“All roads, in other words, lead to trouble of some sort, which makes year-ahead asset allocation pretty easy: you just own everything that protects you regardless of which road gets traveled.”
~ John Rubino, The Money Bubble
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There are two ways to be wrong about the dollar, and most people manage one of them.
The first is the mainstream error. The federal debt is a chronic condition, the story goes, a high blood pressure the patient has carried for decades and will carry for decades more. Nothing to do. Nothing to see. Stay invested, stay calm, let the professionals handle it.
The second is the doom error. The collapse is imminent. It arrives next Tuesday, it arrives all at once, and the only sane response is panic. So, we need lots of red arrows on charts. Screaming thumbnails. The end of the world, brought to you by… a gold-coin affiliate link.
The two errors look like opposites. Yet, they produce the same result. A reader convinced that nothing will happen does nothing. A reader convinced that everything will happen, and soon, also does nothing, because terror is not a to-do list. Neither of them has a plan.
Here is what the data shows. Since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, the dollar has lost about 88 percent of its purchasing power. Not in a crash, but in a grind. The chart above is not a cliff. It is a slope… and it has sloped the same direction for fifty-five years, through every administration, every crisis, and every official assurance that the dollar’s strength was beyond question.
That slope is the whole point. A cliff would be a story, but for most, it’s just the current condition. You just plan around it.
At dollarcollapse.com, we’ve spent sixteen years writing under a name that makes people at dinner parties wince. However, we are still not in the doom business. The doom business has its own model, and the model is fear, because fear converts. A frightened reader buys the kit, watches the video, forwards the link, and feels, for an afternoon, that he has acted. He has not. He has bought a feeling. Doom without a plan is just entertainment for pessimists, and the pessimists are always find themselves… entertained.
A plan asks more of you, which is why fewer people have one. It hands you tasks instead of feelings. Pay off the variable-rate debt. Build the ninety-day reserve. Move a portion of the paper into something that is nobody else’s promise, which we call simple financial self-defense, run by an ordinary household, in an order that fits its situation. That isn’t survivalism or speculation…
The arithmetic of self-defense is forgiving. You do not have to call the timing, because nobody can. You only have to be positioned before the timing calls you. A dollar left in cash since 1971 is worth about twelve cents today in real terms. The same dollar put into gold is worth roughly fourteen. One household watched. The other owned.
That is the difference the charts are measuring. One household carried a feeling for fifty-five years. The other carried a position.
Doom is a mood. We are here to help you position with a sound, forgiving plan. Only one of them survives contact with a reset.
