I say “the numbers tell us” because I’ve become very sensitive to the impact this kind of statement has on people. When I warned about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors in 2006 and 2007, readers actually blamed me for the company’s problems — as if my warnings to the public were the real problem, rather than GM’s $400 billion in debt.

The claim was absurd. But the resentment my work engendered was real.

So please… before you read this column, which makes several arresting claims about the future of our country… understand I am only writing about the facts as I find them today. I am only drawing conclusions based on the situation as it stands. I am not saying that these conditions can’t improve. Or that they won’t improve.

The truth is; I am optimistic. I believe our country is heading into a crisis. But I also believe that… sooner or later… Americans will make the right choices and put our country back on sound footing.

Please pay careful attention to the data I cite. And please send me corrections to the facts. I will happily publish any correction that can be substantiated. But please don’t send me threats, accusations against my character, or baseless claims about my lack of patriotism. If I didn’t love our country, none of these facts would bother me. I wouldn’t have bothered writing this column.

I know this is a politically charged and emotional issue. My conclusions will not be easy for most readers to accept. Likewise, many of the things I am about to say will challenge folks to re-examine what they believe about their country. The facts about America today tell a painful story about a country in a steep decline, beset by problems of its own making.

I am speaking out now because I believe someone must. And I have the resources to do it. I am sharing these ideas because I know we have arrived at the moment of a long-brewing crisis.

Our political leaders, our business leaders, and our cultural leaders have made a series of catastrophic choices. The result has been a long decline in America’s standard of living.

For decades, we have papered over these problems with massive amounts of borrowing. But now, our debts total close to 400% of GDP, and America is the world’s largest borrower (after being the world’s largest creditor only 40 years ago)… And the holes in our society can no longer be hidden…

We’ve reached the point where we will have to fix what lies at the heart of America’s decline… or be satisfied with a vastly lower standard of living in the future.

How do I know? How do I statistically define the decline of America?

The broadest measure of national wealth is per-capita gross domestic product (GDP). Economists use this figure to judge standards of living around the world. It shows the value of the country’s annual production divided by the number of its citizens. No, the production isn’t actually divided among all the citizens, but this measure provides us with a fair benchmark to compare different economies around the world. Likewise, this measure shows the growth (or the decline) in wealth in societies across time.

So… is America growing richer or poorer based on per-capita GDP? Seems like a simple enough question, doesn’t it? Is our economy growing faster than our population? Are we, as individuals, becoming more affluent? Or is the pie, measured on a per-person basis, growing smaller?

This is the most fundamental measure of the success or the failure of any political system or culture. Are the legal and social rules we live under aiding our economic development or holding us back? What do the numbers say?

Unfortunately, it’s a harder question to answer than it should be. The problem is; we don’t have a sound currency with which to measure GDP through time. Until 1971, the U.S. dollar was defined as a certain amount of gold. And the price of gold was fixed by international agreement. It didn’t actually begin to trade freely until 1975. Therefore, the value of the U.S. dollar (and thus the value of U.S. production, which is measured in dollars) was manipulated higher for many years.

Even today, our government’s nominal GDP figures are greatly influenced by inflation. The influence of inflation is particularly pernicious in GDP studies. You see, inflation, which actually reduces our standard of living, drives up the amount of nominal GDP. So it creates the appearance of a wealthier country… while the nation is actually getting poorer.

The only real way to accurately measure per-capita GDP is to build our own model. The need to build our own tools tells you something important — the government doesn’t want anyone to know the answer to this question. It could easily publish data far more accurate than the indexes it puts out. But government doesn’t want anyone to know. And it wants to be able to say “those aren’t the real data” when studies like ours produce bad news.

So pay attention to how we built our charts. You can see for yourself that our data are far more accurate than the government’s figures. Our data are based on the real purchasing power of the currency, not the nominal numbers, which are completely meaningless in the real world.

