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

Top Two Ways to Store Wealth Abroad

Nick Giambruno sits down with Doug Casey to get his take on what his favorite places and ways to store our wealth abroad.

Nick Giambruno: For centuries, wealthy people have used international diversification to protect their savings and themselves from out of control governments. Now, thanks to modern technology, anyone can implement similar strategies. Doug, I’d like to discuss some of the basic ways regular people can internationally diversify their savings. For an American, what’s the difference between having a bank account at Bank of America and having a foreign bank account?

Doug Casey: I’d say there is possibly all the difference in the world. The entire world’s banking system today is shaky, but if you go international, you can find much more solid banks than those that we have here in the US. That’s important, but beyond that, you’ve got to diversify your political risk. And if you have your bank account in a US bank, it’s eligible to being seized by any number of government agencies or by a frivolous lawsuit. So besides finding a more solid bank, by having your liquid assets in a different political jurisdiction you insulate yourself from a lot of other risks as well.

Nick Giambruno: Moving some of your savings abroad also allows you to preempt capital controls (restrictions on moving money out of the country) and the destructive measures that always follow.

Doug Casey: This is a very serious consideration. When the going gets tough, governments never control themselves, but they do try to control their subjects. It’s likely that the US is going to have official capital controls in the future. This means that if you don’t have money outside of the US, it’s going to become very inconvenient and/or very expensive to get money out.

Nick Giambruno: Why do you think the US government would institute capital controls?

Doug Casey: Well, there are about $7 - 8 trillion, nobody knows for sure, outside of the US, and those are like a ticking time bomb. Foreigners don’t have to hold those dollars. Americans have to hold the dollars. If you’re going to trade within the US, you must use US dollars, both legally and practically. Foreigners don’t have to, and at some point they may perceive those dollars as being the hot potatoes they are. And the US government might say that we can’t have Americans investing outside the country, perhaps not even spending a significant amount outside the country, because they are just going to add to this giant pile of dollars. There are all kinds of reasons that they could come up with.

We already have de facto capital controls, quite frankly, even though there’s no law at the moment saying that an American can’t invest abroad or take money out of the country. The problem is because of other US laws, like FATCA, finding a foreign bank or a foreign broker who will accept your account is very hard. Very, very few of them will take American accounts anymore because the laws make it unprofitable, inconvenient, and dangerous, so they don’t bother. So it’s not currently against the law, but it’s already very hard.

Nick Giambruno: What forms of savings are good candidates to take abroad? Gold coins? Foreign real estate?

Doug Casey: Well, you put your finger on exactly the two that I was going to mention. Everybody should own gold coins because they are money in its most basic form—something that a lot of people have forgotten. Gold is the only financial asset that’s not simultaneously somebody else’s liability. 

And if your gold is outside the US, it gives you another degree of insulation should the United States decide that you shouldn’t own it—it’s not a reportable asset currently. If you have $1 million of cash in a bank account abroad, you must report that to the US government every year. If you have $1 million worth of gold coins in a foreign safe deposit box, however, that is not reportable, and that’s a big plus.

So gold is one thing. The second thing, of course is real estate. There are many advantages to foreign real estate. Sometimes it’s vastly cheaper than in the US. Foreign real estate is also not a reportable asset to the US government.

Nick Giambruno: Foreign real estate is a good way to internationally diversify a big chunk of your savings. What are the chances that your home government could confiscate foreign real estate? It’s pretty close to zero.

Doug Casey: I’d say it’s just about zero because they can make you repatriate the cash in your foreign bank account, but what can they make you do with the real estate? Would they tell you to sell it? Well, it’s not likely.

Also, if things go sideways in your country, it’s good to have a second place you can transplant yourself to. And I know that it’s unbelievable for most people to think anything could go wrong in their home country—a lot of Germans thought that in the ’20s, a lot of Russians thought that in the early teens, a lot of Vietnamese thought that in the ’60s, a lot of Cubans thought that in the ’50s. It could happen anywhere.

Nick Giambruno: Besides savings, what else can people diversify? How does a second passport fit into the mix?

Doug Casey: It’s still quite possible—and completely legal—for an American to have a citizenship in a second country, and it offers many advantages. As for opening up foreign bank accounts, if you show them an American passport, they’ll likely tell you to go away. Once again, obtaining a foreign bank or brokerage account is extremely hard for Americans today—that door has been closing for some time and is nearly slammed shut now. But if you show a foreign bank a Paraguayan or a Panamanian or any other passport, they’ll welcome you as a customer.

Nick Giambruno: The police state is metastasizing in the US. Is that a good reason to diversify as well?

Doug Casey: It’s a harbinger, I’m afraid, of what’s to come. The fact is that police forces throughout the US have been militarized. Every little town has a SWAT team, sometimes with armored personnel carriers. All of the Praetorian style agencies on the federal level—the FBI, CIA, NSA, and over a dozen others like them—have become very aggressive. 

Every single day in the US, there are scores of confiscations of people’s bank accounts, and dozens having their doors broken down in the wee hours of the night. The ethos in the US really seems to be changing right before our very eyes, and I think it’s quite disturbing.

You can be accused of almost anything by the government and have your assets seized without due process. Every year there are billions of dollars that are seized by various government entities, including local police departments, who get to keep a percentage of the proceeds, so this is a very corrupting thing.

