Tldr: Markets are going to shit because the Europeans are killing each other again, and I am going to use too many words while documenting my experience with economic doomsday prepping.
A flea bit a mouse and fuedal lords were forced to be better employers, for fear of being beaten to death in their parlors. Smallpox crossed the Atlantic and the English got to rule Ghana for a while. A German Jew misunderstood Hegal and the Tsar got shot, and an Austrian antisemite misunderstood Nietzsche and the Americans inherited oceanic supremacy.
When viewed in isolation -a handful of decades, without context- geopolitical upheaval virtually almost herolds economic misery. Historic events are deemed so only In hindsight -Roman plebs couldn't hear the tune from Nero's fiddle.
The Russians beat the Americans to Berlin, and OPEC decides whether you can afford to commute to work or not. The Egyptians took a cannal, and hope for our species pretty much rests on an Afrikanner space-pirate outcompeting Texan oilbarons and Peninsular petro-princes.
When taken in an, admittedly, arbitrarily defined 'wider context', and viewed through the lense of a soon-to-be defined, equally arbitrary, set of presuppositions and a fiduciary moral framework, it is undeniable that economies have been successful at exploiting the momentum of tsunamic depressions and evolving into structures of greater versatility and propensity towards innovation.
The Gipper made Gorbachev go Glassnot and Ba'athists traded rubles for petrol from a Caliph in Ninevah. European Eastern Economic Expansion lit a Crimean powderkeg, again, and the continent proceeds towards becoming a constellation of diasporas -again. A bat caught the flue, and corporate realestate risks industrial irrelevance.
Previously, a set of necessary presuppositions were mentioned. The wording used was, admittedly, misleading. The 'set' is no more than two: The first, being that this analysis assumes a wholey amoralistic reader intentionally depersonalizing their approach so to realize their financial goal; the second, being that the goal is firmly held as being defined by the reader as the mitigation of vulnerability to market instability, and the exploitation and manipulation of said instability concluding in the assumption of a favorable financial standing following the inevitable (forced) pacification of the economic turmoil by the global financial elite that inherits the scepter and the fountain pens. Riding the waves/thermobaric concussions that have only just begun to come from the international economic system straining against the web of interconnected financial ties as it prunes any and all possible sources of exposure. Corporate social responsibility, personal ownership of the burden of environmental due diligence, and the need for using economic enfranchisement as a means of championing social justice are among the many topics that I will not allow to influence the message I intend to convey.
CS nerds rode the startup wave and picked dopefiends for a nieche, and Oligarchs have begun leaving Geneva for Metamask. Croniesm and consumer economics are at an equilibrium, Facebook is marrying LinkedIn and Second life, Grimes' ex is using biomechanical engineering to manifest advertisers' greatest wet dream in an IRL South Park skit, and the Germans and Poles are looking East in preparation.
For what?
That is not the concern of this paper. I will not attempt to make specific predictions as to the progression of the current geo-politico-socio-economic 4D tick-tack-toe. Specific events, except for those of a radioactive eschatology slant, are of less significance to this expiriment in financial doomsday prepping than the variables to be discussed, and expending the labor of attempting to predict, prepare for, and prevent the myriad of possible consequences of an infinite number of possible crises progression would likely be more of a detriment to the reader than provide any realistic stablitory benefit.
No; now is not the time for tweezers and finetoothed combs. Now is the time for long brushstrokes and a whole hell of a lot of praying for the best.
The world, in all of its hideous beauty, will die tonight, and wake up tomorrow, no longer the devil we know. The pledge of allegiance by the global banking system to the global military industrial complex in handing over the reigns to SWIFT; the apparant capitulation of various cryptoexchanges to Clinton's calls to fulfil their patriotic duty to participate in the forced economic isolation of many dozens of millions of people -as the founding fathers would have wanted-; and the abrupt end of adherence on the part of policy makers to the charade of representative solidarity with the electorate as the burden of illthoughtout economic policy changes grind us into the pavement have each contributed to the absolute of erosion of trust in the economic system, as it stands.
This is not about politics. Left, right, or center -I'm sure we can all agree that a penstroke in Washington or a government stamp in Port Said should not be capable of causing instant economic desolation to a small town on the gulf coast. Regardless of the individual holding this power, no single person should claim such concentrated authority.
Not much can be done, though. Or, much can be done, but it's not for me to do.
I want to pay rent. Beyond that, however, I want to be afforded the comfort of knowing I will always be able to pay rent. It is not enough that I own a few psychedelic digital cartoons worth a nice condo in SF, nor is it enough that I am comfortable paying for my 2.5 kids to go to college without having to incure a single cent of debt. It's not enough.
It will be enough when I am able to picture the absolute worst series of events transpiring, without the fear of future financial insecurity taking a spot among the chorus of likely anxieties that would follow such an unplanned tragedy.
Realistically, that is not possible -as things stand. So long as pocket-protectors on WallStreet influence global agricultural logistics, as long as lobbyists wander between DNC and RNC fundraisers and Shawerma shops in Utrecht go out of business, I'm always just one “clear conscious” oriented sacrifice away from destitution.
Its dor that reason that Ive decided to, if you'll forgive the cringe phrasing, embark on a journey of mapping out the boundaries of the current global economic system -in relation to the probable modus operendi to be adopted following the conclusion of the ongoing Great Reshuffling-, to identify the boundaries most malliable and susceptible to redrawing through the use of pioneering Fintech and continuously evolving consumer financial frameworks, and to set a broad gameplan to be adopted by the hypothetical, blank slate of a dissilusioned Doomer following this series of posts.
As of now, the following subjects' analyses are in the works:
1) Cosplaying Oligarchs: Empires for Sale in the New-New World Order.
2) Blockchain and the Great Unraveling: Entrenchment above Integration.
3) Pedestrian Colonialism: Offshore Realestate and Your Last Stand against the Tax Man.
When the winds change, we adjust our sails; so to as the mushroom cloud forms, we need to monetize the fallout.
Cheers.