#jeffberwick

“If I expatriate, how can I make a living in a foreign country?”

It’s one of the top questions we get. After all, not all of us have sizable amounts of savings that we can nestle upon. In fact, most in the western world don’t after they’ve had most of it siphoned off by the state. And even those who think they do, and have a bank account flush full of green pieces of paper or who receive large government pension cheques backed by those same Federal Reserve Notes will soon find out that their “wealth” was illusory.

In this article we will discuss some common misconceptions of the opportunities in the world today - Jeff Berwick.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS

The West is filled with misconceptions. The majority of what almost everyone believes is just not true – it’s what makes living there next to impossible for free-thinkers. But here are a few common misconceptions that relate to the topic we are discussing today:

We are rich, they are poor:- This is, on a generalized basis, simply not true. The perception is that the West is quite rich and the rest of the world is destitute. This was true for a period… about 40 years ago… but humans have a tough time adjusting to paradigm shifts so many continue to believe this.

When the US Government went bankrupt for the second time in 1971 it denoted the change of the world as we knew it. By that point, the Chinese had nearly finished with their disastrous communist experiment. The great criminal Mao finally shed his mortal coil in 1976 and soon ushered in the new age of Deng Xiaoping and “to get rich is glorious”. By that point the USSR was already circling the drain and, unbeknownst to most, the US began its decline as well for all the same reason as the USSR… too much government involvement in the economy (for the record the perfect amount is 0%).

When total government and personal debt is added to the average net worth in the west, almost everyone is indebted… whereas developing and “third world” countries and the people who live there have no debt. Almost everyone in places like Latin America and Asia all have cell phones, most have cars, most have computers, many have homes… the only difference is that all of it is paid for, not on their credit cards or mortgages.

There is more opportunity in the West:- This used to be absolutely true. But things change and if you get stuck in the old paradigm you’ll find yourself wasting time and money and more. The days of moving to the US, getting your kids into a good school and them building a life for themselves is mostly over. Now it is more likely to end up with them getting indoctrinated in socialist culture, pepper sprayed, heavily indebted with student loans to learn things which are all available for free on the internet and then, if our predictions are correct, forced into the military or Homeland Security to pay off their debts. The real opportunities today are mostly in Asia, Latin America and former Soviet Bloc countries as we will talk further about below.

My kids need a good job There is opportunity for my kids:- This is another anachronistic mindset. All the slaves on TV drone on about how they need jobs… but this is a direct result of placing young children in socialist child prison camps for 12 of their most formative years. Anyone remember their “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” class from elementary school? Of course not, it does not exist in public schools. That is because the entire system is designed to produce worker slaves who are conditioned to show up at 9am and not leave until at least 5pm, sit in a cubicle for the entire day and not ask questions.

Once you get outside of that mindset the world is your oyster. You don’t need someone to create a job for you… you just need to see an opportunity to add value to someone or something and seize it. This makes expatriating to a foreign country infinitely easier. - Jeff Berwick

If I stay where I am I’ll get a good company pension and Socialist Security cheques as well in 10 or 15 years. You can forget all about that right now. We’ve shown countless times how the Western nation-states socialist security systems are a bankrupt ponzi scheme.

But even corporate pensions won’t be worth much in a few years time. There are a few reasons why. For one, most corporate pensions are invested in the stock market – yes, that same stock market that has made no nominal gains for the last 10 years… or the bond market which will soon evaporate..

And, even if they do manage to grow their funds, the payments will be made in fiat currencies that simply won’t exist 5-10 years from now. Just consider them gone right now and save yourself a few years of fearful anticipation.

ESCAPE FROM AMERICA

Again, if you are stuck in old paradigms, you will not see the massive changes going on all around you. Lou Dobbs is a perfect example of this. Every night on Fox he’ll decry foreign workers from sneaking into “our” country and stealing “our” jobs. There’s just one problem. Everyone’s leaving. In fact, Lou should move his schtick to Mexico and decry the influx of Americans into Mexico as a recent Pew Research Report states, “In the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, about 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States and about 1.4 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children moved from the United States to Mexico.”

For first time since Depression, more Mexicans leave U.S. than enter.

Many of them are Mexicans who are returning to Mexico. This snippet from a Washington Post article shows why:

It is better to be unemployed in Mexico than to be unemployed in the United States, he said, because most migrant workers leave their families in Mexico. “They miss the warmth of being in a welcoming community,” he said, adding that with tougher border control and more deportations, Mexicans would rather be in a “precarious situation than in a situation of fear.”

