So who really rules the world?

[Billy T]

To The Esotericist

Sorry I only skimmed you long post and got little from it. In first part you seem to think "corruption" is a major cause of current global financial troubles. I don´t but admit it is a cost.

I think the root of the problem is that most of the democratic world votes for benefits now and assumes their children will some how be able to pay for them. I. e. huge borrowing to live beyond their means for some decades has been a common (not just US) practice.

Probably is this is coming to an end as lenders begin to realize they will never be paid back in currency with the purchasing power of the money they lent. Most countries are intentionally destroying their currency so as to be able to pay debts fixed as X number of currency units. This will soon drive interest rates up, making it harder to roll the debts (or the FED, ECB, etc. will just print paper to pay off debts - either way savers will be destroyed.)

There have always been crooks and corruption, probably more in the past than now. What is different now is several decades of use of borrowing to live beyond your means - consuming more than you produce.

[The Esotericist]

Agreed.

But there is a fine point here which needs to be made. The world financial system has ostensibly been set up by the western powers. Or at least the fiat system of finance has been.

In days past, trade and finance throughout the world, if it was conducted beyond the borders of the western system of power brokers, always had to be conducted in hard assets, commodities and the like. The Roman Empire could never trade with the Chinese empire in "fiat" currency, loan, etc. If you dig really deeply into this whole mess, I mean what really backs the imbalance of gold, and where the massive amounts of hidden gold are, and how it all got into Indonesian and hidden into spots in east Asia during WWII, you will find it goes back to the trade between Rome and China.

And that brings us to today. China doesn't want worthless and continually devaluated "New Roman" US Treasury bonds. It wants the gold that the allies squirreled out of China to keep safe from the Japanese during WWII. Those bonds that the US traded to the Chinese for their gold were never expected to be cashed, and were intentionally printed to look as if they were counterfeit. If and when that gold ever surfaces, it will be a whole new ball game.

Have you heard rumors of a gold bubble?

And the question remains, who knows the locations of these caches, where are they, and who do they rightfully belong to? Do they belong to nation where they are located in, to the Chinese, or to the US who paid bogus bonds for them? And with the current value of gold and the instability of the world's economic system, could that be a spark for a global conflagration?

What I find fascinating is that the trade for gold by Romans for silk and spices from the Chinese is having such a profound affect on world politics today. Mind boggling.

[Billy T]

Agreed.

But there is a fine point here which needs to be made. The world financial system has ostensibly been set up by the western powers. Or at least the fiat system of finance has been.

In days past, trade and finance throughout the world, if it was conducted beyond the borders of the western system of power brokers, always had to be conducted in hard assets, commodities and the like. The Roman Empire could never trade with the Chinese empire in "fiat" currency, loan, etc. If you dig really deeply into this whole mess, I mean what really backs the imbalance of gold, and where the massive amounts of hidden gold are, and how it all got into Indonesian and hidden into spots in east Asia during WWII, you will find it goes back to the trade between Rome and China.

And that brings us to today. China doesn't want worthless and continually devaluated "New Roman" US Treasury bonds. It wants the gold that the allies squirreled out of China to keep safe from the Japanese during WWII. Those bonds that the US traded to the Chinese for their gold were never expected to be cashed, and were intentionally printed to look as if they were counterfeit. If and when that gold ever surfaces, it will be a whole new ball game.

Have you heard rumors of a gold bubble?

And the question remains, who knows the locations of these caches, where are they, and who do they rightfully belong to? Do they belong to nation where they are located in, to the Chinese, or to the US who paid bogus bonds for them? And with the current value of gold and the instability of the world's economic system, could that be a spark for a global conflagration?

What I find fascinating is that the trade for gold by Romans for silk and spices from the Chinese is having such a profound affect on world politics today. Mind boggling.

An interesting POV, but not sure it checks with reality.

For example I think most of the gold removed from the Earth was taken after the Roman Empire existed no more. I have no doubt that all over Asia there are some buried gold coins from long ago, many with their locations now forgotten. - Probably more valuable to coin collectors than for their gold content.

