By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com (WNW 213 10.23.15)

The biggest headline this week came from Sochi, Russia, and it plays right along the increasing war theme. Vladimir Putting is worried that the chances of a wider global war are increasing and not decreasing. At a global conference discussing war and peace prospects, Putin said, “We had the right to expect that work on development of US missile defense system would stop. But nothing like it happened, and it continues. This is a very dangerous scenario, harmful for all, including the United States itself. The deterrent of nuclear weapons has started to lose its value, and some have even got the illusion that a real victory of one of the sides can be achieved in a global conflict, without irreversible consequences for the winner itself – if there is a winner at all.”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Money manager Axel Merk says you simply must own physical gold in this risky environment. Merk explains, “Many people say why invest in a brick that doesn’t pay interest? When you look at cash paying negative interest rates on a real basis, after inflation, then a brick suddenly doesn’t look so bad anymore. . . . I would allege the Fed is all but promising to be behind the curve. Even if the Fed is trying to raise rates, emphasis on trying, they will be behind inflation. Yes, they will raise rates, but net inflation, real interest rates are going to continue to be negative. If I look out a decade from now, I don’t see how the U.S., Europe, Japan, or any other country can afford positive real interest rates.”

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Greg Hunter USAWatchdog.com   ( Early Sunday Release)

Renowned financial and geopolitical analyst Charles Nenner says the war cycle that started in 2014 will take years to play out. Nenner explains, “When cycles in war and peace show we are going to have wars, then everywhere in the world you are going to have trouble. I have been saying that the major war is going to be China and Japan about the islands over there (in the South China Sea). The news today goes in that direction. So, for now, we don’t have major wars, but I think it’s not going to be stable in the world, and we are going to end up in a big war (on the scale of a world war). We predicted it would start in 2014, and it will grow slowly until 2021. Why do I think it will be China and Japan? Because the aerospace industry went through the roof, and so something was cooking over there. So, China is preparing something. It should slowly get worse during the next two years.”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com (WNW 212 10.16.15)

It looks like the war hot spots in the world are getting hotter. Russia continues to punish anything or anyone that is against Bashar al-Assad. Russia’s top goal is to keep the Assad regime in power, and they are doing it. Russia is flying bombing missions every day in Syria. They are reportedly very effective. The White House says what is happening in Syria is an act of desperation by Iran and Russia. Russia counters by saying that America did not have an “agenda” or strategy, and the U.S. is the weakling on Syria and stopping terrorists. The U.S. has given up on training the so-called moderate rebels in Syria. The U.S. spent millions of dollars and only trained less than a half dozen fighters. It did make a stab at supporting the anti-Assad forces which, as I have said in the past, are in large part al-Qaeda. It dropped 50 tons of ammunition to the “moderate” rebels. You know terror fighters are getting most, if not all, of that. Talk about desperate and, while we are at it, let’s add stupid, the U.S. continues to openly arm terror groups. What kind of foreign policy is this? Not a winning one, that’s for sure.

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Financial analyst Rick Ackerman says the mother of all market meltdowns is a sure thing. It is just a question of when, and when it starts, it will simply implode at a stunning pace. Ackerman explains, “We’re in a situation now where any day something can happen. I think that the black swan will be something like the stock market starting down for no apparent reason. That in itself would trigger the implosion, and I think the only thing that is propping up the markets now is the mentality of . . . how bad can things be if the stock market is trading within shooting distant of all-time highs? I think the stock market is the main buttress of this enormous hoax that has been going on with easing (QE or money printing).”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com    (Early Sunday Release)

At the beginning of 2015, economist John Williams predicted the U.S. economy would continue to slow down to stall speed, but it is much worse than that. Williams explains, “I’ll contend we’re in a new recession and recognized likely to be timed from December of 2014. . . . The downturn in 2007 wasn’t recognized until the end of 2008. I think by the end of this year, people will recognize the economy turned down in December of 2014. I’ll tell you why I say that. There are a couple of very solid leading indicators . . . of the broad economy. One is industrial production. Industrial production contracted in both the 1^st and 2^nd quarter of this year. Those are the official numbers out of the Federal Reserve. Estimations for industrial production are for continued contraction. Industrial production used to be the GDP measure. . . . Retail sales contracted in the first quarter, adjusted for inflation. Year over year growth have dropped to levels you only see in a recession. It’s the same thing again with industrial production.”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Weekly News Wrap-Up (WNW 211 10.09.15)

