 Gold. Now what we're going to do is we're going to measure gold. We're going to put the price of gold up here because a lot of people consider the price of gold to be a valid measure of preserving wealth, maintaining, preventing money from depreciating. When you look at this thing, when money goes from $100 to $100 to $3.70, that's a currency, right? That's not money because one of the things money has to be has to be a good store of value and currency is not a good store of value. So when that saying comes along that says cash is money, it is true. You need to be liquid, right? But cash is only money for short periods of time. You don't want to be in cash too long, right? We'll talk about this a little bit more when we graph some of these things. But let's put gold on here. In 1900, gold was $20.67. So gold, I'm going to put this $20.67. Okay. And this is gold. So let's put gold as gold, right? Use the gold marker. So this is gold. So gold was $20.67. And what we're going to do here, we're not going to adjust for inflation. We're not going to, because $20.67 in 1900, in 2017, was $517. So $20 was equivalent your purchasing power if you take this into consideration, right? So if you had this money, not money, I keep using the wrong word, but this currency, if you had your wealth in this, right? And inflation was doing this, right? If we're going to measure how much $20.67 was equivalent to in these dollars, it was worth $517. But we're just going to use the value there. This is 10 here, this tick. So 20 is around here, right? So if you put, you know, you bought $20 worth of gold in 1900, and the government didn't confiscate your gold in this period because the US government is a period in 19. I wrote this down. I knew this history before. Oh, I wrote it down in the previous iteration. I didn't copy it over to this one because I wasn't going to talk about it. But there was a certain period, a few years here, during World War II, where the US government confiscated everyone's gold, right? And sort of everyone had to take into the banks, and the banks took that gold in at this price. And then a few years later, the government raised the price of gold because this was not fluctuating the way or controlled the world. It was completely controlled. It was set. It was set in stone. Right now, it's supposed to be fluctuating based on market principles, but it's really not. It's sort of controlled as well in a big way. But during the World War II period, or built up to World War II, the US government confiscated people's gold, and the banks took them in. And a few years later, the banks sold on a higher value, right? So they made pretty good money, pretty good returns, considering the amount of time involved, right? So $20, if you put $20.67 of gold in 1900, right now, gold is trading at a few days ago anyway when I look this up. It's trading at $1,230, right? So let's put that on here. Oops, I got the wrong set. $1,230, $1,230, right? So this is $1,000. This is $1,000. $2,000 is up here because that's $10,000. So $1,230 is like pretty close to $1,000. Let's say it's both here. So right now, if we just think about these as straight lines, this straight line, this was a bad place for you to be in. You would have lost everything because your purchasing power has also decreased, right? It's a double whammy. Your money, value of your money has decreased and your purchasing power has decreased. This is supposed to be a measure of this, but it's really not, okay? So keep this in mind. And gold basically mirrors this, right? To a certain degree, because one thing we can do once we start putting things on grass visually, we can do a table format too. It's more difficult to visualize the stuff in table format. What you can do is start doing calculation, taking ratios, some stuff we're going to talk about in series four of the language of mathematics, but what you can do is take the slope of this graph and take the slope of this graph, which is basically rise over run, right? And rise over run and see which one is a steeper slope. The one that's a steeper slope. If you're invested in it, that's better because it's giving you faster returns, right? So for this graph or this visualization, what we're thinking about is which one is going to be a steeper slope, right? On the upside, not on the downside. This is one of the, the only one that I took or found where the price has decreased over time. Actually, I think textiles are looked at as well, but I didn't really bother graphing that because that's very small scale. And technology actually goes down as well. The cost of technology goes down over time as well. And that's really cool to look at, but we're going to take a look at at a different time and different video that we've set up for, right? So gold has gone from $20 to $1,200, right? And you can do a multiple of this, right? You could do this if you want to figure out what the multiple is for the CPI, 244 divided by 8.9. That's 27.4 times. And 1,2,3,0 divided by 20 points is 59 times, right? Wow. So if this is, let's say this was 30 times, this is 59, let's say 60 times. So the slope of this, even though that doesn't appear so right now because we're on a log scale, right? Gold has increased twice as fast as the CPI, which is a good indication of gold based on government measures, based on measures, is a good place to store value, right? Is it a good currency? Do people, does everyone trade gold? I don't know how to, well, I do know the geology. So I have, I can test it and figure out if it's gold, if it's malleable, right? If it's not metallic, you can figure out if something is gold. I know, I've