Jeff Berwick - That’s not the only reason, either. There are simply more opportunities in Mexico than in many parts of the US now despite all the propaganda about there being a deadly drug war and the Obama administration running guns into the country. It would come as a big surprise to most Americans to hear that the Mexican stock exchange has gone up nearly 1,000% percent in the last ten years.

Now, as with all stock markets today, you have to take the numbers with a large grain of salt as they don’t account for inflation and the Mexican peso money supply likely plays a significant role in the rise… but certainly prices have not risen four fold in Mexico since 2005… but the Mexican stock exchange has.

A net rise in Mexican immigration vis-a-vis the US and a booming stock market? Maybe the government and the media aren’t telling you the whole story!

SEEING IT FOR YOURSELF

This is why “seeing it for yourself” is the only way to go. The governments and media is so full of propaganda and skewed world-views that it is actually dangerous to your mental health to pay attention to them.

Even listening to friends or trusted sources can’t possibly give you the big picture about any one location. Even if you were able to clone yourself and send a different clone off to the same location every week for a year, they would all have different perspectives on the area. That is because our views are formed by our experiences and it is impossible for two different people to have the exact same experiences. All it takes to ruin a location for many people is one pickpocket… and all it takes to make a place the most wonderful paradise on Earth is for you to cross paths with one beautiful girl whom you fall in love with.

For this reason it is imperative to visit any location in which you are considering living and spend a significant amount of time there first. Of course, you can listen to like-minded people are publications you feel you can trust [like The Dollar Vigilante and Whiskey & Gunpowder] but that just gives you the big brush picture. You’ll never know if a place is right for you until you actually go there.

Regards,

Jeff Berwick

The Dollar Vigilante

Retirement is a marketing construct. You’ve been sold a bill of goods for the last few decades of your life.

You’ve been told that nation-states, democracy and socialism are good. You’ve been told our monetary system prevents instability. And — while the government and central banks put your unborn children or grandchildren into debt for life — they’ve been telling you that there will be a socialist safety net to protect you and that the “American dream” includes retiring in your 50s or 60s to a wonderful life of golf and lying on the beach.

As part and parcel with the bill of goods you’ve been sold telling you that you need to go to 16 years of indoctrination training (school and college), work forty years in a cubicle and not ask questions, they needed to come up with something that made it all seem worthwhile. That carrot is the concept of “retirement”. - Jeff Berwick

You see, if you can get through the nearly 20 years of child slave camps and 40 years of slavery where the majority of your income is taken and the rest is eaten up in interest costs for mortgages and loans so you can have a house and car, then you need a reason to do it all.

It even appeared to work for a short while thanks to demographics and the greatest advances in human history.

The baby boom was ultimately caused by the nation-state (which created World War II). Central banking (which created the Great Depression and funded World War II) was truly a boom that created a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make it appear as though some of these inane socialist theories could actually work.

A look at the number of workers per retiree in the US shows this plainly.

And, with the advent of the internet, productivity also increased massively in the 1990s and 2000s, further obscuring the collapse to come. And it is coming. In fact, it’s already started. So, if you are basing your future retirement plans on what has happened in your living memory you better snap out of it.

SOCIALIST SECURITY – THE ULTIMATE PONZI SCHEME

A ponzi scheme is defined as “a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation”. By this definition, the Socialist Security system in the US is a ponzi scheme.

The end of a ponzi schemes always end when net payments outstrip net income. This occurred in 2010 and there is no end in sight even under the US Government’s own heavily massaged and always underguesstimated projections.

There is only one reason it and the US Government hasn’t gone bankrupt yet. It’s because they can still print dollars to cover all these deficits. But how much longer can that realistically last before hyperinflation sets in and the dollar becomes worthless? We can’t see any way it goes more than five more years from here… and that’s pushing it.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY, DON’T

Obviously, you are forced at gunpoint to pay into the Socialist Security system so long as you are a worker (entrepreneurs can avoid payments) or live/work in your home country in the Western world. So, as long as you live and work in the West this is unavoidable.

Other tax-sheltered retirement plans can sometimes be avoided, however. IRA’s (Individual Retirement Accounts in the US) are usually optional. In Canada, plans called Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs) are also optional. If you have the option, do not bother paying into these type of plans.

Your government registered financial advisor (at least the great majority of them) will try to persuade you to do so. But he is running on the premise under which he was trained which states things like “stock markets always go up in the long run” and the belief that the current fiat monetary system is a permanent fixture for eternity. He is wrong.

