At the moment, I think the safest bet is hard assets and, ideally, productive hard assets. I.e. those that generate an income which is independent of whether they rise or fall in value. So, moving to a bigger house in the hope it will go up in value; not a good idea. Buying a buy-to-let property that will give a rental income, irrespective of how the value of the asset performs; good idea. Land can always be put to use, irrespective of what happens to its value; rent it out, grow food on it, put trees on it, put a solar farm on it, etc.
However, in a real TEOTWAWKI situation, even these assets wouldn't be safe. Someone's gun would be more potent than the pen that was used to assign you title to the land. But then we're into a whole new paradigm anyway.
They do say that this stealing of money from bank accounts cant happen in this country, because the whole thing is a Euro [ German ] order to help safe an EU country,...and we are not a member of the EU so we cant be ordered to do the same,...so I think we are safe for a while
If other countries feel that the same thing may happen in their own countries, then they might feel its safer to put their money into the UK,... giving this country a big boast, relieving any need for the UK to do the same to us
..... Maybe.....
I really don't know. There have been a lot of mixed messages coming out of the Bank of England recently.
Just last week there was talk of "negative base rates". In other words, the BofE would charge banks for holding their reserves in the BofE, thus encouraging them to lend more, thus stimulating the economy. This would be an alternative to Quantatitive Easing (money-creation). The Chancellor kind of reinforced this idea when he said that he had authorised the BofE to use "unconventional monetary instruments" to create economic stimulus.
HOWEVER - just today the BofE has issued an edict requiring banks to increase their capitalisation by 25 billion pounds. This involves them raising more capital, possibly lending less, and stashing more of it in the BofE!
The banks are also struggling to make a profit at the moment; something that is essential to avoid even more capital flight away from the banks, in the form of shareholders selling their shares. So there is likely to be a lot of pressure on banks to generate more income.
From an economic stimulus viewpoint, money sittiNg in savings accounts is dead money. I can actually see a situation in which the banks, with the blessing of the government, reduce savings rates to near zero and even start to charge savers for the service of "safely holding their money" for them (a negative interest rate if you will). This would force savers to find another home for their money, such as property, stocks and shares, etc, all of which would create economic stimulus.
We're in exactly this situation. When we made our life-changing move to Scotland we released a tidy sum after the sale of our house. The plan was to put it into a fixed rate savings account, risk-free, and have the interest contribute to our income. There are no decent rates around that will allow us to do this, so we,re now having to look at higher-risk investments at an extremely volatile time in the financial world. We have no pensions to speak of, so these decisions are pretty critical. Funny how things don't turn out how you expect.
I supose we all play things as WE percieve them....we tend to look at the way things are and have always been....this is the danger...the people of cypress did that and just look whats going down....just because we live in britain means f.ck all....our lot would do it to us in a hartbeat....because they can...what you going to do bout it...right...f.ck all
The point I was making in my post though was that if others who are in real risk of losing money in their savings,..[ and we are not yet ],.. look for a safer means of banking, then the UK being outside the Euro zone, but still in Europe is going to look very appealing to them
....if this does happen, then it is bound to help the UK economy,..and there would be no reason to follow the route that Cyrus had to travel,... even this government has SOME sense, with the rise of UKIP they are trying at least not to do anything that is going to put the voters on UKIPs side
Of course all this would depend on how much money found its way here
im taking some of my money out tomorrow and the rest there after
This is not new.....argentina did similar job....bank holiday..devalued by 40%.. stealing money is easy.....remember the gold standard no longer exists and does not backup any currency....bonds and derivertives rule via the federal reserve.....and when that bubble bursts we can all look out even then....any cash you hold in your hands will only be good for 3 weeks tops...add vaselene to the rest as a fire starter...my tip of the day and prepper related
Taking all my cash out tommorow ! I was thinking of buying land abroad as the UK is to expensive but after looking at the map of the world...No where is safe, not from financial meltdown, wars, famine, nothing. It's all fecked ! So back to square one, stuck here
(27 March 2013, 20:06)MaryN Wrote: [ -> ]After the Cyprus debacle, I can perfectly understand the urge to withdraw your cash. but what would you do with it? Sod's Law decrees that as soon as you invest it in something else then an unexpected bill with crawl out from under a stone. Personally, I am reading the financial papers every day and at the first sniffle of a problem in the UK I'll be heading for the Bank, other than that.....
Ditto Mary.
Money to spare? That would be nice.
I owe the bank.
They can take that if they want.
Meg.