talked to someone where they said some people go to, if you want to find, use a method to find gold in places where they might be gold, right? You don't have to go out in the forest and to the rivers and start pan, pan as a pan, they call it and start looking for gold. Some people take magnets and they go to thrift stores, right? And they take anything that's gold colored and they put a magnet to it. And if it doesn't stick to it, they buy it because gold is not magnetic, it's not ferrous, right? I think it's ferrous if I remember terminology correctly. Then if magnet doesn't stick to it, if it's really gold colored, then it might be gold. And that's one of the things you could use to go searching for gold, right? Go look for treasure, right? So gold is a good place to preserve wealth based on CPI numbers. But this double slope really doesn't do anything to help you compensate for the price of tuitions going up, stuff like that, right? Now, the next measure we're going to look at, we're going to look at the S&P, S&P 500, the stock market Wall Street. Sort of what we talked about in the previous video, or reading Mr. Armstrong's article, right? So the S&P in 1900, okay? And this is sort of, it wasn't called the S&P in 1900, it was called the Composite Index and the Composite Index. I found only one source, which gave me the 1900 number, there's multiple sources I found for the 1920 number and stuff like this. But the 1900 number, the S&P 500 if you want to think about it as the S&P 500, was 6.1, 6.1. So 6.1 is under the 8 somewhere around here. I'm just going to put it far enough down that we can actually see, here let's move this guy a little bit higher up. Now we're a little bit more accurate I guess and get rid of that 10 value and give this guy a row. So 6.8, or 6.1 is around here. Just a straight up S&P value is, the last time I look is 2459, 2000, let's say 2450, right? 2400, oops, knock this one up, 2450, 2400, 2450. And that guy, that's 1000 here, this tick, so 2000 is going to be up here. The slope of this is much better than the slope of the other two, that's for sure. Let's look at the multiple on this. 2450 divided by 6.1, 401 is the multiple, 402 is the multiple, right? That's pretty good. Now one thing with the S&P is you can't just, well you can, you could buy the S&P and just let it ride, right? But one thing with the S&P happens is the stock market, if you buy the right number of stocks, what happens is they give you dividends, money back a certain percentage per year. And that's basically the main gist of our current economic system, which is just chasing growth. And that's a certain flaw in our economic system as well because everything, things don't grow in forever, right? So our current system economy is based on growth and a certain percentage, I want to, S, let's put the S&P up here, another thing as well, right? So it's based on growth and this slope is much better. But what happens with the S&P is there's certain stocks you combine that give you dividends every year. So it varies the fluctuates, it goes from anything from less than 1% up to like 6%, 7%, 8% more aggressive ones, right? But the average S&P return during this period, I looked it up and seemed a little sketchy some of it because first of all, not, you know, no individual is going to be invested in for 117 years. It's not going to happen. It's going to be institutions with a certain degree, right? And what happens is basically if you take out the inflation factor, the CPI, the devaluation of the currency, you lose a little bit of percent there as well, right? But one of the measures on the high end, if you include, you're getting dividends and not spending your dividends because what happens, most people invest in dividend stocks because they get a certain amount of income, they call income stocks, I believe they call income stocks correctly, and you get a certain percentage back every year and they use that as expense money, right? Funds that they want to, they live by, right? But if you, on the extreme end, if you invest the 6.1 dollars, right? In 1900, in 1900 dollars in the S&P and took out your dividend, right? You didn't reinvest that dividend, you just went for this growth. This is what you would have, right? But if you took that dividend, all of that dividend being given to you and put it all back into play, right? And this is concept of compound growth. The value jumps up a lot and this is on the extreme side. And I found some numbers in the calculation I did was, I basically took it being a 7% growth, okay? Because average, I believe, the dividend return for the S&P was 4% per year if you averaged it out for this period, for this period of time. Actually went for a shorter period of time, so I'm not sure even if dividends existed here. So we're thinking about absolute extreme, okay? So 4% dividend return and the growth rate was 2.8%. So I took it to be 7% growth, right? If you put 6.1 dollars in 1900 into the S&P at 7% growth for 117 years, that's what we're talking about, right? Your return was 16,000. No one would have done this. Most people that I know and that I've known that play Wall Street, play the stock market, they don't reinvest all dividends into the same play, same game. It wouldn't be a smart decision to do, but basically, well, it would be to a certain degree depending on what you're in at certain points in life, I guess, but 1600 would be here. Okay, whoops, squished it. Okay, that would be 1600. So your growth could either be this on the minimum side if you took out all your dividends or the growth would be this and that multiple is way more. 1600 divided by 6.1 is 2,622 times