Back in 2013 I posted to this blog my "Unconventional Financial Advice for the Youngins" where I encouraged young officers to invest their money to increase their freedom, both because our world is uncertain and also because a more independent officer is in a better position to be a good public servant and more willing to take the risks that are increasingly required when working for our government. In short, I recommended living well below your means, getting out of debt, investing money, and making smart family decisions to include not having kids until you had achieved real financial independence (which for most means not having kids until you're too old to have them).
The gut instincts and fears I had about our world thirteen years ago have not been assuaged and we are now in the midst of a complete re-shaping of our economy, our nation, our government, and our relationship with government. As is typical during such paradigm shifting time periods, things that seemed rock steady stable will simply be flung aside and replaced. It is increasingly clear that we are rapidly galloping away from an economy based on labor, and into an economic system that has been far more prevalent in human history than our modern capitalist system. That new government is overtly and purely fascist and the new old economic system is feudalism.
In this blog post I want to provide my updated financial advice. Except it's not for the youngins this time. I wouldn't even attempt to advise somebody in their twenties or younger how to financially prepare in our current world. I believe they are proper fucked. Instead, I will give my recommendations for older folks who had a chance to make wealth over the past couple of decades. But first let me provide some context and a backdrop as I see it. The context is going to be a bit long and you won't like it. But what we like or not doesn't change reality.
The Context
The wealth gap has grown dramatically. Technology has made it increasingly easy for individuals to make large scale market movements. Our corrupted government is comprised largely of candidates created and manufactured by those individuals and placed into office to do their bidding. Our system unfortunately includes a Federal Reserve which makes it possible to extract massive amounts of wealth through the money printer, converted into real wealth for these individuals, and simply replaced with staggering debt on the backs of the American people. This machine has, of course, proven to be irresistible to those who can fill government with their people and have laws passed and actions taken which funnel billions of dollars at a time to them while inching the people of the United States closer and closer to poverty through inflation and inevitable economic default.
Growing up, year after year, it was a regular occurrence to see politicians pretend to disagree over the debt, typically only disagreeing with how the wealth of America was extracted. Inevitably, the end result was the same. More debt for Americans. During these theatrical performances, the phrase "kick the can down the road" was typically employed, pointing out that the short term "benefits" of the debt at the time would come with a cost for average Americans later. Later is now. Our national debt held by the public is greater than our GDP for the first time in our history. Likewise, for the first time, our government spends more of our taxpayer money on interest to service our debt than it does on our extremely bloated military. And it does this during a period of artificially suppressed interest rates which are more than likely going to break their artificial chains and climb much higher, making interest debt payments even greater and leaving less money for our government to pay its required tribute to Israel, less money to send to laundering machine ventures in places like Ukraine, and this means that there is even less money for lower priority back burner projects like improving and defending America.
America is little more than a collection of marks just begging to be fleeced. Meet a few Americans and talk to them about anything of substance and it's difficult to blame those who manipulate and fleece them.
Still, more Americans today are starting to see that the word "inflation" isn't just an academic gobbly-gook term, but is a real thing. A day late and many dollars short though. When money is printed into existence, the prices of things go up. Those who get the newly printed dollars can purchase things of real value at the current price. Then months later, the rest of us have to pay more money to attain things of real value. We don't get the hot off the digital press newly conjured dollars, the low-to-no interest loans to the banking class, the contract payments to various corporate entities, and so we don't get to enjoy the benefit of buying real things at yesterday's prices. Rather, we are left with the debt and higher costs after the money the oligarchs spend is injected into the system. People now see this purposeful theft as they look at home prices, college tuition, the cost of food and fuel, rising electrical prices, and most everything else. The minority of Americans in the market mistake it as good, however, when they see the numbers of their stock portfolios and 401Ks going up, not realizing these increasing numbers are not gaining them any actual purchasing power but rather are helping them simply to lose less than those who aren't in the market. But that hedge against inflation will disappear if the Everything Bubble pops. By which I mean, when it pops.
And despite the hype, the reality is such that the so-called Artificial Intelligence and robotics will render the vast majority of human labor not only un-required, but not desired. I can still remember debating fighter pilots and telling them their jobs would disappear with drone technology, back before it became undeniable as it is today. With the exception of one guy, the response was always the same. "No way a computer can do my job." Now we see AI fighter pilots beating human fighter pilots every single time in the simulator, and unmanned systems are finally the bleeding edge of our technology. The same will go for most every job out there and eventually all of them. Even today, unemployment is skyrocketing despite the government's fabricated methods to downplay it.
The oligarchs are seeding their purchased and controlled media resources, whether "mainstream" or "alternative" with discussions of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Elon's quixotic Universal High Income (UHI). The intent is simply to calm the masses down during this transition by convincing them to idiotically think somebody will provide for them when they have no economic value and can no longer earn money. But the concepts of UBI/UHI are nothing more than an impossibility dressed up as snake oil and served with a side of "not gonna happen."
