Category Archives: economy and money

Gold price rise

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Gold has been growing lately, and the question some people ask is whether it’s time to sell because it might crash.

That logic might have made sense in the past, but I don’t think it does now. Let me explain.

First of all, gold didn’t even catch up to inflation yet. The commodities such as olive oil went up 2x and I don’t see anybody expecting it to come down. However, the more important reason why people expect it to crash is the expectation that the Americans control the gold price in order to prop up the dollar, and since they are still in power, the expectation is that they will manage to crash the gold just because they always do.

The problem with this logic is that the dollar, at this point, is the world’s hottest hot potato. Everybody who has it is trying to get rid of it, because America is using it as a weapon.

China, in particular, invented a very good method of simultaneously getting rid of their dollar reserves and buying all the dumped gold from the West, and it’s so elegant I’m amazed that the Russians didn’t think of it. You see, all the Chinese did was set the gold price on the Shanghai exchange $100 above what they sell it for in London. As a result, everybody wanting to earn a quick profit will buy gold in the West and sell it in China for more money. If the West wants to dump gold to prop up the dollar, they can feel free, but everybody will quickly scoop it up and sell it in China, thus pumping the Western gold to China and Chinese dollar reserves to the West. As a result, this makes China more resistant to Western financial pressures, prepares it for a future where all the currencies are either gold backed or irrelevant, and depletes the Western gold reserves. If the West tries to counter this by raising the price of gold, it will actually increase the buying pressure because the retail buyers might smell the coffee and jump on the hype train. If they prohibit sales of gold for dollars, it’s the end of the dollar. The beauty of the thing is that they can’t even prohibit China from buying up their gold, because formally speaking it’s not China doing it, it’s everybody who wants to make money on the Shanghai exchange.

So, I guess if you think gold will crash, just because it always did, I would say you don’t understand what’s going on in the world. What’s going in the world is the end of America, the end of Dollar, and the return of gold as money. No, Bitcoin is not the new gold. Gold is the new gold, and the fact that the central banks are the ones buying most of it at this time, and the fact that the retail buyers don’t get it yet, means that you will either have gold, or you will be bankrupt.

How do I know that this present gold price rise is not a retail phenomenon? Because you can go to your local bullion dealer and buy pretty much whatever you want. When it’s a retail phenomenon, everything instantly vanishes from the shelves, because the supply of retail products is very limited, being tailored for the normal levels of demand.

Also, according to my estimates, gold is still super cheap considering where it will be soon. That’s why the Chinese can put the price at +$100 over spot; it’s because where spot is. They don’t think they are losing money doing it, they think it’s the best deal ever.

Spike

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Both gold and Bitcoin are spiking, and it looks as if some insiders started moving assets out of fiat currency and the stock market and into parallel perceived stores of value, and the move was significant enough to have triggered a small panic, because people are asking themselves why now, amidst all the crises, and what does someone know that we don’t.

 

The limit of prediction

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The problem with trying to predict future events is that all interested parties also make their own predictions, they assess outcomes of possible moves and use all of their power to avoid the most undesirable outcomes.

Basically, this means that I can, for instance, see the predicament of the American economy, but so do the American analysts, and their willingness to make even the most drastic moves in order to prolong the status quo should never be underestimated. If they know that something will doom them, they will do literally anything to prevent it. “Anything” can range from printing trillions of dollars, spoofing the entire economy, creating a civil war, to cooking up a nuclear war. One can think that nothing can be as bad as nuclear war, but if you’re in a position of someone who knows they will be doomed without it, and with a nuclear war they can arrange everybody else to be doomed worse, the picture changes.

