Jan 26

Today’s News 26th January 2017

  • Trump Redpills ABC’s David Muir: “The World is as Angry as it Gets”

    In an interview with ABC’s David Muir, Trump addressed his policy to restrict immigration from certain muslim nations, with a God hammer filled with redpills. Muir brought his bag filled with liberal care trolls, asking Trump if restricting muslims from entering the United States would cause ‘more anger among muslims around the world’ and Trump took said bag and ripped it to shreds.

    Watch.

    Aside from that, Trump discussed Obamacare, waterboarding, Chicago, the inauguration crowd size, voter fraud, the border wall, and the fucking nuclear codes.

    The wall: Mexico will pay for the wall, 100%.

    Obamacare: My plan will take care of everybody. ‘Obamacare is a disaster.’

    Trump on waterboarding: We’re not fighting on an even playing field. Waterboarding works.

    Chicago murder rate: This is worst than Afghanistan. Chicago is a warzone. Maybe it’s ok if someone else is President. Not on my watch.

    Voter fraud: We’re gonna launch an investigation. None of the illegal votes go to republicans. Wanton democrat chicanery.

    Inaugural crowd size: We had the biggest audience in the history of inagugural speeches. I won’t let the media demean me or the people who came.

    Nuclear codes: Sobering and scary.

    Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com

  • Top U.S. Secret Service Agent Rages: "I Wouldn't Take A Bullet For Trump"

    Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

    (Pictured: Secret Service Denver District Chief Kerry O’Grady)

    As the last line of defense for the leader of the world, America’s Secret Service agents are tasked with risking their lives and even standing in the way of a bullet should it be headed towards the President.

    But after a tumultuous election year some in the agency are not prepared to do their sworn duty.

    In a series of recent Facebook posts Kerry O’Grady, reportedly one of the nation’s top Secret Service agents, said she would not be willing to take a bullet for the President.

    Kerry O’Grady, the special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Denver district, oversees coordination with Washington-based advance teams for all presidential candidate and presidential trips to the area, including all upcoming or future trips by the president, vice president or Trump administration officials.

     

    Despite her senior security role, she has made her disdain for Trump and his incoming administration clear to her Facebook followers, who included current and former Secret Service agents and other people who were employees at the time of the posts.

     

    Via: The Washington Examiner

    The posts, written during the heat of the campaign in late 2016, show that O’Grady was a Clinton supporter and likely assumed Hillary would be elected to the Presidency. Such a move may have done wonders for her career had Clinton become her boss.

    In her initial post O’Grady raged about how she is “horrified and dismayed” by Trump and his supporters moving “our civil rights into a period of bigotry, misogyny and racism that this country has not tolerated for decades.”

    She quickly followed up with another post, in which she claimed she’d rather go to jail than to take a bullet for President Trump:

    …this world has changed and I have changed. And I would take jail time over a bullet or an endorsement for what I believe to be disaster to this country and the strong and amazing women and minorities who reside here.

    The full Facebook post was captured by The Washington Examiner and was subsequently deleted when the news organization reported it this Tuesday:

    secretservice1

    While her actions are certainly being applauded, albeit behind closed doors, by mainstream media pundits who have previously joked about the assassination of President Trump, The Washington Examiner notes that while America’s First Amendment protects our free speech, Secret Service employees agree to enhanced restrictions when joining the agency, including the following two rules:

    • May not post a comment to a blog or a social media site that advocates for or against a partisan political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.
    • May not use any email account or social media to distribute, send or forward content that advocates for or against a partisan political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.

    Though O’Grady now claims that she would uphold her duty and protect the President, the cat is out of the bag and it is clear that neither the President or his family would be safe in her presence.

    The Secret Service said on Tuesday that they are “aware of the postings and the agency is taking quick and appropriate action.”

    We suspect Ms. O’Grady’s career with the Secret Service will be coming to an end in short order:

  • Americans Are Flipping Houses Like It's 2006 All Over Again

    How quickly the sins of the past are forgotten.

    Roughly 10 years ago, a Mexican immigrant working as a strawberry picker in Bakersfield, California, making $14,000 per year, was lent every single penny he needed to purchase a $720,000 home.  And, as crazy as that sounds to most of us, stories such as that were all too common leading up to the 2008 housing crash as everyone, and their brothers, became expert real estate investors buying and flipping multiple houses every month…which worked really well, until it didn’t.