Jeff Berwick - Under his thinking it makes sense to shelter some of your income now to get a tax break in the present and to delay paying those taxes in the future. But, with the coming bankruptcy of socialist styled fascist democratic nation-states and the collapse of the entire fiat monetary system this plan makes no sense. In fact, what is the most likely thing to happen is that as western governments collapse they will look at funds in accounts like IRAs and RRSPs as lucrative spoils by which they can confiscate or tax to stay alive a little while longer.

As well, most retirement savings plans (not all, see below) restrict you on your choice of investments and so you are limited and not able to invest in things like gold or silver bullion held abroad… so by putting funds into these accounts you are often stuck with investing in asset classes that will collapse in the coming years, such as the entire bond market.

And, even in the off chance that somehow these nation-states and their currencies can stay alive for another decade or two until you “retire” they will be in such a tattered state of affairs that the tax rate will be extraordinarily higher than it is today… so paying less tax now at lower rates in order to pay a higher tax rate in the future also makes no sense.

So, if you have yet to contribute to these kind of funds and have the choice to not participate, don’t do it.

WHAT IF YOU ALREADY HAVE FUNDS IN IRA’S or RRSP’s?

Every country is different and has different plans and tax laws so it is difficult to get into exact details for each. But, let’s take the US as an example.

In the US there are two main types of tax-sheltered retirement plans: 401k’s and IRA’s. Often with a 401k there are severe penalties if you withdraw the money while you are still working for the company in which you were employed when the funds were contributed or before a certain age. Depending on the penalty, each individual needs to make their own decision on whether to withdraw the funds. Keep in mind that many of these funds are invested in assets that can and will go to zero so even a severe penalty may be worth getting the funds out and invested into something safer such as precious metals or other hard assets that will not become worthless in a fiat currency system collapse.

In the case you wish to keep the funds in the plan then sometimes there are options to have ownership and control over what the funds are invested in. In the US this is called a Self-Directed IRA (see TDV’s Self-Directed IRA here). This enables you to invest the funds in almost any asset on Earth so it is much better than the majority of IRA plans where you are severely restricted as to what asset class and what geopolitical region you can invest in. Once you have a self-directed IRA set-up you can get:

(a) your assets outside of your home country to make it difficult to seize them and

(b) can invest in asset classes like gold bullion which will survive your country’s financial and monetary system collapse.

A BETTER WAY

So ignore that mouldy carrot state propaganda has been using on you. Forget the idea that once you hit 65 you can stop going to work and can lie on the beach everyday. (Of course, most people soon find out that lying on the beach everyday is fairly boring… and the lifestyle change is so great that many people have heart attacks in the weeks and months after “retirement” anyway.)

A much better way to live is to realize that all of this apparatus built up around us is mostly false. So avoid public schools (home school or unschool) and socialist colleges (all info is freely available on the internet with no massive student debts or being pepper sprayed) as much as possible. Start up your own business or become an independent contractor – preferably in one of the dozens of countries that has no noticeable taxes, regulations, and licenses that squeeze the incentive out of everyone. And, with all the money you make and the millions you will save from not having to pay egregious amounts of tax in the Western world you can afford to do whatever you want whenever you want.

Here’s the thing. You’ll probably never want to “retire” because you’ll be having such an enjoyable time doing what you are doing.

Regards,

Jeff Berwick

It must be “Bash Gold” week on the CNBS network. Warren Buffet has been leading the charge by talking down the precious metal in a recent newsletter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders and followed up today on CNBS’s “Squawk Box” where he warned that despite the declining value of the dollar, running to gold is a “mistake.”

Not to be outdone, Buffet’s partner in crime Charlie Munger recently declared “gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939 but civilized people don’t buy gold – they invest in productive businesses.” - Jeff Berwick

And now, Bill Gates went on CNBS today to try and explain the great error in investing in the barbarous relic. It’s like they’re trotting out the billionaire boys club to scare people back into Berkshire and Microsoft stock.

As they should. Bill’s Microsoft has been absolutely decimated vis-a-vis gold for 12 years straight and running.

Both Buffet and Gates concede that paper money will continue to be debased as long as central banks hold the legal monopoly to print it. What they won’t mention is that such blatant fraud is conducted to finance government deficits and prop up a virtually zombified banking sector.

Gates in particular tries to tie his bumbling rant together by declaring gold has a kind of psychological value to it. That those who buy it are motivated by it because “people in the future will think it’s worth more than it’s worth today.” Gates goes on to point out that as more people flood to the gold market, the more the gold mining sector will develop which will subsequently increase the supply and put downward pressure on prices.

