The Best Way to Protect Yourself From Out of Control Governments

By Nick Giambruno, editor, Crisis Investing

You probably know it’s a bad idea to put all of your asset eggs in one investment basket. The same goes for holding all of your assets in one country. But how much thought have you put into political diversification? With proper planning, you can greatly reduce the risk your home government presents to your financial and personal well being.

International diversification frees you from absolute dependence on any one country. Achieve that freedom, and it becomes very difficult for any group of bureaucrats to control you. The results can be life changing. Everyone in the world should aim for political diversification. Though it’s especially critical for those who live under a government sinking hopelessly deeper into financial trouble.

That means most Western governments. The US in particular. To get started, there are four core areas to consider: your savings, your citizenship, your income, and your digital presence.

Diversify Your Savings

It’s crucial to place some of your assets beyond the easy reach of your home government. It keeps that government from trapping your money if and when it implements capital controls or outright asset seizures. Any government can do either without warning.

You can diversify your savings in several ways:

• Foreign bank accounts
  
• Precious metals held abroad
  
• Foreign real estate
  

Foreign real estate is especially helpful. I call it a diversification “grand slam” because it accomplishes a number of key goals at once. Owning real estate in a foreign country moves a good chunk of your savings into a hard asset. One that’s outside of your home government’s immediate reach. Ideally, it’s located somewhere you’d enjoy living.

Unlike digital financial assets, it's probably impossible for your home country to seize your foreign real estate. Owning foreign real estate is one of the very few ways you can legally maintain some privacy for your wealth. In that sense, foreign real estate is the new Swiss bank account.

Foreign real estate often opens up other diversification options. In many cases, owning property in a foreign country makes it easier to open a bank account in that country.

It can also put you on the road to obtaining residency in a foreign country. It can even put you on a shortened path to citizenship in some cases. Lastly, owning foreign real estate gives you a second home, vacation hideaway, or place to retire. It’s an emergency “bolt hole” should you need to escape trouble back home.

Diversify Your Citizenship

One way to diversify your citizenship is with a second passport. Unfortunately, there is no route to a second passport that is simultaneously easy, fast, cheap, and legitimate. But that does not decrease the benefits of having one. Among other things, having a second passport allows you to invest, bank, travel, live, and do business in places you wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

There’s another important reason to get a second passport. No matter where you live, your home government can revoke your passport at any moment under any pretext it finds convenient. Your passport doesn’t actually belong to you. It belongs to the government. Having a second passport means that you can always escape your home country without having to live like a refugee.

Diversify Your Income

Income diversification means structuring your cash flows so you’re less dependent on any one country for your income. The goal is to create multiple sources of revenue from international investment opportunities and trends. Bonus diversification points if you do all this through your own offshore company domiciled in a favorable jurisdiction.

Diversify Your Digital Presence

Moving your digital presence to ideal foreign jurisdictions also adds significant political diversification benefits. This commonly includes your IP address (which often pinpoints you to a precise physical address), email account, online file storage, and the components of personal and business websites.

Plan for Bigger Government

Somehow, someway, your home government will keep squeezing your pocketbook harder and keep subjecting you to escalating, arbitrary, and burdensome regulations and restrictions. Expect more government and less freedom all around. The window to protect yourself closes a bit more with each passing week. The good news is you can start to diversify internationally without leaving your home country, or even your living room.

Still, it’s essential to take the necessary steps before the government slams your window of opportunity shut. If history is any guide, it won’t be open forever. It's much better to have developed and implemented your game plan a year early than a minute late.

International diversification is a time tested strategy to protect you from desperate and out of control governments. Wealthy people around the world have used it for centuries to effectively protect their money and their families. Now, thanks to modern technology, anyone can implement similar strategies.

Regards,
Nick Giambruno
Editor, Crisis Investing

P.S. Taking the simple steps above is now more important than ever. As you'll see, widespread economic chaos is coming… America is about to enter a crisis far more severe than what we saw in 2008–2009. 

Most investors aren’t prepared for what's coming. But Doug Casey and I know how to turn these types of situations into huge profits. And in this video, we share need to know information about the coming global economic meltdown.

