There has been considerable speculation that higher interest rates are inevitable since the surprise election victory of Donald Trump as U.S. President. The problem is that few economists are contemplating the consequences on the enormous amount of debt the Federal government has wracked up since interest rates were last at a historically more normal five percent rate.

Consider that the Federal debt today is over $19.867 trillion. This makes it literally larger than the whole American economy, with a Debt to GDP ratio of 106 percent. In only the first 45 days of the 2017 fiscal year, another $294 billion has been added to America’s debt.

This amounts to a yearly debt increase of 13 percent. If they kept up this staggering borrowing, the total national debt would rise by $2.4 trillion this fiscal year alone. That would grow the total to over $21 trillion by September.

The debt is now rapidly outpacing U.S. economic growth. It is distressing news, despite Nobel winning Paul Krugman’s argument that debt is good. He argues that the American economy has managed to expand significantly despite having been saddled with debt since 1835.

It is not strictly true either. Besides the relatively unusual years during the U.S. Civil War and the Second World War, the levels of debt throughout the majority of American history were actually low. For example, the 1916 debt one hundred years ago equaled $3.6 billion, or seven percent of the GDP.

Today the situation is out of control. The Federal government is now forced to borrow money to pay the interest for the money that it previously borrowed. This equals the classic definition of bad debt.

In fact the Federal government presently spends almost all of its revenues from taxes on fixed and mandated entitlement programs (Medicare and Social Security) alongside the enormous interest on the debt. This would be bad enough if both Social Security and Medicare were not hopelessly underfunded and rapidly burning through their remaining cash.

The debt interest payments alone equate to hundreds of billions every year. This is with interest rates at all time lows. Today’s Federal government does not even have to pay two percent interest rates on its enormous debt. In 2006, the U.S. debt interest rate averaged a historically more normal over five percent. This sounds unthinkable now, but it was considered low in those days compared to the extreme rates from the 1980s and 1990s.

Interest rates on government debt at five percent today would actually break the U.S. government. This means that if today’s abnormally low interest rates are not around forever, the government is facing a time bomb of higher interest payments which will blow it to pieces. Trump’s monetary policies and growth ideas may be good for other areas of the U.S. economy, but they could easily be ruinous for the Treasury Department’s finances.

Excessive debt loads have brought down a number of the biggest global corporations. Most importantly, excess debt has led to the irrevocable decline of many of the greatest geopolitical superpowers in history. Thanks to chief debt cheerleader Paul Krugman, governmental decision makers believe they can continuously expand the debt without consequences or limits. When interest rates do finally rise (maybe this coming year, thanks to Trump), the debt funded spending party will quickly be over.

Will your portfolio weather the imminently higher interest rates?

Gold and silver have performed best as governments financially collapsed. These precious metals are your ONLY hope for hedging protection against a crashing American dollar and global stock markets. This makes them the best form of investment insurance for your retirement portfolio. Click here to obtain your free gold IRA rollover kit from Regal Assets so that you can have all of the critical information on how to best protect your portfolio using tangible gold and silver.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

The results of Trump’s election have caused a significantly different effect on the markets than analysts and economists predicted. Stocks did not crash and burn for more than a few hours. They have instead risen dramatically to mark new all time highs. Volatility demonstrated by the VIX has calmed to historically reasonable levels too.

Despite this, many any have expressed concerns over President Elect Trump’s trade and economic policies. These will have a real impact on your personal investments going forward. Though Trump has significant successful business experience, he has never governed.

Consider that Mr. Trump goes to Washington riding a wave of hostility towards free trade. He could easily become the most protectionist American President since Herbert Hoover. The new President elect is against the two main free trade deals with Asia (the TPP Trans Pacific Partnership) and the European Union (the TTIP Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership).

He will probably succeed in his threats to scuttle both. China is the likely beneficiary of such a move as they are ready to offer their own pan-Asian trade agreement to fill the vacuum. NAFTA is also at risk of being repealed.

Trump harshly criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement constantly while running for office, correctly calling it the first nail in the factory workers’ proverbial coffins. This deal that regulates all trade between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada is something he can repeal without congressional help. Trump has vowed to put tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports.

