Tag: Meltdown America

Doug Casey: "America Has Ceased to Exist"

Posted on by The INO.com Team

By Doug Casey, Chairman

“America is a marvelous idea, a unique idea, fantastic idea. I’m extremely pro-American. But America has ceased to exist,” says Doug Casey. Watch him in this fascinating interview with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie discuss the political, social, and economic challenges the US must conquer as well as lessons we can learn from failed states.

A severe economic and/or political crisis can sneak up on you before you know it. Learn from the three harrowing stories of international crisis survivors—and the insightful comments of experts like Doug—how to recognize a crisis in the making. You may need those skills soon because it can, and will, happen here… Watch Meltdown America, a 30-minute free documentary that predicts the economic and political unraveling of the US.

 

The article Doug Casey: “America Has Ceased to Exist” was originally published at caseyresearch.com.

I Owe My Soul - Why Negative Interest Rates Are Only the First Step

Posted on by The INO.com Team

By: Jeff Thomas, International Man

In 1946, an American singer, Merle Travis, recorded a song called "Sixteen Tons." The song told the story of a poor coal miner in Kentucky, who lived in a small coal mining town. The town's economy revolved entirely around the mine.

The mining company owned a "company store," which had a monopoly on the sale of provisions. It charged rates that were designed to use up the weekly paycheque of the miner, so that the miner, in effect, was a slave to the mining company. As the song states,

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

Negative Interest Rates

Let's put the song aside for the moment and have a look at a concept that has been bandied about by the European Central Bank (ECB) for a while now. Since the collapse of the central banks would doom the world (their claim, not mine), it is essential that the banks be saved no matter what else must be sacrificed. Efforts to "save" the situation have been implemented through quantitative easing (QE) and the setting and continuation of low interest rates.

Unfortunately, in spite of record profits by banks and staggering bonuses handed out to senior bank executives, somehow the QE and low interest rates have not created the prosperity desired. The economy is still in the tank. What to do? Continue reading "I Owe My Soul - Why Negative Interest Rates Are Only the First Step" →

Good Reason for Doom and Gloom

Posted on by The INO.com Team

By Doug French, Contributing Editor

Predicting the future, like getting old, ain’t for sissies. Questioning the bull market is even more treacherous.

Howard Gold, writing for MarketWatch, makes fun of seers who made what he calls “the four worst predictions to gain traction over the past few years.”

Gold says the last six years have been a disaster for those who stayed out of the stock market. He claims there’s a bull market in doom and gloom, referring to a column by his colleague Chuck Jaffe, who points out, “The fortune-tellers … know that the more outrageous the prediction, the more attention they get. They can highlight any forecasts they get right, knowing that their misfires are forgotten quickly. Thus, calamity and catastrophe sells. Right now, it’s a bull market for bearish forecasts.”

If such a bull market in doom were really happening, the market wouldn’t be hitting all-time highs. Besides, no one ever went broke being out of the market.

But more importantly, there is a very good reason people respond to gloomy forecasts. Behavioral economics pioneer and 2002 Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman explains in his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow that when people compare losses and gains, they weigh losses more heavily. There’s an evolutionary reason for this: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce,” Kahneman explains. Continue reading "Good Reason for Doom and Gloom" →

You Can't Shoot Fish in a Barrel Without Ammunition

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By Dan Steinhart, Managing Editor, The Casey Report

FOMO.

I heard this acronym on a podcast last week. Having no clue what it meant, I consulted Google.

Turns out it stands for "Fear of Missing Out." Kids use it to describe their anxiety about missing a social event that all of their friends are attending.

It struck me that investors experience FOMO too. And it usually leads to bad decisions.

From Prudent to FOMO

In the comfort of your home office, investing rationally is pretty easy. You think a bull market might be emerging, so you invest in the S&P 500.

But you're not stupid. No one really knows where the stock market is headed, so you keep a healthy allocation of cash on the side to deploy the next time stocks trade at bargain prices. A prudent, rational plan.

But leave the house and things start to change. You notice that others seem to be making more money than you. First it's the "smart money" raking in the dough—those who had the foresight and fortitude to buy during the last panic, when everyone else was retreating. You’re OK with that. Investing is their full-time job. You can’t expect to compete with them.

But as the bull market charges higher, the caliber of people making more money than you sinks lower. The mailman starts giving you stock tips. And your gardener's brand-new Mustang, parked in your driveway just behind your sensible, 2011 Toyota Corolla, starts to irritate you.

Your brother-in-law is the last straw. He thinks he's so smart, but he's really just lucky to somehow always be in the right place at the right time. I mean, just last month you had to pick him up from a NASCAR tailgate after security kicked him out for lewd behavior—and now he's taking the family to Europe with his stock market winnings?

If that guy can make $30,000 in the market in six months, you should be a millionaire.

Now you feel like a sucker for holding so much cash. Why earn a pitiful 0.5% interest when you could be making… hang on, how much did the S&P 500 gain last year? 29.6%?

Some quick extrapolation shows that if you invest all of your cash right now, you can retire by 2023. Factor in a couple family trips to Europe, and we'll call it 2024 to be safe.

Cash Is Trash… Until It’s King

Such is the (slightly exaggerated) psychology of a bull market. FOMO is a powerful motivator and causes smart investors to do stupid things, like go all-in at the worst possible moment. Which is no small concern, since it undermines one of the most powerful investment strategies: keeping liquid cash in reserve to invest during market panics. Continue reading "You Can't Shoot Fish in a Barrel Without Ammunition" →

Putin's Secret Weapon – How Russia Could Take Down America Without Firing a Single Shot

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By: Casey Research

Here's a startling fact most investors have never heard: During the last financial meltdown in 2008, when the U.S. economy was on the brink, Russian leaders met with China to persuade them to dump the dollar – and destroy the world's reserve currency.

Before they could act, the Fed pumped over $700 billion into the economy and delayed their day of reckoning. Still, the threat remains. China holds over $1.2 trillion in U.S. debt today. And with their Russian allies, they could drop the dollar at any moment. This excerpt from our eye-opening documentary called "Meltdown America" explains the severity of this imminent threat:

For the full story and to learn more about what could be "the early stages of the end of the West," click here to watch the full version of this documentary.

You'll hear the harrowing and true stories of three people who survived economic and political collapse in Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, and Argentina… and discover how their powerful stories of hardship foreshadow what's happening in the U.S.

Click here to watch this full-length documentary right now – it’s FREE!