Light Verse for a Heavy Universe

Hard times are coming! Runaway inflation. Bank panics. Bankruptcies. Currency collapse. Plunging stocks, worthless bonds, monstrous debts, $40 hamburgers. Now’s your chance to make the moves that will make you a millionaire.

Make that a trillionaire. Millionaires may be shining shoes.

But not you. You’ll be rich because you saw it coming. Through the years, you’ve been reading Howard Ruff (How to Prosper in the Coming Bad Times), Gary North (The Last Train Out), Doug Casey (Crisis Investing), Martin Weiss (The Great Money Panic), Lord William Rees-Mogg (The Great Reckoning), and all the other paperback prophets of panic and crash. No? Well, at least you weren’t dumb enough to pass up this all-important article.

But don’t shout it from the rooftops. Rooftops collapse.

In fact, don’t tell a soul that the sky is falling. Keep it to yourself. Be one of the fortunate few who pile up unbelievable profits when everything comes apart. Why should you suffer just because civilization collapses around your ears?
 
 

To embark on this low road to riches, the first step is to recognize that the old rules no longer apply. Those who fail to study the past are free to study the future.

It used to be that you could salt away your money in a bank to earn 3-1/4 % interest and get rich through the magic of compounding — until the 1980s brought 14% inflation. Still, you could buy stock in big, rock-solid companies like Pennsylvania Railroad, Gulf Oil, International Harvester, or Singer Sewing Machine. Or high growth companies like WorldCom, Enron, Global Crossing, and the dot-coms of the 1990s.

The end of the world will change all that.
 
 

Your next step is to panic. No matter what you read about interest rates, deficits, GDP, and the Dow, there are only two market forces that count: fear and greed. Fear comes first because if you don’t understand fear, all of your greed will just go to waste.

So frighten yourself. Take out a $10 bill and look at it.

Why is it worth five loaves of bread? Because it has an eagle? Because it pictures Alexander Hamilton? Because it shows the U.S. Treasury?

The eagle nearly went extinct. Hamilton is extinct. And the U.S. Treasury is the place where they don’t redeem $10 bills for silver or gold anymore, as they used to back when a "ten" was worth fifty loaves of bread.

You’re looking at a penny’s worth of paper and ink, and the only reason it’s worth anything more is that the government says it is, and you trust the politicians who speak for the government.

Are you scared yet? Listen, do you want to get rich or don’t you?
 
 

You need access to insiders, but not the kind of insiders who make insider trades. Before this is over, those fools could be burning their stock certificates to keep warm. And never mind the insides of the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s and Business Week. That’s the public trough.

What you want are private advisers who know what’s really going on. People who can give you Ten Shocking Predictions for 2007, Six Powerful Keys to Financial Survival, and Hidden Danger Signs All the Economists Have Overlooked Except Me.

Where can you find such advisers? Never mind; they’ll find you. If you’ve ever bought a share of stock, they’ve been trading your name with each other and they’re in the mail.

Hulbert’s Financial Digest tracks 180 more or less mainstream investment newsletters, but if you search the web for "hard-money investment advisors," Google reports 146,000 results. There must be some misunderstanding; but then, that’s what makes a market.

Hard money pundits tend not to trust Congress, the IRS, banks, brokers, Wall Street analysts, the IMF, the Fed, or the Yankee dollar. They trust gold - and a few other hard assets which they find reassuring in the face of doomsday: rare coins, silver bullion, small town real estate, and producing farms.
 
 

Subscriptions to these various branches of the grapevine cost anywhere from $60 to $1,200 a year, so you could wipe out just trying to pay for the information you need to get rich. But the truth is, many of the editors devote most of their pages to interviewing each other, so you can buy one gospel and get maybe 12 apostles.

Two or three subscriptions will quickly pile up more investing ideas than you have dollars to invest and more fears than you have nights to lay awake. In case the sky falls before the first issues arrive, here are a few sample strategies to become the last investor standing (names withheld because they actually charge for this stuff).
 
 

One caveat. If the $5 billion or so now invested in rare coins gains 28% a year, in 34 years all the money in the world will have been spent on rare coins. That would mean that by 2040 there will be two kinds of people - the kind who have rare coins, and the kind who have money.

What an opportunity.

So the grapevine is a little tangled. Most of the seers are convinced that bad times are a comin’ and that you can make a fortune on misfortune if you follow their advice, but you may have to flip a rare coin to decide which advice to follow.

Are hard times really coming? Sure. Hard times are always coming. So are good times. The question is, when?

Remember two things. First, just around the corner there’s another corner. Second, untold riches are like untold jokes. There aren’t any.