return. That's very good. That's very good, right? Now, let's take a look at some other measures. On the same level, if we take a look at, and I took this and it comes up, the reason I took this because this company is having a huge role to play in our current political and economic system, but basically renaissance technologies is a tech company that was started, not a tech company, it was an investment company, hedge fund managers basically that came about because of the advent of technology, because of the advent of computing, what we talked about in the previous video, really, all these videos are sort of connected, which Martin Armstrong talked about behind the curtain, the full Monty, how automation came into play in our current political economic system. And this company has had a huge role to play in our current political and economic system. They were one of main backers of both parties in the United States last year or this year, last year, I guess, right? So they were one of the main backers, main players and policymakers to a certain degree, because those funding and election get to decide the policy of that governing body to a certain degree. So this company came about in 1900s, not 1900s, 1980s, because of the advent of technology, computer power. And what they were able to do, they were able to come up with programs to do trading on a more frequent basis and use algorithms. And their return from 19, their main fund, one of their main funds, from 1994, okay, if you invested $100 with them in 1994, $194, I'm just going to put a little dash $94, is that going to show up? I don't know if it's going to show up for you. $100 and that's $94, right? In 1994, so we're talking about, this is 2020, 2010, 2000, 1990, right? 1994 is here. So if you invested here, $100, and we're talking right here, somewhere around here anyway. If you invested $100 in 1994 in this fund, if you were given the opportunity to do so, your return $100 would have gotten you back $22,661, right? $22,611, $22,000, that's, oh $16,000 is not up here, my apologies, gang. If this is $10,000, that's $20,000, right? So $16,000 is here, my bad, somewhere around here anyway, right? So $22,661 is higher than this. So that's $10,000, $20,000 comes up here. So take a look at this, the slope of this dwarfs, like these guys, right? And this sort of plays out for us in something called differential accumulation, something we talked about in ASMR math previously, right? When we talk about disruptive animation and basically what we're seeing right now is automation in regards to trading stocks, right? From the 1980s, right? 2010, 2019, 1990, 1980, coming into play, technology coming into play here, where the people playing that system at this time in 10 years were able to create a fund that in 1994, if you put $100 in it, gave you a return of $22,661, that's pretty impressive, that's pretty impressive. And the multiple on that is that I do the multiple calculation. I don't even think I did the multiple calculation. The multiple calculation is, oh, what is it? It's just $226, right? The multiple is 226 times in a matter of, oh, and one thing I forgot, this isn't in 2017, it was 2014. So we're actually here, 2010, 2014. It's actually here, right? A little bit out. So it's a dot. It's not on the tick, right? So you have 226 times a return. And for fun, I just, I punched it in because what this return is for this period was 71% return compounded yearly, right? So 71% return. Now think about this. The CPI, the purple, actually let's put the table on here, the purple here, or sorry, not the purple. Oh yeah, the purple here. This was the minute, oh sorry, the pink. The pink was the CPI, right? The pink is the CPI. This was supposed to compensate for inflation, right? And inflation is supposed to be around 2 to 3% per year. These guys were getting return of 71% per year, right? Renaissance. Rentech. Let's call it Rentech. Okay. That's these guys here. And for fun, what I did was I took that measure, that growth, and I applied it. Come on, stick away. And I applied it, hey, and I applied it from 1900. And I took, we did the thing here, I took $100 and I did it from 1920. I didn't even do it from 1900. I did it from 1920 because initially I was just going to do things from 1920. Your return was to, if you put $100 in 1920, which is 1910, 1920, we're not going to write the numbers because it doesn't make sense, right? If you put the number here, $100, 1920, right? Your return was 2 times 10 to the 23. 2 times 10 to the 23, 71%, the same rate of return as this. So if you want to visualize where this graph is, because all you really need to do is take the line created here, right? Over here. Let's do it with the ruler. So because the growth rate is going to be the same, right? The growth rate to a certain degree is rise over run, right? Basically, it's going to be, right? The percent rate on it anyway, compounded. But what you can do is just get an approximation of where this is going to go. Use the same slope and just transpose this over here. And keep in mind that each one of these ticks is log 10. And what this was is 10 to the 23 of the world, maybe, is past trillions, right? I should have actually figured out what that word is to describe 2 times 10 to the 23. Now, going back to more realistic, or not realistic, this is realistic, right? This company, the same company had, and this was private fund, by the way. You could only have connections to be able to buy in that fund, or a lot of wealth to be able to buy in that fund. It wasn't open to the public. This same company had funds existing for a certain period there where they