If he succeeds, prices for American consumers will rise dramatically. This will be more aggravated when U.S. exports likely suffer tariff retaliations from China and Mexico. It could even lead to a trade war.

The last time the U.S. carried out such protectionist policies happened under Herbert Hoover in 1931. The Smoot-Hawley Act erected the largest tariffs in history on imports coming to the United States. The act and subsequent retaliation were among the underlying causes of the Great Depression.

The other centerpiece of Trump’s economic ideas centers on massive tax cuts and infrastructure spending. He dreams of becoming another President Reagan. Trump wishes to outlaw the estate tax, slash the highest levels of income taxes, and cut by more than half the business tax rates. These will be most beneficial to you who are corporate or high earning individuals, though many would gain something.

Assuming the Republican-controlled Congress approves these measures to coincide with Trump’s intended major infrastructure building program, they will certainly increase growth. The U.S. terribly needs to improve its airports, highways, electrical grid, and water infrastructure. The theory is that interest rates at extremely low levels would allow America to embark on this spending spree cheaply.

The problem is that it is still a spending spree, even if it appears to be on cheap terms now. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has assessed this as an independent think tank. Their troubling conclusion is that these plans will cause the U.S. government debt levels to explode. They predict the government debt to GDP ratio will rise by an astonishing one-third in ten years.

Government bonds are dropping in value, demonstrating the worries of higher government borrowing and more debt. On top of this, Moody’s has just opined today that the future of the U.S. Aaa credit rating is in jeopardy over the medium term from these very policies.

Will your portfolio weather the debt explosion of the new administration?

Silver and gold have a long history of outperforming when debt crises and trade wars erupt. The precious metals assets are the ONLY ones that offer inverse protection against the U.S. stock market and dollar. This is why they are ideal investment insurance for any retirement portfolio. You can request a no-cost gold IRA rollover kit from Regal Assets by clicking here to obtain more information on the best ways to utilize physical gold and silver to safeguard your portfolio.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

As voters grapple with the outcome of the election for the White House, the question remains will either of the candidates affect any much needed change? Or is it just an accident that the original party led by Thomas Jefferson was called the Democratic-Republican Party until its ill fated split in 1824 led to the creation of the two rival parties we know today?

While the Democrats have a platform that strives to increase controversial social freedoms such as abortion and gay rights, they attempt to legislate their way to fewer economic freedoms as with higher taxes for the rich and more banking rules and legislation. The Republic party claims the opposite ideals are its core platform. Yet consider the examples in this election cycle of conflicting ideas from the two parties.

A Wall Street CEO and billionaire floated a retirement tax bill for the new administration and Congress to consider. It purports to institute a new three percent tax on payroll which would go straight to the Wall Street companies to be invested. Despite the fact that this sounds like a Republican idea, it is in fact a Democratic Party bill which their candidate supports.

This candidate has taken huge sums of money from Wall Street firms and will subsequently do their bidding. Despite this, the party supporters are choosing to ignore this and any other information which demonstrates she does not truly represent the ideas of her party.

It is a similar charade within the Republican Party. Their candidate is so different from the party’s core traditional ideas that many of its own leaders were infuriated that he might win the election. Some of them threatened to vote for the other party to stymie his efforts to become President under their party banner.

The reality is more troubling. Both of these major parties are comfortably in the pockets of the special interest groups that offer the largest amount of financial support. This is why the banks, pharmaceuticals, oil firms, and military goods manufacturers wisely provide similarly huge donations to both parties.

This ensures that their wishes will be realized regardless of which candidate prevails. Another way of putting this is that the two mainstream parties in America are largely interchangeable, in economic terms at least.

Consider that in the year 2000, the total debt of the American federal government amounted to a mere slightly more than $5 trillion. After eight years of Republican leadership in the White House followed by another eight years of the Democrats, the national debt has risen to approximately $20 trillion. That is up four times in only 16 years.

In other words, it does not really matter economically whose party takes the reins. The debt will keep expanding at an unprecedented, exponential, and indefinite rate. Only if the government was to institute stunningly painful cuts to the military and welfare benefits could this worrying trend be reversed. Regardless of who takes office in January, it will not happen.

