By Peter Macfarlane for The Q Wealth Report

There’s a good reason why we have barely commented on the US election race until now. We don’t really do politics here at The Q Wealth Report. Years of experience have made us grow cynical of politicians of all stripes, and we doubt that even the President of the USA wields the power popularly attributed to him. He is not, after all, a dictator!

Our view is that we have to seek the way to get ahead as individuals no matter who is in government or what government does. “Yes we can” – in spite of politicians! So when we open our mouths we want to say something useful, not just contribute to the background noise of meaningless commentary. Now seems to be one of those moments when we should comment on politics. So here goes…

The clear victory of Obama shows that the American people want change. Given how dismal things have been looking of late, it is hard not to be positive about the wind of change – most of all the meaningful endorsement the American people have given to a radical departure from existing policies. People are looking for a new way of doing things and whatever happens, that has to be good. People are sick of war – whether in Iraq and Afghanisatan, or the wars declared on US soil such as the wars on terrorism, drugs and the collateral damage to freedom and liberty.

Perception plays a big role in politics. Obama has been very smart to appeal not just to US voters but to a global constituency, even in his acceptance speech greeting those in palaces and parliaments and huddled around radios in forgotten corners of the world. Kenya’s President immediately declared a national holiday, while Russia’s immediately announced deployment of a new nuclear defense system in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave surrounded by the European Union. (In a separate telegram, President Medvedev apparently congratulated Obama and said he was seeking a “constructive dialogue.” Hmm.)

This marks a distinct change from GWB’s confrontational and isolationist rhetoric. Non-Americans might not have votes but their support will undoubtedly make a big difference to Obama in getting anything at all done at a global level. And almost everything these days functions at a global level. Obama’s own story shows “The American Dream” is alive and well, and gives the USA a desperately needed bailout of moral capital to achieve its goals on the world stage.

The race issue has been played up a lot too. Undoubtedly it means a lot to the majority of Americans. But am I the only one who sees the irony in this? A lot of people apparently voted for Obama just because of his race or color. This type of voting is just affirmative action at work, something the voters of Nebraska wisely rejected in this same election. Affirmative action is a form of racial discrimination.  I suppose Obama’s victory is a landmark, and progress doesn’t come overnight, but if I were really interested in improving race relations in the US (which I’m not) the focus on “the first black President” would be something of a disappointment. The very fact that people are talking about it highlights continuing divisions. Real progress on the race issue will only come when people do not think about the skin color of their President. For the “sheeple” hyped up by the mass media, that day may be some way off yet – but successful people today are simply not interested in what race they are, nor in what race their business associates are. People who focus on race issues, whether they are black or white or anything else, always tend hold themselves back.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t have any quick fixes for the economy. He can’t. And the economic future of the USA looks quite simply terrible. In his speech the President Elect said that the USA, Wall Street and Main Street, will “rise or fall as one nation.” While clearly this was his token jibe at capitalists who are generally blamed for the state of the economy, unfortunately I think it will be more a case of Wall Street taking Main Street down. If the Bush administration had just let Wall Street rise and fall on its own, the effects would have been a lot less disastrous for Main Street. But politicians cannot resist meddling, and neither Bush nor Obama are exceptions to this rule. Obama might well be worse. Obama’s plan is to spend, spend, spend. This will have to be financed by printing yet more money, or – who knows – by still more underhand methods that conspiracy theorists whisper about, like the Amero.

Either way it comes to the same thing. Your dollars will be worth less, or may well even up worth nothing at all. Here at Q Wealth we will suggest strategies to protect your assets from the US government’s economic policies – first and foremost by diversifying out of the dollar. Or perhaps fleeing the dollar would be a better way to put it.

