Marching to a different drummer.

I doubt I have ever written anything that wasn't contrarian in some way.  I'm not a mainstream thinker.  My view is that the more people who believe something, the less likely it is to be true.

The economy is teetering. President and Congress worked out an agreement which they call 'raising the debt ceiling' and I call  'digging a deeper hole'.  As far as I am concerned, those are completely different concepts and have completely different solutions.  I believe there is a lot of confusion out there about what is really going on and what we, as individuals, can do about it.

Most of the people I know are buying silver and gold and will think they are bargains at any price.  I read an article a friend sent me from the 'National Inflation Association'.  I shall excerpt a paragraph:

By the end of 2011, we are confident that not only will we see QE3 under a new name, but the Fed will act to force banks to lend their $1.6 trillion in excess reserves. It is a joke that we are debating spending cuts of $70 billion over the next two years, when only very dramatic across the board spending cuts of 50% or more of the total budget will give the U.S. any hope of balancing the budget and avoiding hyperinflation. Best case scenario, if the U.S. government cuts spending by 50% or more in all areas of the budget including entitlement programs and is able to prevent hyperinflation, NIA still believes we will see the U.S. dollar lose 90% of its purchasing power this decade with the price of gold rising to above $16,000 per ounce.

Sadly, my friend believes this nonsense. If she had ever researched the 'NIA', she wouldn't.  I have other friends who are buying property for farming.  I'd like more farmland myself, but it quickly becomes difficult to farm for profit in a staggering economy.  If the dominoes fall, beginning with Greece, most of Europe will fall and the Euro will be a bad dream.  At that point, the US exposure to almost all of the CDS in the world, which hedge almost all of the junk sovereign paper in the world becomes nearly 100%.

So...it won't be paid.  There isn't that much money.  Almost everyone accepts that, but then we break into two camps.  One insists that there will be runaway inflation.  The other believes there will be runaway DEflation - but both sides somehow believe that their personal investment in precious metal will protect them.  I am skeptical.  I am SO skeptical that, if I were in the money lending business, I wouldn't consider taking silver as collateral at over $10 an ounce or gold at over $200 - if I took them at all, which is in itself unlikely.
   

I also have friends who are buying property and starting small farms. That's probably a good idea.  One-acre lots in HPP are on the market for $20k, but the property values are still dropping.  In 2003 my lot went for $12k and we could easily see that again. But almost no matter how it falls out, credit is going to get tighter than it is now and interest rates are going to go up.  My concept is that you take care of the basics - food and water - and build out from there.

The federal government doesn't have any more money to give to the banks, so the QE idea of taking all the money from the citizens and giving it to the banks, which was wrong from the start, is not going much further.  It was an attempt to literally paper over the problem with freshly minted paper and only had the result of making the paper worthless.

I have never wanted much money and I have never saved any - so none of this affects me much as long as I can grow enough vegetables to keep eating and I think I'm OK with that.  So I have enough worry-free time to think about what is probably real rather than what the MSM and government tell us is real. They either don't know, which is scary, or they are lying - which is scary because people believe them. 

I have been listening to the mainstream opinion now for several years:  Pay off your mortgage.  Pay off your credit card bills.  Pay off all your debts. Buy silver and gold - nothing else will hold it's value. Have at least a year of income in the bank. None of that advice makes any sense at all to me. It seems exactly backward.  No one can do that anyway. We have no money left.

I understand that I can't live beyond my means, but the government is living 2 BILLION dollars a day beyond it's means and it keeps right on truckin'.  Somehow the government doesn't understand that all the jobs it let the multi-nationals ship overseas aren't coming back.  The manufacturing base that was shipped overseas isn't coming back either. That the tax cuts for the rich aren't trickling down - and that when food riots start, so will the civil war. 

The unemployment rate has nowhere to go but up - yet the government is borrowing more and more money with the expectation that the tapped-out middle class can suck it up and pay it.  We can't.  We have nothing to pay it with. We can't pay taxes because we don't have jobs.  We can't buy mandatory health insurance and the few people who DO have jobs can't subsidize the rest of us. And the president and congress just tossed the millions of unemployed and elderly to the wolves.

 

So after a lot of thought, I decided there might be a way to beat the system legally.  Maybe I can, maybe I can't. But the system can't beat me anymore so why not try?  I feel sufficiently abandoned by the government to give it a go. 

Marching to a different drummer?  I reckon.