SGM Metals: Bank Runs, Bank Holidays, Stolen Pensions, Gold & Silver Are Only Safe Option!

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. - April 8, 2013 - PRLog -- Forbes.com reports: [ The Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI) has released its report highlighting the intense state of insecurity American workers are experiencing as they look forward to a retirement without sufficient money to see them through.

Per the survey conducted by EBRI, 57% of American workers currently have less than $25K in total savings & investments (excluding homes) for retirement. In 2008, that number was 49%. As a result, almost 50% of the nation’s workers are “not at all confident” that they will have sufficient resources to cover their retirement.

If you are somehow unaware of the historic stagnation in the wages paid to the American worker since the 70’s, these bullet points, compiled by the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities & based on the Census survey & IRS income reports, should open your eyes:

   The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth & broadly shared prosperity.
   Incomes grew rapidly & at roughly the same rate up & down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 40s & early 70s.
   Beginning in the 70s, economic growth slowed & the income gap widened.
   Income growth for households in the middle & lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.
   The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen more than 80 years ago (during the “Roaring Twenties”).

As for the availability of the retirement plans that were once provided in return for years of service to one’s employer, the ERBI study notes that, in 1979, 28% of American workers were the beneficiaries of defined benefit programs which guaranteed them an income from the day they retired until the day they died. Today, that number is just 3%.

Then there is the decline of the private sector union movement that, in 1970, saw membership peak at 17 million holding union cards which has dropped to just 7.2 million.

Soon, millions of Americans will more fully understand the dreadful price to be paid for having backed the wrong horse as the country is left to deal with a serious senior crisis brought on by two generations of employers unwilling to properly compensate workers for their contributions & public policies that rewarded this greed.

One of the greatest tragedies a decent society can experience is the abandonment of its elderly. We have set the stage for that tragedy to play out in the US through policies that have denied millions the opportunity to properly save for their retirement. The question is, what will we do now? ]

Post WWII, employers were clambering to attract the returning war veterans as employees.These companies offered sweetheart pension packages that would attract these highly desirable workers.

The corporations realized the pensions would bankrupt the companies over the coming decades & they needed a way out. Wall Street wanted to get a piece of these veterans incomes but they were not interested in gambling in the markets. They were children of the Great Depression that had learned the hard lesson of letting the bankers control the economy & gambling your life savings in the markets they control. The federal govt was looking for a way to fund their plans to expand suburbia in order to accommodate the flood of veterans who were now home starting families which was growing the population of future tax paying voters of the nation in a post war baby boom.

These three entities, all with their own agendas & interests, wanted the same thing, a way to redirect a percentage of the nations private wealth into a pool that the govt could tax on the way in & the way out to fund the expansion of suburbia, an alternative retirement solution so the corporations could quietly avoid bankrupting themselves & Wall Street would have access to fresh blood to take as profits & a reason to design new investing tools they would run to collect fees until the working class died. Enter the little known program called E.R.I.S.A (Employee Retirement Investment Security Act) which within two years morphed into the modern 401K program. This gave all three of the collaborators in the trifecta what they wanted & the public was none the wiser to the shift that had happened or how their retirement would now be as unstable as ocean waters in a hurricane.

Since the mid 1970’s the 401K program rolled forward as the nation decoupled from the gold standard which gave the govt & the FED the ability to print money & create a mildly inflationary environment that would build into the froth that made the stock & bond markets seem prosperous & kept people coming back for more. This mildly inflationary environment played a huge roll in the designing of retirement investment tools such as IRAs, annuities & bond funds to name a few. These vehicles appear to be beneficial as long as the Fed & the govt. together are expanding the money supply moderately every year which creates that froth at the top that creates the illusion of ever expanding wealth. This works, until it doesn’t. Now we have gone full tilt the other direction, we are no longer in a mildly inflationary world & instead we have embarked upon a wild inflationary panic strategy that has dumped over $50 TRILLION in new monies into the market place & these traditionally stable retirement investment packages are now flopping around like a fish out of water.

So what now? In a global currency war that is a race to debase all fiat currencies even a moderate stock market correction could come soon & it could hyper accelerate the fear of a replay of 2008 that could very well mortally wound the retirement investments of the average American. This type of panic in a recession/depression could very well create a selling environment that could surely become a bloodbath when the high frequency trading computers smell blood. Now we see the banks can claim imminent domain over your deposits when they decide they are in trouble & the govt’s seem to be willing to turn a blind eye since they stand to lose trillions in bailout funds the banks have already extorted from the tax payers if they don’t let the banks confiscate the public’s money in bank holidays to cover their insolvency. So if the insiders are dumping stocks at an alarming rate of 50/1 in expectation of that stock correction should you do the same? If govt.’s are declaring bank holidays & extending them in duration out to two weeks, giving cover to the wealthy elite so they can funnel their wealth out the back door through London leaving the average Joe’s to shoulder the banks wealth grab all alone to the tune of 60% thefts, should you remove yourself from harms way? The only people in Cyprus who weren’t hurt by this grand theft were those who held their wealth outside the banking system in physical gold & silver bullion . . . . food for thought.