My older brother in Norway is an extravagant version of myself. He too is someone who needs to feel free in order to prosper. He quit his job years before I did, and was in that way something of a trail blazer for myself. However, I went a few steps further than he did. Not only did I quit my job, I sold my house, divided my estate among my children, and left Norway for good.
I was feeling increasingly trapped by the system, and decided to get as far away from it as possible. My family found my sudden urge to get away odd, but it appears that the sense of unease that I felt back in 2016 is now starting to seep into a larger portion of the population. There's been something of an exodus out of Norway lately, and it doesn't appear to be confined only to the super-rich.
My cousin, who's wealthy but not exactly super-rich, has expressed an intention to sell all his shares in the family business. But that may not happen, because he has discovered to his dismay that the sale will trigger a 30% tax on whatever he can get for his shares.
Someone else in my family is also looking to get out of the company. I'm not sure who it may be, but the number of shares on offer indicate that it's someone from the younger generation.
I find all of this fascinating, so I called my brother to hear what he's making of it, and that's when he told me that he felt trapped.
People are discovering that there's no room for manoeuvring outside the path set up by the authorities. Any deviation from their vision of how people should live and invest is punished. There's a cage set up around us that we only discover once we try to do something contrary to their plan. The only option is to either stay within the confines of their plan, or get completely out of the system.
Once out of the system, we're not invited back in. I've discovered that I cannot any longer open a bank account or buy shares in Norway, and this problem extends to my eleven year old son. It appears that my plan to buy him a few shares in the family company has to be scrapped. We'll have to wait until he's eighteen so that he can set things up without having to mention his relationship to me.
However, there's no reason to feel sorry for either me or my brother. We're doing fine. He's enjoying a great deal of personal freedom, and so do I. Our everyday lives are spent in leisure. We both have enough gold to last us the rest of our lives. We're both free to do all the little things we like, and we're not confined by any boss. But we're not free to do much other than this.
With this in mind, my advice to my children in Norway will be to stay away from investments beyond a modest apartment and gold and silver coins. Now is not the time to be optimistic about the economy. It's a time to hunker down and do what my brother and I have done. If things deteriorate further, and there's a need to get out of Norway, my kids can sell their apartments and smuggle their coins out of the country. But I doubt that things will get that bad.
The most likely end station for this ongoing madness is a big parallel economy where things will be traded against gold and silver. My brother is in this respect perfectly positioned, as will my children be if they take my advice.
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| American Silver Eagle |
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