The Swiss newspaper Le Temps published on October 6 an exclusive piece of information that did not get the coverage it deserved: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) knew as early as 2016 that the Lebanese banking system was going to collapse, but the central bank and its governor, Riad Salamé, had the fourteen pages of the report that anticipated the disaster deleted.

The ECB is building a Potemkin village of European public debt, to keep up appearances, hoping that inflation will not undermine the whole thing...

Evergrande, China's largest property developer, directly employs 200,000 people and indirectly employs 3.8 million people. Problem: the group is bankrupt and announced on September 14 that it is facing a risk of default. Evergrande is crushed by liabilities of nearly 260 billion euros, while it has yet to complete 1.4 million homes with a total value of 170 billion euros.

Central banks are stuck and condemned to see the value of their currencies deteriorate, hoping that inflation will be "temporary". So this situation will continue and get stronger, maybe one day we will reach the -10% real interest rate, as in my fiction (i.e. a division by two of the value of savings in only seven years). But the monetary and financial system will probably have exploded before then.

The American and European central banks - the Fed and the ECB - would have us believe that they will be able to raise their key rates when the time comes. In reality, they will have to choose between several crisis scenarios.

We note an average gold's performance of +8.17% per year, then +8.69% per year over the last twenty years. No liquid asset has performed this well over such a long period. It is reported that an investment offering an annual return of +7.18% can double its capital in ten years. Therefore, gold investors have, on average, doubled their investment every ten years for half a century!

Alleviating public debt through a dose of inflation is a widely shared and defended idea, it even seems obvious. But what is it really?

Money printing causes prices to rise, that's how it is, and the central banks' printing presses have been active since the beginning of the 2000s (interest rates fell following the crash of Internet stocks in 2000 and then the attacks of September 11, 2001). It was reinforced with the subprime crisis of 2008, before reaching delirious levels since the Covid pandemic and the lockdowns.

No, TARGET2 is not a video game. The term is never mentioned in the media, yet it is the crucial point of fragility of the euro. A note from the French Treasury clumsily attempts to defuse this risk. Let's analyze it closely.

The European Central Bank's printing press is the only thing left to provide glitter, cheap illusions, stock market and real estate bubbles that will turn heads but will only last a short time. An ECB that will also hold at arm's length a banking sector burdened with bad debts... Our economy is definitely confined.

This deluge of liquidity with no counterpart in the real economy produces bubbles (shares, real estate in particular), crashes, and eventually a bubble on all prices, i.e. inflation, then hyperinflation if things really get out of hand.

It is spending at all costs that will be necessary in Italy, less to revive the economy (the aid plans have a limited real effect) than to save a very fragile banking system. Christine Lagarde won't find anything to complain about, so we can be sure that the ECB's printing press will continue to run at full speed.

With zero interest rates, the government has locked savers into a trap from which it is difficult to escape, but it is to its advantage, since it can finance its budget deficit at a lower cost. How does it do this? We must begin by asking the question: Why do banks and insurers buy debt that brings them little or nothing in return?

Gold, for its part, has an unrivalled track record in this category, it is simply number one. This is the best way to "flee" from money without going to an asset in a bubble situation, and thus risking collapse. It remains by far the best way to preserve the purchasing power of capital in the long term, and to escape the "invisible tax" that weighs on all savers.

CBDCs are part of a plan to eliminate cash: make it useless and then ban it. And when all our money exists in digital form, we will no longer be able to escape a negative rate of -0.5%, -1%, etc. (who knows where it will end), which will erode our savings.

As can be seen, public debt is found in the accounts of the ECB, either directly (by acquisition) or indirectly (as a guarantee of liquidity lent to banks). The snake bites its tail, the public deficit is financed almost entirely by the central bank: the money supply explodes, the spectre of inflation approaches, etc.

Is the French budgetary situation recoverable? Les Echos tells us that in 2020 and in 2121, the government will be financed as much by debt as by taxes, and the amount of debt issuances will be as high as tax revenues.

Governments can limit the number of bankruptcies by distributing money to companies and paying unemployed workers, with euros printed by the European Central Bank, but this "sovietization" of the economy only postpones the deadline, and it can also lead to a wave of hyperinflation that would ruin everyone- companies and savers alike.

Perhaps we will return to the gold standard... Will it then be necessary to bring back gold in exchange for banknotes? No, we won't be fooled twice. We'll have to keep our gold, we'll have to maintain, at least in part, its decentralized form to preserve its value, and to guarantee our freedom.

Are we witnessing a movement of European bank mergers? Rumors have been circulating for several years about a merger between Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank or with BNP Paribas, between Société Générale and Unicredit, but nothing has happened so far. But lately several mergers have taken place.