lost a certain percentage. So the slope was down, right? Those were the public funds that you can invest in. The private ones, those were like this, the two I looked at. And the public ones, there was only two public ones they had, or one public one. That one public one was a declining investment, not a good investment, right? Take that however way you want. Now what we're going to do is take a look at another place where you could have stored your wealth in a big way, in a big way, okay? And that's in art, right? Because art has been one of the greatest investments you could have made over time, okay? And that investment, we're going to talk about something that's dear to my heart if you're watching these videos. We're going to take probably the most important comic book on the market since we've reached a level where we're talking about extremes, right? As soon as we hit this, it's extremes, returns, right? So let's do something that's compatible to this. Art is one of the best places you could invest in. Paintings, well-known painters, their prices, their astronomical, I don't follow that market, but I do follow the comic book market, right? So if you bought Action Comics Number One, the first appearance of Superman, I'm just going to put Superman here. Superman. But it's Action Comics Number One. I'm going to write this the other way. Really, it's not Superman. Action Comics. But I'm going to call it Superman so we know what it is. Superman. So if you bought Action Comics Number One in 1938, because it came out in 1938, its price was 10 cents, right? Its price was 10 cents. So 19 and it's 1938. So let me put this here too. 10 cents. Okay. So that's 1910, 1920, 1930, 1938 is here. So let's see. 10, 20, 30. So we're here. 1930. And you bought it at 10 cents. So you basically, I should have had another scale here. My bad, right? I totally forgot about that, right? Because one, then 10 cents would be here, right? So let's not make it 10 cents. Let's make it, you bought 10 of them just so we can put it on this graph, right? Initially, I'd gone, and by the way, 10 cents in 1938 was equivalent to $1.73 in 2017 dollars, right? So 10 cents was $1.73 in 2017 dollars. So even the price of comic books hasn't stayed up with, you know, surpassed the CPI measure, right? If comic books had only stuck with CPI, it took the rate of inflation into consideration, we should have been able to buy comic books at $1.73 in our stores right now. But comic books cost $5 right now. Three, well, anywhere between $3 to $5 right now, your basic comic book, right? So that's gone up huge as well. That hasn't, that's sort of showing you where the CPI really doesn't take into consideration certain things. So instead of buying one action comics number one, let's say we bought 10. So that makes it a dollar, right? So let's say it's $1, 1938, and we're sitting right here. 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, so we're sitting right around here. So that's action comics number one. Okay. Since I only did the calculation for one of them, I'm going to have to multiply this. But basically what happened in 2014 and 2016, I believe as well, action comics number one, the higher grade ones, which is grade nine, nine means it's very fine near mint, right? Near mint minus, like that's, it's in good quality, it's in good shape, sold for $3.2 million, right? So 10 cents, if you bought it, and if you kept it in good shape, would have returned $3.2 million, right? $1, you know, 10 of those, if you assumed it was going to keep the same value, okay? Because if you had, if you had 10, then it wasn't as rare as now, right? Because I don't, I believe it's less than 10 that are graded at point 9.0, right? I think there's only four or five of those around. But I actually live in a city right now, Victoria. I talked to a comic book store owner that told me that he actually personally knows five people that have action comics number one in their possession, lower grades. I don't know what the grades are, we didn't talk about it, but I assume it's lower grades as well. But supposed to be there's five of them in my city alone. That's one reason I moved to this city as well. It's got a huge comic book history to it. A lot of comic book people here, okay? But 10 cents would have got you 3.2 million. So 10 of them would have got you 32 million. Pretty sweet. If the value kept the same. And just to give you a comparison of five, a 5.5 action comics number one sold for about a million dollars. So the different price between the nine and the 5.5 was $2 million three times, right? But basically one dollar investment in action comics number one in 1938 would have got you 32 million dollars. How am I going to put this on here? 32 million dollars. I didn't plan on doing 10 comic books. So we're actually up here, right? We're above scale. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to extend this. And we're basically up here. If it kept kept the same value, right? One dollar 32 million dollars, 32 million times a return. Wow, right? And the slope of this is compatible to this one, right? It's compatible to these guys. The return of these guys. One big difference. It is less. These guys were able to get that kind of return a short period of time, right? Now let's kick it down a notch and take a look at the wages that we earn. How have wages varied over time? Okay. Now in 1938, I did it for 1938 because we had data available for that. I also looked at salaries. So let's talk about salaries. In 1938, basically hourly wage was 25 cents an hour. Okay. So if that's a dollar, so we're back down here again below this. So we're not going to look at hourly wages, but just to give you a heads up, the minimum wage was 25 cents an hour. And right now the minimum wage is 7.2 dollars an hour. Okay. In 1968, the minimum wage was 1.6 dollars. So 1960. So if we're talking about, I should make the ticks here, what do we have? That's 1940, 1950, 1960, that's 1970. 