Inevitable Crash

I've been watching some independent sources and what becomes clear is that indeed, "this time it's different":rolleyes:

This time the debt mountain was not created by individual banks lending to households to purchase mortgages. It was created by central banks supplying cheap credit to big corpo allowing them to borrow money to buy back shares, artificially increasing share prices and giving impression that all is great. It also allowed smart money to buy whole companies and flip them later at inflated price. It all works until there is enough supply of cheap money and until the interest rates are low.

There's mountain of debt worldwide but US situation is particularly bad, as the debt levels increased much much faster than the GDP. They can't increase the interest rates because it would mean increased cost of servicing their debt which they can't afford.

Meanwhile, the wages did not increase much in the last decade, I certainly can't see the "recovery" among people I know. All this "recovery" is virtual money that was channelled to the 1%.

I've been watching the share prices in the last 6 months and the picture is bleak, property developers (ie.Cairn, Glenview) plummeted, banks plummeted, seems that DB operated just like Lehman Brothers did - totally reckless stuff

A lot laughed at me at the property market forum that I mentioned bitcoin but I watch it closely as an indicator of sentiment towards extreme risk. The moment it fell off the cliff few weeks back, I started getting worried.

One of the things preceding the Big Depression in US was that ordinary Joe was into shares, people who had no clue would be invested in something they don't understand. This time even teachers at my son's school were buying bitcoin.

In my opinion we are already 6 months into big downturn.

This time my worry is that the crisis will be so big that it might cause civil unrest. I presume that Chinese that hold lots of US debt won't be impressed at losing their money due to devaluation of $, high inflation or high interest rates.
US might try to pull the stunt of inflation to wipe their debt off but not a hope to pull this with Chinese.
Some commentator said that US was credited by poorer countries buying their bonds but no more because everything evened out and these countries don't want to lend any more to US.

Also, I was in US recently and what hit me was that it was so terribly run down and just poor (NYC, NJ state). Roads, infrastructure, shops - old, ugly and in bits ???
I draw a direct comparison with my home town in Poland where it's unrecognisable from 1990. It's back to it's full glory, everything done up etc. You can see where the money went, and Poland has only caught the wind few years back after a period of pure robbery, facilitated by politicians hired by western (UK in particular) investment banks. Same happened in few other countries so this source of money to the West has dried up. There was a failed attempt to pull the same stunt with Ukraine which failed, however I saw parallel situation in countries that joined EU recently.

In anticipation of change, we cashed out of housing market here (bought in 2012-13 sold 2018) and probably will move somewhere where we could buy for cash. It is possible, because my personal goal over last 10 years was to build a skill set that is transferable to any country hence I can move where the work is and don't need to rely on local economy.

My biggest worry is that I have cash in the banks that I don't trust at all (BOI) and unfortunately Santander bought the bank I had my account in in Poland.
I think that the only thing I could do is to spread the risk, maybe keep money in a basket of different currencies as well.

Investing in shares is not for me, maybe in raising market but not now, too much volatility. And I learned my lesson that there's no logic these days and the share market, which should have not risen to this levels did (should level out in early 2010's) only because of QE which was a total robbery and transfer of even more wealth to the 1%.

So yeah, it is too scary to invest anywhere but to keep cash in banks is even more scary.

While watching one of German documentaries I heard that wealthy Germans are withdrawing cash (physical notes) from the bank and locking it in the same bank's individual lockers (the ones used for jewellery etc). It might be just a hearsay but nevertheless, it's one of the methods to avoid bailing in the bank.

I also noticed that quite a lot of people predicting downturn suggest Gold, however they have invested in it as well (Peter Shiff for example) and are brokers for same so this limits their own credibility and making all their doomsday predictions corrupt (they benefit from like minded people who buy gold through them).

I got burnt with gold a while back, the dynamics of gold price drops in 2013 was equivalent to bitcoin in the early 2018 - maybe there is a correlation between those scenarios?