Also, it’s easy to speculate what the Russians could do, if they so wanted, but it’s almost impossible to know the exact thinking of the people who are actually in charge. They might have an internal red line they will never make known, and if that red line is crossed, they might activate a pre-arranged plan that is also not known outside their inner circle; for instance, if the Americans escalate past a certain point, for instance by starting to hit deep targets within the Russian Federation with carriers that can be modified to carry nuclear warheads, and it can’t be known in advance whether the warheads are conventional or nuclear, they might activate something ranging from a deep tactical response to a full nuclear first strike. You see, they really want to avoid a nuclear confrontation, but they are aware that they are in fact encouraging escalation by being too restrained, and this will inevitably encourage the West to perform a sneak nuclear attack. They are torn between really not wanting things to escalate, and realisation that their restraint might cause exactly that. So, it’s reasonably easy to understand what they might do by analysing the options that are available to them and making a cross-section between that and the analysis of their behaviour and thinking. Basically, you see what they can do and then eliminate the options that cause outcomes that are highly unfavourable to them, and then plot a tree of possible desirable courses. For instance, it is quite obvious to me that the Russians can take the entire Ukraine within a month. They could also cut off their gas, oil, food, water and electricity during winter and kill off the entire population. They could cut off all supply and communication between NATO and Ukraine. However, when you make a cross-section between that and the desire to de-escalate and decrease the probability of making the conflict threatening enough for NATO that really bad options start looking probable, you are left with options that look like “winning by not losing while the enemy is drained of resources and demotivated”.

In essence, I can plot out a tree of options, but you need to be aware that all the parties involved are doing the same thing, and what makes sense to me doesn’t necessarily have to make sense to them; for instance, if I calculate that the best outcome would be a nuclear first strike, and Russian leadership already decided that they would never use that option, it would be very hard for me to assess what the second most favourable option would be, because they might be betting on something I see as exceedingly unlikely.

Futility of pretense

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I was recently asked how I can manage it; knowing that the global economy is in the process of controlled demolition, that a major world war is unfolding and it’s just a matter of time before it goes nuclear, and the global “elites” have plans to kill half of us and completely subjugate the rest.

My response was “what’s the alternative?”

I can pretend everything is fine but that takes away my power to do what little I can to be aware and prepared, essentially to watch for the direction of the falling tree before I start running. I cited the example of a leaky window frame – I can either pretend there’s no problem, and ignore rainwater seeping into the wall and the black mould colonies, I can be aware of the problem and do nothing about it because it’s not my problem to fix, or I can be aware of the problem and do something about it. The only options that include any agency on my part start with awareness. Sure, it’s not very comfortable to know that the world that we know is pretty much doomed. But what is the alternative? Live in an illusion? What problems does that solve? It’s like having a brake light on my car turn on, but I say it’s fine because the brakes haven’t failed yet. Yes, fixing the brakes is a hassle – get an appointment with the mechanic, wait, travel there and back and spend some money. But what’s the alternative? Wait until the brakes fail completely, hope you don’t wreck the car when they do, and then still have to fix the problem, only with an undriveable car so you have to have it towed. How would that be helpful?

With the civilizational collapse, the matter is different only in the sense that one can say we’re doomed anyway and no degree of preparation can help, so it’s better to just not get stressed over it, but that is a fallacy right there. Let’s assume the worst-case scenario – total doom, and nothing you can do can save you. Oh, really? You can’t meditate, you can’t pray to God for guidance, you can’t resolve your attachments, you can’t put your affairs in order? You can do many things, because souls do survive the death of the body, at least for those who in fact have a spiritual core worth speaking of. Let’s say there’s a nuclear exchange, and it kills the total of 3.5 billion people, which is more-less the worst-case scenario estimate. With today’s world population of 8.1 billion, this means 4.6 billion survivors, which is more than the world population was in the year 1980. There would be no nuclear winter; that’s known to be pseudo-scientific rubbish. Sure, there would be some dust injected into the high layers of the atmosphere, but no worse than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, which puts a definite upper limit on all my estimates, and the global climate effects of that were trivial. Radiation will be really bad in hot spots, but those will be the exact hot spots where the likelihood of surviving the nuclear explosions and their aftermath will be lowest, anyway, so it’s like shooting a corpse; not really adding to lethality. If you’re not in one of the directly impacted zones, you will likely not even know what happened because there will be a total or almost total loss of communications. There will definitely not be real-time reporting on the Internet or the cable TV.

