Friday, August 29, 2025

Who Invented BRICS | Yuliana Titaeva

Many people believe that the idea of this strategic alliance was proposed in 2001 by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill. In fact, he only came up with a successful name—BRIC (“brick”), formed from the first letters of the countries. The point was that these four economies would be the engines of global growth in the 21st century.
 
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit from August 31 to September 1 in Tianjin.
 
But in reality, the idea of an alliance between Russia, India, and China was first voiced by… Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In 1920, Lenin wrote a “Letter to the Indian Revolutionary Association in which he directly addressed the Indian people, called for liberation from British colonialism, and emphasized that India’s struggle was part of the world revolution. For Lenin, Russia had to be the natural ally of India and China in this struggle.

» The spiral of history. «  
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1920. 
 
Of course, Lenin thought in terms of revolutions and class struggle, not trade blocs. But still, this was the first articulation of the "Russia–India–China" connection as a historical and political project. He was the first to see in these three civilizational giants natural allies against Western hegemony.

SCO Unites to Crush NATO’s Pressure, Pepe Escobar, August 29, 2025.
 
Seventy-eight years later, in 1998, the foreign minister of the new Russia, Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov, formalized the idea of the strategic triangle RIC (Russia–India–China) as a foreign policy concept. In 2006, the tropical giant Brazil joined the "triangle," and the four countries turned the abbreviation into a real international club. Today, before our very eyes, BRICS is beginning to perceive itself as an alliance against Western hegemony. The spiral of history.

 
 
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Thursday, August 28, 2025

Europe's Debt Ponzi Scheme 2.0—Default or Forced Loan | Martin Armstrong

During the Panic of 1893, which became a global contagion, Italy couldn't roll over its short-term debt, as it was unable to sell new bonds to pay off maturing ones. When faced with circumstances similar to what we see today, Italy did not officially default in the classic sense of failing to pay. Still, it executed a coercive debt restructuring that is widely considered a selective default or soft default in 1893–1894. This is what we refer to as a forced loan.

» We are living in a perpetual Ponzi scheme. « 
 
Italy was facing a run on its short-term debt and unable to roll over the maturing paper because there were no buyers. The Italian government, led by Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, did not formally declare a default. Instead, it passed a law (Legge 11 luglio 1894, n. 386) that forcibly converted the short-term Buoni del Tesoro into a new long-term bond. The law mandated that holders of the short-term Treasury notes could not be repaid in cash upon maturity. Instead, they were forced to exchange their maturing short-term paper for a new long-term government bond, called the “Rendita Italiana 5%” (5% Italian Annuity).

Where inmates run the asylum, insanity rules.

This new bond had a 5% coupon but was issued at a price below par (effectively giving a higher yield to compensate, somewhat, for the forced nature of the deal. Crucially, it was a perpetual bond, meaning it had no final maturity date.

The Italian government unilaterally changed the terms of its debt. Investors lent money for 30 days, expecting to be repaid in cash at the end of that term. The government broke that promise. Investors had no choice. They could not get their cash back; their only option was to accept the new long-term instrument. While they received a new security, it was illiquid (perpetual), and its value was uncertain. This action caused significant financial losses for many Italian banks and citizens who held the paper.

I would expect that Europe will do this when it can no longer issue new debt to pay off its old debt. We are living in a perpetual Ponzi scheme. There is only one way this ends, and that is a default or a forced loan. 
 
 
»
Europe needs war as a distraction, and stablecoins are, in fact, war bonds. « 
 

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Monday, August 25, 2025

20-Week Cycle Troughs in S&P 500, NASDAQ, Gold & Bitcoin | David Hickson

The S&P 500 suggests a Hurst 20-week cycle trough has formed on August 1, but the NASDAQ and Bitcoin point to a trough that still lies ahead. This divergence underscores the need for cross-market confirmation before drawing firm conclusions.

S&P 500: The April 7 trough of 18-month or larger magnitude underpins the ongoing bullish bias. Sentient Trader Hurst cycle analysis software places the 20-week trough in early August, but the FLD (Future Line of Demarcation) interaction rating is weak (~30%), leaving doubt about whether it was the 20-week low. Price has shown some support at the 20-day FLD, but evidence remains mixed.
 
The April 7 trough of 18-month or larger magnitude underpins the ongoing bullish bias. 
 
If the early-August low was indeed the 20-week trough, the S&P 500 could break above its mid-August highs and extend higher into autumn. If not, the index still has a decline due, possibly into late August, before resuming its primary uptrend. Traders should await confirmation through clearer FLD interaction.

