“Inflation will send us right into a recession. Is that what the intention is? I don’t know, we will find out. I think next year is gonna be very, very interesting.” Welcome to Mantra Monday’s. Today, I’m going to show you all the different reasons why my mantra is what it is.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Mantra Monday
0:32 Food
1:49 Water
3:32 Energy
6:06 Security
8:22 Barterability
11:29 Wealth Preservation
13:20 Community
15:42 Shelter
SLIDES FROM VIDEO:
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
If you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future and you’d like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible, then you’ve come to the right place. My name is Lynette Zang. Now it’s time to go Beyond Gold and Silver.
I’m Lynette’s Zang, Chief Market Analyst at ITM Trading and a very proud prepper. Welcome to Mantra Monday’s.
So we’re just gonna dive right in and we’re gonna start with of course Food, which is the single most important thing. And I don’t know how you feel about this, but I’m so excited, being facetious, that Bill Gates has backed, a startup that wants to be a crystal ball for farmers. And I’m really kind of wondering, how much more control that would give. The Gates Foundation. The startup reaches 7 million farmers and a hundred countries through its 250 customers, which include seed Giant, Syngenta AG, consumer goods company, Unilever Pls, the governments of India, Nigeria, and agencies such as the World Bank. It gives me a very warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that all of these entities care about being a crystal ball for me. I don’t need a crystal ball. I will use Farmer’s Almanac and Lindsey and all the other resources at hand to grow good, clean food that does not have GMO in there. Sorry. But anyway, there you go. He cares about your food.
And while we’re up there talking about Microsoft and Bill Gates, let’s talk about Amazon, who vows to replenish all the water it uses for data centers, which apparently use quite a bit of water. Data centers use a considerable amount of electricity and water to cool the racks of servers and computers. Quite interesting considering that we are in almost a global drought and we have an energy shortage, but these data centers where they can capture all of our information, well, don’t worry, they’re gonna vow to replenish that. Google, which has vowed to offset 120% of its water usage. But when are they gonna do it? They’re vowing to do it, but I don’t know when, reveal last week that it’s global data centers consume 4.3 billion gallons of water a year. That seems like a lot of water to me. Microsoft has already committed to replenish more water than it consumes. Oh, here we go, by the end of the decade. Yeah, it’s so easy to make all of these promises and vows and then put this time out and in the meantime, use these vital resources. While Amazon and its rivals have disclosed more of their energy footprints, they have been less willing to share how much water they use that’s caused political tensions in areas facing droughts. I wonder how much political tension their energy use is calling for as well.
But let’s just go right into OPEC. But it’s OPEC+. So that is the Middle East plus Russia, and they’re going to consider deeper oil output cuts ahead of Russia sanctions and proposed price cap. And this is to prop up the price of oil, which, hey, we just got the latest inflation data and the cost of gasoline anyway has declined. So hey, look at this. They’re getting control of inflation, not food, not retail, not clothing, but they’re working on it. This is a group of 23 oil producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. So we’ve talked a lot about the petro dollar as well. You have to keep all of that in mind when you’re looking at it because none of this is isolated. It’s all coming together. But clearly they manipulate the price of oil, you know, I mean, used to be 20 bucks a barrel. And that wasn’t all that long ago until we hit 2008. Now it’s been way far away from that for quite some time, but they did agree in early October to reduce production by 2 million barrels a day from November. It came despite the calls from the US for OPEC plus to pump more to lower fuel prices and help the global economy. The Energy Alliance recently hinted it could impose deeper output cuts to spur recovery and crude prices. So they want the price of oil to go up, why not? They make more money when that happens. The signal came despite, a report from the Wall Street Journal suggesting an output increase of 500,000 barrels per day was under discussion for Sunday. Not gonna happen. But can you see between OPEC plus and also traders that these are the entities that are controlling what you’re paying. This is not a true supply and demand market and oil is global. It’s a big issue. As much as they’re trying to pull away from it, are they gonna be able to do it? Do we have those things in place? Alternative energy sources? Not really. We don’t have it in place yet, so we’re gonna be subject to all of these whims.
In the meantime, right? Food, Water, Energy, Security. Australia’s number one, health insurer says all customers data hacked. There’s all different kinds of security. One is your, your personal information that’s security, they are Australia’s largest health insurer says a cyber criminal hacked the personal data of all its 4 million customers. As the government introduced legislation that would increase penalties for companies that fail to protect clients’ private information. I mean, let me tell you, we don’t know how much of our information has been hacked and might be for sale on the dark web or used in other terms. If you don’t need to use your credit, I can tell you one of the things that I’ve done, which is to shut down my the credit reporting agencies. I just have it locked. Should I decide that I need my credit for some reason I simply unlock it for that minute and then lock it back up. But I could be wrong about this, but I’m, I’m thinking that if I do that, then somebody that gets a hold of my information will not be able to take out debt in my name or use it in that manner because they’d have to check with the reporting services. And the reporting services aren’t gonna tell them anything because my information is locked. Just a little thought you might wanna think about. Password management app LastPass says it is investigating a security incident after an unauthorized party compromised its systems on Wednesday and gained access to some customer information. Obviously all of the customer information. Because the reality is, is your data, your information has value to a lot of players. A lot. Once we go into a CBDC system, they’ll have all the information they need on you, let me tell you.