So there you have it, folks. Whatever happens in government, life goes on in the global economy, and there are many opportunities out there. You would be well advised as always to protect your assets, take the time to look after your own health (or as Jacques Haeringer says, to “win with nutrition”) and ensure you have good medical insurance coverage. No matter what happens the dollar, the pound or the euro, there will always be basic industries and people will always need a place to live. Get yourself covered. If you haven’t yet signed up for The Q Wealth Report, now is the time! Click here to join.

by Peter Macfarlane for The Q Wealth Report

For a while recently, let’s say the first half of October this year, the talking heads got to me. I was glued to the financial crisis. I was watching CNN and BBC World, and dozens of different RSS feeds on the internet, reading all the commentary, checking currency rates every few minutes…

It took a long, introspective walk on the beach for me to realize I was taking entirely the wrong approach. It is so easy to be sucked into mass media hysteria. It was happening to me. It happens to all of us at times. But it’s much more important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

The markets are being manipulated. We are not in a free market situation. We are now dealing with government owned banks in North America, Europe and elsewhere. Besides the clear government market manipulation (a.k.a. bailout) that we see, you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist nut to see that there are lots of other hidden factors at play. Lots of special interest groups with their hands in the pot, trying to direct the way things go at every turn in their own interests. Lots of infighting too.

We as individuals or ‘little guys’ have no hope of controlling what is going on or even of predicting things with any degree of accuracy. The best thing we can do right now is just say no – no to participation in manipulated financial markets.

The realisation I came to during that walk on the beach last week was simply that years ago I made some decisions about my life that I still believe in, more strongly now than ever. Wealrth for me is not just money which can gom up and down as governments decide, but quality of life – a healthy life with friends and family. Time to do things I believe in, that please me. In other words – I want to be in control of my life.

Quality of life for me is not being a slave to the TV all day, seeing who is the next person to be wheeled in to comment on the financial crisis. These days, lack of information is not so much of a problem as information overload. “Less is more,” as they say.

Life goes on. I already ‘headed for the hills’ as the Americans say years ago. Or to be more precise, I headed for the beach. I left my country of birth (the UK) to live in a place with a better quality of life, a tropical climate, and lower living costs too. A place where people are friendly and have time to chat and pass the time. Nothing is forever, as things can change. But right now I am very happy with my life as it is. That is by far the most important thing to me.

It is rewarding to live in a place I enjoy, do work I enjoy around my own schedule, and most of all to know that I am helping clients to protect themselves, their families and their assets from everything the world can throw at them.

If you haven’t yet made those essential first steps to freedom, however, these will be tough times for you. Sometimes it takes a jolt to wake people from their complacency. To encourage them to take action, either to protect their freedoms or even to make a new and completely fresh start. If you can’t look me in the eye and honestly say you are happy with your life and financial situation, then there is no time like the present to get started on new plans to protect and build your wealth – well away from the greedy hands of big governments! The time to start is now. Today! How? With a suscription to The Q Wealth Report, of course.

As a subscriber you are entitled to many and varied benefits that most people don’t even make full use of, including the Members’ Section where you can download back issues and a number of unique free reports. You can join us on our events and trips. You can email us and benefit from our huge network of contacts and informal advice. More than ever, I want to make Q Wealth about you, our valued client. More than ‘just’ a newsletter, I want Q Wealth to something about you – an important part of your financial future and your financial and personal freedom. Choose freedom, wealth and privacy today!

Note: the above article is a brief extract based on an article by Peter in the forthcoming Issue 51 of The Q Wealth Report. This report will be sent to members shortly and includes 24 pages of reasoned, detailed analysis, including new and exclusive subscribers-only material from Richard Cawte, Peter Macfarlane, Jacques Haeringer and others. To be sure you receive your copy as soon as it is released, plus to receive immediate online access to a range of members-only reports on investing and wealth creation offshore, sign up now.

by Peter Macfarlane for The Q Wealth Report

The US Congress met in a rare weekend session to pass what The Daily Telegraph of London calls ”the most far-reaching rescue package for America’s financial system since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.”

The ceiling on the US national debt has been lifted by a further $800 billion, giving the Treasury almost unlimited resources to prop up the world’s two biggest financial institutions: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That amounts to about $2,666 for every US citizen.

Now when the world’s two biggest financial institutions are in trouble, you know that does not bode well for the global financial system. Commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph article went as far as to say, “This raises implicit concerns about the credit worthiness of the United States itself.”

