Monday, January 12, 2015

Digital Silver

1/11/2015 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints…

A belated happy new year to our fellow taxpayers. While the pages of The Mint have been quiet, The Mint himself has been pressing forward on a number of initiatives. Perhaps the most notable being our renewed interest in Tax Planning and preparation, which is a natural complement to our virtual CFO and associated services. More to come on that.

Long-suffering readers of The Mint are well aware of our views on monetary theory. Throughout the ages, true money has generally taken the form of gold and/or silver. However, for roughly 44 years now, mankind has been on an extremely dangerous experiment in which debt has come to take the place of money in everyday transactions. While it may seem a completely normal manner of transacting business today, it is lost on most that money and debt are actually polar opposites. They are meant to cancel each other out in trade and, in doing so, maintain the quantity of one another and by extension all of world trade and economic activity, in balance.

However, when money becomes debt, then debt can only be cancelled by the issuance of more debt, which means that the primary impulse of all economic activity is not a well thought out response to the laws of supply and demand, but a response to whether or not the supply of debt instruments in the world is increasing or decreasing.

The period between 2008 and 2013 has been marked by a relative stagnation in what was until then a steady wave of increasing credit post 1971. This stagnation was almost fatal to the debt based monetary system that, by definition, counts on an infinite expansion in the quantity of debt for its very existence.

The current expansion, which began in 2014 and is set to accelerate through 2015 and beyond, is already causing cosmic shifts in the economy. Old, established companies and brands are being supplanted by a phenomenon that is best exemplified by social media platforms: Hyper focused content delivery and a wholesale fragmentation of what were, just five years ago, long-established norms around consumer behavior. Large brands are losing the edge as consumers can increasingly tailor the content that passes by their eyeballs on social media and, further, consume almost any type of media on demand.

This shift is once again propelling a large wave of growth, which means that soon, consumers will begin to demand increasing amounts of credit so that they can underwrite their various individual activities necessitated by this shift.

What place does Silver have in this brave new world? At $16.57 an ounce, physical silver is taking a short breather as the world's best investment. However, a new form of Silver is rising to take its place.
Silver Money
Digital Silver in the form of unsecured credit at your fingertips

Silver Money Service is a simple mobile app that filters hundreds of credit card offers to help you find unsecured credit that suits your needs. While at first this may seem an elementary concept, the utility of the Silver app, which is currently available for Android and iPhone, cannot be overstated.

As much as we are loath to admit it, most consumers will need to increase their credit footprint over the coming year in order to keep pace with inflation. What the Silver app does is simply save consumers tens if not hundreds of hours sifting through credit card offers in the mail and on the internet.  By asking a few simple questions, Silver guides the user to the current credit card offerings that are best suited to their needs.

How does it work?  As we mentioned above, the app asks the user a simple, multiple-choice question:
  1. Which type of card are you looking for?
    • Rewards
    • Cash back
    • Low Interest
    • Bad Credit
From there, it asks the user a second, again multiple choice question based on their response to the first in order to tailor its results to the user's unique credit needs.  The app then presents a list of the relevant credit card offers alongside buttons that allow the user to contact the credit card provider directly via telephone, email, or directly at their website.

Silver's refreshingly simple and intuitive approach to assisting consumers in expanding their credit footprint.  You can download this handy app that the Google Play store and the iPhone App Store today and get a head start on your peers.

While physical silver will always be a safe harbor, the Silver app may prove more useful over the coming years as a way to fund the next wave of credit expansion. Even if you are a gold or silver bug, you can use the Silver app to get a credit card to get ahead of the curve by ordering your next tube of rounds or silver bars from your favorite bullion dealer.

For in the blow off phase, it won't matter how much unsecured debt one has to pay back, but what real assets one has on hand to confront the gradual disintegration of the real economy.

Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Key Indicators for January 11, 2015

Copper Price per Lb: $2.79
Oil Price per Barrel (WTI):  $47.58
Corn Price per Bushel:  $4.00
10 Yr US Treasury Bond:  1.97%
Bitcoin price in US: $276.80
FED Target Rate:  0.12%
Gold Price Per Ounce:  $1,225
MINT Perceived Target Rate*:  0.25%
Unemployment Rate:  5.6%
Inflation Rate (CPI):  -0.3%
Dow Jones Industrial Average:  17,737
M1 Monetary Base:  $3,157,800,000,000
M2 Monetary Base:  $11,769,400,000,000