“You kids change partners more than square dancers.” – That 70’s Show
Marie Antoinette should have known the time was right for a revolution in France – she had a Coup Coup clock.
Okay, the title is clickbait. We all know the Four Best Stocks For After The Death Of The Last Human On Earth are Rock, Paper, and Scissors. Oops. I think the real answer is Rock, Rock, and Rock. I mean, who is going to make the paper and the scissors?
Oh, wait, I said four.
Add Google®, I guess.
One constant theme of this blog since I started writing it is that I want to convince everyone I can that tomorrow may not look like today. I think this is important, because too often we start to think that our lives of today are the lives that people will live forever.
Why?
That’s the way we’re wired, to think that tomorrow will look like today. It’s complacency.
Dozens of my ancestors lived as kings, having all the food they wanted and the choice of the peasant maidens in the dozen miles (metric conversion of one deciliter) around the mud hovel they lived in. It may sound dreary, but it’s still better than Netflix®.
Genghis Khan is far better known than his brother, Gingivitis Khan.
My ancestors lived every day of their life just like that, until they died at age 32 after they got a nasty infection because they were sharpening their bronze and flint nosehair trimmer, and accidentally conquered China. That seems to keep happening. I blame . . . well, all the people that conquered China.
For 100,000 years our brains, as wrinkly and wonderful as they are, grew up in a world where yesterday was mostly like today, and today is mostly like tomorrow. Except for you people who have wonderful smooth brains. I think I have some Bernie Sanders™ coloring books for you.
There’s a danger to thinking that tomorrow will be just like today.
Let’s pretend you’re a turkey on a farm. There’s a nice farmer that feeds you every day. What a nice guy! You keep gaining weight, and getting bigger.
What a nice farmer! Farmers must love turkeys.
Then, one November near Thanksgiving the impossible happens: the farmer fires the turkey due to the COVID-19 outbreak and his turkey 401k drops 90% and his turkey wife tells him that . . . all those eggs? Not his.
That turkey has found a fate worse than being roasted at 350°F for three hours (6.02×1023 Watts for six fortnights). Turkey alimony.
The point remains: life changes in an instant, never to return to the way things were.
I shot my first turkey this year. Scared everyone in the meat aisle, and now I’m banned from Wal-Mart.
Here’s another one (I’ve used this example before): I’m quite sure that there was a British guy at the dock watching as the last Roman Legion left Britain in 407 A.D. What was he thinking?
“The Romans have been in Britain since 43 A.D. They’ll be back. Why wouldn’t they?”
It’s nearly a 100% chance that was exactly what he was thinking. Our hypothetical British dude had never lived a single day when Roman troops weren’t controlling Britain. They have to come back, right?
Well, not really.
There are reasons that hordes of Roman coins are found buried in Britain.
When Rome was strong, a Denarius (Roman coin) contained about $4.00 worth of silver at today’s prices. As Rome continued, successive Caesars trading in Rome’s military might, reduced the amount of precious metals in the Denarius until it hardly contained a whiff of silver.
I hear there are extraterrestrials living in Rome – someone said that there were Italiens there.
Then one November near Thanksgiving, the impossible happens: the guy in Britain gets fired and the Roman 401k drops 90% and his British wife tells him that Joe Biden (who was only 35 in 407 A.D.) was elected. The worst part?
Joe Biden is carrying the British woman’s baby.
Our Roman’s world collapses. Everything that he knew changes overnight.
When archeologists go digging in old British trash piles, they find something interesting. The trash at the bottom of the pile (when Rome left) contains really cool broken plates. Archeologists love plates.
Why?
Because angry wives break them all the time, so they make it easy to date a culture by the number of wives that go crazy and start throwing plates. Apparently, the number of mad wives that throw plates is a scientific constant like the speed of light, so trash pickers archeologists can date the change in a culture based on broken plates.
The archeologists determined this: the broken dishes at the time the last Roman Legions pulled out of Britain were awesome. They were great dishes. And everyone had them. It turns out that dishes in the Roman Empire were mass-produced in southern France and shipped everywhere in the Roman Empire. Southern France was the Wal-Mart® of quality dishware.
You can plainly see that Indiana Jones’ least favorite band is the Rolling Stones.
Then archeologists looked at dishes that were 100 years later in the trash pile. They knew this particular trash pile was a king’s trash. The dishes in the king’s trash were something that a kind parent would have congratulated a mildly retarded child for because the mildly retarded child tried really hard.
But these Roman plates weren’t widely available – only a king could afford them.
History happens one day at a time. People lived it, the hard way. Let me give you some examples that might add some perspective:
- A French girl born at the start of the French Revolution would have been 26 and had multiple children when Napoleon finally lost at Waterloo.
- A German girl born at the end of World War I would have been 27 and had multiple children before the end of World War II.
- An American girl born at the end of the Clinton administration already has 43 earrings, sixteen tattoos, and herpes.
What I’m trying to explain that there are two types of changes the first one is fast, really fast, like the turkey’s bad November day. The second type seems fast only when viewed from 200 years in the future. Remember, love can last for a lifetime, but herpes is forever.
In my estimation (for what it’s worth) we are in an atmosphere where both types of change will happen. We will have sudden changes, like the turkey, or like Marie Antoinette. These will be changes we cannot go back from. If you burn a receipt from Arby’s©, there’s no going back to get those curly fries if they shorted you.
We all burn our receipts from Arby’s™ as soon as we get home, right? Otherwise The Man would know how much we like Horsey Sauce®, and you where that leads:
Tyranny.
I digress.
But I will* note that I had a conversation with a friend over a year ago. He and I were talking about investing and other things. During this conversation, I had an epiphany. Where was my money? Mainly in a single bank (this has now changed).
Where does the Federal Reserve hide its economic failures? In debasement.
My question to my friend then was this: “How much of your money is diversified?”
His response was, “Well, it’s in mutual funds, and in a wide variety of stocks and bonds. So it’s diversified.”
I followed up: “No, I mean how much of all of that is in dollars?”
There was a long pause. “All of it.”
I guess this post is mainly to point out that just like we don’t buy things in 2020 with a pocketful Roman coins, and we don’t buy things with French Francs from before their Revolution, and we can’t buy things with Soviet Rubles, how long will we be able to buy things with Dollars?
Just asking.
I’m not even suggesting any particular path, though I will disclose that if everything goes well, my kids might inherit some silver and gold when The Mrs. and I pass on. Like any turkey, I know one thing: tomorrow generally looks like today.
Until it doesn’t.
*Standard I’m Not A Financial Wizard Blah Blah Blah And If You Listen To Me For Financial Advice You’re Insane Differently Mental Disclaimer.
