Black Swan

[Silverfondler]

Time to get the elephant out of the room. I hear and read about this now almost daily. That of course is the, Black Swan. What is it? Every talking head on TV has their own little scenario of what it could be. Every publication has their own twist of the Black Swan event that will bring down the house of cards. I guess what I am interested in is. What are your thoughts? Will we even have a Black Swan event? Or will the carpet be taken out right from under us without a so called, Black Swan event even taking place? Perhaps it will be a combination (if that's even possible).

This is purely speculation of course - What are your thoughts on the mass Exodus of the markets OR Bubbles bursting globally? When? Where? How? Why?

Looking forward in reading your dark picture of such a globally terrible event. That could realistically happen at almost anytime now...

Cheers!

[theo]

I've always thought that a terrorist event will be used as cover for an economic collapse. It could also serve as an excuse to tighten government control. I'm thinking a chemical attack in a major port-city (Not NYC) perhaps on the west coast. It would cause mass casualties and disrupt commerce. The chemical would be a semi-persistent agent, sparking fears (mostly unfounded) of the chemical spreading east. Gas masks will be in high demand and a few dozen people will suffocate to death after completely sealing their homes or apartments. At first an anti-government group will be suspected, but the terrorists will ultimately be found to be an Iranian sleeper cell, with inconclusive evidence of Russian involvement.

[Thogey]

One crappy US Bond auction should set TSHTF in motion. Higher rates, US quickly becomes insolvent. EBT cards are no longer accepted. SS payments stop. Fed prints more to fix it and avoid default. China sees weakness at this point and invades Taiwan.

We do nothing. Within a few months hyperinflation kills every business that depends on stable commodity prices.

We then have no choice but to start over.

[Copper Catcher]

Here are just two....Black Swan situations....

One of the biggest risks to the world's financial health is the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market. A quadrillion is 1,000 times a trillion! To put that in perspective, the world's annual gross domestic product is between $50 trillion and $60 trillion. The derivatives market is complex and unregulated and rarely talked about. No one will dare blow the whistle on this scam because too much money is being made. The game will end when a mistake is made that crashes the system because it can't be "fixed".

The FAKE "economic recovery” i.e. “bull market” is driven totally by High Frequency Trading Programs which account for 70% of market volume! Again this way of scamming the system want be stopped unless it implodes.

[Silverfondler]

Here are just two....Black Swan situations....

One of the biggest risks to the world's financial health is the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market. A quadrillion is 1,000 times a trillion! To put that in perspective, the world's annual gross domestic product is between $50 trillion and $60 trillion. The derivatives market is complex and unregulated and rarely talked about. No one will dare blow the whistle on this scam because too much money is being made. The game will end when a mistake is made that crashes the system because it can't be "fixed".

The FAKE "economic recovery” i.e. “bull market” is driven totally by High Frequency Trading Programs which account for 70% of market volume! Again this way of scamming the system want be stopped unless it implodes.

I like these thoughts. How would the derivate markets make a mistake "big" enough to cause it to crash? And, I suppose the economic recovery/bull market we are seeing now will implode when the bubble (fake recovery) goes to high? Which I imagine they can make go higher than we can imagine before such an event would take place?

[Silverfondler]

I've always thought that a terrorist event will be used as cover for an economic collapse. It could also serve as an excuse to tighten government control. I'm thinking a chemical attack in a major port-city (Not NYC) perhaps on the west coast. It would cause mass casualties and disrupt commerce. The chemical would be a semi-persistent agent, sparking fears (mostly unfounded) of the chemical spreading east. Gas masks will be in high demand and a few dozen people will suffocate to death after completely sealing their homes or apartments. At first an anti-government group will be suspected, but the terrorists will ultimately be found to be an Iranian sleeper cell, with inconclusive evidence of Russian involvement.

Do you think this is already taken place currently? Sure seems like it - a Post 9/11 life in America is quite different these days...

[Hawkeye]

I was just thinking the other day about the "black swan" and I thought about trying to start a list of potential "black swans" and what, if anything, could be done about them. After thinking about it for 5 minutes, I came to the conclusion that we are living in a house of cards. Any disturbance at any point can send the whole thing tumbling down. I just read an article the other day about the vulnerability of our entire power grid. And then there is the viral epidemic killing pigs. Taking out a major commodity like that could have some serious and brutal repercussions. There are a million things that could trigger panic and/or disaster. To me, all we can do is try to prepare for whatever it will be as well as we can.

