I get really sick of the fearmongering pitches about the “death of the dollar,” but readers keep asking so I thought I should take a quick look today at one of them. This is a pitch from Nick Giambruno about a “Reset” of the US Dollar, and in many ways it’s effectively a repeat of the “IMF SDR Bogeyman” pitch that we saw in heavy volume from Jim Rickards about five years ago.
Here’s a little summary from Giambruno’s order form, to give you the general idea:
“Is the IMF moving in to… Raid Your Retirement?
“You could lose everything you’ve worked your whole life for….
“Unelected bureaucrats at the IMF and the World Economic Forum, along with radical environmentalists…
“They’re rolling out an alarming plan called the ‘Great Reset,’ to potentially control your life and destiny.
“Soon, the elites could issue their new world reserve currency and take down the U.S. dollar.
“Americans who worked all their lives could wake up and realize that their 401(k) and savings are slashed.
“You could be stripped of the right to own property or pay higher property and income tax… and a new ‘World Tax’….
“Here’s the most shocking pronouncement made by the World Economic Forum:
‘… You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy… You’ll have to rent everything you need’
“Is THAT how you imagine your life or your retirement?
So you can see why people feel panicked, right? Especially if you’re at all predisposed to believe conspiracy theories about world governments and black helicopters and some Illuminati that’s keeping you down. That sends people into subscribing to the newsletter, in this case The Casey Report (one of their “entry level” letters, $49 renewing at $129).
Don’t panic.
Yes, the dollar is likely to lose value over time (as it has for decades, sometimes quickly but usually slowly)… yes, there are ways to hedge against that… yes, government policies may change and taxes might go up… and no, the World Economic Forum is not about to strip you of your property rights (that “you’ll own nothing and be happy” quote, which caused a panic last year, was a technological prediction about the Uberization of the economy… not a policy strategy), and you’re not going to wake up tomorrow and find that the IMF suddenly stole 31% of your 401(k).
Let’s go over what it is he’s pitching, you can think it over yourself, and maybe, once your heart rate comes down a bit, you can make a rational choice about whether or not you feel like subscribing to Giambruno’s newsletter.
“I believe the IMF … central bankers, economist, royals, and selected politicians…
“They’re all using the global pandemic to push for a reset of the entire financial system.
“To potentially issue a new global reserve currency.”
That’s all about the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) program. SDRs are basically the tool that the IMF uses to help countries move money around, and to bolster the reserves of countries that are in trouble — a lot of them were created to “buck up” struggling nations after the 2008 crisis, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the recovery from the pandemic brings another wave of that. More from Giambruno:
“The IMF has set the official exchange rate between this currency and the U.S. dollar.
“In plain English, the dollar is valued almost 31% lower than the new currency.
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“A 31% devaluation of the dollar is like a 31% pay cut.”
That’s ridiculous. The SDR is just a basket of currencies, if in some outlandish future the world’s governments decide to give up local control and return to something like a Bretton Woods agreement, which was effectively a global currency with fixed exchange rates, based on gold, then currencies would convert at whatever the ratio might be at that time. $1 wouldn’t turn into 1 SDR, any more than one Yen would turn into one SDR (you can’t really spend SDRs, but if you turned US$1 into SDRs you’d get about 1.4 SDRs today).
The SDR was originally based on gold, just like the US dollar, but after the Bretton Woods agreement was broken in the 1970s it became a freely floating representation of the combined value of the currencies in the basket. The biggest changes in the past few decades have been some shifting around to incorporate the Euro and, later, the Chinese yuan into the basket, but as of today one SDR equals about US$1.42. That value shifts around — each SDR is roughly 41% US$, 30% Euros, 8% British Pound, 8% Japanese Yen, and 11% Chinese Yuan. The prominence of the dollar has been constant for a long time, it didn’t even really change when the Yuan was added (the Yuan’s slice of the pie came mostly by snipping off a bit from the Pound and the Euro). The US Government also effectively has veto power over the IMF and over the composition of the SDR.
