Premium Archives
Executive Summary
- Planning determinants for:
- Precious Metals
- Bullion: physical
- Bullion: stored & tradable
- Miners
- Stocks & bonds
- Remaining long
- Strategies for shorting
- Real Estate
- Debt Management
- Income Security
- Local Investing
- Personal Preparations
- Community Preparations
- Precious Metals
If you have not yet read The Good News In All The Bad Data, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Though we strongly advise in Part 1 to move to cash, it's essential to remember that this is largely a transitional maneuver. The goal is to keep your powder dry during the coming deflationary storm, and then deploy it in as intelligently and timely a manner as possible when your dollars can buy quality assets at excellent discounts. In this Part 2, we walk you through the principal components for building your investing action plan for both in advance of, and when, that time arrives.
Also, we understand that for reasons of options and attitude, simply moving your portfolio 100% into cash is unpalatable or unrealistic for a number of people. Some of you will want to, perhaps even need to, have a percentage of your capital remain in the financial markets for the foreseeable future. So we discuss both long and short strategies for you to evaluate and pick whichever best suits your personal situation.
It's important to understand that the solution set contained below is a superset for your consideration and not a one-size-fits-all recipe (i.e. do NOT take it as personal investment advice!). As strongly urged in Part 1, its best use is as a structured guide for you and your financial adviser to use together in discussing and developing an investment plan customized to your goals, needs and risk tolerance.
Suffice it to say, everything discussed in this report (even the % cash component mentioned in Part 1) should be reviewed with your financial adviser before taking any action. Am I being excessively repetitive here in order to drive this point home? Good…
Precious Metals
One of the biggest mysteries that continues to perplex Chris and me is: Why is central bank liquidity creating price bubbles in every asset class EXCEPT the one you would expect it to most?
Here we have everything from Facebook stock to Las Vegas houses to junk bonds to Beats headphones catching bids at insane prices. As Chris discussed last week with economist Steen Jakobsen, the data for stocks over the past year shows that the worse the balance sheet, the better a company's stock performance has been.
Why is everything down to pure crap being lifted by the giant pool of money sloshing around the planet, but prices for gold and silver — arguably the highest-grade assets to own — are so badly languishing?
I won't rehash all of our speculations for why, as there are dozens of recent articles on this site speculating on the topic. But as this year's mega-report on gold drives home, the actual fundamentals for owning precious metals not only remain intact, but they are expanding materially each year.
Well, the good news here is that the precious metals market is the one place you don't have to wait for the "buy at pennies on the dollar" experience. It's here now.
Prices are not only far below what the fundamentals justify, but…
How To Position Yourself Now
PREVIEW by Adam TaggartExecutive Summary
- Planning determinants for:
- Precious Metals
- Bullion: physical
- Bullion: stored & tradable
- Miners
- Stocks & bonds
- Remaining long
- Strategies for shorting
- Real Estate
- Debt Management
- Income Security
- Local Investing
- Personal Preparations
- Community Preparations
- Precious Metals
If you have not yet read The Good News In All The Bad Data, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Though we strongly advise in Part 1 to move to cash, it's essential to remember that this is largely a transitional maneuver. The goal is to keep your powder dry during the coming deflationary storm, and then deploy it in as intelligently and timely a manner as possible when your dollars can buy quality assets at excellent discounts. In this Part 2, we walk you through the principal components for building your investing action plan for both in advance of, and when, that time arrives.
Also, we understand that for reasons of options and attitude, simply moving your portfolio 100% into cash is unpalatable or unrealistic for a number of people. Some of you will want to, perhaps even need to, have a percentage of your capital remain in the financial markets for the foreseeable future. So we discuss both long and short strategies for you to evaluate and pick whichever best suits your personal situation.
It's important to understand that the solution set contained below is a superset for your consideration and not a one-size-fits-all recipe (i.e. do NOT take it as personal investment advice!). As strongly urged in Part 1, its best use is as a structured guide for you and your financial adviser to use together in discussing and developing an investment plan customized to your goals, needs and risk tolerance.
Suffice it to say, everything discussed in this report (even the % cash component mentioned in Part 1) should be reviewed with your financial adviser before taking any action. Am I being excessively repetitive here in order to drive this point home? Good…
Precious Metals
One of the biggest mysteries that continues to perplex Chris and me is: Why is central bank liquidity creating price bubbles in every asset class EXCEPT the one you would expect it to most?
Here we have everything from Facebook stock to Las Vegas houses to junk bonds to Beats headphones catching bids at insane prices. As Chris discussed last week with economist Steen Jakobsen, the data for stocks over the past year shows that the worse the balance sheet, the better a company's stock performance has been.
Why is everything down to pure crap being lifted by the giant pool of money sloshing around the planet, but prices for gold and silver — arguably the highest-grade assets to own — are so badly languishing?
I won't rehash all of our speculations for why, as there are dozens of recent articles on this site speculating on the topic. But as this year's mega-report on gold drives home, the actual fundamentals for owning precious metals not only remain intact, but they are expanding materially each year.
