The past few days have been disturbing. A brutal death caught on tape. Peaceful mass protests and organized civil unrest on an order of magnitude not seen in a generation, evolving in a few places into looting and rioting.
An image in the Times of the LA Farmer's Market was the gut punch - that's where I used to take my great uncle for coffee well into his 90s, often bringing a toddler in tow. To see it as a front in the conflict over police brutality was a new reckoning.
It's not that I hadn't considered such scenarios might happen. It was more the experience of dissonance when what I had only ever regarded in the abstract began to overlap with my map of reality.
A while back, Gasem linked to a video by Ray Dalio (hedge fund billionaire with a delightfully pugnacious Queens accent) that was so fantastic and intuitive, I sat down and watched it with the wife and kids. Twice.
One of the privileges of having a network of invisible friends through this blog is the ability to be continually exposed to new or uncomfortably complex ideas that don't necessarily support my world view. Gasem is one friend who continually challenges me to approach problems from a different point of view, and helps me probe for weaknesses in my financial thinking (there are many).
I also maintain email correspondence with Dr. S, who was interviewed for the Docs Who Cut Back series. Dr. S has a much wider historical scope of vision, both from an upbringing in Europe and from a family history of grandparents who lost significant property in the chaos of World War II.
Dr. S has previously endorsed the purchase of gold coins to keep as a rainy day backup plan. If you suddenly need to leave the country, having gold immediately available (not in a precious metal fund or even a bank safety deposit box, both of which may be inaccessible in a crisis) can be useful in arranging escape, obtaining black market supplies, or starting afresh in a new country.
Think it could never happen here, to you? My book club just read volumes one and two of Maus by Art Spiegelman, a graphic novel about his father's survival in Nazi concentration camps. The books show a complacent and acculturated group being progressively stripped of rights, property, and eventually humanity. Even slight advantages might determine who lived or died at any given moment during that period.
All of which makes me think that my belief in the stability of our government, American way of life, and our well-laid plans for the future have been resting entirely on a thin veneer that has been peeled back. Revealed are the violent collision of politics, scarcity, and inequality that will reshape our future like shifting tectonic plates.
It's jarring, and we may not recognize the world that results. The measures we take now to prepare for that uncertain future might offer the slim advantages (the accrual of marginal gains so important to investing strategy) that will mark the difference between those who exist and those who thrive.