An insider squeals.....

Not anybody can change the mess that's coming. Five or 10 years and the whole planet is wracked with the bust after a hyper inflationary boom.

That's the way it looks at this point. Will the gang in power last that long?

Who knows!

Mean while, our store sales still down a bit off of projections but the local economy is picking up as some hiring going on. Tax checks start coming in over the next few weeks should help. One thing for Patty and me  is that all our old debt is paid and we are now working on  the rest of our doctor bills . Any luck and those will be all covered by July. Then I gang up on the car payment so I can start shopping for my RV next fall for our retirement coming up in a couple of years .

Of course, if they close the Suez Canal then  gas hits 10 bucks a gallon or so  and all bets are off. We'll all have more important things to worry about like eating or freezing. I'm just glad there's a half dozen fishing lakes and a million deer and elk outside my front door.

But for most people living in more  civilized surroundings you'll have to eat Mexicans or maybe gold or something, LOL.

Anyways, I'm wondering that  if gold is such a great investment why is everybody on TV selling this shit, hmm?


The Solari Model - Total Economic Return at The Solari Report Blog

As I have described in recent posts, we live in an economy where access to and cost of capital of outsiders is controlled and manipulated by insiders–who are using the system to subsidize their own cost of capital and to rig returns on it.

Imagine if to buy a house or car, we have to borrow at steadily higher rates, while the people who deal drugs in our community have bought the local bank and run City Hall. They rig votes with computer voting machines and campaign financing. They can borrow for no cost, access insider information and then require full bailouts any time they say they made a mistake and are in danger of losing money on the uneconomic transactions they used to rig the game for themselves. They have a government budget to fund their attorneys targeting us in court or with dirty tricks, more dirty tricks and even more dirty tricks. Without representation, through banking policies that control our local currency and inflation of our food and energy and other costs, we have to pay the price of these bailouts to ensure they can succeed at rigging things against us. Pretty soon they own the whole neighborhood and no matter what we do, we are facing an Orwellian financial headwind. The harder we work, like a hamster on the wheel, the harder we have to work.

A detailed study of our time and energy shows that, a growing number of courageous early adopters aside, many of us are still supporting the insiders, or what I call the “Tapeworm.” Many of us are still banking at their bank. We are voting for candidates which propose giving them even more power over the flows of capital in our community. We are watching and buying their media. We are investing in their bonds and stocks. Our theory is that this will make us more money. For some reason, we believe our local grocery store, our local farmland, our local gas station, our local utilities will be worth more if we finance the Tapeworm’s ownership and control of them instead of our own. We believe that we are better off lending to each other through them, paying extraordinary fees and interest rates, on the theory that we are not trustworthy but, somehow, they are.

When someone proposes pulling capital out of large banking, corporate and investment intermediaries to instead own assets directly without the Tapeworm in the middle, there arises a great debate about how we should govern resources. Hence, the alignment of a wide variety of parties about how we could directly finance and govern our resources on a diversified, cooperative basis would significantly increase the resources we could shift in wealth creating ways.

For example, one set of alternative proposals says that making money is bad and that we should embrace not-for-profit models or reject money and financial tools all together. When you dig behind many of the people and groups promoting these models, they are financed by those who would love nothing more than for alternatives to not be financially sustainable, let alone attractive to the personal and family capital of those proposing it. This leaves alternatives financially dependent on foundations or governments and that means they can be controlled. This also leaves all financial capital in the Tapeworm — it having no other place to go. What better strategy for wining the cost of capital wars than to persuade your competitors to adopt self-immolating financial and investment models?

My response to ally Caroline Casey’s statement that a new world is percolating was “yes, but can we make it bankable?” The answer is, yes, of course we can make it bankable. Who is responsible to ensure that all of our resources are being optimized? I would suggest that we all are. The question is how do we break down that responsibility so that we can each do our bit? Popular support for holding investors responsible to understand and seek positive investor and total economic returns is an important step to making it so.

Total Economic Return

An investment’s return is its total economic return. This return can be positive or negative. It can be looked at and measured from various points of view. The first portion of the return is the return to the investor. The second portion of the return involves the return to all the other affected parties in the investment‘s ecosystem. We call the net return to all other parties the return to the network. So, for purposes of definition, an investment‘s return is its total economic return, which is divided into two portions: return on investment to the investor (first test) and return on investment to the network (second test). For a graphic description of this approach, see the flash presentation on the home page at Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC.

Traditional fiduciary principles say that investors should optimize their risk-adjusted return to investor. Solari investment strategy agrees. Our goal is to see investors achieve the best returns possible. We support doing this by adding the second test as an essential source of strategic intelligence. Think of estimating and tracking returns to the network as an essential navigation tool for the investor.

In Solari investment strategy, significantly greater intellectual mastery of how to create the greatest total economic returns than traditionally required is used to reduce and manage risk and to generate sustained individual investor returns. The Solari investment model adds a new constraint - it is the surgeon‘s motto: “Do no harm.” In other words, use best efforts to invest in enterprises and activities that have a negative network and total economic return. While it is true that theoretically the traditional fiduciary model is supposed to hold to a constraint of the rule of law, simply ensuring that organized crime is profitably managed behind the veil of national security and law enforcement has rendered this constraint almost useless.

Standards of total economic returns necessitate that investors attempt to understand their ecosystem, including the “who” and “what” of the criminality around them. No one who understood total economic returns and followed this practice nvested in the housing bubble. The financial advantage of not being part of destroying communities was not losing money when the uneconomic game came crashing down.