John Michael Greer (i.e., JMG) noted a long time ago that the present-day collapse of US Industry would be orders of magnitude worse than the Great Depression since most people no longer have sufficient practical skills to 'make do' like their Great-GrandParents did circa the 1920s to 30s.
Industrial society collapsing would mean Necrophilia, Cannibalism & other monstrous Antihuman tendencies rapidly being normalized as 'The Beautiful Ones' (i.e. Service & Tech people in the Cities who don't build anything REAL) get Devoured by hordes of Desperate, Emaciated Zombies.
Oh, & yes, this is before the Third World War is factored in, & we consider the 'Eight-Nation Alliance' style Delenda Est of CONUS by coalition forces in the coming punitive Military Expedition.
Calling it now: We will be seeing Bronze Age Collapse level numbers for overall fatalities in America & most of its sundry Vassals & Satrapies worldwide.
I've been rereading his Twilight's Last Gleaming at least once a year for the past several years. I see he's got an updated version up at Amazon, so I'll have to lay hold of that, too.
So, in theory, that means the post-US would be ripe for colonization by developed or established powers right? Western US would be managed by China, Southern by the CIA (Cartels), etc. It's already going in that direction when you look at the political money flow.
The best hedge against this sort of thing is not a high income, it is wealth - specifically wealth that helps one sustain oneself. This sustainment has always been valuable, but was growing ever cheaper for a long time - not so anymore.
Hopefully it doesn't snap all the way back to survival.
That was a good article, thank you for sharing it. One of my greatest regrets is that when I was young I confused "rich" and "wealthy" and made wrong choices.
What would you recommend to people to protect themselves from the effects of stagflation - gold and silver? (I personally believe crypto is completely corrupted via the tether scam)
It's tricky. If we get a debt deflation one set of investments will triumph, if we get hyperinflation another. Right now I'm betting on hyperinflation and war, so I'm invested in gold, silver, bitcoin as well as energy stocks and defense industry stocks. I've also prepped for Bad Things as much as my budget affords. But I've predicted 12 of the last 4 recessions, so I don't know that I'd take my own advice!
I don’t know where you are located, but there are lots of real estate clubs that can be good sources of info. Beware of ones that are looking for money. Florida, Ohio, and So Ca have some good ones.
There are some gurus and books that are worthwhile. Some good free stuff on YouTube.
A question I always look for is how the group leader / hire / organizer makes money.
In California, a challenging place, nolo has some good books.
In the great depression grandpa lost everything because the renters couldn’t pay and had nowhere to go and he couldn’t kick them out in good conscience. Being a landlord is not good in a depression by and large.
One of my great grandfathers lost all their savings when a bank failed in 4 corners Colorado. They had some type of farm and income was seasonal. He lost his farm.
And in some states, cough cough California, you have a target on your back as a landlord. The regulations in some areas are incredible. NYC I’ve heard horror stories on. Or Oakland, SF, LA, Santa Monica.
Some markets there is a shortage of housing. And some types are just not economical to build.
It’s a business and if you want to pay your mortgage you need to have people that pay rent. Screening is really important. And if a person can’t pay, you need to get someone that can.
I honestly don't understand why people automatically go to precious metals in times of instability. Can you eat them? Can you live in them? Can they defend your property? An investment in a generator, ammo, and a big tank of propane would do far more good in a genuine collapse scenario.
Fast LEAD will be the most precious and useful metal, along with candles, matches, water-purification cartridges, booze, fresh veggies, shaving-blades, canning-glasses, 1st.aid materials, solar-panels, etc.
For all the above, most precious of all will be the personal SKILLS !!!
Gold, silver, Bitcoin, shares, bonds, petrol-cars, funny gadgets, even cell-phones will all be absolutely WORTHLESS.
Fun is important, but a 2015 VW TDI (diesel) gets 50 mpg, and (unlike gasoline) diesel stores safely and reliably for ages. (Works nicely in tractors, too, and does incredible amounts of work with only a pint or two of fuel.
I'm in NC too; next time you head toward the mountains, stop by for lunch.
Hah! I think it's optimistic for me to think that I'm even a good enough driver to handle my vehicle in the Wasteland so it'll probably crash before I run out of gas. Doh!
Farsightedness, patience and utmost care for tires, revs, oils, seals and filters are essential for safe travel in wastelands and deserts, guaranteeing a precious, positive experience as well as a safe return to a well hidden den. Its entrance should only be accessible on rocky ground for a couple of kms. just to prevent leaving tracks that could incite some zombies to follow them ...
As long as people think gold and silver are valuable, they will be worth something in any SHTF scenario. And since people have regarded both as valuable for oh, six thousand years or so, I doubt that will change any time soon.
But it has to be in a form readily usable as currency, so: Junk silver and 1/10th oz gold coins.
- The expression "when SHTF..." is widely used, but in that scenario the fan will only move if the owner has connected it to a solar off-grid-system. Sockets, cables and plugs will be obsolete in case s.b. still relies on the grid.
- During the last 6k yrs, 99.9% of the people were decentralized, egalitarian, sustainably self-sufficient and only the big-wigs were able to think and able about hoarding precious metals to finance raids & wars.