Click Here to Watch it Now.

The article The Best Way to Protect Yourself From Out-of-Control Governments was originally published at caseyresearch.com

Should You Invest in the Marijuana Boom?

By Dan Steinhart, Managing Editor, The Casey Report

I was planning to explore the investment landscape of the burgeoning marijuana industry today, but it looks like the party’s already over.


Appearing before the Maryland Legislature, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop testified that 37 people died in Colorado on the first day of legalization from overdosing on marijuana.

What a damn shame. With morbid stats like that, the government can’t possibly allow the legalization trend to proceed any further. People’s lives are at stake!

Except they’re not. Chief Pristoop got those stats from a tongue-in-cheek story in The Daily Currant, a satirical newspaper à la The Onion. He believed it to be legitimate, so he cited it during testimony. Despite the fact that exactly zero people in history have died from overdosing on marijuana.

As you surely know, Colorado and Washington recently became the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational use, joining 18 other states that have legalized it for medical use only. Legalization is gaining steam across the US, and that’s unlikely to change—if only because, other than citing fake facts, opponents of legalization have no argument.

Opposition to legalizing marijuana is dwindling for the same reason that opposition to gay marriage is dwindling: there’s no intelligent reason to oppose either one. Unless, in the case of marijuana, you’re concerned with its potential to cause more car accidents. But if those are your standards, we should criminalize beer, cellphones, and makeup, too.

One thing’s for sure: the investment world is enamored with the idea of a brand new green industry. As an illustration of exactly how hot this infant sector has become, take a look at this screen shot of an email received by a senior Casey Researcher this week. It’s a news release from a mining company, announcing its intent to “diversify” into the legal marijuana business:

An interesting business decision. I’m not sure what synergies exist between mining and marijuana, nor do I have any particular insight into how Next Gen’s management plans to enter the green business. But I applaud its forward thinking.

Apparently, so does the market. Here’s how Next Gen’s share price reacted to the announcement:

It soared over 300%, transforming from a penny stock into a dime stock in one day. Again, Next Gen didn’t grow earnings, discover a new gold deposit, or accomplish anything tangible. It tripled its valuation simply by announcing its entry into the marijuana business. That’s what I call a scorching industry.

So, should you put some speculative money into the hottest cannabis stock? Let’s take a quick tour around the burgeoning industry to get a picture of its investment prospects, focusing on five factors…..

1) Profits Will Plummet

 

Had Al Capone been born in any other era, he would not have amassed a $100 million fortune. It was Prohibition that allowed him to earn extraordinary returns in the otherwise standard business of providing alcohol to people.

Likewise, legal purveyors aren’t going to earn anywhere near the spectacular returns that criminals enjoyed when marijuana was illegal. Drug distributors can become filthy rich because dealing drugs requires taking extraordinary risks. One misstep and you go to jail. Or worse, the rival Mexican cartel mows you down. That risk premium is why illegal drugs are so expensive, and why marijuana costs $300-400/oz in the US. But it won’t for long.

How can I be so sure? Because we already have a glimpse into the future. Uruguay legalized marijuana in December, and an ounce of the stuff costs $28 there, less than 10% of what it costs to obtain it the US.
It’s true that the Uruguayan government controls the marijuana industry tightly and set that $28/oz price. But the cost to produce marijuana there averages just $14/oz. So $28/oz is a reasonable guess as to where the price of marijuana would settle if the market were allowed to clear.

Going forward, profit margins won’t be nearly as fat as they were in the past.

2) The Government Will Be Heavily Involved

 

At least one guy will unquestionably make a killing from marijuana’s legalization. His initials are “U. S.,” and he wears a star-spangled hat.

We’re just two months into legalization, and taxes are already hefty. In Colorado, marijuana is subject to a 2.9% sales tax, plus a 10% tax on retail marijuana sales, plus a 15% excise tax based on the average wholesale price. Washington is no better—it plans to exact a 25% excise tax, plus an 8.75% sales tax.

