Time to refocus a bit on economic things, and we kick around a very good question from a reader:
Every once and a while you hear that the/a government is going to confiscate gold from vaults when the poop hits the fan. Occasionally you hear the SEC stops trading on certain stocks at limit down, Russia closed their markets this year for a few days.
Hypothetically can the US government stop the trading of short ETF’s?
Again if you own them could the government stop their trading for an indefinite period of time or even terminate/liquidate the whole position? Has our government ever rendered a position valueless? You and I have had conversations about going short in index funds going on 5 years and this just crossed my mind.
What do you think on this topic, will the government scapegoat the bears?
This is in no way financial advise (my last email on your long position was friendly concern), this is one crazy old buzzard who worked in the salt mines on Wall Street in the early mid 70’s spent some time in our military worked in the construction industry & was forced out in April 07 during a buyout (thank God). I feel that the bear is coming like a mega tsunami of historic proportions.
I have prepared gotten my finances, home, food, fuel, kids college all straight. I am locked and loaded, & feel years of prep is still not enough. I’ve been in places and done things, that most do not ever do, I had to have to play big, get lucky, rely on training and the knowledge I was flat out better than my adversary. I do not feel I match up, there are no rules and or they change; and the referee’s are playing favorites.
Is it possible to survive? Your buddy,
First off, on the question about ETFs: Yes government can do whatever it wants since, when it feels threatened, all it needs to do is haul out the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (of 1977) which summarizes in Wikipedia this way:
“In the United States Code the IEEPA is Title 50, sections 1701-1707. The IEEPA authorizes the president to declare the existence of an “unusual and extraordinary threat… to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” that originates “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” It further authorizes the president, after such a declaration, to block transactions and freeze assets to deal with the threat. In the event of an actual attack on the United States, the president can also confiscate property connected with a country, group, or person that aided in the attack.
The IEEPA falls under the provisions of the National Emergencies Act (NEA), which means that an emergency declared under the act must be renewed annually to remain in effect, and can be terminated by Congressional resolution.”
No, it does not require a war per se: Only existence of an unusual and extraordinary threat, which, believe me, this administration (or any other, regardless of party) would jump on in a NY second faced with global economic collapse later this year or next. So yes, if you don’t get out of ETF’s (and get your money the hell out of a stock account) you can bet your bippy it would be frozen as part of a Bank Holiday of the 1930′s variety.
Now, that gives us a “legal” framework to launch from, since once in power, governments tend to be “self-legalizing” – a topic for a much deeper study. But in answer to your question, this is precisely the kind of thing Robin Landry and I talk about when we get together: What will the order of collapse be. When will be the moment to bail on short positions and make a clean move to your bank or into physical assets?
On your second question: Of course government will blame “short sellers” but this will be unadulterated bullshit, so be ready for it when it arrives. That happened in the 1930′s event and it will happen again. Everyone will be wrong (except government) and everyone but excess spending and watering down the dollar’s purchasing power done hand-in-hand with congressional approval will be blamed. The corporate ownerships will love it because in the short term, it might result in something of a bounce so owners of companies can cash in.
Yes, it is possible to survive. Keep your mouth shut and go with the flow and always have a number of exit strategies from any situation. Why do you think Clif is building a boat? Why do we have a “magic carpet?” A wise person would have some land, sea, and air skills banked by now, along with some grub and means to grow a subsistence existence.
But it may not be pretty: Should the global collapse be avoided, it will still be many times worse than the “nearly lost it” events of 2009. Government will be bailing out “to big to fail” outfits right and left. Do you know anyone who actually has stock certificates in hand anymore? Turn off the internet and what have you got?
My book on that little nightmare is almost complete – I should have it available in about two or three weeks. In the meantime, last week’s Peoplenomics report outlining the systemic attacks on autonomous systems (home gardening, home chicken raising, homeowner association rules that remove property rights, requirements to hook up to city water and sewage, and on, and on…) is a must-read, as well.
Feel better for asking?
Friday at the WuJo
Ah, here’s a fine email:
“Hi, George,
I’ve been reading your blog for years and have always been interested in the WuJo stories. I have had some woo woo stuff happen over the years but feel compelled to write you now because of something that happened to my husband this week. Unlike me, he is not particularly interested in the paranormal and is quite the skeptic. He is very much a practical person who doesn’t entertain the possibility of supernatural events, which makes his experience unlikely to be the product of an overactive imagination. While his experience is unlike any of your recent reports, I wanted to add it to the record since it may be another example of the “thinning of the veils” between dimensions.
My husband related his experience to me yesterday (Wednesday), but it occurred on Tuesday at his workplace. He works for a manufacturing firm that has a military/government presence on the site. Many ex-military work for the company, and the facility is monitored by government officials because some of the work there is related to military defense–not experimental in nature but still regulated. Not sure if it is relevant to the event but thought it should be noted. My husband’s desk is in an open area close to the operations part of the plant. He was working on his computer when he felt a hand firmly clasp his shoulder. He immediately turned around, saying “Hey” as he did so and was stunned to find that no one was standing there. He had thought that a colleague had approached him from behind and was greatly disturbed to see no one anywhere close in the vicinity.