Congratulations Bill, you have stumbled onto some of the most basic lessons of economics.

First, since the value of all goods and services are determined solely by the purely subjective perceptions of utility amongst market participants, gold is no different from any other investment. Many perceive it is a viable currency alternative to the current state of affairs.

Those who put their money in equities do so because they believe it will yield them a return. “Psychological” factors play just as much of a part in this thinking than they do in those who purchase precious metals.

Second, if an investor’s marginal profit is exceedingly high, this is a signal to other market participants that there is money to be made in whatever sector in paying out at such a rate. People move to where they can make a profit. They don’t sit idly by making negligible returns. Supplies increase, prices adjust, and so does the market.

None of that diminishes the purpose of gold which not only acts as an investment but a hedge against the profligacy of governments. The pressure on central banks to flood the world with liquidity is enormous. The practice of fractional reserve banking has left much of the world’s major financial institutions insolvent. Central bankers know of no other solution from their Keynesian instruction guide than “print, print, and print some more.”

If Gates really wants to speak to psychological factors, why not say a word on why inflationary monetary policies are employed to begin with? Indeed, if money printing actually created just one iota of wealth, then Emperor Diocletian (whom Paul Krugman looks to for policy advice) would have led Rome into a period of material abundance rather than wreak havoc on a once thriving market economy.

Jeff Berwick - But of course inflation is purposefully resorted to in order to both aid the first receivers of money and create the perception of prosperity. With some prices boosted relative to others, there is the appearance of ‘feeling richer.” The overall supply of goods hasn’t increased; only the amount of pieces of paper with dead Presidents in circulation. The short term boost in confidence comes at the cost of long term stability as capital is consumed with little savings being accumulated for replenishment. The inevitable bust, as Ludwig von Mises showed, cannot be avoided.

THE END OF THE MONETARY SYSTEM AS WE KNOW IT (TEOTMSAWKI)

As governments continue to binge on endless servings of liquidity financing, there is little threat to gold’s price in the long term. Short term fluctuations are an inherent feature of a market system based on the ever-changing value judgments of billions. There is no conceivable end in sight to inflating currency supplies. If central banks were to stop inflating the house of cards that is the global banking system would collapse.

The question is where you put your trust? In the promises of highway robbers who climb their way into public office through lies and vicious personal attacks? Or in a commodity that has thousands of years of historical usage to prove its functionality as a means of exchange?

Bill Gates puts his faith in the goodness of scoundrels.

IMITATOR, FOLLOWER AND SEARCHING FOR A PURPOSE

The fact of the matter about Bill Gates is that he has never innovated. The only thing he has ever done that paid off incredibly well is this: he finagled his way decades ago into the position of being the sole accepted computer operating system at the very start of the personal computing revolution. Since then he has lived off of having that incredibly powerful position.

He was incredibly slow to realize the power of the internet, he was always second to the party with inferior products like Internet Exploder, Zune and countless other copycat, failed products. He installed a completely insane man to manage Microsoft after he left. And now that he has some extra time on his hands he has decided that

a) the planet needs to be depopulated and

b) he will use a significant amount of his time and power to help depopulate it.

He is pathetically searching for a purpose. And, since he has no idea how economics works, nor money, as he shows in his interview on gold above, he has decided to make depopulation his purpose as he shows in this awkward, ridiculous speech given at TED where he uses all kinds of incorrect premises such as manmade global warming being real to come up with this unbelievably absurd “mathematical” formula:

CO2 = People x Services x Energy Per Service x CO2 Per Energy Unit.

Then he adds that in order to get CO2 to zero, “probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty close to zero.” And given that he is spending much of his free time with famous misanthropes such as Ted “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal,” Turner, it is pretty clear which one will be the top priority. It’s the most absurd premise based on the most absurd assumptions I think I have ever heard in my entire life. And his understanding of gold is just as flawed.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger may have once had some sort of relevance. But, today they are globalist shills pathetically trying to keep an immoral and violence/theft based system alive by which their importance and life’s work are tied. The world is leaving them behind… and they will work to enslave it (the Buffet Rule) or genocidally kill it if they have to in order to maintain their sense of self-importance.

Buy gold, sell MSFT and Berkshire Hathaway and fiat dollars, sit tight and be right. The fact they are all running to CNBS in the last few days must mean they are getting desperate.

Regards,

Jeff Berwick