Category: Flood News

How will our Lord judge Babylon by destroying all wealth in one hour as revealed in Rev 18:17 ?

I am convinced that Babylon is America and is represented by New York City.  It is the haunt of every unclean bird, animal and spirit.  Many nations grow rich because of her.  She leads the global alliance of governments (kings of the earth), global companies and all small and medium enterprises in the global supply chain (merchants) and the global shipping lines and ports cum financial centers (those who make their living by the sea) engaged in globalized trade.  Rev 18.  When God judges Babylon, these three groups allied with her will weep as described in Rev 18.

Since the 2008 Great Recession,  the major economies have intervened so much in the financial system and caused so much imbalance which I believe the damage is irreversible. 

The current lockdown in many nations as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic has disrupted the supply chain badly and the energy crisis is compounding the problem further.  Prior to the pandemic, the US was already staring at the collapse of the financial system and had to do QE to the tune of trillions of dollars.  The pandemic induced economic slowdown was the good excuse to do so because the other major economies would also face similar economic slowdown and would have done the same, and the dollar would be relatively unscathed. 

In 2020, the income of 50% of all American workers was USD 34,612 or less.  While the elites and their corporations are amassing so much wealth through manipulation of the financial system with all kinds of tools such as QE, repo, reverse repo, bond purchases and backstopping of all bonds.  The poor and rich divide could not have been greater at all times.  The current supply chain disruption and the energy crisis will cause the relative poor further pain through high inflation.  The financial collapse will happen sooner or later and chaos will erupt.  The elites have the most to lose if it happens.  So it is better for the elites to be prepared now through using political, financial and military tools to prevent the collapse and to control the relative dissenting poor.  We are actually seeing such preparation as the US and her allies continue to make use of digitization technologies to control the supply chain and pass discriminatory laws to exert total control over the population in the name of protecting public health.  (In contrast, China invests in the physical production of every link in the supply chain of products and energy.)

Charles Hugh Smith in his blog explained that the current exponential bull market run is caused by the Fed incentivizing the biggest gamblers that they will be bailed out, should they somehow lose, by offering them unlimited lines of credit and eliminate transparency in market pricing to mask their losses. This implicit guarantee that any bet on markets lofting higher will be a winning gamble rewards those making the riskiest bets. All the risks piling up as trillions of dollars are leveraged into ever larger can’t-lose bets have not evaporated, they’ve been transferred to the financial system. So when risk exceeds the carrying capacity of the system, it will be the system which implodes, not just punters’ riskiest, most highly leveraged bets.

Since the Lord has already foretold that He will judge Babylon by destroying all wealth in Rev 18:17,  it will happen.  Governments will not be able to control trigger events like an earthquake hitting a major financial city, or solar flare disrupting all transformers, or global coordinated cyber attack, etc.  How will our Lord destroy all wealth ?  Will it be a system implosion ? Wil it be a calamitious natural disaster ? How can we weather this event and even rejoice over His judgment ?  Rev 18:19. 

This is the summary of another article on preparation in anticipation of the US dollar collapse, Dollar Collapse Preparation Plan, by Mr Jim Rickards.  His free report can be found in https://dailyreckoning.com.

There are four scenarios that can usher in the collapse –  inflation, deflation, market collapse and financial warfare.

Inflation

In the scenario of inflation, it is simply the value of your money is diminishing.  Between 1977 to 1981, the US dollar lost half of its value in just five years.  The losers will be those who hold dollar deposit, insurance, retirement income, pensions, annuities and savings.  That is, any kind of fixed dollar amount is going to devalue in the event of inflation.  Presently with so much printing of money by the Federal Reserve and yet there seems to be very little inflation.  But it can come suddenly and we have to be ready for it.

Deflation

Deflation is the opposite of inflation.  Money actually worth more while other asset classes lose value. But governments hate deflation because the value of their debts goes up.  For people who borrow a lot from the bank to buy houses for example, and the value of the houses go down,  they will be caught with margin call from the bank.

