Well, my hat is off to the global central planners for averting the next stage of the unfolding financial crisis for as long as they have. I guess there’s some solace in having had a nice break between the events of 2008/09 and today, which afforded us all the opportunity to attend to our various preparations and enjoy our lives.

Alas, all good things come to an end, and a crisis rooted in ‘too much debt’ with a nice undercurrent of ‘persistently high and rising energy costs’ was never going to be solved by providing cheap liquidity to the largest and most reckless financial institutions. And it has not.

The same sorts of signals that we had in 2008 are once again traipsing across my market monitors. Not precisely the same, of course, but with enough similarities that they rhyme loudly. Whereas in 2008 we saw breakdowns in the credit spreads of major financial institutions, this time we are seeing the same dynamic in the sovereign debt of the weaker European nation states.

Most informed people are familiar with the concept of Peak Oil, but fewer are aware that we’re also entering the era of Peak Government. The central misconception of Peak Oil -- that it’s not about “running out of oil,” it’s about running out of cheap, easy-to-access oil -- can also be applied to Peak Government: It’s not about government disappearing, it’s about government shrinking.

Central government -- the Central State -- has been in the expansion mode for so long that the process of contracting government is completely alien to the nation, to those who work for the State, and to those who are dependent on the State. Thus we have little recent historical experience of Peak Government and few if any conceptual guideposts to help us understand this contraction.

Peak Government is not a reflection of government services or the millions of individuals who work in government; it is a reflection of four key systemic forces that drove State expansion are now either declining or reversing.

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I want to take the lowest risk approach to the future. So much is riding on it.

Personally I feel that the scientific progress we have made over the last few hundred years is astounding. I don’t want to lose that. I think that is a gift to the future and I don’t want to run the risk of a collapse that could destroy all that we have.

Even if you think the collapse is a low probability -- let’s say it's 5%, 10% probability -- it is an asymmetric risk. The downsides of not treating it seriously are huge.

I mean, you buy fire insurance for your house even if it is a 0.1% probability that your house will burn down in your lifetime. But the consequences are so negative that you do it. And when you are talking about the accomplishments of all civilization, you need to buy insurance and treat that with the respect it deserves.

Tom Murphy -- associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego -- has mapped the distance between the earth and the moon to within a millimeter, and built instruments to study colliding galaxies. We feel comfortable saying he's a pretty smart guy, as well as an optimist about what human ingenuity and technology can do for the advancement of society.

In 2004, he became intrigued with the global energy situation and brought his disciplined, empirical approach to bear. He set out to determine which new sources were going to pick up the slack once fossil fuels began becoming scarce. Looking back, he says the theme underlying his findings was "disappointment."

The math showed him that there simply will not be nearly enough BTU yield from alternative energy sources to meet the rising global demand. In fact, if anything, his investigation made him realize how few minds today are truly aware of the extraordinary energy throughput we are getting from fossil fuels.

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Once a year the very chic and exclusive TED conference takes place in Southern California, bringing together entrepreneurs, inventors, and thought leaders from every corner of the world.

There, gathered around a stage, a kind of hive mind begins to unfold in which the most cutting edge ideas in healthcare, energy, social development, and behavioral psychology are shared from a very plugged-in, big-screen podium. It’s extremely well done.

And despite the reflexive criticism from outside the conference -- that the gathering is inward-looking and elitist -- TED usually does manage to disturb the zeitgeist, a little, with its unveilings in technology and innovation. It is plainly good that next-step advances in solar technology, data collection, and developing world health initiatives are explained and broadcasted from TED. Especially given that policy makers, or those who have the ear of policy makers, are also often in attendance.

A better charge to level against the TED conference, however, is that it’s routinely, if not unfailingly, optimistic.

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Alasdair Macleod, publisher of Finance and economics.org, sees little room for a happy ending to the worsening European credit crisis.

In this interview, he builds on his excellent synopsis from earlier in the week that detailed how the crisis originated, essentially embedding a fundamental structural shortcoming into the entire Eurozone construct starting back in 1997. This flawed monetary model was exploited for temporal gain and it worked very well as long as the pie was expanding and nobody was looking too carefully at the mounting imbalances created as it chugged along beautifully. Everybody was getting rich on their Mediterranean villas going up in price almost daily.

This whole thing was bound to work until, mathematically, it couldn’t work.

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[This week, we introduce a new contributing editor to ChrisMartenson.com, Alasdair Macleod. He will mostly be contributing commentary focused on the situation in Europe, where he's located. The credit crisis underway there is not Europe's problem alone; it has the potential to send crippling financial shockwaves to the US and elsewhere around the world. Please join us in extending a warm CM.com welcome to Alasdair. -- Adam] 

The purpose of this report is to give readers the essential background to the economic problems in Europe and to bring you up-to-date in what has become a fast-moving situation. At the time of writing, there has been a lull in the news flow, but that does not mean the problems are under control. Far from it.

