This video was from 2008…the last time bank failures were the Big Thing in the news. I’d imagine that the process has changed a bit since then, but it is still interesting nonetheless.

I have no idea why anyone would keep money in the bank. It earns virtually no interest, so that’s not really a valid reason. I suppose the only real reason is because youre simply afraid to trust your nest egg to a gun safe or a hole in your backyard.

The notion, expressed in the video, that the FDIC won’t cost the taxpayers anything because the FDIC gets its funds from premiums paid by the bank is…well…a platttude to allay the concerns of people who are paying attention. If enough banks fail, or enough banks with large losses, that backstop that the FDIC is holding will evaporate. And, as they said rather clearly in the video, they then ‘borrow’ from Treasury. Which means…..the taxpayer is on the hook.

When I was younger I recall meeting people who had parents who lived through the Depression, or grandparents who did, and some of them never recovered any faith in banks.

My own banking needs are pretty small….I keep money in a checking account to fund my debit card for various purchases, and thats about it. The rest of my money goes into silver, gold, investing, Roth, and cash-in-hand. If any of those tank, I’ve got enough elsewhere to keep me going. And if it all collapses…silver and gold become worthless, the banks disappear, the cash devalues to zero, and the stock market crashes. Well, thats a situation where money is way down the list of priorities and food, ammo, and fuel become primary measurements of wealth.

But…if you see some guys in suits outside your bank at 4:59pm on a Friday patiently waiting for the last customer to leave….well….maybe you might wanna get back on line and make a withdrawal.

There’s a scene in some movie, I forget which one, where the one character is about to do something nefarious to another and they say:

“Don’t move. If I do this wrong it will hurt a little.”
“And if you do it right?”
“It’ll hurt alot.” <evil grin>

That about sums up government’s latest efforts to curb inflation by inflicting ‘pain’ on the average American. In short, the plan is to purposefully throw us into a recession to slow inflation. Trying to purposefully put the US into a recession at this point is like shooting out streetlights to make the sun go down.

First off, given this administrations clueless efforts at economic manipulation, I could totally see them oversteer and give us a depression rather than a recession. But, more importantly, how far down the path have we gone where a recession becomes the more attractive solution an economic problem?

If you never saw ‘World War Z’, a rather bad zombie movie, there’s a scene where the hero realizes that the zombies only attack healthy people. The zombies ignore the diseased and sick. So the hero injects himself with something fatal but curable. He injects himself, walks through the crowd of zombies unmolested, and when he gets to safety he is injected with the cure to what he injected himself with earlier. This economic strategy of purposeful recession to stem inflation is the economic analog to this.

Also, this doesn’t take into account that we’re already in a recession and, surprise, inflation is still a problem. (And, mind you, in the 70’s inflation was calculated in a different way than it is now. If we used the same method we used in the 70’s inflationary period we would see that our current inflation rate is rather significantly higher than what is being reported now.)

As the saying goes, there is no problem so difficult that government cannot make it worse. George Washington died not from illness, but rather from the treatments given to him at the time. It is ironic that Washington (the person) died from treatments meant to heal him from illness, and now we’re looking at Washington (the .gov) inflicting treatments for an economic illness that will be  more punishing than the illness itself.

So, even if we weren’t in a recession (but we are, despite the hastily redefined term ‘recession’) we can expect one as .gov tries to stem inflation by any means except the most logical one – stop the free money express.

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. At least, thats one of the definitions. By that definition the solution is to either reduce the amount of money being spent or increase the amount of goods. Since we’re still dealing with ‘supply chain issues’ from when .gov mandated businesses close up or run at half-strength, increasing the supply of goods might be tricky. Easier to reduce the amount of available money. How’s that done? Well…youre going to find out. Gov could stop with the handouts (student loans, extended unemployment, etc.) but what are the odds of that. A recession, though….unemployment goes up, people hold onto their money, they stop spending, prices come down, inflation is tamed, and all it cost you was the jobs, homes, and financial security of millions of citizens.

he trick is going to be being one of those citizens who isn’t negatively affected. How do you do that? Shoot, man…you already know he answer to that. Get out of debt. Yes, in periods of high inflation you are at an advantage by paying off debt with devalued money…but you still have to have the money. And if your job suddenly goes tango uniform, the last thing you need is to be sending your remaining dollars to the bank rather than to the grocery.

Get out of debt as fast as you can, buy in large quantities things you anticipate using up over time, try to have more than one revenue source, and spend deliberately and carefully.

Midterm elections are coming, and as unpalatable as this stuff is, it is going to be even worse when the elections are over and they can roll out the stuff that will really get the masses reeling.

Skip the jet ski and new car this year..and next year. Work on your economic resilience instead. There’s gonna be plenty of jet skis and like-new cars at bargain prices being sold by short-sighted sheeple before this is all done.

