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authorpocketcow · 5 years

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Pooh Characters as Queer Environmentalists

No seriously. I had a very vivid dream involving all the Winnie The Pooh characters as a group of enthusiastic (and queer) environmentalists who meet once a week to talk about environment things because they’re nerds.

Starring Christopher Robin, Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, Kanga, Roo, Gopher, Eeyore, and Piglet.

· Christopher Robin

o 33 years old

o Head/leader/founder of the Environmentalist Group

o Really interested in saving the whales

o Chill dude, but kind of an airhead

o Everyone thinks he’s some kinda office worker

o One day someone accidentally found out that he’s the CEO of some green-planet organization and runs this group for fun to see what kinds of ideas he can get and to see what people think of environmentalist efforts

o He always credits people for their ideas, but people assumed that he just worked for the company, not that he ran the damned thing

o A pansexual icon

o Has been to every single pride event that their city has ever had

o Rumour has it he started the pride events

o Wilder rumour has it he threw the first stone at the Stonewall Riots

o Even wilder rumour has it that he’s an immortal vampire who survives on the blood of homophobes

o He won’t deny any of these rumours but has yet to confirm it

o Has a genderqueer partner that literally nobody has met

o Seriously, not even Pooh

· Pooh

o 29 years old

o Really wants to save the bees

o Like, REALLY wants to save the bees

o Vegetarian, but because he doesn’t like meat

o Massive sweet tooth; dentists hate him!

o Ace/Aro

o Loves children, wants to adopt his own someday

o Babysits Roo all the time

o Kanga and him are best friends

o He brings little sweets for Roo every meeting

o Perhaps a little bit of a pothead but he’s not addicted

o He just smokes a joint once in a while to chill out

o A stereotypical “make love not war” hippie

o Nice to everyone all the time

o Cries when someone is mean to him

o Gets uncomfortable when people hit on him

o Christopher’s little brother

o A visual artist; uses lots of colours and sells his art at galleries and markets

· Tigger

o 27 years old

o ADHD

o Like SUPER ADHD

o Gay

o Hit on Pooh once but when Pooh got uncomfy he backed off

o Thought maybe Pooh was uncomfortable with gays and was confused and sad

o When he found out Pooh was Ace/Aro he totally understood

o They’re good friends now

o Really wants to save rainforests and trees

o A freelance writer; his books are elementary school Magic Treehouse shit

o Very much into fantasy shit, his non-children’s series’ lore is always the deepest mindfuck ever, how the hell did he even come up with that

o Bestselling author tho

o Kinda famous tbh but he doesn’t like media attention

o He just thinks everybody should have fun all the time

o Does he vape? Probably. Has anyone ever actually seen him do it? No.

o Does he sleep? Probably. Has anyone ever actually seen him do it? Once.

o Kanga caught him powernapping when she came into one of the first meetings really early, but all she did was put a blanket on him and leave to go to the convenience store or something to stay out for a bit longer so he could rest

o He didn’t know who it was until a bit later he figures it was her since she’s always knitting and it was a very pretty knitted thing

o That’s his momma figure now

· Rabbit

o 25 years old

o Vegan and very in-your-face about it

o “Bugs are important to the ecosystem but boy do I hate them in my garden”

o Scifi enthusiast

o Post-apocalyptic things slightly terrify him because he believes that’s how the world is gonna go

o A bit of a conspiracy theorist

o Genuinely believes the government is vaguely spying on everybody

o Did Bush do 9/11? Who knows… but the moon landing was real, and the earth is round, don’t be dumb

o Just identifies as queer, doesn’t like labels

o A very organized person but when he’s very upset perfectionism scares him bc he thinks he’s not ever gonna be good enough and will mess things up on purpose

o Has a long-distance boyfriend

o A farmer

· Kanga

o 38 years old

o Divorced trans woman

o Has a 5 year old son that she fostered as a baby and adopted when he was 4

o Recycles aggressively

o Calls everyone “dear”

o Uses reusable bags and plastic containers all the time

o Knits a lot, everybody always gets scarves or mitts or hats for Christmas

o Usually in the design of ‘planet earth’, but also makes pride flag designs and takes requests for fave colour schemes

o Vegetarian but not aggressive ab it like Rabbit is

o You know what she is a bit aggressive about? Recycling

o If you throw something that’s recyclable in the garbage in front of her...

