PROTECTING YOUR ASSETS IN A SERIOUS FINANCIAL CRISIS

I wrote my Senator about the bailout.

The little one: Paulson and Bernanke's $700 billion donation to their favorite charity, Wall Street.

I urged her to rethink a commitment of nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars of taxpayer money - my money, and yours - when we had no way to pay it back other than going cap in hand to our friends in the Chinese Communist Party and Dubai to try to borrow it.

I say try, because Congress has been spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year more than it takes in for years and our Marxist and Muslim bankers are getting more than a little skeptical about whether we will ever be able to repay them.

No wonder. We are currently in debt more than eleven trillion dollars, and this is just the government IOUs like Treasury Bills, and Treasury Bonds. Forget the money Congress has ripped off from the Social Security program and the tens of trillions more of unfunded liabilities (future financial commitments for which we do not have the money. Estimates run to about sixty trillion dollars).

These numbers are so big they break the mind. It's hard to even fathom what they mean.

"If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills! It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills."
- www.100777.com

You get the picture.

The interest on the national debt last year was $451,000,000,000. That's $1,252,777,777 a day, $52,199,074 an hour, $869,984 a minute, $14,499 a second.

Makes you feel warm all over, doesn't it?

So I told my Senator to knock it off.

She responded. She said that 88,000 people had written in opposing the bail out and that 5,000 had written in in favor of it. But that this was a national crisis and she and the other members of Congress felt they were doing the right thing for the American people.

Arrogance doesn't even begin to say it.

These legislators, who have the financial IQ of road-kill, who have bankrupted our nation to the point of a half a trillion dollars a year in interest for wars and welfare, know what's best for the American people?

The first bailout, which was a catastrophe, is of course, now being followed with a second that has more pork than a Jimmy Dean sausage factory. This one is now branded as a "stimulus package", and is being muscled through Congress as I write this for a cool trillion and a quarter (including interest).

You'd think someone pumped LSD into the drinking water up there. With the new bailout program, cum stimulus plan, the projected budget deficit for this year alone is about $1.8 trillion.

Where do they think they are going to get this money? Foreign central banks are dumping dollars like a bad habit, and U.S. debt is now about as welcome as an envelope of anthrax.

Which brings us to the point of this article, which is that when the government finishes its spending binge, and wakes up to their eye-watering fiscal hangover, they will turn inward with a vengeance, seeking to filch money from every nook and cranny of the U.S. population.

TAX INCREASES ON THE WEALTHY

That there will be tax increases is a given. And they will start with the affluent. If you have worked hard and accumulated some wealth in the process, you are a high-profile target for higher taxes.

There is strong sentiment from the White House on down that if you make decent money, if have accumulated some assets, the government should take some of it and spread it around.

Everyone is familiar with the President's statement to Joe the Plumber during a campaign stop last October when he said, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

"Everybody" being those people who didn't earn the money but who get some of yours.

But let's not quibble about who created the wealth, what's important is to spread it around, even things out.

And in case you're not mainlining MSNBC for your political news these days, you might have missed the fact that this point of view is not the sole province of the White House. Some key members of Congress are very clear about their Das Kapitalian intentions.

Barney Frank, the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, noted recently,

"I think at this point there needs to be a focus on an immediate increase in spending and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second seat... I believe later on there should be tax increases. Speaking personally, I think there are a lot of very rich people out there whom we can tax at a point down the road."

In fact, the good Congressman may seek a shortcut to your income. Instead of waiting for your tax return, your salary itself could be at risk.

An article in Financial Week, quotes the Chairman of the powerful Financial Services Committee as saying, "Congress will consider legislation to extend some of the curbs on executive pay that now apply only to those banks receiving federal assistance.... The compensation restrictions would apply to all financial institutions and might be extended to include all U.S. companies." (Emphasis added).

Channeling Karl Marx, Franks' colleague in the House, Democratic Representative James Moran, had this to say during a campaign stop:

"In the last several years, we have had the highest corporate profit ever in American history... But it hasn't been shared. And that's the problem. Because we have been guided by a Republican Administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it. And they have an antipathy towards the means of redistribution wealth."

Say what?

See, here's the scary part, he's serious. He is a United States Congressman on the Appropriations Committee - one of the most important and powerful committees in the House. He is also part of the Democratic Leadership in the House and this man thinks there is something wrong with people who consider that when they have accumulated some assets, they are entitled to keep them.

When you add gargantuan budget deficits to a government whose economic philosophy is grounded in a craving to redistribute the wealth of its citizens, you know they will be coming for those that have managed to flourish and prosper.

Let's be blunt: if you earn well or you have assets, your financial statement is at risk.

But the assault on your assets is not just coming from potential changes in tax policy.

CONFISCATION OF PERSONAL RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS

Testimony before the House Committee on Education a few months ago, suggested that personal retirement accounts (IRAs and 401Ks) should be converted into government controlled accounts called Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs). They would be managed by that bastion of fiscal propriety, the Social Security Administration.

