Chris Answers Your Questions (Part 2)

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the first one, we received so many good questions that we didn't have enough time to cover them all. But we made a pretty sizable dent.

This week's questions covered topics ranging from an update on where Chris thinks we are on the (hyper)inflation timeline, to the risks of gold ownership, to the importance of developing a grounding sense of 'purpose' as we enter a new era certain to be unlike the past several decades. 

Based on the positive feedback from our readers so far, Chris and I will plan to conduct these audience-scripted interviews on a regular basis going forward.

Let us know your thoughts in the Comments section below. And if there are questions you'd like Chris to address in our next interview with him, add them here.

Click the play button below to listen to my interview with Chris (runtime 50m:14s): 

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Or click here to read the full transcript. 

 

Our series of podcast interviews with notable minds includes:

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/chris-answers-your-questions-part-2-2/

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Pension funds are topical right now.
I am assuming that they are forfit. Even they wont fill the debt hole. Not that that fact will stop them being shovelled it in order to keep the game going a little longer.

In light of this fact I recommend to my fellow workers that we leverage these funds against other pension funds and buy the Port where we work. This is Distributism.

In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII states that people are likely to work harder and with greater commitment if they themselves possess the land on which they labour, which in turn will benefit them and their families as workers will be able to provide for themselves and their household. He puts forward the idea that when men have the opportunity to possess property and work on it, they will “learn to love the very soil which yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of the good things for themselves and those that are dear to them.” [
As a community we have the all the skills to do very nicely,thank you. By seizing the funds now at least we would be able to salvage something.

The response I get is that of a lamb. A lamb to the slaughter. There is only one other person on the site who can envision a future unlike the present. And he believes in Abiotic Oil and thinks that the Bureau of Meteorology is in cahoots with Al Gore to defraud us of millions.

What I do not understand is how two very knowledgable and intelligent people like  Nicholle Foss and Dr Martenson can create such mutually exclusive models. The way I see it is that it is in the nature of infinite asymptotes that both conditions can exist at the same time at the moment of crisis.

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Hence infinite rate of debt default (deflation) in one corner and a trigger finger hovering over the decimal point of the computer digits in the other. (Inflation) Will they be able to print as fast as others default? Dunno. But what I suspect is that the capital will not go to fill the debt hole.

Or we could just entertain our selves with a nuclear war. The other infinity.

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There are no straight or smooth lines in nature; that is an abstraction by man that chances a massive misunderstanding.   There are also many types of infinity in mathematics but not much is known about these abstractions.   Quantum Mechanics shows us that one cannot extract one detail of nature without deforming it and, consequently, not being able to measure other aspects.   So this should tell man to be humble before Nature, but instead he thinks himself a god.

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Chris said,
"I think the most important part that really came out of that Faber podcast was him noting the observation, which I have heard elsewhere as well and made the same observation myself which is that these crisis, they started kind of smallish you know, long-term capital management that was a gigantic, gigantic problem back in 1998. It was about a $3 billion hiccup, right? Which was huge at the time. It was an unthinkable amount of money. Federal Reserve and Greenspan had to intervene. Now, we look at that and just laugh; $3 billion? Really? Oh, that’s nothing. That’s Tuesday morning for the Federal Reserve now. "

Yeah… to think we used to treat a mere 3000 million dollars as if it were real money… haha… how quaint.  Now it’s not real money until it’s $1 Trillion…  oops, I mean 1,000,000 million dollars.   

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Yeh Jim, in 1966 it was 5 pieces of candy for a penny now it’s "penny candy???, what’s that?". "Ban the penny, who needs it". LOL
BOB

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As a Brazilian, my experience was that the failure of our currency happened rather slowly in hindsight.  Inflation didn’t become hyperinflation overnight, but rather crept up over the years, gaining an extra digit every few years, then every year.  So what started as double-digit inflation in the 70’s, became 5-digit inflation a decade later.
Of course, people didn’t expect inflation to reach 10,000% (which it did in March 1989) to start moving away from holding money or paper assets to hard assets, including the dolla, then an option, but unavailable to America now by definition.  However, this move also caused inflation on asset prices, to the point of my selling my car - bought used - for more than when I bought it when priced in dollars.

So, in a way, Chris is right that the fall of a currency can start quickly, but it takes some time for people to realize it and for its effects to be felt fully.  I think that this will be true for the dollar, since its status as world reserve currency will cause its holders to act with the power they have - power of law and of arms - to forestall its fall, until it cannot be forestalled.  As an example, the games that the EU has played with Greece, not to rescue it as advertised, but to rescue its creditors.  Once these were spared the full blunt of a Greek default, Greece is being cut loose before our very eyes.  I’d expect an analogous process to happen to the dollar - and the euro, the pound and the yen for that matter - with the difference that it wouldn’t take place in a bureaucracy, but on the streets and battlefields, methinks.

This translates into giving people some time to shift away from a failing currency even after it starts, but not so much time before asset prices become inflated themselves.  Which leads to my conclusion, which agrees with Chris’ recommendation, that the sooner people move to hard assets, the better their wealth will be protected, especially if this happens before their prices enter a stratospheric realm.

As a matter of fact, I’d venture to say that all major fiat currencies have stepped into a slide which they cannot jump off of.  It is an inevitability that they will all fail, so the smart time to start moving away from them is now.

 

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 I agree the death of the dollar seems more likely to be slow relative to our human time scale; debt and inflation are following exponential paths but we don’t know yet where along on the "hockey stick" we really are until that sharp turn is really felt.
I take issue with the experts in the mainstreatm media I hear time to time say there no problem with our debt right now. That may be true for the moment, but it’s the path we are on that will lead to trouble; e.g. Greece.  If you are on a certain trajectory, albiet however slow, if no forces counteract it then soon or later you will hit whatever you are moving towards.