Crisis Update - Russia Turns Off Gas

Pope moves all funds to Vatican bank; CDC pushes bi-monthly boosters

Europe’s disarray was foreseen; energy crisis provides pretext for societal change.
EU considers energy price controls; G7 pursues oil price cap as options narrow.
West’s focus on emissions, rather than renewables, is stress-tested in real time.

Vatican Bank orders funds be placed under central control by the end of month.
May be a response to financial scandals or a coming monetary reset.
Pope aligned with Rockefeller environmentalism & Rothschild inclusive capitalism.

EU launches new effort to help weaker members restrain borrowing costs.
Germany seeks greater sway, calling for majority voting on tax and foreign policy.
Britain appoints a WEF and intel puppet as its new prime minister.

Related:
Great Game Over: Did The Investors just give Afghanistan to China? (Aug 17, 2021)
Afghan Squid (Aug 28, 2021)
China and Israel, The New Silk Road (Apr 14, 2022)
U.S. Initiates State Control Of Food Supply (May 20, 2022)
When The Skies Were Free - Clouds, currency and carbon (Jun 12, 2022)
Russia Turns Off Gas (Sep 6, 2022)
Not Enough Minerals For Green Energy (Sep 8, 2022)
Europe Reels From Germany’s Impending Decline (Sep 29, 2022)
Europe, Gas And The Endgame (Sep 30, 2022)
Nuclear Threat Follows Bombing Of Pipeline (Oct 26, 2022)

(Four or five stories totaling 3,500 words or 15 minutes of your time.)

Sep 6, 2022

Europe is reaching for desperate measures last seen in Argentina or Venezuela to halt the energy crisis. These include capping prices, curtailing use, and proposing a price ceiling on gas imported from Russia.

The main gas pipeline to Europe is shut off and will remain so until sanctions are lifted — a hardening of policy after Nord Stream I closed for maintenance last week.

It is partly a response to proposals to cap the price of oil and gas. The group of seven prominent economic powers plan a buyers’ cartel. The G7 wants Russia to cut its price to below the market level and threatens to withhold maritime tankers and insurance, which are mostly Western controlled. The aim is to cut Moscow’s income.

Washington is concerned that an EU oil embargo on tanker and pipeline imports, to take effect in December, will drive the price of energy even higher. However a buyer’s cartel can’t work unless the majority of consumer countries join, which two of Russia’s biggest energy customers, China and India, have not. Russia also says it simply won’t sell to those who refuse to pay the market price.

Staring down the barrel

This is a battle in which Europe faces huge odds, but it will stick to its guns, as in Ukraine, and charge over the top when Washington shrieks the whistle.

Austria and Germany and now Nordic countries are poised to bail out energy companies. It raises the question whether price controls and bailouts are a pretext for nationalization.

The problem that the Europeans will not confront is the contradiction at the heart of their Green energy policies. Whatever the merit of renewables, they are not currently a substitute for conventional energy sources. Eurocrats turned their backs on continuous nuclear and hydro power in preference for intermittent power sources like wind and solar, yet they dropped the concomitant backup of gas, coal and oil.

Bureaucrats will always say the answer is more bureaucracy and more centralization — the reward for failure is bigger budgets — but Europe's problems are not going to be solved by government, as economist Daniel Lacalle points out quoting the German business organization for utilities, BDEW:

“In Germany, only 24% of all costs in a household bill are ‘supplier costs,’ according to the BDEW 2021. The vast majority of costs are taxes and costs set by the government: Grid charges (24%), renewable energy surcharge (20%), sales tax (VAT) (16%), electricity tax (6%), concession levy (5%), offshore liability levy (0.03%), surcharge for combined heat and power plants (0.08%), levy for industry rebate on grid fees (1.3%). However, the ‘problem,’ according to the messages of the president of the European Commission, is the market.” [1]

We’ve argued before that if there was genuine intent to move to renewable energy, there would be a planned transition. That fact that there is no such plan, is ominous. The only way to reduce energy consumption by half without replacing it, is to cut consumption by that amount.

