I want to respond to a couple of member questions to the last report.
Here are two flavors of the same question, written in response to “How This Will All Play Out,” both wondering why I am advocating that people accelerate their plans, whatever they may be, to become more resilient.
Lemonyellowschwin wrote:
Chris wrote:
“If your plans include moving, selling a house, or making big improvements to your current house, I would strongly recommend putting those plans into high gear.”
Is this because of concerns about rapidly-rising interest rates (killing the ability to buy or sell real estate) and inflation increasing the cost of improvements?
nickbert wrote:
I myself am wondering the same thing. My family and I don’t own any real estate anymore (at least not in the US) and are not planning to buy anytime soon so that’s not an issue for us, but if there is another specific reason I would love to hear it.
As usual, there’s no easy answer to this, such as Because everything will stop working on June 12th, 2012 at 3:05 p.m.!! Nobody knows when the next difficulties will begin, obviously, or how serious they will be. Such is the nature of complex systems.
Given this, the best we can do is constantly weigh and then reweigh the various risks as circumstances change.
One example is the constant shifting we must undertake as we try to predict what the Fed will do next. Will they cut off the quantitative easing (QE) funds abruptly in June, forcing the markets to experience cold-turkey withdrawal, or will we be treated to ‘sort-of-QE’ as maturing MBS debt is rolled into Treasury paper?
But we must also constantly guess as to when and where all the other various pressures might conspire to create some other tipping point in our markets.
My most certain conclusion from all of this is that right now time is the most valuable asset we have.
To begin with, the process of creating additional resilience in your life (or lives, for the families out there) just takes time. Food resilience requires years of growing, amending, and experience if you are the do-it-yourself sort, and just about as long if you are counting on your demand leading to additional local supply.
by grover 
