April 19, 2023 - The Truth Central - Dr. Jerome Corsi
36:50
The Looming Global Debt Catastrophe
The first quarter of 2023 saw the most large company debt defaults worldwide since the 2020 pandemic, layoffs and bankruptcy filings continue to mount across the US while commercial real estate is in a crisis. While the mainstream media is more fascinated with celebrities and Biden's photo-ops, all of this happening under the proverbial radar could soon hit a critical mass, causing economic disaster.. Dr. Jerome Corsi details the truth about what's really happening on The Truth Central'Visit Dr. Corsi's The Truth Central website: https://www.TheTruthCentral.com'MyVitalC: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.phpPro Rapid Review: https://prorrt.com/thetruthcentralmembers/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-truth-central-with-dr-jerome-corsi--5810661/support.
This is Jerome Corzine and today is Wednesday, April 19th, 2021.
We're here with the Truth Central, and we are intending to bring you the truth that's not always pleasant, not always what you might want to hear.
And today I think it's going to be one of those cases, because we're going to be delving very deeply into what's going on in the economy.
And I'm predicting a massive crash.
Predicting a global crash that could be worse than 2008-2009, could be worse than the 1970s.
For those of you who were alive and remember that, when we had the OPEC oil crisis, we've got the combination of debt crisis, which we had in 2008-2009, and energy crisis, which we have today, both occurring at the same time.
Now the first story is one that should upset everyone, and again it is not on the horizon for most people to pay attention to at this point, but there are massive defaults going on in commercial real estate.
These are the big buildings in downtown or throughout the country, wherever there are major commercial centers, many of them now even suburban, where you have commercial real estate that is largely either overpriced or not fully occupied.
Now, some of this is a residue of the pandemic and lockdown.
People realized they could work from home.
That's a lot more convenient, a lot more fun to not have to commute every day into a central business district.
But the point is that we just had a major failure.
What triggered this today is that there's a major failure in a commercial office complex that is this giant Brookfield A holding company which has basically defaulted at $161.4 million in mortgage for 12 office buildings in Washington, D.C.
That means 12 office buildings in Washington, D.C.
are basically bankrupt.
Now, the story is that this Brookfield company Had transferred their loan to a servicer who was going to try to execute a negotiation with the borrower, which evidently failed.
And, uh, what's happening is the office space in DC and district of Columbia has slid 36% through March compared with a year ago, uh, due to rising vacancies and the remote and hybrid post COVID work habits.
So essentially the average occupancy across Washington DC of commercial real estate is only 43% and has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels.
Now that's where you've got the problem across the country.
So essentially you've got about $2.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt that's going to mature the next five years.
But we have, again, seen bank failures, which the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other regional banks has really magnified the problem for these regional banks.
And the commercial real estate loans that they hold are going to be another compounding factor Because as of February, regional banks account for a staggering 70% of commercial real estate loans outstanding.
Now, including multifamily farmland and construction loans.
Now, that's going to be a major hit on banking.
The retail banking and commercial banking sectors in these small regional banks are simply gonna fail.
You're gonna have a compound problem of having commercial real estate that's not being used in an inflating market, With loans that are going to get more expensive to service because interest rates are higher and the buildings are largely empty.
43% occupancy means 60, you know, 57% which is, you know, unfilled.
So the majority of these downtown office buildings are empty.
And again, this is not just a trend that has to do with the work habits, it's also the fact that the economy is slowing down.
And we're finding a massive slowdown is occurring across the country.
Now, finally, major, major firms like you're finding Morgan Stanley, Various, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, they're all saying that there's going to be a crisis, a huge default problem in delinquency rates on these loans, which is going to lead to bankruptcy across the commercial real estate market.
And it's a huge, huge market.
There's over 5.6 trillion of outstanding commercial and multi-family mortgages in the United States, rental properties, and essentially with this amount at the end of 2022 the Federal Reserve Board's flow of funds accounts data attributed 2.8 trillion to banks and thrifts Which basically includes $627 billion of loans collateralized by owner-occupied properties and other $468 billion by loans backed by acquisition, development, and construction projects.
So basically, of the amount that is held in commercial real estate loans, A large percentage of it is at risk.
That's what this means.
And when that starts defaulting, like with the 2008-2009 subprime real estate market defaults, it collapses the banking industry.
Because the banks are holding these loans as assets.
If the assets default, the bank assets have to be marked to market, and the bank does not have the asset, the liability ratio is needed to remain solvent and to continue in operation.
This is a serious and looming problem, and it's not getting reported.
