Important New Book – Michael Panzer’s “When Giants Fall”

The author of Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes, Revised and Updated Edition has a new, must-read book  just hitting shelves.

Review coming, but considering the prescience and brilliance of Michael Panzer’s previous work, I believe it’s a must-read for anyone wanting to prepare for the economic and societal shifts bearing down on us right now.

The above mentioned book, Financial Armageddon, called with exceptional clarity, the problems we’re enmeshed in right now, even though our “leaders” and economic “experts” laughed such talk off. Well, they’re not laughing now, but sadly, still in their “leader” and “expert” roles, pretending to know the way out of the woods.

Most of these “architects of our demise” will attempt to marginalize the concepts in this newest Panzer work as well, but will be on the front lines telling us what we need to do to fix the problems when they show up.

What Americans Don’t Know WILL Hurt Them

I must admit, I’ve been mystified by the reaction, or more accurately the lack of reaction by Americans with regard to our imploding economy. But I get it now, thanks to Dmitri Orlov’s excellent Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. Orlov, an American with Russian roots, was able to watch the collapse of the Soviet Union while visiting a number of times during that collapse.

At the height of the intensity of the bailout drama a couple weeks ago, I visited a nice, mid to upscale mall where I occasionally shop (I needed the Apple Store, my only consumerist passion). I was amazed that even though our economy was on the verge of meltdown with anyone who knew anything about what was going on tense and wondering how the next couple days were going to play out, the everyday consumers flowing around me in the mall seemed completely unaware that anything unusual was going on. I realize now that they weren’t completely unaware of dramatic things going on, they were simply convinced that it wouldn’t affect them. That’s a distinction that was lost on me that day, as the well-practiced credit-card presentation moves were displayed even as the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson got down on one knee to beg Nancy Pelosi to pass the $750 Billion bailout bill.

I was comfortable spending a little money that day, because I have protected myself from short-term disruptions in the everyday workings of our economy. Having cash on-hand, safely stored along with enough food, water and household goods to easily weather a couple months disruption is something I recommend to anyone who asks my advice about what could possibly happen. But looking around, I realized that few, if any, of my fellow shoppers had protected themselves in that way.

Reading Orlov’s new book yesterday, I realized that we Americans are asleep about what could happen to us because we don’t believe anything catastrophic could happen to us. And that’s not a completely unreasonable assumption, since nothing bad has happened to us in almost 80 years. Plus, it’s been almost 150 years since war has been seen on our shores, as wars are something that Americans have to travel a long way to participate in. It’s been that way since the Civil War ended in 1865. Europe lives with that collective memory still relatively fresh. Even if Europeans haven’t lived through it first-hand, it’s a part of their history that’s closer to the surface.

We in America are living in one of the best-insulated pockets of comfort the world has ever seen, and that will make the troubles that are almost certainly coming much harder to deal with. The shock Americans will feel when the ATMs don’t work will be devastating. When the grocery shelves are cleared by those with a little cash on-hand, the panic will set in. Most people don’t plan for disruption because they don’t believe it is possible. Waking up to the realization that their assumptions in that regard aren’t true will be a difficult experience.

The alarm has most certainly gone off. The government is frantically doing what it can to keep hitting the snooze button, but when it’s morning, you can only do that for so long before waking can no longer be delayed.

The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

Apparently, the Chinese curse worked. We are living in “interesting times.”

Congress is currently putting together a play that will, depending on whose view you take, save the economy of the U.S. (and so the world) from certain destruction, or simply create a financial autocrat in Henry Paulson. The latter view is particularly troubling, since the same Henry Paulson is the bureaucrat under whose leadership as Treasury Secretary we arrived in this mess. He is the former head of Goldman Sachs, raising serious concerns about how appropriately he’ll treat his former employer through this mess (the phrase “sweetheart deal” is being mentioned), but more importantly, many are sure the guy whose incompetence helped get us in this mess is exactly the wrong guy to help steer us out of it.

I can’t disagree with this sentiment.

The amazing thing about all of this, is that despite government’s inability to manage important systems, like Medicare and Social Security, the American people are willing to write the biggest blank check in the history of civilization to fix everything. It simply won’t work, and represents nothing more than a bigger band-aid slapped over the collection of previous band-aids. It’s folly, and meant, in the humble opinion of your editor, to give the people who created this mess a little more time to check and adjust their golden parachutes and jump out of the burning, disintegrating airplane before it crashes.

As I write this at 5:39am on Monday, Gold is again jumping in price. One of the most disturbing sights on Thursday and Friday of last week was the strong rise in the price of the metal, even though the stock seemed to be charging back. While satisfying, since I believe that gold is the only safe harbor for saving wealth, it still made me uncomfortable to see the numbers march hand in hand with the Dow. It’s not supposed to work that way

Also disturbing is how many people don’t have a clue about what’s going on. They blindly waddle into Best Buy to buy plasma televisions and fill restaurants. They just don’t believe anything bad can happen. They are wrong. A bad thing happened over the weekend. Our economy turned down a dark, dark road bereft of road signs, or I fear, much pavement.

Protect yourself, your family and your assets. I urge you to read, at the very least, Financial Armageddon (both the book and the website), Urban Survival, JSMineset and DailyReckoning.