Glen Roberts paying his bill at Be Okay Restaurant in Asuncion, Paraguay.

Well our stateless expat was back in the news. We reported on Glen Roberts back in 2014 He may have been the first person in history to give up his United States citizenship without having another citizenship, thus leaving himself stateless. We have all read—and believed—that you can’t do that. Glen proved that you certainly could—and did.
 (How to Renounce Your U.S. Citizenship)  

So from that we learn that it pays to question everything.

Glen vacated Montevideo and took up residence in Paraguay several years ago. Roberts continues to blaze trails wherever he goes. He recently had lunch in the Be Okay Vegetarian Restaurant in Asuncion, the capital city of Paraguay, paid for his lunch from his Bitcoin account, and then used the first crypto currency ATM machine in Paraguay, which happens to be located in the Be Okay Restaurant, to transfer dollars to his crypto currency “wallet.”

As you know, at Four Flags Journal we like to diversify our lives and our assets as much as we can in the financially chaotic atmosphere the world is in right now. So in that light, we have been looking at crypto currencies and decided to take a small position, mostly to learn how it works. We are not sold on the future of crypto currency as much as some of our colleagues are, but we look at every opportunity. And the more we look at this one, the more we like it. We are not going to bet the farm on it, but we are diversifying in a minor way into the crypto currency space.

There is always risk in everything. A bank account today is a risk since Obama’s Executive Order allowing failing banks to use depositors’ money. You are now an unsecured creditor of the bank if the bank fails, just as the depositors were in the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Your editor’s own parents and many others lost everything when the banks closed, including their home, in some cases, because they didn’t have access to their money to pay their mortgage. Houses went on the market for taxes alone.

The price of not paying attention to economics and not seeing these things coming can be high. Yet there were many people who became very wealthy during that depression. It was those who had stayed informed and planned ahead. Reports were that more people became millionaires during that depression than any other time in American history. 

The national debt of the United States is now 104.8% of our GDP, they just raised the debt ceiling, and we at Four Flags Journal can do the math!  We are saddened by the irresponsibility of those who are in charge of  national economic decisions.  But we do our research and take steps to mitigate risk. And share with you what we find. And while we’re doing that, we look for how we can profit at the same time. If they insist on going down, we do not intend to go down with them and we hope that you don’t either. And that’s going to take being willing to build independence. Dependence makes for vulnerability. If they go down, so do we. Independence is the path to freedom. And we love freedom!

Personally, we think that crypto currencies may well be one way to diversify risk.

(Disclaimer: All investments involve risk. Always check with your financial advisor before making any investment.)

Stay tuned!

Until next week . . .

Arlean

Further reading:
https://usawatchdog.com/big-banks-will-take-depositors-money-in-next-crash-ellen-brown