The question we are trying to answer is: What would per-capita GDP numbers look like, if we used a real-world currency, like gold, or a basket of commodity prices, instead of the paper-based U.S. dollar? What would the figures be if we measured GDP in sound money instead of the government’s funny money?

Here’s how we figured it out. We took the government numbers for nominal GDP and measured them first against commodity prices, and later (after it began to trade freely) gold. We used a standard commodity index (the CRB) up to 1975 and gold post-1975. The result of this analysis shows you the real trend in U.S. per-capita GDP, as measured on a real-world purchasing power basis.

Our analysis shows you what’s actually happened to our real standard of living. The results, we suspect, will surprise even the most bearish among you.

America is in a steep decline.

Americans Are Getting Poorer — Fast

Let me anticipate the “official” criticism of our study. Many people will claim that our numbers aren’t “real.” They will say that we “mined” the data to produce a chart that showed a steep decline.

That’s simply not so. All we’ve done is convert the government’s nominal GDP stats into a fixed currency value that’s based on real-world purchasing power. The fact is, our data are far more accurate than the government’s because they represent the real-world experience. That’s why our data are far more closely correlated to other real-world studies of wealth in America.

Consider, for example, annual sales of automobiles. Auto sales peaked in 1985 (11 million) and have been declining at a fairly steady rate since 1999. In 2009, Americans bought just 5.4 million passenger cars. As a result, the median age of a registered vehicle in the U.S. is almost 10 years.

Our data shows that real per-capita wealth peaked in the late 1960s. Guess when we find the absolutely lowest median age of the U.S. fleet? In 1969. At the end of the 1960s, the median age of all the cars on the road in the U.S. was only 5.1 years. Even as recently as 1990, the median age was only 6.5 years.

Rich people buy new cars. Poor people do not.

Most important, our data “proves” something I know many of you have felt or perceived for many years. You’ve seen the decline of your neighborhoods. You’ve gone years without being able to earn more money in your job. Or you’ve seen your purchasing power decrease to the point where you’re now substituting lower-quality products on your grocery list for the brand-name products you used to buy.

You can see how much harder it is on your children to find good jobs, to buy good housing or a new car. As a result, few people under the age of 40 have the same kind of “life story” as their parents.

And because they can’t “make it,” many have decided to “fake it.” The average college student now graduates with $24,000 in debt… and by his late 20s has racked up more than $6,000 in credit card debt. Meanwhile, median earnings for Americans aged 25-34 equals $34,000-$38,000. (Source: Demos.org, “The Economic State of Young America,” November 2011.)

Can you imagine starting your life out as an adult with a personal debt-to-income level at close to 100%? What does this say about the state of our economy? What does this say about the state of our culture?

Who Suffers Most

It’s not only the young that are having trouble in America. It is also the old.

Debt levels among households headed by people older than 62 have been rising for two decades. The average mortgage size for this population is now $71,000 — five times larger than it was in 1987 (adjusted for inflation), according to William Apgar of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Older Americans are also more reliant on credit card debt than ever before… credit card debt. From 1992 through 2007 (which is the latest data available) older Americans took on credit card debt at a faster pace than the population as a whole. According to USA Today, lower- and middle-income Americans aged 65 and older now carry an average of more than $10,000 in credit card debt, up 26% since only 2005.

Given average interest rates of 20% for these debts, it’s a fair bet that these obligations will never be repaid. But they will have a terrible impact on the standard of living of these older Americans.

What in the heck is going on? Don’t Americans pay off their mortgages before they retire? Don’t they work hard during their careers, save, and invest, so they can move to Florida and spend their retirement in comfort?

Older Americans living with credit card debt! This doesn’t sound like America, does it? Or maybe it does.

My bet is that most folks know that something has gone terribly wrong with America. It’s not easy to figure out how all of this happened… but you know from your own experiences that these numbers aren’t wrong. It might not be pleasant to think about… but these figures paint a sad but accurate picture: America is not the country it was 40 years ago. These changes are warping our economy, politics, and culture.

