I have some extra money lying around in USD being slowly devoured by inflation. The conventional wisdom is to invest in stocks or bonds in the US. Fundamentally, that’s just gambling on the continued success of empire. Should I buy gold or other metals instead? Are there non-dollar-denominated ways to invest in economic development of the global south instead? I don’t care about returns I just want long-term stability of value
Yes, this is my strategy too. It's definitely a strategy, and not just a reflection of living near the poverty line.
I think you have access to the Hong Kong stock exchange from the US?
The best long term stability of value is an S&P 500 index
Success of US empire is not necessarily correlated with SPY performance
Are you in America? Excuse the answer, but I'm serious. If so-
Water purifier. Big ol' clean metal barrel will do. Preferably not aluminum. Get a filter or make one with bags of clean sand, rocks/gravel and charcoal. Get a lot of charcoal. Rain catchers.
Vitamin and nutrient supplements. Iodine. Prussian Blue. Bleach and disinfectants, masks, gloves. Depends on what you feel would apply to you. Plus they're cheap.
Garden implements. Fertilizer (for gardening, silly.) Tomatoes, onions, potatoes.
(In spaces without dedicated growing spaces you can order indoor grow kits. You can grow more than weed indoors ya know. Combine that with tinned food and you're set.)
Self-defense. Martial arts, a knife, a gun, trapping, etc.
Start talking to others in your community. Not even for the sake of bonding; but knowing who is around you. What their beliefs are. If they are armed. Bond and start talking about community plans with your neighbors and trusted community. Otherwise your investments won't mean much when shit hits the fan.
Most of this is based off the assumption that you want security. Finances, yes, but those finances and investments are for emergencies I imagine. I'm telling you dropping that mindset is better and to invest in things that will make you far more valuable than gold in a shit situation.
You want a physical asset to hold onto? Toilet paper. Not joking.
Thanks for taking the time to write this out! I really appreciate it. Having secure physical resources that are immediately useful is a good idea, I’ll think of what I can do to that extent.
honestly all investments are risky and likely tied to imperialism. you could go the dprk route with bitcoin but now is probably not a good time to buy but i am definitely no expert on it.
you could also invest in chinese stocks but they seem to often get shorted and devalued due to western capital's fickle nature, imo
They're all under valued because China actually curbs harmful monopolies, extreme exploitation that is great for profits, and nationalizes troublesome companies
I suppose they refer to the fact the DPRK uses crypto-coins to evade sanctions. It's not that their whole economy is based on them and really it seems most likely a large amount of the coins they do own have been stolen from the west via hacks so their exposure to actual risk should the whole thing go down in flames is likely to be lower and less impactful than if you as an individual invested in it and the whole thing went down in flames.
Fact is they don't do a ton of foreign trade so the actual amount of crypto-coins used compared to both total size of foreign trade with friendly countries like China and Russia as well as the total size of their economy which isn't foreign-trade oriented is pretty small so again it's not a big risk for them to use them for sanctions evasion whereas the exposure to an individual putting half their savings in crypto is a lot, lot worse.
I'm not particularly an economic expert so take my words with a grain of salt but I don't see crypto as particularly useful as an investment vehicle, it's basically a situation where you either got in on the ground floor and got rich off a fluke OR you're using them to do illegal things like buy narcotics or send funds to sanctioned or designated groups (though with the latter in particular the US can track an trace a lot of the coins back to people eventually so I really wouldn't risk it). Beyond that I don't think they necessarily have a lot of value. Most of the big investors got in fairly early so if most of the larger coins were to say lose 30% of their value they wouldn't be badly hurt whereas you if you bought now and placed your savings in them would be.
