Joke Du Jour:
As a brain wave technologist, I often ask postoperative patients to smile to make sure their facial nerves are intact. It always struck me as odd to be asking this question right after brain surgery, so a colleague suggested I ask patients to show me their teeth. Armed with this new phrase, I said to my next patient, “Mr. Smith, show me your teeth.” He shook his head. “The nurse has them.”
Short Commercial Loan Lesson:
For the past week or so, we have been talking about the equivalent of HELOC's on commercial property. Lines of credit, secured by commercial properties, are extremely hard to find; but apparently, according to my readers, the occasional bank will reluctantly make them... in a first mortgage position.
The problem is that almost all commercial mortgages today contain a prohibition against junior financing. If you put a second mortgage on a commercial property, the underlying first mortgage could be called in full at any moment. Yikes!
When Money Becomes Worthless:
Back in the early 1920's, shortly after the end of World War I, Germany was saddled, under the terms of the Armistice, with the cost of the war (reparations). The government of Germany was forced to assume an impossible amount of debt. Germany could never possibly repay such debt. The very idea was absurd.
To buy time, the democratic government of Germany, known as the Weimar Republic, resorted to printing paper money in enormous quantities. They had to print paper money so fast that the German government only had time print their paper money one side of the paper. One side. Haha!
There is a story (true?) of a widow who withdrew all of her savings in order to buy her groceries for the week. The amount of paper money filled a wheelbarrow. She painfully rolled the barrow to the grocery store, where she was forced to leave the barrow and the money outside. When she finished shopping, she went back outside to get her money to pay. Her wheelbarrow had been stolen, but the near-worthless money had been dumped on the ground!
There are other stories of paper money being used as wallpaper. Workers would go on strike if they were not paid daily at lunch time, so their wives could rush their wages to the grocery store before the money became even more worthless.
I can now foresee the time when this happens in America. The money will be digital, but I could see a time where it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to fill your gas tank or to buy a few days of groceries.
"George, you're nuts - funny, but bat-snot crazy. The dollar has never been stronger."
It's true. The Euro has fallen to less than a dollar. Russia has invaded Europe, and China is threatening to invade Taiwan. The investing public worldwide is flocking to the dollar, the ultimate safe haven.
But will the dollar still look like a safe haven if Chinese carrier-killer missiles destroy much of our Pacific Fleet in the opening minutes of the war? Think about the replacement cost of this fleet. Remember, I have predicted that the Chinese will invade Taiwan in April of 2023, when the ocean tides are next favorable for their landing craft.
But forget about this "silly" notion of invasion for the moment and think about the definition of dangerous precedent. A dangerous precedent has been defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as an action, situation, or decision that has already happened and can be used as a reason why a similar action or decision should be performed or made again.
Need to become a popular politician? Borrow a whole bunch of money and then give it away to your potential voters. Trump, Biden, and Congress have all done it... and they keep doing it. Folks, if a dog breaks into the chicken house, you have to shoot him. I fear this pork and insane printing of money will never end.
Why aren't you guys committing murder to
get this hard money and servicing course?
At some point, the smart money is going to say, "The U.S. now has an impossible amount of debt. I'm outta here."
In the past, folks, I am often early in my predictions. I started predicting a deflationary depression way back 2004 to my investors. People thought I was nuts. I even wrote a book, The Reverse Multiplier Effect. It was four more years before the deflationary "Great Recession" hit. I was early.
Maybe the Chinese won't attack until April of 2024 or April of 2025. Maybe I am early again; but Japan is rushing to build 1,000 intermediate range missiles. China may not be able to wait any longer.
All of these missiles are conventional. No one wants a nuclear war; but on the flip side, nuclear weapons are no longer a deterrent to invasion. Neither side will ever use them.
If you are saying to yourself, "The Chinese will never invade because we could nuke them back to the Stone Age," then you are smoking that California oregano. Russia invaded Europe. No one used nukes. No one will likely use nukes if China invades Taiwan.
Where To Invest When Money Becomes Worthless:
If the dollar could plunge to pathetic levels, and the stock market could crater as foreign investors flee our shores, where does a wise investor put his money these days?
1. I have always loved farmland. Farmland can't be burned down in riots or blown up with missiles. People always need food.
2. Businesses (stocks) in companies that capture and deliver water. I don't know of any, but if some promoter came to me with the idea of constructing water-catching basins and delivering the water by pipelines to desperate locations, I might be an easy sucker.
3. Gold? Naw. The price of gold has been manipulated for fifty years. The Federal government and the New York investment banks don't want you to know just how worthless our dollar has become. They play games with gold futures to make the price of gold look stable. I think there are a bazillion gold contracts for every actual ounce of gold in America. Don't waste your time. It's a crooked market.
Won't you please...
Did you know that a group of gold producers sued the Fed and the New York investment banks for manipulating (suppressing) the price of gold for decades? After ten long years and millions of dollars in legal fees, the case was quietly settled, with a confidentiality clause. The manipulation of the price of gold continues.
4. This is going to sound very self-serving; but subprime first mortgages on small commercial properties did surprisingly decent during the S&L Crisis, the Dot-Com Meltdown, and the Great Recession. Even though commercial real estate values fell by 45%, most of the hard money commercial first mortgages in our portfolio surprisingly kept making their payments, even though the properties were upside down. In other words, more was owed on the property than the property was worth.
Careful here, folks. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. But I have been moving my company's own profit sharing plan into commercial first trust deeds all year.
I did not start out this training article to sell our first trust deed investments. We have three ravenous investors for every good commercial first trust deed opportunity right now. But in an environment where the U.S. could suddenly lose its status as the world's safe haven, this is where I would personally want to be invested.
And farmland... but I think farmland today only pays about 1% in net rents.