The pitch includes a chart to show that each SDR would be worth 69 cents, and implies that somehow the fact that this means the dollar is going to lose 31% of its value because we’re just going to turn a switch and say “nope, those US$ are SDRs now!” That’s one of those things that looks like compelling math, but doesn’t make any sense. The IMF lists the average exchange rates between various currency units and SDRs, and it so happens that an SDR would be worth 2 Kuwaiti Dinars — does that mean that Kuwait will suddenly switch to SDRs and their currency would double in value? No, of course not, that’s just a reminder that currencies are not all the same.
Much of the ad is more of the same, Giambruno brings in plenty of other scary-sounding stuff like a global tax, more funding for the IMF that would create more SDRs, perhaps to be used for climate change amelioration, the fact that other governments are showing signs that they might not want to keep funding the US budget deficit, etc. etc.
And probably the worries about the future of the dollar have some merit — we have tended to have a dominant global currency that everyone keys off of for trade for centuries, often set by military might and the expression of colonial power, and there has been a little bit of a pattern of rotation from one century to the next… with “roughly 100 years” being the average lifespan of global currency dominance (since the 15th century we’ve gone from Portugal to Spain to the Netherlands to France to the UK and, since either 1920 or 1944, depending on how you look at it, to the US$). Maybe the Chinese Yuan will be next, maybe something else, maybe Bitcoin or some other technological advance will usher in the end of a single-nation currency, I have no idea.
So I wouldn’t spend much time worrying about some magical “reset” of the US dollar, but if you have some rational worries about the US dollar losing purchasing power because of inflation (which just means the continuing depreciation of the value of the dollar), then perhaps it makes sense to try to hedge against that lost purchasing power. After all, it’s virtually certain that today’s dollar will indeed lose 39% of its purchasing power — that’s about how much purchasing power the dollar lost from 2004 to 2021, for example.
You’re probably already preparing for that in at least one way, likely the most successful way, by buying shares in companies that have purchasing power — companies that can raise prices, and therefore continue to make a profit even as the currency in which they work loses value. That’s not what this ad is teasing, though, so let’s see what he thinks you should do in the face if this panic.
More from the ad:
“Here Are Three Critical Steps I Believe You Must Take Right Now To Protect Your Assets….
“Step 1. You Should Own the World’s Hardest Currency…
“I’ll give you details on a relatively new asset that helps you move as much money as you like…
“Completely out of the U.S. banking and financial system…
“And potentially grow it at the same time.
“It has nothing to do with gold, silver, or any precious metals.
“And it’s not any other paper currency you’ve heard of.
“This asset is simply “hard money” that liberates you from government control.
“No central authority controls it. No country’s sanctions or laws can affect it.
“It’s not available in a central location for a SWAT team to raid, either….
“Folks who put their money into this hard currency have seen their stake grow more than 900% in 21 months.”
OK, so that’s just a reference to, you guessed it, Bitcoin. I own some Bitcoin, I think it’s an interesting way to bet on the further acceptance of Bitcoin as a “store of value” among large investors, since it’s that adoption rate that’s increasing demand and driving the price higher, but it’s certainly not a “hard currency.” If you owned Bitcoin for 21 months ending in February, which is when this ad seems to have pulled its data, then yes, you saw that increase in value by 900%. If you had bought a couple years before that, near the prior peak in 2017, you might have seen the value of your Bitcoin in US$ terms fall by about 75% into early 2019. If an investment can fall by 75%, in a year, I hope we can agree, we shouldn’t put too much faith in it as a “store of value.”
Bitcoin and almost all of the cryptocurrencies are near all-time highs now. Bitcoin prices are driven by people wanting to buy Bitcoin, to overstate the obvious, and some of that drive comes from worries about national currencies. That’s not based on purchasing power or fundamental change to the currency system, it’s based on sentiment about a new asset class — maybe that adoption of Bitcoin continues to increase and that sentiment continues to get stronger, maybe not, I don’t know. I’m holding some Bitcoin, but I also sell some from time to time — when you’re counting on sentiment, without any real foundational argument that makes logical sense for why Bitcoin should be at $1,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000, well, you’re really betting on the feelings of millions of people around the world… and feelings can change very quickly.
