How to safely protect your life your liberty and your assets

and...own physical precious metals in safe vaults in safe jurisdictions!

                            Most people have no idea what really happens when a currency collapses, let alone how to prepare.

                                 Hold your real assets outside of the banking system in a private international facility!

Sell everything whose value only exists as a result of confidence in central bank(ster)s.

Lo "strano fenomeno" per cui le banche detenevano sempre meno obbligazioni bancarie. Loro sapevano, gli altri no

"Exiting While We Can..." A Crisis Worse than ISIS? Bail-Ins Begin

Bail In:*** nessun conto corrente è al sicuro! Come mettersi in salvo   - Claudio Borghi A.

***USCIRE MENTRE ANCORA SI PUO’

***********************

<Caro Roberto,
A volte noi leggiamo le date della Storia, senza renderci conto che tra quelle date, che noi leggiamo in pochi secondi, passano giorni interminabili. L'ascesa al potere di Adolf Hitler è di 4 anni posteriore alla crisi del '29: viene nominato Cancelliere nel Gennaio del '33 e il Reichstag gli conferisce poteri assoluti nel Marzo del '33, ma il Putsch della Birreria a Monaco è del Novembre 1923. Sono circa 3,400 giorni per prendere il potere in Germania. La marea, per usare la tua metafora,che mi pare appropriata, monta e non smette di montare fino al 1 Settembre del 1939, data dell'invasione della Polonia. Altri 1,000 giorni circa. La marea, da lì in poi, salirà fino a provocare disperazione in chi la oppone, sperando che alla fine si inverta. Nell'Agosto del '42 comincia la Battaglia di Stalingrado, che andrà avanti fino alla resa della VI Armata Tedesca a Febbraio del '43. La Battaglia di El-Alamein comincia il 23 Ottobre del 1942 e finisce l'11 Novembre con la disfatta dell'Africa Korps. Sono altri 1,000 giorni, prima che l'Armata Rossa inizi una marcia inarrestabile che si fermerà solo sulle rovine fumanti di Berlino.
Ricontali Roberto, sono oltre ....oltre 5,400 interminabili lunghissimi giorni prima che la marea si fermi, prima che il flusso si inverta. Quello che facciamo qui, quel poco che facciamo noi e quel tanto che fa il Prof. lo facciamo per i nostri figli, certamente non per noi, per me, l'unica cosa che vorrei, è poter tenere su la testa e affermare "io non ho ceduto, io ho combattuto" da uomo libero. Non è poco. E deve bastarci .> Il tempo della Storia  

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Bail-ins (and other confiscations) are likely coming. It is only smart to have a LARGE amount of your financial assets outside of the banking system.
The Bail-Ins Are Back! Portugal Slaps Senior Bank Bondholders With €2 Billion Loss

(And for those wondering just which institutional investors are holding those, here's a list (note that Allianz and BlackRock are right at the top...)

Updated: Creditors Accuse Portugal Of Unfair, Populist Short-Cut In €2 Billion Bank Bail-In

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"We keep watching what is happening in Cyprus with morbid fascination. As a reminder, the unhappy island was the first major “haircut” victim in Europe. Its bankers, who had flagrantly over-traded their capital and won prizes for running “the best banks in Europe” along the way, erroneously believed the repeated promises of assorted EU commissars that Greece would never – never! – be allowed to go bankrupt. Consequently they stuffed their balance sheets to the gills with supposedly risk-free Greek government bonds, only to eventually see them get “haircut” twice in a row..."Revisiting the Greatest Crash in History

Uno Stato che si fa dettare la politica di bilancio dall'estero è un protettorato/una colonia. Chiaro?