A statement from French banking giant BNP Paribas says: “The epicentre of the financial market sell-off will switch from the US into Europe and Oceania. Most of Euroland has entered a recession. A synchronised global downturn is on the agenda.”

Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari Inc, Former Assistant Secretary of Housing in the Bush I government, wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal saying that “creating a private company free to use federal credit to buy Congress and drain communities, pension funds and global investors is a bad idea indeed. However, it is not as bad an idea as bailing it out after it has finished making such a mess.”

So, things don’t exactly look good. But there are always ways for smart investors to generate wealth in turbulent times. That’s what my articles in The Q Wealth Report will be focusing on for the duration of the global crisis. For example, gold will go up! If you are interested in learning more about investments that are not exposed to the global financial crisis, sign up today for The Q Wealth Report.

If you don’t wish to sign up for the full paid membership yet, you can keep in touch with our ideas by signing up for our free email newsletter Q Bytes, and by adding this blog to your RSS newsreader.

What happens when Private Property is no longer a right? That’s the question asked by John Loeffler, host of a weekly syndicated US talk radio show, in a recent article that we highly recommend to Q Wealth readers.

Socialism, says Loeffler, “is the mechanism which transforms government from its noble role as a protector into a predator.”  He explains the three steps of Socialism, starting with stage one, an unrealistic offer of Something for Nothing that is generally accepted by citizens.  Step 2 is where things start to unwind in a Silent War between government and citizens.

In the latter part of Stage 2:

…the war kicks into gear as the dragon responds to the rising opposition and imposes a growing panoply of laws and regulations with increasing fines, penalties and prison sentences.  To block the rampant flouting of law, the dragon wants to monitor everything the citizens do in order to assure that plunder shall be paid, all in the name of the rule of law, public order and morality.  Civil rights break down, all in the name of morality and public security.  <snip>

As the security of property ownership declines, investments flee and the economic environment becomes unstable, no one wants to invest where earnings will be heavily taxed, or even the possibility of direct confiscation on the allegation of having violated a plethora of unknowable, unobservable laws.  Doing business is just too dangerous.

In Stage 3, The Day of Wrath and Mourning, “Faith in government dissolves along with faith in the currency.  Widespread flouting of law is common and tax payments quit.  If it gets bad enough, crime flourishes, both organized and random. The domestic economy collapses into a depression and the currency just collapses.”

Today’s America, says Loeffler, ”is truly at an economic and moral crossroad, having already started into Stage Two of the sad road to socialism.  Whether or not we plow through all three stages remains to be seen.”

What will happen next? We highly recommend you read the full article, but at the end, the writer offers a ray of hope:  ”It is here where Americans in times past have always shown themselves most noble.”

We’ll certainly be looking back on this article in Panama City the week after the US elections, at Recipes for Success, the Q Wealth Event about preserving and improving your wealth and health. More details of the event are here.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/loeffler/2008/0718.html

by Peter Macfarlane

Despite Benjamin Franklin’s wise advice that those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither, the public seems more than happy to trade a little liberty for the rhetoric of greater security. That at least was the conclusion of The Economist in a recent article entitled Mary Poppins and Magna Carta based on a survey carried out in June by YouGov PLC.

Successive governments have conned us that by giving up just a little more freedom each time they ask, we somehow increase our collective security. This has been going on for decades now, and the effects really are becoming noticeable – especially to people like me who live offshore and just visit ”onshore” Big Brother countries on rare occasions.

As restrictive new laws are brought in, uses for them tend to multiply fast. For example, in March this year it emerged that local councils in the UK had been using surveillance powers intended for deployment against terrorists and serious criminals, to spy on people trying to game the school-admissions system.

As David Davis, the British Member of Parliament who recently resigned his seat to make his point, says:

The government presents these issues as Faustian trade-offs between security and liberty. The reality is that draconian measures rarely make us safer and often jeopardise security. That is not a trade-off. It is a con…

British premier Gordon Brown has indeed done just this. He claims that new authoritarian powers for the state are “guarantors of liberty.” Should we believe him? Should we believe George W. Bush when he claims that the USA PATRIOT Act guarantees our liberty?

