Sys Nica

Friday, August 17, 2018

When Will the U.S. Dollar Collapse?

Updated March 19, 2018

A dollar collapse is when the value of the U.S. dollar plummets. Anyone who holds dollar-denominated assets will sell them at any cost. That includes foreign governments who own U.S. Treasurys. It also affects foreign exchange futures traders. Last but not least are individual investors.

When the crash occurs, these parties will demand assets denominated in anything other than dollars. The collapse of the dollar means that everyone is trying to sell their dollar-denominated assets, and no one wants to buy them. This will drive the value of the dollar down to near zero. It makes hyperinflation look like a day in the park.

Three things that could cause a collapse

Three conditions must be in place before the dollar could collapse. First, there must be an underlying weakness. That situation exists in 2017. The U.S. currency is fundamentally weak despite its 25 percent increase since 2014. The dollar declined54.7 percent against the euro between 2002 and 2012. Why? The U.S. debt almost tripled during that period, from $6 trillion to $15 trillion. The debt is even worse now, at $21 trillion. The debt-to-GDP ratio is now more than 100 percent. That increases the chance the United States will let the dollar's value slide.

That's because it would be easier to repay its debt with cheaper money.

Second, there must be a viable currency alternative for everyone to buy. The dollar's strength is based on its use as the world's reserve currency. The dollar became the reserve currency in 1973 when President Nixon abandoned the gold standard. As a global currency, the dollar is used for 43 percent of all cross-border transactions. That means central banks must hold the dollar in their reserves to pay for these transactions. As a result, 61 percent of these foreign currency reserves are in dollars.

The next most popular currency after the dollar is the euro. But it comprises less than 30 percent of central bank reserves. The eurozone debt crisis weakened the euro as a viable global currency.

China and others argue that a new currency should be created and used as the global currency. China's central banker Zhou Xiaochuan goes one step further. He claims that the yuan should replace the dollar to maintain China's economic growth. China is right to be alarmed at the dollar's drop in value. That's because it is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasurys, so it just saw its investment deteriorate. The dollar's weakness makes it more difficult for China to control the yuan's valuecompared to the dollar.

Could bitcoin replace the dollar as the new world currency? It has many benefits. It's not controlled by any one country's central bank. It is created, managed, and spent online. It can also be used at brick-and-mortar stores that accept it. Its supply is finite. That appeals to those who would rather have a currency that's backed by something concrete, such as gold.

But there are big obstacles. First, its value is highly volatile. That's because there is no central bank to manage it. Second, it has become the coin of choice for illegal activities that lurk in the deep web. That makes it vulnerable to tampering by unknown forces.

Three events that could trigger a collapse

These two situations make a collapse possible. But, it won’t occur without a third condition. That's a huge economic triggering event that destroys confidence in the dollar.

Altogether, foreign countries own more than $5 trillion in U.S. debt. If China, Japan or other major holders started dumping these holdings of Treasury notes on the secondary market, this could cause a panic leading to collapse. China owns $1 trillion in U.S. Treasurys. That's because China pegs the yuan to the dollar. This keeps the prices of its exports to the United States relatively cheap. Japan also owns more than $1 trillion in Treasurys. It also wants to keep the yen low to stimulate exports to the United States.

Japan is trying to move out of a 15-year deflationary cycle. The 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster didn't help.

Would China and Japan ever dump their dollars? Only if they saw their holdings declining in value too fast and they had another export market to replace the United States. The economies of Japan and China are dependent on U.S. consumers. They know that if they sell their dollars, that would further depress the value of the dollar. That means their products, still priced in yuan and yen, will cost relatively more in the United States. Their economies would suffer. Right now, it's still in their best interest to hold onto their dollar reserves.

China and Japan are aware of their vulnerability. They are selling more to other Asian countries that are gradually becoming wealthier. But the United States is still the best market in the world.

When will the dollar collapse?

A dollar collapse will not occur in 2018. In fact, it's unlikely that it will collapse at all. That's because any of the countries who have the power to make that happen (China, Japan, and other foreign dollar holders) don't want it to occur. It's not in their best interest. Why bankrupt your best customer? Instead, the dollar will resume its gradual decline as these countries find other markets.