Well, the good news here is that the precious metals market is the one place you don't have to wait for the "buy at pennies on the dollar" experience. It's here now.
Prices are not only far below what the fundamentals justify, but…
Executive Summary
- The new drivers of the current housing price cycle
- Why investment capital, not normal household formation, has become primary for pricing
- What the implications of an investment-driven housing market are
- Why prices will fall & what homeowners (residents & investors) can do now
If you have not yet read The US Housing Market's Darkening Data, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
The The New Drivers of The Current Housing Cycle
1. Cash
First, we are currently seeing something in residential real estate markets that has not occurred in our lifetimes – the magnitude of all-cash offers. 40-50% of residential real estate purchases have been for cash in recent years. This phenomenon has no precedent in recent economic history. Why is this happening? We need to remember that a primary goal of the Federal Reserve in setting short term interest rates near 0% was to induce investors to buy “risk assets” – think real estate and common stocks. By eliminating rate of return in safe securities such as Treasury bonds, CD’s, etc., the Fed essentially forced formerly conservative investors to purchase higher risk assets in order to get any acceptable rate of return.
In good part, the all-cash offers are coming from investor’s intent on buying to rent. Intent on obtaining an acceptable cash on cash rate of return as yield can no longer be found in safer investments. This crosses the boundaries between investors in the asset accumulation phase of life and retirees starved for yield, draining formerly CD-centric bank accounts in order to purchase income-producing rental properties…
Get Ready For Falling Home Prices
PREVIEW by Brian PrettiExecutive Summary
- The new drivers of the current housing price cycle
- Why investment capital, not normal household formation, has become primary for pricing
- What the implications of an investment-driven housing market are
- Why prices will fall & what homeowners (residents & investors) can do now
If you have not yet read The US Housing Market's Darkening Data, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
The The New Drivers of The Current Housing Cycle
1. Cash
First, we are currently seeing something in residential real estate markets that has not occurred in our lifetimes – the magnitude of all-cash offers. 40-50% of residential real estate purchases have been for cash in recent years. This phenomenon has no precedent in recent economic history. Why is this happening? We need to remember that a primary goal of the Federal Reserve in setting short term interest rates near 0% was to induce investors to buy “risk assets” – think real estate and common stocks. By eliminating rate of return in safe securities such as Treasury bonds, CD’s, etc., the Fed essentially forced formerly conservative investors to purchase higher risk assets in order to get any acceptable rate of return.
In good part, the all-cash offers are coming from investor’s intent on buying to rent. Intent on obtaining an acceptable cash on cash rate of return as yield can no longer be found in safer investments. This crosses the boundaries between investors in the asset accumulation phase of life and retirees starved for yield, draining formerly CD-centric bank accounts in order to purchase income-producing rental properties…
Executive Summary
- The math explaining why Ukraine was a predictable flashpoint
- Why the IMF's "help" is about to make the Ukranian situation a lot worse
- Implications for those considering relocating inside or outside of the US
- Chris' "must have" ingredients that make a potential relocation destination worth considering
If you have not yet read Rising Resource Costs Escalate Odds of Global Unrest, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Ukraine
Now back to Dave’s original series of questions. I think that Ukraine was primed and ready for a shove into instability.
There’s a well known psychology experiment where two male rats can be placed in a cage where they will live somewhat happily as long as they have sufficient food. However, if painful electric shocks are applied to the floor of the cage in such a way that the rats cannot escape, the two males will begin fighting.
Keep up the shocks long enough and the fighting will be severe, even to the death.
What’s happening? The rats lack the context to know that the shocks are coming from outside somewhere. The only thing they can project their discomfort onto is the only other living thing in their sight – the other rat.
So they fight.
Similarly, the people of Ukraine lack the context to know just who is to blame for the unpleasant conditions in which they live and seemingly cannot escape. So they blame each other and fight each other. They blame the President and so he’s gone. But the next one, and the ones following, will be just as bad; and eventually they will each be in turn ousted, too.
The problem is the shocks are not being caused by players they can see and blame. We’ll get to more on that in a minute.
By the numbers, the …:
What To Avoid When Relocating
PREVIEW by Chris MartensonExecutive Summary
- The math explaining why Ukraine was a predictable flashpoint
- Why the IMF's "help" is about to make the Ukranian situation a lot worse
- Implications for those considering relocating inside or outside of the US
- Chris' "must have" ingredients that make a potential relocation destination worth considering
If you have not yet read Rising Resource Costs Escalate Odds of Global Unrest, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Ukraine
Now back to Dave’s original series of questions. I think that Ukraine was primed and ready for a shove into instability.
There’s a well known psychology experiment where two male rats can be placed in a cage where they will live somewhat happily as long as they have sufficient food. However, if painful electric shocks are applied to the floor of the cage in such a way that the rats cannot escape, the two males will begin fighting.
Keep up the shocks long enough and the fighting will be severe, even to the death.
What’s happening? The rats lack the context to know that the shocks are coming from outside somewhere. The only thing they can project their discomfort onto is the only other living thing in their sight – the other rat.
So they fight.