Let’s say it’s just the economic collapse and the war threat fizzles out for some reason. Economic collapse looks like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, only everywhere, and there isn’t a stable foreign currency to use, because everybody is impacted at the same time. If only one could have known in advance and bought gold and silver to trade with. Oh wait…

Knowing what’s about to happen might not change the outcome, but it gives you some degree of control over your situation, it gives you time to spiritually prepare for death, and it gives you time to prepare for a survivable bad situation in ways that can possibly mitigate the hardships, and even if it doesn’t help in the end, you feel better knowing you at least did what you could.

Honestly, I’m not sure what good my preparations will do, if any, because every single actual hint I got “from above” was about the “other side”, afterwards, and it felt wonderful. I wasn’t warned to stock up on canned beans because I’ll have to survive a nuclear holocaust or something. I was told that this nightmare will end for me. So, why am I still buying gold coins, fixing my car, fixing the leaky roof window and buying a new computer? Why am I not just letting go and letting everything turn to shit? Because that’s not my style. When the end comes, it will find me firmly in control of things, acting as if everything will go on forever, with car serviced, phone batteries charged and with enough gold to ride through a really bad shitstorm, God willing. And at every single second of dealing with things as if they are to go on forever, I will be ready to go at any moment.

Closing window

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There have been multiple reports from America that the banks are closing the accounts of the local precious metal dealers. There have been all kinds of analyses based on the assumption that there isn’t a conspiracy and that the coin shops have merely been “acting suspiciously” according to some AML/KYC bullshit the banks are implementing, but I find this extremely unlikely, as no evidence of it has been presented. Rather, let’s approach this from the position of game theory.

The banks in America are reporting a very significant outflow of deposits, caused, obviously, by the fact that the banks are either going bankrupt or are being rescued by the state, and the legislature is in place allowing the banks to bail themselves in with their clients’ funds, as long as those are above a certain threshold, which in America is the FDIC limit of $250000. In theory, everything up to this limit is “safe”, and everything above that limit will be treated according to the principle of “steal from the rich, they can afford it”. In the EU, the guaranteed limit is much lower, 100000 €.

What has been happening behind the scenes is perfectly logical – people have been trying to rescue their money from the looming threat. Some think that the bigger banks are safer so they are moving their money to the biggest banks, although this logic might be misguided, since the state is using the biggest banks to rescue all the problematic assets, which might in fact collapse those biggest banks together with the state economy – essentially, they are trading strategic balance for a tactical respite. Other people are trying to move money into real estate, or something else that is out of harm’s way. One of those obvious options is to order gold and silver bullion from a bullion dealer and wire him the money. The banks noticed the pattern – basically, there is a “sink” to which the money can escape from their accounts, and “someone” told them to close this option, and thus all the “unexpected” and quite coordinated closures of the bullion dealers’ bank accounts.

Basically, the time window for rescuing money from the system is closing. Either its value will be inflated away because the states are drowning in debt, and inflating the money in order to make the debt manageable is too tempting an option for any scoundrel to resist, and/or all citizen assets will be subject to such a tight control, everybody will essentially be given an allowance sufficient for bare survival, in the short time before this totalitarian neo-communist control scheme collapses, following the example of all such schemes that have been tried in the past.

My expectation is that the next thing the banks will do is limit the amount one can wire out from their account using the Internet banking system, under some fabricated cause; a good example is the OTP bank in Croatia, which limits the wire transfer amount to 30000kn, or something under 4000 €. For anything more than that you need to come to your bank physically and sign the transfer. Now, let’s say there’s a lockdown due to the next plandemic, and the banks are closed because reasons, and so you can’t physically go there and order a transfer. This would effectively bottleneck your ability to transfer money out of the trap it’s in, and if you make too many successive 4000 € transfers, this would likely qualify as “suspicious activity” and your account would be suspended, pending review. If you think this is paranoid or unrealistic, you are an idiot, because all the mechanisms for this are already in place. You can already use your money only for things the state/bank conglomerate allows, and stringent measures are in place to ensure compliance. It’s merely a matter of them modifying the list of allowed behaviours, so soon you’ll have to ask for your mommy’s permission to use your money to buy toilet paper so you can take a shit.

When the general populace wakes up and smells the coffee, it will be far too late for them to do anything constructive. That might not be a problem, though, for most of them are up to their eyebrows in debt anyway, so the issue of them rescuing their assets from the system is moot.