Market Collapse

We had seen three such collapses in 1998, 2001 and 2008.  In 2008, people lost 50% of the value of their stocks and houses. And it came very quickly and almost out of nowhere.  Contagion can happen very quickly.  When the subprime loans were having problem, the US hedge funds were selling Japanese stocks to raise cash for margin call.  That is the kind of contagion which cause other stock markets to suffer as well.

Financial Warfare

Inflation, deflation and market collapse have happened before.  But financial warfare is new.   The British ever blockaded France during the Napoleonic wars to cut off French access to imported goods and war materials.  In the current environment, states can use stocks, bonds, commodities, derivatives and foreign exchange to fight other enemy states.  Financial warfare can also include cyber-warfare to hack computer systems. Today, we are so digitized that if these computer systems running the economy are hacked, everything can be brought to a halt.

Sidestepping The Crisis

In 1920, the Weimar Republic of Germany was the best example of a major industrialized economy that faced hyperinflation in history.  A load of bread, which used to cost one Reich mark, eventually cost 4 trillion marks.  Outrageous, isn’t it ?  One German guy, Hugo Stinnes, made a fortune instead and became the richest German then in 1922.  He had the right assets in energy and transportation.  If you have these hard assets such as factories,  you don’t get wiped out.   So how do we diversify ?  We can start with 10 to 20% of our investment portfolio in gold.  Gold is physical and not digital and cannot be wiped out unlike being in the digital accounts in banks.  Gold is a very good insurance policy. Gold should be kept in independent storage places and not in banks in case banks get closed down.  Keep some cash as part of the portfolio.  It is a good deflation hedge.  Gold and cash are hedges against inflation and deflation respectively.  Cash can also give us opportunity to buy important assets at the right price. We can keep money in the bank up to the insured limit only.  Investing in energy and transportation assets are great hedges against inflation. 

What I am trying to do here is to summarize the main points made in the article “Rickards’ reaction : a model for predicting financial collapse” written by Mr Jim Rickards.  The free article can be found in www.dailyreckoning.com. In his model known as REACTION, there are five stages of collapse –  RE-pricing, ACceleration, Transmission, Irrationality and Oblivion.  It is a good explanation of what will happen in each of these stages. 

Stage 1 : Re-pricng

A market meltdown occurs with the rapid re-pricing of a particular instrument or asset class.  Take for an example in Tesla.  Presently it is so over-valued even though the company is losing billions of dollars and running on unpayable debt.  One day, if a prominent analyst can report that it is destroying value and heading towards bankruptcy and the stock will crash suddenly and dramatically.  Other triggers can be an election result or a criminal complaint.  Wishful expectation can outweigh reality at the moment but when reality takes over,  the asset will be re-priced. 

Stage 2 : Acceleration

Acceleration happens when a repricing overshoots the new reality and continues based on momentum and market dynamics.  The main causes are margin, leverage and stop losses.  Leverage are basically bets in markets.  An explicit leverage appears on the balance sheet in the form of bank loans, repurchase agreements or securities lending agreements.  An implicit leverage exists off balance sheet in the form of derivatives such as options, swaps or futures.  As a result, such leverage amplifies whatever non leverage gain or loss made in markets. To prevent such heavy losses, such bets made by funds can be automated to conduct selling.  And different levels of stop loss selling can be activated as a result as one level selling triggers another and spiraling downwards can happen as a result.  The most famous example was the Oct 1987 stock market crash known as “Black Monday”.  Dow fell 22.6%.  Much of the selling pressure came from automated “portfolio insurance” programs.

Stage 3 : Transmission

The next stage, transmission or commonly known as contagion, occurs when disruptions in one market spread to other markets which seem unrelated or uncorrelated with the initial market.  Take the example of the 2008 crisis.  The crisis was caused by subprime loans in the US.  Because the US hedge funds were unable to off-load the toxic mortgages,  they had to sell their holding of Japanese stocks to raise cash to meet margin calls on the mortgages.  Today, the markets are so densely connected and so contagion will affect all markets altogether.

Stage 4 : Irrationality

Investors know that at the end, only cash is money and all stocks and bonds are merely assets.  When contagion happens, investors may panic and want to convert all assets into money by selling all their assets.  Panic selling leads to more irrational panic selling sending prices spiraling downwards.  When everyone wanted their money back in previous crises such as in 2008, central banks printed money and made it available through asset purchases and swap lines.  The oblivion stage was avoided so far.