- Current conditions are far more complex and interdependent, highly hierarchical: mega-cities, bad, nutrient-deficient food, lots of office-work in artificial light, much less movement, much more centralized power to banks, corporations and government, utter lack of even the most basic skills in emergencies, fake news to boost the panicked sheeple ...
Silver & small value gold coins will be the 1st. and most reliable items to be used again for daily trading.
Hopefully, it will take a LOT of time until there is a new elite looking for bullion ...
In the first hrs., days and weeks after collapse, the stuff mentioned in my previous reply will be essential because everybody is just looking for himself. Protection with skill and fast lead will be of highest importance to keep the ones away that did not care in time and ridiculed the preppers.
Gold and silver will remain stores of valuable for the simple reason that even rudimentary barter economies need some sort of currency intermediary that will allow you to trade some tiny percentage of your cow for the guy down the road who is farming rabbits. Or green veggies you need to avoid malnutrition.
I've probably forgotten more about prepping than most people here know. I created and ran a very large prepping site called emergency-preps.com for several years, until I buried myself in the writing of Lightning Fall, my 1000 page EMP kills America opus, which was so long because, among other things, it contained just about everything I knew about prepping.
My biggest loss when leaving San Francisco in 2016 for refuge in rural Indiana - the handwriting not only was on the wall, the hand of the writer was spelling out mene, mene, tekel, upharsin - was the five years worth of *everything* I'd prepped: 150 sealed 5 gal buckets filled with popcorn, wheat, beans, rice, dried peas in mylar bags, my solar system, sufficient to keep a standard size chest freezer running indefinitely in refrigerator mode, hundreds of #10 cans of everything you can imagine, five gallon buckets of stabilized and sealed oils, (in SHTF the name of the game, in the end, is calories), various Faraday caches stuffed with small electronics (the easy way is to buy some small galvanized steel garbage cans with tight sealing lids, large enough to hold a five gallon plastic bucket, and fill the plastic bucket with whatever, all kinds of medical supplies, especially drugs like antibiotics, about 20 thousand rounds of ammo for the rifles, shotguns, pistols, pistol caliber carbines, all kinds of tools, including my gunsmithing supplies, carefully stored up, and on, and on, and on. Turned out the movers wouldn't move most of it. I gave most of the food away. I drove from San Francisco to Indiana in an SUV containing me, a somewhat nervous but excited Pomeranian, a couple hundred gallons of booze, all those guns and ammo (talk about nervous - I had to drive through Illinois, passing just a dozen miles south of Chicago on the interstate, which was a happy hunting ground for cops looking for "suspicious" cars with Cali license plates so they could run the civil asset forfeiture exception to the constitution that permits literal highway robbery confiscation scam if they found a roach in your ash tray (and if they didn't find one, they found one anyway), so that I laid up all day at the Iowa border, then made my midnight run for Hoosier freedom...anyway.
I know a lot about prepping. I know that SHTF is shorthand for any sort of major disruptive disaster that brings down major systems, and the US is nothing but a staggery, creaking, meta-system of complex systems all tended and maintained by the products of DIE programs at your finest universities. I know that in any SHTF scenario, whether it's zombies, aliens, CME, HEMP attacks, complete financial collapse, the PRC invading the West Coast, WWIII nuke bugaloo, whatever you like, you're still going to need food, water, shelter, (including clothing), a power source, effective means of protecting all of this, as well as anything you can think of to make life even slightly more bearable while you're trying to figure out why the seeds from the garden you planted are all infertile, so that your second year's garden, assuming you manage to survive that long, just doesn't appear at all. You also need to figure out how to avoid or defeat the Zombie Biker problem, which will be a major hazard for the first few weeks or months of the defacatory fibrillations, until those guys starve to death, run into the real meaning of "the most heavily armed citizenry in the history of the world," succumb to disease and illness, or end up bending their necks to the axes of the farmers they thought would be their slaves.
Oh, my, how I do go on. It's a gift that just keeps on blabbing.
Bill, if you'd ever be interested, I'd be happy to host a guest article by you on the Tree of Woe about prepping, because in the context of World War III or American Civil War II. I know perhaps 5% of what you do and I think the expertise would be welcome. You could, of course, link to your book and writing elsewhere.
Can you elaborate on what you mean? E.g. buy a gas tank to what purpose? how big? etc. Asking seriously. I am no expert in prepping and don't claim to be.
If you want a buffer of gasoline or diesel, then find a local oil/fuel delivery company (they mostly serve farms and businesses these days) and buy a 250-300 gallon tank with a manual pump from them. Then have them fill it up regularly and use the gas from it instead of buying at the gas station. Or mix between both if you prefer. I have mine filled with 90 octane ethanol free gas, which means I can use it for lawn and power sports machines without ethanol treatment, and vehicles that prefer high octane gas. It will often be slightly cheaper than the same grade of pump gas, but not always. My service charges a $40 delivery fee if you buy less than 200 gallons at a time.
Then make sure your vehicles can use whatever gas you're storing as well as your generator, etc. to buffer your total energy supply chain.
