There are many things I do not understand in the wide world of finance, but the one which perplexes me the most is why people believe that their money is safe under their mattress.
\n
\nI mean come on people: mattresses? The odds of a fire in your household serious enough to call the fire department during the year are about one in three hundred. Sure the odds of the whole house burning down are lower, but do you really want to put it under a mattress?
\nAnd what about residential robbery? Your odds of a break in are somewhere around one in 250 per year. And if I’m a robber in these dire financial times the first place I’m looking is, of course, under your mattress (and those jewels that you stuffed under your clothes in your dresser, do you really think that’s the best place for them?)
\nThis doesn’t even consider the odds that all hell will break lose in the economy and we will, for example, enter into a period of prolonged hyperinflation. At this point that money under your mattress is all safe and sound except for the fact that it is rapidly becoming worthless. Of course you could convert it to gold bars and put it under your bed, but then you could have bet incorrectly and inflation could not go up and gold could go down in value (are you really sure gold is a pure inflation hedge?) Oh, you say, invest in treasury inflation protected securities! But wait, what is the opposite of inflation? Oh yeah, deflation is a risk as well.
\nThere is no “safe” place for money. Never has been, never will. If you’re really concerned your best bet is probably in vast and substantial diversification across instruments you’ve probably never even thought about as places to park your cash. Of course you probably don’t have the resources to do that, since the transaction costs and management costs necessary to do that keep it far out of your reach. And sure if you want to make your mattress one of the places you park your money, that’s fine. But me, I wouldn’t be sleeping safely because I’ve got money under my head at night.<\/p>\n
Jim Cunningham: Son… DO YOU SEE THIS? This is an Anger Prisoner. A textbook example. DO YOU SEE THE FEAR, PEOPLE? This boy is scared to death of the truth. Son, it breaks my heart to say this, but I believe you are a very troubled and confused young man. I believe you are searching for the answers in all the wrong places…
\nDonnie: You’re right, actually. I am pretty- I’m, I’m pretty troubled and I’m, I’m pretty confused. But I… and I’m afraid. Really, really afraid. Really afraid. But I… I… I think you’re the fucking Antichrist. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are many things I do not understand in the wide world of finance, but the one which perplexes me the most is why people believe that their money is safe under their mattress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-ha-ha","category-go-ahead-waste-your-time"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}