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From Rural Revolution

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pop the lid on a huge bucket, open it up, and have an instant homestead? Inside that bucket would be a ready-built off-grid cabin, a huge raised-bed garden area fenced against the deer, a well with a hand pump, a pond, an acre of wheat, two milk cows, a flock of chickens, and all your seeds sprouted in pretty little containers, ready to plant.

Well I’d like that too, but it doesn’t exist.

While I applaud any and all efforts for people to adopt a more preparedness lifestyle, I must point out a dangerous tendency: the mindset that someone can stash away all kinds of supplies and equipment, but they won’t bother learning anything about it until such time as the bleep hits the fan. Bad idea.

It’s a whole lot easier to talk about doing something than to actually do it. Preppers must learn how to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. A mark of a real Prepper (versus an armchair Prepper) is the determination to make sure that his efforts won’t be wasted. This means testing your theories, supplies, and equipment; and it means learning how to do things by alternate means. And this must be done before the bleep hits the fan.

There are some people – the “garden of Eden in a bucket” types – who would have you believe the skills to run a…

From Modern Survival Blog – surviving uncertain times

Guest post: by Christine Coburn

There is nothing more frustrating than when you have worked hard to get a batch of food prepared to can and then your canner doesn’t work right or for you to have Old Faithful erupting on your stove instead of staying in Yellowstone…

After 30 years of canning I have learned several “tricks” All of them the hard way. In order to understand what is causing a problem and how to fix it then you need to understand how each part of the canner works together with the rest of the parts.

The normal run of the mill canner: (mine is a Mirro 22 qt made in 1980, it has been in service full time for 31 years)

Various parts of the canner:

Pot (See the locking lugs all the way around)

Lid

Gasket

Canner Racks.. One is always placed on the bottom of the pot under your jars. The other is placed on top of the first level and then a second level of jars on top of it. This is when you are canning pints or half pints and are doing a second level. You can not stack quart jars. Failure to use these will cause your jars to break in the canner.

Stem

Pressure regulator (this is what regulates the amount of pressure in your pot)
…

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From Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

Reader “Brisbane Bear” from down under sent potpourri of links on the dwindling prospects for the Australian economy.

Oceanfront Homes for 65% Off

In apples, rot starts at the periphery and spreads to the core. In real estate, rot starts in condos and vacation homes, then slowly encompasses city after city.

Please consider Investors snap up coastal property bargains in Queensland.

While prices soar in some coastal towns close to mining centres, astute buyers are managing to secure ocean- front homes in traditional tourist locations for $ 500,000 or more off peak prices as vendors cave after years of trying to sell.

One buyer scored an oceanfront unit in a marina development at Cardwell, halfway between Cairns and Townsville, for $ 157,000 – almost $ 300,000 less than it sold for in 2006. The unit had been on the market for three years.

A penthouse with ocean views in the same development sold for $ 570,000 less than its 2007 sales price.

RP Data senior analyst Cameron Kusher said buyers of the most affordable seaside holiday homes needed to be prepared for a long commute. But he said coastal market values had fallen across Queensland, meaning bargains could even be found in popular locations.

Chain Sales and Contingent Offers

When all else fails, buyers accept any offer they can get including contingent sales as noted by The Age in Risky ride on the vendor-go-round.

SELLING a home

…

From The Market Ticker

If you have not read this article, you need to.  It is presented as a “why the middle class is squeezed” in America piece, with the premise being that we were once great enough to be the world’s manufacturing powerhouse but we no longer are and this is our fault.

Wrong.

Let’s start with this:

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

Ok, so why not?

Is it because the Chinese are smarter?

Is it because we lack the ability to perform the manufacturing?

Is it our tax structure?

In short, is it our fault?

In a word: NO.

This, my friends, is why:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according

…

From SurvivalBlog.com

Financial calamity can take many different forms.  The Brazilian saga of hyperinflation / depression / recovery from the 1980s leading to one of today’s most robust economies is a classic tale of overcoming adversity.  Argentina’s economic collapse in 2000-2001 followed by hyperinflation in 2002, debt repudiation and seizing foreign deposits is another story with a solid recovery afterwards.  The disastrous 20-year Japanese experiment with deflation and negative growth is at the other end of the spectrum.
Which will the US experience first?  And, how quickly will we feel the scorching fire of hyperinflation or the freezing blast of deflation?
The short answer is that today we should be preparing for a recession in the near future with actual deflation in certain sectors.  We also need to anticipate the possibility of a deflationary spiral into the “Great Correction.”