Gas gets stale over time so it's a good idea to keep a bottle of PRI-G on hand in case you need to preserve your supply in the event of serious disruption:
We try to empty our tank about every 3 months but with treatment the gas should be fine for at least a year.
Having a home diesel/gas tank will definitely spur some questions if you are in the suburbs so keeping a half dozen gallon jerrycans filled might be more feasible for some folks without property.
Russia’s PPP GDP was just reassessed by the World Bank at $6.7T and is 4th place after U.S. China and India, beating out Japan and Germany.
They also estimate that 40% of it is not tracked by the Russian Government (gray economy) which puts it at $9-10T - a hair away from India.
I don’t think it will get that bad. Not because there will be some great re-industrializion. But because the U.S. has vassalized most of Europe, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. They will be harvested until there’s nothing left unless an acceleration of the exodus in blocks from the system occurs.
Use of the PPP metric probably deserves more attention than it typically gets.
Your info on Russia is sobering, but fortunately not shattering. I don't recall the #'s, but a sizeable chunk of possible military age conscripts have left the country rather than serve and face the Ukrainian meat grinder. Also, Peter Zeihan keeps saying that the (last or better) educated engineering cadre in Russia, from the 1980s or so, is dying out, so real technological advances or repairs/ correctives in oil or elsewhere will face difficulties. He sounds persuasive but I try to maintain some level of skepticism on his You Tube pronouncements. Humans are adaptable, especially during war -- witness the financial adjustments made by Russia as sanctions continued to be added by the West.
I gather the PPP for the CCP military is also (somewhat) brighter than mere $ equivalents would suggest. On the other hand, only the US, Russians, Ukrainians, Hamas, Israelis, and Houthis seem to have any really valid recent military experience. But I really don't know just how impactful the various joint military training operations we hear about are in improving a given military's performance or integration with allies.
PPP is the valid metric for almost any economy but primarily highly industrialized surplus economy, like Russia and China. Nominal USD denominated GDP is subject to distortions both deliberate and through non-productive or inefficient activities that count as GDP (e.g. Healthcare in the U.S.).
Peter Zeihan is an idiot. I realized that years ago when it became clear he has a dismal predictive and analytical record. There are much better analysts out there - he is not one of them.
I also use George Friedman's Geopolitical Futures (GPF) to learn about general and ongoing geopolitical issues. Do you have any other alternative recommendations to Zeihan? He is "readily available" via You Tube, so he may get more attention than you perceive he deserves. Better sources perhaps not so much?
There are many good INDEPENDENT voices worth hearing regarding geopolitical topics, and zerohedge(dot)com hosts a variety of worthwhile business analysts. For geopolitics, try globalresearch(dot)ca, The Unz Review, James Corbett, Philip Giraldi (former CIA), Scott Ritter, John Mearsheimer, and Karl Denninger (for general finance and politics, foreign and domestic), at market-ticker.org
100K to Kazakhstan; 10K to Georgia [per day?!]; 40K to Armenia?
Admittedly much lower than the vague 300K to 800K number I had bouncing around in my head from prior casual reading. The reporting on this is not real clear either, and probably pretty hard to pin down definitively. Hence my vague "chunk".
So either the US exports most of its inflation to the holders of UST abroad by deliberate USD debasement and some of it within to its own people- and this can only then be temporary as holders of UST will begin dumping (like China has over the past 4 years) (No - unlikely the US citizens will revolt) or - more than likely - they need to concoct (another) bigly (endless) world war to spike up its MIC business to new insane levels and/or reassert its hegemon-status and send a message to bring back USD based universal reserve currency. I believe you said it as much in the extracted** snippets below.
** "The last time we were faced with it, we only escaped it by leveraging our military-industrial might to create the petrodollar! No such opportunity will present itself this go round.
Historically we’ve always been willing to go to war to move back to the upper-left quadrant, but now attempting to do so will trigger World War III. That still might happen (indeed, I have predicted it’s likely to happen)."
Speaking of "going to war", and this oversimplifies, but was there a plan to replace the petrodollar with a pharmadollar, whereby other countries are encouraged to purchase bioterror protection (by the way of vaccines and technical assistance) from the US in dollars via the WHO? Instead of a monopoly on violence, we were supposed to have a monopoly on bioterror?
The concept of producing "real wealth" via manufacturing goods rather than supplying services has merit as far as it goes: especially related to ensuring national security or medical supply chains for a given nation state. But at least two factors need to be considered under this idea.
1) Manufacturing is really the use of information to manipulate materials to some desired purpose or function (engineering designs, inventory and kitting, production scheduling, procurement supply lines and orders, manufacturing processes descriptions and tracking, distribution and product support, etc. Also set up and maintenance of tooling and automation. So a lot of "not really hands on" skills are also still needed. Many collars are closer to pinkish or purple rather than true blue.
2) Part of the reason manufacturing has this "real wealth" attitude associated to it is because typically such goods retain their "persistence of value", in that a widget can be used for some time and does not have to be immediately replaced, as can be the case for many service actions (clerking, wait staff, even police or EMT services, etc.). Of course much "stuff" is also made, used, and discarded quickly. But some services also provide longer term value, such as selected legal (contracts, staying out of jail) and medical services (operations prolonging health and life).