The spending on welfare, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security programs already equate to roughly two thirds of the entire budget of the U.S. federal government. This spending will increase. Military spending will also grow. Whether or not your candidate ultimately triumphs will not change this.

When there is no one left willing to loan money to the Federal government and they can no longer print their way out of the next crisis, gold will be your best bet for investment and financial insurance. The time tested safe haven metal has protected people in crisis situations, debt implosions, and currency debasing for thousands of years.

If your portfolio prepared to take on the next cycle of market uncertainty?

Gold and silver have historically performed best during times of crises and market uncertainty. These are the ONLY assets that have shown an inverse relationship with the dollar and economy, which makes them an amazing investment to protect and diversify one’s retirement portfolio. Request your free gold IRA rollover kit from Regal Assets or click here to get more information on how you can safeguard your portfolio by including physical gold and silver.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

Every year, more baby boomers reach retirement age. If you haven’t begun seriously planning for your own future yet, it’s important to start as soon as possible. But even if you are building up your savings, you might not be doing it as wisely as you could. Here are some of the top mistakes that baby boomers make with their IRA or 401(k) plans.

Failing to Withdraw the Required Minimum Distribution
Once you reach retirement age, the IRS requires you to withdraw a certain minimum amount from your IRA. This is called the Required Minimum Distribution (RMD). Unfortunately, many people fail to take out that money, fearing that it will deplete their savings.

However, not doing this actually puts you in more financial jeopardy. If you don’t withdraw the annual RMD, you could be charged penalties of up to 50%, which curtails your IRA’s growth and ends up depleting it more quickly than if you had simply taken the money.

Borrowing from Your 401(k)
Your 401(k) is there to provide for your retirement. But what if you run into financial troubles before that? It can be tempting, if a large emergency expense comes along, to dip into your savings in order to cover it. But this is a bad idea.

Even if you do pay the money back in full before you reach retirement age (which is difficult), you’ll also have to pay penalty fees for early withdrawal. Plus, taking out a lump sum, instead of incremental payments, diminishes the additional interest you’ll earn on your savings. If you need extra cash, find another source besides your 401(k).

Putting Your Money in a Trust

Rather than borrowing against your retirement fund, you might decide on the opposite course of action: putting the money into a trust for later use. Unfortunately, this carries with it a lot of the same problems as raiding your 401(k) early. First, you’ll be charged taxation fees. And if you take out the money before the age of 59.5, you’ll accrue an additional penalty of 10%. Leave your money alone to grow on its own, and don’t touch it until you’re ready for it.

Investing in Company Stocks

This is more of a risky move than a cut and dried mistake. Stock investments have the potential to produce huge payouts. However, if you’re not careful, you can also lose a large chunk of your savings. You never know how a company you’ve put money into will perform over time. If one such business has a bad year, or even goes under, you can be left with next to nothing. Experts advise putting no more than 10% of your IRA into company stocks.

Even more dangerous is putting all your money – and faith – in your employer’s stock.  As poorer-but-wiser ex-employees of Enron and current employees of Wells Fargo can tell you, just because you work for a company it’s no guarantee they’re being honest with you about what’s driving the stock price, and where the business is headed.  As in every area of finance, it’s a horrible idea to put all your eggs in any one basket.

Not Diversifying Your Portfolio

This goes hand in hand with the above point. Many people have a “favorite” type of investment, which they think will bring the biggest return, or the safest payout. Often, the temptation is to put all or most of your money into that particular venture in the hope of maximizing your IRA or 401(k).

However, no investment is without its risks. If an unexpected disaster occurs, you could be left with nothing. This is what happened in 2008. The stock market crashed, and IRAs and 401(k)s were decimated overnight.

Even bonds, once considered among the safest investments of all, are a risk these days. Returns are diminishing, while incremental inflation rises, causing people to lose money.

Thus, the smart thing is to spread your investments out across multiple outlets. That way even if trouble arises with one, you’re only out a relatively small amount of money, and you still have the rest to fall back on.

