Ladies and Gentlemen! Introducing...A NEW ECONOMIC TERM!

I've coined a new term for unstable, one trick pony financial economies like Iceland and Cyprus: A Bank Branch Republic.

And how about that Malta? From Wikipedia:

Lombard Bank is one of Malta's major banks. Today, Cyprus Popular Bank of Cyprus is the largest shareholder with an equity stake of about 49%. Over 1,200 shareholders, including investment funds, hold the remaining shares. The Bank has a 60% stake in Maltapost plc., the Maltese postal service.


Yowsa!


Now that banks no longer offer interest OR security, they have basically just become mattresses with fees...

Cyprus gets Greeked: is there a lesson for your "real assets?"

We all see what is happening in Cyprus. Governments in the Developed World are behaving more like Third World governments (Cyprus is a Eurozone country, after all). Here in the US, your financial assets are more monitored and regulated than ever before, causing some foreign banks to stop accepting American deposits.

The "rich" world is glued together with promises so detached from reality they're practically psychedelic (appropriate that they were dreamed up by and for baby boomers). This is leading to previously "unthinkable" measures like the one in Cyprus. But these moves aren't new (in '92 Italy had a more modest 0.6% deposit tax), and they certainly aren't a Europe-only phenomenon. In 1933, the US had bank holidays AND the government outlawed the possession of gold, only legalizing it again in the 1970s.

So...

Do you have some extra cash on hand? Smart. Maybe provisions for a week or two in case stores and banks were closed due to some natural or man-made disaster? Smart. Do you maybe possess a few silver coins in case of real trouble? Not a bad move at all.

I mentioned cash, which may annoy some myopic survivalists. "The dollar bill is just paper!!!"

Correct, but I guarantee you any Cypriot who had a cash stash at home before this crisis is faring much better than one who didn't. People do not revert to trading seashells overnight.

While we're on the subject of paper, we should take time to think the next thought. You know what else is just paper? Contracts. Contracts, like dollar bills, are just promises. Cypriots had contracts with their banks. But when quaking duress arrived...bye bye (αντίο!) contract. Remember that this also applies to real assets. Real assets--apart from precious metal coins in your physical possession--are also just backed by paper. A receipt for gold stashed abroad is just a piece of paper. And having a contract for a patch of land in Costa Rica doesn't mean much if you aren't there to protect it (an important lesson for those with "safe zones" established abroad). Squatters are not known for their fear of fine print. Remember, part of the reason that escape ranch you bought in Latin America was so cheap was because assets in countries with less overall stability tend to sell at a discount due to the risk involved in investing there. You remember that free market and its price signals? Stop merely using them as a slogan and start giving them some actual thought.

Politicians interested in nationalization--which of course just means personal gain and aggrandizement for the nationalizing politician and his cronies--also don't worry much about the concerns of survivalists (there is a reason Chavez died a billionaire despite not inventing anything for Apple). Never forget that with just a bit of force, a contract can be nullified (along with the person attempting to enforce it).

Just to drive the point home: you know what else is just paper? The Constitution. Waving it around scares no one. Unless you are able to fold it into the world's deadliest origami sword, it isn't going to help you much.



MOVE ALL YOUR MONEY TO MY TWITTER FEED: https://twitter.com/greatMikePayne

A Merry Aside on Suicide

When someone is bemoaning existence, saying he wishes he weren't alive, often a bystander will say: Well if you hate life so much, why don't you just kill yourself?

No matter how depressed or ill you are, the process of going from living to not living is not a comfortable one. Wishing you were kaput isn't the same as having the resolve to do something about it. Plenty of people wish to be thin, but they don't wish to go through the pain of diet and exercise. Thus, they remain plump. Getting slim is rough, and I'd say the evidence shows that the desire for self-preservation (staying alive) trumps even the desire to be slim (though listening to the song "Stayin' Alive" will make killing yourself much easier).

To off yourself, you have to first overcome the psychological hurdle, which means coming to grips with ceasing to exist. Much harder than ABC, 123, or falling off a log. Yes, the universe existed for billions of years before you came along, but you had the good fortune of not being alive to know that you didn't exist. Still with me? Great. Once you are alive and conscious of it, the tendency is to try to keep living no matter what. Life has always been brutal, and not so long ago, it was a helluva lot more brutal than it is today; much more disease, much less food, much more death all around you meaning much more grief. Yet suicide remained uncommon. Obviously, the self-preservation instinct is almost indomitable, so it takes a humongous amount of will to push past it.   