I can’t possibly analyze all the factors that have led to this decline. But I want to document the growth of graft in politics. I want to demonstrate — with real facts and examples — how public company leadership has deteriorated. And I want to document some of the things that are occurring in the broader society, all of which I believe are linked to this fundamental decline in our standard of living.

You see, I believe the decline of our country is primarily a decline of our culture.

We have lost our sense of honor, humility, and the dedication to personal responsibility that, for more than 200 years, made our country the greatest hope for mankind. I want to detail some of the factors that gave rise to the current entitlement society. We have become a country of people who believe their well-being is someone else’s responsibility.

I’ve labeled these problems: The Corruption of America.

These problems manifest themselves in different ways across institutions in all parts of our society. But at their root, they are simply facets of the same stone. They are all part of the same essential problem.

The corruption of America isn’t happening in one part of our country… or in one type of institution. It is happening across the landscape of our society, in almost every institution. It’s a kind of moral decay… a kind of greed… a kind of desperate grasp for power… And it’s destroying our nation.

The Ethos of ‘Getting Yours’

Americans know, in their bones, that something terrible is happening. Maybe you can’t articulate it. Maybe you don’t have the statistics to understand exactly what’s going on. But my bet is, you think about it a lot.

For me, a poignant moment of recognition came this month.

Bloomberg news published an article based on confidential sources about how Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and the Republican U.S. Treasury secretary during the financial crisis, held a secret meeting with the top 20 hedge-fund managers in New York City in late July 2008. This was about two weeks after he testified to Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “well-capitalized.”

I knew for a fact that what Paulson told Congress wasn’t true. I wrote my entire June 2008 newsletter detailing exactly why Fannie and Freddie certainly had billions in losses that they had not yet revealed to investors — $500 billion in losses, at least. There was no question in my mind, both companies were insolvent — “zeros,” as I explained.

And yet, in front of Congress, the U.S. Treasury secretary was saying exactly the opposite. Either I was a liar… or he was.

Then… only a few days later… what did Paulson tell those hedge-fund managers?

He told them the same thing I had written in my newsletter. He told them the opposite of what he’d said publicly to Congress. He told these billionaire investors that Fannie and Freddie were a disaster… They would require an enormous, multibillion-dollar bailout… The U.S. government would have to take them over… And their shareholders would be completely wiped out.

Here you had a high-government official, explicitly lying to Congress (and by extension, the general public), while giving the real facts to a group of people who represented the financial interests of the world’s wealthiest folks. The story didn’t come to the public’s attention for two years.

This was the most outrageous example of graft and corruption I have ever seen. Certainly it involves more billions of dollars in misappropriated value than any other similar story I can recall. These managers had the risk-free ability to make tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions, by using derivatives to capitalize on what they knew was the imminent collapse of the world’s largest mortgage bank. Who picked up the tab? You know perfectly well. It was you and me, the taxpayers.

(One of the investment managers present at this meeting was Steve Rattner, who by that point was already deeply involved in another bit of graft, his efforts to bribe New York state pension-fund managers for large investments into his hedge fund, from which he earned perhaps as much as $100 million. He later settled the charges for a mere $10 million shortly after Andrew Cuomo was elected governor of New York.)

The Bloomberg story… about a crooked Treasury secretary handing a room full of crooked billionaires inside information worth billions of dollars… hardly caused a ripple. As far as I know, no actions are being planned against Henry Paulson or any of the hedge-fund managers involved. No other major media outlet picked up the story. I saw nothing about it from the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What does that say about our country when even the most egregious kind of corruption — involving hundreds of billions of dollars — is simply ignored?

It seems like everyone in our country has lost his moral bearing, from the highest government officials and senior corporate leaders all the way down to schoolteachers and local community leaders. The ethos of my fellow Americans seems to have changed from one of personal integrity and responsibility to “getting yours” — the all-out attempt, by any means possible, to get the most amount of benefits with the least amount of work.