1970, the minimum wage was dollar something, dollar 60. And right now, it's at 7.5, the 7.2. So if we do the minimum wage, right? Min wage. Min wage. Let's throw this on here for the fun of it. So minimum wage is this guy here, the orange. Minimum wage was a dollar 60, dollar 60 in 1968, dollar 60 in 1960, 1940, 50, 60, 70. So dollar 60 is like here. And minimum wage right now is 7.25. 7.25. Okay. And that puts you about here. If you're doing minimum wage, you're out of the game, right? Because one thing you have to consider is, you look at these guys, right? This was the S&P. Okay. This was gold, right? So gold was above S&P. If you come over here, the S&P, both the minimum and the maximum, are above gold. So that means, if you consider these to be systems, right? And they are systems, they're different economic systems. If you're investing in gold, you could have easily bought into the S&P, right? But over here, if you're investing in gold, it's not as easy to buy into the S&P. You get less of the S&P for your gold. So what's happening? When you see a crossover, with the slopes, with the lines, when you see a crossover, basically jumping from an upper system to a lower system is easy to do because it's based on US dollars, based on its currency value, is valued more so you can jump into it. But when one system is above another system, it's way more difficult to jump into the other system, right? This economic system, if you want to invest in, right? Or you have to buy a smaller chunk. So over here, you know, I don't know what gold prices were here, $100. But if you're investing in gold here, and these guys are up here, or Action Comics is up there, you, hard time, hard time. If you look at 1938, the minimum wage in 1938 was 25 cents, right? So you could have bought, you worked two and a half hours, you could have bought one Action Comics, right? If you worked, you had to, sorry, you could have, for one hour, you could have bought two and a half Action Comics, right? So if you worked an hour, right, you worked four hours, which is a dollar, you could have bought 10 Action Comics, right? If you bought 10 Action Comics in 1938, with your 25 cent minimum wage income, right? You were in the game for all of these, right? In 2017 and before that. But the price of Action Comics hasn't gone up in that amount. I believe in 19 or Superman number one, I can't remember if it was Superman number one or Action Comics, I'm pretty sure it was Superman number one, not Action Comics number one, which we're talking about in 1970 was worth $100. In 1980 Superman number one was worth $1,200. And I remember in 1994, which is right here, 1992, 1993, Action Comics number one sold for $160,000 and at that time was breaking records, right? So Action Comics number one, let's put this up here too, Action Comics number one, because I know this, I heard about this in a convention, I believe, $160,000, 94. Let's say 92. I think it was 92, okay? And let's put the dot there. So 1992 cost you $160,000, that's $10,000. I forgot to put a little tick on the $100,000 here. So 1992, which is about the same as 1994, this thing costs you this much, $160,000, right? It's not $200,000, $200,000 would be up there a little bit more, $160,000. Whoops, 94 is going to be further over, isn't it? It's going to be here. Hopefully I'm doing this right. Maybe. So it was like here. That would be Action Comics number one. Pretty much fits a linear scale on a log, like graph, which is a good thing, right? It could have maybe done this a little bit, price gone up, or fluctuated, it comes down on a log scale, it's difficult. Looks like a linear line to a certain degree, right? So if you bought four Action Comics number ones in 1938, working minimum wage four hours a time, stored that over time, right now in 2017, you could have $32 million. So keep this in mind, in every period in our lives, right? There are times where even though you're not in one of these systems, there are investments you can make that could possibly increase your slope, give you a better return than what you're in right now, right? If you go back to the minimum wage here in 1968, the minimum wage, is that where it were? The minimum wage puts you $7.25, right? That's the slope there. So if you're here right now, you should be thinking, what kind of systems can you invest in? Here, possibly closer to your range here, that can kick you up down the road into a higher return, right? You're looking for a steeper slope. Are there any steep slopes coming in, right? And there are, there are. While we're on this actually, let's do the salaries as well. Because the salaries, we're just going to do one salary from 1900, because that way we can put it on the scale here, right? The average income in 1900, okay, individual income in 1900 across the board was $438, which is equivalent to like $12,000 in 2017, dollars, right? If you take the deflation or rate of inflation in consideration, the evaluation of your currency, but we're still going to stick with the $1,900, right? So $438. In 1920 was $1,400, but we're going to stick with the 1900. So 1900 average salary was $438, okay? $438 minimum wage salary. So this should really be salary as well. Wage, $438 would be around here, okay? And the average salary right now, this was, you know, depending on different measures, you