You're not typically reading about this.
You know, you've got the headlines, which are going on a lot of different things these days, but they're not focusing on what are really, what I think is developing to be a major, major crisis in the economy, and that's something I'm gonna continue focusing on.
Now, the second story I wanna cover is equally disturbing.
There are massive layoffs going on across the country, In employment, Ernst & Young, which is one of the major accounting firms worldwide, had failed essentially to break up the global firm.
They wanted to break up the firm globally.
That failed.
So what they did is they turned around, Ernst & Young on Monday said it was going to eliminate 3,000 jobs, which is about 5% of its workforce, and they said this is part of the ongoing management of our business, but it's from the, because they didn't implement a global breakup of the company, they're going to reduce employees.
In a statement, Ernst & Young put out, they said, after assessing the impact of current economic conditions, strong employee retention rates, and the overcapacity in parts of our firm, we've made the difficult decision To separate approximately 3,000 workers.
Now, essentially this layoff in the United States, Ernst & Young generates more than 40% of the firm's global revenue and employs in the United States about 50,000 professionals.
And these kinds of layoffs, Are essentially the beginning of much greater layoffs throughout the big four accounting firms.
McKinsey last month, another one of the major accounting firms, said it was going to eliminate 1,400 positions.
And Accenture said it was going to cut 19,000 jobs.
Now, we're seeing cuts on Amazon, we're seeing cuts in the tech industries, now we're seeing accounting firms.
When accounting firms are laying off, it's because their accounting activity is down, but business activities are down.
You've got failures in commercial real estate because it's overbuilt, it's not being utilized.
Go downtown in Manhattan, these skyscrapers which have been built in recent years are empty.
And when you measure the occupancy by the number of people coming through and swiping their cards to get past the turnstiles to get into the building, you're finding that the occupancy rates are so low that there's not enough cash flow for these buildings to service their debt.
Now, I'm going to cover one more story and then I want Chris to comment on this.
But basically, all the stories I'm covering today are like a systemic breakdown of the economy.
In other words, it's not going to happen just in one sector.
It's going to happen really across the board in various sectors.
And it's going to be like, they say, a perfect storm where you've got all the combinations of things that could go wrong happening at the same time.
This story says that global Corporate defaults, which is the amount of global debt, which is probably at the all-time historic high.
That chart shows it.
You know, the global debt is just massively out of control right now.
And companies around the world, more companies around the world defaulted on their debt in the first three months of 2023 than in any quarter since late 2020, when the businesses were still hamstrung by restrictions to stop the spread of COVID.
So we're going into a period that is worse than the COVID shutdown in terms of corporate bankruptcies.
Tuesday, Moody's said that 33 of the corporations it rates defaulted on their debts in the first quarter, the highest level since the last quarter of 2020, when 47 companies defaulted.
Essentially, this is the most massive defaults that we've seen since the pandemic.
And when the, it's already affected the financial sector with the defaults, Silicon Valley Bank and its holding company, SVB Financial Group and Signature Bank.
All of these banks have experienced tremendous problems, both because they've got treasury debts that the Fed encouraged them to buy.
The Fed was subsidizing our massive debt to the United States, $30 trillion in the debt service, by buying our own treasury debt.
We were buying our own debt, as insane as that sounds, and those Coupons, the treasury bonds that were being bought were at or near zero coupon because interest rates were at so low a rate throughout the Obama years.
Now interest rates have been rising.
And I think interest rates are going to continue to rise because I don't see any end to the inflation.
I'll cover that in a minute.
But the first part of what I wanted to present to you today is that we've got massive Failures.
When you've got commercial real estate crashing.
When you've got major corporations laying off thousands of employees.
When you've got global corporate debt and in the United States corporate debt causing bankruptcies in corporations.
Major corporations not able to sustain their economic activity.
And we'll segue into that because the next story is specifically about the bankruptcies.
Chris, you want to comment?
One of note though, as far as the bankruptcies are concerned, while we had 33 defaults worldwide in the last quarter, Q1 of 2023, 15 of those were in the last month.
So this situation was exasperated over a very recent event.
So we're not just talking about a quarter flip, we're talking about a month spike.
Yeah, stay with me for a minute.
I want to go to the next story because that's exactly... Bankruptcy filings in the United States rose for the third straight month in March in all major industries.
A total of 42,368 new bankruptcies were filed last month.
It's according to our data from Equip Bankruptcy, which is a provider of U.S.
bankruptcy court data.
