Hoje este investimento é “mais popular que Jesus” e os Beatles

Empiricus Crypto Alert

Quanto dinheiro você ganhou com moedas digitais este ano?

Exponential Coins

 

BITCOIN: O PROFESSOR QUE EU QUERIA SER

Por André Franco e Vinícius Bazan

Sempre que chega essa época do ano, é impossível não parar e fazer uma breve retrospectiva de 12 meses atrás. Mais precisamente do dia 23 de dezembro de 2016.

Lembro, na ocasião, que já trabalhávamos próximos à Empiricus, principalmente ao Rodolfo Amstalden, com os desenvolvimentos do Investeaê, nosso projeto de educação financeira.

Estávamos prestes a fazer parte oficialmente do time Empiricus e, em um dos emails do Rodolfo, ele citou ao final “P.S.: caso ainda não o tenham feito, leiam a newsletter que a Luciana Seabra publicou ontem. Ao fim de 2017, vocês provavelmente sentirão algo parecido”.

Sempre admiramos o Rodolfo pela assertividade nas recomendações da sua carteira no PRP , mas não sabia que ele previa tão bem o futuro.

Ele se referia a um texto no qual a Luciana falava sobre ter deixado para trás a carreira de jornalista para comandar a série  Os Melhores Fundos de Investimento na Empiricus. Ela estava feliz. Muito feliz.

E de certa forma, isso se repete exatos 12 meses depois. Estamos nós dois aqui… Também tendo abandonado nossas carreiras tradicionais. Por mais que a paixão pela engenharia ainda ecoe, o que sempre quisemos, de verdade, era ensinar pessoas.

Sabemos que existem alguns professores que passam pelo nosso caminho e nem sequer são lembrados alguns anos depois. Já outros carregamos para o resto da vida. Talvez pela capacidade técnica, carisma, ou até jeitão de pai ou mãe.

Apesar das características de cada professor serem diferentes, o que faz com que eles sejam marcantes é o que aprendemos com eles. Pois cada um tem um jeito próprio de ensinar, mas todos nos educam de alguma forma.

Confesso também que, ao a ensinar alguns amigos nossos a investir, também tínhamos esse sonho. Sempre desejamos ser aquele professor que faz a diferença na vida das pessoas.

Ao falar sobre educação financeira, desde o princípio da idealização do projeto, nosso objetivo era entregar um conteúdo suficientemente relevante para que sejamos lembrados. E, para isso, precisávamos que as pessoas seguissem os nossos ensinamentos.

O que mais tentávamos colocar na cabeça das pessoas durante toda a nossa vida era: poupar e investir para o futuro. Mas acredito que esse desejo de ensinar e incentivar a todos a pensar no amanhã é o desejo de qualquer educador financeiro.

No entanto, a quantidade de pessoas investindo na Bolsa, por exemplo, é quase a mesma de alguns anos atrás. Então, tanto nós, quanto outros educadores financeiros, falhamos.

Agora adivinha quem está ensinando isso da forma mais direta possível? Vou dar uma dica: começa com “bit” e termina com “coin”. Sim, o bitcoin tem mostrado às pessoas o valor do dinheiro no tempo.

O investidor de bitcoin sabe que se ele não vender as suas criptomoedas hoje, literalmente amanhã, ele pode ganhar mais. Apesar de ser uma realidade distorcida se comparada ao universo de investimentos comuns, como Tesouro Direto, as pessoas passam a entender o valor do dinheiro no tempo.

E esse entendimento é pautado nas expressivas valorizações em questão de dias, mas esse quesito acende um outro desejo no investidor, a ganância.

Se um investimento multiplicou por 10 vezes o valor inicial em um ano, o mais ganancioso pensa que poderia ter colocado todo o dinheiro ali e então ficar mais rico.

Mas esse é o erro que o investimento em criptomoedas pode fazer as pessoas cometerem. Por isso, acredito que se você está investindo com aquela regra de ouro de até 5 por cento do seu patrimônio, o bitcoin está lhe ensinando mais uma lição valiosa.

Sei que deve bater aquela vontade enorme de aumentar a aposta nas criptomoedas e cada vez ganhar mais e mais dinheiro, mas o investidor que se mantém firme na sua tese só tem a ganhar no longo prazo.

Primeiro porque não corre riscos desnecessários entrando em um mercado super novo e que ainda não tem a maturidade do mercado de ações. Segundo porque passa a criar disciplina necessária para ser um ótimo investidor mais à frente, sempre seguindo uma tese pré-estabelecida por si mesmo.

E, por isso, o investidor em criptomoedas tem aprendido lições valiosíssimas que nenhum curso poderia ensinar de maneira tão prática quanto está acontecendo.

