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CoinCube

The time may come soon when a thread on "Plan B Countries" should be started...  iamback has already given us a taste of which countries he would suggest.

I do not remember where I read a comment once, but it was to the effect of that the time to get OUT is when the pressure FIRST starts getting turned-up for real.  It is clear to all who observe the trend of an "Exit Tax" that it is getting higher and higher.  The comment I read pointed to when the Jews could have left Germany (at not outrageous cost) in the 1930s when all of THAT started.

One can learn from reading History.  While it does not repeat, there are always parallels.

Cross-posting from the Skycoin thread...


Let's not lose too much time to somewhat off-topic tangents, but I just want to interject that Armstrong's model gives daily, weekly, and monthly trading information for numerous asset classes and even political economic issues. And the model has correlated repeating cycles (of human and nature) throughout recorded history. So he is able to make very time specific predictions, such as predicted the top of the Japanese stock market to the day and predicted the closing price of oil for Dec 31 2014.


I wrote similarly recently:


Here is Armstrong's post about that scandal:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/05/21/21188/

and theres still so much common internet user doesnt even realize

Your "open-minded" attitude is a sign of decadence. In China, party officials are publicly demolished for immoral intrigue. Long gone is the era where doing something that could even be misperceived as immoral was considered a liability to public office. And long gone is the right to be politically incorrect on gay rights, feminism, etc..

I don't know how representative this is of France, but looks like a Islamic volcano ready to explode when the economy turns down.

If both your parents don't work, you are likely not to be productive either even if the state pours a lot of money in schools, housing ect. All this money may or may not help but you are still likely not to be productive because you are starting way off with both parents not working.

Good luck.

CoinCube,

Japan is bankrupt so they will have to tax everything. China is not bankrupt, and everything the Communist Party does is for show, while the Communist Party members use Singapore to hide profits offshore. China will make a show of force but in reality 75% of what is being done will be free market. Asians say one thing to save face (and even to appease the G20), and do another thing to maximize profit. In China it won't be a completely transparent system, you have to know how to game the system. That is the way Asia works. It is strange concept for a Westerner to understand since we are so accustomed to transparency and openness of communication. What you think you see of China is not the real China. You would need to have many friends and relationships before you understand the real China and how to game the system in way that is unseen and unspoken.

IMO you have not provided any evidence to refute my assertion that capital controls will applied mostly to Westerners (and Japanese perhaps) but not to Asians because their societies are not bankrupt.

Btw, I could see European countries hunting down their expats for wealth confiscation because European countries are bankrupt.

Plan B countries are those societies (private and public finances and social capital, education levels, socialism levels, etc) that are not bankrupt and thus will not self-destruct taking their citizens down into the abyss.

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CoinCube must be a banker with Goldman-Sachs, look, his reply number is 666...  

I have seen various figures for debt in China and Japan, it is hard to know which figures are "best" for examining their financial situation, so I will not go into that here.

Similarly for capital controls, a topic which I must leave for another rainy day.

*   *   *

The whole issue of "Plan B countries" is very complex, at least for Americans.  There are a slew of factors to be taken into account, and these factors have to be judged for each individual.

1)  Plan B countries among the "developed countries"?  Well, ahh, I don't know.  ALL of them have arguably MOAR problems than the USA.  Canada?  Europe?  Japan?  Australia/NZ?  None are convincing candidates for me.  Lots of debt, risk of authoritarian governments as bad or worse than the USA.  The weather in Canada and most of Europe is unattractive to me.

2a)  Rest of Asia?  Well, not for me.  The only candidate that comes to mind for me would be Singapore.  Reasonably free but disciplined.  Wealthy country that seems to be governed reasonably well with good .gov attitudes.  But, I have not been to Singapore.  I have been to Japan (twice), S. Korea and China.  I would feel very alien in any of those three countries.  I do not speak their languages (knowing the local language is almost required to live happily in any country IMO).

2b)  How about other places in Asia?  Author Robert Kaplan recently (2014) a book on geopolitics there in East Asia: Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific.  Highly recommended.  He discusses (a chapter each, and yes, he went there) most of the major players there in E. Asia (not S. Korea and not Indonesia).  He liked Singapore and Malaysia.  He somewhat liked Vietnam and Taiwan.  He did not like the Philippines.  Re the Philippines, he did not like the excess corruption and poverty there that leave it so far behind their neighbors.  He did not much discuss China (other than their threat to "annex" the S. China Sea, which he discussed at length, the point of the book) but did mention some of their problems (pollution, Communism <--- which struck me as a big problem (for me) when I went, and their own Debt Bubble).  The fact that you must be connected to succeed in China is a big drawback for me (iamback).

*   *   *

So where would an OROBTC go?  Europe and all/most of Asia are not attractive.  Most of the developing world is not so great either (forget Africa, S. Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia).  Most "niche" countries would not work either (Iceland, Liechtenstein).  The Caribbean?  No.

For me, that leaves Latin America.  I speak Spanish, so there is some choice (but I do not speak Portuguese, so Brazil is out for me).  We have our company in Peru (as well as nice in-laws there), so Peru wins by default in my case.  Other places in LatAm might work: Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Uruguay and even Paraguay might be OK.

Note that each person's likes & dislikes are very much a part of the complicated equation!  iamback referred to the relatively violent nature sometimes seen in LatAm society, and yes that too is a factor (especially street crime).  Also corruption.  Also the fact that a country today might seem just fine, but in 10 years not (Venezuela and Argentina are great lessons).