You can see this in everything from the lowering of school standards (revising the SAT) to the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional, college, and high school sports. Cheating has become a way of life in America.

I have an idea about how this happened… about the root cause of this kind of corruption and why it was inevitable, given some of the basic facts regarding how we’ve organized our government and our corporations.

Let me show you the numbers — the hard facts — behind what’s happened to our country…

Regards,

Porter Stansberry
for The Daily Reckoning

The Corruption of America originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.

When most people are sued by the SEC, they do their best to put the matter behind them – as quickly and quietly as possible.

This normally involves paying a large fine and essentially promising “not to do it again.” If you pay the fine, the chances are good most people will ignore the matter. You’re not required to admit any guilt. Thus, the damage to your reputation is largely mitigated and you can go on with your life. That’s why most people settle with the SEC when it comes to civil (noncriminal) lawsuits.

But I didn’t settle when they sued me.

Even when a settlement was offered to me for as little as $1 million, I refused it. Instead, I’ve faced a lengthy court battle that’s brought with it tremendous risks to my reputation and legal bills amounting to almost $3 million.

Why on Earth would I try to fight the “city hall” of the securities industry?

Because I’m eager for the facts of my case to come to the public’s attention. I know when the facts of my case are accurately known by the public, my subscribers will support my decision to fight the SEC. That’s why I’ve never tried to hide this matter from anyone.

Unfortunately, so far, almost none of the critical issues at stake in my fight have been accurately reported. Worse, people who have no idea what they’re talking about continue to assume my case is another example of a financial publisher acting scurrilously – front-running his subscribers or ripping people off by promoting penny stocks that he’s been paid to endorse.

And so… at the risk of upsetting the judges who have to date refused to believe a word I’ve said about the matter… I would like the opportunity to tell you, my subscribers, exactly why I’ve refused to settle my case. And why the matter is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

I’d also like the opportunity to direct you to several reliable sources of information about the matter, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Most of the things written about the case elsewhere are patently false and misleading.

For example, most people don’t know my battle with the SEC actually has nothing to do with stock trading or actual securities fraud.

The truth is, there isn’t any allegation that I ever owned the stock in question – and there never has been.

Nor is there any allegation I’ve done anything at all that’s directly related to the purchase or the sale of any security. I didn’t “front run” my recommendation. I wasn’t being paid by promoters to recommend a stock. These things have all been said about the case – even by a few fellow journalists. But in fact, I wasn’t even accused of doing them by the SEC.

So what is this case about, if it’s not about trading in securities?

My lawsuit with the SEC started as a fight over the First Amendment rights of a publisher – me. It has continued because I refused to settle or buckle under to the government. I maintain my writing was honest, materially correct, and is certainly protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

I claim a former unit of the Department of Energy – a unit that was sold to investors in 1996 and is now known as USEC – was withholding material information from the public. I believe it did so in order to reward certain investors, including its bankers, its corporate insiders, and members of the Department of Energy.

By revealing information about a major and long-pending agreement with USEC’s Russian supplier of uranium, I disrupted the opportunity insiders had to accumulate shares at lower prices. In short, I ruined the party by telling investors the agreement had been reached and would be announced in a few days.

Because USEC was trading at a very distressed price (half of book value) and was paying such a high dividend (yielding more than 8%), I believed the stock would soar once this long-pending agreement was made public. In my report, I explained why the agreement would turn USEC into a profitable company by lowering the company’s raw material costs dramatically. I predicted the stock would double on the news.

And that’s almost exactly what happened.

Based on what I’d learned from a company insider (the director of investor relations), I wrote the agreement would be announced at a major nuclear summit featuring presidents Bush and Putin on May 22, 2002. The insider explained the details of the summit to me in advance, long before they appeared in the newspaper and told me to “watch the stock on May 22.” And in fact, the long-awaited announcement came about a month later, on June 19, 2002. Keep in mind, this agreement had been pending for more than two years. And yet, somehow, I was able to pinpoint almost to the day when it would be announced to the public.

