February 2, 2009 at 11:02 pm
In the fall of 2001 I attended a private investment conference in London to give a paper, The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group.
The presentation documented my experience with a Washington-Wall Street partnership that had:
- Engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble;
- Illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the U.S.;
- Used “privitization” as form or piracy - a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder.
Other presenters at the conference included distinguished reporters covering privatization in Eastern Europe and Russia. As the portraits of British ancestors stared down upon us, we listened to story after story of global privatization throughout the 1990s in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Slowly, as the pieces fit together, we shared a horrifying epiphany: the banks, corporations and investors acting in each global region were the exact same players. They were a relatively small group that reappeared again and again in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia accompanied by the same well-known accounting firms and law firms.
Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’etat underway.
The magnitude of what was happening was overwhelming. In the 1990’s, millions of people in Russia had woken up to find their bank accounts and pension funds simply gone – eradicated by a falling currency or stolen by mobsters who laundered money back into big New York Fed member banks for reinvestment to fuel the debt bubble.
Reports of politicians, government officials, academics, and intelligence agencies facilitating the racketeering and theft were compelling. One lawyer in Russia, living without electricity and growing food to prevent starvation, was quoted as saying, “We are being de-modernized.”
Several years earlier, I listened to three peasant women describe the War on Drugs in their respective countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. I asked them, “After they sweep you into camps, who gets your land and at what price?” My question opened a magic door. They poured out how the real economics worked on the War on Drugs, including the stealing of land and government contracts to build housing for the people who are displaced.
At one point, suspicious of my understanding of how this game worked, one of the women said, “You say you have never been to our countries, yet you understand exactly how the money works. How is this so?” I replied that I had served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in US communities. Apparently, it worked the same way in their countries as it worked in mine.
I later found out that the government contractor leading the War on Drugs strategy for U.S. aid to Peru, Colombia and Bolivia was the same contractor in charge of knowledge management for HUD enforcement. This Washington-Wall Street game was a global game. The peasant women of Latin America were up against the same financial pirates and business model as the people in South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia, Baltimore and the South Bronx.
Later, courageous reporting by Naomi Klein and Greg Palast confirmed in detail that the privitization and economic warfare model I discussed in London had deep roots in Latin America.
We were experiencing a global “heist”: capital was being sucked out of country after country. The presentation I gave in London revealed a piece of the puzzle that was difficult for the audience to fathom. This was not simply happening in the emerging markets. It was happening in America, too.
I described a meeting that had occurred in April 1997, more than four years before that day in London. I had given a presentation to a distinguished group of U.S. pension fund leaders on the extraordinary opportunity to reengineer the U.S. federal budget. I presented our estimate that the prior year’s federal investment in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area had a negative return on investment.
We presented that it was possible to finance places with private equity and reengineer the government investment to a positive return and, as a result, generate significant capital gains. Hence, it was possible to use U.S. pension funds to significantly increase retirees’ retirement security by successfully investing in American communities, small business and farms — all in a manner that would reduce debt, improve skills, and create jobs.
The response from the pension fund investors to this analysis was quite positive until the President of the CalPERS pension fund — the largest in the country — said, “You don’t understand. It’s too late. They have given up on the country. They are moving all the money out in the fall [of 1997]. They are moving it to Asia.”
Sure enough, that fall, significant amounts of moneys started leaving the US, including illegally. Over $4 trillion went missing from the US government. No one seemed to notice. Misled into thinking we were in a boom economy by a fraudulent debt bubble engineered with force and intention from the highest levels of the financial system, Americans were engaging in an orgy of consumption that was liquidating the real financial equity we needed urgently to reposition ourselves for the times ahead.
The mood that afternoon in London was quite sober. The question hung in the air, unspoken: once the bubble was over, was the time coming when we, too, would be “de-modernized?”
In 2009 — more than seven years later — this is a question that many of us are asking ourselves.
http://solari.com/blog/?p=2058
Part II: Rethinking Diversification
For our entire lives, most of us have depended on highly centralized systems. Our food comes from a thousand or more miles away. Our savings is shipped into distant financial centers and invested by strangers in enterprises run by strangers. We watch highly scripted news that serves the same spin no matter how many channels we try. We bank at impersonal global banks with criminal records that would make a felon blush and have no idea where our money goes, just that the government guarantees that we will get it back.
Within this centralized system, diversification means having your financial assets deposited into a “one-stop-shop” brokerage account invested in securities representing different global industries, the idea being when one industry is doing poorly, another “countercyclical” industry would be doing well.
But suddenly, we find that we may not be able to trust these centralized systems. Suddenly, traditional portfolio theory no longer addresses our anxiety. This is because we need to shift from diversification within a centralized system to real diversification in a decentralized, possibly “out of control” world.
If you study the investment patterns of families and wealth that has survived through the generations, including through periods of lawlessness and warfare, you come to understand that for those who want to thrive in all economic and political scenarios, diversification has had a far deeper meaning than what is commonly understood in the financial markets today. For the astute strategist, it means not putting all your eggs in one basket in every important aspect of your life. Given what is happening in our world and economy, it’s time to revisit the deeper meaning of diversification.