Stage 5 : Oblivion

In the next panic, IMF is likely to be relied on for liquidity.  If it still fails, the response will be to freeze all accounts at the banks and brokers. This stage is the oblivion stage or complete system collapse.  In 1933, all banks were closed in the US for 8 days.  Near collapses happened in 1987, 1994, 1998 and 2008.  Total collapse can happen with a number of catalysts such as social unrest, war, infrastructure failure or natural disaster.  More likely, there will be a combination of these events in which one collapse cascades into another and eventually cause a total collapse. As seen so far, the elites have the powerful political, financial and military tools at their disposal to truncate the near collapse. When total collapse happens, the elites have the most to lose.

(I believe God will judge this Babylonian system mentioned in Rev 18:17 by destroying all wealth in one hour through a combination of the above-mentioned catalysts – possibly a natural disaster such as a major earthquake devastating a major financial city or infrastructure failure caused by a solar flare, meteorite hit, or cyber or physical terrorist acts.)

Conclusion

If you prepare and the disruption does not reach total collapse stage, you are none the poorer.  But if you do not prepare and the total collapse comes,  you will suffer the consequences. Either the banks collapse or closed, you cannot lay hold of your money.  So the solution is to look at alternatives in which your money cannot be frozen.  Examples are silver and gold, and physical cash.

For further reading : https://gnseconomics.com/2020/02/10/the-stages-of-the-collapse/

The US economy was already showing sign of distress in September 2019 when the Federal Reserve had to conduct repo action by pumping hundreds of billions into the market.  The covid-19 pandemic simply amplified the distress.  The Fed created so much new money out of thin air to enable the US government to provide stimulus package to the economy in March 2020.  The balance sheet had set new record.  The G4 (US, EU, UK, Japan) balance sheet will grow from USD 16.5 trillion in 2019 to 29.5 trillion in 2022.

(What is a repo ?  When enacting a repo operation, the US central bank buys government securities from banks with predetermined repurchase dates. The offerings create temporary liquidity for the financial system, adding more funds to the plumbing that connects banks, accounts, and transactions.)

Sadly, all these monies went to bankroll the government debt and backstop all the bonds of almost all major corporations including zombie ones.  Think of what the zombie CEOs would do with the easy helicopter money.  They bought back the shares of the companies and sent the stock market into record frenzy heights creating the biggest disconnect between the stock market and the real economy.  No longer is the stock market the barometer of the health of the economy.  While the big corporations, including zombie corporations, have easy access to such money,  the SMEs will close in record numbers.

Imagine how the rich and the poor Americans will spend their stimulus check of USD 1200.  The rich will have no need of this money and put it in stock or Bitcoin and putting this USD 1200 into Bitcoin in March 2020 will yield USD 4000 in Jan 2021, while the poor will have spent it on basic necessities.  This has caused the biggest rich and poor divide.  The rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer.

The interest rates from central banks are now at record low between near zero to negative even.   Imagine now the failing states like Italy, Spain and Portugal continue to get zero or negative interest loans from ECB to bankroll their deficits indefinitely.   The central bank of Japan is now the only sole buyer of the government bonds and the government now owns 50% of the stock market.  Italy, Spain and Portugal are imitating what Japan is doing.

I can see no solution at all except for the G4 central banks to continue to print money to finance everything without any end in sight.

How will this crazy imbalance end ?   I believe the judgment of all wealth by God mentioned in Rev 18 will be the final outcome.  The wealth of US and all who grow rich because of her will be destroyed.  All the kings of the earth (governments), merchants (global MNCs, SMEs and their supply chain components) and those who make their living by the sea (global ports cum financial centres) will weep when the judgment comes.  I believe the prophecy in Scripture – that the fourth empire under the Antichrist will emerge to lead the disillusioned world – will be fulfilled after this destruction of wealth.

If not for the continual regular intervention of central banks, the global financial system will have collapsed.  We can see the unprecedented market intervention firepower that went from desperate to absurd in the last decade timeline.

