Building Wealth with Silver. Thomas Herold

They are either joking or really have no idea what they are talking about.

      The rumors of recession having actually ended may, in fact, be mere propaganda designed to keep this leaky balloon called our economy from releasing too much hot air too soon.

      Don't get me wrong. The movers and shakers in this world have good reason to slow down or trying to prevent the balloon from bursting. An overblown dollar that pops too quickly can spell disaster for everyone, not just the movers and shakers.

      If you own a business, especially in retail, you know that the recession is actually getting worse. You know your costs and your likely margins. You know that your competitors are scrambling just as much as you are. You know your customers.

      There simply is not a lot of spending going on at any level. Multiply that by an entire nation, an entire global economy, and it spells real problems that cannot simply be smiled away by politicians and the talking heads on the six o'clock evening news.

      On a personal level, it means that your financial security is in peril due to the changes – often catastrophic – that are rippling down from the world at large. Prepared or not, change is about to happen to everyone – big time.

      The Disaster of The Titanic - Only This Time on Global Scale

      I will tell you this up front: in economic, social, environmental and many other terms, we are all in for the biggest ride in history. What you see right now is just the tip of the iceberg. You can compare some events in U.S. history with the Titanic. When she was built she was the biggest luxury cruise ship in the world.

      She was built with pride using the best materials available. She was touted as the safest, most luxurious vessel afloat.

      People were confident that she could take on the worst weather, push her way through the biggest icebergs and endure through any calamity the seas could throw at her. However, the Titanic was flawed from the very beginning, and it was that initial weakness in her design that ultimately led to her sinking.

      Similarly to the story of the Titanic, very proud and intelligent persons in the U.S., along with some equally self-serving advice from their European banking counterparts, engineered a marvel of finance on a grand scale. In 1913 the Fed, which is nothing more than a cartel of private bankers that control the money supply, was sold to an unsuspecting public and their representatives.

      An extension of the idea of centralized banking systems that had seen development in almost all western countries during the 18th and 19th centuries, the Fed was seen by many at the time as the stalwart captain at the helm of the ship of money and finance.

      The Fed has now run into just the tip of an iceberg that will ultimately sink the U.S. economy and take other economies along with it. Like the Titanic, the Fed has a fatal flaw, possibly the biggest in the history of the United States. Like the Titanic, the Fed's makers and captains have realized only too late the nature of their hubris around this flaw when it comes to navigating the behemoth U.S. economy to safe harbors around the world.

      Say Goodbye to Money - The Abandonment of The Gold Standard

      A second flaw was created in our economy in 1974 when President Nixon convinced the senate to abandon the gold standard, and to push the rest of the world to make the dollar the global trading currency. Together, the creation of the Fed and the abandonment of the gold standard are the cornerstones of our current financial disaster. You will learn more about these two pivotal events in a following chapter.

      In 1912 the world learned of the horrific tragedy of the Titanic's sinking, a disaster that claimed more than 1,500 lives. In 2008 we all were witness to how the olympian U.S. economy hit its own iceberg and began its startling descent, pulling hundreds of thousands of individuals and businesses into the vortex along with it.

      The death toll for this disaster has yet to be fully determined. We now know that the U.S. economy had been perilously close to sinking for some time, by the estimates of some experts a matter of hours away from total bankruptcy, kept afloat only by 'lifeboats' of dollars printed out of nothing more substantial than air.

      Like the dot com bubble before it, the housing bubble of 2006 had burst, this time with even more far-reaching consequences. The lifeboats can only go so far. Sooner, rather than later, the U.S. economy will ultimately lose its remaining buoyancy and nothing in the world can stop its plunge to the depths.

      When the U.S. economy does sink it will negatively impact all major industrialized countries even more than before. The initial bump into the iceberg is just a hint of what is in store for the world at large. No one anywhere in the world will be immune from the tsunami created with so many economic vessels on their way to oblivion.

      There are no lifeboats large enough to withstand a wave of economic destruction on that scale.

      Nevertheless, readers of this book can benefit from the information found within no matter what their nationality or place of birth.

      Never before in human history have we relied on the titanic structure of one economy to serve as the bellwether for the entire global market. It was only recently in relative terms that the global marketplace had begun to function as an interconnected whole rather than as a bucket of bolts.

      Our global financial perspective was one of calm seas and clear skies, enabled by advances in electronic market reporting with billions of transactions taking place in just microseconds. Staggering amounts of money are landing in far-flung ports around the world with precision and certainty - much like cargo during our grandfathers' time made its way from one exotic locale to another around the world.

      However, our grandfathers' markets were a different order of magnitude altogether. The effects of modern investment and banking vehicles, coupled with nearly instantaneous exchange of untold wealth, mean potentially great windfalls as well as disastrous shortfalls.

      Derivatives - Financial Instruments of Mass Destructions

      Modern investment vehicles are complex and designed to work quickly. Some are much riskier than others. Many are not well understood by those who are in positions of countering challenges to the economy. Many, through no inherent fault of their own, play to people's greed and disregard. All this can be wrapped up in one word: derivatives.

      A derivative, if you are not familiar with this term, is simply anything that derives from a service or product. So orange juice would be a derivative of oranges and a mortgage is a derivative of a house. In the world of finance, swaps, futures and options are all types of derivatives. By its definition, a financial derivative is based on the value of some expected future price.

      The dollar amount of the various financial derivatives that are floating around most likely exceeds $100 trillion dollars, which is equal to a one with fourteen zeros after it: 100,000,000,000,000. To give you a better idea of this number lets compare it with some other things.

      •There are probably 150 Billion galaxies in the universe,

      •About 200 Billion stars in the Milky Way and

      •100 Trillion is the estimated number of cells in the entire human body

      One way to better understand large numbers such as these is to compare the heights of stacks of varying numbers of dollar bills.

      The thickness of a single one dollar bills measures .0043 inches or .0000000679 miles.

      The height of a stack of 100,000,000 (one hundred million) one dollar bills measures 35,851 feet or 6.79 miles. This would reach from the earth’s surface to the approximate altitude at which commercial jetliners fly.

      The height of a stack of 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) one dollar bills measures 6,786.6 miles. A column of bills this high would extend 28 times higher