In June 2007, EVR published a two-part article series entitled Flying Scrolls and Baskets: A Vision of Today. It is an exposition of Zechariah 5. Amazingly, this short chapter of only 11 verses, contains two separate but important visions of the endtimes. Readers may recall the account of a giant scroll that is levitating in the air (verses 1 to 4). Right after this, the angel speaking to Zechariah shows him another vision. We then see a strange picture of an ephah (measuring basket) being carried by two women with the wings of storks.

We concluded that the false witness (lying) and the stealing being mentioned specifically had to do with the global idolatrous commercialism and corruption of all human life on earth of the last days, depicted in the second vision. Pinpointed were the two sins that are mainly responsible for the filthy idolatry that was shown in the flying ephah—lying and stealing.

Encompassed in these visions, by implication, was everything from the elevation of manipulative and global monetary systems, fiat money, capitalism, competitive globalism based on the vested interest of intertwined world-wide trading systems, accounting shenanigans, corporatism and debt-based wealth to grand larceny All together it represents that heaving mass of Mammonism—a world that has chosen Money over God.

According to the visions, the corrosiveness and imbalances of these systems literally consumed “the timber thereof and the stones thereof” (Zechariah 5:4), this symbolizing the structure of mankind’s globalized foundation. For such systems to prosper—prospering here meaning nothing more than giving the semblance of success, though its underpinnings are deceitful and not sustainable—they depend upon two impulses alone. What are these? To no surprise, the very two sins of stealing and false witness. We invite you to read the entire two-part article which can be found on our website.

We again raise the issues of “lying and stealing” as these continue to become more organized, sophisticated and globalized than ever before in history. Again, this trend we interpret to be aligned with the prophesied conditions that Zechariah foresaw. We next list just a few statistics from around the globe that are emblematic of this state.

• According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA, and we here quote from a Special Report of the Bank Credit Analyst dated May 24, 2011) margins of overseas business have swung up relatively suddenly. Between 2000 and 2008, profit margins of overseas management companies (most of these just a mail drop on a sub-tropical island somewhere) rose from 25.8% to 57%. These very same management companies only accounted for 0.1% of total overseas revenues! Alternatively, segmenting overseas profits by country, we discover that profit margins in “Other Western Hemisphere” exploded from 37% to 103.7%. That category is a catch-all that includes most tax havens. We are not sure how a profit margin can be greater than 100%. But apparently, this is now possible in the corrupt and weird world of multi-national corporation profits.
• The 2005 UNODC World Drug Report estimated the worldwide drug trade at $320 billion.
• A 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 psychiatrists who wrote the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies. Not surprisingly, in 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotic became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States. – Aljazeera.net, July 12, 2011
• In the United States, UNODC estimates that smugglers are paid around $7 billion to bring 2.7 million Latin Americans over the border every year. Though it would seem as though this equates to a $7 billion outflow from developing countries, in fact this amount is more than made up in the $20 billion in remittances which migrants send back to Latin America every year.
• In 2005, TRAFFIC Europe estimated that the total legal trade in wildlife (not including fish and timber which are discussed in separate sections of this report) was worth $22.8 billion. Illegal trade is estimated to be around one-third of the legal trade which would set it at a range between $7.6 and $8.3 billion.
• In January 2011, approximately 300 economists signed a letter urging the American Economic Association, (AEA) the world’s largest association of economists, to adopt an ethics code. The letter cited a study that found that the vast majority of economists did not reveal their private affiliations when writing academic papers on financial regulatory reform or opinion pieces in newspapers. It also cited a Reuters investigation of lack of disclosure of consulting gigs and directorships in congressional testimony. Only a handful of its 18,000 members have bothered to offer any input. – Reuters, July 8, 2011
• The companies whose brands are copied measure counterfeiting according to how much they lose as a result of the practice. In his book, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, Moisés Naím cites an Interpol figure that estimates global commercial losses due to counterfeiting at around $500 billion.
• The most recent report by Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries,found that illicit outflows have increased to a range of US$1.26 trillion to US$1.44 trillion in 2008 and that, on average, developing countries lost between US$725 billion to US$810 billion per year over the nine-year period 2000-2008. Illicit flows increased in current dollar terms by 18.0 percent per annum from US$369.3 billion at the start of the decade to US$1.26 trillion in 2008. When adjusted for inflation, the real growth of such outflows was 12.7 percent.

A recent best-seller on the New York Time list is John Mauldin’s book, Endgame. While it certainly does not intone “end of world” hysteria, from what we can gather (we have only read overviews of the book), as the crackpot Harold Camping has again managed to achieve, the populist Mr. Mauldin does point out quite a number of trends that seem to be coming to an end.