It was clear that the global financial system was in serious trouble by the end of 2019.  And with the pandemic lockdown in the first quarter of 2020, the market intervention by the central banks, especially the Fed, went from desperate to absurd.  The Fed ended up backstopping U.S. Treasury markets, corporate commercial-paper and municipal bond markets and short-term money-markets. The Fed essentially socialized the markets.  With such absurd socialization of all major markets by major central banks, the investors are pushed to even riskier financial market products. The balance sheets of central banks are now investment vehicles with no boundaries.  The whole system is now so extremely fragile which requires even bigger bailout to stop it from implosion.  The QE addiction is absolute and without regular infusion of QE drugs, the system will collapse.

Will the global financial system collapse by September 2022 ?

(All information is gleaned and re-presented for easy reading from the following article.  https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/extremely-dangerous-game-central-bankers-extend-pretend-has-increased-risk-catastrophic/ )

Rev 18:1-10

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his glory. ² And he called out with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast. For all nations have drunk the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.” Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues; for her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. Pay her back as she herself has paid back others, and repay her double for her deeds; mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed.  As she glorified herself and lived in luxury, so give her a like measure of torment and mourning, since in her heart she says, ‘I sit as a queen, I am no widow, and mourning I shall never see.’  For this reason her plagues will come in a single day, death and mourning and famine, and she will be burned up with fire; for mighty is the Lord God who has judged her.” And the kings of the earth, who committed sexual immorality and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning. ¹⁰ They will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, “Alas! Alas! You great city, you mighty city, Babylon! For in a single hour your judgment has come.”

In my book, The Coming Economic Flood, I recounted that God gave me some visions and the very first vision, the 911 terrorist attack on World Trade Center, was the judgment on the symbol of the Babylonian system.  That financial system is unmistakably the present capitalism in which all the global economies are engaged in globalized trade led by the United States with her reserve currency. Just as heaven is sometimes depicted as a city – the New Jerusalem – or sometimes as the new heaven descending on the new earth, likewise Babylon can be depicted as the leading financial city or the whole globalised system of governments, global businesses and major seaports cum financial centers.

It is no coincidence then that New York City was selected among several cities to site the Statue of Liberty eventually. (Watch the videos for the amazing history of this statue.) All the excesses of sins of pleasure-seeking (sex, pornography, sexual perversion and other indulgences) and money-making originate from this city and proliferate throughout the whole world. Presently the city has the highest coronavirus infection of all cities in the US and also faces one of the worst riots in history.  It is no coincidence again that the newspapers described the city as burning. The United Nations and World Bank are also headquartered in this city. New York City perfectly fits the description of the city mentioned in Rev 18:1-10. (Watch the following videos for the amazing “coincidences”.)

Due to the Fed Reserve still being able to get away with printing much money to prop up the financial system at this moment, we will continue to watch whether she will eventually go up in smoke and make every government and merchant weep.

Considering all the above evidence and current events, is New York City the Babylon of the end times ?

https://www.youtubetrimmer.com/view/?v=JX6S0ZSbtQ0&start=536&end=1191

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QevlCDr-0Y

Postscript (17 July 2024) :

Here is another explanation of Mystery Babylon from the Youtube channel .

I hope to provide a simple summary of what I understand about financial derivatives from various good articles and YouTube videos in the net. I hope to explain my God given conviction of an economic flood or reset that the world will face soon with current observation of events in the financial markets. Will the pandemic be the catalyst that cause it through the unraveling of the derivatives bubble ?

The real cause of the 2008 financial crisis was the proliferation of unregulated derivatives during that time. These are complicated financial products that derive their value from an underlying asset or index.  Let us look at the housing mortgage backed securities (MBS) as the asset example.

The US housing mortgages were sold to Fannie Mae to relieve the banks of more funds for lending.  Fannie Mae resold them in a package of other mortgages in the secondary market.  A hedge fund or investment bank then divided the MBS into different portions because of different default risks and then combined with other similar risk levels of other MBS into a tranche and resold that tranche to other hedge funds.  Then the mortgage defaults happened and caused the 2008 crisis. These financial products were so complicated that nobody knew which part of the MBS was toxic, so nobody knew the actual value of the MBS.  The secondary market shut down and banks and hedge funds were unable to sell the derivatives that were declining in value. Soon, banks stopped lending to each other altogether to conserve cash.