California Democrat, George Miller's House Committee on Education and Labor heard a proposal from Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, to eliminate tax breaks for 401(k) and similar retirement accounts such as IRAs and convert them into Guaranteed Retirement Accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.

THE PLAN

Under Ghilarducci's plan, employees would have 5% of their pay mandatorily deducted from their pay and deposited into their GRA. This deduction would be in addition to Social Security and Medicare taxes, which would also have to continue being paid by employers.

The 5% would not be deductible by employers (as is now the case) and only half of the GRA assets could be passed along to your heirs at death. Presumably, Uncle would keep the other half.

"I'm just rearranging the breaks that are available now for 401(k)s and spreading the wealth," she said.

There's that phrase again.

ARGENTINA TO CONFISCATE RETIREMENT PLANS

And just in case you think the idea of a government confiscating personal retirement accounts is out of the range of possibility, we urge you to read the story in the October 22, 2008 issue of the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the Argentinean government had seized all private pension and retirement accounts to fund government operations and a ballooning budget deficit. Some articles note that this program was mandated by the President, but still had to be approved by the Argentinean Congress, which is controlled by the President's Peronist political party.

CONFISCATION OF GOLD AND SILVER

But trillion dollar budget deficits will require more.

Many turn to precious metals during times of economic duress. This is no surprise as gold and silver have been a store of value for thousands of years and they have actual productive uses as opposed to paper currency which has none other than its government mandated use as money.

When a government has debased its currency at the printing press, it often takes measures to try to prevent its citizens from fleeing from the currency into precious metals or stronger currencies. One of the measures that has been used in the past is making the ownership of precious metals illegal. This seeks to stop the capital flight from its currency to hard assets.

Sound unreal?

We give you President Franklin D Roosevelt on March 9, 1933.

"I as President do declare that... the continued private hoarding of gold and silver by subjects of the United States poses a grave threat to the peace, equal justice, and well-being of the United States; and that appropriate measure must be taken immediately to protect the interests of our people.

"Therefore ... I hereby proclaim that such gold and silver holdings are prohibited, and that all such coin, bullion or other possession of gold and silver be tendered within fourteen days to agents of the Government of the United States for compensation at the official price....

"All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed....

"Therefore be advised that your vault box must remain sealed, and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the Internal Revenue Service."

It may surprise you to know that laws still exist that give the President the authority to prohibit the ownership of gold, silver and other assets during emergencies. The Trading with the Enemy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act can be used to freeze privately held assets and prohibit their possession anytime the President issues a proclamation of emergency.

CURRENCY CONTROLS

Currency controls are yet another way governments try to contain the adverse effects of printing too much money.

Wikipedia defines it this way: "Currency control is a system whereby a country tries to regulate the value of money (currency) within its borders."

This can take many forms, but for our purposes, one of the ways governments implement currency controls is to limit or prevent assets from leaving the country. You might not be able to move money or other assets abroad (as that would take them out of the grasp of Uncle). Converting dollars into a stronger currency could become illegal as could transferring funds out of the country to buy gold, if it were outlawed here.

Increased taxes, currency controls and outlawing the ownership of precious metals are just some of the potential consequences that could emanate from a government that will soon wake from a spending binge the likes of which has never been seen before. And when the enormity of the damage they will have created starts to dawn on them and starts to dawn on the rest of the country threatening their House or Senate seat, they will turn on the wealthy like machines from the Matrix seeking income for the government in ways that all such governments have done in ages past - ways we have detailed above.

SOLUTION

"Your government considers you a national resource to be exploited. If you don't get your money out of the country before the government gets your money out of you, you're an idiot, and you're going to get what you deserve."
The Casey Report January, 2009

Growing numbers of people are moving assets offshore into gold, silver and stronger currencies such as the Swiss Franc, the Japanese Yen and the Chinese Yuan. Seeing the coming tsunami of government debt and inflation and potential confiscation of personal wealth, many are turning to offshore jurisdictions that provide privacy and outstanding asset protection.

Government taxing authorities would love to have people believe that moving assets offshore is somehow immoral or even illegal. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 83 of the nation's 100 largest corporations including world class brands such as General Motors, Pepsi, News Corp and Wells Fargo had subsidiaries in offshore tax havens in 2007. In fact, hundreds of thousands of offshore entities - corporations and foundations - operate legally in tax haven jurisdictions from Panama to Liechtenstein, from the British Virgin Islands (BVI) to Hong Kong.

Offshore corporations, foundations, and trusts can usually be set up for very nominal amounts and enable those creating them to move some of their assets out of dollars, out of the reach of fiscally irresponsible, avaricious governments and off the radar screen of Big Brother.

Bruce Wiseman has been a senior credit officer with banks in the San Francisco Bay Area and Beverly Hills. He later co-founded a company that handled the business and financial affairs of entertainment professionals and oversaw the assets of some of the biggest names in Hollywood before retiring to a writing career. He founded Offshore Financial Solutions in 2008 to help people protect their assets from the effects of the exploding, worldwide financial crisis.