Both the good and the scary about our current woeful modern world is just how interdepend on each other we really are. The pandemic showed there are relatively few truly nonessential services/ jobs. [outside of government, anyway :-) ]
Great essay- full of informative data and research. However, Mises published at article 22 hours age, which argues that the Saudis have been drifting out of US axis for some time- technically, the story propagating on social media and YouTube is incorrect, but in real world terms it's symbolic of a broader geopolitical shift.
Biden and DC should have admonished Saudi Arabia for the death of Jamal Khashoggi. Although politics and diplomacy don't tend to mix well, it's important to maintain consistent positions. That being said, there is a world of difference between an abstract condemnation of an impersonal sovereign state and making it personal by threatening to turn MBS into an international pariah. This particular Biden blunder must surely qualify as the single worst diplomatic blunder in the first quarter of the 21st century. If one wants to hold any influence over the behaviour and geopolitical alignment of a current ally, one with control of a strategically important resource, it's probably best not to insult their permanent Head of State.
Saudi Arabia has been aligning more closely with Russia and China ever since.
Agreed. The number of geopolitical mistakes the US has made over the last twenty years beggars the imagination, but alienating Saudi Arabia has to be one of the chief ones.
Could I ask a basic questions on the trade balances? Since most countries don't have a balance between exports and imports, is that always sustained by financial things like the US is doing (i.e. attracting people to hold USD because of financial assets etc.?) and so what the US did with petrodollar etc was to just dial this up to a much larger scale, so that everyone needs to hold USD, ensuring that the currency is strong enough to keep import prices relatively low, even without exports increasing?
Yes, more-or-less. A trade imbalance can be offset by a capital imbalance in the other direction. If your trading partner has more of your currency than he wants to spend on your exports, he will use it to buy your real estate, stock, etc. Obviously that can't go on forever.
Is it safe to reason that, like in the Great Depression and the Yugoslav economic collapse, the effects will be felt far, far more in cities compared to rural areas?
Stories I've heard from first-hand survivors of both from rural areas indicate that life didn't change all that much aside from the fact that newer goods were harder to come by. I.e., new phones, computers, cars, etc. are going to be very few. But the things that actually matter will still be accessible -- in rural areas at least.
I think that is accurate. Everything I've read has indicated that the further you are from a major urban center, and the more self-sufficient you are, the better off you'll be. That said, I've personally never experienced anything like this, so all I have to go on is armchair prepping.
Even without these formal or informal agreements to only sell oil for dollars, many countries will still probably do so just because they are ideologically invested in a leftist (U.S. led) order. The countries that want to buy oil for yuan or rubles are a group of Usual Suspects
I think that's true in the near term, but a large part of the leftist ideologues are (I think) only leftist because that's where the power and money is right now. When that changes, they'll follow the money and power. So I expect a "cascade" effect where it starts slow, then all at one.
Can the European right wing throw off those shackles? Would they want to if they could strike a deal to keep the dollar system going so long as immigration would be curbed? Important questions, since I do not think the US was ever exporting most of its debt to Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa.
John Michael Greer (i.e., JMG) noted a long time ago that the present-day collapse of US Industry would be orders of magnitude worse than the Great Depression since most people no longer have sufficient practical skills to 'make do' like their Great-GrandParents did circa the 1920s to 30s.
Industrial society collapsing would mean Necrophilia, Cannibalism & other monstrous Antihuman tendencies rapidly being normalized as 'The Beautiful Ones' (i.e. Service & Tech people in the Cities who don't build anything REAL) get Devoured by hordes of Desperate, Emaciated Zombies.
Oh, & yes, this is before the Third World War is factored in, & we consider the 'Eight-Nation Alliance' style Delenda Est of CONUS by coalition forces in the coming punitive Military Expedition.
Calling it now: We will be seeing Bronze Age Collapse level numbers for overall fatalities in America & most of its sundry Vassals & Satrapies worldwide.
JMG is correct. I think I can credit him with being the first person to point that out to me...
So when can we expect that wonderful scenario:)
Since this is the Tree of Woe, I predict it will come at the worst possible time!
(I wish I knew when)
I've been rereading his Twilight's Last Gleaming at least once a year for the past several years. I see he's got an updated version up at Amazon, so I'll have to lay hold of that, too.
So, in theory, that means the post-US would be ripe for colonization by developed or established powers right? Western US would be managed by China, Southern by the CIA (Cartels), etc. It's already going in that direction when you look at the political money flow.
Who could have possibly forseen basing our currency on the product of a foreign and dubiously aligned nation could go wrong!
I am as shocked as you, sir!
It likely means the Great Taking is right around the corner.
https://thegreattaking.com
Very likely.
The best hedge against this sort of thing is not a high income, it is wealth - specifically wealth that helps one sustain oneself. This sustainment has always been valuable, but was growing ever cheaper for a long time - not so anymore.
Hopefully it doesn't snap all the way back to survival.
https://argomend.substack.com/p/you-own-nothing-and-might-be-happy
That was a good article, thank you for sharing it. One of my greatest regrets is that when I was young I confused "rich" and "wealthy" and made wrong choices.
