 Surviving the Soft
Depression of the 21st Century
December 22,
2003
Bob Moriarty
If man isn't
living in caves a hundred years from now or entirely extinct,
the most popular tome about the United States of America will
be titled "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire."
For what better title could you pick?
I'd write it
myself if I didn't know that fifteen guys both smarter and better
able to turn a phrase are already hard at work. But the economic
history portion of the book has already been written. It's titled,
"Financial Reckoning Day." William Bonner and
Addison Wiggin wrote it together.
They piss me
off not only because they are indeed smarter and better writers,
but they have stolen all the ideas I would have come up with
if I wanted to write THE ECONOMIC HISTORY BOOK of the
American Empire.
A short book,
about 270 pages of writing, I read it in one go on a journey
to the San Francisco Gold Show a month ago. They sent me a copy
to review before the show and it made a perfect travel companion,
especially for anyone on the way to a gold show.
Our site, 321gold,
has been going for 2 1/2 years now. We started the site to give
prospective gold investors more balance in what they had to read.
I did some numbers and realized that only 1 investor out of 3500
actually owns any gold shares or bullion.
There's more
to the price of gold than a conspiracy and more to the economic
future than only precious metals. We try to offer more variety
of pieces than other gold sites. You don't need to read every
piece but we want to cover the spectrum.
We've succeeded
at trying to educate readers. A year ago we had about 15,000
readers a day to the home page, today we have 45,000.
One of the
greatest pleasures has been dealing with the caliber of writers
we talk to on a daily basis. I suppose we have had about 150
different contributors at 321gold, each with his own special
talents and viewpoint. Still, I don't doubt that when all the
dust has settled, there will still be people crying that no one
warned them of what was ahead.
Our readers
have been warned and anyone who has been coming to the site for
any length of time is almost certainly better off financially.
One of the hardest things we do is choose which articles to post,
For us to post 20 pieces a day, we have to read 100. I'm a speed
reader and that helps. It's by far the most enjoyable part of
the day, there is some brilliant writing today from a variety
of sources.
 For those not familiar
with Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, you need to make a short
journey to the Daily
Reckoning
to sign up for their daily blurb. In it, a variety of writers
reflect on the state of both the economy and the world.
In the most
simple of terms, the United States has enjoyed the fruits of
having the US dollar as the world's reserve currency of choice
since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. That has been both
a blessing and a curse as US politicians have fed at a pig's
trough for 60 years, knowing full well that the US could print
money at an unlimited pace. They did and the butcher's bill must
now be paid.
Wiggin and
Bonner do an excellent job of describing both how we got here
and how the ramifications of past American folly will affect
our future. They even go back to the early 18th Century to describe
John Law's experiments with paper currency while he was an advisor
to the King of France. In that case, unlimited spending and a
cornucopia of debt led directly to a bloody revolution. It may
happen again.
Wiggin and
Bonner leave no doubt as to what they believe will happen in
the US. What I found most interesting about the book were their
suggestions as to how to cope. They pointed out with great accuracy
that in 1990 an investor could have made a single investment
decision and gone away for ten years, secure in the knowledge
that his investment would continue to increase in value. In 1990,
the investment of merit would have been the general stock market.
They leave
no doubt an investor in 2000 was faced with another single choice
investment. Bear in mind, they have spent the entire book demonstrating
why stocks, bonds and real estate will fare so poorly in coming
years. Their recommendation for 2000 to 2010 was so short I actually
skipped over it. I was looking for pages and pages of explanation.
Instead, in a couple of paragraphs they delineated the perfect
investment for today.
If you get the book
and don't skip over those couple of paragraphs, you, too,
will know what you should be invested in today. It's a 10-yr
decision, you can make the decision anywhere from 2000 to 2010,
and the results will be the same.
Financial Reckoning Day just hit the top of
the New York Times bestseller list and when you put it down,
you'll know why.
Thanks guys,
it's a great road map to the future and we love posting your
work at 321gold.
To buy the
book from Amazon, with a 30% discount, click here.
Bob Moriarty
December 22, 2003
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Email bob@321gold.com
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