could measure average salary, individual salary, or you could measure average income per household. I took one of the measures, like personal average for one person is $30,000, household is $56,000. That's basically usually one person full-time at least, one person per time or two people full-time. But the average I took as being $48,000, okay? On a log scale, it's not going to, these numbers, and based on the other graphs that we have, are not going to make that much of a difference, right? So $48,000, so that's $10,000, that's $22,000. $48,000 would be around here, maybe a little bit lower, but I don't want to overlap too much, right? So what we have to do is take a look at the slope, and that's the slope there, that's the slope there, right? The multiple is 110 times, and the multiple here is not 110 times, the multiple here, we could just do it, but the multiple here is, oh let's just do it. We got 7.25 divided by 1.6, it's 4.5 times, and there's different states have different minimum ranges, Massachusetts has the highest one right now at $11, okay? So if you're making just a salary, right? If you're making hourly salary, you need to think about systems, if you want to function in the society, if you want to have better returns, better growth, because that's what this is sort of about, then you need to think about different systems that you could put your money in, okay? One other thing we're going to take a look at, two other things we're going to take a look at, we're going to look at home prices, okay? Home prices in 1900 were seeing a bubble, they were seeing a peak. In 1900 home prices, an average home cost around, this is what I came across, it was hard to find this information, really difficult to find this information, was around $5,000, okay? In 1920 the average home price was $3,000, so $5,000, $3,000, so they're saying $5,000 here was the average home price in 1900, and in 1920, which is this tick here, is around $3,000, so around here, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to take the average, I'm going to make it $4,000. Home, let's make this home, not home, but house, so light green is house, and let's put the average price in 1900, $4,000, and keep in mind, you know, what type of houses you were getting at that period, keep in mind that most places didn't have electricity, right? $4,000 will be around here, so those are houses, I should have brought out a table, I do have a table, let's take these down, that way they're not sticking up, let's take these kids that were at it. So $4,000 was average house in 1990, and in 2017 the average house in the United States, the median, then the median house, it's not the average, the median house, and the median is, we're going to talk about this when we do this, but median is the middle number, is $370,000, $370,000, that was a median, so 300, so I put in too many zeros on this one, silly me, that's a million, we got, let's make this one, and that should be $100,000, of all the places to make little mistakes, right? So that's $100,000, so it's going to be $307,000, which is going to be somewhere around here, right? That's what a house is, and that's the slope there, right? And the multiple on that thing is going to be 307 divided by 4,000, it's 76 times your return, right? Gold was 20, was 61 times, right? Inflation was supposed to be only 27 times, right? Your money's devalued 96%, right? This loss is purchasing power, what's this guy? That's the minimum wage, your wage has only gone up, was it 100 times? 110 times? But house prices have jumped up 76 times, not bad, considering your wages, I guess. You have to work 10 years to buy a house here, well less than 10 years, it's about the same, okay? But there's a big difference in living expenses, right? Your purchasing power, your cost of living, interest rates, actually interest rates are pretty low right now, very nicely, okay? Now we're going to look at one more thing, one more measure. And that's something that's playing out right now, it's coming to play because of the same reason that these guys weren't playing, right? Renaissance technologies, Renaissance technologies, how they've come to play, right? Using automation, computer power to generate wealth, right? Wealth that we can measure with US dollars, okay? One thing that's coming to play recently is something we talked about, I sort of gave you my opinion on it, which is cryptocurrencies, right? And when it comes to thinking about them as investing or thinking about them as currency or thinking about them as commodity, for me, cryptocurrencies are sort of faith-based, trust-based, and they also have certain aspects of a commodity because they're based on scarcity. One of the reasons that the US dollar has depreciated, lost 96% of its purchasing power, right? Is because there's more and more being printed, right? It's just being flooded with currency, with US dollars, right? To a level where 10 years ago in 2000, and I can't remember 2008, 2009, 10, they stopped reporting the M3, I believe. How much money was being on the large scale? How much money was being dumped into the markets? And that's one of the reasons we're seeing the S&P, the S&Ps are this guy, the S&P at these levels, right? So let's take a look at Bitcoin as far as cryptocurrencies goes because they're considered to be currency, but they're based on scarcity. And to a certain degree, the hurdles that Bitcoin faces or cryptocurrencies face that are based on scarcity is to get them into circulation, to increase their velocity, okay? And once they increase their velocity, then what happens? They start changing hands more often, but since