The Russians are putting on a clinic on how to destroy terrorists. They are pulling off a well-planned takedown of just about anyone who stands in the way of the Assad regime. To the Russians, there are no so-called moderate rebels—just terrorists and non-terrorists. Only in the land of the “Wizard of Oz” are there good witches and bad witches. In the real world, witches are witches, and Russia sees things much the same way. They are spending big money and deploying many assets to destroy them. The latest show of force was launched from the Caspian Sea. Russian ships fired 26 cruise missiles into terror targets such as training camps and supply dumps. You can bet the missiles cost around $1 million each and have high explosive payloads that are measured by the ton. These are very big bombs, and they traveled across 900 miles and two countries to hit their targets in Eastern Syria. NATO is stunned, and President Obama looks weak and indecisive in the Middle East. This is bad news for America’s leadership role in the Middle East and bad news for the U.S. dollar.

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

“V, the Guerrilla Economist” says we have reached the point of no return in the global financial system. “V” explains, “We are entering a time which I call the collapse point. At the collapse point, there is going to be massive systemic shock. Why? Because you have one paradigm and one system being done away with, which is the dollar. It is going to be replaced by a new system. During that transition period, you cannot expect to trade anything because what do you trade it in? That’s why the Chinese are gearing up their own gold price fix. Once that collapse point happens and the world reels from the systemic shock, the Chinese gold price fix and the BRICS system will be there to fill in that vacuum. That is what’s being set up right now.”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com (Early Sunday Release)

Financial writer and analyst Bix Weir is not surprised by the Federal Reserve’s policies because it is all part of the long term plan. Weir explains, “The goal, since we went off the gold standard in 1971, has been to run the financial system as long and as hard as possible, sucking up all the benefits of fiat money, and there are very few attempts to slow this mess down. The idea is to put as much money as you can . . . until you have printed so much money the system implodes. This was a Nobel Prize winning paper in the 1960’s called “On the Road to the Golden Age.” It basically says if you have this freedom and flexibility with the monetary system, run it as hard as you can until people stop accepting the unbacked fiat money, then crash the system and go back to something safe and sound after it all blows up. . . . What they need is a big enough bubble so when it crashes, it take out all the derivatives, the malfeasance of the banks, the good guys and the bad guys and all the things going on behind the scenes. They need the bubble so big, and that’s what they are doing right now is blowing the bubble so big everybody feels the effect of a crash.”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com  (WNW 210 10.02.15)

The Middle East is spiraling into chaos and war at an alarming rate. It went from a war of words between President Obama and President Putin at the UN on Monday to the Russians bombing targets in Syria just a few days later. The Russians say they are fighting terrorism, and the U.S. says Russia is propping up the Syrian government, and it is bombing the CIA backed so-called moderate rebels. Russia has sent the world’s biggest nuclear armed submarine to the coast of Syria. It reportedly holds some 200 nuclear warheads, and its missiles have more than a 6,000 mile range. It looks like the Russians are in it for the long haul and are drafting 150,000 into the Russian military. Ash Carter, U.S. Defense Secretary, says the Russian plan is “doomed to fail.” I have been saying for years the Russians were not going to allow Assad to be removed from power. It has a strategic port on the Syrian coast in Tartus, and it has spent billions of dollars retrofitting it for nuclear armed ships and subs. Obama looks like a buffoon and failure on the foreign policy stage. Putin looks like he is taking over, and there is not much President Obama is going to do about it.