o Lord help you

o Last man who did that was never seen again

o Okay that’s a lie, he was seen two weeks later

o But he was advocating for a save the whales organization on the side of the road and wearing all thrift store clothing

o She traumatized him into throwing himself into the environmentalist pit headfirst

o Thinks Gopher is just a big softie; is the only one who is super nice to him all the time (besides her son, and Pooh who is nice to literally everyone)

o Kinda has a thing for the grumpy man but won’t admit it

o She’s like an accountant or something, nobody knows what she does for a living but she seems to be well-off

· Roo

o The adopted 5 year old son

o A little bit spoiled, but not just by Kanga, by everyone in the group

o Loves sitting in on the meetings

o His first sentence at 15 months was “recycle that!”

o Loves blue because of recycle bins

o Literally wears nothing but blue

o Will accept things that are less than 100% blue as long as its more than 50% blue

o Also likes things with pink on them

o Thinks Tigger is the coolest person ever

o Doesn’t understand all of Tigger’s books but reads them anyway

o Except the non-children’s ones of course

o Reads everything he can get his hands on

o Don’t let him get his hands on anything inappropriate for a 5 year old

o Asks a lot of questions

o Everyone adores him

o His mama is his favourite person on the planet but also Mr Tigger is so cool

o He likes Mr Gopher too, he thinks Mr Gopher is great because of “how happy Mama is when he’s around”

· Eeyore

o 23 years old

o Has depression

o Trans boy

o Just really wants friends

o Wants to help the planet

o Is a massive pessimist that thinks the world is doomed

o Very smart boy

o Talks about CO2 emissions and carbon taxes

o A university student studying some kinda chemical engineering

o Very quiet

o Bit of a crush on piglet tbh

o Has a big love for superheroes without powers because he loves the idea of things being solvable through hard work mixed with passion and technology

o Except he doesn’t believe it because his depression makes him super pessimistic

o Also a big tech nerd

· Gopher

o 45 years old

o Landlord of their meeting place

o Grumpy ass old man

o Sometimes people are grumpy right back to him and he’s ok with that

o Actually a soft spot for these weird hippies and joins them sometimes but says its because he wants to make sure they’re not damaging the place (they know that’s a big fat lie but won’t say anything)

o Will fight anyone who mocks them

o Has actually fought someone who mocked them

o Has not told them about said fight

o Especially adores Roo

o Thinks Kanga is a bit of an odd woman but also thinks she’s very pretty

o Repressed bisexual

o He thinks nobody knows he’s bi but eventually when he kinda mentions it he realizes everyone knows

o Specifically, Piglet and Kanga are super supportive

o He definitely actually has a crush on Kanga, who knitted him a bisexual flag scarf once

o He wears it all the time but will vehemently deny that it’s the same scarf when called on it

o Big brawny weirdo

o Was a football player in college and can definitely bench-press everyone

o Works construction now, which is why he’s still in good shape

o Actually a brilliant man, can architect and calculate like nobody’s business

o Will help Piglet with his mathematics homework in exchange for Piglet teaching him more things about the LGBT+ community

o After a while he realizes that perhaps genderfluid fits him well but Piglet is sworn to secrecy

o Has a daughter who is institutionalized for her mental health issues that grew beyond his care

o Piglet reminds him of his daughter and he’s very protective

o That’s why he legit fought that asshole who mocked the “little F****t hippies”

o He was almost arrested for assault on that one actually

o The cop was a buddy of his and 100% believed the “defense of those who can’t defend themselves” explanation that Gopher had

o Got off with a warning and fined for “disturbing the peace” or some mundane BS

· Piglet

o 21 years old

o Gay and demiboy

o Anxiety disorders through the roof

o OCD

o Recycling is a compulsion

o Reducing energy consumption too

o He checks his lights all the time

o He walks or bikes everywhere

o He says it’s to reduce CO2 emissions

o He’s just scared of vehicles

o Has some kinda PTSD but nobody knows the source

o He got into a massive car accident when he was little

o Because his father was angry and speeding

o His mother died in the accident

o But nobody knows this! Someday he will tell them tho

o Today is not that day

o Tomorrow is not that day either

o But someday

o Crush on Eeyore

o Also a university student

o Studying mathematics because it makes sense to him

o Gopher reminds him of his grumpy old gay uncle who died when he was in high school

o Feels like he can actually not double-check or cross-reference anything that Gopher teaches him because he trusts him a lot

o Still will sometimes check everything if he’s having a bad day

o Gopher doesn’t mind, he understands that Piglet has a lot of anxiety issues

o Has an exception in his uni file to be able to take twice as long on his exams and tests and get an extra few days for assignments because he checks every single answer 3 times

o His OCD number is 3, everything is 3, he turns his lights on and off 3 times, etc

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isa-ly · 3 years

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OH MY, WHAT’S THIS?