You can believe that Bitcoin or blockchain or other cryptocurrencies are “the future,” but also realize that sometimes the future doesn’t move in a straight line. The internet was the future in 1999, too, but if you chose that moment to bet big and chose, correctly, two of the most dominant companies who seemed likely to be driving that future, Microsoft and Cisco, you would have had to wait 18 years to break even on Microsoft. You’d still be waiting on Cisco, which hasn’t gotten back to those levels yet. Sometimes when you get excited about buying the future, you pay too much.
So that’s one unsurprising recommendation for worries about the dollar, “buy some bitcoin.” Pretty easy to to, probably most of you have at least tinkered around with it a little. I wrote about two of the popular “on ramps” to cryptocurrencies here if you’re curious (Voyager and Coinbase).
His “Step 2” is all about how to avoid the “surveillance state” and keep your assets out of view, he doesn’t talk much about it but I assume it’s buying hard assets (land, gold, collectibles, etc.) that aren’t part of what the Fed or the Treasury can see, or maybe even opening an overseas bank account (there are a lot of rules and limits on that). I won’t go into that stuff… but then Step 3 is, again, no big surprise, it’s all about gold…
“Step 3: Buy the World’s Safest “Hold in Your Hand” Asset
“Gold is the world’s oldest money.
“Emperors and kings used it as far back as 500 BC as a store of wealth.
“In fact, gold prices have rallied through every historic financial crisis.”
Gold is surely not as exciting as cryptocurrencies, but those couple thousand years of historical human fascination with the shiny stuff, and acceptance that gold is pretty universally valued, does provide some solace. I’d be more comfortable putting gold away for 50 years than I would be putting Bitcoin away for 50 years, but over the short term, over decades, the movements of prices in all these things fluctuate a lot. The long-term charts make it look great over the centuries, but on a more immediate and human scale there have been plenty of times when an investment in gold lost value, even over long periods (10-20 years).
How does he recommend investing in gold? Here’s more from the ad:
“I’ll reveal a gold secret that historically turned $500 into $56,500 — a life-changing 13,200% gain.
“It’s not a mining company. And you don’t have to buy any gold bullion.
“Most folks have no idea this gold secret exists or how it operates.”
That “secret way to invest in gold” without buying a mining company is often a reference to buying into gold royalty companies… and this time is no different, the chart he shows is a perfect match for the 13,200% returns you would have gotten from an investment in Royal Gold (RGLD) over the past 40 years.
Now, it so happens that Royal Gold is the gold royalty company that has been publicly traded for the longest (Franco-Nevada is really the pioneer, but they were private for a few years in the middle), so it could be that’s why he shows this particular chart — I don’t know whether he specifically recommends Royal Gold (RGLD) shares, or is just pitching the concept. There are a half-dozen decent-sized gold royalty companies in the market now, and another half dozen small ones that have at least some revenue, so there’s a lot to choose from — if you want to go into more detail, I talked quite a bit about the sector when I dove into a teaser for a newer royalty stock back in February. Franco-Nevada (FNV) is the standard-bearer for that sector, and usually carries a premium valuation, the ones I own are currently Sandstorm Gold (SAND), Royal Gold (RGLD) and Nomad Royalty (NSR.TO, NSRXF).
Royalty companies are levered to gold when it goes up — they collect a small percentage of the output of lots of different gold mines, and when prices rise the value of that output rises. They’re also levered to gold when it falls, but not as dramatically as gold miners — they don’t have to pay to build mines or operate them when gold prices are falling, and they don’t usually have nearly as much debt as gold miners, so they don’t face as much risk of going out of business if gold falls by 40%. They are typically able to “ride out” bad gold markets, like from 2012-2016 or so, their share price will fall in those situations, but not as much as most mining stocks, and they’ll live to fight another day.
And they also tease a way to own physical gold with less hassle:
“I’ll also reveal another little-known gold technique.
“You can buy physical gold, without worrying about storage, or coin premiums.
“And here’s the kicker.
“If at some point in the future you want that physical gold shipped to your house…
“It can be done at your discretion.”