As Yana Popkostova of the European Union Institute for Security Studies wrote in January, more than a month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the energy market is cyclical. Even without Covid and Ukraine, the EU should have stress-tested its energy policy. Instead it undermined resilience through its exclusive focus on emissions. [2]

The West does not have a renewable energy policy. It has an emissions policy. That would be consistent with another objective: digital identity tied to personal carbon allowances, as the justification for a credit score and a central bank digital currency.

The emissions targets, and thus UN-EU energy policy, may have nothing to do with Green anything, for it serves equally well as a pretext for a new social and monetary system.

Renewable does not seem to be the same as replaceable. This is not just the EU’s problem. Last month California banned the sale of gasoline-engine cars and days later appealed to people not to charge electric vehicles because of a power shortage. The Fortune magazine headlined: “California is the first state to make electric cars mandatory. Now it’s telling owners not to charge them.”

The same “oopsies and oversights” are baked into United Nations policy and Agenda 21. French president and Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron said the winter would see “the end of abundance.”

It sounds just like the live exercises of the World Health Organisation, Rockefeller, Gates and Johns Hopkins where they war game a crisis in gruesome detail, map out how they plan to use it — and then watch the crisis unfold.

The coming season will be a real-time stress test of renewable energy policy. The people have a chance to demand answers from politicians, energy companies and the foundations that influence policy. Time is not on our side.

We’ll look in a moment at the urgent messaging from the Vatican and the CDC, but first the financial crisis that lies behind Event Covid.

Covid is a monetary event

Although gold served as a store of wealth for thousands of years, no modern monetary system has lasted more than decades. The British pound is a thousand years old but like most currencies it is now based on paper, and its value rests on the unsecured word of the government.

Many Western countries have de-industrialized and no longer have the manufacturing base and balance sheet of exports to back their currencies. The fuel crisis that’s gripping Europe is an example of how decoupled their paper currencies are from the fuel they need. To put it another way, the Western populations live a lifestyle without making the goods to support it — because we don’t create enough and there’s a shortage of the commodities to make what we do.

Governments increasingly live on the never-never, borrowing money to finance their borrowing. What’s causing the monetary system to break down is not simply a periodic bout of inflation such as some of us can remember from the 1970s but that the markets which underpin the monetary system don’t work.

Repeated banking crises (some of them purposely staged by the time-honoured technique of pump and dump) have been encouraged by bank bailouts. Money creation has financialized everything that moves. Commodity and resource markets now have a life of their own or, to use a canine metaphor, the tail wags the dog.

In addition the banks don’t trust each other, to the degree that in autumn of 2019 the European banks in particular found themselves unable to borrow even short-term “overnight” money known as the repo market — a crisis called the Repocalypse. A similar divide exists at the government level, with Italy and several southern European governments unable to borrow even at punitive interest rates.

Some central bankers may be tempted to rig one final, almighty crash, and sweep the remaining public and private assets into the croupier’s apron, before launching new cental bank digital currencies.

European governments and banks in particular have an incentive to “bail in” customer deposits and roll social security and health obligations into some kind of universal basic benefit. The popular press in Britain is already positing “should there be a universal basic energy plan?”

In Europe, there’s the added problem of the euro zone. This month the European Central Bank is making available its Transmission Protection Instrument, which buys the bonds of weaker euro zone countries to prevent their interest rates or yield rising too far above the more stable core euro zone countries of the north. The question of whether the risk will lie with national central banks or be shared has not been clarified, but it’s probable the Germans will pay to keep the euro project together — so long as they get to run the project.

Their problem is they have no control over currency issuance or spending. One way to achieve that would b CBDC and to do away with national central banks and consolidate control under the ECB/BIS. From what I understand, Tom Luongo says it’s the ECB. I say it’s the Bank for International Settlements, which circles back to the Nazi/banker connection (basically the same guys regardless of ethnicity) as the Bank of England, the Bundesbank, the top banks and banking families who stand behind Klaus Schwab and his WEF.