TW: mental health, therapy

Golly gosh, has she really gone and made yet another god damn blog? Yes. Yes she has.

Let me explain myself. I know this is probably like what, my tenth or eleventh online blog that I’ve made now? You would think that I would have a huge and dedicated reader base by the rate and ferocity I create these blogs with, but well, since I forget about every .tumblr.com and .wordpress.com after about a month or two, it comes to no surprise that these unattended digital corpse-pages don’t really have many readers. Should maybe give them a proper burial by hitting that delete button and letting them move on to the afterlife of 1′s and 0′s. But since I don’t even remember half the URLs I came up with, they’re probably just gonna keep peacefully existing in the graveyard that is the the forgotten blog section of the internet.

So. Why another one? Why add onto the pile of aesthetic yet virtually empty “personal” websites?

I’m just going to tell you what my therapist told me: “It seems like you have so many thoughts in your head, it probably feels like exploding.”

Don’t worry, I’m not saying that I’m Miss Big Juicy Brain and too smart for my own good – that’s not what my lovely therapist meant either. The reason she said that to me was because in our latest session, she had asked me to give her a quick rundown of what goes through my head whenever anything emotionally triggering happens to me. I had then proceeded to talk for twenty whole minutes (there go twenty whole bucks, thanks a lot, non-existing public mental healthcare system) about what happened in my old noggin whenever ~A Feeling~ occurred. And I described it in such excruciating detail that I think she stopped taking notes halfway through and just zoned out. Can’t blame ya, Kerstin, twenty minutes of incohesive rambling doesn’t really meet the expectation of a “quick rundown”. Sorry for that.

Anyway, we then proceeded to talk about overthinking, as we have done a million times before. And, as we have also done a million times before, we came to the conclusion that my inner monologue resembles a thirty-meter death-ride water slide, when it comes to the velocity and severity of how fast and far I tend to spiral with my own thoughts.

Now, don’t worry, by now I’ve been in therapy for long enough to know how to safely land back on the floor. However, I did agree with my therapist that my intense introspection does sometimes compromise me in my day to day life, as I will spend days on end in my own head rather than in the world that lies outside of it. That then usually leads to self-isolation and that, in return, leads to even more introspection. Hooray, to unhealthy processing mechanisms!

Alright, enough self-deprication. Basically, the conclusion I came to in that session, was that I’m pretty much the exact opposite of the “no thoughts, head empty” meme. For me, it’s more like “all thoughts, head explode”. And while I’ve been trying to get better at sharing face-to-face what’s going on in my head, I don’t always have the energy to text, call or meet friends and make my brain form words that my mouth then says out loud (which, I realize, is also known as talking).

I have made progress in that direction but ironically, these thought spirals tend to be the exact reason why I sometimes get into the bad mindset of thinking “Ugh, why even bother sharing? It’s already exhausting enough to just think it. Talking and explaining will be even harder.” And I know that that is not entirely true but listen, change comes in waves and you can’t battle all your inner demons at once. It is important to choose your battles accordingly to your strengths.

So, that is what I’m doing. I am choosing a battle by making a compromise. And making a blog.

God, how awfully millenial of me. What’s next? A TikTok account where I ironically document my panic attacks over the sounds of Jason Deulos’ ‘Savage Love’? (Hold on, just gonna note that idea down for later...)

Seriously, I realize that this has a certain bobo-esque, self-absorbed cringe vibe to it (did I really just say vibe, this is worse than I thought). However, I also care for and know myself well enough that I tend to downplay and ridicule the fact that I really do have a massive stick up my ass when it comes to talking about my emotions, my traumas and all those pesky, invasive thoughts. And that’s why Kerstin and me came up with the idea of me simply making a blog where I can dump all my thoughts whenever it feels like they are getting too much.