This financial derivatives market is complicated and unregulated.  The value of these products are difficult to ascertain.  It probably started as a financial tool to mitigate risks but has now turned into one monstrous gambling game.  Since the 2008 financial crisis, nothing much has changed as far as regulation is concerned. The speculation in the financial derivatives has risen to new heights as a result.  Presently, by some estimates, the derivatives bubble can be anywhere between USD 600 trillion and USD 1.4 quadrillion.  The exposure of the major banks to this bubble is staggering. Warren Buffet called these derivatives financial weapons of mass destruction. And IMF stated that the Deutsche Bank is the biggest threat to the global financial system.  Watch the following video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSsH2dsW5-c

The following article on Foreign Policy website gave the predictions of 12 leading thinkers from around the world concerning the global order after the pandemic.

These are the main predictions in the authors’ own words that I gleaned from the article :

1. The pandemic will strengthen the state and reinforce nationalism. Governments of all types will adopt emergency measures to manage the crisis, and many will be loath to relinquish these new powers when the crisis is over.
2. The coronavirus pandemic could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of economic globalization.
3. The COVID-19 pandemic will not fundamentally alter global economic directions. It will only accelerate a change that had already begun: a move away from U.S.-centric globalization to a more China-centric globalization.
4. Given the economic damage and social collapse that is unfolding, it is hard to see anything other than a reinforcement of the movement toward nationalism, great-power rivalry, strategic decoupling, and the like.
5. COVID-19 is undermining the basic tenets of global manufacturing. Companies will now rethink and shrink the multi-step, multi-country supply chains that dominate production today. Governments will intervene forcing what they consider strategic industries to have domestic backup plans and reserves. Profitability will fall, but supply stability should rise.
6. Given the scale of financial market losses the world has experienced since February, companies are likely to come out of this pandemic decidedly gun-shy about the just-in-time model and about globally dispersed production. The result could be a dramatic new stage in global capitalism, in which supply chains are brought closer to home and filled with redundancies to protect against future disruption. That may cut into companies’ near-term profits but render the entire system more resilient.
7. I would expect many countries will have difficulty recovering from the crisis, with state weakness and failed states becoming an even more prevalent feature of the world.

If failed states and partial deglobalisation are a reality after the pandemic, let Christendom in each country discern how it will affect them and prepare to weather it. Because not all will be living in cities that make their living by the sea. Rev 18:17.  Or living in cities that are major manufacturing hubs.  Rev 18:15.

Zeph 2:3

Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
you who do what he commands.
Seek righteousness, seek humility;
perhaps you will be sheltered
on the day of the Lord’s anger.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/20/world-order-after-coroanvirus-pandemic/

After Sep 2015 in which USD 11 trillion dollars were wiped out of the global stock markets and the markets recovered strongly from then,  I sought the Lord whether the economic flood would be the next.  (I was given the vision of 911 attack in Sep 2001, the vision of the global recession in Sep 2008, and the global market crisis in Sep 2015 as recounted in my book, The Coming Economic Flood.)

(http://www.jcmanifesto.org/when-will-the-global-financial-system-finally-collapse/ )

I was told to read on the parable of the vineyard and it was only after three attempts in failing to recover the rent proceeds from the tenants that the landowner finally came and destroyed all these wicked tenants.   I am now wondering if this pandemic is the catalyst that will cause the economic flood.  Whether this coming flood is the final flood that causes the global economy to collapse,  it is definitely unprecedented in history.  (God is ever so patient and He may give some more time for some to come out of Babylon before the plagues of mourning, death and famine hit.  2 Chron 7:13-14.)

With many countries in lockdown for weeks now, if not months of partial lockdown,  it is clear that their economies will suffer recession.   But looking at the various problems that are already surfacing before the end of 2019,  the likelihood of it escalating to a depression is very probable.

Here is an article that believes the corporate debt reckoning is coming.