For a start, says David Davis, look at the British national ID card scheme. Not to mention its overseas equivalents such as America’s REAL ID Act, that effectively seeks to create a USA national ID card by standardising state ID cards. There is no convincing evidence that terrorists are using fake identities – the September 11^th hijackers used their own, legally obtained US IDs to board the planes, and the national ID card schemes already in place in Germany and Spain did nothing to prevent terrorist plots there either.

The ID cards common in European countries, however, are much less dangerous to our liberties than those proposed by Blair, Brown and their cronies. Traditional ID cards use a limited amount of data which remains broadly in control of the card bearer. They are not “swiped” by terminals linked to a national database wherever you go, while the British ID card will be.

Promises that sensitive personal data will be carefully protected also look rather limp. Last November, CDs containing 25 million child-benefit records were reported lost. On June 12th a civil servant was suspended after top-secret papers about terrorism were found on a train; on the same day another set of documents—this time on financial fraud—turned up on a different train! Five days later it emerged that a laptop stolen from the office of a cabinet minister may have contained confidential documents, violating data-protection rules.

Yet, the British public, according to The Economist/YouGov survey, trust the government a lot more than private firms with their personal data. Odd… since more than half of British consumers have signed up voluntarily for supermarket loyalty schemes which track their purchasing habits down to the last bar of soap.

Privacy is a basic human right, and you should think very carefully every time you are asked for personal information. Give out personal information on a strict “need to know” basis. If a few companies don’t want to do business with you that way, or try to bribe you with a free toaster, just live without their services. In the long run you’ll be glad you did.

To finish, here’s another thought from Ben Franklin that seems very appropriate to our themes of freedom, wealth and privacy: “Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.“

by Frank Suess and Scott Schamber writing from the Swiss mountains!

The television show Big Brother has taken off all around the world, as now many countries, including many of ours here in Europe, continue to spawn off of the original concept. Apparently, peaking into the lives of people has become a staple in many of our pop cultures. But why should this intrusion on the everyday-Joe’s life be so popular only with the general public…?

We’re going to change the spotlight from our “friend” Easy Money over to his offspring: “Big Brother”. Some also call him Sam. Although in other places around the world he might be known as Charles, Ludwig or Giovanni. All of them have very similar stories. You want to know their stories and their behavioral patterns in order to know what lies ahead.

We’ve tried to give you an idea in the latest issue of our newsletter. To view our current newsletter, you can click on the following link: http://www.bfi-consulting.com/index.php?id=51

Editor’s Note: Frank and Scott of BFI Consulting in Switzerland are regular contributors to The Q Wealth Report. You can sign up free for their excellent newsletter directly from their website, linked above. Highly recommended!

by MB for The Q Wealth Report

A libertool is any tool that you can use to liberate yourself … to free yourself from whatever holds you back. It’s a tool that advances your competence, effectiveness, freedom, health, wealth, happiness, etc.

What are some examples of Libertools?

• Wealth-building and personal managment skills enable you to free yourself from a ‘wage slave’ lifestyle, or from getting bogged down in stress.
• Simply knowing where you are going is a libertool. Most people don’t have realistic plans. If you don’t know where you want to go, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get there!
• Online wealth building skills (whether your own e-commerce business, or simply using online brokerage accounts etc) can help you achieve the financial freedom you deserve to live the life you desire.
• Health and wellness information, like understanding good nutrition and healthy living, will empower you to prevent or overcome most illness and disease.
• PGP, Virtual Private Networking and other technologies that protect you online against identity theives, censorship and so on are libertools that let you get on with your daily life in freedom and privacy.
• Learning to use your instincts (for example “Instinctive Investing”) is a proven technique to free yourself from conditioning you have grown up with, and constant dumbing down by the mainstream media.
• The online virtual economy is a potent libertool for individual economic empowerment.

In short, anything that brings about positive individual empowerment is a libertool. There are many other examples. In the Q Wealth Report we focus on empowering you with libertools. Focusing on the positive can be a very powerful strategy to improve conditions of individual lives, as well as in the world generally.

