Tools for Surviving Economic Chaos

 

Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…

www.poormansurvivor.net

ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 

Aftermath: Surviving Chaos

American people seem to want a society that will shelter them from anything that could possibly go wrong.  We’re becoming a less self reliant nation thanks to the demeaning Nanny State agenda pushed by so many on the Left.  What happens when the collapse arrives?

Our SHTF scenario could wind up being a case of our trade war with China [unless US businesses get wise and regain their lead and start using America’s resources again] or another negative: a socialist takeover of our nation.

 Our conflict with China has suddenly escalated to a dangerous new phase.  This is not simply just a “trade war” any longer, and our relationship with China will never be the same again.  As you will see below, President Trump just referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as our “enemy”, and this is something that the Chinese are going to take extremely seriously.  In China, the national leader is a representation of the government as a whole, and the government as a whole is a representation of the entire county.  So to the Chinese people, what Trump just said will be interpreted as “the United States and China are now enemies”.

China stunned global markets when it announced a new wave of tariffs on U.S. goods early on Friday…

The trade war between the U.S. and China escalated further Friday as Beijing announced a new set of tariffs on American products, sending the stock market plunging.

The China State Council announced it would impose tariffs ranging from 5% to 10% on an additional $75 billion in U.S. goods, according to state media outlet Global Times.

After Trump learned of this, he hit the ceiling, and he immediately went on a Twitter rant in which he pledged to hit Chinese goods with even higher tariffs…

For many years China (and many other countries) has been taking advantage of the United States on Trade, Intellectual Property Theft, and much more.

And as our society has become less moral, we have seen an escalation of violence all over the country.  Too many young men are growing up in fatherless families, there are fewer role models [Hollywood sure doesn’t set any example; hell, even the Boy Scouts are being withered away due to pressure by the Left to become politically correct].  Many young men have become lazier, fatter and studies show they have less testosterone and often seem to have a desire to make themselves ugly through excessive tattoos, body piercings, crude hair styles and seem more prone to criminal behavior to the point where our military has loosened their recruitment standards. Many of them have a more difficult time securing decent employment as a result [we won’t hire people who have excessive body art which can be seen as it’s a stomach turner for many of our older client base who grew up associating it with gangs, prisons or the sideshow].

Is it any wonder why so many of them are embracing the notion of socialism.  After all, according to the Far Left presidential candidates, they’ll get everything for FREE even if they “don’t want to work.”

The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is steadily disappearing. Some are even predicting another civil war.

The vast majority of Big Finance, after all, is a complete sham… a shell game…

It is, as Baudrillard put it, a “society of spectacle”...

An orgy of activity that, in terms of creation, produces very little of substance save for sweat, dopamine, and the occasional chafed skin. 

It’s no wonder, then, the financial world is fraught with pundits who, having left the lemming race, are now predicting gloom, doom, and collapses.

There’s now an entire industry shaped of former Wall Streeters standing on the outside, staring into the abyss of their former lives, and reporting on the madness with clearer eyes in books, journals, newsletters, and Youtube videos. 

I have warned my readers that our relations with China were going to get progressively worse.  We have been expecting this for a long time, but most Americans still do not grasp the implications of this crisis.

This conflict between the United States and China is going to change everything.  An extraordinary amount of pain is heading our way, and our society is completely and utterly unprepared to handle it. Trump has publicly encouraged our manufacturers to get out of China and to become more self sufficient [as I have called for the past five years or more]

The top Yahoo headline this morning:

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said President Trump has the power to block American businesses from investing in China.

'The Emergency Economic Powers Act' »

 Stock prices around the world are plunging, the price of gold is spiking and the Chinese yuan is crashing.

But, alas, few have dared to, in the midst of the revelries, bend over and ask, what do we do after the orgy? 

Or, more precisely, What happens after the collapse? 

For that, we have Rickards and his latest book, Aftermath: Seven Secrets of Wealth Preservation in the Coming Chaos. 

 

Aftermath: Bonus Chapter

“In life, a few mistakes go a long way…
By Jim Rickards

Mistakes offer valuable lessons in all areas of life, including investing.

Early in Aftermath, I tell the story of how, as a new driver, I forgot to turn off the headlights when parking my car. I returned to find my battery dead. The frustration and effort required to fix the problem gave me a valuable lesson that I wouldn’t forget.

A gold-based monetary system is based on lessons that civilized, capitalist societies do well to remember. The lesson, repeated over and over throughout history, is this: All paper currency systems fail. It’s only a matter of time.

The history of paper money is one of pain and wealth destruction for all but the savviest elites who manage to preserve some wealth through hard assets. Hard assets include precious metals, productive land, and businesses that can survive accelerating inflation.

Given the disastrous history of paper money systems, defenders of today’s global monetary system are implicitly saying, “Today, with the right Ph.D. Economists running central banks, we know better! We can responsibly manage a pure paper money system for the benefit of all participants.”