    Now, and quite unfortunately for those of us that prefer not to day trade our primary residence, America’s home flippers are making a come back.  According to a new study from Trulia, home flips accounted for 6.1% of all U.S. home sales in 2016, which is the highest share since 2006, when flips accounted for 7.3% of sales.

    House Flipping

     

    As Bloomberg points out, the cities where home flipping seems to be the most pervasive are all the same ones that suffered the biggest boom/bust during the last cycle.  Perhaps we could suggest that the people of Las Vegas need to just do all their gambling INSIDE the casinos from now on.

    House Flipping Volume

     

    Of course, rising home prices are responsible for luring Americans back into the home flipping game…because everyone gets to look like a genius real estate investor in a rising market.

    Flipping has become more common as home prices have increased, said Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist at Trulia. Whether that’s cause for concern is an open question.

     

    Local housing market investors can bid up prices in a speculative frenzy, as recent history has shown. When flippers crowd into a market, meanwhile, they compete with buyers seeking a home to live in, deferring the availability of listings and pushing homes out of some buyers’ price range.

     

    But flippers can also provide a valuable service to the housing market by investing in needed improvements that owner-occupiers might not have time for, McLaughlin said. Trulia’s report shows that flippers in Las Vegas are seeking building permits at the highest rate since 2000, suggesting that they’re making substantial repairs and not simply buying homes to ride local price appreciation.

     

    “Is the market going to flip out again?” he said. “I don’t think the signs are there yet.”

    But maybe it will all work out this time around.  After all, as a Bear Stearns RMBS trader told us back in 2007, “these structures will never break because home prices have never fallen more than a few percent in the history of the United States”…well, except that one time that they did.

  • Google Permanently Bans 200 "Fake News" Sites

    The crackdown has begun.

    In a blog post by Scott Spencer, director of product management for sustainable ads, posted on Wednesday, Google said it has banned 200 publishers from accessing its Adsense advertising service for posting fake news stories. Google said it had cracked down on sites which contained 1) Ads for illegal products; 2) Misleading ads; 3) Bad ads on mobile; 4) Ads trying to game the system and, 5) Promoting and profiting from bad sites. But the emphasis was on the so-called “fake news” category which has dominated media buzz for the past two months.

    This is how Spencer explained his action:

    In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

    * * *

    We’ve had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content.

    Google has faced criticism over its handling of fake news stories, including allowing a fake news website to rise to the top of its results displaying an incorrect story claiming that President Trump had won the popular vote.

    In his post explaining how Google attempted to crack down on “bad ads, sites and scammers,” Spencer explained that Google had expanded its policies against misleading websites in November, leading to the crackdown.

    From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations.  We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

    In total, Google took down 1.7 billion ads that they found in violation of their policies in 2016, more than double the 780 million they removed in 2015.

    It wasn’t just fake news: Google provided the following examples of common policy violations among bad sites in 2016:

    • We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
    • We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
    • And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

    Some of the more conventional bans were the result of Google adding a policy mid-year prohibiting ads for payday loans, considered predatory. Roughly five million payday loan ads were disabled over the latter six months of 2016. Also among those the removed ads were what Google calls “tabloid cloakers.” These advertisers run what look like links to news headlines, but when the user clicks, an ad for a product such as a weight loss supplement pops up. Google suspended 1,300 accounts engaged in tabloid cloaking in 2016.

    Spencer concludes:

    In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.

    Google has not disclosed the list of 200 sites it had permanently banned.

  • Trump & Yellen's Collision Course

    Submitted by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist,

    Although the stock market is giddy from President Trump’s pro-growth policies, there is another constituent not quite so enamoured with recent developments. Although a few years ago Fed officials were begging for some help from fiscal policy, with employment now running at a “perceived” tight pace, FOMC participants have switched to viewing fiscal stimulus as a potential inflationary concern that needs to be offset with tighter monetary policy.