There isn’t any free lunch, I’m afraid, so you don’t get to buy gold without dealing with the hassle of storing gold — either you secure it yourself, put it in a vault somewhere, or you pay someone to do that for you. There are some ETFs that promise both to back up your investment in the ETF with physical gold that’s allocated to you, and some that will even redeem those ETF shares for physical gold bars or coins (and, naturally, they charge a little more than other ETFs). The Sprott ones have been pitched before (like Sprott Physical Gold Trust (PHYS)), but the redemption requirements there are pretty tough, you have to have at least 400 ounces worth (that’s one London Bar). There’s also the VanEck Merk Gold Trust (OUNZ), which will offer redemption fo smaller amounts with gold coins and such. They describe their process here, I haven’t ever bought either of those ETFs — they do offer some psychological solace in that redemption ability, whether real or just theoretical in your specific case, but they are therefore more expensive than the standard gold bullion ETFs (GLD or IAU).
And there are a million other schemes for buying gold through allocated storage, at widely varying fees, and lots of scammers out there trying to get you to convert your 401(k) to gold coins — don’t overthink it too much. If gold goes up, all the representations of gold will go up. I own some gold coins, I think they’re attractive and interesting and part of the appeal is that they’re a little bit of a hassle to sell, so I probably won’t sell them unless I REALLY need the money, but if I were going to bet on the direction of gold prices I’d use a cheap gold ETF like IAU, and if I wanted a little leverage to gold I’d buy gold royalty companies (or, if I really wanted to swing for the fences with a slice of my portfolio, dabble in trying to pick some junior miners). All of those things will move with gold prices, and we don’t get to know what gold prices will do over time… but yes, gold does tend to go up after market crashes (not necessarily during crashes, usually a ‘sell everything’ impulse hits gold as much as it hits stocks).
So there you go… Nick Giambruno would like you to panic about the IMF suddenly somehow taking over the US currency and converting your dollars to SDRs, and he thinks you should protect yourself from the globalist hordes by buying bitcoin and getting exposure to gold. I wouldn’t panic, but a little diversification away from full reliance on the US dollar is probably good for most of us. That’s just what I think, though, and what I’m doing with my money — with your money, well, you get to make the call. What’ll it be? We’d all like to hear, just share your thoughts in the friendly little comment box below.
Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, physical gold coins, and shares of Royal Gold, Sandstorm Gold and Nomad Royalty among the investments discussed above. I will not buy or sell any stock for three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.
I thought about buying (investing in) bitcoin but then I read about the energy cost of “mining” or creating it and how some think that makes it unviable as a future medium of exchange.
There is nothing inviable in BTC, the bitcoin blockchain has been running 24/7… 365 days a year… for more than a decade. Nobody has successfully hacked it.
There’s NOT a bank, central bank or traditional online payment processor that can say the same thing.
And about Energy?
The U.S. military consumes 10 times more energy than BTC
Banking consumes 11 times more energy than BTC
Online porn consumes 19 times more energy than BTC
Gaming consumes 6 times more energy than BTC
Gold mining consumes 3 times more energy than BTC (and Gold mining is extremely destructive for the environment)
Etc
A GLOBAL networks needs energy, everyone knows that, and top BTC miners, like Riot Blockchain are already supporting green projects. BTC can be a ‘bridge’ to a renewable energy future.
Bitcoin is a fairy tale. Some green projects can’t get actual money as a loan?
Why not? Unstable accounting that no one believes in?
What does energy have to do with this?
Greta, Gore, AOC are proven to be wrong.
Carbon dioxide is only .04 of earth’s air and human activity only contributes 3% of that. How much does the US contribute?
Australia is adamantly against Greta’s ideas.
I agree that there is a lot of “WOLF” being cried here by this boy, Nick, which is more than a bit irritating on several levels.
First, because it is disingenuous.
Second, because the fear-mongering is intentionally aimed at preying-for-profit on persons made vulnerable by societal upheaval with no time left in life to recover should this Great Reset occur.
But thirdly, – most importantly – because it puts anyone who can see the very-real potential for the world as we have come to know it to be disrupted on most every level in a VERY bad light.