Assuming you can put all that aside long to enough plan an exit, you then have to face the disagreeable nuts and bolts of suicide. Talk about irksome. You have to picture yourself with your neck in the noose, hopping off the chair and being jerkily choked to death (Ask anyone who's been jerkily strangled with a rope if they enjoyed it. Rarely will they say "I can take it or leave it."). And you have to picture the potential horror of hanging there and suddenly wishing you could get your legs back to the chair. Imagine trying and failing...it is enough to turn a goth chick into a cheerleader. 

Jumping off a building...also a tall order. You have to overcome the mental image of a long, agonizing freefall (picture a rollercoaster made in the Soviet Union), followed by the possibility of not immediately dying upon smacking the pavement. Jumping off the high dive scares most people. Imagine jumping from a much greater height, only in this scenario you're landing on sidewalk rather than water, and in doing so you won't be impressing any hot chicks who might sleep with you later. Advantage: high dive.

Even something which is presumed to be painless (or "instant") like a gunshot to the head requires actually putting gun to temple and having to swallow your steadfast self-preservation instinct. To do so means trying to comprehend oblivion, which is pretty much beyond comprehension. If you try to bypass this horrible inner debate by rushing the gun to your head, you may misfire and merely end up with an eyebrow trim.

Knowing how hardwired we are to try to survive at all costs, it is quite simplistic to just say, "Hey man, if you're unhappy, why don't you kill yourself then?" And considering how grisly these various suicide scenarios are, it is no wonder that most people take the easy way out (i.e., continue to live).

Squeaking Truth to Power

The subway I frequently ride runs past a few colleges, including one for women only. This means I'm lucky enough to overhear the dreams, delusions, and disinformation spouted by America's future embarrassments-in-chief. A slice of conversation I was treated to:

And the professor, he just kept talking about global warming, you know, just so outspoken about it. Just, you know...like, really outspoken.

And this woman would know about climate, because I'm sure she took many rigorous science classes while majoring in Transgender Ceramic Studies.

When people discuss outspokenness as an inherently good thing, it makes me want to eat lit dynamite. No one this side of Andromeda actually believes outspokenness is an inherently good thing. You know when you like someone who is outspoken? When you agree with the things he is outspoken about. You know when you hate someone who is outspoken? When you disagree with the things he is outspoken about. When your boss becomes outspoken about your incompetence, you seldom sing the praises of his candor.

People who assume the glories of outspokenness only apply to their own views is nothing new, of course. I'm sure when Joseph Goebbels became Propaganda Minister, the subway riders of 1933 were forced to hear:  

I love how Goebbels was so outspoken out the Final Solution! He soooo didn't back down! I wonder if he'll sign my dreidel?

The only thing keeping me from stabbing my eardrums out is the fear I would end up encountering a bunch of outspoken deaf people.

I tend to meet women who are logically unavailable

When a woman is thinking out loud about her romantic history, she'll often say: I tend to go for men who are emotionally unavailable.

Somewhere in Hell, Freud is sniffing another line (though maybe in Hell there are no razors to cut up your coke...it is Hell after all) and cackling as newfangled versions of his nonsense continue to confuse otherwise thoughtful people.

Let's walk through this:

So upon meeting this guy in a bar, you immediately sized him up and figured out he was ultimately going to be emotionally unavailable. While the two of you made bad small talk about micro-brews ("Have you tried the Staten Island Guido Stout? It's made with 20% Muscle Milk"), you just divined that three months down the line he was going to be "emotionally unavailable?" This subconscious insight then sent signals to your loins to GO FOR IT..?

Interesting. The same woman who will come running to you, New York Times in hand, screaming that there is a WAR ON SCIENCE!!! will in the next breath declare she was able to do the very thing no human, scientist or otherwise, has ever been able to do: forecast the future. She can't believe people still believe in psychics!!!!, but when it comes to her relationships, she talks like a madame staring into a crystal ball.

Here are some possible alternative explanations:

Maybe you're just incapable of attracting stable men.

Maybe he just doesn't care about the same things you care about. Just because someone doesn't get as emotional about something as you doesn't make that person "emotionally unavailable." Have you ever stopped to think you might be emotionally overavailable? Maybe you're an emotional 7-11 that remains open even on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe you should close once in a while.

Maybe you simply like him far more than he likes you; hence the lack of reciprocation. Even if his feelings equal yours, remember that men in general do not chatter nonstop like women. Failing to be effusive and monotonous doesn't make one emotionally unavailable.

Maybe you just go for men with blue eyes. You see a blue-eye chap, the blue eyes trigger the initial spark, and by coincidence, you happen to have met five blue-eyed losers in a row. The common denominator that grabbed you at the outset was the eyes, not the emotionally unavailability you somehow foresaw.