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Trader/analyst Gregory Mannarino says what is going on in the stock market is way worse than a so-called “correction.” Mannarino explains, “We are definitely going lower. Everything I look at, and there is a lot of material, is pointing lower. This is just the beginning. If we continue on the current trajectory, we are going to see a sell-off in this market that is going to spin people’s heads around. In my opinion, the party is over. There is going to be a terrible price to pay for financial misdeeds and irresponsibility by the Federal Reserve. . . . All they created is asset bubbles all over the place and inverse bubbles, meaning suppressed assets. This is going to correct to fair market value. It is a mathematical certainty, and there is no way out.”

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Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com    (Early Sunday Release)

Former top Wall Street banker Nomi Prins says forget about a Fed Rate Hike in December. It’s not going to happen. Prins explains, “They are not going to raise rates in December. I didn’t think they were going to raise rates in September. . . . It wouldn’t have made sense for that to happen, and it’s not going to make more sense for the same reasons for December. In the next three months, economies thought the world will not be repaired, markets will not be stable, currencies will not be stable, and all of a sudden, interest rates will not have the need to rise to hurt other countries who are reducing their rates. So, the Fed is not going to move in December. . . . The factors around the policies, around economy, around the markets, don’t lend themselves to doing that. So, she (Janet Yellen) is in a catch 22 of her making and of the Federal Reserve’s making. The choice was made to bail out the financial institutions and prop up the markets with artificial money, and printing money, and reducing the level of interest rates, and reducing the level of currencies relative to the dollar throughout the world. That was the decision that was made. . . . The talk is ‘we will see what the economy does. We’ll see if unemployment is better. We’ll see if inflation is still low, and then maybe we will think about it.’ That is all code for we are not going to think about it because we are scared to move and cause a worse situation than the one we already created. ”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com (WNW 209 9.25.15)

On his first visit to the U.S., the Pope is acting more like a left wing politician than a messenger of Christ. He has scolded Congress on everything from global warming to immigration. Most of his criticism is directed at Republicans though. There was not a single criticism given to the Castro regime in Cuba, and last I checked, their government is communist and atheist. I have been following the intense coverage and reading the Pope’s quotes, and I have yet to hear one public mention of Christ. I am a former Catholic that left the church after the pedophile priest scandal and the cover-up that went all the way to the Vatican. I like Catholics and have no problem with the main points of the Catholic Doctrine. The five main parts of the Catholic Doctrine are: Christ is the Son of God, Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, Christ died on the cross and shed his blood for the sins of the world, Christ rose again from the dead, and Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. Please notice how ALL five major points of the Catholic Doctrine (which I totally agree with) are centered on Jesus Christ. While the Pope has mentioned God a few times in his public quotes, I have not heard a single quote that mentions the name of CHRIST.  WHY??????  I don’t know if it is because the Pope just forgot to do so, or if he would like to see a one world religion, and of course there is no place for “God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ” in a one world religion. One thing is for sure, the omission of Christ’s name on an historic trip by the Pope this big is “too stupid to be stupid.”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Warren Pollock warns the global economy is headed for a brick wall. Pollock explains, “It’s good you are using the term brick because that’s the part of the economy which is crashing first, the emerging markets, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). That’s on the edge of empire, and now it is imploding inward. So, we can look at all of these peripheral economies, and that’s where the crash has occurred right now. When you talk about crash and people asking, ‘When is this going to happen?’ It’s happening right now, but it is not happening at the center of empire, it’s happening on the extremities of empire. These emerging markets, these miracle economies, the few countries in the world that had productive economies, they’ve hit a brick wall. They’ve crashed. China has crashed. When you look at Brazil–crash. When you look at Russia–crash. When you look at oil prices–crashing now. People keep asking when is this blowing up? And the answer is it’s blowing up right before your eyes right now, this minute. The domestic indicator is the declining velocity of money.”

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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com   (Early Sunday Release)

Financial writer Bill Holter contends the recent announcement of the Federal Reserve not to raise rates means the “Fed has Lost Control.” Holter explains, “Whatever the Fed does is wrong. The reason I say that is because no matter what they do, they can’t fix what they have already done. There is no policy at this point that can repair where we are at this point as far as debt ratios, derivative outstanding and the money supply exploding. Nothing that they do now can fix it. The only thing that remains is a reset.”

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