Twice Not Guilty

 Today, Saturday, February 13, 2021, President Donald J. Trump was - again - formally determined to be Not Guilty of any prosecutable act he took as President via the constitutionally mandated legal process (Impeachment). This being so, it follows that there can be no additional prosecution of any action he committed during his presidency. Donald J. Trump enjoys the exact same legal (and other - see: Former Presidents Act) protections as do former Presidents Barrack Obama, George W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and Jimmy Carter (the name variant he used to be sworn into office).

The argument could be made that he does so twice as much as his fellow Presidential alumni, though I have to admit that smacks more than a little of being praised with faint damns.

The current attempts by a Georgia prosecutor to indict former President Trump must now be regarded as unlawful and possibly criminal in nature. IANAL but I believe that absence of authority to do something constitutionally (at either State or Federal levels of constitutional authority) is entirely and only that. Since the US Constitution mandates that Impeachment and Removal From Office are the only means whereby a President may be prosecuted directly for actions taken while in office (and such Removal being the only mechanism making a former President subject to prosecution post-tenure in office), President Trump now enters the exact same legal status as do all of America's still-living former Presidents.

I wish him and all of his colleagues every lawful success in their post-Presidential lives.

The Silver Silver Bulls

 The recent discussion of a "silver squeeze" has me smiling. A short prefatory story first:

In 1980, two Texas brothers, Nelson Bunker Hunt, his younger brother Herbert, and several other members of their extended family, managed to buy something like two thirds of all the privately held silver on planet Earth, ultimately driving the 1 ounce spot price to $600+ for at least a short time. While doing so was seemingly not against any laws, they ultimately ended up in court where they argued (unsuccessfully you will no doubt be shocked to discover) that they weren't manipulating the silver markets but rather they were building a hedge fund against the rampant inflation of the US dollar during the 1970's. I can't imagine why the Federal Reserve, not to mention the US Mint, took such extreme exception to this denigration of their collective financial acumen.

The two primary reasons the Hunts failed are that they borrowed against their other assets to fund this buying spree, and there were too few of them to make prosecution unmanageably difficult for the USG.

Back to 2021, and silver spot prices have essentially doubled over recent weeks but there isn't any obvious orchestration of the buying efforts. Given the realities of digital social media, there is an opportunity to be realized from the two examples above.

Social security payments are all directly deposited into the recipients bank account on the Wednesday of the week the recipient was born. I for example was born in the fourth week of October, so I receive my social security payment on the fourth Wednesday of each calendar month. Should enough people (lets assume 1 million buyers on each of the four Wednesdays of payments in any given month) buy $500 of silver coins as part of a tranche of buyers on their Wednesday, and they did this for 10 months in total. It ought to be fairly easy to slowly drive the market spot price up to a value of 5x the spot price 10 months previous.

Now, silver is measured on the imperial scale, so 16 ounces to the pound. If you assume an average of 3 pounds of silver is purchased by each individual buyer in the first month, the rise of the spot price in succeeding months will reduce the amount $500 will purchase. Obviously, the up side of this is that your silver is now worth more than when you bought it; the down side being that your $500 the next month won't buy as much as it did the first month. This being a wildly speculative example of a hypothetical, let's say (for the ease of calculating) that all 4 million senior citizens each end up with 10 pounds (or 160 ounces) of silver on the first day of the 11th month, when the spot price has been above a pre-determined multiple of the starting value for a pre-designated amount of time, at which point everybody descends on their preferred precious metals dealer at opening time of the next regular business day, offering their hoard for sale at that days spot price.

No signal required.

The second thing that will happen is that the next day's spot price will drop to almost the level it was 10 months previous. The first thing to happen is that metal buyers across the US will be desperately trying to figure out where to get that much cash. Since the second thing is a desired result we will concentrate on alleviating the first thing. Instead of accepting a check (because bank deposit records are already reported to government agencies), suggest that the dealer exchange an equivalent amount of gold coins for the majority of the silver, leaving no more than $1,000 in currency needed to complete the transaction. It is simplicity itself to come back every week-or-so to sell a coin.

This would result in 4 million senior citizens increasing the value of $5,000 to (realistically, probably no more than 3x) its original value. Still, as a way to potentially make a little extra money, this seems reasonably easy and minimally risky (barring a home invasion or other type of robbery, obviously). At worst, barring being a crime statistic, people will have accumulated a modest amount of precious metal to hold for a future profitable sales opportunity.

Also, identifying - never mind rounding up - 4 million senior citizens who are individually guilty of nothing more than buying a legal product in a legal transaction seems overly Orwellian even for 2021.

I'm not on reddit either, so don't look to me for ringleader material, but it does make for interesting speculation (and a terrible pun), doesn't it?