Did the stock soar? No, not exactly. It moved from around $8 to around $11. That’s roughly a 40% move in a few days. That’s not bad. More importantly though, following the new agreement with the Russian uranium supplier, the stock traded all the way up to nearly $20 over the following three years. In fact, by the time my case reached its first federal judge, investors who followed my advice would have made more than 150% on the investment, thanks to capital gains and big dividends. (The stock eventually went to $25 during the uranium bubble of 2007.)

Yes… that’s right. The SEC is suing me for a matter that involves a stock that went from under $8 to nearly $25. That’s more than a 200% gain. You’ve got to be kidding, right? Nope.

But why?

Here’s the heart of the matter.

I believe the company knew for certain its deal for cheap Russian uranium would receive the required final approval of both the U.S. and Russian governments at the summit. This approval was the only thing holding up the deal. With this knowledge in hand, it would have been easy for the company’s insiders and other senior officials in the Department of Energy to load up on the stock and profit once the news was announced to the public.

And I wasn’t the only analyst who was told when to expect the deal.

In the discovery process of our lawsuit, we found a notebook from USEC’s investment bank – Bank of America – where its analysts clearly indicated May 22 was the expected announcement date.

But instead of pursuing the possibility USEC’s managers and bankers were withholding this material information, the SEC decided to attack me. Keep this in mind: I didn’t use this information for my own personal gain. I didn’t buy the stock. Or even just tell my friends to buy the stock. No, instead I did my job. I published a report about what I’d learned and offered to sell my report to any (and all) interested investors.

I also sent a copy of my report (and the accompanying sales letter) to my source at USEC. He never asked me to change a single word of my report. He had my cell phone number. He had my office number. He had my e-mail address. If there was any legitimate problem with my report, all he had to do was ask for a correction. He never did. Not even to this day.

I did all of the things any reputable journalist would do. I checked my source’s facts. Sure enough, a presidential summit was approaching. Sure enough, there was a large pending contract. Sure enough, the new deal would change the economics of the company in a dramatically positive way. I sent a copy of my report to my source. And I offered it for sale to the public. If anyone wasn’t satisfied with the report, for any reason, I gave him his money back.

Even today, looking back at the matter through the lens of time and experience, I still think my USEC report was one of the great stories of my career and I’m proud of the report I wrote. Are there things I would have done differently? Yes. I would have made sure to have a recording of my interview.

You see, even though I never owned a share of the company, even though I had no incentive whatsoever to lie about the company, and even though third parties who have looked at the facts of the case (like The New York Times) agree my report on the matter was overwhelmingly correct… the SEC decided to come after me and not the people who were really defrauding the public.

Incredibly, the SEC sued me for securities fraud, saying I had lied about what my source told me and that selling my report about USEC was tantamount to brokering the stock. Specifically, the SEC claimed my source didn’t tell me to “watch the stock on May 22,” which was the only part of our conversation that I quoted.

Since I can’t prove what my source said, you might assume I must be lying. But if he didn’t explain the timing of the deal to me, how could I have known – within a month – exactly when the deal would close? The fact is, until our discussion, I didn’t know anything about the upcoming presidential summit. It wasn’t reported in The Wall Street Journal until about a week after our discussion.

But… just for the sake of the argument… what if you assume I knew about the summit from another source and I merely attributed it to the company in order to claim I really had “inside” information? Why then, even after I wrote the report and sent my source a copy, did he not demand a retraction?

And if the company knew my report was false, why didn’t it put out a press release denying it? The NYSE rules require companies to put out press releases anytime there’s a material misstatement in the press.

The fact of the matter is, my report was overwhelmingly correct. And my source couldn’t deny my report because he didn’t know whether or not I had a recording of our conversation (which took place over the phone).

