"We Track the Financial Collapse For You, so You'll Thrive and Profit, In Spite of It... "

Fortunes will soon be made (and saved). Subscribe for free now. Get our vital, dispatches on gold, silver and sound-money delivered to your email inbox daily.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Safeguard your financial future. Get our crucial, daily updates.

"We Track the Financial Collapse For You,
so You'll Thrive and Profit, In Spite of It... "

Fortunes will soon be made (and saved). Subscribe for free now. Get our vital, dispatches on gold, silver and sound-money delivered to your email inbox daily.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

World On Fire

The latest Middle East news is right out of ISIS’ medieval playbook. But it’s not (at least not all) ISIS.

US ally Saudi Arabia apparently decided to start the New Year off by beheading or shooting 47 people, one of whom was a prominent Shia cleric (the Saudis are Sunnis, putting them on the other side in Islam’s Catholic/Protestant civil war).

Iran, the leading Shiite power and a long-standing rival of the Saudis for regional dominance, was not happy:

Iran’s leader warns Saudis of ‘divine vengeance’ over execution of Shia cleric

(Guardian) – Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has renewed his attack on Saudi Arabia over its execution of a leading Shia cleric, saying that politicians in the Sunni kingdom would face divine retribution for his death.

“The unjustly spilled blood of this oppressed martyr will no doubt soon show its effect and divine vengeance will befall Saudi politicians,” state TV reported Khamenei as saying on Sunday. It said he described the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr as a “political error”.

Iranian protestors then set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran and the Saudis broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. More, no doubt, is to come.

And that’s just one of five or six Middle East conflicts in various stages of combustion.
The ever-industrious Saudis are also bombing their smaller neighbor Yemen back to the 12th century. Russia and Turkey are shooting at each other’s assets, human and economic, and sanctioning each other’s trade. Based on the rhetoric they’re one more incident away from a straight-up war.

Turkey is apparently allied with ISIS and is helping it sell oil on the world market. And the Turkish military is more interested in killing Kurds (whom the US like and support) than in settling things in Syria, where chaos reigns same as always.

ISIS is wreaking havoc wherever it can, staging its own New Year celebration by murdering 300 African migrants in Libya.

And the US, which abhors a power vacuum, is apparently returning to Iraq with serious boots on the ground:

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter informed Congress last month that a “specialized expeditionary targeting force” would be sent to Iraq on top of the 3500 personnel already there, with the authority to operate in Syria too. This mix of Special Forces “will over time be able to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence, and capture ISIL leaders,” explained Carter. Where greater opportunities appear to work with local forces, he added, “We are prepared to expand it.”

That most of the above is both the West’s fault and still getting worse implies that the Middle East will be a source of continuing trouble in 2016. Europe will get another million or so refugees, the US presidential campaign will be hijacked by ever-more-grandiose invasion plans, and military budgets around the world will rise, regardless of the fiscal and monetary consequences.

And — the ultimate point for this website — financial instability will be magnified by the long list of things that could go wrong when US markets are closed. Yet another reason for risk-off to be the dominant mindset in the year ahead.

14 thoughts on "World On Fire"

  1. U.S. Proxy ISIS beheads a few individuals and U.S. mainline media makes an uproar. “We have to eliminate ISIS”. SA beheads a Shia cleric and 47 others and not a peep is heard from US propaganda ministry. Iran vows revenge which is likely what the U.S. wants to justify attacking Iran. How hypocritically evil can you get.

  2. I’m wondering if this is all a case of ‘every man for himself’?

    On Sept 29th the entire world changed. Putin (Russia), with his highly advanced missile systems and 4.5g fighter bombers is now, arguably, more than a match for the US and its aging, overly complicated, software reliant, pizza eating, video game military. The retreat from the ME of various US hardware in the last couple of months (to be replaced by the more clandestine ‘black-ops’) appears to be the the dead giveaway (Alongside Putins threat to destroy ANY hardware found to be impeding current Russian air/ground/naval operations).

    With the House of Saud rapidly running out of easily accessible oil (which is currently being sold at a margin barely above extraction costs) and Iran willing to sell its own oil, at undercutting rates, outside the PeteoDollar system (which the US can no longer prop up against Russian/Chinese/Iranian wishes) Saudi citizens had to be reminded of what would happen in the case of any ‘citizen unrest’. As, no doubt’ there are going to be quite a few pissed off Saudi’s going hungry very soon & starting to ask why just one family (tribe) squandered their entire nations wealth on cocaine, hookers, private jets and fleets of Rolls Royce.

    Revving up a bit of cross border angst is also a neat way for Saudi to divert attention away from is own inevitable (and some would say imminent) demise. Not to mention, playing straight into the hands of US/Israeli Neocons that have been itching for an excuse to go after Iran for the best part of the last two decades.

    This is just the warm up….

  3. ” with the authority to operate in Syria too”. NOBODY gave pox Americana the authority to go around mucking up the world.

  4. “…bombing their smaller neighbor Yemen back to the 12th century”

    The Saudis live in the 12th century themselves, only with air conditioning. If some Europeans think the Syrian refugees are a problem, wait until the Saudi oil runs out and they start starving. Up until the US embarked on regime change in Syria and sent out its presstitute minions to smear Assad, the country was seen as a relatively modern, Westernized nation for that part of the world (e.g. Assad’s wife is British). But the Saudis are medieval, plain and simple.

    Several years back, Robert Baer (CIA operative) made the assertion that a simple suicide bomber in a boat could disable oil loading platforms off the Saudi coast, shutting down a huge chunk of their oil exports. You think about Iran and Hezbollah and that looks very easy. The world is oddly prepared for such a disruption, what with so much crude floating around that we don’t even know where to put the stuff, but the Saudis surely aren’t prepared for a disruption in welfare payments to the citizenry. They may have been cutting off their own foot when they cut off all those heads.

    Maybe they can import food for gold, assuming they weren’t storing their gold in Dubai.

    1. The Saudis ARE vile and have attained special status only because of the petrodollar agreement. Honestly, I think the best strategy might be to surround the ME to contain it and let them all kill each other.

  5. > capture ISIL leaders

    Like in Ramadi, where operations were suspended until the USA could airlift the IS leadership out before falling into the hands of Iraqi forces.

    1. Get your “money” out of fiat currency. At the very least get out of the financial system as much as possible (e.g., as little as possible in the “big banks”; smaller, local, community banks are better, 50-50 on safe deposit boxes with banks vs home safe security, consider paying off debt as a kind of savings (e.g., for every $1 paid at x% interest is X% earned in a savings account – the caveat being that the pay down of debt is money no longer accessible, conversion of fiat to PMs, purchasing real tangibles that have value to you regardless of market “worth”, etc.)

      1. Depends on how bad things get. The may print another 30 years and get away with it. Then tomorrow it might look like the walking dead. The average person will pretty much go along with anything that “might” save them. Its a survival thing, not what’s logical.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


Zero Fees Gold IRA

Contact Us

Send Us Your Video Links

Send us a message.
We value your feedback,
questions and advice.



Cut through the clutter and mainstream media noise. Get free, concise dispatches on vital news, videos and opinions. Delivered to Your email inbox daily. You’ll never miss a critical story, guaranteed.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.