Most relationships, like most things in life, fail, so no matter what kind of men you are attracted to, it isn't going to work out THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE TIME, regardless of whether or not you have some fatal flaw. And because relationships have such a huge impact on us, we are inclined to construct powerful narratives and rationalizations to explain their failure. Also, there is the reality that people today play the field a lot more before getting married. When they do get married, it lasts six months, leading to more field playing. All of a sudden you've got a generation of women with 85 failed relationships to ruminate on. Combine that with the insidious boom of the self-help, pop psychology, and MAKE IT WORK! industries, and next thing you know every woman is approaching her relationships with the confidence Bambi had just after seeing her mother get it between the eyes.


Have you noticed men never talk about women being emotionally unavailable? With men and mating, the decision is binary: either a woman is attractive enough to have sex with or she isn't. If she is, and the pursuit works up to a point, fine. If not, there are several million other women between the ages of 18 and 40.

Another Phrase to be Retired

Often when a high profile person --a coach, a CEO--quits his job, he announces: I'm quitting to spend more time with my family.

Any time someone utters this upon leaving a job, it means things were going really, really badly and were about to get much, much worse. No one quits anything that is going well, especially not to "spend more time with his family." If someone has a job important enough to require notifying the press of his departure, it means he's spent many nights over many years neglecting his family so that he could attain that position in the first place. You don't become CEO by leaving every day at 5:00 to watch your daughter flop around in ballerina clothes. How convenient that this hyperambitious captain of industry suddenly became a family man the moment his career started to flounder.

You want to spend more time with your family? Kick your least attractive mistress to the curb and quit seeing that shrink every Tuesday. Your paramours and shrink are just crutches to help you deal with the guilt of neglecting your family anyway, so spend those hours at home and you'll solve two problems at once.

The Loud Shall Inherit the Earth

Since the financial crisis, collapse has been on everyone’s lips. The players in this general talk of implosion: doomsday preppers, gold bugs, and gun nuts, and people who are fashionably hysterical about doomsday preppers, gold bugs, and gun nuts.

So let’s say society took that silly walk over the precipice: who would rise under such a scenario? My guess is that it would be the great pandering orators; feel good folks like Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin. Substance barely matters here in the pre-apocalypse, but at least it matters somewhat. Right now people do take notice if you're Dr. Prodigy Patel, the world's greatest neurosurgeon. They may not care as much about your frontal lobe tinkering as they do about born again benchwarmer Tim Tebow, but at least neurosurgeons still get some respect.

But if society broke down and existence became more like The Road, substance would not matter at all. No one would follow a mousy brain doctor.

The people who would rise would be the great superficial talkers, the ones who could fill the threatening silence with verbal comfort food. Anyone who spoke with precision or unassuming expertise would get nowhere. The untrained ear (which comprises the vast majority of ears), barely understands subtle oration now, and would make even less of an effort to fathom it while scrounging for another unappetizing post-apocalypse meal.

Ironically, one of the people most heralded by those worried about collapse is a prime example of someone who wouldn’t rise under such circumstances: Ron Paul. Consider just some of his talents: medical training, military experience, and an esteemed track record as a high school athlete. The man has about as much substance as you're likely to find in a person. But despite all these qualities--qualities that are uncommon by themselves, let alone combined in one person--no one would follow him post-apocalypse. Why not? Because Ron Paul isn't a rousing speaker. He would either bore the survivors or go over their heads. They might even trample him in their rush to hear Oprah Winfrey's next speech.

Being a verbose dolt is always a surer path than being a learned square. It is an even surer path these days; just look at the 40 year boom in the self-help racket. Self-help exists because once people leave the nest to become adults, they still look for people to be their parents. In the pre-self-help days, when people didn't get divorced every three years and switch religions each time there was a heat wave, their spouses and clergymen acted as de facto parents. Whether they actually loved their spouses or believed their clergymen was irrelevant. They still had a stabilizing force to pat them on the head and say that everything was going to be okay. As those stabilizing forces shriveled, they turned for direction to sophistry factories likes Dr. Phil.

Post-apocalypse, we would all feel like children again, and the people who would capitalize on this would be the folks best able to recite "reality" back to us in bumper sticker form. Even without electricity the soundbyte would be king (perhaps especially, as there would be no Wikipedia to fact-check people with).

So for those who think a societal breakdown would cause a Great Purging of the Morons, I couldn't agree less. You optimists would probably be horrified by the folks who would rise in the wake of such a collapse. We would probably see a lot of pro-wrestlers become leaders; not because of their biceps, but because of their tongues. It wouldn't be a reflective Buddha-type who would take the reins. It would be Ric Flair.