Quelli che ‘l’euro era giusto, ma il cambio era sbagliato’

20 Terrible Ways to Trade

Good trading is very basic; it’s trading with an edge to capture a trend in your own time frame, while managing your risk exposure carefully with the right position sizing and stop loss.
There are endless ways to trade badly. You can change these if you make an effort and become self-aware. Be on the lookout for these pitfalls.
*******************Here are the top 20

***Robert V. Green: Trading And Investing Are Different

Here Is The Real Reason Why Authorities Want To Ban High Denomination Bank Notes

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    ...le banche italiane sono tutte serie; non ce ne è una che ride...

Sell everything whose value only exists as a result of confidence in central bank(ster)s.

Planets aligning for gold – Macroeconomic unstoppable forces

That’s what happened in Cyprus. The banks were going to the wall. So, they confiscated deposits to help make themselves whole again

The War On Cash Is Increasing

Many don’t notice the stealth war on cash but it’s quite real.
As countries move to negative interest rates the thrust of the policies are to force people to spend. No mattress money allowed thank you. Nations like Japan, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland have already implemented these policies.
Central Banks are basically charging member banks to hold cash. The superficial belief is to force loan making and spending which will stimulate inflation and growth. The minus rates being applied by the ECB, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, and Japan havefailed to juice growth, or stocks, or inflation.
A clear ulterior motive is by eliminating cash, countries will increase tax revenues by negatively effecting the private economy and illegal activities at the same time. A recent move by the ECB is to eliminate the €500 note. This was followed this week by influential economist Larry Summers desires to eliminate the $100 bill. And, so it goes. But clearly the government wishes to squeeze cash transactions.

The Central Banks hate physical cash. So much so they there will likely try to ban it in the near future.
You see, almost all of the “wealth” in the financial system is digital in nature.
◾The total currency (actual cash in the form of bills and coins) in the US financial system is a little over $1.36 trillion.
◾When you include digital money sitting in short-term accounts and long-term accounts then you’re talking about roughly $10 trillion in “money” in the financial system.
◾In contrast, the money in the US stock market (equity shares in publicly traded companies) is over $20 trillion in size.
◾The US bond market (money that has been lent to corporations, municipal Governments, State Governments, and the Federal Government) is almost twice this at $38 trillion.
◾Total Credit Market Instruments (mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, junk bonds, commercial paper and other digitally-based “money” that is based on debt) is even larger $58.7 trillion.
◾Unregulated over the counter derivatives traded between the big banks and corporations is north of $220 trillion.
When looking over these data points, the first thing that jumps out at the viewer is that the vast bulk of “money” in the system is in the form of digital loans or credit (non-physical debt).
Put another way, actual physical money or cash (as in bills or coins you can hold in your hand) comprises less than 1% of the “money” in the financial system.
As far as the Central Banks are concerned, this is a good thing because if investors/depositors were ever to try and convert even a small portion of this “wealth” into actual physical bills, the system would implode (there simply is not enough actual cash).
Remember, the current financial system is based on debt. The benchmark for “risk free” money in this system is not actual cash but US Treasuries.

In this scenario, when the 2008 Crisis hit, one of the biggest problems for the Central Banks was to stop investors from fleeing digital wealth for the comfort of physical cash. Indeed, the actual “thing” that almost caused the financial system to collapse was when depositors attempted to pull $500 billion out of money market funds.
A money market fund takes investors’ cash and plunks it into short-term highly liquid debt and credit securities. These funds are meant to offer investors a return on their cash, while being extremely liquid (meaning investors can pull their money at any time).
This works great in theory… but when $500 billion in money was being pulled (roughly 24% of the entire market) in the span of four weeks, the truth of the financial system was quickly laid bare: that digital money is not in fact safe.
To use a metaphor, when the money market fund and commercial paper markets collapsed, the oil that kept the financial system working dried up. Almost immediately, the gears of the system began to grind to a halt.
When all of this happened, the global Central Banks realized that their worst nightmare could in fact become a reality: that if a significant percentage of investors/ depositors ever tried to convert their “wealth” into cash (particularly physical cash) the whole system would implode.
As a result of this, virtually every monetary action taken by the Fed since this time has been devoted to forcing investors away from cash and into risk assets. The most obvious move was to cut interest rates to 0.25%, rendering the return on cash to almost nothing.
However, in their own ways, the various QE programs and Operation Twist have all had similar aims: to force investors away from cash, particularly physical cash.
After all, if cash returns next to nothing, anyone who doesn’t want to lose their purchasing power is forced to seek higher yields in bonds or stocks.
The Fed’s economic models predicted that by doing this, the US economy would come roaring back. The only problem is that it hasn’t. In fact, by most metrics, the US economy has flat-lined for several years now, despite the Fed having held ZIRP for 5-6 years and engaged in three rounds of QE.
As a result of this… mainstream economists at CitiGroup, the German Council of Economic Experts, and bond managers at M&G have suggested doing away with cash entirely.