I didn’t think investigating the “you’ll own nothing and be happy” meme would bear fruit, but it had legs.
That's always a pleasant surprise when it happens!
Smelling a story in the most unexpected of places is the greatest high.
What would you recommend to people to protect themselves from the effects of stagflation - gold and silver? (I personally believe crypto is completely corrupted via the tether scam)
It's tricky. If we get a debt deflation one set of investments will triumph, if we get hyperinflation another. Right now I'm betting on hyperinflation and war, so I'm invested in gold, silver, bitcoin as well as energy stocks and defense industry stocks. I've also prepped for Bad Things as much as my budget affords. But I've predicted 12 of the last 4 recessions, so I don't know that I'd take my own advice!
People always need a place to live. If bought at the right price, right location, and managed correctly rentals can be a good income.
Good point. Requires some know-how that I don't have, but yes.
I don’t know where you are located, but there are lots of real estate clubs that can be good sources of info. Beware of ones that are looking for money. Florida, Ohio, and So Ca have some good ones.
There are some gurus and books that are worthwhile. Some good free stuff on YouTube.
A question I always look for is how the group leader / hire / organizer makes money.
In California, a challenging place, nolo has some good books.
I live in the Raleigh-Durham area, in North Carolina. Thank you!
In the great depression grandpa lost everything because the renters couldn’t pay and had nowhere to go and he couldn’t kick them out in good conscience. Being a landlord is not good in a depression by and large.
True.
One of my great grandfathers lost all their savings when a bank failed in 4 corners Colorado. They had some type of farm and income was seasonal. He lost his farm.
And in some states, cough cough California, you have a target on your back as a landlord. The regulations in some areas are incredible. NYC I’ve heard horror stories on. Or Oakland, SF, LA, Santa Monica.
Some markets there is a shortage of housing. And some types are just not economical to build.
It’s a business and if you want to pay your mortgage you need to have people that pay rent. Screening is really important. And if a person can’t pay, you need to get someone that can.
I honestly don't understand why people automatically go to precious metals in times of instability. Can you eat them? Can you live in them? Can they defend your property? An investment in a generator, ammo, and a big tank of propane would do far more good in a genuine collapse scenario.
Fast LEAD will be the most precious and useful metal, along with candles, matches, water-purification cartridges, booze, fresh veggies, shaving-blades, canning-glasses, 1st.aid materials, solar-panels, etc.
For all the above, most precious of all will be the personal SKILLS !!!
Gold, silver, Bitcoin, shares, bonds, petrol-cars, funny gadgets, even cell-phones will all be absolutely WORTHLESS.
"petrol-cars will be worthless"
WHAT NO
I bought a black V8 Muscle Car just to help me RULE THE WASTELAND
Fun is important, but a 2015 VW TDI (diesel) gets 50 mpg, and (unlike gasoline) diesel stores safely and reliably for ages. (Works nicely in tractors, too, and does incredible amounts of work with only a pint or two of fuel.
I'm in NC too; next time you head toward the mountains, stop by for lunch.
Hope you have a safe cache for HUGE amounts of petrol !!!🤞🤞
Do you think there will be somebody or something left to be ruled over ?? ...
Imho, THAT's very optimistic.
Hah! I think it's optimistic for me to think that I'm even a good enough driver to handle my vehicle in the Wasteland so it'll probably crash before I run out of gas. Doh!
Why so pessimistic ???
Farsightedness, patience and utmost care for tires, revs, oils, seals and filters are essential for safe travel in wastelands and deserts, guaranteeing a precious, positive experience as well as a safe return to a well hidden den. Its entrance should only be accessible on rocky ground for a couple of kms. just to prevent leaving tracks that could incite some zombies to follow them ...
Have a nice time !!
As long as people think gold and silver are valuable, they will be worth something in any SHTF scenario. And since people have regarded both as valuable for oh, six thousand years or so, I doubt that will change any time soon.
But it has to be in a form readily usable as currency, so: Junk silver and 1/10th oz gold coins.
The whole situation is warped:
- The expression "when SHTF..." is widely used, but in that scenario the fan will only move if the owner has connected it to a solar off-grid-system. Sockets, cables and plugs will be obsolete in case s.b. still relies on the grid.
- During the last 6k yrs, 99.9% of the people were decentralized, egalitarian, sustainably self-sufficient and only the big-wigs were able to think and able about hoarding precious metals to finance raids & wars.
- Current conditions are far more complex and interdependent, highly hierarchical: mega-cities, bad, nutrient-deficient food, lots of office-work in artificial light, much less movement, much more centralized power to banks, corporations and government, utter lack of even the most basic skills in emergencies, fake news to boost the panicked sheeple ...
Silver & small value gold coins will be the 1st. and most reliable items to be used again for daily trading.
Hopefully, it will take a LOT of time until there is a new elite looking for bullion ...
In the first hrs., days and weeks after collapse, the stuff mentioned in my previous reply will be essential because everybody is just looking for himself. Protection with skill and fast lead will be of highest importance to keep the ones away that did not care in time and ridiculed the preppers.
