The r0ach report vol. 4: Prepping for the end of the world
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster, marine biologist, day trader. To me, being a day trader was better than being the president of the United States. You have no boss; you can walk around in flip flops; money magically falls from the sky. Where does the money come from? Who cares.
It turns out the money has to come from somewhere. The money comes from bubbles or misallocation of capital. The bad part is, bubbles blow up, and when the currency itself is the bubble used to fund the lower level of Maslow's pyramid, it becomes life threatening.
I'm not Bernie Madoff, but I do my fair share of trading: commodities, equities, Bitcoin, anything you can make money off of. When I'm not trying to find a trade setup, I'm usually analyzing things like macroeconomic data, and here's where the story begins. You often hear people say "the economy is bad", "the economy will implode", or some other variation of this story. If you're inexperienced with markets, it's hard to quantify if any of this is actually true or not.
Speculate no longer, because if you're going to hand pick any single economic variable to try and quantify market health, it's money velocity. The second I started paying attention to this variable since the 2008 crisis, I knew the debt markets were finished and going to implode.
So what do I mean when I say "debt markets are going to implode"? It honestly does not take a financial genius to figure any of this out. You're operating in a leveraged debt based system, where one man's debt is another man's asset on a balance sheet, often multiplied to some exponential power from there. The extreme lack of money velocity tells you an undeniable fact - the base debts that make up this system even before being multiplied in further dangerous things like derivatives are now completely unserviceable. This results in further defaults, aka cascading deflationary collapse.
What happens then? You either have some form of debt forgiveness, inflate it all away with printing, or deflationary collapse of the currency where people no longer even use it because the terms of doing so are so outlandish. Example being owing $200,000 on a house, but in a deflationary collapse, owing the equivalent of $2 million or more overnight without some form of debt forgiveness. People just refuse to honor any terms like that and the entire system dies because claiming debts as assets on balance sheets always creates systemic risk.
The idea of the entire economic system spontaneously dying sounds scary to most people, but it's actually a gift in disguise. The current system is a usury based, unsustainable scam designed solely to benefit the money issuer/creditor, so by collapsing, you're essentially being freed from it unless you let them initiate an identical scam right afterwards. You just have to make sure you own real (silver and gold) or uncorrelated assets (bitcoin) before it happens.
The act of debt forgiveness isn't actually a bailout for you, it's a bailout for the creditors so they can continue their vampiric, usury scam which became unsustainable. The long story short is, no matter which of those three options occurs, it will not be a minor event, and the value and confidence in government issued paper is going to the dumpster, while the value and confidence in things like gold and silver, and probably Bitcoin, will increase.
If I had to make a call, I'd say the most likely option is hyperinflation. Even if it was the most sane choice, debt forgiveness is not something bankers do. Their only goal in life is to get you in debt. It's like a vampire freeing their victims. It just doesn't happen. It's harder logistics-wise to perform than helicopter money anyway when debts are considered assets. This is why it's kind of a running joke between financially literate people that the financial world can end in any other way besides hyperinflation.
I want to get away from the ifs or hows of collapse. It's going to happen and it doesn't really matter how. The only important thing is figuring out how bad it will be, what happens after, and what your own options are. Everything is generally corporate owned nowadays with barely any family businesses. When the monetary system blows up, the grocery store can't just say "oh we will barter food for some random thing you can drag here or piece of gold or silver".
These stores are going to sell food for fiat right up until the end, then all store shelves will either be flash emptied using semi-worthless fiat, or looted, or the government will take control of them and have the national guard there with money maybe not even being utilized in the stores. Something like Venezeula in other words. All that matters is, the shelves are going to be empty or inaccessible in some type of way.
The good news is, it's not hard or expensive to insure/hedge yourself for prolonged food shortage in monetary crisis where the alternative might be dying from starvation. I'm going to assume you don't live near a body of water for fishing and don't have access to things like hunting deer. In a situation like this, you would likely be forced to grow your own somewhere along the line, even if it's inside your house or on your roof. It takes a minimum of around 40 days before anything planted is going to give you food, but most vegetables are more along a 60-90 day period.
This means you need two things if you don't have access to fishing or hunting: some seeds to toss in your closet or refrigerator (they last decades but last longest in the refrigerator - don't freeze them), and three month food supply at the very least. The seeds are only $15 and can be purchased from places like Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Heirloom-Vegetable-Survival-32-Variety/dp/B00LE4RGOE/
For food before anything actually grows, there's tons of ways to approach this like ordering specially designed, MRE-like boxes, but I'm just going to list my own approach here. The time frame for a black swan debt market implosion could be anywhere from the very near future all the way to 2-3 years from now if they drag it out by hyperinflation and price controls. The time frames involved means that canned goods are a pretty viable choice and you don't really even need to get into anything exotic.