It's a simple exercise to realize such schemes are impossible despite every psychological thread of our being wanting to believe that oligarchs will suddenly care about hundreds of millions of people and take care of them despite history and human nature showing how unlikely that would be. But even if the oligarchs wanted to provide UBI/UHI, they couldn't. It's impossible. Imagine that Amazon has bought up all companies and produces everything with its AI and robots. Food, housing, everything. Nobody has a job minus a handful of people which are a rounding error. Now Amazon sells a product for X dollars. But people have no money. But the people have UBI which comes from, you guessed it, Amazon, because the government has no money it can raise from people who have no jobs so it can't provide it. So Amazon must somehow sell a product for X dollars, and then from the revenue extract some profit Y, otherwise what would be the point of having a business that sells a product to the public. That leaves Amazon with (X-Y) and from that, they are supposed to send some amount Z to the government, because of course we need government (even though it's already indistinguishable from the corporate world and will only become increasingly so), and then they are going to provide X-Y-Z dollars to the public in the form of UBI, so that the public can turn around and buy a product that costs X dollars? The math doesn't math. It cannot work, even if the oligarchs were socially conscious angels who really wanted to take care of hundreds of millions of "useless eaters."
So the entire system will change because without human labor having any value, what we understand as capitalism or crony capitalism is unfeasible. What will remain is feudalism where a handful of oligarchs own the means of production behind castle walls, and the majority of humanity is outside those walls trying to survive somehow. Except this analogy fails and the new neo-feudalistic reality is much worse because peasants aren't even required to grow food outside the walls to bring to the castle.
More accurately, there will be those with resources required to survive, and there will be a great many more who have no such resources and have no labor value to exchange for those resources. The myth of UBI/UHI dispelled as a possible indication of what happens next, we have to turn to Nature to see how our species will solve this imbalance. It's the same process all animals regularly see occur. When the rabbit population explodes, so does the population of coyotes. When the coyotes lead to a declining rabbit population, so declines the coyote population.
There will be a massive thinning of the herd, expedited or not by artificial events, and some coyotes will be sitting on mountains of rabbits while the rest of the canines perish. Banish any thoughts of revolution from your mind as a way to prevent or change this, it will not happen. Revolutions have always had a poor track record in human history, and the technological parity and other factors that led to 1776 no longer exist. Enjoy your AR-15 just as the Incans enjoyed their spears, but the brick-by-brick creation of our police state and digital control grid will easily ensure neither lead the population back to sustenance let alone liberty. Violence and revolution is a non-starter. This is the context and the backdrop of our economic reality.
My Advice
I'm not a financial analyst or a professional money maker. The one big "stock" play I made was many years ago when I was deciding what investment to dump my pilot bonus into. I had narrowed it down to Microsoft or Google. I chose Microsoft because it was steady and slow while Google was on a massive upward trajectory and seemed to me more risky. So I dumped six figures or so into MSFT and made a healthy 30% gain which is pretty good for an amateur investor.
Had I put the money into Google I would be far too rich to be making this blog post as I would be too busy re-arranging my yacht collection.
Similarly, a few months before the Great Recession, I decided to pull out of the market because the incompetence of companies and the obvious bubble had me convinced the market would crash. I could just feel it. Just weeks before it became headlines, I sold everything including my IRA and just took the tax hit. My timing couldn't have been better. And then I left that money out of the market and never got back in and missed out on massive gains after that. Even if I had left my money in and not sold at all, I still would have made far more money as the bubble was inflated on steroids with all the qualitative easing policy and cheap money. Instead, I purchased property and did well but not as well as I would have had I kept that money in the market.
So I have a very conservative approach. I know the markets are rigged against the average person and inflated through artificial money printing. Oligarchs use their puppets in government to make big moves that are contrary to most shareholder positions, certain people have an advantage with network connection speeds, insider trading is standard practice for the highest paid employees of the oligarchs, media is used to get the masses to make poor market decisions so the oligarchs can capitalize, and like any casino you can win, but play long enough and the house is stacked against you. Luck and timing. But today the manipulation is so much more prevalent whether it be through having owned-and-operated politicians do your bidding when it comes to a lab created virus, or whether it's using the might of the U.S. military to manipulate energy markets through social media posts.
What about rental real estate? Another massively inflated bubble and a backdrop of people without paychecks as tenants. "But everybody needs a place to live!" You know who doesn't? People who die. I expect we will soon see a tragic decline in the "demand" portion of housing supply and demand, as people take their lives and starve and die of opioid and other addictions in our new reality, to say nothing of even larger population declines due to the wars our nation's owners in Israel frequently order us to conduct, and not even mentioning lab created viruses purposefully inflicted on populations. I would tread carefully when it comes to rental real estate.
