There's no need to gamble with your retirement.

I'm a huge advocate of saving for retirement the most obvious and simple and time tested way possible: storing gold and silver bullion coins.  My entire self retirement program is based on this.  I have a small pension from IBM and I trade stocks for fun and profit but none of this is my retirement.  Why?  Because IBM and social security cannot be counted on it the future and stock trading is gambling, not an income generation source.

The con men running the show on one hand debase the currency so that you will not hoard it.  It is a written part of their strategy to slowly debase.  They make no effort to hide it: they want to debase at 2% annually.  This is an exponential function and I am not the only one who understands this by any means.  Because of this we all inherently know we have to participate in markets with the acronym commonly using being TINA (There Is No Alternative).

But, like everything government says, it's an obfuscated lie; the stock market is just another part of the Ponzi.

If you stored your wealth in a form that held its value then that money would be taken out of the economy and they don't want that.  The want you to consume so that their buddies the industrialists can have the cash flow that is needed to make the monthly payment on their junk bonds.  But don't worry, if you leave your money in the market then it will keep up with inflation.

OR so they tell you.

But where do they ever tell you about risks inherent in gambling?  When you save you take no risks and that is not the friend of the con men who need you to risk your retirement wealth.  They need you to gamble in their casino. They know that the longer you have your wealth at risk in their game, the more purchasing power they will be able to steal from it.  They also fail to mention that while stocks may appear to keep up with inflation, so do taxes!  Uncle Sam treats inflation gains as actual gains instead of just keeping your head above water in terms of purchasing power (which is all savers are really trying to accomplish).  So when someone says they made $100k in the markets they are really saying "and government let me keep about 3/4 of it".

Now let's talk about physical gold and silver.  There is no trading it.  There are no margin calls.  There is no leverage.  THERE IS NO RISK.  It cannot go BK. Never has, never will.  It's money in every country.  Ask any insurance company actuary about the dollar value of risk.  It's called an insurance premium and insurance doesn't come free.  Or even cheap.  And sometimes you buy it and the insurance company defaults on you so you don't get what you paid for.

And forget what you hear about the risk and difficulty of storing metals.  50 gold coins fit in one hand and that's about $100K.  Even if you have $1million in gold it easily fits in a briefcase.  Silver is a bit more difficult but even $500k worth really isn't a huge problem to store and hide well at home.  And what about the risk of government nationalizing your retirement account, putting your bank on holiday, and instituting capital controls?  Fools who try to tell me I am taking a risk by holding my own physical gold and silver simply do not understand what complete fools they are.

But gold produces no return, right?  Must be true because you hear it so often from people who have no fucking idea what they are talking about.  But once in a while they slip the truth out as you can read here in this Yahoo Finance article.  Holding gold wins out over stocks in the long run not just in price action but soooooo importantly, in risk elimination to your retirement savings plan.

Housing "expert" thinks 30 million people are at risk of being evicted.

I love it when idiot "experts" extrapolate fairly recent past trends forward despite the fact that if they looked even further back in history they would see a different story.  Today's example is this so called "housing expert" (whatever that is...) who fears that 30 million people are at risk of eviction.

As I stated in yesterday's discussion of this, it is not the people who need to worry but rather the landlords.  You see, a ton of investor money has been poured into buying rental property because of the great income stream it provides while your property appreciates.  Yes, property always goes up.  That's what people think.

But that's only what happens in the fat middle of the cycle.  Toward the end of the cycle everything is turned on its head because the politicians fight each other to buy votes to stay in power.  There is an old saying which I am sure everyone has heard which basically says if you owe the bank a few hundred K and you stop paying, you have a problem but if you own a few hundred million, the bank has the problem.

Same with housing in normal times if a small number of people stop paying rent then they have a problem.  But in times that we are heading toward a large number of people not paying rent is the landlord's problem and the bank's problem.  If everyone is out of work in a depression and you try to throw just 5 million people into the street, forget 30 million, just 5 million, that is enough to cause havoc that has never been known in the USA before.  You think those people will just lie down and die?  NO.  They will blame someone else.  Anyone else.  Anyone who has something will be at fault.

Many of these people could have saved something aside for a rainy day but no, they spent it all on cars they could not afford, upscale apartments they could not afford, trips here and there and everyone in order to get "experiences", etc.  Each dollar that came to their hands left their hands with an extra 5 cents that came from a credit card.  And this happened for YEARS.  So now they are in debt to their eyeballs and cannot pay rent or make car payments.  Their stupid liberalism caught up with them.  They have no savings and a ton of debt.  That is liberalism 101.  Never worry about tomorrow, spend it all today and then some.  Like I have always said, liberalism is the tendency to consume before producing and that is so obvious today.