What would happen after a collapse

A sudden dollar collapse would create global economic turmoil. Investors would rush to other currencies, such as the euro, or other assets, such as gold and commodities. Demand for Treasurys would plummet, and interest rates would rise. U.S. importprices would skyrocket, causing inflation.

U.S. exports would be dirt cheap, given the economy a brief boost. In the long run, inflation, high interest rates, and volatility would strangle possible business growth. Unemployment would worsen, sending the United States back into recession or even a depression.

How to protect yourself

Protect yourself from a dollar collapse by first defending yourself from a gradual dollar decline. Keep your assets well-diversified by holding foreign mutual funds, gold, and other commodities.

A dollar collapse would create global economic turmoil. To respond to this kind of uncertainty, you must be mobile. Keep your assets liquid, so you can shift them as needed. Make sure your job skills are transferable. Update your passport, in case things get so bad for so long that you need to move quickly to another country. These are just a few ways to protect yourself and survive a dollar collapse.

Exceptional BBQ begins the day before *Complete

If you really want an exceptional BBQ'd meal, begin the day before.

Meats such as pork have a rather bland flavor that easily takes on the spices you prepare it with. This meal I'm preparing for my evening meal tomorrow will have a mild spicy flavor with a hint of garlic so I begin by slow boiling the meat with that flavor in mind.
Some people like a tougher meat at the meal whereas I like almost a pull pork consistency so keep that in mind as you parboil your selected meats. The less time you prepare your meats in the parboil the longer your meat will have to stay on the grill. My meats typically stay above charcoal for 8 minutes, just long enough for the flavor and to slightly char my sauce.

My pork is now sitting in a dry rub and will be refrigerated overnight.

My potato cooked just long enough to be done yet firm in the middle as it will become potato salad by this evening. I allow it to cool before adding it's overnight spices so that when cubed, it will have a firm consistency.

I may have forgotten something as I am not a good instructor but I'll update this post as the stages of preparation progress.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see often is not allowing the flavors to mend.

With my potato at room temperature, I cube it in slightly larger pieces than what will be in the meal. The mixing process will wear them down This is also the time to add any flavors that you wish to "deep seat" in the final product. The flavors that you want toi take a light seat in your meal should be added towards the end of the process.

Toss it all in the fridge and we're done until tomorrow.

I didn't forget this post and here is the most delicious BBQ simply because I began the day before.

And yes, my puppy, "Nietzsche" is patiently waiting for his LOL

Something for my foodies

When you look at "everything" in life as a system, this is easy.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

With my comments, someone asked me my race

I like to think that this blog is appealing to the more intelligent individuals around the world and I'm a "Geechy". You know how to look it up.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Do I have Laser Printed Gun Downloads?

*Of course I do.

Did you think they were free?

I also have the how to's of creating a weaponized drone, but again Not free.

Where AI is headed in 2018

Stephen Hawking said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Ever since its genesis, there have been conflicting views and concerns on the potential enhancement or doom that it can cause to human civilization. While some experts believe that this technology will advance and augment our intelligence, some like Bill Gates have expressed concerns on how a machine’s intelligence becomes strong enough to be a concern.

Patriotism, Race, Religion & the Truth

Throughout my blog I have said many things about my character, my past drinking and drugging, my lack of concern about people that don't help themselves, etc. I admit and even profess these things because I am human with flaws.

From time to time I get an email about my blogging things about a race, religion, country or whatever.
Let me make this clear, I could care less about your objection! I was about to blog about the 300 Catholic priests that molested or raped over 1000 children and I have Catholic friends, so what.

If I'm not concerned about the things people know about me, I'm more than certain that I don't care about what people know about you, your race, your faith and your country.

I don't post to make friends, I have a puppy for that.

How to remain humble

Almost everyone has a cell phone yet almost no one knows who invented the first one. Add to this that no one knows the name of the engineer that created the cell phone on right now.
I submit that if almost no one knows these things, what in the hell would they know or remember me for?

Humbled

The line between truth and lies is becoming ever murkier

By Melissa Hogenboom

15 November 2017

It is no secret that politicians often lie, but consider this – they can do so simply by telling the truth. Confused?

That statement becomes clearer when you realise that we've probably all done it. A classic example might be if your mum asks if you've finished your homework and you respond: "I've written an essay on Tennessee Williams for my English class." This may be true, but it doesn't actually answer the question about whether your homework was done. That essay could have been written long ago and you have misled your poor mother with a truthful statement. You might not have even started your homework yet.