If you think this sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory, consider that France has a cash ban on any transaction over €1,000 Euros from using physical cash. Spain has a cash ban on transactions over €2,500. Uruguay has cash bans on transactions over $5,000. And on and on.
A cash ban will be coming to the US in the near future. Already, the big banks (the ones with the closest ties to the Federal Reserve) have begun turning away deposits OR charging them.
State Street Corp. , the Boston bank that manages assets for institutional investors, for the first time has begun charging some customers for large dollar deposits, people familiar with the matter said. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank by assets, has cut unwanted deposits by more than $150 billion this year, in part by charging fees…
And here’s another big “tell”…
“At some point you wonder whether there will be a shortage of financial institutions willing to take on these balances,” said Kelli Moll, head of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP’s hedge-fund practice in New York, saying that where to hold cash has become an increasing topic of conversation as hedge funds are shown the door by longtime banking counterparties.
So where is the physical cash meant to go?
Jerome Schneider, head of Pacific Investment Management Co.’s short-term and funding desk, which advises corporate and institutional clients, said that as a result of the bank actions, he and his customers have discussed as cash alternatives boosting investments in U.S. Treasury bonds, ultrashort-duration bond funds and money-market funds.
When it comes to cash, Mr. Schneider said, “Clients have been put on warning.”
      Source: Wall Street Journal.
This is just the beginning. Indeed…

-Graham Summers

                                         GOLD – GETTING SET FOR THE GREATEST BULL MARKET OF ALL TIME

"Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency...and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewellery. It's not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating."
Alan Greenspan, ex-US Federal Reserve Chairman, August 23, 2011

"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted."
Alan Greenspan, May 20, 1999

Gold And Silver: Governments And Central Banks Are Losing Control

"You’re never going to save everyone. There are some people that are never going to get it. It’s sad, but true.
There will always be investors that can’t help themselves or get out of their own way.
I used to think everyone could be saved if they would only learn. But changing behavior is simply too difficult for many.
In order for one group of investors to prosper, another group has to fail. It’s an unfortunate truth of the financial markets."
-Ben Carlson

Got Silver?

Fred & EntendanceInvestors Beach Top Silver Stock: EXK Endeavour Silver Corp

That says it all as far as any ECB's credibility left. Banksters.

“Why do they hate gold so much?”
That one is easy—the central bankers and their crony politicians hate gold for the same reason tanning salons hate the sun. Because gold cannot be printed or destroyed, it exists in limited and quantifiable amounts, and therefore, unlike paper money, there is a limit, a tether, on the amount of incompetence and financial mismanagement our elected governments can get away with without being called to account.
On the other hand, the amount of paper (or digital) currency that a government can create (usually through the mechanism of its “agent,” or third-party central bank) is limited only by the amount of available ink and paper, the processing capacity of its computer systems, and the ignorance of its citizens. And all of these are now in plentiful supply, it would seem.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
-André Gide

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; 
when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; 
when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work;
and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you;
...you may know that your society is doomed."
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Act accordingly. E.

No productivity growth. None.