These are just a few of the mistakes that baby boomers can make as they try to plan for their retirement. But you don’t have to fall into these traps. Do your research, stay informed, and make sure that, when you do ultimately leave the workforce, you’ve set up your IRA and/or 401(k) to provide the maximum benefit to you with the minimum hassle.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

With all that is going on with the wild and unpredictable U.S. election season, it is easy to forget that a potentially more cataclysmic campaign is underway in Italy over in Europe. At stake is the future of Italy in the European Union. More than this, the whole future of the European Union project is actually on the ballot.

December 4th is the day when Italians will vote whether or not to back the significant constitutional reforms on which Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has staked his political future. More important than the actual reforms is what will happen if Renzi loses the referendum. You could call this vote Brexit on steroids for the sake of the European Union.

Politicians across the spectrum in Italy have joined in unprecedented unity against the referendum in the past weeks and months. Last week the former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti announced he is against the referendum. Long time Italian Premier Silvio Berlesconi is also campaigning against it. All the opposition party leaders in Italy are as well.

So far, analysts have been mostly looking at opinion polls to try to decide if Italy will really go against the prime minister and trigger the resignation he has promised if he fails. The problem with a general election now is that opinion polls show that opposition leader Beppe Grillo, head of the populist Five Star Movement, will win the majority in parliament and become the next prime minister of Italy if Renzi is forced to resign.

Grillo has promised a referendum on continued use of the euro currency in Italy. Polls again show that most Italians are in favor of leaving the euro zone to go back to the Italian lira. This would mean Italy withdrawing from the currency union of the block, if not outright from the European Union itself.

Especially this soon after Brexit, the EU can not afford to suffer a core member (with the third largest economy left in the block) choosing to abandon the European project now. Other countries would likely choose to follow suit, and the entire fifty year project in Europe could easily unwind.

How likely is this to happen? The Euro zone banking system keeps track of inflows and outflows of Euro currency from one country to another. Italy’s central bank has been recording a lot of liabilities to the Euro system as deposits leave the country lately.

By the end of September, these represented 354 billion euros, an amount that is 118 billion higher from the same time last year and 78 billion higher since the end of May. While the flow of money leaving Italy for mostly Germany is not yet as big as during the European sovereign debt crisis in 2012, it is substantial and growing.

One of the main explanations for why money is leaving Italy in such significant amounts is that people do not want to risk their Italian Euros being converted to Italian lira. This could realistically happen if populist leader Beppe Grillo wins the national elections on the back of a failed referendum vote.

You should be concerned about the fate of the European Union, even though it may seem far away. It is the largest economic and trading block in the world. Its major banks are interconnected with American financial institutions on several levels. An economic catastrophe like a major unwinding in European economic integration means a severe blow to the world and also American economies.

You can protect yourself against economic fallout from the situations like the Italian referendum. Now is the time to place a portion of your retirement money or savings into gold. Gold shines its brightest in times of economic uncertainty and collapse. Click here to download your free Gold IRA information package to learn how you can roll over part of your retirement account to gold and silver.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

In only the past eight years, the aggregate U.S. government debt has soared by a historically unparalleled $9 trillion. Since President Obama took office, it has exploded from $10.6 trillion to reach $19.7 trillion. This nearly doubling of the public debt in under a decade should concern you.

The trend does not look to be reversing any time soon either. For the fiscal year 2016 the Federal government just closed the books on, the Feds poured another $1.4 trillion on to the mountain of debt. This is the third highest annual debt increase in American history, and all when neither a war was being fought nor any significant improvements made in the national infrastructure.

With the trend rapidly accelerating towards national insolvency, you might say that the U.S. election is merely a battle for who will be the next captain of the already sinking Titanic. Yet Joseph Stiglitz the Nobel Prize winner for economics argues that there is no reason to be concerned regarding the enormous national debt.

He goes so far as to claim that if you do make a big deal about it, you do not grasp economics. In fact it makes him crazy that everyone “gets this wrong about the economy.”

Per Joseph Stiglitz, no one looks at only a major company’s debt when considering its future prospects. You would also take into consideration a variety of other characteristics, such as its income, assets, and growth before you make a determination of the financial status of the company.

To be fair, Stiglitz is right about these other factors mattering. If you look at a country like Norway or Switzerland, you do see nations whose debt pales in comparison to their income, assets, and growth. Sadly, the United States is not a country on this positive fiscal short list.

