Slow collapse - the collapse everyone is too scared to consider

Many people speculate and dream of a short, sharp economic reset before growth rebounds and society continues as normal, or a total SHTF collapse where we return to gold and silver as currency and all our modern daily troubles are wiped away as we return to either some idyllic agrarian society or we roam a post-apocalyptic land as foragers on the remnants of industrial society.

However, another far more likely alternative is an ongoing slow collapse punctuated by the occasional extreme economic event. Society will become more monitored, more controlled, more manipulated, and governments will drift towards authoritarianism. Disinflation would become deflation. Life will become a slow, painful grind where our best days are behind us.

What will it look like? A quote from someone on another forum:

 

^^^^It may well be remembered as having started in 2007/8 instead of 2015. In Australia the screws are staring to be turned to take away the goodies that are too costly to provide in todays world.

Regards Errol 43

 

Look at the Roman Empire , Ottoman Empire , etc. History will repeat itself. Just a matter of time. Let's enjoy life and keep stacking. LOL

 

So you like 'forum swinging' silverpete?

But yeah I've been saying something similar for a long time. Their totalitarian efforts are not in vain.

The rest of all this including all the so called precious metal gurus are in pockets of the elites. All this is one big theatrical performance to keep the average person completely distracted, misled and "individualized" so as not to become organized enough to have any impact on their agenda.

 

I was impacted by the Cyprus bail-in. There was a bit of a giggle about one of my earlier threads on gearing up for Easter. The Orhodox Easter is next week which is coinciding with some of the Greek debt coming due. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a bank holiday next weekend in Greece.

 

Started in 1972.

 

Yeah. Damn Gough!

 

Symptom, not cause.

 

I thought these, ... "were the good old days"

 

It's already exactly on that trajectory. We are all waiting for a crash, it looks like a slow grind onto deep recession is just as much on the cards.

 

A theory, at best.

 

I agree.

And of course a controlled process is better for the elites than an uncontrolled one. Nobody likes uncertainty.

 

I used to write a lot on this topic before it became fashionable. All things come and go, all flags that people die for lie forgotten and in time all the villains and heroes lie unknown together .



What is wrong in the PM community is the notion that big economies currencies decline or collapse quickly or that such things are assured to happen. As Diocletian well illustrates even a relatively short reformist administration can hundreds of years further to a currencies lifetime.It is a multigenerational process with the big question being do the currency disasters cause the imperial declines or do the imperial declines cause the currency disasters. I can to the conclusion that it was in fact the latter.

Once a currency is sufficiently huge it develops a life of its own and becomes a vital asset in the pocket of trading partners who may provide life support externally. Venetian currency dominated trade for a long time.

Neither is fiat per se the issue. The debasement of currency in the Roman empire something quantifiable due to archaeology did not involve any script currency. The gold pesos and francs we look at attribute to this. Where are those emperors on the reverse of the coins now?

It is a shame that the subject has become a bedrock of portions of the PM community. The expression that fiat currencies all die is entirely true - but then so do all pm based currencies - our PM collections are full of examples of dead currencies made of gold or bimetallic.

One of the things Greenspan wrote about in his last book the map and the territory is the issue of how we discount future returns, the expected lifespan of the individual being the key factor and therefore how humans attribute interest based on time.

A global economic collapse that forces PMs to a universal currency medium (and it would have to be global or else another fiat currency would become of reserve status) if it were to happen would from our current position take many lifetimes and therefore may be discounted. Gold in particular has other properties in particular it is near unique as regards counterparty risk that make it useful and currency will always fluctuate but the advocacy of any assured collapses of existing large currencies within one lifetime are to some extent a marketing lie that should not have been promoted. Those properties and the debate of fiat Vs pm currency are nothing more than the debate of the Aristotelian view Vs Platonic view on currency that has existed unresolved for two thousand years.

That this is in fact rarely if ever mentioned in the PM communities online leads somewhat to the conclusion that it is not mentioned because those writing are not aware of it. This utterly undermines what they write as they merely are broadcasting their lack of knowledge to advocate or suggest anything in the area. The argument is frankly unsettled and likely always will be. Both have merits.



Rapid collapse, visions of apocalypse etc and doomerism is the worst reason to hold PMs. Distrust of government and its invariable expansion to the point of slowly choking the host society is the best.

 

Has anyone looked at the rationale that we will live to 90-100, used by present government think tanks as part of a justification for pushing OAP eligibility to 70? It doesn't seem to make sense.

 

Joe Hockey has at last come clean...There is no bikies left in the tin...

The next recession in Australia is already here only most don't realize it yet.

Where will the Reds and the Blues get the money from to finance the next budget promises..Less tax from petrol sales, iron ore and coal down...

Last election it was Gonske and the NDIS.. Peter Costello said then we can't afford it and so it proved to be.

Looks like Child care for Mum and Dad workers is next on the election agenda. We just cant afford it at this point of time.

Yes no one wants to consider a collapse of our economy until the writing is well and truly on the wall.

Regards Errol 43

 

The news always gets reported AFTER the event has happened.
Even great depression newspapers didn't accurately report what was happening at the time. They were always reporting about overseas woes and what Chaplin was filming. The politicians were the same, just jawboning about temporary belt tightening etc.
Can't rely on the Mainstream to help inform us.

 

Finally, some common sense. Maybe people will start thinking before f*cking like bunnies.

 

It wasn't called the Great Depression until after it was over and people looked back at that period.

 

Coming up on the end of the year. Has anything really changed in 2015 to reverse the slow winddown of economic growth? It seems politicians are struggling to find good economic news, but maybe it's all for affect.

We have yet another Prime Minister due to a party coup, we are looking at higher consumption taxes and growing debt, we have slowing markets, slowing growth, calls for more terror laws, more surveillance, more data retention, more monitoring of citizens, and recently political statements that any debate over liberty is no longer even relevant due to security concerns.

Are people starting to notice yet?

 

This really seems to be happening now.