Posted on 03/07/2013 6:34:19 AM PST by SeekAndFind
...I can still buy beer with it... by AppyPappy
We all use 'fiat money', even Agere. Sure, we get lots of talk about some kind of goofy gold standard just like we keep hearing about needing tin foil hats for the black helicopters, but back on Planet Earth the subject goes way down on our list of priorities...
Here on planet Earth every unit of fiat currency conceived by the mind of man has eventually returned to its true purchasing power.
Which is zero.
There have been literally thousands of different brands of fiat currency throughout history. The vast majority have completely ceased to exist outside of museums. Among the present batch of fiat currencies not one has retained its purchasing power over the long term.
For instance: our un-backed USD and GBP are both currently depreciating by at least 7% a year. Ouch.
I use fiat currency while people still accept it. But I don’t try to save in it. Neither should any FReeper.
Rather: we should turn our fiat into precious metals and other non-printable assets. If we rely on fiat-savings or fixed fiat income then we are going to become extremely poor.
Sincerely hope this was helpful.
In fact the Fiat 124 4-door tooling was sold to Russia and with some slight suspension modifications (rough Russian roads) became the Soviet Lada.
The Fiat dollar on the other hand has been unreliable.
We can agree that the USD and a few other 'fiat currencies' do have value, and that even if they only kept 93% of their value every year then their value would never reach zero.
All 'ifs' aside, what we got is that in Aug. 2011 $10K could only buy 5.7 oz. of gold, and now it buys 6.1 oz. In fact, gold's lost over 7% of its value over the past 4 months alone and that's an inflation rate of 24%. Most of us like using dollars more than unbacked fiat gold.
This was the last straw. We will not escape without a financial collapse.
My question is how to prepare for this situation: financially and practically. What are sources of advice?
Agree that creating a couple trillion dollars from nothing ain’t good.
However, there is this. Fracking creating 50-100 trillion dollars worth of US hydrocarbon reserves and promised oil independence in less than a decade. All that from nothing. That ain’t bad.
By my reckoning these two balance each other out.
This new balancing is the internal reason why gold is declining and the middle east is quieting.
You gotta think of oil gold and the dollar like paper scissors rock.
As scary as it seems, a financial collapse by itself isn't near as bad as it's cranked up to be. Like, we had one here in Panama a while back and all the banks closed for over a year. What happened is that everone kept on with thier lives and employees got paid in IOUs that they traded for other people's IOUs and the auto mechanic bought groceries with chits he got from fixing some checkout cashier's car.
The bad part is that the last world wide collapse we had in the first half of the last century went on for decades as the left continued to blame the rich no matter how bad things got. It didn't end until Europe was in ashes and east Asia was radioactive, only then did people set aside their stupid rhetoric.
There's a guy in Argentina, who writes a blog on surviving in economic collapse. I won't have time for a couple of weeks to research it.
There's no comparison to any other country, if the US dollar explodes or implodes.
I had a Fiat 124 four door and it was a screamer
no top end but acceleration out the wazoo.
You didn't get into it, you wore it like an exoskeleton - big guy little car. With it's 850cc engine (there are motorcycles with engines three times the size) it would still do 90, which seemed a lot faster when you were sitting 12 inches off the ground. Twas' a real fun car !
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