Determining this is not rocket science, thanks to the U.S. Treasury Department. They put out periodic financial statements that relay the government’s income versus expenses and liabilities versus assets.

The first part of the equation is not pretty. The government is hemorrhaging out literally billions of dollars every year in substantially greater expenses than income. The trend continues to be negative.

Regarding the liabilities measured against assets, the balance sheet is similarly underwater. The Federal Government itself admits to having only $3.2 trillion worth of assets at the same time as it boasts $21.4 trillion in liabilities.

This equates to a negative net balance sheet total of -$18.2 trillion. It is an untenable negative position no country or company has ever been in throughout the history of the entire world.

A significant number of economists will insist that the American government has other assets that translate to trillions of dollars. Among these are the military, the taxing authority of the federal government, and even the federal highway network. If you are going to count these as assets, you should not forget the more than $40 trillion worth of liabilities that are not funded in Social Security and Medicare.

You should also be aware of the fact that the debt load of the United States is amassing at a significantly faster pace than the growth rate of the underlying economy. Consider the fact that when President Obama began serving, the public debt of the U.S. represented 73% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product. In 2016 this figure is 105%. The economy may have grown in those eight years, but the debt growth has outpaced it massively.

You can protect yourself by keeping a portion of your savings in gold. Gold has no counter party risk and is not an institution that can fail on you. Get started by requesting your free information kit from Regal Assets today.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

In the last few days, gold has been on a losing streak. Last Tuesday, gold prices fell by $42 per ounce – 3.3% – the biggest single-day drop in value in nearly three years.

Does that mean gold has resumed its long-term downtrend since it reached its all-time high of $1,923.70 per ounce in 2011? Some analysts predict gold prices will fall another 20% or more before stabilizing.

That’s certainly what central banks and governments would like you to believe. But it’s not how the world’s richest investors and central banks themselves are investing.

Billionaire George Soros, for instance, recently sold stocks and instead bought gold and shares of gold mining companies. The world’s central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace in decades, adding nearly 500 tons of gold to their vaults in 2015. The pace increased in 2016; central bank demand in the first three months climbed 28% versus the previous year.

A big reason people are piling into gold is the lack of other good options.

Take bank accounts, for instance. When you deposit money into your bank account, from a legal point of view, it’s no longer your money. You become an unsecured creditor holding an IOU.

Not that long ago, you could earn 5% or more in accounts at US banks, which offset some of this risk. But no more. Today, you’re lucky to earn one-tenth that much. In some countries, money on deposit in a bank earns a negative interest rate.

That’s right. You turn over your money to a bank for safekeeping, lose legal ownership of it, and pay the bank for the right to keep it there.

But how safe is the money you have on deposit in a bank? Not very safe at all. In the US, the five largest banks have a capital ratio of only 6%. In effect, if depositors in these banks demand their money back, these banks could repay only six cents on the dollar before they ran out of money.

Sure, there’s always deposit insurance. In the US, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guarantees bank deposits up to $250,000 from losses due to bank insolvency. But for every $100 on deposit, the FDIC has only $1.15 with which to back it.

Doesn’t that make you feel warm and fuzzy about the safety of your bank deposits?

Then there’s the “bail-in” phenomenon, which first emerged during the 2013 banking collapse in Cyprus. Some uninsured depositors got half of their money back, although at one bank, customers received nothing over the “insured” amount.

Billionaires and central banks, of course, also purchase bonds. These securities at least can’t be bailed in. But there’s a reason my colleague Doug Casey calls bonds “instruments of guaranteed confiscation.”

First, interest rates are the lowest they’ve ever been in at least 5,000 years. Indeed, more than $13 trillion in bonds with negative interest rates are now sloshing through the global financial system. Just a 0.1% increase in interest rates could lead to losses of $1 trillion in bond portfolios.

Second, the credit quality of bond issuers has declined sharply in recent years. That’s particularly true of government bonds. For instance, credit ratings firm Fitch has downgraded 15 nations in the first half of 2016. That compares with a previous high of 20 downgrades for all of 2011.

