Did you know that you are involved in the most massive Ponzi
scheme that has ever existed? To
illustrate my point, allow me to tell you a little story.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Sam. When he was younger, he had been a very
principled young man that had worked incredibly hard and that had built a large
number of tremendously successful businesses.
He became fabulously wealthy and he accumulated far more gold than
anyone else on the planet.
But when he started to get a little older he forgot the values of his youth. He started making really bad decisions and some of his relatives started to take advantage of him. One particularly devious relative was a nephew named Fred. One day Fred approached his uncle Sam with a scheme that his friends the bankers had come up with. What happened next would change the course of Sam's life forever.
Even though Sam was the wealthiest man in the world by far,
Fred convinced Sam that he could have an even higher standard of living by going
into a little bit of debt. In exchange
for IOUs issued by his uncle Sam, Fred would give him paper notes that he
printed off on his printing press. Since
the paper notes would be backed by the gold that Sam was holding, everyone
would consider them to be valuable. Sam could take those paper notes and spend them on whatever
his heart desired. Uncle Sam started to do this, and he started to become addicted to all of the nice things that those paper notes
would buy him.
Fred took the IOUs that he received from his uncle and he
auctioned them off to the bankers. But
there was a problem. The IOUs issued by Uncle
Sam had to be paid back with interest.
When the time came to pay back the IOUs, Uncle Sam could not afford to
pay back the debts, pay the interest on those debts, and buy all of the nice
things that he wanted. So Uncle Sam
issued even more IOUs than before so that he could get enough notes to pay off
his debts. As time rolled on, this pattern
just kept on repeating. Uncle Sam
repeatedly paid off his old debts by taking out even larger new debts.
Meanwhile, since the notes that Uncle Sam was using were
backed by gold, everyone else in the world decided to start using them to trade
with one another. This was greatly
beneficial to Uncle Sam, because the rest of the world was glad to send him
oil, home electronics, plastic trinkets and anything else that Uncle Sam wanted
in exchange for his gold-backed notes.
Eventually, however, the rest of the world started to
suspect that the number of gold-backed notes that Uncle Sam was issuing far exceeded
the amount of gold that Uncle Sam actually had.
So the rest of the world started to trade in their notes for gold.
And by that time Uncle Sam definitely did not have enough
gold to back up his notes. Realizing
that the scheme was starting to collapse, one day Uncle Sam announced that his
notes would no longer be backed by gold.
But he insisted that the rest of the world should continue using his
notes because he was the wealthiest man on the planet and everyone should just
trust him. And the rest of the world did continue to trust him, although it wasn't
the same as before.
As Uncle Sam got greedier and greedier, he started to issue
IOUs and spend notes at a rate that nobody ever dreamed possible. The great businesses that Uncle Sam had built
when he was younger were starting to decline, and Uncle Sam started buying far
more stuff from the rest of the world than they bought from him. The rest of the world was still glad to take
Uncle Sam's notes because they used them to trade with one another, but they
started accumulating far more notes than they actually needed.
Not sure exactly what to do with mountains of these notes,
the rest of the world started to loan them back to Uncle Sam. It eventually got to the point where Uncle
Sam owed the rest of the world trillions of these notes. Even though the notes were losing value at a
rate of close to 10 percent a year, Uncle Sam somehow convinced the rest of the
world to loan him notes at an average rate of interest of less than 3 percent a
year.
One day Uncle Sam woke up and realized that the amount of
debt that he owed was now more than 5000 times larger than it was when Fred had
first approached him with this ill-fated scheme. Uncle Sam now owed more than 16 trillion
notes to his creditors, and Uncle Sam had already made future financial
commitments of 202 trillion notes that
he would never be able to pay. Meanwhile, the notes that Fred had been
printing up for Uncle Sam were now worth less than 5 percent of their original
value. Uncle Sam was becoming concerned
because some of his other relatives were warning that this whole scheme was
about to collapse.
Sadly, Uncle Sam did not listen to them. Uncle Sam knew that if he admitted how
fraudulent the financial scheme was, the rest of the world would quit sending
him all of the things that he needed in exchange for his notes and they would
quit lending his notes back to him at super low interest rates.
And if the rest of the world lost confidence in his notes
and quit using them, Uncle Sam knew that his standard of living would go way, way
down. That was something that Uncle Sam
could not bear to have happen.
When a financial crisis almost caused the scheme to crash in
2008, a desperate Uncle Sam went to Fred and asked for help. In response, Fred started printing up far
more notes than ever before and started directly buying up large amounts of
IOUs from Uncle Sam with the notes that he was creating out of thin air. Fred hoped that the rest of the
world would not notice what he was doing.
It seemed to work for a little while, but then an even worse financial crisis came along.
Once again, Uncle Sam started issuing massive amounts of new IOUs and
Fred started printing up giant mountains of new notes to try to fix things, but
their desperate attempts to keep the system going were to no avail. The rest of the world started to realize that
they had been sucked into a massive Ponzi scheme, and they lost confidence in
the notes that Uncle Sam was using.
Suddenly nobody wanted to lend notes to Uncle Sam at super low interest
rates anymore, and people started asking for far more notes in exchange for the
things that Uncle Sam wanted.
Uncle Sam's standard of living dropped dramatically. Since he could no longer flood the world with
his notes, Uncle Sam could not continue to consume far, far more wealth than he
produced. Uncle Sam sunk into a deep
depression as he watched the scheme fall apart all around him.
Uncle Sam had once been the wealthiest man on the entire
planet, but now he was a broke, tired old man that was absolutely drowning in debt. Unfortunately, once he was down on his luck
the rest of the world did not have any compassion for him. In fact, much of the rest of the world
celebrated the downfall of Uncle Sam.
All of this could have been avoided if Uncle Sam had never
agreed to Fred's crazy scheme. And once
Uncle Sam made the decision to stop backing his notes with gold, it was only a
matter of time before the scheme was going to collapse.
Does this little story sound crazy to you? It shouldn't.
The truth is that you are involved in such a scheme right now. In case you haven't figured it out,
"Uncle Sam" is the United States, the "notes" are U.S.
dollars, and "Fred" is the Federal Reserve.
Source: Zero Hedge.com, The Biggest Ponzi Scheme In The
History Of The World | Zero Hedge
http://www.facebook.com/l/rAQHjhV0OAQES6OiVHm75ZwOW8e7ZuBPh4ZD1MyELzIGiPw/www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-24/biggest-ponzi-scheme-history-world
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