The Destruction of the American Economy

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Many thanks to all those who are doing sessions with me. It's so nice to meet you guys in person and be able to chat and advise you, especially in times like these. You guys are tougher and stronger and wiser than you know, and I want you to really feel that in these moments. The link is here for those who were asking.

Today we’re going to discuss….

Is Trump Going to Destroy the Economy?

As we’ve begun to do sessions, I’d say one of the top concerns is money. Not as in making a quick buck overnight, but: are these maniacs going to destroy everything I’ve worked a lifetime for?

I’ve been warning you that a lot of people are going to Sink With the Ship. This is what I mean, in a way: is Trump going to destroy the economy? Now, I don’t want to scare you. So. Don’t imagine Hollywood movie levels of ruin. It’s not going to be like that, and that isn’t how societies collapse. It happens in a much more normal way, which is to say, it creeps up on people.

Just like it is right now.

What’s happening tomorrow? The tariffs are going into effect. And right now, I’d say, most people don’t fully grasp just how startling, sudden, and severe the consequences are going to be. And yet even that’s only the small picture.

After that? They hope to cook the books so that even as the economy gets destroyed, things look fine. No, I'm not kidding, we're going to get to that.

I know how that sounds, so bear with me, and we’ll take it step by step. This isn’t a game, and it’s not some kind of childish conspiracy theory, this is your life.

You need to think about how to protect yourself right now. If you don't want to Sink With the Ship.

How to Destroy an Economy

What’s the first thing to notice about the tariffs? The stock markets are cratering. Tomorrow, as the grim reality sets in? They’ll crash, and that doesn’t necessarily mean 1929, but it does mean that things are going to go south, in a big way.

What does that tell you? Something crucial, actually, and it’s not about Trump and his buddies, which we’ll get to. The markets didn’t price in this risk. They got it wrong.

I’ve been arguing, or rather, friends have been arguing with me. Over the last few months. The tariffs are just a ploy! They’re just a negotiating tactic! And I’d sort of shrug and wait for it to end, and then ask: for what? For…maple syrup? For Toronto Raptors swag?

They were never just a ploy or a tactic. They were real, because part of the plan here is to crash the economy. Crashing the economy to me and you and the average person is precisely what this form of power regards as success, and that’s troubling, because well, come on. When even most big biz CEOs are pleading for this to stop, we’re way beyond even capitalism.

So where are we, if this isn’t even really predatory capitalism anymore?

We’re now deep into the weeds of oligarchy. And the name of the game in oligarchy is to crash the economy. The modern one, at any rate. And build something more neofeudal in its place. So that you, the oligarch, can pick up the pieces on the cheap, and then charge people a fortune for basics. Food. Water. Shelter. Transportation.

It’s not a coincidence all of those are sectors that are going to be hit hardest by the tariffs.

This is how you destroy an economy.

And turn it into something more like an oligarchy proper. A system, a form, which has “an economy,” sure, but not in the way we think of it: you can earn, save, and have a better future, and decide what that is. It’s a place in which you’re squeezed past the bone in order to exist.

What does that mean, “squeezed past the bone”? Americans already can barely afford to live. Credit card balances and debts are skyrocketing. That’s how you become an oligarchy. Everyone’s perpetually in debt, meaning that in real terms, they own nothing, and if you do, in net terms, count yourself lucky, because you’re very much the exception. In such a system, you are slowly taking everything people have, and could have. 

They are forever indebted to you, the oligarch, and in that sense, this system is more feudal than modern: they’re your vassals, and that word meant something like “people who don’t have autonomy or self-determination, and spend their lives owing me something.”

This is how you destroy an economy, and it’s happening to America in plain sight.

This is what the tariffs will begin to do. Really do.

How many Americans do you know who can afford:

—$5000 more for a car
—10% more for a hour
—25%+ for groceries

Anyone? Who’s not already worth a few billion? But this is what the tariffs will do in real terms. Meanwhile, they will make oligarchs even wealthier, as they swoop in.

Swoop in…to what? To pick up the pieces. Businesses will swiftly go broke. Supply chains will fracture. Entire sectors and industries will buckle. People will have to go even deeper into debt, as mass layoffs sweep the economy. If you’re an oligarch, and you don’t care about human misery, and you’re buddies with power, you can make a killing, in many, many ways, from acquiring businesses for pennies, to profiting off people’s debts, to buying up whole supply chains and monopolizing them.

