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The Five Stages of Collapse

Metadata

  • Author: Dmitry Orlov
  • ASIN: B00CGNQVIY
  • ISBN: 0865717362
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGNQVIY
  • Kindle link

Highlights

the root cause of financial collapse is usury. — location: 457 ^ref-40998

Nor is it possible to limit the rate of interest, because market participants require the ability to charge an interest rate that corresponds to their notion of the riskiness of the debt: — location: 479 ^ref-57237

insurance is where we pay someone to insure our possessions; usury is where we pay others to insure their own possessions while we remain uninsured. — location: 485 ^ref-52238

to reward someone for abstinence in service of greed—the definition of miserliness—is to cultivate a vice. — location: 489 ^ref-11535

usury best viewed as a form of systemic, institutionalized violence. The best way to look at lending at interest is as a form of extortion: whenever you have two groups, one that has all the money and another that has none but needs money to live, the former can extort payments from the latter for temporary use of the money. Just as with any racket, the lender’s goal is to turn an episode of extortion into an arrangement of permanent tribute, — location: 493 ^ref-47008

A positive interest rate requires exponential growth, and exponential growth, of anything, anywhere, can only produce one outcome: collapse. This is because it quickly outpaces any sustainable physical process in the universe, — location: 506 ^ref-36630

Exponential growth outpaces any physical process. — location: 518 ^ref-60203

Conclusion: borrowing at interest is fine provided you have plans for a time machine and enough cash on hand to actually build one, go back in time and pay off the loan with just the principal; it is not recommended otherwise. — location: 557 ^ref-29824

forcing that country to pay a “risk premium” brings the day of its sovereign default that much closer in direct proportion to the size of the risk premium it is forced to pay. — location: 570 ^ref-6619

Charging a “risk premium” is a risk mitigation strategy designed to bring about the very thing it is supposed to mitigate against. — location: 572 ^ref-48310

The system is no longer self-stabilizing. Its sustained existence requires a continuous, concerted intervention: bailouts, “quantitative easing,” “liquidity injections” and so on—all euphemisms for printing money and handing it out to insolvent financial institutions to allow them to continue functioning. — location: 596 ^ref-42181

energy drives economic growth, a larger economy sustains a larger population and the increase in debt follows along because of hope for a future...of even more growth. — location: 627 ^ref-49555

The most painful part of living through a die-off is realizing what is happening. But those who survive quickly put this experience behind them and are back to having children in no time. — location: 647 ^ref-47034