Great points.
Gold and silver will remain stores of valuable for the simple reason that even rudimentary barter economies need some sort of currency intermediary that will allow you to trade some tiny percentage of your cow for the guy down the road who is farming rabbits. Or green veggies you need to avoid malnutrition.
I've probably forgotten more about prepping than most people here know. I created and ran a very large prepping site called emergency-preps.com for several years, until I buried myself in the writing of Lightning Fall, my 1000 page EMP kills America opus, which was so long because, among other things, it contained just about everything I knew about prepping.
My biggest loss when leaving San Francisco in 2016 for refuge in rural Indiana - the handwriting not only was on the wall, the hand of the writer was spelling out mene, mene, tekel, upharsin - was the five years worth of *everything* I'd prepped: 150 sealed 5 gal buckets filled with popcorn, wheat, beans, rice, dried peas in mylar bags, my solar system, sufficient to keep a standard size chest freezer running indefinitely in refrigerator mode, hundreds of #10 cans of everything you can imagine, five gallon buckets of stabilized and sealed oils, (in SHTF the name of the game, in the end, is calories), various Faraday caches stuffed with small electronics (the easy way is to buy some small galvanized steel garbage cans with tight sealing lids, large enough to hold a five gallon plastic bucket, and fill the plastic bucket with whatever, all kinds of medical supplies, especially drugs like antibiotics, about 20 thousand rounds of ammo for the rifles, shotguns, pistols, pistol caliber carbines, all kinds of tools, including my gunsmithing supplies, carefully stored up, and on, and on, and on. Turned out the movers wouldn't move most of it. I gave most of the food away. I drove from San Francisco to Indiana in an SUV containing me, a somewhat nervous but excited Pomeranian, a couple hundred gallons of booze, all those guns and ammo (talk about nervous - I had to drive through Illinois, passing just a dozen miles south of Chicago on the interstate, which was a happy hunting ground for cops looking for "suspicious" cars with Cali license plates so they could run the civil asset forfeiture exception to the constitution that permits literal highway robbery confiscation scam if they found a roach in your ash tray (and if they didn't find one, they found one anyway), so that I laid up all day at the Iowa border, then made my midnight run for Hoosier freedom...anyway.
I know a lot about prepping. I know that SHTF is shorthand for any sort of major disruptive disaster that brings down major systems, and the US is nothing but a staggery, creaking, meta-system of complex systems all tended and maintained by the products of DIE programs at your finest universities. I know that in any SHTF scenario, whether it's zombies, aliens, CME, HEMP attacks, complete financial collapse, the PRC invading the West Coast, WWIII nuke bugaloo, whatever you like, you're still going to need food, water, shelter, (including clothing), a power source, effective means of protecting all of this, as well as anything you can think of to make life even slightly more bearable while you're trying to figure out why the seeds from the garden you planted are all infertile, so that your second year's garden, assuming you manage to survive that long, just doesn't appear at all. You also need to figure out how to avoid or defeat the Zombie Biker problem, which will be a major hazard for the first few weeks or months of the defacatory fibrillations, until those guys starve to death, run into the real meaning of "the most heavily armed citizenry in the history of the world," succumb to disease and illness, or end up bending their necks to the axes of the farmers they thought would be their slaves.
Oh, my, how I do go on. It's a gift that just keeps on blabbing.
Carry on.
Seems, the last word in my previous post triggered open an overflow of your memory ...
Thank you so much for your comprehensive reply replenished with so much useful info !! 👍👍💯💯 I still have a lot to learn ...
We're on the same frequency, your amplitude being higher.
Have a nice time !! and thanks again !!!
Bill, if you'd ever be interested, I'd be happy to host a guest article by you on the Tree of Woe about prepping, because in the context of World War III or American Civil War II. I know perhaps 5% of what you do and I think the expertise would be welcome. You could, of course, link to your book and writing elsewhere.
People from abroad would be most willing to trade goods or a passport for precious metals rather than a volatile currency.
Many (perhaps most) people who like metals have already stocked up on the other essentials, and may even be off-grid already.
You can't eat dollars either so give me all your dollars.
Seriously people who respond that you can't eat precious metals so you shouldn't buy them are the most retarded of all the doomer community.
For the slow I'll spell it out for you:
- Buy your generator
- Secure your water supply
- Secure your food supply
- Buy a gas tank
- Buy a propane tank
- Pay off your debts
After that if you still have $150k plus of surplus income per year (after taxes and living expenses):
- Buy some fun toys
- Buy some physical gold
Can you elaborate on what you mean? E.g. buy a gas tank to what purpose? how big? etc. Asking seriously. I am no expert in prepping and don't claim to be.
If you want a buffer of gasoline or diesel, then find a local oil/fuel delivery company (they mostly serve farms and businesses these days) and buy a 250-300 gallon tank with a manual pump from them. Then have them fill it up regularly and use the gas from it instead of buying at the gas station. Or mix between both if you prefer. I have mine filled with 90 octane ethanol free gas, which means I can use it for lawn and power sports machines without ethanol treatment, and vehicles that prefer high octane gas. It will often be slightly cheaper than the same grade of pump gas, but not always. My service charges a $40 delivery fee if you buy less than 200 gallons at a time.
