For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.

And it’s a lot closer than you may think.

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.

According to the IMF forecast, whomever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy.

Most people aren’t prepared for this. They aren’t even aware it’s that close. Listen to experts of various stripes, and they will tell you this moment is decades away. The most bearish will put the figure in the mid-2020s.

China’s economy will be the world’s largest within five years or so.

But they’re miscounting. They’re only comparing the gross domestic products of the two countries using current exchange rates.

That’s a largely meaningless comparison in real terms. Exchange rates change quickly. And China’s exchange rates are phony. China artificially undervalues its currency, the renminbi, through massive intervention in the markets.

The comparison that really matters

The IMF in its analysis looks beyond exchange rates to the true, real terms picture of the economies using “purchasing power parities.” That compares what people earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.

Under PPP, the Chinese economy will expand from $11.2 trillion this year to $19 trillion in 2016. Meanwhile the size of the U.S. economy will rise from $15.2 trillion to $18.8 trillion. That would take America’s share of the world output down to 17.7%, the lowest in modern times. China’s would reach 18%, and rising.

Just 10 years ago, the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s.

MF Global Looted Customers’ Accounts Via Internal Bank Run

Big players got warning ahead of time that financial broker was set to collapse

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Days before the doomed financial broker filed for bankruptcy, MF Global conducted “unexplained wire transfers” that led to a $900 million shortfall in client funds, leading customers like Gerald Celente to learn that their accounts had been looted and setting the precedent for internal bank runs as more big firms go bust.

According to Bloomberg, “Examiners from CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures exchange, found unexplained wire transfers at MF Global Inc. and a $900 million shortfall in client funds during the weekend the failing broker was talking with possible buyers, a person briefed on the matter said.”

CME noticed the missing funds on October 30, but MF Global didn’t inform the Commodity Futures Trading Commission until the day after, suggesting that the transfers were made, “in a manner that may have been designed to avoid detection,” according to CME.

The suspicious cash movements are now being probed by the U.S. Justice Department.

MF Global trustee James Giddens said in a court filing yesterday that customers would get back 60 per cent of their account funds, prompting fury amongst clients, many of whom used their accounts for business collateral and living expenses.

Although individuals were burned by the broker’s downfall, larger clients were protected from the fallout because they had the miraculous fortune of withdrawing all their funds just weeks before the collapse.

“Both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were charged with overseeing MF Global, their clearing member. If we are to believe them, they had no idea of any difficulties within the firm before customer accounts went missing just a few days before the collapse. But someone clearly knew of the cratering positions and imminent collapse of MF Global, as billions of dollars of accounts were “coincidentally” withdrawn,” writes Huffington Post’s Daniel Dicker, noting how funds in accounts owned by the billionaire Koch brothers were withdrawn just in time, clearly suggesting that big players got a “heads up” that MF Global was going down.

Although the collapse of MF Global was assured when it came to light that the broker was heavily exposed to the European debt crisis, causing the broker’s stock price to plummet, Fox Business reports that numerous circumstances indicate the downfall was in the works weeks before, drawing attention to the fact that employees didn’t receive commissions for the third quarter and were fired two weeks before the firm filed for bankruptcy.

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One of the victims of the scandal, popular trends forecaster Gerald Celente, joined Alex Jones on Infowars Nightly News to detail how a six figure sum was looted from his gold futures account, which, unbeknownst to Celente, was being held under the auspices of an MF Global subsidiary.

As the Financial Times reported, the hundreds of millions in looted funds from customers’ accounts later “turned up at JPMorgan Chase, the failed broker-dealer’s custody bank.”

Despite his account being fully funded, Celente was hit by a margin call as Chapter 11 trustees stepped in to take control of his funds, leaving his account empty thereby closing his positions and preventing him from taking physical delivery of his gold which was due in December. When Celente rejected demands to transfer more money into the account it was hastily closed.

Speaking with Alex Jones, Celente expressed his fury at the move, labeling it an example of “economic martial law,” and speculating that the real reason for the looting was because the broker never had the gold and silver to deliver in the first place.

Celente encouraged Americans to cash out of all gold ETFs and withdraw their funds from the bank because “they are going to steal all our money”.

The trends forecaster savaged MF Global CEO Jon Corzine, labeling him a “cheap SOB” who was responsible for the collapse because of his using customer funds to bet on losing European bonds.

“How come he’s not in jail, because he’s one of the white shoe boys from the Goldman Sachs crowd,” Celente fumed, going so far as to say Corzine “should have died” in his recent car accident.

Celente said that he had sufficient funds stored in a safe place that could not be looted and that if anyone did try to steal them and threaten his life he wouldn’t hesitate to ‘blow their brains out’.

Celente reiterated his plea to Americans to withdraw all their money from the banks and leave only operating capital in their accounts, warning that “the merger of state and corporate powers” has brought “fascism” to America.