[KaiserJeep]

Money isn't real, folks. It is a fiction, and today even more virtual, because 90+% of the money exists only as digital bits stored in NonStop systems.

I know because I was one of a few who built those systems, then sold them to the banks, the credit companies, and the stocks/commodities exchanges.

Now I'll tell you a secret. That money is perfectly secure, as long as everybody has confidence in it. The world will end when you lose that confidence.

You Doomers and your doubts are what will end the good times for all of us.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')You Doomers and your doubts are what will end the good times for all of us.

[onlooker]

Are some of you going to shoot the messengers because of the message. Lets face it, money as Kaiser himself confessed is now almost totally virtual and hanging by the thread of confidence. Well, what happens as more and more people realize that what is happening now is but one gigantic swindle. When QE is just for those "Too Big to Fail", when your money keeps losing purchasing power, when the stock market continues upward even as the prospects for millions continues downward. Because that is what is happening. And it is getting much worse as a key energy source that fuels economic activity is seizing up and rapidly degenerating. I speak of Oil. So, you think when all logic and sense points to an Economic System in the throes of decline and dysfunction, people are suppose to remain confident in the medium of exchange that this Economic System traffics in? When "growth" is based on speculative bubbles of irrational exuberance because no longer can growth happen organically and in a healthy way. Because that is what all those charts and graphs are really showing. And all some of you can say is hush, your predictions of doom have been wrong previously so happy times MUST continue. Do you really think people are blind to their own circumstances and that of their neighbors and the world at large to such a degree as to continue to have faith in an Economic System that is showing signs of rapid decline. At some point people will look at reality because they must or is plain as day. NOT because someone like me or a few others here told them too.

[GHung]

Economic systems don't fail because people lose confidence. People lose confidence because economic systems are out of balance. Using extraordinary measures to force systems back into balance only creates the illusion that the system is in balance. These attempts to thwart the organic evolutionary rise and fall of economies (as in massive debts on one side of the balance sheet) eventually fail, sometimes spectacularly.



.... but people will pretend as long as they can.

[KaiserJeep]

I meant exactly what I said. The virtual money stored in computers has real value today, it can be spent, exchanged for real estate, food, water, energy, etc. - all because you have total confidence that those digital bits represent value.

If you or somebody else were to realize that there is really nothing there - just a pattern of bits in a computer memory is the literal reality we are talking about - and you were successful in convincing everyone else of the real facts, then BANG the world will end.

So please don't publish any more FUD, at least not until I have had a few more years to feather my nest.

I mean, you were not under the impression that money was real, were you? It's only a way of keeping score in the game of life.

[onlooker]

Don't worry Kaiser, few people visit this site and even less would take seriously Internet Savants like us. And NO, I never thought money was anything more than worthless paper and an accounting tool. But I do remember as I think you and others here, when the Greenback was backed by Gold. When companies and consumers borrowed on last resort not first option. When, the Markets were somewhat reflecting the state of the Economy. All that is gone, and we are left with mirages and smoke and mirrors. And profound corruption as it seems the well connected and knowledgable realize the Game is almost up. Witness the bunkers being purchased by the wealthy and those in the know. So, yes nothing left to do for us all than too live for today and for yourself and your loved ones. I am doing the same.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', ' ').........

So please don't publish any more FUD, at least not until I have had a few more years to feather my nest.

I mean, you were not under the impression that money was real, were you? It's only a way of keeping score in the game of life.

[onlooker]

So much for economic growth
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')mportantly, the entire revision is almost entirely due to a change in the inflation rate. On a nominal basis, there was virtually no real change at all. In other words, stronger economic growth came from a mathematical adjustment rather than increases in actual economic activity.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I') meant exactly what I said. The virtual money stored in computers has real value today, it can be spent, exchanged for real estate, food, water, energy, etc. - all because you have total confidence that those digital bits represent value.

If you or somebody else were to realize that there is really nothing there - just a pattern of bits in a computer memory is the literal reality we are talking about - and you were successful in convincing everyone else of the real facts, then BANG the world will end.

[KaiserJeep]

Since you mentioned it, gold or other precious metals have no more value than printed pictures on paper. I would not swap food or water or liquor or anything of real value for precious metals, anymore than paper currency. Just because precious metal coins predate printed currency means nothing.

[onlooker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('baha', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'Y')ou Doomers and your doubts are what will end the good times for all of us.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'T')he world will end when you lose that confidence.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'S')ince you mentioned it, gold or other precious metals have no more value than printed pictures on paper. I would not swap food or water or liquor or anything of real value for precious metals, anymore than paper currency. Just because precious metal coins predate printed currency means nothing.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', 'J')ust because you can't eat gold doesn't mean it has no value. Would you eat ammunition or the gun that fires it? Would you eat a good pair of boots? And yet those have value.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', 'J')ust because you can't eat gold doesn't mean it has no value. Would you eat ammunition or the gun that fires it? Would you eat a good pair of boots? And yet those have value.

[mmasters]

Fractional reserve banking is like capitalism, it has its problems but nobody has yet to put out a system that works better in this day and age. It may be possible a better system exists however it's biggest opponents would be the people behind central banking. They would probably stop it from ever happening.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', 'N')ot if you need a meal or a drink RIGHT NOW. But if you want something to trade after paper currencies aren't trusted (or are trusted far less), then I think it does. Maybe that's my bias, as I tend to try to look decades ahead, vs. just at today or the next 5 minutes.

[onlooker]

So, what is going to happen to the vast wealth of the super rich once economic conditions really deteriorate? I think the super rich have already indicated that they lack confidence in "their" wealth by cashing in some of it to purchase fancy state of the art bunkers and formulating other means to survive/prosper in the coming turbulent times

https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/surviv ... f6cddd0cc1
The Rich are plotting to leave us all behind
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ') There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

[KaiserJeep]

Quite sensibly they are stocking up on the necessities of life, which is what a bunker is for - a place to keep and protect the stuff you need to live.

That does not include gold. I mean, I believe that it has value today when civilization exists. Gold is attractive and easily plated onto other metals to form a protective coating.

After TSHTF, smug people sitting on a pile of gold will starve on their golden thrones. I'm not going to trade you food or water or ammunition or building supplies or anything else for useless gold metal. Gold is a currency and all forms of currency are worthless in a barter economy. They will instantly devalue to zero and stay that way forever.

Don't be a fool. ALL currency has zero intrinsic value. Gold will have value for at least five minutes beyond greenbacks, before everybody decides that all currencies are totally worthless. After that happens, you will actually regret that you didn't keep paper currency instead, which has some minimal value as a kindling to start a wood fire.

If you want to preserve wealth, buy arable land, put a fence around it, and build the afore-mentioned bunker plus a sniper tower that covers it all. You don't need any more land than that which can be covered by a well aimed rifle shot from that tower, because other people will take that excess land away because you can't protect it. Perhaps you were going to hire security guards on horseback to protect the old Doomstead, and pay them gold? They will pay themselves with your stash of food and water and guns, after they kill you - but they won't touch useless gold.

For <insert diety name>'s sake, believing in currency of any form is to believe that Doom will partially destroy our civilization, and then stop, and after TEOTWAWKI, you can then BUY THE THINGS YOU NEED. Rank foolishness.