Then make sure your vehicles can use whatever gas you're storing as well as your generator, etc. to buffer your total energy supply chain.
Gas gets stale over time so it's a good idea to keep a bottle of PRI-G on hand in case you need to preserve your supply in the event of serious disruption:
https://www.amazon.com/CP122-Pri-G-Gasoline-Treatment-oz/dp/B009TWQAOA
We try to empty our tank about every 3 months but with treatment the gas should be fine for at least a year.
Having a home diesel/gas tank will definitely spur some questions if you are in the suburbs so keeping a half dozen gallon jerrycans filled might be more feasible for some folks without property.
New York Times front page coverage of the US/KSA agreement published on 6/9/1974 here:
‘MILESTONE’ PACT IS SIGNED BY U.S. AND SAUDI ARABIA - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/09/archives/milestone-pact-is-signed-by-us-and-saudi-arabia-acclaimed-by.html
Epic, thanks for sharing that!
Yeah, at least we know 06/09/2024 is the fiftieth anniversary of *something.*
Russia’s PPP GDP was just reassessed by the World Bank at $6.7T and is 4th place after U.S. China and India, beating out Japan and Germany.
They also estimate that 40% of it is not tracked by the Russian Government (gray economy) which puts it at $9-10T - a hair away from India.
I don’t think it will get that bad. Not because there will be some great re-industrializion. But because the U.S. has vassalized most of Europe, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. They will be harvested until there’s nothing left unless an acceleration of the exodus in blocks from the system occurs.
Thanks for sharing that information on Russia - fascinating.
My *guess* is that there will be an acceleration of exodus from the system. Like the old saying, "how do you go bankrupt? slow, then fast".
Use of the PPP metric probably deserves more attention than it typically gets.
Your info on Russia is sobering, but fortunately not shattering. I don't recall the #'s, but a sizeable chunk of possible military age conscripts have left the country rather than serve and face the Ukrainian meat grinder. Also, Peter Zeihan keeps saying that the (last or better) educated engineering cadre in Russia, from the 1980s or so, is dying out, so real technological advances or repairs/ correctives in oil or elsewhere will face difficulties. He sounds persuasive but I try to maintain some level of skepticism on his You Tube pronouncements. Humans are adaptable, especially during war -- witness the financial adjustments made by Russia as sanctions continued to be added by the West.
I gather the PPP for the CCP military is also (somewhat) brighter than mere $ equivalents would suggest. On the other hand, only the US, Russians, Ukrainians, Hamas, Israelis, and Houthis seem to have any really valid recent military experience. But I really don't know just how impactful the various joint military training operations we hear about are in improving a given military's performance or integration with allies.
PPP is the valid metric for almost any economy but primarily highly industrialized surplus economy, like Russia and China. Nominal USD denominated GDP is subject to distortions both deliberate and through non-productive or inefficient activities that count as GDP (e.g. Healthcare in the U.S.).
Peter Zeihan is an idiot. I realized that years ago when it became clear he has a dismal predictive and analytical record. There are much better analysts out there - he is not one of them.
I also use George Friedman's Geopolitical Futures (GPF) to learn about general and ongoing geopolitical issues. Do you have any other alternative recommendations to Zeihan? He is "readily available" via You Tube, so he may get more attention than you perceive he deserves. Better sources perhaps not so much?
The Red Line is a very approachable geopolitics podcast. The host, Michael Hilliard, also has some great guests.
https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/
The Diplomat is focused on Asia-Pacific.
https://thediplomat.com/
There's also a lengthy thread of recommendations on r/geopolitics:
https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/ploc8j/what_are_some_good_geopolitical_podcasts_or_world/
There are many good INDEPENDENT voices worth hearing regarding geopolitical topics, and zerohedge(dot)com hosts a variety of worthwhile business analysts. For geopolitics, try globalresearch(dot)ca, The Unz Review, James Corbett, Philip Giraldi (former CIA), Scott Ritter, John Mearsheimer, and Karl Denninger (for general finance and politics, foreign and domestic), at market-ticker.org
I would start with The Duran. They’re also on YT.
Define "sizeable chunk."
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/where-are-russian-draft-dodgers-fleeing-to-a-look-at-the-numbers-101664275038573.html
100K to Kazakhstan; 10K to Georgia [per day?!]; 40K to Armenia?
Admittedly much lower than the vague 300K to 800K number I had bouncing around in my head from prior casual reading. The reporting on this is not real clear either, and probably pretty hard to pin down definitively. Hence my vague "chunk".
So either the US exports most of its inflation to the holders of UST abroad by deliberate USD debasement and some of it within to its own people- and this can only then be temporary as holders of UST will begin dumping (like China has over the past 4 years) (No - unlikely the US citizens will revolt) or - more than likely - they need to concoct (another) bigly (endless) world war to spike up its MIC business to new insane levels and/or reassert its hegemon-status and send a message to bring back USD based universal reserve currency. I believe you said it as much in the extracted** snippets below.
** "The last time we were faced with it, we only escaped it by leveraging our military-industrial might to create the petrodollar! No such opportunity will present itself this go round.