    Case in point – have a look at the comments from the most dovish member of the FOMC – über dove Lael Brainard (all quotes from Bloomberg):

    September 16, 2016

    “The case to tighten policy preemptively is less compelling” in an environment where declining unemployment has been slow to spur faster inflation, Brainard said Monday, according to the text of her prepared remarks in Chicago. She made no reference to a specific meeting of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

     

    Brainard’s comments are the last before the Fed enters its quiet period, during which officials abstain from publicly speaking about monetary policy in the run-up to an FOMC meeting. Policy makers will gather in Washington Sept. 20-21 to discuss their monetary policy stance. Recent comments from the committee’s voters have not projected a cohesive signal about whether they will lift interest rates or stay on hold.

     

    “Asymmetry in risk management in today’s new normal counsels prudence in the removal of policy accommodation,” Brainard said, arguing that with interest rates near zero, it’s easier for the Fed to react to faster-than-expected demand than to a negative surprise that upsets the economy. “I believe this approach has served us well in recent months.”

    January 17th, 2017

    Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said the U.S. central bank may accelerate interest-rate increases and measures to shrink its balance sheet if Congress approves a sustained, material increase in fiscal stimulus that pressures inflation without lifting productivity.

     

    “Based on recent spending indicators, we might expect progress to continue to be gradual and steady,” Brainard said Tuesday in Washington. “However, if fiscal policy changes lead to a more rapid elimination of slack, policy adjustment would, all else being equal, likely be more rapid than otherwise.”

    Brainard is the most dovish member of the Federal Open Market Committee, yet she is openly warning about higher rates. Other FOMC members are even going so far as to signal upcoming balance sheet reductions and even higher rates than the market has currently priced in.

    Chair Yellen is also making some hawkish chirping noises. Have a look at the first paragraph from her recent Stanford speech:

    In my remarks today, I will review the considerable progress the economy has made toward the attainment of the two objectives that the Congress has assigned to the Federal Reserve–maximum employment and price stability. The upshot is that labor utilization is close to its estimated longer-run normal level, and we are closing in on our 2 percent inflation objective. I will then discuss the prospects for adjusting monetary policy in the manner needed to sustain a strong job market while maintaining low and stable inflation

    “Labour utilization is close to its estimated longer-run normal level, and we are closing in on our 2 percent inflation objective” is the key line. In this speech, Yellen then goes on to sketch out the basic formula for setting rates. It’s a boring econometrics discussion, but the important point is that she is setting out how the Federal Reserve will go about raising rates.

    Make no mistake – rates are going higher. Probably a lot higher than the market realizes. Just look at this comment buried in Yellen’s speech:

    That said, I think that allowing the economy to run markedly and persistently “hot” would be risky and unwise. Waiting too long to remove accommodation could cause inflation expectations to begin ratcheting up, driving actual inflation higher and making it harder to control. The combination of persistently low interest rates and strong labor market conditions could lead to undesirable increases in leverage and other financial imbalances, although such risks would likely take time to emerge. Finally waiting too long to tighten policy could require the FOMC to eventually raise interest rates rapidly, which could risk disrupting financial markets and pushing the economy into recession. For these reasons, I consider it prudent to adjust the stance of monetary policy gradually over time–a strategy that should improve the prospects that the economy will achieve sustainable growth with the labor market operating at full employment and inflation running at about 2 percent.

    In the coming quarters, the Federal Reserve will march rates higher. But more importantly, the more Trump pushes on the fiscal accelerator, the harder the Fed will lean on the brake.

    The stock market has risen on each pro-business executive order Trump signs. In fact, this latest push to new highs is the direct result of Trump’s following through with his promised plans.

    Although the stock market is screaming higher, the bond market is not at all happy. Not only does the bond market need to deal with the threat of increased inflation from Trump’s policies, but also a Federal Reserve intent on tightening monetary policy to offset the fiscal stimulus.

    I think the Federal Reserve is too eager to raise rates (and also reduce the size of the balance sheet). They continue to fight the last battle and don’t realize that in a balance sheet constrained global financial system, inflation is not the main worry. They run the risk of becoming another Japan with an economy littered with false starts. I don’t know if it is a political bias, or they would have been just as quick on the trigger for a Democratic President, but it really doesn’t matter. Nor does my opinion about the Fed being better off letting the economy run hot for a while mean two shits. All of these thoughts should just be discarded in the dustbin of not worrying about what should be and instead focusing on trading what will be.

    It seems obvious the Federal Reserve is intent on withdrawing monetary accommodation until something breaks. There is no sense fighting it.