This is obviously not the first time that someone thought of jutting down what’s going through their head. I am self-aware enough to know that I didn’t invent the concept of writing about my life and inner turmoil. YouTubers and ex-Vine stars already did that before me, just look at the list of New York Times Bestselling Authors and you’ll see it for yourself. And if Gabbie Hannah can publish her own poetry book (never forget “Link ... in Bio”), I can damn well make another unknown blog where I share what seems to have gotten stuck somewhere on the way from my brain to my mouth.

Sorry, by the way, if nobody got those weird references. Whenever I’m not busy bashing my overthinking head against the metaphorical wall of fear of my sharing emotions, I spend most of my time watching drama channels explain why yet another book published by yet another unproportionally famous vlogger is yet again unsurprisingly shit. But that’s not the point of this first blog entry, so let’s let the money-hungry world of YouTubers performing figurative self-fellatio rest.

Bottom line: I need to get better at talking. To people other than my therapist, that is. Because frankly, if that poor woman has to listen to even more twenty minute rants of me dissecting my own broken psyche, she’s probably gonna quit her job and then I officially have no one left to chew through my issues with. And that would be quite unfortunate for everyone involved.

So, I want to practice. Try out the whole brain-to-mouth thing, but in a less confrontational way, by making it a brain-to-keyboard thing first. And not just that, I want to make an active effort in setting myself reminders that no matter how deep and lost I am in my own overthinking patterns, I can always put a stop to it and just spew it out onto virtual paper. To get it out of my system, manifest it into something more physical, read through it, recognize what’s lacking and what I need to change and lastly, editing it into something that makes more sense to me and also others.

In summary, this is kind of just me making my own “How To Talk About Emotions – For Dummies” guide. I expect no one to read all of what me and my sore yet hyperactive mind come up with, but I still gladly invite you to, should you care to see what that looks like. I apologize in advance though, I do tend to over-dramatize and under-estimate the way and amount I write about most things, including my own feelings.

But hey, maybe by writing this blog somewhat close to regularly, I’ll also figure out a way to talk about my emotions in a way that isn’t filled with unnecessarily smart-assy Big Dictionary Words and pop culture references barely anyone understands. Let’s hope for the best.

After it now took me exactly 1.291 words to explain what could have been explained in about two sentences, I’m finally gonna shut up. “Thank the Lord”, I hear you say. Or ... maybe that’s just my overthinker voice and fear of vulnerability that heard you say that? Kerstin would probably smile and nod proudly now. Gold star for me, yay. Just kidding, I never get any cool stickers for my achievements. Honestly, that whole therapy thing is way less fun than I thought it would be, I just want a stamp that says “Great job!” or “Super cool!” every now and then. Is that too much to ask? Okay, I think I see now what she meant when she said that I seem to secretly rely on the approval of others for personal successes so I can compensate the fact that I never give myself any credit for them.

Phew, that whole writing things down idea seems to already pay off. But okay, enough self-revelations for today. I have no idea how often I will actually write on here and even less of an idea what the topics will be. However, I will always include tags and trigger warnings, so that if there actually is someone who reads through it, they can know what each post is about.

So, yeah. That’s it for now. Brain-to-keyboard to you soon. (Get it, that’s my way of saying talk to you soon, because– okay, yeah, you got it. Right.)

P.S.: Yes, the name of the blog is a pun, let me live a little.

#about #introduction

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andrewdburton · 6 years

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The five types of retirement

As you probably already know, I’m a nerd. I’m such a nerd that during my spare time I like to read books about money. But more and more, regular personal-finance manuals aren’t enough. I crave something nerdier! And so, I’ve begun to research the history of retirement. Right now, I have four or five books on my office desk that are all about the origins and evolution of retirement.

Turns out, retirement wasn’t always considered desirable (at least not for employees). In the olden days — back in the late 1800s — “mandatory retirement” caused a great deal of resentment among older workers and there was a popular backlash against it. People wanted to keep working, but as big corporations rose to prominence and power, they pushed for a younger workforce.

I haven’t really read enough about the history of retirement to write intelligently on the subject, but I wanted to share a quick observation on the nature of retirement in 2018.