[Silverfondler]

While I certainly agree with what you all have mentioned above. I try to take a step back and realize/wonder is this just how society is? It seems like the general population for the most part has been living in some sort of fear or masked panic that the world is doomed if THIS or THAT happens - since the great depression...Maybe even before that. Look back at history, just in the U.S.A. And, you will find panic and fear throughout history. Famine, disease, nuke this, nuke that, radiation poison, Cuban missile crisis, Anthrax, West Nile virus, Some bird virus (the name slips my mind at the current moment), China shooting rockets, China calling in their loans, Enron, Obamacare, Ukraine, Wall street employees dying suddenly, Missing large air craft, Large natural disasters (Tsunami, Tornado, Hurricane, Earthquake, Volcanos), Nuclear power-plants melting down x2, etc. Just to name a few. Even with all the above items that have happened mostly in recently history. We trudge on. Having said, we have even endured a terroristic attack on our soil over 10 years ago (9/11) and an act of war over 70 years ago (Pearl Harbor).

My point is - here we are. Still going. Still going about our day - just like any other. Sun still comes up in the East somewhere and goes down in the West'ish - everyday. Yes, PM prices go up and down just like are market fluctuates daily - just like it has been doing for the last however many years, even with all the above variables happening around it. Maybe the can has been kicked to the end of the road? Maybe it hasn't? All I know is it (market/world/economy) has & can endure a lot. Maybe, more than we can think...

All the while, the talking heads and even us are discussing potential Black Swan events. You would almost think anyone of those above mentioned events could be a, Black Swan event. And, yet here we are.

Cheerio!

[68Camaro]

Hmmm, well for the hundreds of millions of people that died violent deaths in the 20th century perhaps some of them were black swan events. They just weren't TEOTEAWKI events. Maybe that's what you mean instead.

----

To add to this using the convenience of a big keyboard, it's sometimes difficult to sort out emotion and feeling from fact; we've had several other recent threads/posts discussing that. And to your point, we are capable of surviving bad stuff.

The bulk of the population appears to me to be numb to anything. But the prepping/survivalist movement - is it a fad? Only time will tell. Is it growing or has it always been there at the same proportions and it just now more visible? There have always been some people that focused on staying prepared, and historically a larger number of people used to live closer to the land and so were inherently more prepped. But it's an undisputable fact and crystal clear that the bulk of our population is 3 days away from the beginning of starvation. We are also completely unbalanced with regard to our dependence on electronics, should an event occur that destroys the bulk of them. And our financial system continues to overextend - there has never not been a correction of these bubbles, but this time it is massive and it is global. Have we every before had a government that was so out of touch with the people? - there has always been corruption and deceit, but in this time it is out the open with no apology. The issues list is long so I'll stop there.

The sum of the times of my generation, and my parents and grandparents - covered the 20th century. While there was calamity and concern, and there was fear in the 50s and 60s over global thermonuclear war, there has never before been the same level of certainty that we were on an irrecoverable path that MUST lead to calamity. I tend to think that's the difference; previously there was at least some hope we would avoid an issue, or that the calamity would be limited in time or space. Now there is a greater sense of near certainty, and that it will have no boundary in space, and uncertainty as to time.

That doesn't mean there there isn't an other side to this, or that the world will truly end. Just that there will be difficult times at an unprecedented global scale.

I would rather be wrong about this, as we've said before, and have been inefficient about my investments. But I would rather store my wealth in places I trust, and I would rather be far more self-sufficient than is common modern practice.

[IdahoCopper]

It is too easy. We, here on Real Cent can provoke the ultimate Thule Black Swan.

All we need is 10 members to sell their entire hoards at the current spot price, $19.65. Within a week or two, silver will moonshot to $150.00, and Black Swans will be flocking to roost everywhere.

TEOTWAWKI.

[Copper Catcher]

Here are just two....Black Swan situations....

One of the biggest risks to the world's financial health is the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market. A quadrillion is 1,000 times a trillion! To put that in perspective, the world's annual gross domestic product is between $50 trillion and $60 trillion. The derivatives market is complex and unregulated and rarely talked about. No one will dare blow the whistle on this scam because too much money is being made. The game will end when a mistake is made that crashes the system because it can't be "fixed".