There was a huge surge in the quantity of gold known to westerners when the Spanish stole it from South America. Many boat loads were stolen. (That too is long after the only residue of the Romans was in the language used by the church.) Romans generally paid with salt (word "salary" come from that.) I suspect the caravans and boats going from Europe to China took salt to pay for spices, etc. - gold would be sure to get them robbed on the way. Salt´s bulk made it safer.

Normally, several hundred years (or more) ago boats full of A were traded for boat load of B. This does have influence even today when fiat currency is used for trade.

For example, they now eat a great deal of cod fish from Norway in Brazil. It is at least twice the cost per Kg as locally produced beef, but the culture here "needs" it for special meals (and ordinary ones too). This is because centuries ago, Norwegian ships sailed to Portugal to get olive oil and offer the salted cod as payment. (To make it eatable, you soak it in fresh water at least over night.)

I don´t have hard data but suspect that between them, the Brazilians (descendent of the Portuguese) and the Portuguese, eat nearly half of all the salted cod fish consumed in the world.

Back to my main point:
What fraction of the now "above ground" gold even existed during the Roman era?

[The Esotericist]

An interesting POV, but not sure it checks with reality.

Fair enough. It is only what I have read from an insider. Wish I could remember where I read the source now. I read a lot of alternative sources. I don't know if you viewed that video I posted earlier from RT about those seized "fake" bonds. I have no doubt that they were verified to be forgeries by the establishment and the MSM.

What has not been commented by in the MSM is how difficult it is to forge that many authentic bonds on that scale, nor why anyone would date them from 1934 in antique containers? This whistle blower gave this explanation. Of course, I don't think all of this Chinese gold came out of trade with Rome, China's dynasties had it's own sources of gold in ancient eras, and up to the great wars.

As far as your comments regarding Rome trading salt? No, it did trade other goods, but mainly China was self sufficient and mainly sought gold from Rome until Rome's Emperors realized it's gold reserves were dwindling due to too much of it's gold reserves leaving to China due to the high demand for silk among the upper classes.

In 106 BC, for the first time, a caravan leaves China and travels through to Persia without the goods changing hands on the way. The Silk Road is open.

In the 1st century BC the Romans gain control of Syria and Palestine - the natural terminus of the Silk Road, for goods can move west more easily from here by sea. Soon a special silk market is established in Rome.

China, proudly self-sufficient, wants nothing that Rome can offer. And the Han rulers are unwilling to release silk - either as thread or woven fabric - except in exchange for gold. It has been calculated that in the 1st century AD China has a hoard of some five million ounces of gold. In Rome the emperor Tiberius issues a decree against the wearing of silk. His stated reason is the drain on the empire's reserves of gold. The Silk Road introduces global economics.

Read more: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/...#ixzz1tIVnn3z1

To calculate just how much gold China had pre-WWII, I suppose one could take what the value of gold was in 1934, and find out how much six trillion dollars would purchase to squirrel it out of the country and stash it out of the way of the Japanese if this outlandish whistle blower is to be believed.

As I write this, I am researching it too, so if I get this convoluted story wrong on the origin of these boxes, and these bonds, sorry.

I only seek to find out what the origin of the bonds is. Why one might say?

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.
~Karl Von Clausewitz

And Michael Rupperts' corollary;
Politics is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of economics by different means.

So by the transitive property;
War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of economics by different means.
Why Were The Trillions In Fake Bonds Held In Chicago Fed Crates?

Here is what the bonds look like:

And here is where they were kept:

"While there is precious little in terms of detail coming out of the latest and literally greatest "fake" bond story in history, the BBC has been kind enough to release the pictures of the boxes that the supposedly fake bonds were contained in. While we reserve judgment on the authenticity of the bonds, what we wonder is whether the boxes were also fake. Because while we can understand why someone would counterfeit the Treasury paper itself, what we don't get is why someone would go the extra effort to also create a "fake" compartment in which to store it. In this case a compartment that is property of the "CHICAGO FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM." Perhaps Fed uberdove and Chicago Fed President Charles Evans will be kind enough to explain why Versailles Treaty Chicago Fed crates are floating around in Europe (and filled with $6 trillion in supposedly fake bearer bonds)?"