At any rate, all of that was to say that I'm not a professional money guy and I haven't always made the best moves so don't rely on anything I say for your financial decisions. All the same, I'll give you my thought process.
If you have a few gray hairs and have been fortunate enough to have an opportunity to build wealth in the days when human labor had value, you need to quickly shift your paradigm before the Everything Bubble pops. If you're anywhere near my age then you should be debt free. If you're not debt free, then you should have paper assets (401K or an IRA or a stock portfolio) that if you sold, would get you out of debt and leave money left over. If you're not in one of these two situations then you're in the same boat as the youngins mentioned earlier, except with back pain and joint issues. If you have a government pension and/or social security and think that's going to see you through, you're wrong. Your government check is worth less every single month because inflation robs it more month after month. The government claims to adjust it for inflation using its CPI formula, but like everything government does, it's nothing more than a lie meant to cover up the fact that you're being fucked. The way CPI used to be measured was more accurate and more in line with inflation, now the "method" they use downplays real inflation (just like they purposefully inflate and fabricate job numbers). So inflation goes up 10% in reality, they say CPI is only 3%, you get a delayed "raise" of 3% in your check, and the end result is you can buy 7% less stuff with your check. Eventually, however, those military pension and social security checks will simply disappear altogether whether by getting rid of them, or through the dramatic increase between real inflation and the phony CPI number.
And, of course, social security is insolvent and will be reduced far beyond its reduction via inflation number games. And military pensions are not set in stone and can be erased with a mere federal bill, gone just like TriCare for Life was promised and then taken away.
The wealth extraction is in overdrive currently like one of those shopping sprees from the 1990s except instead of somebody from the hood running through the store trying to stuff a cart with TVs and appliances, it's oligarchs and thieves taking breathtakingly overt steps to rob every last cent from the American money printer before it collapses. Everything is inflated other than paychecks, the national debt has gotten to a point where it can no longer be ignored and is affecting everyday Americans, and the future is a bloody nightmare economically.
So my advice is to realize what has actual value, and trade your paper wealth to attain it while counting your blessings that you had the opportunity to do so, while most today did not, and those born today never will. Purchase land away from people that can provide your requirements. Food, water, heat, energy, and security. You do not want to be near large numbers of people in the future that will arise. You do not want a bank owning your property so pay off your mortgage despite the tax penalties. You do not want to be dependent upon a power grid as that connection is just one more way you will be robbed and already in multiple states people are paying more for their electric bills than they do on their mortgages and that will only increase. Solar power is a legitimate way to provide your own power and heat but you need to install it yourself so you're not fleeced by some lease or green company's promises. Make no mistake, a legitimate solar power system is not cheap. But it will be the cheaper option as electrical prices continue to go up and up, more people get off grid and leave the rest of the grid customers to shoulder more of the costs of the aging infrastructure, and as surveillance centers pawned off as "data centers" continue to drive up demand. The Grid Death Spiral will ensure that every single year, people on the grid pay increasingly more for their connections and it will be asymptotic like so many charts today are. You do not want to be on the grid, it's a huge losing proposition. Beyond energy, you should learn about freeze drying and dry storage and start stockpiling food that is available now, despite it being far more expensive today than it was a few years ago, because that food will become harder to come by and far more expensive in the future. Don't store enough food for a couple weeks, store enough for the rest of your life. Once that's done, then learn how to grow your own food.
Once you have that achieved, you can take any wealth you have left over and live the normie life knowing that once the music stops, you're set. Go crazy with your beach front condo in the city and your electric vehicle that can be shut off over the air, travel and go see the shows, hookers and blow and all that. Buy rental real estate to provide an income so long as you can walk away from it. Stack up gold if you want, even though the on and off ramps are controlled to convert it into real things you need and despite the fact that most people who have things of real value will not want to exchange them for gold, so what, it's pretty. Grab some of that fake digital currency, it doesn't matter once you have the things of real value that you need, then it's just funny money at that point. Once the other shoe drops and reality becomes undeniable, you simply have to get back to the abundance you've created and stored, if you can get back before the real lockdowns commence. But don't think for a second that such an off the grid life is inexpensive or something you can make happen in a weekend, at least not if you want to live with all the creature comforts just as you would on grid. It takes a whole lot of money and/or work to live independently. But it's the most valuable investment you can possibly make. It's important to learn the lessons Americans learned in the Great Depression before the depression happens, because what we're in for is going to be far worse. It won't be a blip. The pendulum will not swing back. It won't be a paragraph in human history, it will be an entire new chapter, maybe even a new book.
If you don't have the paper wealth to convert to real wealth, you're in a bad spot. If you are reading this thinking "tin foil" or "panikan" or some such idiotic term, you're too propagandized and too retarded and also in a bad spot. For the rest, you had better get ahead of this, there's not much time left to make the smartest move you've ever made before your imaginary paper wealth disappears. Good luck.
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