[robmusial]

If you live in America, are banking with an American bank, and hold your investments denominated in dollars I'm not sure that just shifting your investments to other global equities would really get you the outcome you want if your goal is to hedge against this specific risk. Besides if this really is the trade war to end all trade wars, the world losing one of the largest markets (the U.S.) is going to depress the entire global economy. I assume if you're even considering VXUS you're not close to retirement so wouldn't the better strategy be to just keep adding to VOO?

[munk-a]

I believe that TD's US presence is still a subsidiary of the main Canadian corporation - and there are some banks that will explicitly offer offshore non-US currency accounts. That is a good point to raise though since most banks may offer holdings in overseas funds but if they're managed domestically they'd likely be subject to the same currency shocks and your account may still read well on paper but be effectively unreachable.

[JKCalhoun]

I am retired but I have not sold all my stocks and moved to bonds. Even if you use the "rule of 100" I should still have around 40% of my portfolio in stocks.

But to your point, I am certain that I am not going to profit from this fuckery. (Although, hilariously I bought silver a decade ago to teach my daughters about investing—and they each purchased a once or two from me. Of course it turned out to be a local maxima and they grow up, went to college—watching their investment sink all the while. Perhaps they did learn a valuable lesson in investing.)

No, I'm just doing damage control.

I had asked a month or so back as to where the "safe harbors" were during the Great Depression. My impression (and the responses did nothing to contradict this) were that there were no safe harbors—as perhaps there may not be any in some dystopian future we may or may not be headed for.

"Hold, don't sell during the panic," is all anyone could offer. (And so too holding those silver coins until now might also have been a valuable lesson for my daughters?)

[embedding-shape]

> where the "safe harbors" were during the Great Depression [...] were that there were no safe harbors

Surely economy and the world economy operates in a completely different way now than it did back them, if not in the US, the very least in the rest of the world? But that's just my intuition, maybe things are more similar than they are different in reality?

> Of course it turned out to be a local maxima

Not to pour salt into your wounds (sorry), suppose your daughters were born 1980-1990 sometime, you really managed to hit exactly the stagnation phase it seems, that sucks but probably true what you say, still had a lesson in there :) I got curious and maybe others are too, especially if you don't usually look at price of commodities so here: https://www.macrotrends.net/1470/historical-silver-prices-10...

[JKCalhoun]

Ha ha, yeah, must have been 2011 when we bought into silver.

[embedding-shape]

:| I was thinking "Yeah, 1980 probably, then they'd be 20 now, it'd match with the college stuff" and then I thought you were joking with 2011 but yeah, terrible for the same reason :/

[machomaster]

At least during the Great Depression you had independent markets like the USSR. Good luck investing, though. :-) The point about the higher independence of markets still stands. Great Depression was named as such by Americans (just like World Series, etc), but wasn't as global as the name implies.

Nowadays the world's economy operates in even more globalized way and when the biggest players get hit, everyone suffers (1998, dotcom, 2008, covid). That's why the tariff war was such a counter-productive idea; even if you theoretically end up on top, everyone will still lose, including you.