Not since the election of Ronald Reagan has the mood on the right shifted in such a positive direction so suddenly.  But now that everyone is feeling so good about things, very few people still seem interested in prepping for hard times ahead.  In fact, it is like a nuclear bomb went off in the prepping community.

As the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, I am in contact with a lot of people that serve the prepping community.  And I can tell you that sales of emergency food and supplies have been crashing since Donald Trump’s surprise election victory.  Firms that help people relocate outside of the United States have seen business really dry up, and I know of one high profile individual that has actually decided to move back to the country after Trump’s victory. 

It is almost as if the apocalypse has been canceled and the future history of the US has been rewritten with a much happier ending. Personally, I am quite alarmed that so many people are suddenly letting their guard down, but it is difficult to convince people to be vigilant when things seem to be going so well. 

And the numbers back this up.  In a previous article, I discussed the fact that a recent Gallup survey discovered that the percentage of Republicans that believe that the US economy is “getting better” increased from just 16 percent immediately prior to the election to 49 percent immediately after the election. I don’t recall ever seeing such a shift in public sentiment in just a few days.  Tens of millions of Americans have put their faith in Donald Trump, and time will tell if he will be able to deliver. 

All of the things that myself and other watchmen have been warning about all this time are coming. My hope is that the optimists are right and that the horrible events that are coming will be put off for as long as possible. But I wouldn’t count on it. A day of reckoning for America is fast approaching, and those that are wise understand the signs of the times.

Perhaps if this industry was comprised of many small businesses, it wouldn’t be so bad. But, at least in Western society, almost all of the food and beverages we buy are owned and operated by just a handful of companies.

A mere ten companies have managed to usurp control of many popular foodstuffs and beverages. This includes Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Associated British Foods and Mondelez. Each and every one of these companies makes billions of dollars each year in revenue, and have spread their presence across the globe.

Oxfam has said that it took action and showed people who is controlling the brands of food and beverages that they purchase as a way to hopefully push the companies into making positive changes within their countries of operation. While this is important, the presence of such extreme monopolization in our food industry is also very concerning for a number of reasons.

Monopoly power comes with many drawbacks — except of course, for whoever is at the helm of the monopoly. When companies have extremely concentrated power like this, they hike up prices well beyond what can be justified based on production costs — prices that are higher than they would be if they had any kind of actual competition. And with higher prices, consumers will demand less quantity.  

This, in turn, means that the quantity of a product being produced and consumed will be lower than it would be under a more competitive market structure. To put it simply, monopolies create prices that are far too high, and reduce production levels far too much. Product quality is also often an issue.

Of course, the consequences of monopolies aren’t just limited to the effects they can have on the economy. You see, large monopolies are also capable of yielding political influence. They are also often able to “capture” political and regulatory processes. Large firms may use their influence and financial power to sway legal and regulatory processes in their favor, or against any potential threat to its market power. Industries that have been monopolozied also utilize their newfound power to bring about changes that widen their profit margins.

She pledged to strengthen the forces of law and order while speeding up the sclerotic deportation process of failed asylum seekers. She said at the start of her speech designed to claw back ground lost in recent months to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Angela Merkel said: "Not all the 890,000 refugees who came last year can or will stay."

But the pastor's daughter who was raised in communist East Germany pledged that every asylum application would be judged on its merits and that people would not be lumped into an "anonymous mass." She said that a refugee situation of the kind Germany had endured in the summer of last year "can and should not be repeated."

And she pledged that the law of the land stood above "any honour codes or Sharia". Mrs Merkel's critical speech came as tensions continue to rise following the brutal rape and murder of  a 19-year-old medical student. An Afghan refugee has been arrested in connection with the murder.

"Germans therefore keep exporting easily and running up a surplus while the Italians struggle and go deeper in to debt." Italian opposition parties want to ditch the euro and hope Mr Renzi's defeat will pave the way for a return to the lira but Mr Hague warned there is no easy way out of the eurozone.

He wrote: "Mr Renzi's defeat has not made the eventual break-up of the euro more certain, because that is coming anyway. It has simply made it more obvious. Leaving the euro, however, is a far more difficult problem than leaving the EU." 