they're based on scarcity, most or a lot of people might be holding on to them, expecting for the value to go up because it's based on scarcity, right? That gave you my opinion regarding cryptocurrencies, and right now I'm not holding any cryptocurrencies as of mid-July, okay? And if you want to know my opinion regarding cryptocurrencies further, that video is the place to be. And again, please keep this in mind, this is not financial advice, okay? So cryptocurrencies, the history of Bitcoin is this. Well, you can take a look at history, but the price of Bitcoin is this, okay? I believe in 2008 or so, 2009 or so, someone tried to sell a thousand or 10,000 Bitcoins for $30 and there was no takers, okay? So it was very hard to get rid of your currency. It wasn't very liquid, right? Yeah, it lacked liquidity and liquidity, and it was very volatile, and it is still very volatile, but in 2009 you couldn't really sell Bitcoins. You know, we're talking about hundreds or thousands for a little bit of money, but in 2010 the price of Bitcoin was six cents, right? Again, we're off the scale, we're in the decimals here. So six cents, let's convert this to a dollar. So all we do is just one divided by six, oops, not one divided by six, one divided by 0.06. You could have bought yourself 100 divided by six. You could have bought yourself 16. You could have bought yourself, I'm just checking, making sure, because in 2017 dollars, six cents was only seven cents, but that doesn't really make a difference. So you could have bought yourself 16 Bitcoins, right? So let's make this leave, this is a dollar. We got the Bitcoin up there, so $1, $1 in 2010. Let's put that here. $1 in 2010, so that's 2020, 2010 is right here, that's 2000, so 2010 right here. That's really when the game began for Bitcoin, okay? And Bitcoin right now, the last I checked, its price was around $2,600. So if you bought 16 of them times, $2,600, oops, 16 times $2,600, is $41,600, $41,000, $41,600, $41,600, make sure I got all this correct. I don't want to give you guys the wrong data, $41,600. Okay, so we're here. Bitcoin, $48,000, $41,600, so we're here somewhere. In 2017, I'm going to put it a little bit off. No, no, let's put it on the line. Now, the slope of this is much steeper than the slope of this. Much steeper. How much steeper? You could take the slopes, you could take the slopes, but I'm not really going to get into that game right now. Basically, the multiple from these guys, Renaissance, was 260, 230, let's say. The multiple of Bitcoin is 41600 divided by 1. The multiple of Bitcoin is $41,000, right? This is what happens when you use trusted calculators, you refer to them for the most simple calculations, right? So, this was 230, and this slope is 41,000. This is blowing away anything else, really. Okay, Superman was pretty good. Superman is really good, right? Superman's fantastic. Oh, did I divide by 10 on this one? No, the multiple was $1, $1 of this, yeah. Same deal to a certain degree. Okay, so this is something you have to really keep in mind when it comes to economic systems at play. And, you know, this ties into what we are talking about in series four of the language of mathematics, when we're talking about jumping from one system to another system, because this is what we really have to keep in mind when we're thinking about personal finances is different economic games at play, right? And we just talked about two, four, six, eight, nine of them, only nine, right? There are multiple other things you can invest your time and energy and your funds in, right? There are different types of, if you're thinking about buying a home, there's real estate, there's different types of real estate you could buy. There are different types of cryptocurrencies you could buy. There are different types of funds. There are different types of comic books, right? This is one of the best returns, but there are other comic books that have given you phenomenal return in shorter periods of time as well, right? Walking Dead, Walking Dead Number One, Harbinger Number One, right? First appearance of Venom, right? First full appearance of Venom, amazing Spider-Man 300, right? Not phenomenal return like this one or Walking Dead return, but there are other returns, Saga Number One. Those are shorter periods of time. Those are in this timeframe we're talking about here, right? You know, a few dollars investments gets you a few hundred or a few thousand, right? So if you're, you know, think about it. Which system are you functioning in? If you're sitting and functioning in a lower-down system where your returns aren't as much as you'd like, then you could take a look at these systems, see if their models are valid, if you plan on saving to jump into those systems, or if you're in this system, there are lower-down systems that are coming into play which are going to surpass your growth rate. Your, you know, over time will preserve your wealth or increase your wealth at a lot better rate than the system you might be invested in, okay? And again, keep in mind that this isn't, this isn't financial advice. This is just quantifying the different economic systems we have at play and taking a look at how they vary because when it comes to personal finance, when it comes to wealth, we're thinking about growth. But this is only the things that seem tangible to us right now. There are nontangible to a certain degree things that we haven't quantified that are worth a lot, worth more than this, give you returns much more than this, right? There are different types of currencies at play. This is the U.S. dollar, there are local currencies at play, right? When