Um abraço e que o próximo ano venha com tudo!

André Franco e Vinícius Bazan

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Você precisa ter um pouco de dinheiro em moedas digitais. Essa é simplesmente a decisão financeira mais inteligente que você pode tomar. E simplesmente não existe, hoje, potencial de valorização sequer parecido ao desta criptomoeda . Trata-se, sem sombra de dúvidas, da assimetria de retornos potenciais mais aguda que já encontramos em oito anos de Empiricus.

We are explaining our money system to our grandson, James, now 14 months old…

His mother tries to get him to go to bed at 9 p.m. But the little boy’s internal clock is still on Baltimore time; it tells him it is much too early to go to sleep.


Bill’s living room transformed into a makeshift nursery

Grandpa takes over, drawing out the monetary system like a general spreading a map on a field table. “Here is the enemy,” he says gravely. “They have us completely surrounded. We’re doomed.”

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James grumbles. He squirms. He has a sunny, optimistic temperament. But we think our explanations are sinking in.

He seems to understand…

…that money is not wealth; it just measures and represents wealth, like the claim ticket on a car in a parking garage.

…that our post-1971 money system is based on fake money that represents no wealth and measures badly.

…that this new money enters the economy as credit… and that the credit industry (Wall Street) has privileged access to it. The working man still has to earn his money, selling his work, by the hour. But Wall Street—and elite borrowers connected to the Establishment—get it without breaking a sweat or watching the clock.

…that a disproportionate share of this new money is concentrated in and around the credit industry—pushing up asset prices, raising salaries and bonuses in the financial sector, and making the rich (those who own financial assets) much richer.

…that this flood of credit helped the middle class raise its living standards, even as earnings stagnated. But it also raised debt levels throughout the economy.

…and that it allowed the average American family to spend American money that Americans never earned and buy products Americans never made…

Instead, Walmart’s shelves were stocked with goods “Made in China.” The middle class lost income as factories, jobs, and earnings moved overseas. Debt stayed at home.

“Okay so far?” we asked James as his eyeballs rolled backward and his breathing slowed.

But one thing must still puzzle him. How did the new dollar actually retard growth?

Maybe it didn’t make people richer… After all, how can you expect to make people better off by giving them fake money?

But how did it make them worse off?

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The Ultimate Absurdity

We began with an attack en masse across a broad, philosophical front:

“As you sow, so shall ye reap,” we said. “And when you put a lot of fake money into a society, you end up with a fake economy.”

Just look at Argentina in 2001… or Zimbabwe in 2006… or Venezuela now…

Prices go wild as people try to figure out what the money is really worth. But the economy shrinks.

It was the same way in Germany during the Weimar hyperinflation. People stopped producing. You might have a billion marks in your pocket, but you couldn’t find a bar of soap for sale.

“But wait… I know what you’re thinking…” we imagined James pushing back. “Those are all hyperinflation stories. We don’t have that now. Instead, we have much less inflation… Prices are almost stable.”

Yes… for now. The inflation is in the asset sector… and in credit itself… not in consumer items. But the phenomenon is much the same.

Fake money is giving grossly distorted information to everyone. In Manhattan, we are told that an ordinary apartment is worth $2 million. But in Geneva—where interest rates have turned negative—we are told that $2 million is worth nothing… You will have to pay one of the banks to take it off your hands.

Without honest money, real savings, and true interest rates, businesses and investors have nothing to guide them. They are lost in the woods. Few want to do the hard work, and take the risks, of long-term, capital-heavy ventures. Instead, the focus shifts to speculation, gambling… and playing the game for short-term profits.

What’s more, artificially low interest rates provide fatal misinformation. They tell the world that we have an infinite supply of resources—time, money, energy, and know-how.

Then, without its back to the wall of scarcity, with no need to make careful choices, capitalism becomes reckless and irresponsible with its most valuable resource—capital itself. It is destroyed, wasted, misallocated, and malinvested. Growth rates fall and the world becomes poorer.

James is startled awake. He is disturbed.

“What kind of a world have I been born into…?” he seems to ask.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
Chairman, Bonner & Partners

Years ago, when visiting the US, I’d often watch late night television. Just prior to each interval, in order to ensure that viewers would sit through the adverts, the show would run a panel that said, “More to Come.”

This, of course, was effective, as the viewer would be anticipating that the best part of the programme would come in a later segment. He would then be more likely to continue watching.

Today, we’re looking at the reverse of that situation. The programme we’re watching is The Decline and Fall of the American Empire and those who recognize the decline are viewing with ever-increasing trepidation the developments that are unfolding there. Even those of us who are not American and don’t live there are glued to our screens, as we’re aware that we’re viewing the early stages of a collapse that promises to be the greatest social, political, and economic event that we’re likely to see in our lifetimes.