All told, taxes in these early-adopting states will be in the neighborhood of 30%. And that’s before the feds get their cut (more on that momentarily). Further, taxes are the one exception to the rule, “What goes up must come down.” Someday, tokers might look back longingly at that 30%. After all, the average tax on a pack of cigarettes in the US is 42%.

Last, the marijuana industry isn’t going to be the Wild West. Colorado is working to control pretty much every aspect of the market, as evidenced by its 144-page marijuana Rule Book. You can be sure that other states will follow suit.

3) It’s Still Illegal

 

Though marijuana is now legal in two states, it’s still illegal under federal law. The Obama administration has said it won’t enforce marijuana prohibition in states that legalize it, as long as those states keep it under control. The federal government maintains the same position on medical marijuana, which, somewhat surprisingly, is also still illegal under federal law.

The feds are moving in the right direction, albeit slowly. Two weeks ago, the Treasury Department issued new rules that open the door for banks to do business with legal and licensed marijuana dispensaries.
Of course, once the feds do get on board, they’ll want a piece of the action. So be ready for even higher taxes.

4) Unsavory First Movers

 

It’s an unfortunate fact that, because the industry was just decriminalized recently, those best positioned to jump quickly into the marijuana business are those who were already in the marijuana business. In other words: people who were classified as criminals just two months ago.

Not that they were necessarily doing anything wrong by growing and distributing marijuana before it was legal. I’m sure plenty of growers and sellers are good people trying to earn a buck, just like those who grow and sell any other crop.

But as with any emerging industry, the first movers will be those who already possess an intimate knowledge of said industry. And in the case of marijuana, that means people who were running illegal businesses. So if you invest in their companies, you’re entrusting your capital to someone who’s willing to break the law.

As an investor, that should give you pause. Tread carefully, and dial your skepticism up to maximum.

5) Weak Candidates

 

The investment options in this infant industry are, understandably, limited. We’re a ways off from being able to buy a bushel of hemp on the futures exchange. If you want to invest, you’ll have to go with one of a handful of public companies. And unfortunately, none of them looks compelling.

The six companies in the chart below are the purest plays in the marijuana space. Their performance in 2014 is the stuff of legends—the worst performer gained 243% in the last three months:

But dig into their businesses and you’ll soon find that their value comes from their scientific-sounding names, and not from actually making money.

First, the companies are tiny and only trade on the illiquid over-the-counter markets. Before the share price run-up, only one, CannaVEST, had a market cap above $60 million.

What’s worse, most of them don’t have any revenue. And the ones that do generate revenue spend much more than they earn. Not that this is surprising—hardly any business could become profitable in just two months, so we won’t hold that against them. The problem is their valuations: CannaVEST is worth a staggering $1.8 billion today, and most of the others are all in the hundred-million range.

Let’s put it this way: if an entrepreneur walked into the Shark Tank seeking a $1.8 billion valuation for a company that doesn’t make money, Mark Cuban would laugh him out of the room. Speculative money already took these stocks to the moon. By buying one now, your only hope of profiting is for a greater fool to come along and buy it from you at a higher price.

As I see it, because of sky-high valuations, the risks in this blossoming industry far outweigh the potential reward, at least for a retail investor. I’m sure there are some fantastic private deals out there, and if you’re willing to press the flesh and meet some marijuan-trepreneurs yourself, you could make money.

But for non-full-time investors, you’ll want to watch this trend unfold from the sidelines, waiting for either (1) the speculative bubble to pop, so you can pick up some shares for fractions of a penny; or (2) a leader to emerge and demonstrate it can turn a profit.

Here’s a tip, though: If you’re looking for an investment with potentially spectacular gains, I would like to point you to another drug, this one perfectly legal once it’s FDA approved. What I’m talking about is an impressive biotech startup my colleague Alex Daley, Casey’s chief technology investment strategist, has dug up.

The company is well on its way to launching a breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment—which, if successful, is sure to be a game changer for the medical industry. Clinical trial results are due out in early March, and should they be positive, the stock could easily double on the news… so right now is a great time to get in. Find out more about the company and its revolutionary product in this report.