If all you need to do is survive for around 90 days, you could theoretically just buy 90 cans of ravioli and live off one per day. You could also buy dehydrated noodles, boil them at the same time, mix the noodles with the ravioli, and be able to feed several people at once from just one can. I like a bit of variety, so here's a selection of some stuff I buy to hold and the expiration dates:
All this stuff lasts a long time, and you can eat it even a year after the expiration date without a problem usually. The canned tuna comes in at a whopping April 2019 expiration date. If the world markets have not imploded by then, I'd be pretty damn surprised, but if not, I'll just eat it all and replace it with newer stuff. This is much harder to do with MRE-like foods because most don't taste good, but if you must go that route, I hear Mountain House is one of the better taste-wise.
Other good options: dried rice, flour, dried beans, dried noodles, honey, etc. Some people believe Ramen noodles last forever, but not even close. They're covered with some type of frying oil that goes bad pretty fast but should still last about the same as canned goods.
Next, I'm going to bring up some more probable necessities. I lived in an area where multiple hurricanes came through and knocked out power for a month. Economic implosion is kind of a similar thing where power and water services can disappear. Having a way to start a fire to cook is kind of necessary, especially if you have a lot of cans. Either buy a big pack of plastic lighters or something like a magnesium, camping style starter:
https://www.amazon.com/Survival-Magnesium-Starter-Compass-Whistle/dp/B016UWWS2O/
As for water, the funny thing here is, that Berkey water filter that Alex Jones shills for is actually the best thing on the market and can even remove 98.6% of radioactive cesium from water. No other water filters seem to come close that I've seen.
Large unit:
https://www.amazon.com/Travel-Berkey-Filter-Filters-Fluoride/dp/B00AWVQLPK/
Small unit that doesn't remove nearly as much:
https://www.amazon.com/Berkey-Sport-Bottle-Portable-Purifier/dp/B0026OKYPE
You probably need some form of weapons. My dad used to own three gun stores so I could make this section longer than it needs to be, but I personally prefer a 4" S&W .357 & Ruger Mini-14 rifle. The S&W mostly because I feel much more accurate than with something like a Glock, and the Ruger because it's functionality is good while not being flashy and can use common .223 or military 5.56 NATO. They basically have to attempt to ban all deer hunting rifles in order to ban the Mini-14. If you have to go ammo hunting from dead bodies, it's also likely going to be 5.56 regardless of whether you're in America or if America is invading you.
Next episode of the r0ach report: Vol 4 part 2 - What to do at the end of the world
(source of first picture: www.rogerebert.com, still from Goodfellas - Warner Bros.)
Was expecting at least one "The government makes the grass grow! There is no way any of the stuff in this post can happen!"
The advice on weapons is insightful.
I'll offer a different overall advice. Move to Asia.
There's all kinds of lunatics out there involved with weapons who give contradictory statements with one another. Common phrases are things like "I wouldn't use anything but a Glock or AK47 for doomsday weapon since you can bury both in the sand and still work after", or "Revolvers are no good, they don't hold enough ammo. Only a Glock is useful because it holds 17 rounds".
For people like cops, a Glock makes a lot of sense. You have the standard police tactic of aim center mass, then just pull the trigger and don't stop until they stop moving. Cops want to have all this ammo because they want to be able to aim at two suspects and dump tons of bullets at both center mass in a panic fire.
The problem for me with the Glock is, I feel that's really it's only good use is situations like that - very close range just mindless dumping center mass. The Glock is a "stand your ground" in close proximity weapon. With something like a S&W .357, I feel confident in being able to plink off a target at longer range, similar to a rifle. It's a good multi-purpose weapon in that regard. I'm not trying to get in some close range gun battle where people are dumping 17 rounds at each other from five feet away.
That's something cops do in their daily routine but not something I'm planning for. If I feel there's danger in being involved in situations like that on a daily basis, I'm going to be leaving the area and going somewhere else because you're probably going to end up dying no matter how good of a shot you are.
It's a game of trade offs with whatever you select. If the world actually does implode bad enough where you constantly need to stand your ground in confined spaces on a daily basis with a Glock, you'd be far better off walking around with something like an MP5 SMG (even though it would be impossible to find) strapped on your shoulder at all times with your finger on the trigger. Because at that point, you're in an urban warzone, and a Glock is not a weapon of war in the first place.
Of course, nobody uses MP5s because they don't go through common III-A body armor, so by the time an MP5 becomes useful, you're in a real war and everyone is walking around with things like select fire AR15s or worse. If I'm surrounded by crazies with AR15s, I'd rather be trying to compete with them using a S&W .357 rather than a Glock. But this goes back to the saying, the purpose of a hand gun is to use it to fight your way to the rifle.
All weapons have their own specific use case. If you're sleeping and in the middle of the night five people form "the hood" are trying to kick in your door, this is a stand your ground situation and you're going to want to have either a high capacity semi-auto hand gun, select fire rifle, or shotgun to stick out the window and unload the whole thing on them.
As you can see, out of those three choices, only one is viable for non-stand your ground situations and at longer range, so everything always comes back to the compact select fire rifle in the end. Of course, all of those are all illegal!
Nice post! I actually picked up the seeds you linked to in the post so I hope you have some type of referral built into that link so you can get credit. =)
No referral type stuff, it's just the best option I could find.
Great post which provides some meaningful insights! What are your thoughts on bugging out? Could you maybe provide some information over the content of you bug-out-bag? Great job on this post!