Schematic 18-Month Cycle Projection for the S&P 500.

 
David Hickson's cycle analysis software, Sentient Trader, calculates the current average wavelength of the nominal 40-week cycle or 9-month cycle in the S&P 500 as only 32.4 weeks (the colored boxes on the price scale at the bottom right of Sentient Trader charts show the average lengths of cycles), whereas the above schematic projection of the 18-month cycle uses Hurst's original average wavelength of 38.97 weeks or 272 days. This represents a difference of 46 days, or 6.6 weeks (Hurst's Principle of Variation). David F. recently calculated the average wavelength of the 40-week cycle over the last 15 iterations since February 2015 to be 259 days, or 37 weeks. Sentient Trader's 20-week cycle currently measures only 16.8 weeks and favored the August 1 low as the 20-week cycle trough. In contrast, Hurst's original value of 19.48 weeks aligned exactly with the recent W formation or double bottom in the S&P 500 on August 20-22.
 
 
 
Hurst's original approach identifies harmonic cycle lengths between lows, and in any composite or summation of a set of cycles with 2:1 ratios of length and amplitude, the crests of individual cycles actually become troughs in the summation line (thick black line). Hurst analysis can also be used to identify cycles between highs, as illustrated by the gold example below.

Schematic composite cycle projection for the S&P 500 during the 
bullish 9-month cycle phase of the current 18-Month Cycle.

Assuming the S&P 500 is in the first bullish half of the third and last 18-month cycle within the current 54-month cycle (which allegedly began in October 2022), and there is no uplifting and dominant influence of the 9-year, 18-year, or 54-year cycles, the upcoming 40-week cycle peak, anticipated around late September to early October, would be a long-term market top. Downward pressure would then lead the S&P 500 through a series of major lower lows and lower highs into the 54-month cycle trough projected into the third quarter of 2026. The same should be true for the NASDAQ
 
NASDAQ: Like the S&P 500, the April 18-month and June 80-day troughs are confirmed, but the early August price action points more convincingly to a 40-day trough, not a 20-week low. The FLD sequence is highly rated (~54%), with clean breakdowns below the 20-day FLD, suggesting the 20-week trough still lies ahead. This cycle evidence looks stronger than in the S&P 500.
 
 In the NASDAQ, Sentient Trader's nominal 20-week cycle currently uses an average wavelength of 20.9 weeks,
and therefore anticipates the 20-week cycle trough in late August or early September (thick dashed orange line).

The NASDAQ is likely to weaken into late August as it completes the 20-week cycle trough. Once that trough forms, the structure points to a strong rebound into a 40-week cycle high around late September, consistent with the dominant 18-month cycle uptrend. Until then, resistance at the 20-day FLD should cap the price.

Gold: Remains rangebound beneath a potential 12-year cycle peak on April 22, but its phasing is uncertain. A recent 20-day cycle trough has been confirmed, providing short-term support. Price is currently trapped in a wedge, with both 40-day and 80-day VTLs (Valid Trend Lines) acting as boundaries.
 
A breakout above the wedge would lead to a potential 12-year cycle peak before a larger decline.
 
The immediate bias is for a short-term rise as the 20-day cycle exerts upward pressure. A breakout above the wedge or VTL resistance would open the door to new highs before the larger decline sets in. Failure to break higher could prolong sideways action.
 
 

Bitcoin: Cycle structure is very clear and highly rated (~69%). The 20-week trough has not yet formed; instead, price is in decline following a textbook F-category interaction at the 20-day FLD. Early August marked only a 40-day trough, not the larger low.
 
In Bitcoin, Sentient Trader averages the nominal wavelength of the 20-week cycle as 20.5 weeks,
and projects the cycle trough into the first week of September.
 

Price is expected to continue falling into the 20-week trough, likely completing within weeks. A rebound should follow once the trough is established, though risks remain of a bearish asymmetry if the cycle phasing proves misaligned. The short-term bias for Bitcoin remains downward.
 

Saturday, August 23, 2025

The Game of Chess, and the Masters of the Board | The Honorable One

Chess can show you how the world is run, who is really in power, and how to break it. There are six types of people who run the modern world. First you need to understand who is at the bottom.
 
 » Someday, someone will return and flip the board. « 
 
Number one, the pawns—the masses. They follow orders, pay taxes, are predictable, and get sacrificed in each game. Without them, there is no game, no power, no state, no Suki system. They are the majority in every game, the foundation of all power, and yet they are too weak to realize it. 