You see, while the idea of retirement might be relatively young, it’s achieved a level of complexity that I find fascinating. Retirement is no longer one thing. It’s many things. Or many possibilities. I thought it might be fun to visualize what I consider the five most common kinds of retirement in our current economy. (Note: Yesterday, we looked at the standard definition of retirement — and how there’s not really any standard definition at all.)

Traditional Retirement

During the 20th century, a standard model of work gained prominence in the United States (and other developed countries). You got a good job, you worked hard for forty or fifty years, and then you retired around age sixty to enjoy the last decade or two of your life. (Your retirement was funded through some combination of company pension, personal savings, and government aid.)

Graphed, the traditional model of work looks like this:

By the 1970s and 1980s, standards of living had risen enough that some folks began to challenge traditional assumptions, even embraced the idea of leaving the workplace.

“Why should we wait until the end of our days to make time to enjoy life?” they wondered. “There’s got to be a better way.”

Early Retirement

This “better way” turned out to be early retirement. These brave pioneers ran the numbers and demonstrated what would have been an impossibility just a few decades before. If you worked hard to increase your income while simultaneously striving to keep costs low, it was possible to save enough so that you can stop working at fifty. Or 45. Or forty.

Graphed, the early retirement model looks like this:

The key difference between early retirement and traditional retirement is your saving rate.

The traditional retirement model requires a saving rate of 10% (or maybe 20%). The early retirement model requires you to save half your income — or more. If you’re diligent and build a wealth snowball, you’ll eventually reach a “crossover point” (as described in the 1992 classic Your Money or Your Life): The income from your investments will be enough to support your spending. You’ll have reached financial independence.

These two approaches are the most popular paths to retirement, probably because they lead to permanent retirement. Once you stop working, you’re done. To folks still trapped in the Matrix, these might seem like the only options. But I believe there are at least three other types of retirement.

Temporary Retirement

In 1988, Paul Terhorst published Cashing in on the American Dream, one of the first books to explore alternative retirement options. While Terhorst advocated early retirement (as described above), he also explored another kind of retirement, one that we’ll call temporary retirement.

Here’s how the author describes it:

We used to work and then retire. [I suggest] you work, then retire, then consider going back to work. Under this plan you devote your middle years to yourself and your family. During those years your mental and physical powers reach their height. You can explore, grow, and invest your time in what’s most important to you. You can enjoy your children while they’re still at home. Later, after you’ve lived the best years for yourself, you can go back to work if you want to. The choice will be up to you.

Under Terhorst’s plan, you go to work for ten or fifteen years, then you take time off to pursue your passions for as long as your money lasts. This could be ten years or twenty — or it could turn into the rest of your life.

Graphed, the temporary retirement model looks like this:

I haven’t thought much about temporary retirement, but it seems to have some interesting features. For one, you do get to spend your prime years on whatever is important to you. But what I like best is that if you return to work later in life, you ought to have higher earning power and you’ll probably have access to better health insurance. (Finding affordable, quality health insurance is a huge issue for early retirees, especially in the past five years.)

Semi-Retirement

Temporary retirement is one novel approach to leaving the workplace. So too is semi-retirement, which was popularized by Bob Clyatt in his excellent 2005 book Work Less, Live More.

According to Clyatt, semi-retirement is about finding work-life balance. For some, that means continuing with their previous career, but in some sort of reduced capacity. For others, it could mean changing jobs completely to something that pays poorly but offers a sense of satisfaction. And for others, semi-retirement could simply mean supplementing investment income with a care-free job at the local coffee shop or fabric store.

Graphed, the semi-retirement model looks like this:

As I’ve said many times before, I consider myself semi-retired. I’m financially independent, it’s true, but I choose to continue working. Having extra income provides and added layer of security. More than that, however, my work here at Get Rich Slowly (and elsewhere) gives me a sense of purpose.

One of the biggest advantages of semi-retirement is it allows you to leave the rat race at a much earlier age than you might otherwise be able. Even if you’re not ready to quit work entirely, you can opt to find less stressful and/or more fulfilling work. Your financial needs aren’t as great, so you don’t have to choose a job based on income.

Mini Retirements

The last of the five types of retirement comes from Tim Ferriss’ 2007 bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek. In that book, he asks: “Why not take the usual 20-30-year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?” With this model, you work in fits and starts. You might work for five years then take two years off — and then repeat the process all over again. Ferriss refers to these career breaks as “mini-retirements”; you might know them better as sabbaticals.

