After watching a ton of apocalyptic videos (like: “The Imminent Market Collapse!”) I saw one with a different take on the situation. This guy believed the same way, that we have a crooked monetary system and that the Federal Reserve are manipulating the markets, but he believed that the Fed is so far out of control that they can do anything they want. That they are Masters of the Universe so to speak and that normal market forces no longer apply. Evidently we’re supposed to believe they can run a $2 trillion dollar deficit on a $3 trillion dollar economy. (If they can print $5 trillion dollars out of thin air, why not $20? A $100 trillion?)

I’m beginning to believe him, especially after reading the book ‘The Aftershock Investor‘ (pictured above). It was written in 2014 and tried to convince readers a monetary system based solely on a central bank inflating bubbles forever was not sustainable. 4 years later and we seemingly are no closer to the collapse the authors and many others have been predicting for decades that was supposedly just around the corner.

The basic premise of all these guys is that basically all developed nations in the world have a debt based fiat currency system that is insolvent (Europe, China, everybody). That we can no longer service the deficits, let alone ever pay off the debt. We are floating bond sales just to pay the interest (the equivalent of an individual borrowing from the credit union to pay the interest on his credit card, not a home equity loan to pay it off). We’ve squandered the SSA and Medicare money as it came in on current spending, rather than leaving it in the “trust funds”  they told us they were doing. Congress of course never thinking beyond the next election.

The national debt has really begun to take off. When Trump took office in January 2017 it was a couple of months before the debt officially hit $20 trillion. Today (11/18/18) the National Debt Clock shows $21,747,000,000,000 and change. It may grow by $2 trillion just in Trump’s first 2 years. That is almost the entire amount it grew in Reagan’s entire 8 years. Its a snowball on a downhill slide. You don’t want to be at the bottom of the hill.

Once again the authors took way too long to give us their recommendations on how to prepare for the crash (367 pages). Oh, and if you really want to prepare, you need to buy their newsletter for $420 bucks a year or hire them as private consultants to guide your portfolio decisions. (“More money can be made selling advice, then following it.”)Whether or not “the big crash” does come, we did indeed have a nasty turn in ’08. There’s no getting around that, and we’ve just piled more personal and government debt on top of that debt crisis. So if a “Global Financial Crisis” can happen once, it can surely happen again.

They were pretty vague on the trigger points to watch for, but 2 did stick out. One was when the interest on 10 year treasuries hit 4% or 5%. The other was when gold starts to spike from its current position of $1,200 an ounce. A lot of people got burnt on gold when they bought the 2011 high of $1,900 an ounce. The authors (Dave and Robert Wiedemer and Cindy Spitzer) think the bond market will shut itself down when interest rates spiral out of control. They think the government will shut the stock market down for longer and longer periods of time to forestall a complete collapse.

I know in Greece a couple of years ago during their banking crisis the ATM’s didn’t work. They were literally taking money out of customer accounts and safe deposit boxes to fund their operations. In the event of a 1930’s style depression, all bets are off as to what the government is capable of. The only thing we do know is that the banks will be taken care of, the customers be damned. Hey, they didn’t buy Congress for nothing.

The book spends an inordinate amount of time warning you of the obvious. Stay liquid, pay off your debt, don’t be a spendthrift, don’t have a job that depends on a customer’s discretionary spending (there will be little left but money for necessities in a true crash). Below are some of the (once again obvious) vehicles they recommend, mostly revolving around hard assets.

• Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities
• Dividend paying stocks
• Gold
• Gold ETFs
• Land
• Commodities
• Cash
• Inverse stock ETFs
• Inverse bond ETFs
• Foreign currencies

And, perhaps most importantly, being prepared and thinking for yourself. Just because the lemmings are going off the fiscal cliff, doesn’t mean you have to. Don’t have 100% exposure to the market when it collapses. Not having the cash when its time to cherry pick the bargains at the bottom. Not listening to the “experts” on TV who saw none of this coming (and certainly didn’t warn you if they did). But as I pointed out, we may be in such a surreal time of Fed unaccountability, that the hard crash may not come at all. They may just gobble up our wealth the silent way, through inflation.

[And once again it boggles the mind that with a government on the verge of bankruptcy, it never occurs to anyone that its about time that ‘non-profits’ (hospitals & churches) ante up. Its ridiculous to say hospitals are non-profit, and defining what a ‘church’ is, is impossible and irrelevant. Our government refuses to take its head out of the sand and acknowledge the severity of the situation.]