There are some excellent articles and videos around at the moment which, between them, provide some thought provoking visions of where the world may be headed and, more importantly, why we are in this mess in the first place.

The first one is a post by the Robert Denner writing over at ZeroHedge on why the world economy is effectively run for the USA through the mechanism of the IMF. The article itself is a lengthy read but is a great introduction to the current state of the financial world. The following extract on the rebuilding of the world after World War II offers a good description of how the current system came into being :

To understand how the global monetary/commercial world works you have to go back to the end of World War II. Following the war the United States was alone as a major industrial power. The rest of the industrial countries were in shambles. The United States was also nearly alone as a producer of oil. It is this later point that needs to be highlighted.

The United States used its vast oil reserves and coupled it with a highly trained industrial labor force and put it to work in its vast expanse of industrial capacity to re-build the rest of the world. It is this fact that is at the very center of our current monetary system some 60 years later. So I will start with my first analogy…

The US Corp could be seen as a huge company like General Motors. Following WWII US Corp was the only company left with the capacity to make things and it had the working capital and energy to do what it wanted. US Corp went out into the world and started to acquire other businesses. First was Japan Corp which US Corp had beaten into a pulp during the war. US Corp decided that it was in its own best interest to build Japan Corp back up but it needed to make sure that it never again could threaten US Corp the way it did in WWII.  Japan Corp used its own currency called the YEN and US Corp obviously used the Dollar. So to make this all work, US Corp had to make sure that the workers at Japan Corp didn’t feel like the last of their country was being taken from them. To keep them vested in the viability of their own country it was very important to let them keep their own currency and their own political structure, albeit greatly modified under the surface. We allowed Japan Corp to keep their figurehead CEO (the Emperor) and we installed a new board of directors (Democratic institutions). We linked the Bank of Japan to US Corp’s bank the Federal Reserve Bank through a new institution called the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

If we were to compare this to General Motors this would be like GM buying another company and bringing it under the umbrella of the GM brand. So in this case Japan is like Pontiac and they are given free rein to run their subsidiary the way they see fit, SO LONG as they abide by the parent companies rules.

This setup worked wonderfully and within a decade Japan Corp was back on its feet and was supplying cheap labor and products for US Corp and with every single barrel of oil Japan Corp bought on the international market it further linked them with our monetary system.  To keep the Japanese citizens from feeling that it was the US Corp in charge of everything we came up with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Of course these institutions were funded initially by the United States and Great Britain and as such they were just pseudo US institutions. But it worked and the Japanese subsidiary of US Corp gladly bought oil and products from the United States in its own currency (the Yen) but it was linked via the IMF to the US Dollar. For you see US Corp linked everything that the industrial world needed to the US Dollar. All gold/oil/silver/food/etc were priced first in US Dollars and depending upon the relative “strength” of your currency to the US Dollar, this would dictate how much of your currency it would take to purchase a barrel of oil or an ounce of gold. This gave US Corp a huge advantage in the world as we produced almost everything anyways. We had most of the world’s oil supply and a very large portion of the food supply. We were the largest producer of the big complex things the world needed to rebuild. We allowed the smaller subsidiaries to produce the little stuff we needed or wanted. Japan Corp was great at the later, supplying us with small radios and other cool electronic gadgets.

US Corp built a company with dozens and dozens of subsidiaries, each one of them bringing something to the table either large or small. And as the world re-built, other countries wanted to get in on the good times and they voluntarily sold themselves to US Corp. Other countries were very reluctant to join our big happy company. Those countries fell into two groups. Either they were affiliated with Russia Corp or they wanted to stay neutral. But in a world that was moving fast towards globalization it became apparent that each country would have to choose a side lest they be shut out of the global market. For remember that the only way to gain access to US Corp’s vast array of markets and supplies is to be a part of the IMF/World Bank. It was the only way to convert your currency to other currencies (like the US Dollar to buy OIL!!).

I will end this history lesson there as I could get sucked in for hours explaining how US Corp and Russia Corp went to economic(and sometimes real) war with each other and how Russia Corp tried to have it both ways by linking themselves partially to the IMF to gain access to US Corps vast supplies and labor.

I will leave that to YOU to go out and study on your own as it is a story to rival any fictional book you have ever read. The important thing to take away here is that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are institutions that were created by the United States and Great Britain. It is a global system that allows countries using different currencies to exchange their goods and services with each other almost seamlessly. Remember also that the system was setup INITIALLY to allow US Corp to control the world’s most important supplies. Things like FOOD, OIL, COMMODITIES (gold,silver,etc) and the rest. At the time this system was created it was the United States that was supplying the lion’s share of these items. But as the decades have come and gone, these items have increasingly come from other parts of the world.  And a good portion of these countries are ones that were FORCED into our system either out of necessity or by direct manipulation of their country by forces outside their borders(meaning the US and the IMF)..

The second extract comes from a post by the excellent Mike Krieger, again writing at ZeroHedge on the possibilities of the SDR from the IMF becoming the worlds reserve currency on the back of a collapsing Euro :

So here is what I think they may try to do.The guys who really pull the strings, whoever they may be, absolutely understand everything.  They know fiat money that they can create and distribute at will is the source of total power and they will never willingly give that up.  They also have known for a long time that the fiat dollar reserve floating exchange rate system was inevitably going to blow up on itself.  It has become readily apparent since 2008 that we are at that fork in the road, which is why the whole SDR concept has gotten more play.  It seems that the intent of TPTB is to somehow shift the SDR into the world’s reserve asset.  The purpose of this might be to devalue all of the world’s major Western currencies at once while also shifting the blame away from sovereign governments and Central Bankers.  At the very least, it would be a way to achieve a massive stealth devaluation of the U.S. dollar.  For example, if the SDRs were suddenly declared the world’s reserve asset and were therefore needed to conduct global trade in commodities for example, the dollar’s purchasing power would plunge.  We could no longer just create dollars out of thin air and directly buy the world’s resources.  We might need to exchange our national currency into the new reserve asset (SDRs) to then buy things.  So there would be direct and drastic consequences if we continued to great create unlimited dollars, just like all other countries around the world face today.  While this is actually the way it should be, the problem is that this is a bankster plan at the highest levels.  First, they would introduce this SDR and then once faith in national Western currencies’ purchasing power cratered and faith was lost TPTB would use that as an excuse to eliminate all national currencies and move to a global fiat currency that they of course control the distribution of.  Problem, reaction, solution.  This is the central planning bankster’s ultimate wet dream.  Remember this is exactly what they have done with the euro. It is no secret that they knew from the beginning that the euro currency in its current form would blow up.  That was part of the calculation.  Once the crisis hit, they would then consolidate power in a Euro fiscal Union with centralized control of everything.  If they pull that off successfully the next stop will be the global currency, with the bait being the SDR.  This should be quite transparent at this stage if you are paying attention.

You may be wondering where exponential equations fit in with this finance related post but it is the one important thing to understand about the modern world as the following video from Cris Martenson tells you everything you need to know about the big Es in the world – Economy, Energy, Environment and Exponential. The presentation itself is around 25 minutes followed by a question and answer session so don’t be put off by the hour plus run time you will see – it is well worth the half hour with a coffee to understand this fundamental point :
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Finally and as an antidote to all this heavyweight material I have George Carlin with Life is a Front Row Seat to a Freak Show.

Do enjoy :
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