This is 17% up from the 36,068 filings in March 2022 as the highest number of monthly bankruptcy
filings since April 2021. And the S&P Global Market Intelligence showed 71 corporate bankruptcy
petitions in March, a jump of 58% the previous month.
This is the highest monthly total since July 2020, and the fourth straight months of increases.
Now you had Bob Nardel, who is the former CEO of Home Depot.
And he was on Fox News.
He said, I think we're going to see a lot of bankruptcies, like Bed, Bath and Beyond.
We've got Walmart not only laying off people, but closing stores.
We've got Accenture laying people off.
We've got Amazon closing distribution centers.
So I think there's a tremendous mixed message here.
He says, basically, the complexity of the American economy is different from anything I've seen in my 52 years on earth.
Now that's, That's the message I'm trying to convey, that this is not just a economic slowdown.
This is a systemic collapse, which is caused in part by the fiat currencies, the global debt, the staggering amount of global debt, and the energy crisis, which I'm going to get into next, but the commercial real estate crisis, not the subprime market this time, but commercial real estate, which is much larger, Is going to, I think, trigger a huge global recession.
So when the United States economy has a problem, the world's economy has a problem, and that's just beginning to happen.
These are the early signs of it, but I'm trying to warn you that it's happening.
Chris, why don't we go to the Swiss America page, which is why I'm making sure everybody's aware of this.
You have an opportunity right now.
With Swiss America, with this gold and silver offer, you've got an offer of walking liberty half dollars, which are about 90% silver.
And for first-time callers, first-time customers, you can buy up to 250 of these about a cost.
That's alone a great deal.
But I encourage you to look for some tangible value.
Gold, silver, platinum are tangible.
And throughout history, going back thousands of years, gold and silver have remained a standard of value, especially when currencies fail.
And we're going into a massive global currency failure.
This is a, it reminds me of what's happening, these different aspects of the economy collapsing, which are just in the very early stages.
You're not reading about it in the headlines of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal even, certainly not the Washington Post.
They're saying everything's rosy, everything's okay, Biden will take care of things.
Well, that's not going to be the case.
I'm telling you something different.
I'm saying that having seen this happen before, being well aware of how these collapses occur, and you know, I've been unfortunately in some ways, we're remarkably good at being able to see what's going to happen from the early first signs.
We're headed for a unprecedented economic global storm.
And if you go to Swiss America, try to get some gold and silver.
They're consultative selling.
I've been with them for 20 years.
They're not going to sell you gold certificates.
You're going to get actual gold, silver, platinum, metal, coins, however you want it, but you'll get the actual metal.
And that's what you need to have these days going into this storm.
That'll hold its value.
Gold right now is still trading at over $2,000.
Let me just check its current price right as we're on air.
And I think it's holding, it's just right at $1,987.
So it's been challenging this $2,000 mark.
But again, we've taken a look at the amount of gold being bought by the World Federal Reserves, the World Central Banks, The central bankers know we're going into this crisis.
They want gold.
I recommend you do the same.
Gold at $2,000 an ounce is gonna be cheap.
When we go into these crises, the last two times gold has really spiked was in the 1970s OPEC crisis and its aftermath, the stagflation.
Going back into stagflation.
And in the 2008, 2009, some prime real estate crisis.
1970s gold went to about $980 an ounce in the subprime crisis, 2008, 2009, it went to $2,000 an ounce.
It could go to $4,000 an ounce before we're done with this.
It may be resistant here, the $2,000 price resistance level, but that's not gonna last.
It's already challenged that once and broken through, will continue to break through.
I'm still telling you that I think gold at $1,988.40, which is what it is at the moment, it fluctuates moment to moment, is cheap.
And I'm not giving you financial advice.
I'm just giving you, I'm telling you economically what I see.
Talk with Swiss America to get financial advice.
Okay, now Chris, let's go.
Do you have a comment there, Chris?
If you'll notice that, as you said, gold and silver, all precious metals kind of fluctuate here.
This looks like it's sort of a slight dip from when we talked about gold reaching over $2,000 in the last week or so.
But this happens.
You've seen it.
Sometimes you want to look around for deals and bargains.
Talk to Swiss America.
Talk to somebody.
Talk to a financial advisor.
Talk to somebody.
People always buy when it's too high.
I mean, people get in too late and they get out too early.
Real estate.
That's a big one.
People say, hey, real estate's great.
We can sell our house.
But you're buying one for just as much.
You find yourself underwater a little bit later on.
Yeah, as soon as you're... the time to buy real estate is when real estate is cheap.
And that's going to happen.