But no matter how sophisticated today’s central bank operations might sound, human nature does not change. Gold is money not merely due to tradition, but because it has stood the test of time going all the way back to antiquity. All prior paper money systems were destroyed by some combination of excess money supply and falling money demand.

The United States has been on a paper monetary standard since President Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971.

I described in the book how, since 1971, wealth inequality has grown. Aside from brief panics, assets like stocks, bonds and real estate have mostly skyrocketed in value. Real growth in household incomes for the middle class has been disappointing. That’s heavily due to the way the monetary system is structured.

Money created by both the Fed and commercial banks tends to bid up the prices of stocks, bonds and real estate first. As this newly created gets recirculated through the banking system, it gets into the hands of consumers and is spent on consumer goods.

 

The system is not working well for much of the voting public, and they are not likely to stand for maintenance of the Status quo much longer.

Regardless of your political views, it’s important to recognize what history says about how wealth inequality gets addressed by political leaders. An enterprising political leader typically finds a way to even things out, and it typically involves deficit spending. Deficits are funded either implicitly or explicitly by central banks.

In the section on behavioral psychology, I write, “It’s one thing to know that a herd can turn and run; it’s another to know where or when the herd will do so.”

In the U.S., the political herd is likely to run in a direction that demands more government support for the middle class. It’s likely to run in this direction during the 2020 election season. If not in 2019 or 2020, the herd will demand some sort of fiscal stimulus during the next recession.

I give a brief history of U.S. debt in Chapter Two, concluding that growth in U.S. federal debt is a bipartisan failure. With federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare on autopilot, and no political will by either party to reform entitlements, federal debt is certain to grow rapidly in the decade ahead.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has a good chance of being elevated to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Fiscal responsibility has not historically been a priority for the Democrats.

So imagine how the concept of MMT might be embraced by the Democratic presidential candidate as it grows in popularity. The temptation of what looks like a free lunch through the adoption of MMT would put federal spending programs into overdrive. A tidal wave of newly printed dollars, fresh from the federally-controlled printing press, would flood the U.S. economy, then the global economy.

The Republican Party has lost any historical association with fiscal responsibility that it once had. President Trump is focused on issues like trade, defense, jobs and the stock market. Unsustainable federal spending on entitlements is not one of his priorities. So if Trump is re-elected, federal deficits will keep growing — and will only accelerate in the next recession as automatic stabilizers kick in. A re-elected Trump would put even more pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates low to support the stock market and the economy.

Both U.S. political paths have a similar destination: Ever-growing national debt that in one way or another will be paid for by a weaker U.S. dollar.

Let’s review the potential MMT path to a weaker dollar, because it’s the path that would most surprise investors who are unprepared for it. Then, I’ll present a stock that’s poised to skyrocket if MMT were to be seriously debated or officially adopted.

In Chapter Five, titled Free Money, I identify the essential problem with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): “The problem with Chartalism and MMT is not that the theory is wrong as far as it goes; the problem is that it does not go far enough. MMT fails not because of what it says, but because of what it ignores. The issue is not whether there is a legal limit on money creation, but whether there is a psychological limit.”

Promoters of MMT focus on the accounting mechanics of dollar creation, and downplay how their policy proposals might affect the use of dollars in the real world. They offer no successful real-world case study showing that MMT works. It’s all abstract.

To make policy prescriptions, one must at least imagine real-world effects. So let’s imagine how businesses and households in the real world might react to the introduction of MMT.

Where MMT proponent view the U.S. dollar as a tool to implement government policy, businesses and households view U.S. dollars as a store of value. Businesses and households play the role of both producers and consumers in the economy.

The introduction of an MMT system would inevitably draw more private sector resources into the public sector. It would put the federal government, which already has a dominant role in the economy, into a supreme role.

Say’s Law is an economic law that simply says supply, or production, precedes demand. Think of how an agrarian economy develops through industrialization. All of that development didn’t happen because consumers suddenly “demanded” an industrialized economy. Instead, it developed because producers invented, produced, and found a market for their production.

Ever since Keynesian and Monetarist economic interventions took off in the 20th Century, mainstream thinking about supply and demand has shifted backwards. “Let’s pump up demand to absorb the excess supplies created by capitalists,” say the interventionists. Fiscal policy pumps up demand; monetary policy pumps up both supply and demand by making commercial and consumer loans cheaper.

Fiscal and monetary interventionism is like an addictive substance. One intervention creates distortions, which in turn begets more interventions to “fix” the supply or demand imbalances created by the prior intervention. It’s a never-ending treadmill of interventions and distortions.

