Friday, September 26, 2008

Economic Upheval

So, follow me on this, because I'm about to go crazy.

Recent financial crisis, Stock Markets down etc. Now I'm normally not worried when the stock market begins to go down because I've always kind of thought that it only meant that a lot of rich people were about to be less rich, which may or may not affect the people who then may or may not affect me. However, there's a lot of doomsday talk going around, and it seems like what they're doing to fix it consists of of them setting the wreckage on fire.

I don't know a lot about the economy. I know just enough to know that the banking industry is the 2nd greatest shell game in the world, with the greatest being a non gold standard currency.

I warned you I was getting crazy.

So here's what I see as my problem. It's my understanding that WaMu bought up a bunch of... Mortgage backed securities, or CDOs, correct the terminology if you know what the straw I'm grasping at is called, and I know enough about what happened to think that doing that is a bad idea that will almost inevitably hurt the bank.

So, and it's a given that my reasoning here is crazy, I'm beginning to worry about my bank. The real threat that can result from this is that I'll go to collect my money from that bank and they'll tell me they don't have it. I was thinking until about 20 minutes ago that I would do this as soon as I saw signs that made me think this was a real possibility, but, and it gets a notch crazier here, the nature of the crisis is that I won't be able to see it coming. So if I'm going to ready for a crisis I'm going to have to react to the crisis before there's a crisis.

Wow, even typing that feels really crazy.

In either case I'm giving serious thought to pulling a lot of money out of the bank.

This will avoid the lesser, but still national scale crisis of a major bank going down. What worries me even more is how the bail out might doom us all.

Money isn't backed by anything, it's paper and assertion, It's a great trick, and most of the time it works, but right now we're a country in trillions of dollars of debt, and we're apparently about to give nearly a trillion to two guys who have been overseeing an economic collapse for their plan to save it. I don't think we really have anywhere to get that money from, so I don't think I'm crazy when I say that we might just print it out. Hot off the presses another seven hundred billion to throw on the fire.

And this is where we get to the real doomsday scenario. This kind of print up write off scheme might weaken the assertion. Money might go to just being paper, and in that case even people like me who have pulled out a lot of their money are going to be screwed. And that's a crisis I'm not preparing for in a normal way. When it comes to that crisis I'm lucky. I already have wilderness survival, urban emergency, first aid, and basic firearm training. We also already have most of the things we would need in case of a mass outbreak of civil unrest including enough melee weapons to keep my entire homestead armed, a high quality lock pick, water purification tablets, sterno, and all of the other basic tools we would need to both facilitate our looting and prevent us from being looted. Still, I'm giving very serious thought to investing in a firearm.

Luckily that is as crazy as it gets. Although I think you have to admit that getting to "My personal economic plan is to buy a pump action shotgun" is some high quality crazy.

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