Misleading by "telling the truth" is so pervasive in daily life that a new term has recently been employed by psychologists to describe it: paltering. That it is so widespread in society now gives us more insight into the grey area between truth and lies, and perhaps even why we lie at all.

In 1996 one researcher, Bella DePaulo even put a figure on it. She found that each of us lies about once or twice a day. She discovered this by asking participants for one week to note down each time they lied, even if they did so with a good intention. Out of the 147 participants in her original study, only seven said they didn’t lie at all - and we can only guess if they were telling the truth.

Many of the lies were fairly innocent, or even kind, such as: "I told her that she looked good when I thought that she looked like a blimp." Some were to hide embarrassment, such as pretending a spouse had not been fired. DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, says that the participants in her study were not aware of how many lies they told, partly because most were so "ordinary and so expected that we just don't notice them".

It is when individuals use lies to manipulate others or to purposely mislead that it is more worrying. And this happens more often than you might think.

Complete article >

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171114-the-disturbing-art-of-lying-by-telling-the-truth

How To Be The Master Of Your Own Destiny

American writer Henry David Thoreau is famous for once writing:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Many people live their entire lives as if they were at the mercy of their life circumstances. Now it's true that there are some things in life that we have no direct control over, like natural disasters and other people's behavior. But it's equally true that we often have more say in how our life goes than we think we do. For instance, we can choose to live on a fault line in an earthquake-prone city or we can choose to live away from hotspots of seismic activity; and some forms of communication are much better at getting a response that we would like from other people than others.

We have two choices in life: We can either submit to our life circumstances, give up our power and lead a life of resignation and often-not-so-quiet desperation; or we can choose to be the master of our own destiny.

If the idea of being the captain of your own ship sounds appealing, here's how we can do it:

Decide What We Want In Life, And Go After It

When we were a child, a bunch of well-meaning adults put a whole heap of restrictions on our behavior for our own good. Well, at least they probably said it was for our own good. Sometimes it really was, and other times it was just a way of controlling us in order to fit in with their needs and to lessen their own anxiety about us getting into mischief. Families, schools, religions and other societal structures all bombard us with rules and limitations about what is possible, permissible and available to us in life. Over time these limiting beliefs filter down into our nervous system and appear very real, even though they're actually just viral copies of other people's rules and limiting beliefs.

Families in particular tend to inculcate us unconsciously with their own set of beliefs about what is permissible for us. Parents with low self-esteem tend to raise children with low self-esteem. The lower our self-esteem, the less we will believe is possible in life for us.

As an adult, we are responsible for how our life goes: So decide what you want in life, and go after it.

Focus On What We Can Control, Not What We Can't

I often notice that my coaching clients, my friends, my self and many other people I meet seem to get these two things around backwards: We often expend enormous energy on trying to control the things in life that we have no power over, and yet neglect or act powerless in the face of things that we can actually control.

The serenity prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous seems to put this most succinctly:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Getting this around the right way will make a massive difference to whether we feel like we're in charge of our life circumstances or whether we're victim to them.

Much of our lasting joy in life comes from our relationships with other people. Attempting to control and manipulate other people at their own expense isn't likely to lead to sustained happiness. There's a big karmic difference between behaving and communicating in ways that encourage other people to want to contribute to our life, and attempting to control or exploiting other people in destructive and manipulative ways. Learn to recognize the difference.

Quit Playing Victim

Playing victim to our life circumstances is the quickest way to undermine our own personal power. Nothing is bad as the smell of a burning martyr. Being a victim is an uninspiring way of living that will attract other victims to us; and that will make it even harder to get what we want out of life.

Adversity is a part of life, and I'm sure you've had more than your fair share of upsets, disappointments and setbacks. I'm not going to minimize the impact that adversity has, because traumatic life circumstances can leave emotional scars that get lodged deep in our nervous system, and it's taken me a long time to extricate many of mine.

If bad stuff has happened to you, get yourself to a psychologist, therapist or life coach and do some emotional healing work to release the stranglehold that the past has over you so you can build a better future. But if you've just developed a bad habit of complaining about your life circumstances, stop focusing on the past and take action to create the future that you want.

You won't be bothered complaining about your past once your present life is amazing.