Certainly, the events of 2020 and their carry-over into the present SHOULD alert any person capable of independent thought and evaluation to the extent of over-reach state and national officials now believe themselves authorized to impose directly and through the regulatory systems that have been designed to function essentially outside the legal system proper with little-to-no consideration of individual rights.
“Just doing my job.” is the closed-rank justification of this army of “public servants” on whom the American tradition that every citizen has freedom to decide for themselves how best to direct their lives, the lives of their dependent children, their assets and their properties is COMPLETELY LOST!
Clearly, “this is not your father’s Oldsmobile” (or Ford, Chev/Pontiac/Buick or Chysler)…
Disingenuous is not a business reason. It is an emotional accusation based on your own “feelings”.
Those with no or little time left were raised by parents who experienced The GREAT DEPRESSION. No one predicted that, either.
No one predicted MANY negative events in history.
Pearl Harbor, 2008, etc.
My husband does not want all assets in gold, but a little, in case another unpredictable event occurs – most likely pushed by the Democrat Party.
Thank you for the piece on “Casey’s IMF meltdown”. A much appreciated and level headed synopsis. Once again, nicely articulated.
i,m puzzled,, a couple of guys made up a system to create wealth, out of nothing,, all computer generated,,
with nothing to back its value,, and the world is going nuts over this,, so i have something to sell, and
someone wants to buy it,,, and say ill give you or pay you, this amount in bitcoin ,, where is the value
in this,, its not gold, silver, or cash, its nothing ,, nothing from nothing is nothing,, can someone explain
this to me,,????
Here’s a little excerpt from my last take on Bitcoin (BTC), etc. — any argument about the real value of the tokens has to be somewhat circular, which is part of why there’s so much room for volatility, there’s no particularly logical price argument to be made for any cryptocurrency (at least, that I’ve looked at):
Several folks have asked me what I think will happen with Bitcoin, and I do have some thoughts… but, to be clear, I have no idea where the Bitcoin price goes from here.
The fact that Bitcoin has grown so dramatically in real acceptance by major institutions, at least as an investment asset, and is being bought up by some large public companies (Microstrategy, Tesla etc.) should serve to further establish Bitcoin as a “store of value” currency… all currencies depend on faith and trust to hold any value at all, even gold, and clearly more big-money folks are starting to believe in Bitcoin, so that clearly helps and it also is clearly part of the reason for the recent strength in Bitcoin prices (which generally trickle through to most of the other widely-traded cryptocurrencies).
That can shift, people are fickle and corporations are run by people, and there’s no way on earth I would have predicted a year ago that my Coinbase account would go up by 2,000% — so any prediction I might have about future prices would just be silly. I think it’s worth owning a bit of Bitcoin and Ethereum as the two most widely-owned cryptos, and because so many cryptocurrencies are built on ethereum, though I’ve sold more than I’ve bought in the past few months… and if you adore the idea of venture capital and trying to get in on cool ideas early, well, you can dabble in the smaller cryptocurrencies as well if you like, they are at least more accessible than a lot of small venture companies, and many of them are fairly transparent about what they’re doing (I’m sure many of them are nothing more than scams, jokes or experiments, too, though even some of those go up sometimes — looking at you, Dogecoin). Just know that nothing goes up by 1,000% in a year (or a month) unless it also has the very real potential to fall by 90%, and if you go into any of these with a mindset of ownership and trying to figure out what a rational asset value might be, well, you’re probably going to be frustrated.
At their best, most of these blockchain projects that I’ve looked at are akin to buying a piece of a certain technology standard or network or business process — and you don’t really get to know in advance how people will think about that standard or that network, all you know is that if it’s valuable in the future, then the way that participants who make the network effective will be compensated is through these tokens you’re buying today, and the value of those tokens will therefore be based in part on how much incentive those future facilitators need to get them to participate, which in turn will depend on how hard they have to work to participate.
The genius of Bitcoin, at least in the way I think about it, is the slowly shrinking issuance of new tokens, so that you know someone having to use electricity and computing power in the future to support the network and earn (or mine) a bitcoin token will only do so if the price of that token in real terms (spending power, I guess) is going up fast enough that the shrinking supply, and therefore the shrinking number of tokens you might earn for participating in the network, is still worth trying to earn. (Not every computer that’s operating as a Bitcoin node is a miner, but the Bitcoin network depends on miners to validate transactions and make sure the blockchain ledger is accurate, and they earn the right to do that by completing computing tasks that consume processing power and electricity, in exchange for bitcoins, and the rate at which miners are compensated is cut in half every four years to generate a small and shrinking amount of inflation.)