"...If one simply looks at the following line-items, it is clear for anyone to see something is about to hit the fan and it’s not anything anyone wants hitting the fan.
•45 million people in the U.S. on food stamps
• some estimates as high as 10 million refugees flooding into the European Union
•non-stop wars of aggression involving NATO, Russia, Syria and several other countries
• financial crisis that began in 2008 has not been addressed and the problems that started that year have grown larger and far deeper
•banking system in the European Union, especially Italy, is under enormous stress due to faulting/fraudulent accounting
•Federal Reserve balance sheet at $4 TRILLION – U.S. debt at $20 TRILLION and counting
•United Kingdom/Britain and the Brexit movement that is taking root
•U.S. Presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, garnering global attention as the citizens of the U.S. seek alternatives to the current embedded criminal politicians.
• Japan instituting a Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP) for their sovereign bonds – Japan has basically been in a recession for over 20 years
•China is manufacturer to the world and with economies slowing down or shutting down, there is no reason to manufacture products..."

A Crisis Unlike We Have Seen In Human History

1. Why did zero interest rates become necessary?
2. Why are negative interest rates now necessary? and,
3. Why are negative interest rates a really excellent idea?*

* if you ignore certain unintended consequences (which is what everyone does all the time, so let’s not worry about them just yet).

1. Interest rates went to zero because economic growth went to zero. If you are just now wondering why that happened, just google “Limits to Growth” by clicking this link. (A public notice about the scheduled end of growth has been on display at your global planning office for four decades now. It is not anyone else’s fault if people of this planet don’t take an interest in their global affairs. I mean, seriously…)

Interest rates and rates of growth are related: a positive interest rate is little more than a bet that the future is going to be bigger and more prosperous, enabling people to pay off the debts with interest. This is an obvious point: if your income increases, it becomes easier to repay your debts; if it stagnates, it becomes harder; if it shrinks, it eventually becomes impossible.

Yes, you can nitpick and split hairs, and claim that there was still some growth, but in the developed economies most of this growth has been in financial shenanigans, fueled by an explosion in debt, and most of the benefits of this last bit of growth accrued to the wealthiest 1%, and did next to nothing for anyone else. Did this growth help support a large, stable and prosperous middle class? No, it didn’t.

In fact, wages in the US, which was once the world’s largest economy, have been stagnant for generations. In response, the Federal Reserve has been continuously reducing interest rates, until they hit zero in 2008. And there they have stayed ever since. But now, it turns out, that’s not good enough. If the Federal Reserve wants to keep the party going, they have to do more, because…

2. Once you are faced with a continuously shrinking economy, just holding interest rates at zero is not sufficient to forestall financial collapse. The interest rates must go negative.

Here are just a couple of particularly striking examples.

Australia has amassed a huge pile of debt—over 120% of GDP—and most of it is mortgage debt on overvalued real estate. Now that Australia’s economy, which was driven by commodity exports to China, has tanked, a lot of this debt is being turned into interest-only loans, because Australians no longer have the money to repay any of the principal. But what if they can’t make the interest payments either? The obvious solution is to refinance their mortgages as interest-only at zero percent; problem solved! Of course, as conditions deteriorate further, the Australians will become unable to afford taxes and utilities. Negative interest rates to the rescue! Refinance them again at a negative rate of interest, and now the banks will pay them to live in their overpriced houses.

Another example: energy (oil and gas) companies in the US have accumulated a fantastic pile of debt. All of this money was sunk into developing marginal and very expensive resources such as shale oil and deep offshore. Since then, energy prices have fallen, making all of these investments unprofitable and dramatically reducing revenue. As a result, energy companies in the US are a few months away from having to spend their entire revenue on interest payments. The solution, of course, is to allow them to roll over their debt at zero percent, and if you want them to ever start drilling again (their production has been falling by around 10% annualized) then please make that interest rate negative.

3. Are you starting to see how this works? Whereas before you had to be careful about taking on debt, and had to have a plan for how you will repay it, with negative interest rates that is simply not a consideration. If your debt pays you, then more debt is always better than less debt. It no longer matters that the economy continuously shrinks because now you can get paid just for twiddling your thumbs!