How about the stock market? While US stocks are trading at close to record levels, the biggest investors are fleeing stocks at the fastest pace in years. Investors have dumped more than $150 billion in mutual funds so far in 2016. That’s more than two times the amount in all of 2015 and the most in any year since 2008. As I mentioned above, billionaire Soros recently placed a huge bet on plummeting US stock prices.

That leaves physical assets – things like real estate, collectibles, and of course gold. All of these items have a place in your portfolio, if only because they have intrinsic value and can’t be bailed in.

Only gold has a 5,000-year track record of preserving wealth. Indeed, the very first Egyptian dynasty in 3100 BC referred to gold in its legal code. The Bible mentions gold more than 400 times and repeatedly refers to gold as money.

Today, there’s another important reason billionaires are turning to gold: privacy. Unlike most other financial assets, it’s possible to store gold privately – in some cases, even anonymously. And unlike foreign bank or securities accounts, US taxpayers can still store certain forms of gold offshore without needing to report it to Uncle Sam. That may be one reason that in the first six months of 2016, nearly 1,400 tons of gold, with a value of $40 billion, were imported into Switzerland.

In Austria, next door to Switzerland, you can actually store gold anonymously at two private vaults. By anonymous, I mean just that; you can begin a relationship at one of these vaults by identifying yourself as Wonder Woman, Jason Bourne, Morpheus, or any other name you choose. There’s no need to show a passport or provide any identification at all. You simply pay for your safe deposit box, choose a code word, and go. If you don’t want a paper trail of bills from the vault, you can pay up to five years in advance.

Even a small box at one of these vaults will hold well over $1 million in gold coins. If you’re a US citizen, you need not make an annual filing to report its existence – or the value it represents – to your friendly Big Brother, the IRS.

The fact that gold retains this key privacy advantage doesn’t please the powers that be. Last year, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which bills itself as developing and promoting policies to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, warned that gold was being used by criminals and terrorists to launder money.

Sadly, it’s probably just a matter of time before governments crack down on anonymous gold storage. But even if that occurs, gold will retain its intrinsic value and serve as an incredibly useful alternative to more mainstream investments. Best of all, you don’t need to be a billionaire to own it – even anonymously.

You can protect yourself by keeping a portion of your savings in gold. Gold has no counter party risk and is not an institution that can fail on you. Get started by requesting your free information kit from Regal Assets today.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

This past weekend Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates the $160 billion investment firm, addressed a packed room of central bankers at the 40th Annual Banking Seminar of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The message he brought was sobering.

“Japan is closest to its limits, Europe is a step behind it, the US is a step or two behind Europe, and China is a few steps behind the United States. This is a global problem,” he told the silent stunned audience. “The biggest issue is that there is only so much one can squeeze out of a debt cycle, and most countries are approaching those limits.”

Dalio was referring ominously to the decades-long debt super cycle which has been underway and is rapidly coming to a close. He warned about a near-future big squeeze. The world’s biggest economies, including Japan, The United States, Europe, and China have run up unprecedented levels of debt and are getting dangerously close to their limits.

Dalio is not alone in sounding the alarm. The International Monetary Fund also chimed in last week with their announcement that the total worldwide debt has reached a historical high mark of $152 trillion. This eye watering number represents about two times the amount of the entire global economy.

The trend is worsening too. Over $5 trillion in brand new debt has been wracked up in the first three quarters of 2016. The year is on course to defeat the prior 2006 all time high. Countries from Japan to South Korea to Italy have broken their records for levels of public debt.

These international debt levels do not even take into account other underfunded future obligations for pension and healthcare programs. Dalio said it best when he reminded the crowd of an embarrassing truth they already know. “There are too many promises that can’t be kept, not only in the form of debt, but also in the form of health care and pension costs.”

You may shrug this off as a foreign issue. While this is a global problem, it is also dangerously an American one. The 2016 fiscal year for the U.S. government represented the third biggest growth in the federal debt in all of American history. The only two times that beat it were the years of the financial crisis and Great Recession.

The problem is that 2016 was not a year of financial crisis. It represented a year of growth in the world economy, the U.S., and the developed world. Despite this, corporate debt for the year also has broken its old record, as have credit card and student debt in the U.S. As Dalio has warned, debt is now in a major bubble itself.