    And it is also clear President Trump will follow through with his fiscal stimulus plans. Many pundits thought Trump’s actions might not follow his rhetoric, but the market is quickly realizing that Trump means what he says.

    These two different forces are on a collision course. More fiscal stimulus translates into more monetary tightness. And Trump isn’t going to back down anytime soon, so all that is left is an expanding fiscal environment with a Federal Reserve desperately trying to apply some brakes.

    This economic expansion is already running long in the tooth, and there is a pattern of recessions occurring in the first year of office for newly elected Presidents, so an overly aggressive Fed is a worrisome development. Ironically, Trump’s fiscal stimulus might be the trigger that ushers in the next economic slowdown.

    Many strategists believed Trump might ask Yellen to step down and appoint someone more hawkish. They mistakenly confused Trump’s campaign complaint about low interest rates killing the economy as future policy.

    Well, Trump will do no such thing. In fact, I suspect before Yellen’s term is complete in 2018, Trump will be blaming her for all his problems when the economy rolls over. I am not sure if Trump is this smart, but keeping Yellen around for exactly this task would be the wise move.

    In the mean time, Trump will keep pushing forward with more fiscal stimulus, and Yellen & Co. will push back with tighter monetary policy.

    This interplay between Trump and Yellen makes for a shitty environment for bonds, and also as real rates head higher, gold and other commodities. Eventually this giant debt disaster will need to be inflated away, but I am afraid this FOMC is not yet scared enough to let that happen.

    As this plays out, be careful with your precious metals and other commodity long positions.

    https://i0.wp.com/themacrotourist.com/images/2017/01/GoldJan2517.png?w=750

    Higher real rates are not conducive for precious metal bull markets. As long as the Fed keeps pressing on the brake, it will be tough for these commodities to get up off the mat. It won’t be until something breaks in the financial system that you want to own them. But at that point, you should be buying with both fists.

  • Dear Bernie, Meet the "Big Mac ATM" That Will Replace All Of Your $15 Per Hour Fast Food Workers

    Dear Bernie, as you continue in your never-ending “Fight for $15“, we thought you might benefit from a simple example of how economics work in a real life, functioning, capitalistic society.  You see, Bernie, labor, much like your daily serving of crunchy granola, is just another “good” that businesses can choose to consume more or less of, depending on price.  And, just to be crystal clear, when the price of labor (i.e. wages) increases, businesses tend to consume less of it.  Finally, our dearest Bernie, when misinformed politicians radically disrupt labor markets by setting artificially high base prices, like your proposed $15 federal minimum wage, then businesses simply stop consuming labor completely and instead replace that labor with this “Big Mac ATM Machine.”

     

    So, you see Bernie, pretty soon all those McDonald’s workers that you promised a “fair living wage” to make Big Macs, will have absolutely no wages at all courtesy of your “Fight for $15.”

    Of course, as the Daily Caller points out, the “Big Mac ATM” is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to low-skilled jobs that will be automated as a result of the $15 minimum wage that has already been passed in several states across the country.

    Wendy’s, another popular fast-food establishment, announced plans in May to start installing self-serving kiosks at some of its over 6,000 locations later in the year. The chain is replacing cashiers and other low-skilled jobs with computers and automated machines because, as Wendy’s president Todd Penegor told Investor’s Business Daily, it has to compensate for wage hikes.

     

    McDonald’s Europe president Steve Easterbrook announced in 2011 that the fast-food restaurant was planning on “hiring” 7,000 touch-screen cashiers to be installed across the continent, according to CNET and the Financial Times. Easterbrook said it would make transactions more efficient — namely lowering the average interaction three to four seconds each.

    Kiosk

     

    So, congrats on getting all those fast food workers fired, we’re sure they really appreciate all your hard work. 

    Minimum Wage

  • Here Are 2.3 Billion Reasons Why Sanctuary Cities Are So Upset At Trump

    While we are sure Mayors de Blasio (New York), Emanuel (Chicago), and Garcetti (LA) are compassionate men who want nothing more than to ensure the safety of illegal immigrants in their cities, we couldn’t help but notice that, following Trump’s decision to defund so-called Sanctuary cities, the sound and fury spewing forth from various municipalities today was perfectly correlated with the size of taxpayer-money they received from Obama.