But are there any unintended consequences of negative interest rates? Unintended consequences are hard to think about, and most people get a headache even trying. How can it be that clean, plentiful nuclear energy will eventually pollute the whole planet with long-lived radionuclides, resulting sky-high cancer rates? How can it be that wonderful genetically modified seeds will render us sickly and infertile in just a few generations? And how can it be that ingenious mobile computing technology has turned our children into zombies who are constantly twiddling their smartphones as they sleepwalk through life? It’s hard to think about any of this without taking some happy pills; and how can it be that taking those happy pills has… you get the idea.

The unintended consequence of negative interest rates is that they destroy money. This is true in an entirely trivial sense: if you deposit x dollars at -ρ% annual, then a year later you will only have x(1-ρ) dollars because xρ dollars has been destroyed. (In case you prefer to count on your fingers and toes, if you deposit $10 at -10% annual, then a year later you will only have $9 because $1 has been destroyed.) But what I mean is something slightly more profound: negative interest rates erode the very concept of money.

To get at the reason for this, we have to ask a slightly more profound question: What is money? I think that money is the cult of the god Mammon. Look at the following symbols:


€ $ ¥ £

Don’t they resemble religious symbols? In fact, that’s what they are: they are symbols of faith in money. They are also units—dimensionless units, of a peculiar kind. There are quite a few dimensionless units in math and science, such as π, e, %, ppm, but they are all ratios that relate physical quantities to other, identical, physical quantities. They are dimensionless because the units cancel out. For instance, π is the ratio between a circle’s circumference and diameter; length over length gives nothing. But monetary quantities do not directly relate to any physical quantity at all. It can be said that some number of monetary units (let's call them "yarbles") is equivalent to some number of turnips, but that, you see, is a matter of faith. Should the turnip farmer turn out to be an unbeliever, he would be within his rights to say, “I am not taking any of your damn yarbles!” or, if he were a polite turnip farmer, “Your money is no good here, Sir!”

Of course, if our turnip farmer were to do that, he’d land in quite a bit of trouble because, you see, the cult of Mammon is a state cult. You have no choice but to be a believer, because only by worshiping Mammon can you earn the money to pay your taxes, and if you don’t pay your taxes you get jailed. Nor can you produce money on your own, because that right is reserved for Mammon’s high priests, the bankers. Making your own money makes you a heretic, and gets you the modern equivalent of being burned at the stake, which is a $250,000 fine and a 20-year prison sentence.

But it goes beyond that, because the state insists that just about everything there is must be valued in units of its money. And the way everything must be valued is through a mystical legitimizing process that is central to the cult of money: Mammon’s “invisible hand” makes itself apparent within the “free market,” which is Mammon's virtual temple. The “invisible hand” sets the price of everything as a mystical revelation and, as with any revelation, it is beyond criticism. It is a redemptive ritual, in which people acting out of their basest, most antisocial instincts—greed and fear—manage, through Mammon's divine intervention, to serve the common good. The “free market” is also believed to have all sorts of miraculous properties, and as with all miracles it is all a matter of smoke and mirrors and suspension of disbelief. For example, the “free market” is said to be “efficient.” But it sets the price of turnips, and the result is that fully 40% of the food in the US ends up being wasted. That’s definitely not efficient.

This sort of inefficiency can be tolerated while resources are plentiful. Should throwing away 40% of the turnips cause a shortage of turnips develop, turnip producers can grow more turnips and sell them at prices that turnip consumers can still afford. But when resources are no longer plentiful, this trick stops working, and what you end up with is something called market failure. The current state of the global oil industry is a good example: either the price is so high that marginal consumers cannot afford it (as was the case until quite recently), or the price is so low that the marginal producers can’t break even (as is the case now).