When you see this bubble pop and/or interest rates rise (one will likely cause the other), the U.S. and other heavily indebted nations will no longer be able to service the interest on their debts, let alone hope to repay them.

On top of this, the major economies’ central banks have printed enormous quantities of money by expanding their balance sheets to all time highs (including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank, and the Bank of England). As they are all in over their heads, this could cause major global inflation at the same time.

Is your portfolio properly diversified?

Placing some of your savings and retirement holdings into gold is your surest hedge in financially unstable times like these. It is nearly 35% below its all time high of over $1,900 per ounce. Click here to request your free gold info kit from Regal Assets, one of the top ranked companies in the industry that specializes in Gold IRA investments.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

The once prosperous farming powerhouse nation of Zimbabwe is an excellent case study in what happens when you refuse to learn from your mistakes. In the early 2000’s, the country decided to go on a money printing spree. In just 2001, the prices of retail goods doubled.

Rather than take a step back and try to reduce inflation, the Zimbabwean government printed money faster to try to get out ahead of it. They had to print enormous new currency denominations that started with thousand and ten thousand Zimbabwe dollar notes and finally reached million, billion, and at last trillion dollar notes.

The hyperinflation in this South African nation skyrocketed to the point that by 2007, the country’s prices doubled approximately every day. Economists have estimated that the hyperinflation actually reached 500 billion percent. This is a staggering figure your mind can not practically understand.

The nightmare ended in 2009 when the government gave up on their currency and the country turned into an economy with hard currency. Businesses and consumers there have utilized other nation’s currencies including American dollars, pounds, euros, Chinese Yuan, and South African rand since then.

You would think that the dictator Robert Mugabe and his cronies would have learned the lesson finally. Yet now their government is beginning to print money again called “bond notes.” The best part is that this time, they are promising they will use restraint and limit the quantities they print. This is precisely what they promised 15 years ago.

It is all too easy to hold up this example and scoff, yet the U.S. and other western developed nations are making similar repetitive mistakes where their banks are concerned. Ten years ago, the banks were dangerously undercapitalized and used sneaky accounting ploys like credit default swaps to hide their dangerous exposure to risk. The largest collapse since the Great Depression resulted starting in 2007 and 2008 in the form of the Financial Crash and Great Recession.

You would think we had learned from our mistakes. Today, the Western banking systems are again perilously undercapitalized and wracking up even more enormous dollar amounts of credit default swaps and other risk instruments. In Europe they are even passing negative interest rates on to customers as their countries’ central banks desperately try to kick start growth by any means they can.

You at least as an individual can learn from these past mistakes which are being repeated. Remember that as a deposit holder in one of the major banks, you are simply an unsecured creditor of an institution whose only hope for a bailout next time lies in the worn out mantra “too big too fail.” This next time, the $20 trillion in debt U.S. government will not be able to save the entire banking system. Only a fool puts all of his hard earned money at risk this way.

There is no reason to keep all of your hard earned assets in near zero interest paying accounts while you wait for the scheming banks to once again go up in flames more severely than previously. Gold protected people in the last financial crisis, and it will again, as it always does.

Now is the time to park a portion of your savings and assets into the ultimate financial insurance policy of gold. It is not tied to the actions of a central bank and has no risk of collapse or counter party risk attached to it like the commercial banks. Click here to request your free gold IRA rollover kit from Regal Assets to learn more about how you can protect your portfolio by adding physical gold and silver.

Gold Investment is the alternative currency that can safeguard you from these types of events. Putting a portion of your savings into this precious metal will help protect you. Download your free self directed IRA rollover gold IRA information kit today.

Despite recent falls in the price of gold, now may be the time to add exposure to the precious metal thanks to demand from Asia, experts suggest.

Gold prices performed well earlier through 2016, hitting a two-year high of $1,366 per ounce in July this year, but have since slumped. Prices are down 6 percent over the past two weeks and finished around $1,254 at the end of Monday trading. Year-to-date, gold prices are up 18 percent.

However, many are seeing this as a price correction, which may be a good opportunity for investors looking to add exposure to the yellow metal and build more favorable positions.