Number two, the rooks—the 20% who do 80% of the work: long hours, efficient, diligent, straight shooters. They are like machines. But they get stuck when routines change, they are not flexible enough, and they are useless on their own. They need number three:

 
» Everyone is afraid of the queen. «  

The knights. For a long time they just sit. Then they leap over walls, surprising everyone. Their paths and creativity are unpredictable. They connect dots no one else connects. They are ahead of the curve and unplug first. They walk into uncharted terrain. But one wrong step, and they fall. 
 
Knights need number four by their side: A good bishop to protect them. He is a quiet planner, the one who can wait. He is patient and prepared with a plan to strike months or years from now. But bishops are nothing compared to number five:

» It's their game. « 
 
The queen can strike anytime, anywhere, in all directions. Everyone is afraid of the queen. Who are the queens of this world? Central Bankers, those who run the Suki agencies, the military—those who can take out anyone anytime anywhere. The rules and laws of pawns, knights, and bishops do not apply to them. 
 
» Families that cannot be named. « 

So why is number six, the king, in power, and not the queen? The king takes small steps in the back rows, unnoticed. Nobody fears him. He holds power through legacy. Queens wield power for decades; kings and their families hold it for centuries. Who are the kings of today's world? The families that cannot be named. They have trillions but don’t appear on Forbes lists. Money does not matter to them—they print it. Everyone plays chess, but they are the ones who provide the board. They decide how many fields the board has and how long the game will be played. 
 
» We are the oil in your dressing, the flour in your bread, the meat on your dinner table. «  
A largely unknown American family dynasty of 14 billionaires traces its fortune to William Wallace Cargill in 1865. The Cargill-MacMillan family business, Cargill Inc., became one of the world's largest private companies. With revenues of $177 billion, it controls 22% of US beef production, and its low public visibility stems from its dominance in the food supply chain, where it and three other firms handle 70–90% of the global grain trade.
 
It's their game, and it is hard to exit. But there is a way: You only win if you don't play. You stop paying, you stop playing. All the game is run by money—consumption, production, access, bureaucracy, taxes. If you stop the money flow, the game stops. Someday, someone who has stopped playing and walked away from the game will return and flip the board: Game over for all the kings and all their Suki helpers. Honor will come.
 
 

 “Suki,” Russian prison slang for traitors and bitches (сука/суки), denotes globalist elites, corporations, and establishment figures—who embody hypocrisy, manipulation, and betrayal. They uphold the “Suki system,” the oppressive order of financial dependency, surveillance, digital control, censorship, and cultural erosion. “The Grim” is the The Honorable One, and the adversary of the Suki. He stands  for growth, reliability, integrity, independence, incorruptibility. He rejects victimhood, consumerism, culture of comfort, indulgence, entitlement, materialism, and resists the Suki system mentally, emotionally, financially and spiritually.
 

See also:
 
了解你的敌人
Know your Enemies.
 

Friday, August 22, 2025

How Opium Trade Fueled the Sassoon Dynasty, the "Rothschilds of the East"

David Sassoon (1792–1864), born into a prominent Jewish family in Baghdad (or possibly Aleppo), traveled to Constantinople to appeal to Sultan Mahmud II, accusing the local governor Dawud Pasha of corruption. When Sassoon's actions became known, Ottoman authorities accused him of conspiracy and betrayal. He was subsequently arrested and threatened with death unless a large ransom was paid. 

David Sassoon (
seated) and his sons Elias David, Albert (Abdallah) 
and Sassoon David, Bombay, around 1855. 
 
Facing death or ruin, Sassoon fled Baghdad in 1829. He reunited with his family in Bushehr, Persia, before resettling in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1832. At the time, Bombay was part of the British Empire's holdings in India, before the British Raj period (1858-1947). The Sassoon family is said to have arrived there penniless, but they were equipped with resilience, high ambitions, unscrupulousness, multilingual skills, and an established extensive network within the Jewish Baghdadi diaspora that stretched from London to Shanghai.
 
In Bombay, David founded David Sassoon & Coin a modest counting house, and traded in cotton yarn, tea, silk, spices, precious metals—and, critically, opium. Already an extremely profitable enterprise, the opium trade became even more lucrative after the First Opium War (1839-42), when Britain used a series of imposed treaties to open Chinese markets. Sassoon established branches across Asia—including in Calcutta, Hong Kong (1843), Shanghai (1845), Canton, and Yokohama—as well as in major cities in Persia and the UK, placing his sons in charge, similar to how the Rothschilds ran their operation in Europe.
 
