Marketing legend Gary Vaynerchuk on dealing with the coming economic collapse

If you don't recognize the face above, Gary Vaynerchuk pioneered the idea of selling wine online in about 1998.  In about five years he took his family's New Jersey liquor store from $3 million to over $60 million in annual sales.  He actually kicks himself for not building it bigger then.  He did that by using the fledgling internet for marketing in ways most people thought were stupid.  Then he took off with his brother and  started a digital agency, what was once called a marketing agency.  In about six years, that's doing $200 million+  in sales annually.  Now he tries to get Fortune 500 companies to market in a 21st century way.  Not bad.  Oh... AND Gary is one of the the top keynote business speakers around the world, AND he puts out more content, across multiple platforms, than anyone on the places where business, the internet, social media, and marketing intersect.  Simply put.  He knows his shit.

People give me grief at times for writing about economics and saying there's a sizable recession coming in the near future.  I'm broke, currently homeless, and they say that's why I have no business having an opinion on this, much less expressing my opinion.  I even got physically threatened for this writing this blog, bordering on death threats, and told to stop writing it by many people.  That's not gonna happen.

I've been an amateur futurist my whole life.  I've watched the markets since buying an ounce of silver as a kid during the 1980 surge.  I actually enjoy reading, thinking, and projecting all these ideas into the future to see what it may look like.  I called the 1993-1994 interest rate rise ahead of time, while working part time, telemarketing for a mortgage broker (Dundee Mortgage in Santa Ana, CA).  I shared my ideas with the owner of the company one night.  He liked my enthusiasm, but told me I was wrong, that he'd been in the business for 25 years, and that's not how things worked.  He was out of business two months later.  I called the last two recessions a couple of years before they happened, as well.  Right now, there's a lot more time for me, and data for everyone, to get a sense of the next economic downturn.  So I'm looking a lot closer at things this time around.

The simple fact is, the big blocks are stacked and ready for a pretty gnarly recession.  I'm not writing this to scare people or piss off Republicans, Conservatives, Industrial Age company management, or any other group.  This is what I see happening, I've showed in previous posts why I see it happening, and it makes sense to acknowledge that there's some kind of downturn likely soon, and prepare for it.  That's all.

Thanks to the work of super brain quant (from Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Goldman Sachs) turned journalist, Nomi Prins, I've realized just how much money is being created and flowed to Wall Street and financial markets worldwide to help us keep the next collapse at bay.  It's kind of like playing blackjack in a casino with $100 chips, but having a debit card with $10 million in the account.  Every time you lose your all your money, you just hit the ATM and get some more.  Eventually that account will run out, but for now things look fine.  That's an oversimplified way to think about our economy right now, but it gives you the basic idea.  We should have had a recession start in 2016-2017, but there's a sort of rolling bail out keeping it from happening... for the moment.  But that can't last forever.

Gary Vee, as most of his fans (including me) know him, sees it from the businessman's standpoint.  Shit happens, another recession will come at some point, might as well work it into the long term plan.  He's actually COUNTING ON the coming recession as a businessman.  He's been through a couple serious ones, he knows there will be massive turmoil, but there will also be a ton of opportunities for people who do have steady cash flow and assets when the next one hits.  He's betting on that.

So in this video, part of which I've seen in another, longer version, he tells you his thoughts on this coming economic downturn.  But in this video, he also mentions, for the first time I know of, that colleges will go out of business.  In fact, HIS college, Mount Ida University, is now gone.  I've been saying that colleges will go under for several months, after learning that much of the $1.5 TRILLION in student debt has been repackaged and sold as Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (called SLABS).  That's very similar to the way subprime mortgages were sold and rebuilt as CDO's, which helped trigger the Great Recession of 2007-9.

After learning about SLABS, it was apparent that many would fail, and it will most likely cause a collapse like in 2008.  BUT, this time, it will be the money that's going into colleges and universities that slows down to a trickle.  Which means sketchy colleges will likely go under, and even major, well known schools, could really struggle.  When you add to that the way technology has made most information available to just about anyone, for free, then things look bad for the college system as a whole.  I think we will ultimately see a big collapse of many schools, and a complete restructuring of the whole college system, eventually.  Virtually EVERYONE thinks our education system sucks now, so this shouldn't be a big surprise.

I've been saying this for quite a while, but nobody wants to hear it.  Since I'm busy on other things, like surviving, I haven't looked into it deeper.  But hearing Gary Vee finally talk about colleges going under, including the one he went to, I just did a quick search to see if others had.  Holy crap!  Dozens of small colleges have shut down in the last 2-3 years or so.  The college meltdown IS ALREADY HAPPENING.  But it's not from a collapse of the SLABS yet, these colleges are closing down for other reasons.  It's just small colleges and it hasn't garnered mainstream attention yet.  At some point, it will.

There's a ton more to be said here.  But I'll save that for later posts.  At this point, adding in thoughts from Nomi Prins in a very recent interview, it seems this economic downturn has already started as a kind of slow motion car crash.  The Central Banks are working to keep a crash from happening, and it's working to some degree.  But there are stress cracks in their plan, and a serious recession is looking much more likely to mainstream financiers and average investors.  Ms. Prins sees it happening in bits and pieces, not on massive market crash up front.  When investors and financiers lose faith, and start getting really worried, things go down hill faster.

In any case, here are a couple of articles about colleges that have already closed or merged with someone else.  There are over 100 in two years.  Freakin' wow.

Spate of recent college closures has some seeing long predicted consolidation taking place (10/2017)

How many colleges and Universities have closed down since 2016?
( I counted 109 on their list at the moment)