certain economies to a certain degree go under stress, all of a sudden disruptive innovation comes into play and new opportunities arise, right? Greece being one of them during the financial crisis for Greece where basically if you look at government statistics, they give you unemployment rates that are huge, they give you GDP that is very low, all the stuff happening. But GDP is a measure of what the government is keeping track of or can keep track of and the taxes that they're collecting. So GDP, I know I'm going off a little bit here, but we are going to touch up on this stuff. But I want to really emphasize the point, using Greece as an example. But Greece, the GDP of a country is basically how much taxes a country is taking in and how much money they have, how they can manage their finances, right? They're basically looking at this but at a larger scale, right? But once the financial crisis hit Greece, what happened was the taxes went up, the services that the government was providing went down, certain banks closed their doors, they confiscated certain types of funds, certain funds, especially in Cyprus, right? All of a sudden people had to scramble and had to adjust to the system and they basically came up with disruptive innovation and in Greece there were basically barter systems put in place where people were doing trade on a personal level, right? They weren't trading everything into a currency and then using the currency as the exchange of medium, right? What they used to be able to trade between each other, they just bypassed the currency and did straight trades and websites came into play and different types of technology came into play where people could go on there and offer certain goods and services and exchange those for other goods and services, right? This isn't the only thing on play. Everything is not necessarily measured in dollars or currencies that lose their value over time. But since most of us are forced into the system, we really have to think about other systems that have more potential, more growth that will either preserve our wealth and or give us a certain type of growth, whatever type of growth we're thinking about and one of the most important things we have to keep in mind when we talk about the beginning of this video is make sure you diversify. Do not, do not be in one system because if things go wrong, some of these things may do a about turn and start having a negative return, right? Devaluing, losing their worth, losing their, you might start losing your wealth. So make sure you're diversified, but diversifying systems you either know, right? Or systems where you can get the information and spend the time required to understand how those systems operate or hire someone to give you financial advice regarding whatever it is that you're planning on investing your time and energy on, right? I think that's enough. Yeah, that's a fair bit to think about and that's a good place for us to sort of do a pause, sort of finish off these set of videos anyway when it comes to personal finance. It's pretty important to think about these things and you know, your weighting doesn't have to be the same in all of them. You could do what the CPI does, right? Have the measure, your wealth invested a little bit in this, a little bit in that, a little bit in that, a little bit in that and keep in mind things that are usually generally more steeper slope, they have a faster income growth rate, exponential growth rate, that only lasts for a certain period of time. Keep your time frame in mind, right? Are you going to be invested for 117 years? I don't think so. Average lifespan in the United States and Canada's, I think for males anyway, it's 82, high 70s, let's say 80 mark for both counties, it's both male and female, right? Well, if you're 80, you know, where are you going to function? For a certain period of that time, you're a child, right? For a certain period of that time, you're not working, right? So what's your work timeframe, timeline, right? From when have you started working to when can you continue working or will you continue working to generate income, to invest in certain systems where you will not lose your wealth, you will at least maintain your wealth, right? I hope this did a good little summing up of what we've talked about so far and what we have to keep in mind and this stuff is directly going to link into series four of the language of mathematics and we're going to talk a lot more about this and delve down into some of these systems. One of the ones we're going to delve, I'll give you a little heads up, one of the ones we're going to delve into at some point is comic books and I've laid out some videos, a set of videos I'd like to do on that and basically quantify investing in comic books a little bit more than the way they've been quantified right now because it's very subjective of what a worth of a comic book is. If you're in the industry, if you know what I'm talking about, the grading system is one way people are going with slabbing comics and stuff like this but I'd like to take a look at the numbers and quantify some of those numbers and I've done some research into it and I've put together some data, some tables and at some point we will be talking about this a lot more. I guess that's about it. I hope you enjoyed this set of videos. It was fun to create. It took a little bit of time. Sorry for the slow progression of these videos but I really lost myself in the data and really enjoyed looking at the stuff and trying to figure out a way what a good way is to present this information. That's it for now. I'll see you guys in the next video.