The only problem for the rest of us is that liberals can vote.  They will vote us out of our wealth.  Why?  Because they think they want it more than we do.

What goes around comes around - wisdom for those with eyes to see.

The US is an empire just like all the other empires that have come and gone.  Empires tend to be manias.  Those who start them off have blue skies overhead and growth is easy.  The best of the best are put into play in order to make something big happen.  In time the empire begins coining its own money and then as growth slows down it begins cannibalizing its money.  The cannibalization at first means clipping coins - literally clipping some of the metal off the coin.  Then the coins are removed and replaced with paper.  Then even the paper is removed and replaced with digital promises.  Each time you move away from gold you are essentially adding a layer of abstraction which is to say a layer of leverage upon the core money which is gold.

 Today we call this Exter's pyramid and you can see how it looks at left.  At the bottom you have gold which is money, the only real money in fact.  With gold there is zero risk of default because it is not a placeholder of anything but in fact payment in full. 


As you move up the chain the numbers get bigger but they get more fragile as well because they are debt/promise/leverage.  Call it what you want, it's all the same thing.   FAKE, TEMPORARY or ILLIQUID wealth.

You can argue all you want that real estate is wealth but who bought property during the Great Depression? NOBODY, that's who.  Real estate went no bid because not only did people not have any money but neither did they want the liabilities.  Think about rental apartments for example.  If you own an apartment in an economic collapse you might think "no problem, I have an income stream".  Yeah, right.  What happens when your tenants lose their jobs and cannot pay?  Well, if the economy is normal then you take them to court, get them evicted and the cops will physically remove them from the premises if needed.  But what is coming is not normal times.  In the coming collapse the government will make it illegal for the "greedy landlord" to evict.  They will also demand rent reductions or rent increase moratoriums.  Why?  Because the voters will cry out "do something if you want to be elected again".  Government has no money of its own so it will steal from whoever has something to take.  Government will also raise taxes and fees and standards of maintenance, etc. on the landlords.  You do NOT want to own property in a financial collapse.

But I digress.  So the empire makes its money the global reserve currency and then each time it debases that currency, its people are effectively taxed but that taxation is shared by ALL holders of the fake money.  And so the empire has a seemingly endless ability to print because the dilution is shared globally.  There seems, for a time, to be no penalty for money printing.

At some point however all the currency of the realm will come back to the realm.  Foreigners who, for whatever reason, no longer need and want to hold the empire's currency will flock back to the mother country of the empire to trade their fakebux for something tangible.  This is true of the fake paper currency, the fake treasury debt (fake in that our government sees it as a gift, not debt), the fake corporate shares (just another fiat currency), and the fake derivatives.  All of that dilution will at some point come back to the US in a tsunami of fake bux and then we will see massive price instability to the upside (rising prices).

It's coming folks and gold and silver are the canaries in the coal mine.

Everybody's getting into trading

I just saw a Youtube ad of some housewife talking about "her trading system" and her students were making "an income" of $1000-$5000 per month using her easy system.  To make matters worse, yesterday I learned that our very capable home repair contractor in the Bahamas (who did our roof repairs, ceiling refurbish, stucco repairs, etc.) is now "learning" Forex Trading.

Shades of Joe Kennedy's shoe shine boy.

I've been trading for decades and I know a thing or two about it.  Let me tell you some basics:

1) You cannot "learn" Forex trading.  You are either born with the gift or you are not.  IF you don't have the gift then you are simply a source of income for the sharks that do.  I will bet money that my contractor ends up in tears over this.

2) Day trading is not "an income source".  If you want income, get a job.  If you want to gamble, trade the markets.  90% of those who trade end up losing it all.

3) Those who trade by emotion are the easiest Marks and Patsies to fleece.  Check your emotion and especially your ego at the door.  When you begin to feel invincible you are about to get screwed.

4) The most important observations are usually shouted down by news that doesn't matter or is actually detrimental to trade.

5) The market heads in a direction until it changes and then without any seeming memory of what transpired just the day before, they change character completely.   Stair steps up until elevator down.

6) Being long the markets does not make you virtuous and being short does not make you evil.  So many people think that unless stocks are going up something is wrong.  That's like saying you only like it when the tide comes in and you hate it and think its bad when the tide goes out.  But do you know what they call it when the tide comes in, comes in comes in and won't stop coming in?  A Tsunami.  The smart money knows how to go long and how to short and the limitations of each.