German chancellor Olaf Sholz last week called for the end of the national right of veto in the European Union’s decisions on taxation and foreign policy. A switch to majority voting may accelerate the federalization of Europe and its expansion to take in Balkan countries and the Ukraine.

He used the argument of emergency to justify the abandonment of unanimity which, he said, “works for as long as the pressure to act is low.” This is the familiar “argument from emergency,” the logical variant of the argument from authority. Of course, the emergency may always be contrived.

Europe's southerners will try to stop them. In particular the Italians, who have a general election on Sep 25 that will see another bid by Italian nationalists to regain control of their country’s destiny. The demonization of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the national-conservative political party Brothers of Italy, is underway in the press. [4]

Whatever the plans of bishops and bankers, events seem to be getting ahead of them. Governments and cental banks launched the preplanned response to Covid by triggering a combined lockdown and bailout that was outlined in 2019, before the pandemic, at the central bank meeting in Jackson Hole and Event 201. Likewise the plans for digital identity and CBDC.

For all their best-laid plans there is little central banks can do to stop inflation that results from a supply squeeze, known as cost-push. One of the few ways that an economy so dysfunctional can be fixed is to squeeze it, like a pustule, to bursting point. In order to stop it you have to destroy demand even more than they did in the 2020 pandemic (which was done to solve the Repocalypse).

Britain trussed

After the leak of Finland’s president horsing around, Britain has appointed one of its own in Liz Truss as prime minister.

Truss had little job experience before politics. She went straight from Oxford to run the local Conservative Association. As foreign secretary she was fooled by her Russian opposite number, exposing her ignorance of geography — Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh are in Russia. See Moneycircus, Feb 2022 — Eurasia note #21 - UK Foreign Flub

Truss is thought to be controlled by former MI6 boss Richard Dearlove. A trove of Dearlove’s emails was hacked in May 2022 which showed the former spy was head of a group called Operation Sunrise, that undermined former prime minister Theresa May for her failure to deliver Brexit promptly. The emails from 2018-2019 show Dearlove works on behalf of British oligarchs who pay his bills.

The group selected Boris Johnson to replace May and is believed to have lost confidence in Johnson, backing the pliable Truss instead. See Moneycircus, Jul 2022 — Crisis Update - UK Gov Collapsing

The World Economic Forum is always just out of the spotlight. [5]

The British currency has been battered by Truss’ promise of tax cuts for the richest, and billions of pounds to compensate consumers and corporate executives from rising prices. This will counter efforts by the Bank of England and the European Central Bank to quell inflation.

As Bill Blain writes: “Simply put: If Truss fails to deliver a coherent strategy for the economy in the next few days — the UK risks an even steeper decline in sterling, an unraveling Gilts market (UK Government Bonds) and the undermining of the third leg of the Virtuous Sovereign Trinity; the political and economic strength that’s underlain the UK’s hard and soft power since the 17th Century.”

She will assume command of a country just overtaken by India as the world’s fifth-biggest economy, behind the U.S., China, Japan and Germany, according to the International Monetary Fund. Only a decade ago India ranked in 11th place.

Of course, with 1.4 billion people, the country’s average per capital income is lower, at $2,500 but the energy crisis may see to that.

Vatican battens the hatches

Pope Francis has ordered the Holy See and connected entities to move all financial assets to the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), commonly known as the Vatican bank, by October 1.

According to Francis’ order, called a rescript, financial and liquid assets held in banks other than the IOR must be moved within 30 days.

The urgency of the Vatican’s move to get its funds in one place raises questions. Last week on the anniversary of the outbreak of WW2 the Pope said we are now in WW3. He referenced Ukraine but many of us see a war on humanity.

As Ed Condon wrote in a now-deleted article in The Pillar, the order is more than it seems. It is not merely a request to accelerate the return of cash and investments into the Vatican’s internal accounts.

Do they fear scandal or a market crash?