That makes it conceptually interesting and, if it is used by more and more people and trusted by more and more people, likely to rise in value naturally and somewhat fundamentally… either because electricity and computing power inflate in value, or because they fall in price but more and more miners are committed to the sunk cost and continue to try to mine… but that doesn’t mean a rate of increase is easy to predict. Especially after it has surged so high, so quickly. Bitcoin was set up brilliantly and conceptually to be a stable currency with mild inflation, but to my mind there’s nothing intrinsic in the design of it that should make you say “it should be worth $5 per token” or “it should be worth $5 million per token”… they have utility, but there’s no real cash value on that utility unless users create that value by competing to acquire those tokens that make the utility work. The wild card is human fascination with a shiny object, whether real or virtual, and trust in the system that limits the supply of those shiny objects.
That’s not really so different from gold, in concept, it’s just that bitcoin has the advantage of easy transfer and being the exciting new thing, while gold has the advantage of a couple thousand years of human trust in its value… both have utility to some degree, though nowhere near enough to justify their current price in any obvious way, and both have a limit on supply growth (bitcoin because of the built-in math, gold because it’s hard to find and mine). Bitcoin is far more likely than gold to rise by 1,000% from here, but it’s also far more likely to fall by 99%. I’ve got some of both, which seems a rational way to diversify away from the US$ a little bit, and with the ramp up in crypto pricing that part of the portfolio has almost caught up with my physical gold holdings.
It’s not about BTC vs Gold it is how you get gold and how you get BTC.If you invest in BTC through the ETF’s and others THEY hold the private keys not you. BTC is not the same as gold in that BTC can be erased, evaporate, locked out of the account, is cyclical and can be manipulated easier than gold can.
BTC runs in cycles and it is up due to halvening and whales, miners and stock market big fish perverting the protocol for various reasons. The difference today than in 2017 is the dollar is not viewed as a strong basis to hold reserves because of the out of control spending and the clear signals they intend to enact a global currency, tax and government.
BTC is manipulated by nameless wallet addresses, but the Dollar is being managed to be a weapon to erase wealth and unseat the power structure it has enabled. This is the Great Reset. Take wealth, make it worthless, those in power are protected and safe and the rest of the West loses their primary advantage over the Chinese, Middle East and 3rd world.
BTC might be a digital escape for the USA, as it has been for Venezuela and Chinese HK, but it will be temporary. Coinbase going public is the first signal that crypto will be strangled by the SEC, the Government and will be neutered to give the CBDC’s a chance to take hold.
The existing dollar is being spent to worthlessness, even though the coming events will not be inflationary, but deflationary. Real asset prices will fall dramatically, but in that collapse the new treasury dollar will emerge, merged with all other CBDC’s in value and a global taxation and government formed that is modeled after the EU (unelected at the top (e.g. UN) and the illusion of democracy that can never challenge the structure or unilateral rule making).
Crypto should be in your planB, but I would not put too much in BTC. Other options exist and use Kraken or BinanceUS, not Coinbase.
There will come a time when we are all locked out of our 401k’s, IRA’s as they set off the collapse of the markets. They will just seize what’s left.
The Democrats, Biden the USA are after your wealth. They know where you have it and they will come for every bit of it to be sure it is worth 0. This includes your property–everything–
There has to be a way to protect all of it and get it out of the dollar, out of the united states and in a place that can be there to tap should we need it. Not one newsletter has focused on this and that is what is needed.
Complete divestiture from the United States. We have about 8-12 months to prepare.
Thoughts?
You can quite easily divest from the United States. just sell all of your assets, move the money and yourself overseas, buy a passport in the Caribbean and put your capital into another currency or into gold or property in another country, and renounce your citizenship and your obligation to pay taxes.
