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What if you do not get your US dollars out of the US before it’s illegal to do so?

Posted by John T. Reed on

In case I do not make it out of the US with our excess US dollars before the capital controls slam shut—outlawing removing money or gold from the US—I now contemplate the alternative.
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Once hyperinflation hits, everyone will instantly understand what I have been trying to tell them for a decade. The purchasing power of the dollar is falling by the minute. What to do?
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Spend it frantically before it becomes worthless. After the Civil war, we had hyperinflation in a US currency known as the Greenback Dollar. There was a hit song about it with the lyric:
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Don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar
Spend it fast as I can.
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Do you need me to tell you that? Now maybe, but if and when it happens, you and everyone else in the world will understand it instantly.
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And what does that mean? That EVERYTHING on the store shelves—all kinds of stores—will be sold out. In my The Day the Dollar Dies web article, I said men would be in fist fights in the supermarket over the last can of rutabaga juice. I was not kidding. Literally everything will be sold out in every type of store as people try to get something of value for their money that is rapidly approaching worthlessness.
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One place you could try that few others will think of initially is to go to your bank and get as many nickels and pennies as you can They contain copper and nickel or copper and zinc. Those metals are commodities that increase in dollar value during inflation. When everyone figures out what a great deal pennies and nickels are, everyone will want them. Now everyone thinks I am an idiot. Everyone will figure it out. By the way, you have to pay cash for pennies and nickels. If you have an account there, you can treat it as a withdrawal in the form of those coins.
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You can try to buy some real estate. Sellers will pull it off the market or hold out for an ever higher price. Which property should you buy? I am not sure you will have any choice. You can buy cars. You will have to pay cash or use your debit card. Credit cards will all be cancelled overnight.
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Should you invest in real estate by paying down your mortgage? No. The hyperinflation will wipe out the real value of your mortgage. It is one of the good deals of hyperinflation.
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As long as the dollar still has any value, you need to convert it to stuff. You will probably not have much choice what to buy, if any. You will have to buy anything you can find that anyone will sell. Maybe cases of rutabaga juice.
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Can you buy gold or silver or junk silver? For astronomical prices. After everyone gets rid of all the USD that still has any value at all, you will be in a new world. To buy anything, you will need to have barter items. I spoke recently here about what the best barter items are.
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Basically, you find someone who has something you want and try to trade for something you have. Such transactions may be illegal, back-alley, black-market deals. The black marketeer may be a former drug dealer. You may be robbed of your barter item as you approach the agreed-upon location. Or of what you get in your transaction when you are leaving.
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What will have value as money then? Easy question because of all the accounts we have from past hyperinflation. Foreign currency is the only good money in a hyperinflated nation.
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It is also illegal to possess because of the capital controls. If you are found to have any, the authorities will confiscate it and give you a lousy price for it. So during hyperinflation the only thing you can use to buy things are illegal foreign currency and barter items. Possession of gold is also banned by capital controls. Can you use other bullion or rare coins? Yes. They become barter items.
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Most people run out of barter items pretty quick. What then?
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Attractive women can prostitute themselves. That is what the hyperinflation 1925 Greta Garbo movie The Joyless Street was about.
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If you know how and have the weapons and a place where hunting it productive and legal, you can hunt wild game or fish. The ubiquitous wild turkeys in the US today almost went extinct in the Great Depression because so many people were killing them for food. You can dumpster dive or go to a dump.

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And you can starve. That was the fate of two of the women in Anna Eisenmenger’s family in 1922 Vienna. One of the starved women was an old female relative of Anna’s. The other was her young daughter-in-law and the mother of Anna’s two grandchildren. Both lived in Anna’s elegant house in Vienna. Many others in Vienna then died from winter cold caused by lack of coal to burn or complications of cold like pneumonia.
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Anna was the wife of the late head of one of the departments of a Vienna hospital. She was rich.
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Can’t happen here in 2020? That is what the people of oh so sophisticated Vienna thought in 1920.
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https://www.johntreed.com/collections/john-t-reed-s-book-on-hyperinflation-and-depression

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