Once interventions are embedded into an economy’s framework, they’re politically impossible to stop — even though the addictive gives rise to ever-mounting debts. Default and liquidation of debts is deemed unthinkable and unacceptable. So, the end game is a monetary reset of the type I describe in Chapter Six, The Mar-a-Lago Accord.

Why hasn’t a monetary reset happened yet? One big reason is that the monetary system since Nixon suspended the gold standard has been geared to inflate asset values. This brings us back to MMT. If ideas from MMT or other pro-consumer stimulus plans were to be introduced to the monetary system, more new money supply would get into the hands of households. 

Although such a policy pivot would be sold as a benefit for consumers, it would ultimately lead to lower standards of living through higher inflation. It would undermine the value of dollar because suppliers of scarce goods and services would recognize that the dollar printing press is now in overdrive. These suppliers would require an ever-higher quantity of currency in exchange for their scarce goods and services. An abrupt change in psychology toward the dollar on the part of the supply side of the economy is one reason Jim calls inflation “a psychological phenomenon.”

A change is psychology toward a currency can happen at light speed in economies like Zimbabwe or Venezuela because they have minimal property rights and government checks and balances. Such a change is likely to unfold more slowly in the U.S., which has — for now — a more-robust system of constitutional rights and property rights.

If the global monetary system continues on its current path, or through the introduction of MMT accelerates its path to destruction, what can you do to protect your savings and wealth?

You can own productive rental property or farmland. You can buy stock in inflation-proof businesses with pricing power. You can put yourself on your own gold standard. I recommend a 10% allocation to gold as insurance against a collapsing monetary system.

>our nation was built on the values of individual freedom, private property and limited government...

 

NOTEWORTHY and USEFUL

 

Homemade MRE’s for Preppers

The Meal Ready-to-Eat – commonly known as the MRE (as shown below) – is a self-contained, individual field ration in lightweight packaging bought by the United States military for its service members for use in combat or other field conditions where organized food facilities are not available.

Read more >

Huh?: Apple Says Don't Keep the New Apple Credit Card in Your Wallet or Jeans

 

How to Earn Serious Money From Your Idle RV

https://www.moneytalksnews.com/how-to-earn-serious-money-from-your-idle-rv/

 

There are a lot of things in life that we take for granted, but there’s one in particular that we rarely think about. It’s the ease and convenience of a bathroom for a biological function that can occur several times a day and has the potential to be a bit messy. A simple flush and quick wash of the hands makes it so easy.

 But in a time of crisis--whether natural or manmade--things like electricity, basic plumbing, and running water might not exist anymore. And the convenience of bathrooms and toilets would become a fond memory.

 Your biggest consideration is the amount of time you estimate you’ll be without a toilet. Most natural disasters have relatively short durations from two weeks up to three months. One exception is Puerto Rico where many resources are still limited or non-existent more than a year after Hurricane Maria...

 Build a DIY Emergency Toilet That Will Last

 

How to start a neighborhood barter club

http://www.grassrootsgrantmakers.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Neighborhood_Bartering_Club.pdf

 

 

Improvised Weapons For Self Defense or A Long Emergency

 There are many things around your home or that are easily obtainable that can be used as a weapon. In this post, we are going to talk about improvised weapons that can be made or found for little or nothing. … Continued

 

I live in a safe neighborhood in a town with a below-average crime rate, so I don't really have to worry about burglars. However, I still have a lot of home security measures in place, and for two reasons:

 1: Better safe than sorry. Just because there isn't much crime in my area doesn't mean I'll never be robbed. And 2: Crime will skyrocket after the SHTF. This is my main concern. Most people only have a few days of food in their homes. When it's all gone, some of them will start looting their neighbor's homes. Hunger can turn regular people into animals.

 If someone manages to get past all of my home security measures, I'd like to be able to tell them that I don't have any food or supplies left. Hopefully, they will give up looking and move on. But that will only happen if I have some very good hiding spots...

 12 Best Hiding Spots For Valuables In Your Home

This is Proven to Work 17 Times Better than Morphine with No Side Effects 

Find Out Why Real Men Are Becoming Extinct 

El Paso Shooter Told FBI It Was Dem Debate That Triggered Him – Not Trump

Fake News Media Continues to Lie About Trump & Pence

 

This is not the America it used to be.

 

Anger on both sides is rising as we head into the 2020 presidential election.

 

And in the words of socialist and potential Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders:

 

"What seems radical today could become mainstream tomorrow."

 

For the first time in American history, a divided populace could put a socialist President in the White House in the 2020 election.  [Let's hope not]!

 

How will this national nightmare turn out?

Access the documentary immediately, use the link below.

Watch the American Consequences 2020 Documentaryhttps://players.brightcove.net/pages/v1/index.html?accountId=5298920694001&playerId=k7kYTMBz75&videoId=6015384240001&autoplay=true

Here Are the UNJUSTIFIABLE Remarks About Trump After Shootings

 

A Final Note…

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