    Not smiling today…

    As Reuters reports, U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to strip municipalities of federal dollars for shielding illegal immigrants threatens $2.27 billion in annual funds for the nation’s ten largest cities, a Reuters analysis of federal grants found. While Trump has the authority to cut some kinds of funding to the cities, cuts to other federal funding would require an act of Congress. The total amount remains unclear, as federal money can be filtered through state governments or granted directly to social-service organizations or other groups. The numbers do not include federal money for law enforcement, which was excluded in the executive order, and programs like Medicaid, which are administered by state governments.

    Mayors and city councils of those cities have said that they will not be pressured to report illegal immigrants to federal agents…

    Local governments in Los Angeles County, for example, received $582 million in federal aid in the most recent fiscal year. That aid included $207 million for the Head Start preschool program, $70 million last year for airport improvements, and $114 million for community development funds used for housing and other needs.

     

    New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, on Tuesday, said he is going to put an additional $250 million a year away in reserves for four years because of a “huge amount of uncertainty” emanating from Washington.

     

    If the Trump administration actually moved to cut funding, “we would be in court immediately to stop it,” de Blasio told reporters.

     

    Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel reiterated the city would remain a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. In December he pledged $1 million to assist immigrant families.

     

    “(Trump) has vastly overstated the funding that could be at issue with these sanctuary policies. Any attempts to withhold funds will certainly be the source of litigation and the courts, not the president, will be the ultimate arbitrator,” said Peter Markowitz, a professor at New York’s Cardozo School of Law, who focuses on immigration.

    Trump plans to make good on his campaign pledge to block federal funding
    to states and cities where local law enforcement refuse to report
    undocumented immigrants they encounter to federal authorities, White
    House press secretary Sean Spicer said.

    “The American people are no longer going to have to be forced to subsidize this disregard for our laws,” Spicer said.

    Spicer said an executive order signed by Trump on Wednesday directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to look at federal funding to cities to figure out “how we can defund those streams.”

  • Trump Promises Supreme Court Pick Next Week As Cruz Threatens "Nuclear Option" To Bypass Dems

    Yesterday we previewed 3 potential picks that seem to be emerging as front-runners to fill Justice Scalia’s vacant seat on the Supreme Court (see “Obama Sets Record For Lowest Supreme Court Win Rate Since Zachary Taylor In 1850“).  While various media outlets reported that William Pryor of Alabama, Neil Gorsuch of Colorado and Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania are the 3 mostly likely people to get the nod, the Los Angeles Times went one step further by declaring Gorsuch the most likely ultimate winner. 

    But while speculation will undoubtedly continue to swirl, earlier this morning Trump promised that his pick will be announced next Thursday. 

     

    Of course, the real fight will begin after Trump’s pick is announced as Democrats in the Senate, now led by Chuck Schumer, have vowed to block any candidate not deemed “mainstream.”  However, appearing on Rachel Maddow, Schumer pretty much vowed to fight any Trump pick put forward, mainstream or not.

    “It’s hard for me to imagine a nominee that Donald Trump would choose, that would get Republican support, that we could support.”

     

    Under current rules, Republicans will need at least eight Democrats to support Trump’s nominee to overcome the 60-vote filibuster hurdle.  That said, Ted Cruz has already started lobbying for the “nuclear option” that would lower the confirmation vote threshold to a simple majority and pave the way for Republicans to confirm any Justice put forward, without Democrat support.  Per The Hill:

    Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) said Republicans should fight to get President Trump’s coming Supreme Court nominee confirmed by any means necessary.

     

    Trump has said he will be announcing his choice to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s seat on the bench next week.

     

    Republicans will need at least eight Democrats to support Trump’s nominee to overcome the 60-vote filibuster hurdle. But Cruz suggested the GOP shouldn’t rule out the so-called “nuclear option” to reduce the threshold to a majority. The move would be a gamble, setting a precedent that could weaken the GOP’s position if Democrats come back into power.

     

    “I think we should do whatever it takes to get him confirmed,” the former presidential candidate said on Fox News’ “Hannity” Tuesday night.

     

    When pressed about whether Republicans would employ the nuclear option this week, McConnell simply said: “The nominee will be confirmed.”

    While Democrats will undoubtedly blast the proposed rule change, we suspect they’ll conveniently forget that they first employed the “nuclear option” in 2013 to confirm several of President Obama’s nominations, via simple majority votes, over the objection of Republicans.

