full image - Repost: I sent a feeler out into the future, and it just got back to me. Having a hard time interpreting its data. But if $280 QQQ breaks, will American Exceptionalism go down with it? (from Reddit.com, I sent a feeler out into the future, and it just got back to me. Having a hard time interpreting its data. But if $280 QQQ breaks, will American Exceptionalism go down with it?)
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So get this, back in late March as Ukraine burned, bludgeoned by the invading army, I started prepping. I’m a liberal. A NYC liberal. I’m not much for conspiracy or preparation, because I believe the government will always take care of me, but I did realize the city would make for a high priority target with cyber attacks that could take down the grid. I lived through the blackout in 2003, and old-timers here still talk about the absolute chaos that reigned during the 1977 blackout (anybody reading this remember that?).Food and water then, were my priority, and the list expanded slightly. Those on the other political spectrum will be proud of my thoughtfulness here:Water purification deviceSmall syphon for extracting gasoline from cars (junkyards use these)Spare bicycle tiresSingle 50 gallon drum (the kind bad drivers run into when misjudging a highway exit)AntibioticsCanned fishVitaminsHoneyhttps://preview.redd.it/6sabs5e2z2591.png?width=4032&format=png&auto=webp&s=38dbf4058056a7124bcd07ad2b6645aaf886718dThe last item—honey—🍯 was Manuka honey. This honey is special. It only comes from New Zealand. Specifically, from bees that feast on the Manuka plant. It’s quite expensive ($3 an oz), addictive, and has a plethora of uses, from digestive health, to the highest quality hair and beauty products. My theory here was that I could buy nature’s most nutrient-dense food (expiration dated 2027), which is a guilty pleasure I enjoy at even the best of times, and if I didn’t need it because homo sovieticus ended his Ukraine incursion, it’s easy to sell—and would keep pace with inflation.“So you’re getting paid to borrow it,” a friend of jewish heritage pointed out.“More like a carry trade borrowing from a life insurance policy,” I said.Enter: Meta Marketplace (better ring to it than Facebook Marketplace no?)Let’s cut the crap. I’m not sure how your locale works, but in NYC, Meta Marketplace is the go-to for a rapidly increasing demographic who’ve been displaced by inflation, symbolic sanctions, and a self-imposed recession. Zuck is really starting to heat up here, and he’s sticking to his guns, pruning value off every retail criminal and shady arbitrageur in the US, encroaching on the territory of dollar stores, and ignoring police union calls to reign in his unregulated bazaar. It’s here you can find Tide selling for 25% off, John Varvatos leather for 50% off, and bogo’s on that Johnny Depp cologne and Läderach chocolates. This is where Zuck’s legacy business is at its finest IMO, where finally it's taken on the look of what it is, and there’s no reason for all the smooth skin and color grading of that weird metaverse shit. Because right now, people need to offset their losses at the pump and prices elsewhere which have put a green candle through heaven’s floorboards. Anyway, I joined Zuck’s Silk Road Marketplace--this was back in late March this year, listing a single unit of 8.8 oz Manuka honey. No deals, no bogo, listing it 5% higher than the current retail price. And I said this:“When someone actually buys this, we’ll know we’re either at, or very near the mid-term market bottom.”On June 9th, contact was made with a buyer.https://ift.tt/BrS5kD3 sounded from across the room and my eyes met Ira’s. We were getting ready to fish in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Ira had a Yeti cooler filled with that Sierra Nevada Torpedo, an IPA so sour you might as well fill a growler with rainbow-slicked water from an East River tributary. I cautiously approached my phone. I don’t use Facebook/Messenger for anything other than Marketplace window shopping by the way, checking in anytime ABC7 airs surveillance footage of a group running not from a teen making good on his 4chan manifesto, but fleeing to the safety of Meta Marketplace with armfuls of Veblen goods, purloined from the racks, displays, and mannequins of luxury stores.“Is this still available?” The message innocently read.“Ira!” I called, but he was already wide-eyed staring over my shoulder, past my phone screen unimpeded, and into that ultimate secret place, which we all know is called the portfolio.“Yes,” I wrote back, visibly shaking.Ira had me pull up the price of oil while he was there. WTI was trading at $122 bbl. He hissed.What I didn’t tell you is that I made a promise to myself in March to go long when that honey got sold. But was it an outlier? Was my tickler into the future the result of something else? Ira back then squared his shoulders and boasted he’d lever up if it sold. So here we find ourselves Ira and I small figures in a curious situation. Because this honey sale coincides closely with $280 QQQ. That’s my line in the sand.We’re only 2.5% away from that. That was the bottom last month and it held. Will it be a double-bottom? If it doesn’t hold, I’ll go on record here, in the presence of this hardened audience and say, we’ll have a 1929 moment this summer, and it will be a Japanese financial implosion. I’m am telling you now, they can't