Quote

“Total U.S. non-financial corporate debt sits at just under $10 trillion, a record 47% of GDP. One in six U.S. companies is now a zombie, meaning their interest expenses exceed their earnings before interest and taxes. As of year-end 2019, the percentage of listed companies in the U.S. losing money over 12 months sat close to 40%. In the 12 months to November, non-financial S&P 500 cash balances had declined by 11%, the largest percentage decline since at least 1980…With economic uncertainty at an extreme and yields spiking, who is going to lend to zombies right now? Exacerbating that problem, we are now at the start of the debt-maturity wall we’ve warned about for years. Roughly $840 billion of bonds rated BBB or below in the U.S. are set to come due this year…

Corporate debt was the defining excess of the past decade’s bull run. Buybacks were funded by debt — over the past half decade, S&P 500 companies have issued $2.5 trillion in debt to afford $2.7 trillion in buybacks. Debt has subsidized the skyrocketing salaries of CEOs. Cheap debt has enabled private equity to take over and financialize Main Street. How severe the consequences will be obviously depends on how long COVID-19 keeps the world locked down. However, a reckoning with debt-fueled corporate greed is coming, regardless of Fed bond buying or government stimulus.”

Unquote

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/corporate-debt-reckoning-coming

Here is another article tracking the unemployment figures right now and comparing with the Great Depression in the 1930s.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/03/recession-depression-data-coronavirus

Whether it is a great recession or a depression,  these are times of testing whether we are truly wise and faithful servants to other servants or sheep to the least of the brothers.  All praise and glory to our Lord.

The following article probably explained why the masses are not enjoying more jobs and higher wages despite the bull run of stock markets.  We are now seeing the social unrest in several countries around the world –  France, Lebanon, Chile, Hong Kong and Spain.

“The one constant across the media-political spectrum is an unblinking focus on the stock market as a barometer of the national economy: every major media outlet from the New York Times to Fox News prominently displays stock market action, and TV news anchors’ expressions reflect the media’s emotional promotion of the market as the end all to be all: if stocks rose, the anchors are smiling and chirpy, and if the market fell then their expressions are downcast and dour.

This cheerleading of the stock market is based on an implicit assumption that the rising stock market raises all boats: a rising market is assumed to reflect an expansion of sales and profits that trickle down to the masses in higher wages, more jobs and rising 401K retirement accounts.

The reality is starkly different: the vast majority of the gains generated by a rising stock market flow to the top 10% households who own 93% of all financial assets, and the gains within the top 10% are highly concentrated in the top .01% of financiers, super-wealthy families and corporate managers who have reaped the vast majority of the past decade of stock market gains. The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017 and 2018 and 2019.  America’s richest 1% now own as much wealth as the middle and lower classes combined…As my friend Adam T recently observed : when we cheer the rising stock market, we’re celebrating the super-rich getting even richer. Why are we celebrating an unprecedented widening of wealth inequality that erodes democracy (because the super-wealthy buy political influence) and the social contract (as the vast majority of wealth and power flow to the top .01%)?

Soaring wealth inequality is extremely destabilizing politically, socially and economically : much of the social unrest breaking out around the world can be traced to the political, social and financial disenfranchisement of the masses by super-wealthy elites.

Economically, soaring inequality concentrates and capital and power in the hands of the few, creating fertile ground for cartels and monopolies which raise costs without generating better services or more jobs. This dynamic is easily visible in the US.

The US only pretends to have free markets :  From plane tickets to cellphone bills, monopoly power costs American consumers billions of dollars a year. Politically, the 90% who are losing ground seek political redress, generating tension in a political system dominated by the super-wealthy. Since the political machinery is controlled by the elite, the bottom 90%’s efforts to gain political redress will fail: Medicare for All (to take one example of many) is just an expansion of rapacious sickcare cartels that further concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.”

– Charles Hugh Smith.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/11/stock-market-cheerleading-why-do-we.html

In James 5:1-5,  it is mentioned that God will make right this injustice of exploiting the poor workers by the wealthy in the last days.  Will this development be a sign of the coming economic collapse ?  Hong Kong, being one of the world’s major seaports cum financial centers, will be among those who make their living by the sea and will weep when the Babylonian system is destroyed and all wealth is destroyed.  Rev 18:17.