I never thought it would be reasonable to assume oil would get this low, let alone talk of $10 not being absolutely insane. Thing about it is you have several groups with stakes in oil who all refuse to reduce production, either voluntarily or not. OPEC has divisions within itself with varying factions vying for economic dominance of the region, Russia and Venezuala both need the income for various economic reasons, leveraged US producers need to pump to service debt payments... all of these factions have unique circumstances that prevent them from cutting prices, but the largest one of all: if any group cuts production and prices rise, all other parties that didn't cut production benefit much more from the higher prices than the group that cut production. So we essentially have a staring contest, and everyone is waiting for someone else to blink.

Gold is a common place people flee to, but US treasuries are more common. Whether this is a good or bad thing can be debated, and the merits of the assessment as well, but treasuries are widely regarded as the safest investment on Earth, and have a history of being so as well. During a flight to safety, money pours into them.

What goes down is not guaranteed to go back up, but on the whole I agree with you that drops in prices create opportunities. Opportunities only though.

This is not a useful metric because it doesn't say anything about the network or the cost of transactions, or anything else relevant to bitcoin. So what's the point in bringing it up?

No other banking system costs $9.5/payment, and neither does bitcoin.

Downturns in the market are common. RBS is not saying this year is going to be as bad as 2008 (they're not saying it's not either, that's your comparison), they're saying it's going to be a bad year and you should flee to safe assets to preserve capital. The market doesn't only go up or explode in crisis. The market has a down year on average for every two up years, and the 1920s was not the last time the market had a crisis. The market has had significant trouble of varying degrees in the early 2000s, the 1980s, and the 1940s. Downturns are common, and they are a normal and healthy part of the business cycle.

I don't agree or disagree with RBS's analysis that this will be a bad year, only the advice that the reasonable thing to do is sell everything in response.

If you own the deed free and clear, there's no reason a bank shouldn't give you a line of credit using the house as collateral, bad credit notwithstanding. Bad credit should only stop you from getting an unsecured loan. You'll probably pay a higher interest rate with bad credit on a secured loan, but the bank wants to make money, and if you default, they can seize the house. If you own the deed, you can find a bank willing to loan you money backed by the asset.

If you can find someone to "loan" you $200,000 on an anonymous message board, all the power to you, and may god have mercy on that poor bastard's soul.

Bitcoin will not be seen as a safe haven. RBS published this research note to advise people to flee from risk. They're saying even equities are too risky, and Bitcoin is riskier than equities by many magnitudes. There's just no circumstance in which people are fleeing risk that Bitcoin does well.

I'm inclined to agree with you, that the alarmist warnings about job destruction are overblown, but the trend is certainly real. Automation and technology reduces the need for human employment. The economy shifts and people find new industries, but this shift is not unlimited. There will not be new jobs simply because there are more unemployed people, there has to be economic need for the employment. Manufacturing jobs are decreasing, and the American economy has adapted with an increase in service jobs, but there is not an unlimited need for service jobs. I think you're saying that with lower than average employment participation rates in the American economy, even though the economy has largely "recovered" and continues to improve. With that said, I think the alarmist warning is overblown because this is a trend that, while accelerating, still takes decades to play out. We're not in danger of having massive unemployment on account of technology in the next 10 or 20 years, though it certainly gets incrementally worse as time goes on.

Royal Bank of Scotland economists have urged investors to sell everything except high-quality bonds, warning of a “fairly cataclysmic year ahead.”

Writing in a client note dated Jan. 8, the bank’s European rates research team said that clients should be concentrating on return of capital, not return on capital, and that an ominous outlook to the world economy “all looks similar to 2008.”

The Key Points

• The note is particularly bearish on China and global commodities, and predicts that oil could fall as low as $16 a barrel.
• In a grim set of predictions, Andrew Roberts, head of European economics, rates & CEEMEA research said that the world has far too much debt to be able to grow well.
• He also warned that advances in technology and automation are set to wipe out up to half of all jobs in the developed world.
• The note says equities could fall 10% to 20%.
• It predicts the year will be spent focusing on how to exit positions that have benefited from long-running QE, including emerging markets, credit and equities.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/01/12/rbs-warns-sell-everything/?mod=e2fbRBS

A 10 to 20% fall in equities certainly isn't a long shot. QE has produced a long run-up in stock prices, and on average, we see a market correction of 10% every two years and a 20% correction every five years. Still, the advice to "sell everything" seems a bit much.

Be careful with 1broker. You're not buying an equity, but a derivative. You don't own any stock, you own a leveraged CFD, which is riskier. It's still not possible to trade actual stocks with bitcoin.

But only fiat can be done without an internet connection, I think is what he was getting at.

I've heard only good things about the movie, but you always have to be concerned with Hollywood adopting a movie based on true events. Real life is never as entertaining as the movies, so factual liberties are always taken to make the narrative more compelling.

There is a legitimate question as to whether Puerto Rico can even declare bankruptcy. It has already defaulted, but that's not the same as bankruptcy, which is a court action.

It's not a change in oil consumption that is affecting the price so much, it's the supply. Oil consumption trends don't change very quickly. Comparatively, the supply has changed much more quickly in the last five years.

Exactly, one of the most important aspects of money is that it is a stable store of value. Highly volatile assets fail this crucial test.

The difference there is that money was an improvement to the barter system. Bitcoin is not an improvement to fiat, it's just an alternative to it. Digital currencies are actually less versatile because they have no physical form.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is the name of the program. They're both talking about the same thing. It's a program Amazon runs where people can complete simple tasks that are too complicated for a computer to do, so they require human intelligence, and they pay anywhere from 1 cent to 20 cents per task (generally, sometimes there are higher paying tasks, like participating in research studies). You're not going to get rich doing it; if you're efficient, you can make a $1 to $1.50 per hour pretty reliably. If you're lucky and find the higher paying research studies, you can make $10ish per day, but those research studies don't show up dependably and are kinda rare. Most Mturk work is kinda like completing faucets, low paying and boring. You'll make more on Mturk per task, but you also do more work than a simple faucet request too.

Absolutely. If the equities market crashes, people will flee to safety, which means US treasuries and cash, and they will be fleeing from the most risky assets. Bitcoin is far riskier than equities as a whole, so you can expect high levels of financial uncertainty to sink the equities and bitcoin market.

A correction occurs when the allocation of assets gets too hot and overvalues the underlying securities. On average, a 10% correction happens about once every two years, and a 20% correction happens about every five years. It's not the end of the world. It's happened before and it will happen again.

Typical garbage post that doesn't even get the garbage right. What you actually mean is that the USD trades at 117 JPY. If you're going to use an arbitrary metric to predict the end of western civilization, at least get the metric right.