    In 2013, Democrats, who at the time held the majority in the Senate, triggered the nuclear option to confirm several of President Obama’s nominees. The move did not apply to the Supreme Court.

     

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said recently he regrets Democrats’ 2013 decision, which is now easing the confirmation of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

    We would also point out that Democrats “changed the rules” in 2010, after losing their filibuster proof majority on the death of Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy, to ram through one of the destructive pieces of legislation in recent history, Obamacare.

    Live by the sword, die by the sword as they say.

  • Are You Ready For An Inflationary Depression?

    Submitted by Tom Chatham via Project Chesapeake,

    We are heading into a new depression. It is not coming. It is already here but we are only in the beginning so it may not be easy for many people to see just yet. Once it is easy to see it will be too late for any meaningful actions to mitigate the effects. Just as you must prepare for a tornado ahead of time, you must prepare for economic conditions early.

    We have 20 trillion in debt, over 200 trillion in unfunded liabilities and over a quadrillion in derivatives held by the banks. Our GDP is only about 17 trillion a year and world GDP is only about 60 trillion. It does not take a math wiz to realize that even if we are not paying any interest at all on this massive debt, there is no way to ever pay it all back short of some type of default.

    That is what depressions do. They wipe out all of the misallocation of resources and bad debt and provide a reset for the economy. These resets can be relatively easy or they can be very destructive depending on the amount of misallocation that is present in the system. The amount of debt, brought on by decades of unrestricted credit creation, is the largest in history. That means we are in for a very bad ride in the near future.

    Much of the money that people think they have is really only made up of digits in some computer somewhere. The banking industry has already taken this money for its own use. To eliminate the need to ever give it back to the rightful owners they must destroy these digits. That is what the new bail-ins are all about. They can at some point just wipe all of those digits out of existence and say tough luck suckers.

    The depression of the 1930’s was a deflationary one in nature. People lost their jobs, prices fell and cash was king. People holding bonds did very well. In an inflationary depression, prices rise, people will get paid in increasingly worthless paper and bonds will collapse. Banks will enact bail-ins to stay solvent and people will go broke while holding piles of cash.

    In the end the inflationary depression will end with the currency collapsing and people losing everything they have that is not fully owned. Eventually we will see deflation as prices fall due to the destruction of the monetary system. At this point most people will be financially devastated. Those that make it to this point with their wealth in tact will be the new wealthy class.

    So how can a person survive something like this? You simply need to focus on the needs of your family over this period of time. If you can provide the needs of your family regardless of the prices at the time, you will make it through the worst of times, This means you need a plan to provide these items to your family whether prices are rising or falling. If you have a years supply of food, it does not matter what the current price is, you will have the means to feed them.

    If your home is paid for, your car is paid for and you have a supply of energy or a way to produce it yourself, it will not matter to you how fast prices are changing or how much money you bring home every week. You will be able to live outside of the rapidly changing economy. The rapid changes that will destroy others will only provide you a glancing blow.

    Those that survive on credit will be devastated as their access to credit is cut off and they become unable to continue making payments on their possessions. They will be devastated even if they still have a paying job. For those that expect to survive on their savings and pensions, they will find those accounts empty following any bail-ins.

    Where you live will also play a major role in how well you survive the depression. What do you think will happen when those dependent multi generational families lose their welfare and food stamps following the breakdown of the credit system and prices rise faster than benefits? The ability to produce some items yourself will also depend on your location and the ability to stay safe.

    The whole of the production and distribution system depends on 30 day credit. When the credit system ceases to function, goods will stop being produced and transported. This will lead to high prices and few goods to buy. So even if you have a bag full of money you may not be able to buy what you want at some point.

    Just like a tornado that tears through a community, a depression can leave the people without the resources they need unless they have them hidden away safely for future use following the event. This is why having resources, real physical goods, put away now will allow you to thrive when the system fails. When the system resets, you will not get a second chance to do it right. You only have one shot and that requires you to finalize your preparations now while you still can make a difference.

    The whole point of preparing for this type of upheaval is to maintain a standard of living that you find acceptable. Lack of preparation in this type of event will likely find you living much poorer than you would like. If you are successful in maintaining your standard of living and preserving your wealth throughout this event you will have won the battle and set yourself up for a better future when things stabilize.

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