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And thirdly, people are increasingly fleeing inflation by going into real assets. They can no longer run to mortgages due to the rapidly rising interest rates. Although gold is in great demand in Europe, having a choice between gold and gold is not enough for somebody. And so the demand for such things as historical weapons, aged alcohol, or Swiss watches is growing. Exports of Swiss watches rose by 19 percent in September and could be a record this year. A time is coming when people will increasingly use cash instead of bank accounts and pour cash into cashable durables.

BY TYLER DURDEN

MONDAY, OCT 24, 2022 – 02:00 AM

By Remix News

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/germany-could-witness-cash-renaissance-its-economy-continues-deteriorate

It may already have seemed that inflation in the West is slowly approaching its peak, but that is not the case. Considering the numbers coming from Germany, inflation may be far from peaking.

Producer prices in Germany increased by a record 45.8 percent year-over-year in September, the same as in August. Energy prices, which rose by 132.2 percent year-over-year, had the most impact on this. The only positive thing about this is that the month-over-month growth slowed a little due to the drop in commodity prices. However, for consumers, it follows that consumer inflation, which lags behind the so-called production inflation, must still climb. We cannot lie about this.

For Germans, however, the following sentence, which German statisticians added as a comment to the numbers, sounds the most frightening: “Compared to the same period last year, August and September recorded the highest increase in producer prices since the start of the survey in 1949.”

Germany is extremely sensitive to mentions of inflation or public debt. To understand why, we have to go back in history. The pre-war hyperinflation in Germany was caused by the fact that Germany could not finance the reparations from World War I. It began to pay its reparations with debt and started to monetize this debt, printing uncovered inflationary money and using it to pay off the debt. The result was hyperinflation and total economic disruption. Many historians believe it was this economic undergrowth that brought Hitler to power and marked World War II.

After the war, Germany, therefore, made a literal 180-degree turn. While before the war it showed enormous fiscal indiscipline, went into debt, printed money, and faced hyperinflation, after the war, on the contrary, it became Europe’s top-of-the-class in fiscal policy. It began scrupulously taking care to keep its public finances under control, not excessively inflating its debt, and not even remotely playing with anything resembling monetization. Jens Wiedmann, former governor of the German central bank, has been the most vocal central banker in Europe when it comes to criticizing the monetization of southern European debt and the policy of negative interest rates that the European Central Bank has begun to commit to in recent years. And it was the German Constitutional Court, through which some of the ECB’s plans of monetizing public debt did not pass.

So we have to understand that for Germany, the current inflation and debt monetization are much more sensitive topics than for any other European country. So far, consumer inflation in Germany is “only” 10 percent, a drop above the average inflation rate in the entire Eurozone, which reached 9.9 percent. Inflation, however, continues to rise.

Economics is not mathematics; economics is mainly about psychology.

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Antony Blinken has been foraging around for Russian weapons for Ukraine. He even asked Cyprus.

Consortium News

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

Foreign policy is complicated.  There are a lot of moving parts and because human beings are making the policy, and feelings and egos are at stake, it’s that much more difficult.

Some policymakers take a long-term view, others are myopic. Couple all that with the problem that I witnessed countless times over the course of my career at the C.I.A. and at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — the insistence of American diplomats, intelligence professionals and White House staff members that they are literally the smartest people in the world and that they know best. 

Former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser once famously said,

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make a clear-cut stupid move.  You always make complicated stupid moves, which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.” 

He was right.  But rest assured that most of the time, the moves are just plain stupid ones.

Blinken’s ‘Migration’ Trip 

I was reminded of  Nasser’s comment two weeks ago when Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that he would travel to Colombia, Chile and Peru to discuss “migration.”  The announcement seemed odd to me because there aren’t a huge number of Colombians, Chileans or Peruvians in the United States illegally.

None of the countries are on the “front line” of the immigration debate.  The Blinken trip made no sense. 

It wasn’t until after Blinken returned that an obscure military publication gave us a hint of what the trip was about.  The Army Technology Newsletter reported that Blinken had secured a promise from the Colombians to help Ukrainian troops clear landmines. 

In Peru, President Pedro Castillo agreed to push a condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through parliament.  He declined to impose sanctions on Russia, which he said would have been a violation of international law.

But he criticized both sides in the conflict, saying that the war has cut off grain supplies to the countries and people who need it the most. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Peruvian President Pedro Castillo and Foreign Minister Cesar Landa in Lima, Peru, on Oct. 6. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)

The Chileans, for their part, were happy to do whatever Blinken wanted them to do.

But that wasn’t all that Blinken was up to.  He was also interested in gauging interest in swapping out whatever Russian or old Soviet equipment those countries may have in their possession that they could send them to Ukraine and then have them replaced with state-of-the-art American munitions. 

The problem the Ukrainians are facing is that American weapons are difficult to use.  They’re sophisticated and complicated.  And there just isn’t any time for Americans to train Ukrainians in how to use them. 

A better idea, the administration thinks, is to just ask countries around the world that have Russian weapons to help.  It wasn’t just these three South American countries that he asked.  Blinken also asked South Africa, Finland, Cambodia, Rwanda, Mexico, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cyprus.  Would they send their Russian weapons to Ukraine and take American weapons in return?

Cyprus Said No 

According to The New York Times, most of those countries said yes.  Cyprus, though, said no.  The Cyprus situation is what I was referring to at the start of this article. 

Greece and Turkey are both members of NATO.  Cyprus is not. 

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