The advantage of using the mini-retirement model is that you’re able to get the best of both worlds — work and retirement — at every age. The disadvantage is that you never really build up a huge buffer of savings because you’re using that money to fund your sabbaticals every few years.

Graphed, the mini-retirement model looks like this:

When I read The 4-Hour Workweek, I felt like Ferriss was vague on how to make mini-retirements happen. Naturally, I dug deeper into the subject when I got a chance to interview him for Get Rich Slowly in May 2008. Sabbaticals and mini-retirements are terrific options for folks who are looking for a non-traditional career path, and who want to take time off to experiment with travel and entrepreneurship while they’re young. (Kim essentially took a mini-retirement while she and I spent fifteen months traveling across the U.S. in a motorhome.)

Which Type of Retirement Is Right for You?

I know those timelines are teensy-tiny, and I apologize. By their nature, they’re long and wide. Plus, it probably doesn’t help that they’re spread throughout the article. In an effort to add clarity, here’s what they look like next to each other. (You can click the image below to see a larger version that might be more readable.)

The brown part of the bar is “training”, the period during which we’re in school as children and young adults. The green part of the bar is retirement. An orange section is work with a traditional saving rate. A red section is work with a high saving rate.

After all this, here’s what’s important to understand: There’s no one right way to retire. Despite what the Internet Retirement Police would have you believe, each of the options I’ve listed here is valid. They’re each a type of retirement. (Still, I try to use the term “financial independence” instead of “retirement” just to avoid confusion — and arguments.)

Which type of retirement is right for you? It depends. Only you can answer that. How’s your health? Do you like your job? How much money have you saved? What’s your purpose? What are your goals? All of these answers will have a bearing on your decision.

The post The five types of retirement appeared first on Get Rich Slowly.

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/types-of-retirement/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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silviajburke · 7 years

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The Golden Conspiracy

This post The Golden Conspiracy appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

[Ed. Note: Jim Rickards’ latest New York Times bestseller, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, is out now. Learn how to get your free copy – click HERE. This vital book transcends geopolitics and rhetoric from the Fed to prepare you for what you should be watching now.]

Is there gold price manipulation going on? Absolutely. There’s no question about it. That’s not just an opinion.

There is statistical evidence piling up to make the case, in addition to anecdotal evidence and forensic evidence. The evidence is very clear, in fact.

I’ve spoken to members of Congress. I’ve spoken to people in the intelligence community, in the defense community, very senior people at the IMF. I don’t believe in making strong claims without strong evidence, and the evidence is all there.

I spoke to a PhD statistician who works for one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. I can’t mention the fund’s name but it’s a household name. You’ve probably heard of it. He looked at COMEX (the primary market for gold) opening prices and COMEX closing prices for a 10-year period. He was dumbfounded.

He said it was is the most blatant case of manipulation he’d ever seen. He said if you went into the aftermarket, bought after the close and sold before the opening every day, you would make risk-free profits.

He said statistically that’s impossible unless there’s manipulation occurring.

I also spoke to Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz at the New York University Stern School of Business. She is the leading expert on globe price manipulation. She actually testifies in gold manipulation cases that are going on.

She wrote a report reaching the same conclusions. It’s not just an opinion, it’s not just a deep, dark conspiracy theory. Here’s a PhD statistician and a prominent market expert lawyer, expert witness in litigation qualified by the courts, who independently reached the same conclusion.

Now, where is the manipulation coming from?

There are a number of suspects but you need look no further than China.

China wants to do what the U.S. has done, which is to remain on a paper currency standard but make that currency important enough in world finance and trade to give China leverage over the behavior of other countries.

The best way to do that is to increase its voting power at the IMF and have the yuan included in the IMF basket for determining the value of the special drawing right (SDR).

China accomplished that last September when the IMF added the yuan to its basket of currencies.

The rules of the game also say you need a lot of gold to play, but you don’t recognize the gold or discuss it publicly. Above all, you do not treat gold as money, even though gold has always been money.

The members of the club keep their gold handy just in case, but otherwise, they publicly disparage it and pretend it has no role in the international monetary system. China is expected to do the same.

