The Fed & Derivatives: How Complexity Hides Dishonesty, by Matthew Piepenburg

There’s a reason Warren Buffet has called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.” From Matthew Piepenburg at vongreyerz.gold:

I often close public interviews with the recommendation that investors facing an increasingly complex, distorted and landmine-rich economic setting need to focus on being informed rather than emotional.

Free Power

In other words, facts, cycles and patterns matter—in everything from the history of debt cycles and the otherwise “boring” patterns of bond marketsto an ignored template of centralizationwhich always follows bankrupt financial systems.

Being informed offers clarity; being emotional creates fear.

And clarity is both powerful and free.

One does not need millions to feel more empowered in a world otherwise usurping your power with each passing day via the invisible tax of misreported inflation—i.e., open theft through the hidden yet deliberate fiat currency debasement sovereigns employ to inflate away their own criminally negligent bar tab at your expense.

The entire premise of our enterprise of preserving wealth through real money—i.e., precious metals—is built upon such informed thinking.

Trust Your Own Judgement

This does not mean, of course, that being informed means blind conformity to other informed viewpoints—ours or anyone else’s.

I, for example, enjoy debating the dollar/DXY with folks like Brent Johnson or Henrik Zeberg precisely because they are informed disagreements.

In the end, however, we all agree on gold’s penultimate role in preserving real wealth against paper wealth. As I’ve said elsewhere: Today, the case for gold is almost too obvious…

We All See the Cracks

Even more importantly, such informed opinion makes for better strategies and conversations within an economic and geopolitical backdrop which most of us (left or right, rich or poor, black or white, BTC or gold-bugging) would agree is becoming increasingly distorted, dangerous and well, just plain corrupted.

Such corruption is the direct and objective result of the deliberate mismanagement, complexity and dishonesty that underpins a global financial system racing toward a fourth turning whose massive yet not entirely known risks and consequences are playing out with each passing headline.

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