When the SEC came calling later in 2002, I expected it would be going after the company for selective disclosure – a violation of SEC regulation FD. And sure enough, it wanted all of my personal records to make sure I wasn’t front-running the stock, etc. But then, instead of shifting its investigation to the company, it demanded to have the entire subscription list of not just my publishing company, but also of our parent company, Agora Inc.

It wasn’t going after USEC for withholding material information; it was going after us by intimidating our clients. And it didn’t ask for just the USEC report subscribers – it demanded every single name and address on our entire database, including my parent company’s database.

Rather than give in to this subpoena, we sued the SEC in federal court to protect our subscribers’ privacy. A well-established legal precedent protects a publisher’s subscriber lists. (What you decide to read is none of the government’s business.)

That’s part of the story I’m sure you’ve never heard before: We sued the SEC first. And we did so to protect our subscribers, the overwhelming majority of whom never bought the USEC report in the first place.

I understand that you might reasonably wonder… How could any of this be true? I mean, wouldn’t you expect that as soon as the SEC knew I’d sent my source a copy of the report, the matter would be closed? Or don’t you think as soon as it knew I wasn’t trading the stock or front-running it, the SEC would have simply left me alone?

Even after reading all of this, undoubtedly, a lot of people must think I’m merely trying to muddy the waters because I’m guilty of front-running the stock… or lying to investors. Why else would the government waste its time on a newsletter writer?

I understand my story might be hard to believe – at first. The public generally has confidence in our government. It will be hard for some people to imagine the SEC would actually go after a journalist with the intent of putting him out of business simply because it didn’t like what he was writing about.

But my story isn’t unique.

At the same time the SEC was abusing its power by subjecting me to interrogations, subpoenas, and crushing legal bills – all in violation of the First Amendment – it was also going after many other legitimate market participants – including David Einhorn, the well-regarded hedge-fund manager (Greenlight Capital) for merely speaking about securities.

As with my case, the SEC came after Einhorn for speaking openly about abuses taking place at a Washington-based business (Allied Capital), a company that – like USEC – was heavily staffed with former government officials, including Joan Sweeney, the company’s chief operating officer, who was a former senior member of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. Our stories are eerily similar…

THIS IS WHAT EINHORN WAS WARNING INVESTORS ABOUT, AS EARLY AS 2002. THE SEC RESPONDED BY INVESTINGATING EINHORN.

Rather than investigating Einhorn’s claim that Allied Capital was cooking its books by using fraudulent accounting, the SEC instead began investigating him, alleging securities fraud because of what he’d said about Allied Capital during a presentation at an investment conference that’s held to benefit charities.

After several years of threats and abuses (like having his phone records stolen), Einhorn was vindicated. The shares of Allied Capital collapsed as the company was revealed as fraudulent. But even today, Joan Sweeney is still with Allied Capital. The SEC has never been forced to fire any of the agents who abused their power during the investigation of David Einhorn.

To draw attention to the abuse he’d suffered, Einhorn decided to donate all of the money he made from shorting Allied Capital to charity, and he wrote an entire book about the situation called, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time.

Says Einhorm about his experience:

Allied isn’t the biggest, most egregious, or most audacious fraud I have seen. In a sense it is a garden-variety fraud – dishonest business dealings by dishonest management. So why all the fuss? The story I am telling is one that has been surprising and unexpected – even to me. I think it is important and needs to be told. This book reveals some serious problems in the regulatory landscape that I am in a unique place to discuss.

I care that the SEC and other regulators seem to have stopped enforcing laws against corporate malfeasance. I care that company officials can lie with impunity on public conference calls. And I have been appalled that the government officials overseeing the lending programs that Allied has defrauded are so indifferent and unwilling to act even when presented with clear evidence of abuse. The overall lack of law enforcement is startling…

If we are going to permit the retribution against the whistleblowers shown in this story – defamation, investigation, invasion of privacy and so forth – then we surrender public free speech. If we allow the people in this story to operate outside the law, then we nourish a corrupt business culture. Rather than turn a blind eye to the fraud I witnessed, I made a decision to stand up and speak out despite the consequences. I hope my story inspires regulators and government agencies to do the right thing.