We're going to be, but only those who will have cash or value gold or whatever will be able to benefit from that because many people will be losing their homes and Jobs, etc.
I'm seeing massive layoffs going on in New York in the tech industries, in all the industries.
A lot of companies are dumping their recruiting sections too.
They're recruiting people and some of the people that are brought in to find ways to hire others.
So that's another thing.
Not only are these companies dropping It's going to be a time for temporary employees.
but they're also dropping the arms of these firms which are out to look for other workers.
It's going to be a time for temporary employees. It's going to be a time when people become
independent contractors because they're just basically looking to pick up work.
I don't see the employment situation as improving anytime near soon.
Inflation in the UK is being reported still double digit and food prices are off the wall across the board in the United States as well.
Let's continue with the stories we've posted.
I want to make sure we have enough time to cover them all and there's quite a few stories I want to touch on today.
The next one has to do, let's shift gears a little bit, As I'm saying that the de-dollarization is going on at a stunning pace.
Now this came from, this was a statement that I paid attention to because it comes from a guy named Stephen Jenn who is well known as a He's an investment analyst.
He's with Eurozon Capital, which is essentially an investment banking firm.
And what he's saying is that the greenback share in global reserves, in other words, our position as a world currency of last resort, or basically the world reserve currency, that slid 10%.
Which is a massive percentage.
The dollar suffered a stunning collapse in 2022 in its market share as a reserve currency, presumably due to its muscular use of sanctions, except actions taken by the U.S.
and its allies against Russia have startled A large reserve holding countries, most of which are emerging countries, the so-called global south.
But you've also then got the attack going on with the de-dollarization in China and India, which are pushing to internationalize their own currencies.
Now this guy, Jen, came up with what he called the dollar smile theory.
The dollar smile theory said that the dollar always does well, both when the economy is booming
and when the economy is in deep decline.
The dollar has remained strong.
What he's saying now is that the economy's going into a deep decline and the dollar is sinking.
That violates his own dollar smile theory.
Now this guy who is famous for that theory is saying the current dynamics are violating
what he's seen as a operating law of international finance, the dollar, going back since World War II.
That's a serious statement by somebody who needs to be paid attention to.
It's when Nouriel Roubini, whom I quote all the time, He predicted the subprime collapse in 2008, and he's saying we're in for a global decline, and when Nouriel Roubini says that, because he has a history of being right, I pay attention.
Now, the other stories here that are impacting this Um, gasoline prices are about to rise.
I've been talking about this for weeks because as soon as I saw that OPEC plus, which includes Russia, uh, again, rebuked the Biden administration and, uh, raised, they've decided to produce less oil.
OPEC has, uh, decreased its production goals and production quotas.
Well, gasoline has already started to rise in the United States.
U.S.
gasoline prices rose for the third week in a row, rising about 8 cents per gallon from a week ago to $3.65 per gallon yesterday, national average.
And this is from a group called GasBuddy.
GasBuddy monitors the national price of gasoline.
And they're saying that with oil touching their highest level of 2023 at $83 a barrel, the national average price of gasoline has continued to inch higher, with 45 of the nation's 50 states seeing prices rise over the last week.
Well, the rising price of oil is likely the largest factor in rising gas prices.
There's also seasonal impacts.
He said ahead of going into the transition to summer, when more gasoline will be used, more people are moving around.
But the point is, we are going to see, I'm predicting, we're going to see $100 a barrel of oil coming as we get into the fall.
And that's going to, again, push gasoline prices up.
And when gasoline prices go up, it means that inflation is going to go up beyond 5.5%.
And that means the Fed will not be able to avoid more interest rate increases.
And so we're in for more inflation and slower economic activity.
That's the definition of stagflation.
Stagnant economy, zero economic growth, people suffering with layoffs.
And yet price is increasing.
I didn't promise you this would be good news, but I want you to know the truth of what's going on.
This is the Truth Central, and this is the truth.
Now the last story.
Germany is closing its last nuclear power plants.
They decided to continue with their original objective of actually shutting down nuclear power in Germany, which is the major economy of the EU, largely because, again, the Green Movement has opposed nuclear energy, not because it has carbon dioxide emissions, but because of Chernobyl.
They don't like nuclear.
Essentially, the result is going to be, they're predicting is that we're going to see electricity bills spike up to 45% increases in Germany because these nuclear power plants are being closed down.
Now, the left has this climate change hysteria.
And the truth is, and it's being said increasingly, I mean, this is a article that stems out of Zero Hedge, which I do follow, zerohedge.com, which says, with stagflation still running rampant in the U.S.
and Europe, the last thing anybody should worry about is less than one degree centigrade rise in global temperatures in the past 100 years.