"As everyone now knows, Article 50 provides for leaving the latter. It may be a vague and inadequate rule, on which our Supreme Court is now deliberating at length, but it is nevertheless a rule that provides for getting out. The eurozone has no such rule. This is a burning building you are never meant to leave. What is more, you are barricaded in."

On that Monday, the 538 members of the Electoral College will gather in their state capitals in all 50 states to formally elect the next president. Throughout US history electors have voted according to the will of the people more than 99 percent of the time, but in 2016 there is a concerted effort to persuade Republican electors not to vote for Trump.

If 37 Republican electors can be convinced to vote for someone other than Trump, that would keep Trump under the 270 vote threshold needed to win and it would throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Most people had considered this to be a longshot, but on Monday a Republican elector named Christopher Suprun publicly announced in the New York Times that he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump. On the other side, there are at least 8 Democratic electors that have already publicly pledged to switch their votes from Hillary Clinton to a compromise Republican alternative to Trump.

So we already know that there will be quite a few “faithless electors” on December 19th. The question will be whether or not they are able to rally enough electors to their cause to deny Donald Trump the presidency.

By injecting additional funds into the economy during a time of crisis, he believed that the severity of recessions and depressions could be reduced.  This approach ultimately become known as “Keynesian economics”, and in the post-World War II era virtually the entire world embraced it at least to some degree. 

Keynesian economists correctly point out that there is a “multiplier effect” to government spending.  In other words, when the government spends money it ends up in the hands of ordinary people.  In turn, those people spend that money on various goods and services that they need, thus boosting overall economic activity.  And the more the money circulates, the more the economy is stimulated. 

So one dollar of additional government spending does not just add one dollar to GDP.  Rather, the impact on GDP is often significantly greater than that. Of course the bad news is that whenever the government borrows money it is stealing consumption from the future.  So we are literally destroying the future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have in order to make the present look a little bit brighter.

At this moment, the US national debt is a whopping $19,901,545,151,126.51, and it will cross the 20 trillion dollar mark by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20th. But when Barack Obama was inaugurated, the national debt was only 10.6 trillion dollars.  That means that we have added about 9.3 trillion dollars to the debt since that time.

So we have borrowed and spent 9.3 trillion dollars under Obama that we did not have.  But because of the “multiplier effect”, that 9.3 trillion dollars actually had a far greater impact on the US economy …without all of this debt that Barack Obama and Congress have been getting us into, we would be in the worst economic depression in US history right now.

Donald Trump is talking about cutting taxes and reducing regulations, and all of those things are good, but ultimately those measures are not going to matter that much. What is going to matter is what Donald Trump decides to do about our exploding debt. If Donald Trump continues to steal money from future generations of Americans at the same pace that Barack Obama has been doing, he will literally be destroying the future of America.  It will be a crime on a scale that is almost beyond words, and if they get a chance to do it, future generations of Americans will look back and curse him for what he has done to us.

So Donald Trump is really in a no-win situation when it comes to the economy. As a nation we have been consuming far more wealth than we produce for a very, very long time, and the only way that we have been able to do this is because we have been able to go into so much debt. But now a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and I am not sure if Donald Trump even realizes that he will soon be faced with some incredibly heartbreaking choices.

In fact, Allison takes that rhetoric one step further. While acting as the head of the Cato Institute, Allison published several theses indicating that the Federal Reserve was obsolete and needed to be abolished as it restricts power from the people and allows billionaire cronies to run banks globally. “I would get rid of the Federal Reserve because the volatility in the economy is primarily caused by the Fed,” Allison wrote in 2014 for the Cato Journal.

As an alternative, Allison argues that if we allow the market to regulate itself, it would be preferable to the Federal Reserve harming the stability of the financial system. “When the Fed is radically changing the money supply, distorting interest rates, and over-regulating the financial sector, it makes rational economic calculation difficult,” Allison wrote. “Markets do form bubbles, but the Fed makes them worse.”

Trump’s meeting is more than notable, it is almost groundbreaking. No president has dared to take power away from the Rothschilds’ and other billionaire elites that control all of the world’s banks. We could possibly be taking steps to eliminate one of the most corrupt banking schemes to ever take hold in this country.