I hope you’ll remember most people don’t do what I’ve done and what Einhorn did.

Most people don’t fight the SEC because they don’t want their names in the paper, they don’t want the stigma of being investigated by the government, etc.

Believe me, I can understand why. When the news of the SEC’s investigation of me leaked out, publishers around the world refused to do business with me. Potential employees refused to come to work with me. Companies refused to be interviewed by me. The lawsuit has made it vastly more difficult for me to simply stay in business. Even today, every time a potential subscriber stumbles across information about the lawsuit on the Internet (and much of it is completely untrue) he’s likely to cancel his subscription or simply decide not to renew.

And think about this… the more people who simply refuse to write about securities because of the threat of an SEC action or because they fear retaliation from the businesses they write about, the less high-quality information will be available to investors. The less information is available, the more bad actors will take advantage of investors.

Whether you realize it or not, the SEC isn’t trying to protect investors. If it were, Bernie Madoff would have never happened. The SEC knew all about Bernie Madoff – the SEC audited him regularly. Many people – including Barron’s – pointed their finger right at Madoff and revealed his fraud. Still, the SEC did nothing.

The SEC knew all about Enron and WorldCom and the conflicts at the investment banks during the Internet boom. The SEC knew all about GM’s debt load. It knew all about the problems with Fannie and Freddie. In fact, it was the SEC that approved the huge increase to investment banks’ leverage in 2004 – a move that directly led to the financial crisis of 2008.

But… maybe you still trust the SEC. And if you do and you want to believe Porter Stansberry is out to harm investors by publishing independent reports on public companies – that come with a money-back guarantee – there’s probably very little I can do to change your mind.

On the other hand, if you ask any securities industry professional who reads our newsletters, I have no doubt he will tell you our work is among the best you can buy anywhere and is far superior to nearly all of the research put out by the brokerage firms. I know this is true because thousands of professionals are our clients and I have hundreds, if not thousands, of testimonials from these readers.

The truth of this case is so simple to see. Just ask yourself two questions:

1. How can the SEC accuse Porter of intentionally lying when Porter sent his source his full report and the source never requested a retraction or a correction to any of Porter’s reporting?

2. Why would the SEC risk a constitutional battle with a bona fide journalist over a report even The New York Times says was basically correct? Why would the SEC want to shut down a business like Stansberry & Associates Investment Research – which offers refunds to any unsatisfied customers and whose analysts never trade in the securities they recommend?

Don’t you wonder why the SEC would target my business – which doesn’t manage money or broker stocks – while ignoring enormous ponzi schemes going on in the businesses it supposedly regulates?

I can’t prove it… but I don’t think the government likes it very much when I tell investors the truth about things like Fannie, Freddie, and General Motors. I don’t think the SEC wants the American people to know the truth about our financial markets – or the state of our government’s finances. And I think the government is afraid of what will happen when you find out the truth.

Whatever happens with my court case, I hope you’ll know I did, and have always done, my best to tell you the truth.

After all, unlike the government, the truth is my only weapon.

Regards,

Porter Stansberry
for The Daily Reckoning

Why The SEC Sued Me – And Why You Should Care originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.

The current administration’s economic strategy will create an unmitigated disaster – not only our country’s worst financial calamity, but the greatest economic disaster in recorded history.

I first warned my readers about what was happening last December, in a letter titled The End of America:

“The coming great inflation will destroy America’s economic leadership. It will lead – eventually – to the return of settling international obligations in gold instead of paper dollars. And this will happen much faster than anyone expects.

“By the time Obama leaves office, you will not be able to exchange dollars for any sound currency in the world without permission from the U.S. government. The price of gold will be well over $2,500 per ounce. Most importantly, commodities will no longer be priced in dollars either, but instead in the currencies of the leading producer. Americans haven’t experienced anything like this since the Great Depression.”