Historically we’ve always been willing to go to war to move back to the upper-left quadrant, but now attempting to do so will trigger World War III. That still might happen (indeed, I have predicted it’s likely to happen)."
That's an apt summary of the doom we're facing, yes. Doubleplusungood.
Speaking of "going to war", and this oversimplifies, but was there a plan to replace the petrodollar with a pharmadollar, whereby other countries are encouraged to purchase bioterror protection (by the way of vaccines and technical assistance) from the US in dollars via the WHO? Instead of a monopoly on violence, we were supposed to have a monopoly on bioterror?
The concept of producing "real wealth" via manufacturing goods rather than supplying services has merit as far as it goes: especially related to ensuring national security or medical supply chains for a given nation state. But at least two factors need to be considered under this idea.
1) Manufacturing is really the use of information to manipulate materials to some desired purpose or function (engineering designs, inventory and kitting, production scheduling, procurement supply lines and orders, manufacturing processes descriptions and tracking, distribution and product support, etc. Also set up and maintenance of tooling and automation. So a lot of "not really hands on" skills are also still needed. Many collars are closer to pinkish or purple rather than true blue.
2) Part of the reason manufacturing has this "real wealth" attitude associated to it is because typically such goods retain their "persistence of value", in that a widget can be used for some time and does not have to be immediately replaced, as can be the case for many service actions (clerking, wait staff, even police or EMT services, etc.). Of course much "stuff" is also made, used, and discarded quickly. But some services also provide longer term value, such as selected legal (contracts, staying out of jail) and medical services (operations prolonging health and life).
Both the good and the scary about our current woeful modern world is just how interdepend on each other we really are. The pandemic showed there are relatively few truly nonessential services/ jobs. [outside of government, anyway :-) ]
Your chart must be black on transparent, because it’s completely unreadable in the app, but fine in Safari.
Oh, sorry about that. MS Paint changed I think such that instead of defaulting to a White background it defaults to a Transparent one. Ugh!
Great essay- full of informative data and research. However, Mises published at article 22 hours age, which argues that the Saudis have been drifting out of US axis for some time- technically, the story propagating on social media and YouTube is incorrect, but in real world terms it's symbolic of a broader geopolitical shift.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/saudi-arabia-drifts-away-washington-and-dollar
Biden and DC should have admonished Saudi Arabia for the death of Jamal Khashoggi. Although politics and diplomacy don't tend to mix well, it's important to maintain consistent positions. That being said, there is a world of difference between an abstract condemnation of an impersonal sovereign state and making it personal by threatening to turn MBS into an international pariah. This particular Biden blunder must surely qualify as the single worst diplomatic blunder in the first quarter of the 21st century. If one wants to hold any influence over the behaviour and geopolitical alignment of a current ally, one with control of a strategically important resource, it's probably best not to insult their permanent Head of State.
Saudi Arabia has been aligning more closely with Russia and China ever since.
Agreed. The number of geopolitical mistakes the US has made over the last twenty years beggars the imagination, but alienating Saudi Arabia has to be one of the chief ones.
Could I ask a basic questions on the trade balances? Since most countries don't have a balance between exports and imports, is that always sustained by financial things like the US is doing (i.e. attracting people to hold USD because of financial assets etc.?) and so what the US did with petrodollar etc was to just dial this up to a much larger scale, so that everyone needs to hold USD, ensuring that the currency is strong enough to keep import prices relatively low, even without exports increasing?
Yes, more-or-less. A trade imbalance can be offset by a capital imbalance in the other direction. If your trading partner has more of your currency than he wants to spend on your exports, he will use it to buy your real estate, stock, etc. Obviously that can't go on forever.
Thank you very much for the clarification and the great article!!!
World has changed a lot since 74
Is it safe to reason that, like in the Great Depression and the Yugoslav economic collapse, the effects will be felt far, far more in cities compared to rural areas?
Stories I've heard from first-hand survivors of both from rural areas indicate that life didn't change all that much aside from the fact that newer goods were harder to come by. I.e., new phones, computers, cars, etc. are going to be very few. But the things that actually matter will still be accessible -- in rural areas at least.
What say ye?
I think that is accurate. Everything I've read has indicated that the further you are from a major urban center, and the more self-sufficient you are, the better off you'll be. That said, I've personally never experienced anything like this, so all I have to go on is armchair prepping.
Even without these formal or informal agreements to only sell oil for dollars, many countries will still probably do so just because they are ideologically invested in a leftist (U.S. led) order. The countries that want to buy oil for yuan or rubles are a group of Usual Suspects
I think that's true in the near term, but a large part of the leftist ideologues are (I think) only leftist because that's where the power and money is right now. When that changes, they'll follow the money and power. So I expect a "cascade" effect where it starts slow, then all at one.
Can the European right wing throw off those shackles? Would they want to if they could strike a deal to keep the dollar system going so long as immigration would be curbed? Important questions, since I do not think the US was ever exporting most of its debt to Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa.
Superb breakdown.
Yes, entirely "incomprehensibly bad".
And people ask why we are militant...
Thank you!