But I wanted to jump to barter ability and I wanted to talk about barterability during the Great Depression because I think we’re gonna be visiting that. During the depression, the agricultural economy got so bad that many farmers were forced to trade their crops and other goods to people in town that they owed. Basically people bartered trading goods and services directly with each other rather than going through the intermediate step of converting the goods and services into a cash value. So when we go into this hyperinflationary phase, then I’m telling you we’re going to get very local for a while, but anything physical that you have, any talent that you possess is barterable. It’s just that gold and silver are universal. So even if like I’m growing peaches and somebody has blueberries, well, maybe I don’t want blueberries and they want my peaches, then they have to go find something that I want to barter with. Whereas if they came to me with a silver dollar, I would barter my peaches for their silver. So it’s just that it’s more universal and should be part of your foundation so that you can survive and maintain a reasonable standard of living. Everybody’s standard of living is gonna change. We just wanna make it as reasonable as possible. So just keep that in mind. Also, I thought this was interesting that Ghana is looking to barter gold for fuel. Now Ghana is the second West Africa’s nation’s reserves. Oh, all right. Ghana is the second highest gold producer in Africa. And you know, gold always has value even when their currency does not. Ghana spends about 4.8 billion annually to buy fuel. They have already started a form of confiscation by making their gold producers large and small, give them or sell them in local currency without any premiums. 20% of their refined gold. Considering the fact that their currency is lost, roughly 50% of its current purchasing power value any of those gold miners, you know, people ask me all the time, well, what about gold miners? Well, this is one case where you can see that it’s not really an advantage. There may come a time, but personally I’m doing it in this form already refined. I hold it, I own it, I can barter with it, just like countries can barter with it, individuals can barter with it as well.
And of course, what do we all wanna do? We want to preserve the wealth that we’ve managed to accumulate and maybe even get into a position to take advantage of what’s happening. And you know, I do like Wall Street veteran El-Erian says, fed comments, royal markets. Well, you know, really, I’ve wondered this a lot because I don’t really believe in coincidences and I think the people that sit on the FOMC committee, they’re smart people, but they’re theory based, they’re not real life based. And I really do wonder if there isn’t some level of intention behind what they say, well, I know there’s a level of intention behind what they say, but if they want to royal markets, if they want more volatility, if they want this next crisis, because let me tell you, if you hold your wealth in these fiat money markets and these fiat money markets implode and we’re getting lots and lots and lots of warnings on this, then who do you complain to? Is this intentional? You can form your own opinion. I think it might be. Trying to engineer a soft landing. Yeah, so that is they want to increase unemployment so that employees don’t have as much bargaining power. And also there’s not as much money to spend, that’ll take inflation down, won’t it? It’ll send us right into a recession. Is that what the intention is? Maybe so, I don’t know. Well, we’ll find out. I think next year is gonna be very, very interesting.
Now, anti-government protests are surging right? In many parts of the world. But this is in Iran, despite multiple crackdowns, this public is still protesting when people get pushed to a certain point, like we’ve seen also in China as well. Things change now in Iran, they’re doing, they just did a beheading, public beheading to try and discourage people from speaking out against the government. And we’ll see how well they do with that. It’ll certainly have some level of impact. But this illustrates the dilemma for authoritarian system that decides to loosen its grip, like a crack opening in a dam. The suppressed pressure builds quickly and the result is a perilous situation. And the longer the unrest goes on, the more it spreads. So the interesting thing when you’re looking at China particularly, and we’ll we’ll talk a little bit more about this, is that those protests did lead to a loosening of the covid restrictions. In Iran, not loosening yet, will they? I don’t know, but you know, peaceful protestors are being killed and that’s gonna discourage people from speaking out against the government. Not everybody though. And that’s what happens. Expatriate dissidents and students stage small scale events in cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, and Sydney in a rare instance of Chinese people uniting in anger at home and abroad, China Covid protests spread to Hong Kong as dozens rally and they changed the policy. Now, will, they change it back? They’re having a big spread of covid of course, because people have been isolated. And so they don’t have that natural immunity built up the way that they would like. But the point of this is that people came together, and at least for a minute, there is some level of change. We’ve got to pay attention because this is what’s gonna happen on a larger and larger scale.
US housing enters deep freeze with sellers and buyers sidelines. Agents struggle to find listings as deals decline. Mortgage rates remain high, although they’ve come back a little bit and signs point to leaner times ahead. Homes for sale were pulled from the market at a record pace in November, in the biggest decline in active listings since at least 2015, an average of 2% of all US homes for sale were delisted. During a 12 week period ending November 20th. Home prices are going to get a lot cheaper. And one thing that history tells us is that, and we’ll have to see how true this is in these different countries, but I’ve done studies on what happens to real estate during hyperinflationary periods and it gets very, very cheap because food becomes the single biggest issue for people. And so if you have limited funds, you’re gonna more likely spend it on food than you are on shelter. We’ve got a rising homeless circumstance, which we can talk about more later, but these are all things that are happening. And oh, by the way, in the most current inflation data, the rents were still increasing.
So that is it for today. Make sure that you watch all of our other interviews on this and go to ITM Trading for my most current work in on the economy. Lots of interesting things happen, and until next we meet. Please be safe out there. Bye-Bye.
SOURCES:
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/02/lastpass-hacked-second-time-2022/
https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/money_12.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-veteran-el-erian-172729245.html
https://twitter.com/steve_hanke
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-covid-lockdown-protests-abroad-rcna59104