 
When patriarch David Sassoon died in 1864, he left his 14 children a fortune of approximately £4 million, roughly equivalent to $3 billion today. His company, David Sassoon & Co., continued to dominate the opium trade, controlling an estimated 70% of the India-to-China market by the 1860s and 1870s. Surpassing rivals like Russell & Company, Jardine Matheson, and Dent & Co., the family's immense profits for decades after his death cemented their status as one of the world's wealthiest and most influential families, earning them the nickname "the Rothschilds of the East." 

Following its initial 1729 anti-opium edict, China saw imports surge from 200 chests annually to 4,500 by 1800. This explosive growth accelerated in the 1830s, reaching 40,000 chests by 1838. The trade only intensified after the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, climbing to 70,000 chests (4,550 metric tons) annually by 1858, approximately equivalent to one year's worth of the total global production of opium between 1995 and 2005.

After David's death, the Sassoon family empire fragmented as his sons Abdallah (later Sir Albert) and Elias David established separate ventures. Elias founded E.D. Sassoon & Co. in 1867, and both branches diversified beyond opium, moving into cotton mills, banking, real estate, and infrastructure projects like the Sassoon Docks in Bombay and the iconic Sassoon House in Shanghai. As treaties phased out the opium trade in the early 20th century, the family’s focus on new industries became critical. David’s granddaughter, Flora (Farha) Sassoon, a daughter of Albert, became a partner and effectively ran the Bombay operations starting in 1894. Under her leadership, profits rose despite regional turmoil, but her brothers, unwilling to accept a woman in charge, removed her after just seven years.

 
While the Sassoons and other prominent figures—including Warren Delano Jr.Thomas Handasyd Perkins, John Perkins Cushing, John Jacob Astor, Robert Bennet Forbes and John Murray Forbes—built family fortunes, dynasties and financial empires on the opium trade, its human cost in China was devastating. The widespread addiction of up to 20 million Chinese destabilized society and drained precious metals from the Middle Kingdom during its Century of Humiliation.” This economic and political chaos, a direct result of the two Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860and British and American opium trafficking, fueled a chain of disastrous events. The most catastrophic was the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which resulted in an estimated 20 to 30 million deaths from fighting, famine, and plague. 
 
Opium stockpiled in a warehouse in Patna, 1850s: The Sassoon family's extensive opium trade into China was
directly related to the British East India Company's monopoly on opium production in places like Patna in Bengal.
 
In 1853, David Sassoon gained British citizenship, boldly affirming his allegiance to Queen Victoria in Hebrew and reframing the family's identity as "British-Jewish." His immense success in drug trafficking was accompanied by extensive philanthropy: he commissioned synagogues, schools, orphanages, hospitals, and libraries, dedicating about 0.25% of profits to religious and charitable tzedakah. By the early 20th century, the dynasty began to decline. This was a result of internal rivalries, over-assimilation into the British aristocracy, and poor strategic decisions—such as Victor Sassoon's failure to foresee Imperial Japan's rise when he centralized operations in Shanghai 

Sir Victor Sassoon (1881-1961), the last of the great merchant princes of the Sassoon dynasty, with
glamorous women (including Marlene Dietrich on the right) during one of his Shanghai parties in 1935. 
 
Yet, today, the Sassoon family's legacy continues through the Sassoon Family Continuation Trust and J. Sassoon Financial Group LLC, led by non-executive chairman David Shlomo Sassoon. This modern entity has diversified away from the family's historical ventures, now managing investments in a range of sectors including composite materials, oil and gas, finance, mining, and food security, focused particularly on the US, Israel, and African markets. Beyond their financial operations, many of the Sassoons maintain a discreet profile and remain "grounded in Jewish heritage." This is exemplified by individuals such as Rabbi Sliman Sassoon, who leads initiatives like the Ohel David Sassoon Institute in Jerusalem, and by the fact that a street there has been named in honor of Flora Sassoon.
 
 
» Bruce Fein, Master Trustee of the Sassoon Family Continuation Trust, unveiled today plans to transfer all Trust's unsurpassed assets valued at over $100 billion to the United States located at present in Switzerland or elsewhere abroad. The Sassoon Family Continuation Trust originated 1495 in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition.  Its longevity and wealth are unrivaled.  The Trust proudly honors and celebrates Orthodox Judaism and is committed to the welfare of the United States and the economic and physical security of Israel. The trust's sole beneficiary is David E. Sassoon, grandson of Eli Nissim Sassoon and executive chairman of J. Sassoon Group, a Washington, DC based private equity and investment banking firm. « 
  
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了解你的敌人
Know your Enemies.