The FAKE "economic recovery” i.e. “bull market” is driven totally by High Frequency Trading Programs which account for 70% of market volume! Again this way of scamming the system want be stopped unless it implodes.

I like these thoughts. How would the derivate markets make a mistake "big" enough to cause it to crash? And, I suppose the economic recovery/bull market we are seeing now will implode when the bubble (fake recovery) goes to high? Which I imagine they can make go higher than we can imagine before such an event would take place?

i.e. The "mistake" would be on a much larger scale then what has previously occurred i.e. to get the back story Google the name Bruno Iksil who was the London-based JPMorgan Chase & Co trader known as the "Whale" that was the one involved in the company's $2 billion loss in derivatives by JPMorgan. Interestingly, I think he is still employed by them! Oh well, a billion here and billion there and pretty soon your talking real money!

[johnbrickner]

The Decline of the Empire

How much time do we have? Ancient and older empires often took hundreds of years. Contemporary empires have taken much less. I pose the idea we have experienced several black swan events (none of which has caused an EOTWAWKI with associated civil unrest expected) and that it will be the cumulative effects of continued Black Swan type events that finally cause the collapse of the empire, not the single event itself. The last event will be the trigger, not the cause of the final collapse.

It is possible America is resilient enough to fend off a total collapse for several decades. I also anticipate we will have times of relative stability and (if you believe the numbers,) times of improved standard of living such as we are having now. Ok, maybe that is a bad example of improving times but it is a good example of what our government is willing to do to stave off civil unrest. People prominent in this area of study claim our course will look more like a river with series of waterfalls and rapids possibly followed by calm or even a rising tide.

I mark the start of the decline with the first events as 08/15/71 the year Nixon announced the U.S. would no longer officially trade dollars for gold, combined with the prediction by Hubbert as 1971 being the year of America’s peak oil production. This was followed by the 2nd duo events to include the recession starting in 1973 coupled with October, 1973 Yom Kipper War and resultant OPEC oil embargo. Given these were both duo event years they had the effect of a one-two punch in boxing.

How steep the falls and how long the calm depends a lot on how we react to the events and how much we do improve the state and course of humanity prior to the Black Swan’s appearing and final EOTWAWKI event. Do know that our world is so intertwined economically that when America falls, much of the rest of the world will follow. What doesn’t follow will be areas of current poor economic status. Similar to how Buffalo, NY incurred little effect to the recent real estate crisis as my nephew claims “It was already the arm pit of the united states.”

Charting the rest of the events would be easy but time consuming. One only need follow contemporary newsworthy issues from the mid-70’s to now to see the continued overall decline with associated occasional blips in the upward direction for the economy. What will happen in the future is anyone’s guess but several items seem to be coming to a head, a number of potentially perfect storms from several different directions all aiming for the not so distant future.

Speaking of perfect storms, I anticipate we will see more wildly oscillating climate change (we need not agree as to the cause as either global warming or having just entered a mini-ice age but, I’m sure we can agree the climate change is now a fact). Another super storm hitting a major city will happen. Let’s make it Huston next time and have it follow the path of the one that hit in 1900 (that went up and thru Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Canada, out the Atlantic and ended about 500 miles from Iceland,) devastating the city and causing untold damage to the breadbasket of crops in America along the way. This will cause a problem for food and energy.

Another area of concern is the little bugs that saved us from the War of the Worlds are acting up. We are overdue for a mutated flu virus that takes out a significant percentage of the population and some bacteria are becoming quite resistant to antibiotics. From this we can imagine a virus similar to the Purple Plague (or Spanish Flu) that hit the world in 1918 taking out primarily healthy individuals from the ages of 20 to 40. More people died from the influenza virus than died in the war. A similar mutated virus where the herd of humans has no resistance could easily infect 25% of the population and take out 2 to 3%. This translates to about 2 billion infected and killing about 213 million (about 2/3rds of U.S. population) over the course of say, two years. Incapacitating and killing this many that are from the core of workers across the world would cause a significant decline in the GDP of the world and result in an economic slowdown. Not to mention dissuade people from publicly congregating in groups during that time, and the shortage of doctors and medical staff that would result from the deaths of the care givers.