Look for, identify and develop your own personal libertools!

The opposite of a libertool is slavetool. Oppressive governments use slavetools, such as vast surveillance databases or unjust and unfair tax collection strategies, designed to keep us under control. Perhaps even worse, slavetools are sometimes deeply embedded inside our psyches, based on the conditioning we have received since childhood.

Many people think they can break free by “fighting slavetools” or trying to reform them - concentrating the negative. Maybe, what they should do instead is identify and develop libertools, use them every day, and persuade people to use them. Would that work better?

What do you think? Please write in and let us know.

How To Play With Ideas

Without Going Nuts!

Most of you don’t remember the good old days, when people accepted the fact that human life included risk. Professors ate DDT to show that it was okay, policemen actually chased criminals (instead of waiting an hour for a dozen guys in black PJs to show up), and teenage boys carried rifles through the subway on their way to ROTC!

But, alas, those days are gone, and we live in a world of obedient bicycle helmet-wearers, kids under adult supervision till they’re thirty, and where fifty million of us express our ‘individuality’ by wearing the same stupid Che Guevara T-shirt.

The world has become filled with people who will accept absolutely anything, except risk. (Imagine these folks at 80: Ready to die, having never actually lived.)

Sure, there are still young people who think they’re being ever-so-cool by rebelling against their parents, but have you ever noticed how they do it? Sex, drugs and bad music! Hey, Funk Master Slick! That’s exactly what your parents did! That is so over… and so utterly boring.

We’re about to take you on a journey through one of the nastiest junkyards on the planet – to the land of true danger – the realm of ideas gone wild!

Get this into your heads now – there ain’t nothing dangerous like an idea. Don’t believe me? Then take it from someone who murdered 20 million of his own guys. This creep knew about danger:

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

–Joseph Stalin

Trust me, if you ever want to scare people – and I mean REALLY scare the crap out of them – start spreading a completely new idea. It works every time. Now, by “scared,” we don’t mean that they’ll whisper about you behind your back – we mean they’ll keep their children indoors and beg their politicians to “do something about this threat to our way of life!”

And when we say “ideas,” we’re not talking about the wimpy little word-clusters that your teacher shoved down your throat in school; we’re talking about unauthorized thoughts…Ideas that have no pedigree, no track record, no important person’s endorsement – just a raw naked idea that you expose to the world. It’s pretty unlikely that you have any experience with such things, but they are incredible!

You think fire’s a rush? Ha! All the rules are known and all the methods of handling it safely (or not) are clear to anyone who can read a page or two. Playing with fire is passé.

Sex? Sex was old-hat in the Stone Age! Sure, our bodies are designed to love it, but if you think you’re being some kind of rebel by having sex, you REALLY need to crack open that mind of yours. People have been doing nothing much except sex for, what, a million years? Get over yourself.

And drugs? Dude, you haven’t a clue! Pharmicate with yourself all you want, but stewing your brain in a chemical soup is lame, lame, lame, compared to actually using the thing.

Sex and drugs are cheap rebellion, but thinking… that scares the hell out of people. Why else do you think they avoid doing it at all costs? (Do you have any other way to explain the Macarena?)

But as soon as you start to really think for yourself, you’ll find a swarm of voices flying at you, screaming that ideas are dangerous, and that you could end up dead, or – even worse – laughed at.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “People do too think!” Ha! we say! They run from it! They exchange a few slogans and repeat a few pre-approved phrases, but not much more. Regurgitating words that you hear from “important” people is NOT thinking!

So, we’re going to show you the most flamboyant ideas-gone-wrong, laugh with you, and help you catch a breath or two between the ever-pounding waves of “Thinking will make the whole tribe hate you!”

More to follow…

Paul Rosenberg is a writer and publisher at Vera Verba Visit his site to read more. He gave a series of presentations on Trusts, Setting your Mind Free, and the Digital Economy at the recent Q Wealth Event, Recipes for Success – Cancun 2008 If you would like to meet him, he is scheduled to be at the next Q Wealth Event in Panama City, Panama, this November.