Right now, China officially does not have enough gold to have a “seat at the table” with other world leaders. Think of global politics as a game of Texas Hold’em.

What do want in a poker game? You want a big pile of chips.

Gold serves as political chips on the world’s financial stage. It doesn’t mean that you automatically have a gold standard, but that the gold you have will give you a voice among major national players sitting at the table.

For example, Russia has one-eighth the gold of the United States. It sounds like they’re a small gold power — but their economy’s only one-eighth as big. So, they have about the right amount of gold for the size of their economy. And Russia has ramped up its gold purchases recently.

The U.S. gold reserve at the market rate is under 3% of GDP. That number varies because the price of gold varies. For Russia, it’s about the same. For Europe, it’s even higher — over 4%.

In China, that number is about 0.7% officially. Unofficially, if you give them credit for having, let’s say, 4,000 tons, it raises them up to the U.S. and Russian level. But they want to actually get higher than that because their economy is still growing, even if it’s at a much lower rate than before.

Here’s the problem: If you took the lid off of gold, ended the price manipulation and let gold find its level, China would be left in the dust. It wouldn’t have enough gold relative to the other countries, and because the price of gold would be skyrocketing, they could never acquire it fast enough. They could never catch up. All the other countries would be on the bus while the Chinese would be off.

When you have this reset, and when everyone sits down around the table, China’s the second largest economy in the world. They have to be on the bus. That’s why the global effort has been to keep the lid on the price of gold through manipulation. I tell people, if I were running the manipulation, I’d be embarrassed because it’s so obvious at this point.

The price is being suppressed until China gets the gold that they need. Once China gets the right amount of gold, then the cap on gold’s price can come off. At that point, it doesn’t matter where gold goes because all the major countries will be in the same boat. As of right now, however, they’re not, so China has though to catch-up.

I’ve described some catastrophic scenarios where the world switches to SDRs or goes to a gold scenario, but at least for the time being, the U.S. would like to maintain a dollar standard. Meanwhile, China feels extremely vulnerable to the dollar. If we devalue the dollar, that’s an enormous loss to them.

China has recently sold a portion of its dollar reserves to prop up its own currency, which has come under tremendous pressure. But it still holds a large store of dollar reserves.

If China has all paper and no gold, and we inflate the paper, they lose. But if they have a mix of paper and gold, and we inflate the paper, they’ll make it up on the gold. So they have to get to that hedged position.

China has been saying, in effect, “We’re not comfortable holding all these dollars unless we can have gold. But if we are transparent about the gold acquisition, the price will go up too quickly. So we need the western powers to keep the lid on the price and help us get the gold, until we reach a hedged position. At that point, maybe we’ll still have a stable dollar.”

The point is that is that there is so much instability in the system with derivatives and leverage that we’re not going to get from here to there. We’re not going to have a happy ending. The system’s going to collapse before we get from here to there. At that point, it’s going to be a mad scramble to get gold.

The price of gold will go significantly higher in the years ahead. But contrary to what you read in the blogs, gold won’t go higher because China is confronting the U.S. or launching a gold-backed currency.

It will go higher when all central banks, China’s and the U.S.’ included, confront the next global liquidity crisis, worse than the one in 2008, and individual citizens stampede into gold to preserve wealth in a world that has lost confidence in all central banks.

When that happens, physical gold may not be available at all. The time to build your personal gold reserve is now.

We need to mention Russia here too. Russia is also amassing gold. And since Russia and China aspire to be true gold powers, it’s not enough to have physical gold. It’s also critical to create gold exchanges and gold markets for price discovery and trading.

Currently the price of gold is set in two places. One is the London spot market, controlled by six big banks including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. The other is the New York gold futures market controlled by COMEX, which is governed by its big clearing members, also including major western banks.

In effect, the big western banks have a monopoly on gold prices even if they do not have a monopoly on physical gold. But that could be about to change.

Russia and China are not only building up physical reserves and exploring for more, they are building trading systems that allow for price discovery and leveraged trading in gold.

It may take a year or so to attract liquidity, but once these new exchanges are fully functional, the physical gold market will regain the upper hand as a price maker.

Then gold will commence its march to monetary status, and its implied non-deflationary price of $10,000 per ounce.

The time to buy is now, before that happens.

Regards,

Jim Rickards for The Daily Reckoning

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