7) Like casino chips, stocks only have value in the wall st casino.  If you see someone shutting your favorite casino down you better run down there and exchange any casino chips you have in your possession for currency of one less degree of abstraction because when they close the casino your chips will be worthless or nearly so.

8) Markets are a zero sum game.  For every winner there is a loser.  More to the point, not everyone can win.  What cannot happen will not happen.   And Wall St will get a cut of everything or they will shut their markets down.  They are not in it for charity.  See item 7.

Markets are now to the point where people think they are guaranteed to go up.  And while we still see some pullbacks ahead, the S+P 500 probably has further to go up before the trap door opens.  But the trap door will open at some point and most people will get flushed.

It's too late for newbies to make money in these markets but it's certainly not too soon to lose everything you have in them.

Liberals are turning on themselves.

Disney is the latest to pull out of Facebook ad spending.  Like others, they claim it is because FaceBook is too divisive but that is not the real reason.  Facebook has been divisive for years.  The real reason is that Disney revenues are tanking and they need to cut costs or they will begin reporting profit deceleration and then outright losses.

I said long ago that the ad based revenue model was liberal and as such, it would not survive the reversal of the pendulum as things swing back toward conservatism.  Facebook will be a casualty of this and so will Google.  Neither have any real business model that is not ad supported.  As the money dries up so will their business models.

Nobody is saying this now and nobody has said it in the past except me.  I acknowledge that I am early on this call but I would not bet against my world view in the long run.  Too many of the things I said to look for as signs of the end of the Global Debt Ponzi (GDP) have already happened to discount my world view.

After ruining NYC, the rich are bailing out

Everyone is now worried about the socialists taking over.  This is why there have been so many elite running away from the north east to none other than Puerto Rico.  PR is not a state, its an unincorporated US territory.  As such, they do not pay US federal taxes.  They have other taxes locally but they currently do not result in the same overall taxation that the wealthy have to pay in the US, and that is before the attack on the rich has actually begun.

But whether we are talking about moving from some CONUS liberal shit hole to PR or from some US liberal shithole to more conservative (i.e. less taxation) US locations, the rich are on the move.  Rudy Guliani discusses his observations in this video and the likes of Mish Shedlock are have moved out of liberal Illin' noise to much more conservative Utah.  Anyone with a brain knows that the end of the Global Debt Ponzi is not far off. 

Morons who think government is a bottomless pit of free wealth are going to find out that what is going down is a Vegas deal.  If you are are in a Vegas deal and don't know who the Patsy is, it's YOU.  Government has no wealth except what it borrows or taxes from others.  We all know what direct taxation is.  Government demands tribute and promises to kill you if you are determined not to pay.  For example: jailing an old man until he died because he was a tax rabble rouser.

And we all know what federal debt is.  Look at that chart. It is headed straight up now and it cannot stop. 



But few really understand that the government doesn't really have any debt.  What they have is a fake money supply which they have tricked people into accepting as if it were real.  The federal reserve is a shell game operator.  It obfuscates the money system so that most people don't see what is going on.  If people ever found out (which means when people finally pull their heads out of the sand - and they will), the game will be over pretty quickly.  People will lose confidence in the issuing authority and they will lose confidence in the con.  And then they will buy anything and everything in order to get their wealth out of the fake money system.

When I say government doesn't really have debt, what do I mean by this?  Sure they have debt.  But how is this debt growing?  Are people actually loaning money to the government???   The answer is that the federal reserve has pretty much become the lender of only resort.  This is why I made such a big deal about watching fed balance sheet expansion back in late Sept of last year.  That expansion has meaning.  It means that the US cannot find more suckers to buy our debt.  It means that the fed is buying all of the new debt being created by government in order to keep the Ponzi pumping. 

But the fed has no money either.  It is creating new currency which thus debases the existing currency.  So if you take on debt that is paid for by currency debasement, is it really debt?  In fact, no.  They show it as debt because debt has the notion of repayment or default.  The goal is to hide the fact that the real source of government money spending is currency debasement.  It's nothing more than a shell game being played on an economically ignorant population.

So the purchasing power of your dollar denominated savings are going down.  They are taxing you without your knowledge or consent.  If you do not own wealth tokens like gold, silver and platinum bullion coins outside of their corrupt system they will steal all of your purchasing power.  If you let this happen to you after all the clear warning that you have received from me at no charge for more than 10 years now, I can only laugh at your outcome and comment that you got what you deserve.  I cannot be sorry for the fate of fools who are made aware of a train coming at them but who refuse to move their car off the tracks.