I questioned him closely about the event. I asked him if it was a light touch or a firm one and if he could have imagined the touch. He was adamant that he most definitely felt the clasp and demonstrated the firmness by gripping my own shoulder. He said he immediately got up and surveyed the area to make sure someone hadn’t ducked behind a nearby desk, but there was no one remotely close to him. He wasn’t sure of the significance of the clasp, but he speculated that he had been touched by God or some other spiritual entity. He said for the rest of the day, he thought he had been touched for a reason and imagined that he was either going to die of a heartache that day or win the lottery! Of course, neither event happened, and he told me the next day when the perceived danger had passed. He has no idea why it happened. I have asked him to let me know immediately if anything else unexplained happens to him. I am curious to see whether any of your readers have had anything similar happen recently.
As for time anomalies, I have had a couple of experiences. The first happened several years ago while visiting Mesa Verde National Park with friends. There were four of us, and I was the only one with any interest in the WuJo. Two of the others are engineers and one is a math teacher, and all three view the world from a scientific perspective. We had purchased timed tickets to some of the cliff dwellings that you cannot visit without a ranger guide. It was the middle of the day, and we had almost three hours before the next tour, so we decided to stop for lunch at one of the park cafes at an outdoor patio. We were careful to note the time because we had to drive a distance to the next tour location. We got lunch and ate it fairly quickly. While we were talking and enjoying the beautiful day, I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see that instead of being about an hour into lunch, over two hours had passed. I informed my friends, and we were all puzzled by the late hour. Each one of us had the distinct impression that we had lost over an hour of time. All of our watches were in agreement of the time, but our internal clocks belied that fact. I had a sense of disorientation, as did the others. it wasn’t simply a matter of losing track of time. We all knew we had not spent two hours at the cafe but were at a loss to explain what happened to the lost time. We talked about it all the way during the drive to the next tour but could not come up with a satisfactory explanation. All four of us were sure that we had lost more than an hour out of our day. I have often sensed a feeling of otherworldliness when traveling in the Southwest and chalked it up to the unexplained in that part of the United States. I know this is not as dramatic as losing a day of time, like your recent reader, but it was the shared feeling of lost time that felt significant to me about our experience in Mesa Verde.
More recently, I had a shared experience of a time anomaly with my husband and son. During this occasion, however, time seemed to stretch instead of contract. It was a weekend day about a month ago at home. Nothing overly dramatic, but all three of us had a strong feeling that the day was lasting unnaturally long. Several times in the afternoon, we noted the time and marveled that it wasn’t later in the day. After noting this feeling earlier in the day, we consciously monitored the passing of time the rest of the day and continued to have the feeling that the day and night were lasting longer than normal. Again, it was the shared feeling of a time anomaly that seemed significant. Also, noteworthy to me is that prior to this experience, I had had a feeling of time acceleration over the past few years, which made the loooong day particularly unusual. It reminded me of those sweet days of summer during my youth in which time seemed to extend on and on.
Thank you, George, for providing a forum for your readers in which we can share and compare our experiences of the WuJo. Maybe we can together discover some underlying explanation for all of our varied experiences.”
Want a wild-ass guess? After a near-brush with enlightenment (the internet providing for mass consciousness arising, and coincidentally when CERN is on the verge of figuring out the whole workings of the material world) we discover that we’ve ripped a hole in the bottom of the boat (economically) and so we descend into a morass of lesser-lifestyle people in order to reorganize and make another run as this mass consciousness stuff.
But, of course, it won’t happen for a good long time, and just like this time around, having shot ourselves in the foot, we’ll be taken over by power-hungry groups and organizations which will sell fear, shame, guilt, and all those other negatives into life in order to keep us all under control and away from that dangerous self-realization stuff. Oh, and when those get shaky, it will be back to guns and clubs again.
You see, there’s a good bit of data to suggest this is a cycle: Arise and fall back otherwise the Vedics would have been successful, or in another cycle, maybe the “How To” book was really in the Library at Alexandria when it burned.
So while the real work may be generally described as “Chop wood, carry water” in my circle of friends, it’s “Chop wood, carry water, build boat, fly magic carpet, prep like the dickens, work on ‘right action’ and hope the numbers work out. And if they don’t, we’ll at least have tried to keep our options open in order to contribute to “what’s next,”, which is more than most of the rest of the herd which obviously ain’t gettin’ it.”
Which is why our whole framing concept for the morning has been the bankruptcy of silver bullet theatrics as a solution to sand in the Vaseline.
Write when you break even: george@ure.net
More for Readers:
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Coping Forward/Autonomous Systems
Time for another chapter of my book “13-acres and Independence” - a steely-eyed look at how the world is doing, and how each of us can each plan our own “coping forward” path into the messy future. Of course this leads directly into a discussion of society’s war on autonomous systems, so we’ll discuss what those are and how they work, by contrasting networked (dependent) systems and the autonomous sort by analyzing what’s likely to fail. Think Global Epic Fail. Boy, are we in the holiday mood, or what? I make a perfectly reasonable case for doing away with many holidays, too, since they’re getting to be “Values Half Remembered” days anymore. But first, as a mood-setter, we’ll run through some of this morning’s headlines and what they mean.
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Safer Computing: Swearing Off Cookies
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