withstand the lows that come after a break of $280 QQQ and what that decollateralizes. And since Japan is the happy buyer of the majority of our debt (China has been offloading Treasuries since 2010), such an event should set the USD like a marble ready to get fired into the parabola of hyperinflation, which I posit, China’s naval blockade of Taiwan will force. Two Decisions we’ll have to make as I talked about in a previous post China will force with their 2023 blockade:Go to war and go hyperDon’t go to war and lose the 21st centuryFor the prudent trader, it would seem $280 QQQ is made for the option play known as a straddle, whereby an equal amount of calls and puts are bought at the same strike price with the same expiration date.If $280 breaks, then I’d assume a 50% drawdown is logical. Bear markets last an average of 289 days. A bear market is defined as a drawdown of more than 20% in any 4Q period. On the other side of this bear however, I don’t know what money or collateral will look like. More on that momentarily.If $280 holds, then I’d expect horn gore. Complete bullish horn gore. Whatever alleles on WSB genes exist for greed will be fully expressed. We’ll challenge the ATH (not in real terms of course because of inflation) before the famine comes destabilizing the Middle-East and North Africa, before the Turkish Lira’s hyperinflation to nada and destabilization, before the resulting EU immigration crisis, Japan’s implosion, and the Taiwan blockade in early 2023. It’ll be a World War sure, it just won’t resemble any of the ones from your grade-school text book photographs. It’ll be a war of currencies, commodities, supply chains, and infrastructure. China has an enormous amount of silver. They have possibly 20x more gold than we know. Russia has a large amount of gold. China is hellbent on percolating their digital Yuan.All of this is partly why I’m hyper-bullish on digital gold—₿, my theory being:A REVERSE 6102 STYLE ATTACKhttps://ift.tt/zt2K7rj, goldbugs will take it from the other end this time. If things get out of control (really out of control), then the West could presumably defund their enemy’s ambitions by coordinating and dumping their gold on the open market. Protection would be too expensive as derivative premiums reprice upwards. It would obliterate the price of gold—permanently—and they could embrace ₿, which the West has all the efficient mining and most of the hashpower for (59% renewable energy and growing rapidly), most of the nodes which actually control consensus, all the top programmers, and all of the libertarian anti-authoritarian culture. ₿’s smallest unit could reprice, then a credit market develop around it, and it would emerge as universal collateral, whereby every discrete payment network switches to using its L2, and I’m not certain most people would know the difference in their day-to-day lives.https://ift.tt/tr8ZAy7 like it in any setting. But what I like about it in a wartime setting is that it’s universal, impairment resistant, and unconstrained by borders, with the only thing required to get started being a free mobile app. It can be THE capital flight release valve anywhere for anyone and no government can stop their citizens from saving themselves or loved ones.Centralized money targets a stable price. This is a terrible system, but it must happen because it’s inflationary and centralized. So in order to maintain that stable price, you must have overwhelming intervention, tools, manipulation, collusion, and organizations to coordinate it. In many cases you need a military esp a global navy to enforce it. Even then boom & bust cycles come. And eventually:https://ift.tt/j50vfyw in the blue corner you the deflationary system. ₿ doesn’t target a stable price. It targets a variable price. It can control its ledger and issuance with the one-directional entropy of energy, and the free market sets the price. When it’s absorbed enough trust (value) its confidence curve (volatility) will flatten. That’s not something humans have ever seen, and it’s probably why after it absorbs enough trust, it’ll be man’s final money. It’ll be a transparent and honest base layer. Right now our base layer is fiat and debt. This is a dishonest base layer. Nothing built over it can ever be honest. Does distortion in money equal distortion in information? Maybe that’s what this transition period will be about, getting rid of that distortion, reigning in governments. Otherwise things that work get built in layers: a human body, an atom, planet, or pizza.In the meantime I’m going long equities. Not levered, but long. It’s at odds with much of the data I’m looking at, and doesn’t feel natural at all. If $280 breaks then I’ll help Zuck heat up and subsidize my street-faring brethren in Marketplace.We didn’t catch anything fishing but the Torpedo made the time pass pleasantly, under a clear blue sky unwrinkled and still. I asked Ira:“What’s American Exceptionalism if you have to put it into a short example.”He cast his line again and said something that bothered me as a NYC liberal, “Probably the fact that in all fifty states you can legally carry a gun around in your waistband and its licensed by the state itself. Freedom is a package deal, amendment one is BS without amendment two.”I sold the honey a couple hours later.But no, if $280 QQQ breaks American Exceptionalism is not going down with it.
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