When we talk about Europe today in an economic context, we really mean the Eurozone, whose seventeen members are the core of Europe and share a common currency, the euro. The euro first came into existence thirteen years ago, on January 1, 1999, replacing national currencies for eleven states; Greece joined two years later. In theory, the idea of a common currency for European nations with common borders is logical, and it was Canadian economist Robert Mundell's work on optimum currency areas that provided much of the theoretical cover.

However, the concept was flawed from the start.

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“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

- Frederic Bastiat

Bill Black is a former bank regulator who played a central role in prosecuting the corruption responsible for the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. He is one of America's top experts on financial fraud. And he laments that the US has descended into a type of crony capitalism that makes continued fraud a virtual certainty - while increasingly neutering the safeguards intended to prevent and punish such abuse.

In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system. 

A warning: there's much revealed in this interview to make your blood boil. For example: the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcements actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.

Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70x greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. So how many criminal referrals did the same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, make?

Zero.

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Here’s a last minute offer for anyone who lives near Greenfield MA…

Are you interested in what to say to your kids about what is going on in the world? Are you wondering about how kids should be educated given what we know (and don’t know) about the future?

This weekend, on Sunday April 29, from 11 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. I will be speaking at a fundraiser for a local education center that offers self-directed learning for teens. It’s not really a ‘school’ in the traditional sense of the word, as it operates just fundamentally differently from a typical school.

All three of my children have attended, and two are currently enrolled.

If you have any interest in the topic of education in this environment, or would like to see how one program is addressing the idea of doing things differently, then this is an opportunity to join in a conversation on the topic and meet kids and staff that are actively pioneering and practicing a novel approach to education.

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Modern investing offers the promise that investors who "do their homework" and use data more intelligently than the herd can gain a valuable edge. But what if the underlying data available to the investing public is fundamentally flawed? 

The federal government agencies that issue headline data and the mainstream media that reprints the data without skeptical analysis would have us believe that these indicators -- the unemployment rate and the consumer price index (CPI), for example -- accurately reflect economic realities.

The other indicator that is implicitly or explicitly assumed to reflect the economy’s health is, of course, the stock market, generally represented by the S&P 500 index.

That the government indicators and the stock market are both suspect is now a given.

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To those of you in the San Franscisco Bay area: Chris is speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California tomorrow night.

This marks Chris' return to the CWC, where he spoke to a standing-room-only crowd three years ago. Tomorrow, they're giving him a bigger venue and the event will be televised for future broadcast.

Chris and I will remain after the main interview is completed to meet with any CM.com members that are able to attend. If you live close enough to make the event, we're looking forward to meeting you.

Here are the details on the event from the CWC's website:

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Harvey Organ has been analyzing the bullion markets closely for decades. The quality and accuracy of his work is respected enough to have earned him an invitation to testify before the CFTC on position limits for precious metals back in 2010.

And he minces no words: Gold and silver prices are suppressed. With extreme prejudice.

In this detailed interview, Harvey explains to Chris the mechanics of how he sees this manipulation occurring, why he predicts this fraudulent pricing scheme will collapse soon, and why it's critical to be holding physical (vs. paper) bullion when it does.

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Ideological deflationists and inflationists alike find themselves both facing the same problem. The former still carry the torch for a vicious deflationary juggernaut sure to overpower the actions of the mightiest central banks on the planet. The latter keep expecting not merely a strong inflation but a breakout of hyperinflation.

Neither has occurred, and the question is, why not?

The answer is a 'cold' inflation, marked by a steady loss of purchasing power that has progressed through Western economies, not merely over the past few years but over the past decade. Moreover, perhaps it’s also the case that complacency in the face of empirical data (heavily-manipulated, many would argue), support has grown up around ongoing “benign” inflation.

If so, Western economies face an unpriced risk now, not from spiraling deflation, nor hyperinflation, but rather from the breakout of a (merely) strong inflation.

Surely, this is an outcome that sovereign bond markets and stock markets are completely unprepared for. Indeed, by continually framing the inflation vs. deflation debate in extreme terms, market participants have created a blind spot: the risk of a conventional, but 'hot,' inflation.

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Recently I was asked by a high school teacher if I had any ideas about why students today seem so apathetic when it comes to engaging with the world around them. I waggishly responded, "Probably because they're smart."

In my opinion, we're asking our young adults to step into a story that doesn't make any sense.

Sure, we can grow the earth's population to 9 billion (and probably will), and sure, we can extract our natural gas and oil resources as fast as possible, and sure, we can continue to pile on official debts at a staggering pace -- but why are we doing all this? Even more troubling, what do we say to our youth when they ask what role they should play in this story -- a story with a plot line they didn't get to write?

So far, the narrative we're asking them to step into sounds a lot like this: Study hard, go to college, maybe graduate school. And when you get out, not only will you be indebted to your education loans and your mortgage, but you'll be asked to help pay back trillions and trillions of debt to cover the decisions of those who came before you. All while operating within a crumbling, substandard infrastructure. Oh, and by the way, the government and corporate sector appear to have no real interest in your long-term future; you're on your own there.