Another scenario not too farfetched is a drug resistant form of bacteria, easily spread and hard to die such as staph or MRSA. I can give 3 personally known examples of this where the avenue of transmission was: 1) Contact with the gym floor; 2) kicked by a soccer cleat; and 3) unknown. Each case had no break in the skin but an abrasion in the first two and possibly thin skin caused by athletes’ foot fungus skin flaking with the third. Let the staph bacteria continue its resistance to more drugs and become more easily transmitted and after a while you have people dying from infection almost like it was prior to the discovery of penicillin.

I could go on with specific scenarios involving overpopulation, rising cost of energy, resources war, the debt, derivatives, food supply lines, alternative world reserve currency, etc. but the one I think would do it easiest and quickest is a high EMP device detonated some 300 to 500 Km over Kansas. This would have the effect equal to the shutting down of the electrical grid and rendering our unprotected digital devices unusable. And if I am not mistaken, this is exactly what is supposed to happen.

[blackrabbit]

Another scenario not too farfetched is a drug resistant form of bacteria, easily spread and hard to die such as staph or MRSA. I can give 3 personally known examples of this where the avenue of transmission was: 1) Contact with the gym floor; 2) kicked by a soccer cleat; and 3) unknown. Each case had no break in the skin but an abrasion in the first two and possibly thin skin caused by athletes’ foot fungus skin flaking with the third. Let the staph bacteria continue its resistance to more drugs and become more easily transmitted and after a while you have people dying from infection almost like it was prior to the discovery of penicillin.
.

This is already epidemic, supposedly over 200 people a day die in the US from drug resistant bacteria acquired at hospitals.

[Silverfondler]

Great comments - I need some time to digest the above comments. I will come back full circle after i process them! Thanks again for your time.

[knibloe]

Saw this post from the past and though about how it relates to the pandemic.

[68Camaro]

I see JohnB hasn't posted in almost 2 years and hasn't been on in almost a year - anyone know what happened to him?

[knibloe]

I see JohnB hasn't posted in almost 2 years and hasn't been on in almost a year - anyone know what happened to him?

I have been readig back posts and wonder what happened to a lot of the people who used to post.

[Recyclersteve]

It makes me wonder how many RC members got or succumbed to COVID...

[shinnosuke]

I see JohnB hasn't posted in almost 2 years and hasn't been on in almost a year - anyone know what happened to him?

Some people might say the same thing about you at BullionStacker where John is alive and well.

[68Camaro]

Well that's good to hear that he's busy over there - may be I had heard that but forgot - thanks for noting that!

True enough that I haven't been to BS in awhile - but then I never spent a lot of time there - hardly ever posted and just didn't feel quite comfortable fitting in. (Whereas John had achieved some status here.)

[Cu Penny Hoarder]

It makes me wonder how many RC members got or succumbed to COVID...

0.01%

Whatever it is, I had it in Late January. 2 weeks and I was better. By the 3rd week totally recovered. I am 54.

Covid is very hyped fear mongering... a bad cold. Nothing more.

[Treetop]

It makes me wonder how many RC members got or succumbed to COVID...

0.01%

Whatever it is, I had it in Late January. 2 weeks and I was better. By the 3rd week totally recovered. I am 54.

Covid is very hyped fear mongering... a bad cold. Nothing more.

My wife and I and most of my wifes school (shes a teacher) had it in january. What sticks out to me is it was hitting us hard before anyone realized. It does hit people with certain issues pretty hard, but for most its less than getting a flu.

[68Camaro]

You all that say that you had covid can't prove it without a test. I'm hearing people that swear they had it last fall too. Maybe they did, but I'm a skeptic unless we can find a group of pre February people over time that show the appropriate antibodies in their blood. There are plenty of other nasty viruses going around with very similar symptoms to covid and in any given time period the odds are that most of those that are ill with flu-like symptoms have something else other than covid.

[Treetop]

You all that say that you had covid can't prove it without a test. I'm hearing people that swear they had it last fall too. Maybe they did, but I'm a skeptic unless we can find a group of pre February people over time that show the appropriate antibodies in their blood. There are plenty of other nasty viruses going around with very similar symptoms to covid and in any given time period the odds are that most of those that are ill with flu-like symptoms have something else other than covid.

Our gov is a dictator, Weve all had tests and had covid here in NM. Believe whatever you will.

[68Camaro]

You didn't have a test in January. Tests didn't exist in the US yet.