It doesn't make any difference.
There's no concrete evidence of any significant climate crisis.
That's what I've been saying.
I wrote a book about it.
Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change.
And all the people who tell us a crisis is right around the corner do so while raking in billions in funding dollars from governments and think tank institutions who have a vested interest in reinforcing the climate change hysteria To build more wind and solar power and put more restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
So the climate crisis is a sham.
I've been saying that for now years.
Okay, but what we're doing is we're committing economic suicide.
Closing down nuclear power plants.
The EPA mandates on tailgate emissions, which are going to require that we have 67% of the cars being produced or the vehicles being produced be electric within 10 years, is ridiculous.
It's just going to increase the costs of transportation, the cost of energy.
This is a suicidal move because we're inflicting it upon ourselves.
No, we're not.
It's not 1970.
We're not having OPEC put an embargo on oil to the United States.
Although Saudi Arabia is just about as mad at Biden as Saudi Arabia was mad at Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.
Biden has let Saudi Arabia know that he's going to allow Iran to continue with its nuclear weapons program.
Saudi Arabia is definitely afraid of that.
Iran may hate the United States, but the Iranians are Shiites, which is the one brand of Islam.
It's a minority.
And the Saudis are Sunnis.
They're fighting over whether the head of Islam should be the member of the family of the prophet or should be civil authority.
Sunnis believe it should be civil authority.
And Iran will next destroy Saudi Arabia if it ever gets rid of Israel.
That's the next major enemy in the Middle East of Iran.
And again, Saudi Arabia is cutting off Some production, but we're even doing more now to damage ourselves by not utilizing oil and gas that we have available, and coal, abundantly and cheaply in the United States.
We did lead the world in exporting oil and natural gas under President Trump.
Under President Biden, we're going to have this green agenda.
This entire Inflation Reduction Act is really a repeat of what Obama did with the stimulus spending in 2008 and 2009, when he put billions of dollars into solar and wind.
You can't will solar and wind to suddenly work.
You can't fund it by building more solar and wind plants because the technology is limited.
We don't have the storage capacity of the batteries.
We don't have the transmission capacity.
We don't have the reliability of solar and wind energy.
These are points I make in the book.
You can't just will it.
You can't wave a magic wand and say, we'll fund it.
We'll throw money at it.
That money will just be stolen.
As it was in Slyndra, about Peter Schweitzer pointed out, and his Government Accountability Institute, that something like 80% of the money Obama spent, billions, in 2008 and 2009 on green energy, went to the people who were on his 2008 presidential campaign fundraising committee.
And they all failed.
Slender failed.
Junk solar panels or wind all over the place.
No one went to prison.
But this is economic suicide.
We do economic suicide at a time when we're having a massive meltdown in lending.
And now we've got energy increasing in price.
This is going to be a catastrophic economic collapse.
Chris, your final comments?
I'm not saying nobody, but very few people are paying enough attention to it.
is paying, I'm not saying nobody, but very few people are paying enough attention to it.
It doesn't get mainstream coverage. It's almost like this is planned by a certain group of people
who want to make sure nobody knows what's really happening behind the scenes.
But you still see every once in a while, you see it not only at the ground level with your friends and neighbors, but you see layoffs happening at large corporations.
You see small businesses having a trim subsequently.
You see banks falling down, regional banks, the banks that were supposed to be the ones to help smaller businesses.
They're falling down.
dollars losing power but these are things that don't hit the headlines but if a celebrity slips on a banana peel and everybody laughs at it that's what's going to that's in the headlines that's number one all right weather weather problems yes we get that but they want to attach all that to climate change want to push uh push gun control the fact is everything that's going on behind the scenes is what's uh it's what's going to cause the real problems and yeah i mean we really need to pay attention i agree and that's why we're that's why we're here with the truth central is one of the reasons i came back to Doing podcasts and with the website.
I'm trying to warn people that this is a time to prepare.
Lastly, I want you people to take a look at this, My Vital C, another one of our sponsors.
We're going to be adding a third sponsor here pretty quickly.
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I can just tell you, I can't promise or predict that it's going to necessarily benefit you because the scientific research does not make this a prescription.
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Hopefully we'll have benefits for you.
So let's wrap it up.
This is Dr. Jerome Corsi.
Today is Wednesday, April 19th, 2023.
In the end, God always wins.
God will win here too.
It's going to be a difficult economic storm.
But the will of God will be done, and we'll be here to talk with you through this.