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Fresh off of a very successful seminar weekend at Rowe in March, we're gearing up for the last seminar we plan to offer this year.

It will be at the beautiful Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, at a wonderful time of year:

We're very excited to have been invited to conduct our workshop at such a well-regarded and respected destination as Kripalu, where internationally-known speakers like Deepak Chopra present regularly.

This June, we'll be building on the new material we debuted at Rowe, which addresses how we are much farther along the "Three E" timeline than when the Crash Course videos were created four years ago.  read more »

"I always tell people when they look at their bank account, they think they have got maybe $50,000 in the bank. It says $50,000 CR. Credit.

You are a creditor. It is the bank’s property, that $50,000. And they recognize in that document that they owe it to you.

So, you have to watch out for that word 'creditor'. When you see CR, you are on the balance sheet. You are at risk."

So says Paul Tustain, founder of BullionVault and advocate for minimizing counterparty risk in a world of rehypothecation and 100-to-1 leveraged paper markets.

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We all know that central banks and governments have been actively intervening in markets since the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown destabilized the leveraged-debt-dependent global economy. We also know that unprecedented intervention is now the de facto institutionalized policy of central banks and governments. In some cases, the financial authorities have explicitly stated their intention to “stabilize markets” (translation: reinflate credit-driven speculative bubbles) by whatever means are necessary, while in others the interventions are performed by proxies so the policy remains implicit. 

All through the waning months of 2007 and the first two quarters of 2008, the market gyrated as the Federal Reserve and other central banks issued reassurances that the subprime mortgage meltdown was “contained” and posed no threat to the global economy. The equity market turned to its standard-issue reassurance: “Don’t fight the Fed,” a maxim that elevated the Federal Reserve’s power to goose markets to godlike status.

But alas, the global financial meltdown of late 2008 showed that hubris should not be confused with godlike power. Despite the “impossibility” of the market disobeying the Fed’s commands (“Away with thee, oh tides, for we are the Federal Reserve!”) and the “sure-fire” cycle of stocks always rising in an election year, global markets imploded as the usual bag of central bank and Sovereign State tricks failed in spectacular fashion.  read more »

"The age of cheap oil is over," agrees Andrew Chung, partner at Khosla Ventures, arguably the most knowledgeable venture capital firm spearheading next-generation energy projects.

While perhaps more optimistic than Chris on the odds that the world can transition off fossil energy sources without experiencing some duration of lower overall energy output, Andrew is clear to point out that large and near-term capital investments are essential for such a smooth transition.

The size and scale of the investments necessary to evolve and replace our existing (and increasingly outdated) power infrastructure are enormous, and too big for private companies alone to address the issue on an acceptable timeline.

And as of now, the U.S. is decidedly NOT treating the matter with the urgency it deserves.  read more »

Nearly every week, ChrisMartenson.com enrolled members enjoy a fresh podcast of "Off The Cuff," an informal discussion on the markets between Chris and Mike "Mish" Shedlock, publisher of the extremely popular economic blog Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis.

We're making this week's Off the Cuff podcast available to the public-at-large to build awareness for an important cause that Mish is championing. Earlier this week, he shared with readers that his wife Joanne suffers from ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

After several years of juggling an intense publishing schedule (describing Mish as 'prolific' is a gross understatement) while caring for his wife on his own, he's created an online raffle as a means to raise funds for important ALS research, patient care, and education. We support his efforts and wish Mish and Joanne all the best.

Click here to learn more about the raffle.

In this week's Off the Cuff, Chris and Mish look at the impact of the recently-released Fed minutes and the worsening situation in Europe (no, the problems there haven't gone away).

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The world's major central banks -- including the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Reserve -- appear to have finally won a major battle in the deflationary war that broke out five years ago in 2007. While the ultimate victor is yet to be determined, it now seems likely that a period of nominal growth could ensue for another two years, perhaps even longer.

This will not be high-quality growth. And little of the growth will be real.

Commodity prices will surely eat away at most, if not all, of any gains that may occur in global GDP. Additionally, while non-OECD growth actually has a chance of achieving some GDP gains in real terms, the prospects for the OECD are not as encouraging.

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"Even Wile E. Coyote had to come back down to earth sooner or later", says Charles Biderman, founder of TrimTabs Investment Research. In his opinion, the prices of stocks and bonds - enabled by excessive financialization of our economy and central bank money printing - have been defying gravity for a dangerously long time. 

If we continue to do all we can to preserve the status quo -- to maintain "phony" asset price levels as Charles calls them -- at best we will restrict overall growth and handicap the economy.

The problem isn't so much the unfairness and malinvestment evident in a rigged market. As Charles shrewdly asks: what happens when the market becomes un-rigged?

We've never experienced the unwinding of an entirely manipulated financial system, so we can't predict for sure. But at this point, a painful collapse of our markets and loss of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency seem entirely plausible.  read more »