As the economy struggles through the next recession, we need to be alert for signals that the Federal Reserve has screwed up and overshot its goal of controlling deflation.  A big miss with too much monetary expansion and the US economy could lurch into hyperinflation with very little warning.
In JWR’s novel Patriots, our heroes experience an occupation force of primarily European UN troops.  Today, that seems unlikely but only because the European countries are determined to make a bigger mess of their economies even more quickly than the US.  After all, politicians in Europe have over-promised for even longer than politicians in the US. …

From Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

Slowly but surely global growth estimates have been ratcheted down. Courtesy of Google Translate from an Italian news site, please consider IMF estimates two years of recession for Italy

Deep red for the Italian economy in the next two years. Against the background of a global recovery stalled, slowed by the crisis in the eurozone in particular, Italy is preparing to reach out to two years of recession in 2012 and 2013. The cold shower comes from the International Monetary Fund put in hand as usual to their predictions gave a general scissor kick to the estimates of growth around the world.

Last update at the World Economic Outlook that the Ansa news agency is able to anticipate its spread before the official next Tuesday, the IMF finds in the euro area’s main patient who staggers a little and infects all international economies. “The global recovery is threatened by the growing tensions in the euro area,” considered the “main reason” the deterioration of economic prospects.

And it is complemented and intertwined “the financial fragility elsewhere.” The Fund therefore warns that the downside risks have escalated. So economists in Washington have been forced to make a clean break with all the statistics and this in large part because “it is expected that the euro area economy will end up in a mild recession in 2012.”

World growth will be just 3.3% this year and 4% next, with a downward

…

From The Market Ticker

On April 1st 2007 the very first Tickers were written.  In just a bit over two months, The Market Ticker will be five years of age.

And through that time The Market Ticker has pointed out one central fact behind everything published here: You cannot spend more than you take in on an indefinite basis.

This, of course, is anathema to a nation — and a world, really — that has done exactly that for more than three decades.  Many of the citizens of the world — those under about 35 (as your first few years of life have little direct connection in a cerebral sense to economics) have never known a world where overspending and ponzi economics was not practiced.

You can’t exactly flaw people for not understanding that a thing is broken when they’ve never experienced life in any other way.  And for those who are somewhat older, those of us who remember the 1970s, the oil shocks, gas lines and 5 gallon purchase limits along with grocery store prices that seemed to double every six months (it wasn’t quite that bad — but it was bad!) it is easy to get the mistaken impression that what we’ve had for the last 30 years “fixed” what was broken in the 1970s.

It didn’t, of course. 

The world had run on it a simple fraud covered in various layers of complexity to hide it from the common man, just as has…

From SurvivalBlog.com

I have been guilty for years of talking about preparing verses actually putting forth the effort and taking the necessary steps to prepare for my family.  I began my prep life back pre-2000 Y-2K bug times.  I began to read about the potential time bomb that was ticking as it pertained to the technology crash back in 1995.  I had subscribed to a homesteaders magazine called Countryside (highly recommended) and began to study what impending danger that our nation and world was faced with.  As did many, I did not want to face the facts that this could actually happen to the good ole USA and like many laughed it off.  As the end of 1998 came closer we lived on a historical farm in central Ohio and I began to take serious the issue at hand.  I became very convicted  that if there was even a small chance that this “bug” could paralyze our society and send us back to the stone age then I at least needed to protect my wife and children.  We all chipped in and began to prepare.  To say I went over-board would be very mild.  We put in a 100’ x 100’ garden (our first) and proceeded to plant everything that came in a seed packet.  I went to the garden center and looked down at the very small tomato plants and thought to myself “how much can one small plant produce”?  So I proceed to buy 52 tomato…

From SurvivalBlog.com

Jim T. suggested a good piece by Thorsten Polleit: How Deflationary Forces Will Be Turned into Inflation

AmEx (American Expat) sent us this: Local currencies: ‘In the U.S. we don’t trust’

The FDIC Friday Follies have resumed: Banks closed in Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania; first failures of 2012

A reader in Manitoba wrote ask me about possible trigger dates for a financial panic. I told her that a key date is March 15, 2012. That is the day that the Greek government must either cough up the cash, or admit default. Fitch seems to consider Greek default almost a certainty.

Items from The Economatrix:

World Bank Cuts Economic Outlook, Says Europe in Recession, Warns Developing Countries to "Prepare For The Worst"

Silver to Explode Upward

Wall Street Rises On Bank Results, But Google Sinks Late

12 Things To Keep In A Safe At Home, Not In A Bank

Oil Above $ 101 On Hopes IMF To Curb Europe Crisis