Put Yourself First, And Don't Neglect Others

Sometimes as a child we are encouraged to focus on other people's happiness at our own expense and put everyone else's needs before our own. That's a formula for resentment and depression. There's a reason that we start out life believing that we are the center of the universe: Because we are at the center of our life experience. Trying to please everyone around us at our own expense will simply make us resentful, and that's ultimately not going to please anybody.

The old airplane analogy is very apt: In the event of a disaster, we fit our own oxygen mask first, so we can then help other people fit theirs. When I did my first aid training, I was taught to look out for my own safety first, so I didn't become just another casualty needing help in a potentially dangerous situation.

Lasting happiness comes largely from connection with other people and contributing to their lives; but the paradox is that in order to do that effectively, we need to make sure that our needs are getting met as well. It's a balancing act: If we focus entirely on ourselves and our problems, we end up lonely and miserable. If we always put other people before ourselves and neglect our own needs, we'll end up resentful. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum is the sweet spot and getting this balance right is key to living a great life.

Face Our Fears

Standing in between us and anything that we want but don't yet have, is usually an unpleasant emotion that we haven't yet faced. Often it's fear: maybe the fear of failure, or of rejection, or of being seen for who we really are.

The key to facing fears is to do it incrementally by taking gradual steps every day to expand our comfort zone in the direction of the life that we want.

I don't recommend that you go too crazy, since you don't want to give yourself a nervous breakdown. But the life of our dreams will not arrive at the doorstep while we just sit at home in front of the TV. At some point, we need to face the fears that are currently preventing us from having the life that we want, and I suggest that building a consistent habit of facing a little fear each day is the most sustainable way to get there.

Embrace Failure

One of my biggest fears in the past has been the fear of failure. It was huge for me, and it still kicks in sometimes in the form of self-doubt. It even came up when I sat down to write this article and I found myself thinking: “What if nobody reads it?”

“Well, thank you habitual negative self-talk, for trying to protect me from the pain that I might feel if nobody does read it.”, I replied to my inner critic, “But I think I'm mature enough to handle that pain now, thank you. Certainly nobody will read it if I give up before I start and don't even write it. Then I'd be shortchanging everyone who might benefit from my experience. So I think I'll just have a go and write it anyway”.

Failure is a part of the road to success. Every successful person I've met says this: They often failed many times before achieving success, but we just didn't see it. The media revels in bad news failure stories. Don't listen to it. Stop shaming other people who fail, and start feeling pride in their willingness to give something a go. Focus on enjoying the journey of working towards what you want in life, and let go of your attachment to results so you see everything as a learning experience rather than a “success” or “failure”.

Learn To Trust Yourself

Many of us have been brought up with religions or life philosophies that dictate that other people know how to run our lives better than we do. As a child that may have been true, although I've got to say that the jury is still out on that one for me. Many adults never self-actualize and those school and Sunday school teachers I looked up to as a kid turned out to be barely adults. I look back at them and their supposed wisdom very differently now I'm a little older and wiser myself.

Now it's true that there's a lot of valuable life lessons to learn from every teacher, religion and life philosophy. It's a lot easier to learn from other people's experience than to rediscovery everything about life from first principles. But there's a lot of bullshit out there too, and the lessons that we learn from our own experience will always be more impactful than wisdom gained from a book, no matter how divinely inspired someone claims it to be.

Learn to trust our own inner guidance: We won't always get it right, but we will learn over time from experience. That involves deciding what we want, having a go at taking action towards getting it, and refocusing our efforts each time we make mistakes we make along the way.

Take Action

Nothing happens without taking action. We can do all the conscious manifesting in the world, but it will come to nothing if we take no action towards getting what we want. We can read all the self-help books in the world too, and that will make no difference if we don't actually implement what they say. If you purchase the Confident Man Program, read the guide and listen to all the audio bonuses; and then go back to watching porn on the Internet, your life will not change one iota.

If we want to be the master of our own destiny, we need to take sustained, positive action towards our goals every day; and we need to enjoy the process since there will inevitably be ups and downs along the way.

If you're not sure where to start, the secret answer to that question is: It doesn't matter. Start anywhere, and you'll soon enough discover whether you're heading in the right direction. But you won't find that out if you're not moving at all, so get started today. If you're still stuck for ideas, check out The Confident Man Program Guide; and quit making the excuse that you don't know what to do!