. The important question, however, is what methods will be available to central bankers when that crisis occurs (if we don’t already have it). In past decades, these were based primarily on lowering interest rates and expanding the money supply. However, the above measures are now being drastically curtailed because of their impact on the rise in inflation. A further rise in inflation would probably only prompt investors to withdraw their money from financial institutions in order to protect their capital elsewhere from the increasing loss of purchasing power. Such decisions would only lead to further liquidity problems. It also cannot be ruled out that the Fed will decide to raise interest rates further. These in turn would devalue the bonds held by banks, which would also deal a severe blow to the financial system. The impact is likely to be similar in both cases: either a liquidity crisis or inflation that is likely to spiral out of control sooner or later, or a combination of both. Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell thus seem to be caught between the hammer and the anvil, and their actions resemble those of an elephant in a china store.

Also worth mentioning is the recent news about the growing risk of a Deutsche Bank default. The banking crisis seems to be coming to a head, also in Europe. Even more important than the crisis itself, however, as already mentioned, seems to be the considerably limited room for maneuver of central bankers to counter it.