Similarly, the people of Ukraine lack the context to know just who is to blame for the unpleasant conditions in which they live and seemingly cannot escape. So they blame each other and fight each other. They blame the President and so he’s gone. But the next one, and the ones following, will be just as bad; and eventually they will each be in turn ousted, too.
The problem is the shocks are not being caused by players they can see and blame. We’ll get to more on that in a minute.
By the numbers, the …:
Executive Summary
- The "half farmer, half X" model
- The "no middleman" model
- The "15% commission" model
- The key features of successful new community models
If you have not yet read The Rise of New Models of Community, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we discussed the potential for new models of collaboration and community enabled by the Web and social media. I proposed a simple metric for differentiating between simulacrum community and the real deal: a community is only a “real community” if the collective actions of its members push the envelope of the material world.
In Part 2, we’ll examine some models that have arisen as people either abandon or are cut out of the Central State/Corporate Consumerism Status Quo and must create new social and economic arrangements to earn a livelihood. This requires structures that enable self-organizing, voluntary communities to endure and grow.
As Zeus noted in Part 1, The new price of entry is production, meaning that parasitic layers of middlemen have no role in these new arrangements. To participate, one must be productive. i.e. create or add value.
As I mentioned earlier, social media doesn’t change a system’s incentives/benefits and costs/disincentives; the Web is a powerful tool for community building, once the incentives for participating far outweigh the costs.
Let’s start our survey with an example from…
Promising Emerging Community Models
PREVIEW by charleshughsmithExecutive Summary
- The "half farmer, half X" model
- The "no middleman" model
- The "15% commission" model
- The key features of successful new community models
If you have not yet read The Rise of New Models of Community, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we discussed the potential for new models of collaboration and community enabled by the Web and social media. I proposed a simple metric for differentiating between simulacrum community and the real deal: a community is only a “real community” if the collective actions of its members push the envelope of the material world.
In Part 2, we’ll examine some models that have arisen as people either abandon or are cut out of the Central State/Corporate Consumerism Status Quo and must create new social and economic arrangements to earn a livelihood. This requires structures that enable self-organizing, voluntary communities to endure and grow.
As Zeus noted in Part 1, The new price of entry is production, meaning that parasitic layers of middlemen have no role in these new arrangements. To participate, one must be productive. i.e. create or add value.
As I mentioned earlier, social media doesn’t change a system’s incentives/benefits and costs/disincentives; the Web is a powerful tool for community building, once the incentives for participating far outweigh the costs.
Let’s start our survey with an example from…
Executive Summary
- Why the US' antagonistic approach towards Russia is likely to backfire big time, in both the near and long term
- How, by definition, the West has already initiated economic warfare against Russia
- Why things will get very bad in a hurry for the West if Russia reacts by re-directing its energy exports
- And how things could get much worse indeed, for everyone, if this conflict erupts into a military confrontation
If you have not yet read Warning: The Ukraine Is At A Flashpoint, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Poking The Bear
And that finally brings us to Russia, which has a long and complicated history with Ukraine. There are many Russian speaking people in the Ukraine, for whom Russia feels somewhat protective, as perhaps US citizens in Canada or Mexico might expect from the US.
Further, Russia quite rightfully feels that it is being systematically surrounded and cornered by the NATO military structure and they might reasonably ask themselves why and for what purpose(s)? There are probably other ways to look at this, but it's certainly reasonable to think that Russia might feel just the tiniest bit provoked, if not threatened, at the West's obvious efforts to get Ukraine to join up with NATO.
Instead of sitting down with Russia to try and hammer things out, the US resorted almost immediately to a series of sanctions targeted at Russian individuals and companies, as well as the Russian stock and bond markets, with the intention of creating economic and financial hardship that would get Russia to leave Ukraine to the west.
Here are a few of the efforts so far…
How This Situation Can Quickly Get Much Worse
PREVIEW by Chris MartensonExecutive Summary
- Why the US' antagonistic approach towards Russia is likely to backfire big time, in both the near and long term
- How, by definition, the West has already initiated economic warfare against Russia
- Why things will get very bad in a hurry for the West if Russia reacts by re-directing its energy exports
- And how things could get much worse indeed, for everyone, if this conflict erupts into a military confrontation
If you have not yet read Warning: The Ukraine Is At A Flashpoint, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Poking The Bear
And that finally brings us to Russia, which has a long and complicated history with Ukraine. There are many Russian speaking people in the Ukraine, for whom Russia feels somewhat protective, as perhaps US citizens in Canada or Mexico might expect from the US.
Further, Russia quite rightfully feels that it is being systematically surrounded and cornered by the NATO military structure and they might reasonably ask themselves why and for what purpose(s)? There are probably other ways to look at this, but it's certainly reasonable to think that Russia might feel just the tiniest bit provoked, if not threatened, at the West's obvious efforts to get Ukraine to join up with NATO.
Instead of sitting down with Russia to try and hammer things out, the US resorted almost immediately to a series of sanctions targeted at Russian individuals and companies, as well as the Russian stock and bond markets, with the intention of creating economic and financial hardship that would get Russia to leave Ukraine to the west.
Here are a few of the efforts so far…
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