Indeed, many long-running secular trends and developments are coming to an endpoint. We have written on many of these in recent decades, though they may not yet have been so popularly evident then. Certainly, the advent of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and five years of a residential real estate slump in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world have sharpened people’s senses to such perspectives.

Actually, the focus of this article is not to provide yet another list of “ends and trends” but to point to a significant shift that is occurring in the perspectives of policymakers and powerbrokers around the world. They have begun to think more pointedly and openly in terms of endpoints and endgames.

How so? The earth to them is now increasingly seen as a finite, crowded, under-resourced little planet. As such, the objective must be to secure natural resourcea … to hoard and stockpile them. Farmland and arable land must be staked and contracted to ensure long-term food security. No matter that such actions might drive up the prices of sustenance materials such as grains and energy.

In short, no longer is “open market” capitalism seen to be producing a bigger pie that can allow all of the world’s populace to share in a bigger piece. Rather, the dominant economic systems of mankind’s world are now sputtering — the Keynesian “endpoint” having been reached. The Keynesian policies of pump priming demand through heightened government spending—now culminating in massive budget deficits in the advanced-nation world—have become impotent and destructive (meaning the stimulative manipulations and deficit spending of governments have reached their effective limits).

Mankind’s money mirage of what is termed “gross domestic product (GDP) is failing to provide sufficient economic growth to preserve the solvency of an over-indebted world. Therefore, attitudes and strategies have changed. Gamesmanship and brinksmanship —in other words, endgames—become the necessary strategies in the eyes of geopolitical strategists and many investors. A culture of hoarding and predation comes to the fore. For some to prosper and advance; others must therefore bear the costs.

This shift to a rather carnivorous and desperate market behaviour ranks on the same level as the “laws of the jungle.” We excerpt a paragraph from the Global Spin of August 2009 (also published by this writer), which illustrates similar animal behaviour.

“The spadefoot frog makes its home in Australia. It is an explosively breeding, desert-dwelling amphibian. It may burrow underground for years, waiting for a seasonal rain or flood. However, when this “liquidity event” arrives, a period of frenzied mating ensues. Incredibly, in a space of as little as a month, its eggs advance through the tadpole stage to full metamorphosis. It needs to quickly reach adulthood before the pools of water again dry up. Fascinatingly, as the water puddles begin to get tepid, murky and shallow, the tadpoles grow teeth … 3 rows of them. They then start eating each other to accelerate the growth of the survivors. Eventually, the frog must go back underground in order to survive the next dry season. Sound a little like today’s capital markets?”

It only follows that such endgame “winner-take-all” strategies as noted in the commodity and money world, can only be pursued by a small minority. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and China have been buying or leasing vast tracts of agricultural land (mostly in Africa). Large (and small) financial institutions and private investors have been charging into commodity markets over recent years.

The problem, however, is this: Commodities such as food and metals (i.e. copper, aluminums, silver … etc.) are an extremely small asset class. Compared to the value of global financial securities (these valued perhaps as high as $200 trillion) commodities represent little more that a drop in the bucket. For example, consider that the entire consumption of wheat in the world (even at recently elevated prices) amounts to only perhaps $250 billion per annum, the equivalent to one-eighth of a percent of worldwide financial wealth.

Generally, commodities are materials that are consumed and not items of wealth to be hoarded. They are “flow items” and not “assets.” The point to realize, then, is that hoarding short-life commodities with the objective of profiting from their rise in price has an unfortunate and destructive side effect. It disadvantages those who can no longer afford their purchase for living needs.

Consider that for most people in the world, food purchases account to between 25 to 50% of a household’s budget. Comparatively, the average North American household spends only 10-11% of their budget on food. Therefore, when asset managers begin to hoard commodities or manipulate their price upward, it causes excruciating hardships for billions around the globe. In this late, great era of advanced globalization and financialization, virtually all commodities are priced uniformly around the globe and their price can be manipulated though various financial instruments..

We see here that, in their endgame actions, wealthy countries, investors and/or large financial institutions disadvantage the majority—namely those that are relatively poorer or already disadvantaged. Yet, it is an accepted tactic in the investment world.

Several prophetic Bible verses speak of similar behavioural traits and conditions as we see becoming dominant in the world wide today: We here reference just two. Firstly, James, the epistle writer, prophesies the following:

“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter” (James 5:1-5).

Clearly outlined here is “hoarding” and a global condition where the rich prosper at the painful inconveniences of the masses. Finally, in Revelation is mentioned, that the cost of food will soar so high that it will require a full days wages for a subsistence level of calories. “Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!” (Revelation 6:6). We, of course, certainly cannot conclude what the cause of this condition of high food prices will be in that future Tribulation period. Nevertheless, it likely is not without significance that today we can already discern just how possible are such outcomes … and possibly very soon.