. . . ah yes, at that end of that article is linked to the Scribd document detailing the history of the "hidden gold" and how the Asian nations now want to bring forward this gold that was meant to stay hidden off of the world market. Bit of an outlandish "conspiracy theory" if it weren't for the bits and pieces of things appearing in the MSM.

Here's another explanation for it all since the regular media doesn't seem to have (or desire?) to give an adequate explanation.
The Strange Inconsistencies Behind the $134.5 Billion Bearer Bond Mystery
It is filled with idle speculation and the information is dated however.

Still, It posits the origin of the bonds not from a conspiracy to swindle world governments in a new emerging world order at the beginning of the 20th century, but a form of covert economic warfare to unseat the current hegemonic western power structure. This also seems reasonable enough.

There should be little debate that the world’s emerging economies in Russia, Brazil, China and certain Gulf Nations are at economic war today with the world’s Western nations and their economic allies. The currency war being fought today is sure to get much uglier in the foreseeable future, in both open tactics as well as secretly executed tactics. Currently, if the currency war were the world series of poker, the US and the UK would be holding a pair of 2s and relying on nothing but bluffs to keep the rest of the world at bay. Conversely, the Chinese and other emerging nations with large surpluses would be holding straight or royal flushes, and likely quietly maneuvering to go “all in” at some point.

Given that the discovery of $134.5 billion of bearer bonds in the suitcases of two Japanese nationals in Chiasso, Italy on the border of Switzerland qualifies as one of the largest smuggling operations in history, and given the various implications of such an act and the possible players involved, the silence regarding this huge story is simply stunning. It is not a huge story, per se, because of the counterfeiting operation, because accusations and revelations of massive money counterfeiting operations have occured in the past. It is a huge story, rather, due to all the inconsistencies of the story and the potential explanations that could explain these inconsistencies. The larger story at hand is, who are the players (nations) involved, and what was the intention of this likely counterfeiting operation? Maybe the future will reveal the answers to these questions. But maybe not.

I feel this is a lot bigger of a story that has to do with who actually rules the world than people really know though.

This goes back to my first post in this thread. The pyramid of control. I don't think the Chinese ruling elites have any problem with this paradigm, the problem is making room for them in it, and shifting it culturally. Can the west do this? Or is it, as it has always been, ethnocentric oriented? There is so much secrecy involved in something like this, and change in the modern age happens rapidly. Rapidity is something that is hard to accomplish in one generation, and in secrecy, especially if you wish to change the culture of the way an organization is run. The ruling elites run things by heredity. There has been very little time for intermarriages twixt the east and west. This control paradigm is very western oriented and not very global oriented. So it either needs to integrate, or be torn down. I think the Chinese would rather have a cultural shift and have their elites integrated instead of having the whole elite power structure torn down. On the other hand, I think they fear that they will never have their true power be proportionally represented in an existing global power structure that was essentially built during the time of the Roman Empire.

That is the situation today. Destroy the way the world elites have governed the world for the past two thousand years, or integrate the Eastern and Western elites in a seamless police state while keeping the global population happy and pacified. Good luck with that.

[Billy T]

To The Esotericist

Thanks for correcting my assumption that Chinese silk was paid for by salt, not gold. I made that assumption just on the basis that salt was very commonly used by Romans for paying and would be much more difficult to steal than gold by bandits during the long trip to China.

[Carcano]

Thanks for correcting my assumption that Chinese silk was paid for by salt, not gold. I made that assumption just on the basis that salt was very commonly used by Romans for paying and would be much more difficult to steal than gold by bandits during the long trip to China.

"The Senate issued, in vain, several edicts to prohibit the wearing of silk, on economic and moral grounds: the importation of silk caused a huge outflow of gold, and silk clothes were considered to be decadent and immoral."

"I cannot see how clothes of silk, materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes ... Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body." -Seneca the Younger

"High-quality glass from Roman manufactures in Alexandria and Syria were exported to many parts of Asia, including Han China. Further Roman luxury items which were greatly esteemed by the Chinese were gold-embroidered rugs and gold-coloured cloth, asbestos cloth and sea silk, a cloth made from the silk-like hairs of certain Mediterranean shell-fish..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romano-...e_Roman_Empire