The article Should You Invest in the Marijuana Boom? was originally published here at Casey Research.

Crude Oil Traders Appear to Shrug Off Syria News....Prices Headed Lower

October crude oil closed lower on Wednesday as it consolidated some of Tuesday's key reversal up. The low range close sets the stage for a steady to lower opening when Thursday's night session begins. Stochastics and the RSI are bearish hinting that a short term top might be in or is near. Closes below the 20 day moving average crossing at 106.46 are needed to confirm that a short term top has been posted. If October renews this summer's rally, weekly resistance crossing at 114.83 is the next upside target. First resistance is last Wednesday's high crossing at 112.24. Second resistance is weekly resistance crossing at 114.83. First support is the 20 day moving average crossing at 106.46. Second support is the reaction low crossing at 103.50.

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October Henry natural gas closed higher on Wednesday and above the 38% retracement level of the May-August decline crossing at 3.680. The high range close sets the stage for a steady to higher opening on Thursday. Stochastics and the RSI are overbought but remain neutral to bullish signaling that sideways to higher prices are possible near term. If October extends the rally off August's low, the 50% retracement level of the May-August decline crossing at 3.842 is the next upside target. Closes below the 20 day moving average crossing at 3.475 would confirm that a short term top has been posted. First resistance is the 38% retracement level of the May-August decline crossing at 3.680. Second resistance is the 50% retracement level of the May-August decline crossing at 3.842. First support is the 20 day moving average crossing at 3.475. Second support is August's low crossing at 3.154.

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The September S&P 500 closed higher on Wednesday as it extends the rebound off the 50% retracement level of the June-August rally crossing at 1629.45. The high range close sets the stage for a steady to higher opening when Thursday's night session begins trading. Stochastics and the RSI are diverging and are turning neutral to bullish signaling that sideways to higher prices are possible near term. Closes above the 20 day moving average crossing at 1657.83 would confirm that a short term low has been posted. If September renews the decline off August's high, the 62% retracement level of the June-August rally crossing at 1611.47 is the next downside target. First resistance is today's high crossing at 1654.20. Second resistance is the 20 day moving average crossing at 1657.83. First support is last Wednesday's low crossing at 1625.00. Second support is the 62% retracement level of the June-August rally crossing at 1611.47.

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October gold closed lower on Wednesday as it extends the decline off last Wednesday's high. The low range close sets the stage for a steady to lower opening when Thursday's night session begins trading. Stochastics and the RSI have turned bearish hinting that a short term top might be in or is near. Closes below the 20 day moving average crossing at 1367.20 would confirm that a short term top has been posted. If October renews the rally off June's low, May's high crossing at 1489.00 is the next upside target. First resistance is last Wednesday's high crossing at 1432.90. Second resistance is May's high crossing at 1489.00. First support is the 20 day moving average crossing at 1367.20. Second resistance is August's low crossing at 1272.10.

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Scott Andrews.....Proof You are Crazy not to Diversify Your Trading

Many commodity traders believe that investors only need to diversify to be successful. But that simply is not true!

No single trading strategy works all the time and diversification can help during the tough stretches by REDUCING your draw downs. Best of all, diversification (done properly) can also ACCELERATE your equity without increasing your overall risk.

Check out this excellent video by our friend Scott Andrews from Master The Gap as he explains the ins and outs of trading diversification. No opt-in required.

The Power of Diversification

During this short, compelling video, Scott explains:

• Why asset diversification is not enough
• 7 ways traders can diversify
• The right vs. wrong way to diversify
• Equity curve example (the power of complementary strategies)
• And much more

Watch This Video Now

Don't worry; there is NO SALES PITCH in this presentation. It's just solid information from a conservative trader that we believe everyone should consider.

If you are interested in adding a new setup and/or market feel free to opt in, then watch your email in the coming days for another free video introducing you to trading the oil market.

Please feel free to leave us a comment and let us know what you think about Scott's video

Proof You are Crazy not to Diversify Your Trading

New Video: How to Invest in Energy

Dan Dicker expert trader reveals the best oil stocks to own and how to diversify your energy portfolio.