And so a bout of supply destruction follows a bout of demand destruction, and then the pattern repeats. Everybody loses, plus this is terribly inefficient. It would be far more efficient to appoint some central planner to calculate the optimum price of oil once a month. Then all the marginal producers would jump out the window, all the marginal consumers would slit their wrists, and equilibrium conditions would prevail. As the oil supply dwindled (it is depleting at around 5% per year), some additional number of producers and consumers would need to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and so on until the last barrel is produced and burned, leaving whatever producers and consumers still remained lying in pools of their own blood.

As natural resources dwindle, our faith in the cult of Mammon is being sorely tested. But what alternatives are there? Well, there is an even older, ancient cult that’s based on idolatry: the worship of precious metals. Gold has some industrial and aesthetic uses, but it is primarily useful for making a golden calf for you to worship (or, if you are former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, a golden toilet). Economists tell us that gold is a “pet rock” or a “barbarous relic,” and they are right, but what is one to do when there is a Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods) going on? Nature abhors a vacuum, and in a Götterdämmerung older pagan deities sometimes emerge and demand virgin sacrifices—such as poisoning entire river ecosystems by mining gold using mercury, or squandering prodigious amounts of fossil fuels in mining, crushing and sifting through millions of tons of hard rock to get at just 3 parts per million of gold.

Negative interest rates are Mammon’s Götterdämmerung. The money cult is bolstered by the idea that its huge and all-powerful deity will be even more huge and all-powerful tomorrow; if the opposite is demonstrably the case, then people’s faith in it begins to falter and fade. Negative interest rates are like an icy-cold bath for Mammon, causing its godhead to shrink a little more with every dip. People see that, and think, “I don’t want to worship his shrinking yarbles.” Then they go and spend their own yarbles on anything they can find—fallow land, vacant houses, golden calves, boxes of brass knobs... They don’t bother investing their yarbles in growing turnips, because what’s the use of turnips if all you can do with them is sell them for even more shrinking yarbles?

Negative interest rates are an excellent idea—and perhaps the only way to keep the financial game going a bit longer—but, given these unintended consequences, they are also a terrible idea. The bankers know that. They want to preserve their cult’s status, and constantly talk about raising interest rates. But they haven’t yet, because they also know that just a small increase will result in trillions of dollars of losses, triggering widespread business failures and ushering in the Greatest Great Depression Ever. This is not a problem for them to solve; this is a predicament. They will delay and pray, and make pronouncements loaded with keywords designed to please the high-frequency trading algorithms that are in charge of artificially levitating the “free market” with judiciously timed injections of “free money.” But in the end all they can do is act brave, wait for a distraction and then… run for the exits!

And your job is to make it to the exits before they do. -ClubOrlov

"...The time to rebel against it is now, while we still have the chance before that boot tramples the face of humanity…forever..."

"...The crucial thing to understand about credit bubble dynamics is that borrowing money from people desperate to lend and using the proceeds to overpay for assets requires only monkey-level intelligence. So while a bubble is inflating it’s impossible for most of the media, banking and political communities to tell the legitimate operators from the hopelessly corrupt and/or extremely stupid. That’s the world we’ve created by handing monetary printing presses to governments, and by extension to corporate CEOs.
Today’s bubble is global, as capital sloshes from one country to the next in search of safety and/or yield. So this time around virtually all major governments have been corrupted, and now every country’s major corporations are about to suffer the same fate. We have, in short, the mother of all crack-up booms coming our way..."

Corrupt Or Just Stupid? Markets Hand Corporations An Unlimited Credit Card 

Snakes in Suits

***Into the Mind of a Psychopath II

Recall the Cypriot banking crisis a few years back. Ultimately, 47.5% of bank deposits over €100,000 were confiscated overnight as they were converted
into bank equity for a loss of roughly €4 billion!

Your Bank Deposits May Become Your Worst Nightmare

Bank Bail-Ins – Depositors’ Worst Nightmare
***How You Could Lose Your Money in The Bank