100%, thats why a lot of companies are trying to buy houses / cars / etc. For the last few years the writing has definitley been on the wall.

I do have one recommendation for an asset that requires no maintenance, but a lot of people aren’t going to be happy when I say Bitcoin and Ethereum are worth investing in now more than ever.

Both are fairly simple to own, you don’t need to buy a whole coin, just a fraction, and self-owned wallets are still legal. (Which let’s you stake your crypto for a nice 5% or more return). I’ve made 12% staking Cardano, beating nearly every bank savings account in existence. It’s very easy to do the same with Ethereum.

Crypto in general is certainly full of scams, but the foundational tech and the coins that come from it are certainly worth holding now more than basically any other currency. All currencies are basically tied to the Dollar for dumb and complex reasons, so crypto is literally the only thing that will not lose value as the dollar does.

Not much maintenance to hold it either. Just do research to be secure with your wallet. I hate Coinbase, but they are certainly the best at getting you started. Diversifying into crypto is likely safer than any other physical asset too at the moment as there will always be a buyer. (Not as easy for a car to become liquid)

And a note: for anyone that wants to argue about crypto, please understand I see it as something that is both a currency AND commodity. So know that I belive it has the strengths and weaknesses of both. Most crypto debates categorize crypto as either one or the other to focus on the weaknesses in each. Yet crypto has a return better than any other investment in the last 10 years, likely because there’s value in something that works as both a currency and commodity.

Anyway, it’s probably not the answer you wanted, but Crypto, specifically Bitcoin and Ethereum are a great way to diversify against uncertainty when bluechip markets are now as uncertain as crypto ones.

Next best after that is appliances, but same issue with maintenance.

It’s a bit complicated, but in short, today is a bank holiday both for the US and for Japan. And the Japanese Yen carry trade is likely unwinding in that time.

Last Friday, the stock market fell pretty hard as well as the crypto markets. This means people were selling what they had of each at a very high rate. When that happens, financial institutions have a bunch of mechanisms to absorb that loss and redirect it.

But one of the biggest mechanisms to do that, the Japanese Yen Carry Trade, has been unwinding over the weekend.

This is not only a bad thing, but is also what caused the 2008 crisis to accelerate.

Here’s a quick overview of what that is, and what’s happening to it now:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unwinding-yen-carry-trade-dawn-new-monetary-era-harshad-shah-bgnvf

For thirty years, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) maintained an ultra-loose monetary policy, with interest rates often at or below zero. This created a perverse incentive for the global financial community: borrow massive amounts of Japanese yen for almost no cost, convert it into other currencies like the US dollar or euro, and invest those proceeds in higher-yielding assets abroad—US Treasuries, European bonds, Brazilian debt, Asian equities, and real estate. This trade was the quiet lifeblood of global asset prices. It suppressed borrowing costs for governments and corporations worldwide, inflated valuations, and encouraged risk-taking.

So, the Yen Carry Trade was a way for big institutions to safely buy Yen and convert it to other high yielding assets. When the market is going down, as it was on Friday, instutions would buy Yen at less than 0% interest then divert it to high yield assets that would offset their losses. In short (and simple example), if the stock market fell 10%, they’d buy Yen, then use it to get some high yield assets at above a 10% return.

But! The Yen carry trade ALSO “inflated valuations.” Companies could use this trade to hide the actual value of their assets. Usually through combining a bunch of other instruments, including some illegal mechanisms that are still legal in the US like naked short selling.

So, the Yen carry trade let Wallstreet inflate their valuations to lure in investors. AND offset losses when they were being too risky.

So the question is: how much longer can they pretend to be valued higher? How much longer can they offset losses and still keep going?

Seeing as how the Japanese Yen Carry trade is a key to both, it’s a critical tool needed for companies not to collapse back to their actual value.

And as of this weekend, that tool no longer works. As the BOJ (Bank of Japan) raised their interest rates to a level never before seen. Because:

Japan is now confronting persistent, above-target inflation. This economic sea change has forced the BOJ to cautiously abandon its yield curve control policy, allowing Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields to rise. The 40-year JGB yield’s surge from 1.5% to 3.4% in just two years is not a mere statistical blip; it is one of the fastest and most significant monetary shifts in the modern era.

The implications are profound. For a Japanese pension fund or insurance company, the calculus has fundamentally changed. Why shoulder the currency risk and geopolitical uncertainty of US Treasuries when you can now secure a attractive, risk-free yield at home in your own currency? The logical, and indeed necessary, response is repatriation.

Repatriation = Permanant death of the Yen carry trade.

So in short, the tool every major US institution has been using to inflate their own values and cover their losses will likely no longer be working as of today. And that’s after a very rough Friday for them. The tool they usually use to recover from that kind of loss is now broken.

Since it’s a bank Holiday, we won’t know until tomorrow, but with how high silver and gold prices are getting, that tends to indicate smoke before the fire. The last time Japan raised their rates like this it was followed by the 2008 crisis, and the 1998 crisis before it.

So whatever happens next likely isn’t great, but that will depend on how honest Wall Street has been since Covid. And from what I can see, they have basically created another “Big Short” situation as they never learned the first time.

Imo, outside the above, and in addition to it, ETFs are a time bomb just like mortgages were in 2008. There is very likely a looming ETF crisis similar to the mortgage crisis with just a matter of time before they explode, and something like the Yen Carry Trade unwinding could cause it.

If that happened, a depression event is almost certain. As ETFs have secretly replaced everyone’s 401ks in the last decade. So instead of losing an overpriced mortgage, if there is an ETF bubble, and it pops, people lose their retirements.

Which is something that very much could be starting tomorrow. Depending on how many other tools are left to contain what the Yen carry trade was doing. AND how fraudulent ETFs are. But that’s a very big other conversation.

In short - Wallstreet has one less cheat code to prevent their bullshit from leaking out into the market and rest of the world like it did in 2008. We’ll know tomorrow how needed those cheat codes were.

I don’t think you understand what Economics is my dude. It’s just the study of commerce and goods changing hands between people. Something people have done for the totality of human civilization.

Saying all of economics is corrupt is like saying all of math is corrupt. It’s literally just measuring the velocity and rate of change of goods in the form of graphs and predicting where they intersect. That’s 90% of economics.

Whatever you believe it to be is wildly inaccurate. Just because there’s a single part of economics you don’t like, doesn’t mean the sum total of all that knowledge is bad or corrupt. That’s such an incredibly bad and completely illogical take. It’s like saying math isn’t real because you just learned about imaginary numbers.

I provided advice on what to do if you have money in this failing economy to try and keep it. I have no control over the powers that be, and just pointed out clear red flags that suggest how messed up our economy is. Red flags that real economists care about, but seem to upset you?

Nothing you said was supported by facts, just your opinion. I have no idea how I upset you by providing a clear warning on how fucked everything is, and is about to be worse.

What exactly are you upset at? The exact indicators and red flags I pointed out, or the fact that I’m pointing them out again now that things have gotten worse?

I seriously don’t get your take. If anything, it proves that clearly explaining how bad things are leads to people taking it poorly. Not usually for the wrong reasons you have, but poorly nevertheless.