Here's Jim Rogers, in an interview from two days ago (7/10/2019), with a much less rosy picture on the world economy, than the day traders enthusiastic about the Dow surpassing 27,000 for the first time ever yesterday. Jim gained fame with founding and managing the the Quantum Fund with George Soros in the 1970's. In a decade where the S&P 500 index went up 47%, the Quantum Fund soared 4200%. He's now living in Singapore, because he sees Asia as a dominant force in the future, and wanted his kids to be hard working and driven, and speak Mandarin. He's officially retired, but is chairman of Rogers Holdings.
"We're in precarious times."
-Jim Rogers in the interview above
While most of this blog is stories from my days in the BMX freesytle world, futurist thinking, and where the U.S. is headed economically and socially, is a huge interest of mine. Since I was a little kid, I've looked into the future, and tried to figure out where things are heading, and how to adapt and prepare for that future. I'm still doing that.
Since 2017, I have believed we're building up to one hell of a big recession, and economic downturn for a number of reasons, SOON. Some of those are financial, like the astronomical amount of private, corporate, and government debt around the world, like Mr. Rogers speaks of above. Other reasons are ultra long term social trends and technological disruption, also major forces in today's world. Because of that, somewhere back in this blog, well over a year ago, I wrote:
"We'll see Dow 17,000 before we see Dow 27,000."
It turns out, I was wrong. Because yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index surpassed 27,000. That's a nice big round number, and a new all time high, and it's gone over 300 points higher since. It's a little rally, and it proved me wrong.
Here's what I got right. I said and wrote, months beforehand, that the stock markets would run out of steam after President Trump signed the much hyped tax cuts, which were a huge handout, to major corporations and the ultra-rich. Hey, whenever the tax laws get changed, it will be in favor of the super rich, ask Robert Kiyosaki about that one. He's written a lot on that subject. Anyhow, as I predicted, Trump signed the tax bill at the very end of December 2017, and the Dow went up to 26,616 on January 2018. That's less than 400 points from the mark it surpassed yesterday, 1 1/2 years later. So while the business news is applauding this thriving economy, the stock market is really only up 700 points, less than 3%, in 17 months, and most of that has been in the last 3 or 4 days. That's actually fucking pathetic. Gold, for example, is up nearly 9% in the last six months alone.
In that year and a half since the Dow hit 26,616, it dropped to 22,445 right before Christmas 2018. The Dow was down 12% 7 months ago, and the Nasdaq was down even further. So while they are creeping to new highs lately, those highs are just barely above the tops the market hit three or four other times in the last year and a half. As I've mentioned over and over and over, our economy is being propped up by every trick The White House, the financial elite, The Federal Reserve and Wall Street can think of, and is basically riding on unicorn farts at this point.
For nearly 30 years now, I've been watching the stock market indexes as a sort of pulse of the U.S. and world economies. But after 2008, we went down the rabbit hole, and things are being manipulated at absurd levels. In addition to that, roughly 35% of our country, after watching and listening to decades of pure propaganda, refuse to believe proven facts are even facts. So we're in an Alice in Wonderland world and economy at this point, where old relationships between one thing and another, like government debt and inflation, don't react like they would in a well run, functional economy.
For this reason, I've decided it's pretty much a waste of time to try and perfectly time the coming economic collapse. It's coming. As Jim Rogers says in the interview above, several things are happening in places people aren't looking that remind him a lot of incidents in 2007, before the collapsing economy was obvious to everyone. So it's coming. Weeks? Months? A year, or a bit more? Who knows? But a collapse like no one alive has seen before, is coming fairly soon.
To me, what's really important is trying to find ways to get "average" Americans making a decent living again. Roughly 60% of this country is struggling paycheck to paycheck, and many of those are in abject poverty or real close to it. Others are making good wages, but suffocating in huge amounts of student loan and other debt.
Personally, I've had an 800 pound gorilla (metaphorically speaking), standing on my neck for about 18 years now. I'm homeless, yet I understand things many don't because of my lifetime of study along these lines. As I work myself out of this homeless situation, I'm also looking at how the tens of millions of people who have either lost their jobs, or are losing their jobs to new technology now, will find to earn a living. We got at least 10 to 15 million people on Social Security Disability, half of whom are lazy pieces of shit who've scammed that system so they never have to work again. Your tax dollars pay for all those people's rent and food. We don't need any more people in that pathetic category.
The tens of millions of jobs being lost to technology is an issue I've been thinking about for a while. In the very second blog post on this blog, this post, two years ago, it's the issue I was really seeing as one of our biggest problems as a country. It's become much worse since. For example, 20,000 retail stores have closed in 2017-2019, or are scheduled to by the end of this year. That's just in the retail industry. It's happening in many other industries as well. So I'm going to focus a lot more of my time on helping people understand what's going on, why all this is happening (that's my futurist/ultra long term thinking perspective), and how to find new ways of making a living in this fast-changing world.
The stock market, real estate markets, and the rest will crash when they crash. And that will wipe out a lot of people's wealth, retirements, jobs, and security. But it will also provide opportunities like we've never seen before modern human history.
Long story short (OK this wasn't too short), I was wrong about the Dow hitting 27,000, and it will rally for a bit. But I know what's coming. Smart investors like Jim Rogers, Robert Kiyosaki, Peter Schiff, and a few others know what's coming. No one else seems to want to know. Your loss.
But I'm going to quit trying to time the downturn exactly, and I'll focus on doing things that will help bring some of us out the other side, when it does happen.
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