Following World War Two, the US was in a boom beyond anything the world had ever seen. The Americans came to the war late, after having built up their manufacturing capacity for war dramatically, at the expense of the Allied powers in Europe. And they achieved this, essentially for free. It was paid for with the gold from the vaults of the European allies. After the war, Europe was trashed, and it would take decades for them to get on their feet again. Meanwhile, the US had been going flat-out in production, had first-rate modern factories, and, most importantly, held the majority of the world’s gold.

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The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement ensured that the US dollar would become the world’s default currency and would later become the petrodollar, ensuring American hegemony over much of the rest of the world.

There can be no doubt that, in the first decades after the war, the US had an amazing run and was, arguably, one of the best places to live in the world.

But, unfortunately, as so often happens, American political and industry leaders became full of themselves and couldn’t resist going out on a limb to gain even more for themselves. In so doing, they turned the US from the world’s foremost creditor nation into the world’s foremost debtor nation. Worse, when they reached this unprecedented point, they opted to just keep going.

Worse still, it would appear that today’s leaders are aware that the mother of all bubbles that they’ve created is going to pop sometime in the near future, as they’re preparing themselves for the mother of all pushbacks from the populace when the crashes come.

The FBI, CIA, NSA, and a host of other authorities have either been created or expanded, allowing the creation of the world’s foremost police state. And, beginning in 2001 with the Patriot Act, they have created a host of laws to assign authority to any of those bodies to exert ever-increasing control over the population. Capital controls, migration controls, higher taxes, confiscation of deposits in banks, and quite a bit more have been passed in legislation, including the ability to declare the US in its entirety to be a “battle zone,” through which habeas corpus and the court system can be suspended nationally.

Yipes. (Or blimey, depending on where you’re from.)

At this point, any American who’s paying attention could be forgiven if he’s genuinely frightened as to where his government is going with all this.

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And so, we come back to the title of this essay—“More to Come.”

A regular flow of proposed laws is now coming down the pipeline that would have been considered the stuff of a bad movie a few decades ago, but is now only too real and  threatening to the freedoms of the average citizen.

Instead of “more to come” meaning that the best is still on the way, the opposite would appear to be the case.

“But how can this be?” we ask ourselves. Surely those in power—the politicians, the industrialists, the central bankers, etc.—must see this coming, and, if that’s so, surely they’ll do something to stop it.

Well, historically, that’s never been the case. Those in the greatest positions of power have never suddenly reversed an empire when it was about to self-destruct. What they tend to do instead is to guard against becoming casualties of the disaster they’ve created.

So, is that what’s happening this time around? In a word, yes.

The Bernie Madoffs of the world go to jail. However, those who commit the same fraudulent acts from within the system never go to jail. For example, if the heads of a bank commit massive fraud, the bank pays an enormous fine. The fine is then paid by the stockholders. And should the fine be large enough to crash the bank, the bankers can appeal to the government to bail them out, as they’re “too big to fail.” Thus, the taxpayers pick up the bill. Therefore, the more damage the bankers do, the more they prosper.

At this point, what we’re witnessing is an era in which laws are regularly being passed to ensure that the creators of the bubble will have a “Get Out of Jail Free” card and others will sustain the losses.

This is the very essence of what happens in an endgame run. Just as a hitman who places a bomb in a building makes his exit before the bomb can go off, the creators of bubbles safeguard themselves before the economic bomb can go off. They have no intention of being around to live with the resultant devastation that they’ve put into play.

Pete Townshend wrote, prophetically, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in 1971, in which he hoped that the latest gang of leaders would be better than the last. In the final line of the song, he grimly announces, “Meet the new boss—same as the old boss.”

And, in fact, this is the usual outcome. Perhaps the reason why empires collapse much in the same way, time and again, and their citizens consistently fail to see it coming, is that empires general last a long time before collapsing. The Venetian Republic lasted over 1,000 years. The Spanish Empire lasted just under 500 years. Holland lasted 130 years; Russia, almost 200; the UK, by some estimates, about 300.

And it’s been much the same for the others. In every case, they last longer than a single lifetime, so it’s rare that any individual sees more than one empire collapse in his own lifetime and doesn’t understand that empires don’t end with a whimper. They end with a crescendo, not unlike The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

We will be witness to the collapse of the world’s foremost empire. This is not mere conjecture. The US has all the symptoms that historically precede a collapse, and we’re now coming close to the final stages.

And, if history plays out yet again, as it has repeatedly, we can expect that, in the lead-up to the collapse, the controls by governments will become increasingly draconian. As we consider “more to come,” we should be braced for the likelihood that the worst controls are yet to be revealed.

Regards,