This is how you destroy an economy, because of course, when that happens, the average person gets squeezed past the bone, and there’s nothing left in the economy, not really.

This is what you have to be careful of now. On a personal level, on a systemic level, and on an institutional level.

Let me make that a little bit plainer.

Don’t Make the Mistake the Stock Market Just Did. Don’t Panic, Plan

The next couple of weeks are going to be mayhem. 

A lot of you need more visibility into your finance and investments. This is a test for your finance guys. Did they get this right?

99% of them won't have. So then...are you really sure you want them to handle everything you've worked for?

See how the markets didn’t price in the tariffs, thinking they’d be just a “ploy”? They still haven’t priced in how bad the effects are really going to be. In sessions, I’ve been explaining to you guys how devastating the consequences will be, for now, suffice it to say that it’s going to blow a hole in the economy.

It’s not me that said that, it’s Ford’s CEO. But guess who stands to benefit from every penny Ford loses? Can you think of someone who’s good buddies with Trump that also has interests in autos? Gee, I wonder who that could be. See the game here?

So. The next few weeks will be mayhem.

For a reason.

Now there will be a massive wealth transfer. From companies, from average everyday investors, from even institutional investors…to…oligarchs. Stripping away all the noise of this-stock-price-did-that or this-index-fell-by-that-much, I want you guys to see the big picture here, the reality beneath the surface, the macro trends.

That’s a wealth transfer to oligarchs. On the order of trillions, probably.

That will take time. The markets will sink, and recover, and sink again, and this will happen many times over for a while now, as they begin to get it. 

You see, the markets are used to thinking that they’re the boss. They literally can’t understand that right now? They’re not anymore. They’re not the prime mover in the economy anymore. They don’t understand that we’ve now moved even past capitalism. They’re not calling the shots anymore. Oligarchy is, and slowly, it’s going to dawn on the markets that they’re screwed. Without calling the shots, what are they? They’re just numbers. Cogs in a machine. Conduits.

For what? They used to conduits that would siphon off this and that for themselves. But now they’re conduits from the average person, straight to oligarchy. And in that context, that’s all they’re good for to oligarchy. If I were markets? I’d be terrified of that, because now you’re no longer a master of the universe, but just…a vassal…like everyone else. You exist how and why the oligarchy wants you to exist.

Now. I’m laying bare this brutal reality for a reason.

So you don’t panic. Now you know the truth. And knowing that truth, don’t make the mistake the markets did.

Don’t see this situation for anything other than what it is. Many of you have good instincts, excellent ones, honed by lifetimes of having your Early Warning Systems be on high alert, just because you’re different in some way. Listen to those. I always tell you this, but now I want you to see how and why.

If you keep pretending, like many are going to do, that la-la-la this isn’t happening, what’s going to happen? You’re going to get blown up, like the markets just did, and will continue to. 

Now you have to understand the game. Which is this simple.

Now there’s a massive wealth transfer to oligarchy. That’s it. That's the game. From everyone to oligarchy. It used to be: from your average working or middle class person to markets. But now we’re way, way beyond that. It’s from everyone, including even Wall St types, to oligarchy, which is a level way beyond them. 

See how much more pernicious and advanced that is as a form of social collapse?

But you need to understand that, and grasp it, so that you can plan, instead of panicking.

Cooking the Books to Hide the Collapse

What happens next?

Something even more surreal.

They want to cook the books, the biggest books of all, which in this case, means tampering with GDP itself. You don’t have to worry about the technicalities of what that means, we’ll discuss that a little more later this week.

Just imagine what it means to cook the books of an entire society. What does that do? Why would you need to do that?

Let’s take those one by one. Would you invest in a society which cooked its books? Not if you were in the least wise. Because who knows what you’d really be investing in, right?

Remember how we were just discussing capital flight? This is how capital flight happens. When you cook the books, so people have to run, because now they can’t trust you to begin with. When that happens at a macro level? That is how economies really die.