I think that would be a mistake, and I think you’re wrong that there will be such a major shift in the next year, but perhaps I’m wrong.
“The Democrats, Biden the USA are after your wealth.” There’s a grain of truth IF you’re making over $400K yearly – the republican free ride for the mega rich is over. What is being done is INVESTING in America, more jobs created means more people with money to spend ( also rebuilding infrastructure which repubs have avoided dealing with means cost savings in the long run ), which in turn cause more jobs to be created to meet demand. FDR invested in recovery & it paid off. Obama invested in recovery & it paid off.
You can make jewelry out of gold. Bitcoin – not so much.
You’re saying this is a conspiracy theory but wouldn’t Nixon’s actions have been the same and look what happened. People are still talking about it like it was a landmark decision. Even you are.
Nixon ended the Bretton Woods agreement and dropped the gold standard to give the US a more flexibility in spending and borrowing, and to control the issuance of dollars. Going back to a gold standard or giving up control to an international currency agreement again would be the opposite. No major country has voluntarily done that in the modern era.
Nothing is impossible, and runaway inflation is worth some fear, but a global takeover of the dollar in some discrete move is not a viable reality, its a scare tactic that appeals a as to people who are already amped up to be panicked about “globalism” — the dollar will die it’s slow death like every currency before it, slowed further by the fact that there is no viable alternative yet.
By the same token the notion that it can’t happen is a scare tactic or an attempt to trivialize something that is an unknown.
Older people don’t like their fears being trivialized.
They are much less likely to go get a job at age 75 or 80 – or 68.
And having or possibly getting a job, is not an option, most of the time.
Why wouldn’t they be afraid?
Just pointing out that it’s a wildly misleading ad, designed to separate people who have a sympathy with the general slant from their money. Doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen, but inducing panic is mostly about getting you to pull out your credit card.
This kind of marketing is about appealing to the buyer’s instincts, reinforcing the fear or greed (or political opinion, or self image, or whatever else), and the newsletters are some of the best targeted marketers in the world.
Try to think not just about what is possible or impossible, but about what you’re being sold. That’s indirectly true with politicians or pundits, but directly true with people who ask for your credit card number.
“but a global takeover of the dollar in some discrete move is not a viable reality, its a scare tactic that appeals a as to people who are already amped up to be panicked about “globalism”
I must respectfully disagree with you regarding your comment on a “…..global takeover of the dollar ….not being a viable reality……etc…. I must ask why you believe that a global takeover of the dollar is not a viable reality, discrete or otherwise?
There are a number of indicators, or distractions, (discrete or not) taking place here in the US, and abroad. which could very well devalue all world currencies in order to establish a one world goverment that utilizes a new global dollar/currency.
Sufficed to say a marketing tactics that induce or reinforce negative emotions, like fear and/or panic, should cause one to take a step back and reevaluate “what they are being sold.” And what an outstanding example of this is watching what has happened worldwide (over the past 18 months) by governments and high ranking officials inducing panic and fear into its citizens over the release of a virus and the need for an experimental vaccine. Fear and panic are strong motivators to get large crowds of people to buy whatever it is that you are selling; one world government, hyperinflation, socialism, communism, you name it.
All this to say that no-one knows what could take place tomorrow, next week or next year whether it’s done discreetly or not, anything is possible.
“Discrete” means in an individual and distinct action. “Discreet” means circumspect and careful. I used the former.
What I mean is that the dollar is likely to continue losing its value, as it has done for 100 years or more, but that we’re not going to wake up some morning and find that a secret cabal has turned off the dollar and turned on some other brand new currency.
To put it another way, I expect the dollar’s decline to be sort of like the slowly rising sea levels — it’s happening, it’s likely to continue happening, and we should be ready. But it’s being teased, as it has been almost constantly over the years, as a hurricane about to hit landfall right in your back yard. You prepare a lot differently for decades of rising sea levels than you do for a hurricane that’s going to hit this weekend.
shares in companies that have purchasing power — companies that can raise prices, and therefore continue to make a profit even as the currency in which they work loses value.
Travis kindly suggest shares in companies that have purchasing power, that can raise prices, and therefore continue to make a profit even as the currency in which they work loses value?