People forget that when the US was founded there were only three federal crimes, and they are listed in the Constitution: treason, counterfeiting, and piracy. Now it’s estimated there are over 5,000 federal crimes, and that number is constantly increasing. This is very disturbing. There is a book called Three Felonies a Day, which estimates that many or most Americans inadvertently commit three felonies a day. So it’s becoming Kafkaesque.

Nick Giambruno: Thanks, Doug. Until next time.

Doug Casey: Thanks, Nick.

Editor’s Note: The US is nearing the worst financial disaster of our lifetimes. It’s inevitable. And it’s the single biggest threat to your financial future.

Fortunately, you can learn the ultimate strategy for turning the coming crisis into a wealth-building opportunity in this urgent video from New York Times best selling author Doug Casey.

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The article Doug Casey’s Top Two Ways to Store Wealth Abroad was originally published at caseyresearch.com.

Citizenship as a Weapon: Travel Controls and What You Can Do About It

By Nick Giambruno

It’s an extremely potent weapon, yet most are not even aware of its existence. That is, unless they have been unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of it.

The weapon I’m referring to is travel controls, also known as people controls. It’s the power any government has to limit the ability of its citizens to travel. They do this by restricting the issuance of travel documents like passports. Any government can use this weapon can at a moment’s notice. It just needs to find a convenient pretext. Many countries in the past have notoriously turned to people controls. For example, the Soviet Union would routinely revoke the citizenship of its perceived internal enemies.

Recently, look at how the Dominican Republic stripped tens of thousands of people of their citizenship with no due process. Or how the Syrian government previously refused to renew the passports of Syrians abroad whom it suspected of being associated with the opposition. Or how the US government revoked Edward Snowden’s passport with the stroke of a pen. These are but a few of countless examples. The point here is not to pick good guys and bad guys. The point is that there are many instances throughout history and modern times that prove that you don’t own your own passport or citizenship… the government does. And they use them as a weapon.

If you hold political views that your government doesn’t like, don’t be surprised if they restrict your travel options. Unfortunately, the situation is getting worse. Over the last couple of years, there have been several attempts to pass a bill that would make it easier for the US government to cancel the passport of anyone accused of owing $50,000 or more in taxes. I suspect that sooner or later Congress will pass this bill. Fortunately, there is a way to protect yourself from these repressive measures. More on that in a bit, but first let’s look at the most common forms of travel controls.

Different Shapes and Colors

Desperate governments always seek to control money with capital controls and people with travel controls.
Here are the three most common forms of the latter:

1. Soft Travel Controls
These include arbitrary fees and burdensome bureaucratic procedures. These measures amount to unofficial travel controls. It’s similar to how FATCA works with money. FATCA doesn’t make it illegal to move capital outside of the US. But it achieves the same effect by imposing onerous regulations that can make it impractical. In the same sense, the government could achieve de facto people controls through deliberately excessive rules and regulations.

2. Migration Controls
Migration controls are official restrictions on the movement of a country’s citizens. Sometimes governments will put restrictions on certain citizens from leaving the country. This is especially true during times of crisis and for those who have accumulated some savings. Many people feel that they can simply wait till things get bad and then exit. But it’s likely the politicians will have slammed the door shut by then. For example, after Castro came to power in Cuba, the government used to make its citizens apply for an exit visa to leave the island. They did not grant it easily.

3. Revoking Citizenship and Passport
This is the most severe form of people and travel controls. Preventing people from leaving has always been the hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Unfortunately the practice is growing in so-called liberal democracies for ever more trivial offenses. In the US, for example, the government can cancel your passport if they accuse you of a felony. Many people think felonies only consist of major crimes like robbery and murder. But that isn’t true.

The ever expanding mountain of laws and regulations has criminalized even the most mundane activities. A felony is not as hard to commit as you might think. Many victimless “crimes” are felonies. A study has found that the average American inadvertently commits three felonies a day. So, if the US government really wants to cancel your US passport, it can find some technicality to do so…. for anyone.

Second Passports - An Antidote to Travel Controls

Here’s what my colleague and the always insightful Jeff Thomas has to say about travel controls:

As a country approaches an economic collapse, a crystal ball is not necessary to predict that, amongst the actions of the government, will be increased currency controls, travel controls, tariffs, and a host of other last-ditch efforts to keep the sheep penned in - to assure their presence for a final shearing.

What remains for the reader to determine, if he is a resident of one of the nations that is presently in decline, is whether he: a) believes that, in the future, his ability to travel internationally may be either restricted or prohibited; and b) whether he should take steps to assure his liberty for the future. If so, it might be wise to do so before he actually has lost his ability to travel.

If you have only one passport, you’re vulnerable to travel controls. I think it’s absolutely essential to obtain the political diversification benefits of having a second passport. You’ll protect yourself against travel controls. You’ll give yourself peace of mind knowing that you will always have options.

Among other things, having a second passport allows you to invest, bank, travel, reside, and do business in places that you could not before. More options mean more freedom and opportunity. I believe obtaining a second passport makes sense no matter what happens.

Unfortunately, getting one isn’t easy. There are no solutions that are at the same time cheap, easy, fast, and legitimate. Worse, there’s a lot of misinformation and bad advice out there that could cause you big problems. It’s essential to have a trusted resource to guide you through the process. That’s where International Man comes in.

You need to know the best countries to obtain a second passport in and exactly how to do it. We cover that in great actionable detail in our Going Global publication. Normally, this book retails for $99. But we believe this book is so important, especially right now, that we’ve arranged a way for US residents to get a free copy. Click here to secure your copy.

The article was originally published at internationalman.com.

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