It’s bad enough that at CostCo, cheapest gas in town, I was still forking out almost $4.70 per gallon (I’d happily put up with mean tweets for $2 gas), but then I decided to ease my agitated soul with some fast food. Nothing fancy, mind you…a double cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke. Nothing fancy. That’ll e $10.69 please. Are you kidding me? You could cover that meal combo with hookers and cocaine and it wouldn’t be worth ten bucks.

I feel sorry for the people on fixed incomes. It’s going to be some severe belt tightening and, for some, a major life change as mortgages that were previously affordable become less so as prices of everything else go up and start eating into the budget.

Fortunately, I’ve been somewhat ready for this for a while. I keep expenses low, multiple revenue streams, and no debt. Paying ten bucks for a cheeseburger still annoys me greatly, but at least I can still afford to do it. In fact, I still have enough margin that I can pick up some gold and silver, which I did this week. I told my metals guy that if he gets in any gold that he wants to sell at spot, let me know. Why would  he do that? Sometimes stuff comes in that is unattractive to a potential buyer…a $5 gold coin that someone drilled a hole in, an oddball weight of gold, a bent-in-half 1/10th, whatever. He buys it below spot and I’ll pay him spot for it. Why not? A tenth ounce of gold is still a tenth ounce of gold even if it is bent, tarnished, or whatever…as long as it’s really gold and weighs what it’s supposed to, I don’t care.

And in other news, while manhandling a box of bullets that weighted 70 pounds, I managed to crack a rib. Ow. Actually heard it go when it happened. So…moving a little slow this week.

And finally, Dopey Joe is stirring up the winds of ban in regards to gun control, which has now rebranded itself as ‘gun safety’. I bought another case of Pmags two weeks ago an was on the fence about whether it was a good idea. Now I feel better about it. Maybe a ban is coming, maybe not. But even if not, I’m still going to be ahead in terms of inflation.

It’s getting to be an even weirder world out there, kids. Let’s be careful out there.

Y’know, just because I’m a survivalist with a closet full of guns, a basement full of food, and a winners attitude doesn’t mean that I actually want the Bad Things to happen.

I’m really curious to see how all this…mess…shakes out. I can’t see a way where any of these nagging things like inflation, ‘supply chain issues’, threats of war, pandemic, etc, come to a close any time soon. A year? Maybe. Two years? Maybe. Three months? Not gonna happen. But…I’ve been wrong before.

I have the worst record at the predicting the future, but I just cannot fathom a scenario where prices do not continue to rise, driven by higher fuel prices, absurd spending, and organic/manufactured logisitics issues. Heck, I just bought a set of tires the other day that I really didn’t want to buy because I knew, with the same level of certainty I know the sun will rise tomorrow, that they would just cost more later assuming they were even available. Sometimes it feels like LARPing the Weimar Germany days.

One thing I’m not doing these days is buying guns and ammo (although I may have just bought another case of Pmags). I settled the gun and ammo thing quite a while back. Which means right now my focus is on pretty much everything else because I think it’s a fait accompli that everything is only going to get more expensive and decrease in availability.

Like what? Geez, man,…everything. What am I buying more of? Every consumable I can think of…soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, socks, shoes, q-tips, sponges, dish soap, batteries, etc, etc. Im actually reviewing the Preponomicon to see if maybe I should bump up my ‘ideal amount’ on a few things. And I was hoping that I was past the expensive part of tings, but nope. And, couple that with Bidenflation, and it’s an even harder kick to the fiscal jimmies.

But…I am at a level of resilience that makes me feel more confident….not about the future, but rather my ability to get through better than most.

The weekends are my usual shopping days…WinCo, CostCo, gas, and maybe WalMart. This means that weekends are the time when I look at the price of things and go “Hey, wasn’t this cheaper last weekend?” For example, gas was up another dime to around $4.18/gal. Ground beef 85/15? $5.25/#. CocaCola? $0.388 per can in a 35-can case….that’s almost 30% higher than what i used to pay about a year or so ago.

I feel bad for people on fixed incomes. For them, their only choice is to find ways to get more income or start cutting things out of their budget.

And, as if inflation wasn’t bad enough, we still have the Wuhan Flu hangover, ‘mostly peaceful’ demonstrations, a heightened possibility of WW3.1, and whatever nonsensical activities the goobers in Washington have planned.

I’m starting to think there will never be a point in my life where I look at a lifetime of being a survivalist and say “Wow, that was a waste.”

So what’s on tap these days for yours truly? Well, not much really. Other than working on financial resources, I’m mostly comfortable with what I’ve got. And, honestly, I’ve virtually no room for more stuff. I guess now is the time to start polishing what I’ve got and refine the small details.

.Gov is upping the interest rates a bit in hopes of slowing down the economy and thereby putting the brakes on inflation. But that has it’s own separate problems. It’s like chemotherapy – it targets the bad stuff but there’s a buncha collateral damage. So you better shrink that tumor fast because if you keep up the treatment for too long you’ll kill off the healthy stuff. And that’s about the extent of my oncological background. But, you get my idea, yes?

So what are you doing to get ahead of this inflationary episode? Cutting back? Buying bulk in advance? Locking in prices?