Well, in truth, we had a de facto collapse in 2008 which was addressed with $4 trillion in QE and, ultimately, a few trillion in Taxpayer subsidies. The proverbial can was kicked down the road in order to enable the insider elitists to continue looting as much wealth as possible from the system. A fractional reserve banking system will always eventually collapse. The fraction of reserves is allowed to become smaller over time and the amount of unpayable debt balloons to the point of explosion.

I would suggest that the massive debt implosion about to happen in the energy sector will be the trigger point for a collapse that can’t be prevented this time.

With that in mind, Zerohedge reposted a Reuters article which is reporting that the Italian banking system is collapsing – LINK.   What’s that got to do with the U.S. financial system, you might ask?  Derivatives.  Every single big bank in the world is interconnected through the insidiously toxic international web of OTC derivatives.

Someone will lose big on Italian credit default swaps and not be able to pay their counterparty.  The counterparty may have offloaded some of that risk and  fail to stand as a counterparty on the risk it laid off.  And so on down the line.  The banks themselves do not know the extent of true counterparty risk exposure.  Internally employees lie to risk managers.  Risk managers knowingly and unknowingly lie to the board.  The CEO then knowingly and unknowingly lies to the Fed and other Central Banks about that bank’s specific derivatives exposure.   I witnessed this first-hand in the 1990s’ when derivatives were just beginning to blossom as a wealth-extracting device for Wall Street.

I bring all this up because one of Bill Murphy’s readers sent him a letter that should, at the very least, raise the hair on the back of your neck.  I emailed Bill, with whom I communicate several times per day every day and asked him about the credibility of the person who submitted this letter:  “Well written, little drama, just input. I couldn’t make up a story like that. This is just a regular guy ho believes our story and follows you too. No reason for him to send this except to point it out. If I thought a bit bogus, I would never have run it. No reason for the girl to make that up and, of all people, one of the Koch brothers.”

So with that, here’s the letter published by LeMetropole Cafe/Bill Murphy’s Midas report:

This email from a fellow Café member will catch your attention. It is edited to keep the identity of the sender private, but the essence of what was presented is striking…

Bill,
I have been working in a chemical plant and have been there for 39 years. We have about 400 people working at the site. I can’t talk to anyone about what is going on with the financial system because nobody wants to hear any of this, they either don’t believe it or their eyes glaze over and they change the subject. I gave up trying to tell people what is coming years ago.

There is one man at the plant that knows what is going on with the worldwide financial system. He is the production superintendent for the plant, reports to only the plant manager, I have two supervisors between him and myself. Last night he called me about 8pm, which was very unusual because we normally stay in touch through email or sometimes, very seldom though, he comes to the unit I work in and we discuss what is going on at that time. His daughter works for Koch Industries in Wichita in marketing. She called him yesterday and told him they had a meeting with one of the Koch brothers giving the meeting. He came out and told his employees that we were about to go into unprecedented times. He said that their company was cash rich and they would be able to ride out the coming storm. One of her coworkers asked if we were going to have a recession or a depression. Mr. Koch answered that no we were going to have an economic collapse with a 40% devaluation of the dollar. I know you know who these Koch brothers are, with the money and inside connections they have wouldn’t you presume they have inside information.

My superintendent’s daughter told her father that Mr. Koch sounded just like him with the speech he gave, because her father has been telling his 2 daughters for years to get ready for the collapse and they have. My job allows me to read probably 11 hours a night when I work days and on weekend days. I started researching our financial system in 2008 because of what went down back then. It is totally amazing to me now that we have a system that is totally manipulated by TPTB constantly and people don’t have a clue about what is really going on. We really do live in the Matrix.
R

Time will tell if this information proves to be prophetic.  Someone asked me today if I thought a collapse was right around the corner.  I answered that, with the enormous effort being exerted by the Fed and other western Central Banks to keep the system from collapsing, there’s no way to know with any reasonable degree of accuracy.  But I said that I would be surprised if the system makes through 2016 intact.