So. Step one: crash the economy, with tariffs and so forth. Step two: the transformation to oligarchy proper. And step three: cook the books to hide it.

That might sound like a brilliant plan to these guys, but let me assure you it’s not. Because what’s going to happen is that it’s going to kill America’s reputation. And that’s going to cause investment to dry, capital to flee, and business, commerce, and trade to run away screaming.

Cooking the books? It’s a very Soviet move. I don’t say that in a moralistic or even political way, but in a pragmatic one. What didn’t the Soviet Union have? Investment from the rest of the world. Investment from itself. That’s why it had to build an Iron Curtain to stop people, and capital, from fleeing. That is because it was cooking the books, and of course, it was laughable to suggest investing in it, for it, or with it. 

When we do things as foolish as cooking the books for an entire society, we are completing the act of destroying an economy. There is no other reason to cook the books, after all. It’s not like you’re trying to hide something good, after all.

In fact, beyond this incomprehensibly foolish act, there is almost nothing you can do to wreck an economy further. 

Let’s say that I’m anyone from a corporation to a bank to a country. Would I invest in a place with cooked books? I’d be crazy to, because I’d never know how my investment was doing, and if I didn’t know that, how would I even be able to tell if I’d ever get paid back? You get my drift. So who’s going to build factories, create jobs, and so forth? You see how this relates back to tariffs…not having a hope…of “working”?

This isn’t just a lack of transparency, it’s something far more damaging entirely. Cooking the books of a society is a way for a society to be looted, and nobody to even to be able to really tell, track the damage, or keep score of the looting. It’s like opening a bank vault, while shredding the receipts for whatever was in it.

Nobody will even know what goes missing.

And in that context? The world is going to stop trusting America. 

Who wants to be part of, invest in, be around, a thing you can’t trust? If my plan is to turn all my institutions over to oligarchs, then fleece people right down past the bone, then cook the books so nobody can even keep the score accurately, do you think the world is going to want to be part of that? What kind of bank, corporation, or country would want to be part of that? Some will, sure, but only the worst kind of all? The ones you can’t trust your money with to begin with.

This is a recipe for disaster on a truly historic scale. 

So bear all this in mind as you think and reflect. This plan is…even worse than you think. It’s way past chaos, something even beyond ruin. It’s the intentional transformation of a modern economy into something premodern, and then to cook the books to pretend everything’s fine.

That sounds great, if you have no idea what you’re doing, but it’s the last part that’s the most dangerous. Because it tells us so much. Cooking the books isn’t something you can do to hide the damage you’re doing. Maybe if you’re an everyday embezzler, LOL. But if you’re the United States of America? You can’t hide it just by pretending you didn’t do it, no sir, no oligarchy here, everything’s just fine, the tariffs made us all rich, whee!! The entire world will see the truth for what it is, and what little trust is left will be gone, poof, like that.

And as that happens? That’s when the economy will really get destroyed.

Sinking With the Ship, or the Path America’s On Now

This is the path America’s on. It’s a fatal one, if you ask me. Crashing the economy is now a feature, not a bug. It is part of the point. That is how you truly make an oligarchy. But when a society becomes an oligarchy, everyone else Sinks With the Ship. And you only need to cook the books on the scale of an entire economy if you have something to hide, something this insane and big and unreal.

Please, read that a couple of time until it sinks in.

Think, reflect, plan. Don’t panic. Understand. Take this time to gather what assets you have, and begin to reorient them in powerful, sensible, and careful ways. Talk to me if you need more personal advice on how to do that, or someone else with the right skills. Take this very, very seriously, and don’t sort of get lost in a haze of despair or bewilderment. Re-read this and the last few essays, until it all clicks, or reach out to me to speak one on one.

This is as serious as it gets. 

Now. I'm not saying there are going to be bank runs tomorrow. There aren't. No Hollywood movie level stuff. But I am saying that the next time period is going to be very disorienting and challenging. I can only give you general principles here. Everyone's situation is different, which is one reason I decided to do sessions, so you're most welcome to book one if you want more personal advice. In general, though:

If the question is: will I lose everything I’ve worked so hard for, then the answer goes like this.

What else would you need to cook the books of a whole economy for?

Lots of love, and hang in there,

Umair (and Snowy!!)

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