Diversification means that our assets are invested such that an economic, political, or natural event — particularly a catastrophic event — cannot wipe us out. So, for example, we don’t invest all of our savings in a single financial institution or fund. Investors who lost their life savings in the Madoff scandal were not practicing even the most basic form of financial diversification.
Diversification also means having multiple types of assets and custodians in multiple places. Custodians (i.e., those who hold our assets for us) might be brokerage firms, banks, depositories or our own safe.
Diversification by place means locating our assets in states or countries subject to different legal and political risks. It means denominating our assets in currencies of multiple countries. It means selecting assets subject to different risks of loss due to climate change, weather conditions, social conditions and other uniquely local vicissitudes. Local investment is a great idea, but the people who lived through Katrina can tell you why having all of your eggs in one local basket may not be the best idea.
Diversification means that we don’t have all of our savings in just one type of asset. So we don’t invest in securities only — we also invest in tangibles. If possible, we buy a house without debt, or with debt that can be serviced by one family member’s income, or invest in our home to lower energy and food costs permanently. We also maintain a sufficient inventory of household goods. And it’s a good idea to invest in disaster preparedness if we live in an area that experiences earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes or is prone to power outages.
Having all your money in one currency or one country is pretty risky – a risk many in the US tend to take. Ask your Jewish friends whose parents got out of Germany in time because they had gold coins or family and assets abroad. Gold coins may hold their value if the dollar collapses, but they can also disappear in a burglary or if you forget where you put them. Digital gold may be a great thing, but if the Internet is not reliable where you are, cold cash may be a good thing. Or if your cash is worthless, a stockpile of food, vitamins and liquor can be priceless. However, food, vitamins and liquor are only good when you are bartering with someone who wants them or is close by. Which takes us back to gold coins or digital gold or some other currencies. So you see, there is no magic bullet – just diversification.
Diversification of life risks is an integral part of all matters related to financial capital. Living things are the source of all wealth. That includes you and me.
Diversification means that we invest in our physical and mental well-being. We invest our time in understanding the toxic chemicals, drugs and other influences that increasingly contribute to poor health and cause us to need so much more funding for more drugs and medical treatments to cure what ails us. One of the greatest – and growing — threats to our financial health is physical illness. The notion that corporate stock investments will create security while one saves money eating unhealthy food is contradictory to the principles of building real wealth.
Diversification means that we invest not just in our own human capital but also in the human capital of other members of our family and those around us. In this way, we are not betting on financial assets alone to see us through. We are investing in each other because it is family, friends and communities that help see us through. An active network of mutually-supportive friends and colleagues is important. For those with sufficient capital and skills, financing the farmers and companies we depend on for our daily bread may not provide much of a return — it may, however, ensure that we have healthy, safe food.
Diversification also applies to the work we do. For most people, our labor is our most important source of financial assets. Skill diversity can mean, for example, that you have a number of skills. If one skill goes out of favor, another will give you the ability to be economically useful. If you have a business that fails, you have the ability to start a new business because you have the experience and diversity of skills to make a business run.
The ability to generate income through your own business or practice is invaluable, particularly when the economic environment makes “W-2” employment more difficult to find. If you are an employee and your company closes, if you have taken care to broaden your skill base, your skills can be valuable commodities for other, different types of employers or employers in other industries or places less affected by a downturn. Better yet, you know how to do many things for yourself, thus offsetting lost income with lower expenses. Look at those who are successful in the current environment: what most of them share is a commitment to life-long learning that translates into a multitude of personal and professional skills.
Diversification is not always easy to achieve. The more resources we have, the easier it is to diversify. The fewer resources we have, the more our diversification focuses on building our human capital and community. Interestingly enough, many of the best opportunities before us are those that can happen when people who have a lot of money and people who don’t have money but have a lot of skills become allies in building greater diversification together. Isolation shrinks our options. Opportunities expand as we organize and collaborate effectively. Hence, it is critical to not assume financial capital can provide sufficient diversification alone and remain isolated from our neighbors and family.
One of my goals for the Solari Report is to explore options we have to strengthen and diversify our human and financial capital and to introduce you to leaders who are taking action to help us do so.
On our next Solari Report, during our “Movers and Shakers Interview,” we will talk with permaculturist Albert Bates (see also: http://www.thegreatchange.com, http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com) about strengthening our communities, including eco-villages and Transition Towns. Albert and I will discuss financial permaculture as well. If the need is growing to shift money out of centralized systems and reinvest in communities, there is an opportunity for those who can help us figure out how to make such investment sound, liquid and profitable. To get you thinking, check out the new video on the first Financial Permacuture Summit.
In “Let’s Go to the Movies,” we will be taking about Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s documentary The Take about the economic collapse of Argentina and how workers responded to bring the economy back to life. If you want a birds-eye tour of what can happen when your financial system and currency collapse, here it is.
In “Money & Markets” I will be reviewing recent financial events and discussing indications that more and more people are concerned about a financial coup d’etat these days.
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