Since I wrote that first warning, I have become much more concerned and much more afraid. What the president has done is actually worse – much worse – than even the dire scenario I had envisioned. Not only is the administration planning on enormous deficit spending this year, but the current plan calls for increasing deficit spending for the next decade – spending that will more than double our entire national debt during his presidency.

The Congressional Budget Office produced the following graphic, which compares the deficits of the 1980s and 1990s to the current and future budgets. Assuming Obama remains in power over the next eight years and assuming these deficits aren’t actually much larger (which almost always happens), the Congressional Budget office estimates the president’s budget will add more than $10 trillion to the total federal debt by 2019 – approximately as much total debt as was outstanding at the beginning of 2007.

Obama plans to borrow more money over the next eight years than all of the other presidents – combined.

It’s very hard to put this in perspective. The numbers have become so large they’re almost meaningless. “Twenty trillion” has 13 zeros: $20,000,000,000,000. Nobody can think about a number that large. But consider this… In 1980, the entire federal debt totaled $930 million. Assuming we’re paying 5% on our debt in 2019, we will spend more money on interest than our entire national debt of 1980.

This level of debt is going to be a huge problem because no one will want to pay the money back – ever. And it can’t be financed forever. The poor will blame the rich. The rich will leave and take their wealth offshore. And absolute chaos will follow. The dollar will be completely destroyed.

Now… I know… you’re thinking, “I’ve heard all of this before. But the end of the world somehow doesn’t happen. We find a way out.”

Not this time. In fact, when I wrote last year that the dollar would cease to be the world’s reserve currency much faster than anyone expects, I’m sure no one took me seriously. But since then, we’ve heard two of the world’s leading powers – China and Russia – both openly suggesting a new world reserve currency must be created. Putin is even talking about using gold to settle international trade. It will happen because no one will want to be a creditor to the United States.

As more and more people try to get out of the dollar, the government will be forced to forbid the free exchange of dollars into other currencies – and perhaps even to forbid the purchase of gold bullion. This will happen. I guarantee it. And it will happen during the Obama administration.

That’s why it’s critical for you to take precautions now, while you still can.

The first thing you should do, if you haven’t yet, is buy gold bullion. It’s easy: You just call a few coin dealers, find out who offers the lowest premium on bullion, and wire them the money. Once you have the coins, they’re easy to hide, easy to store, and easy to transport. There’s no law (yet) saying you can’t take bullion out of the country. If things start moving that way, you should have enough time to get the bullion out before the law passes. If not… well… you can clip your coins easily and use the gold to pay for whatever you might need.

I also believe you should immediately buy gold stocks. In fact, I’m convinced you’ll never have a chance to buy gold stocks this cheaply again… Gold stocks have never been cheaper compared to the price of gold itself. This is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I truly hope you’ll capitalize on it.

The second thing you should do is move as large a percentage of your financial assets as possible out of the country. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about this yet to offer any good advice. I’m working on it.

And the third thing you ought to do is to build a stimulus package for yourself. I realize it’s paradoxical. But the coming crisis will make lots of people rich. It’s not hard to generate a paper fortune in a huge inflation. All you have to do is own the most important economic assets: energy, communication, and transportation. Thing to do right now is buy the assets you know the government has to have for the economy to function. These assets will remain in private hands, and their values will increase the most.

I can tell you what happens to countries that go bankrupt. I’ve been to Argentina. I’m familiar with the history of Mexico and Great Britain. We’ll see the same things here, shortly: inflation, huge tax increases, capital flight and, eventually, capital controls.

It will probably take decades for Americans to realize socialism doesn’t work. But that clarity might not happen during my lifetime. And I don’t want my assets to be stuck inside a banana republic in the midst of a huge socialist experiment. I’m graveyard serious: If you do not take precautions and prepare yourself and your family for the inevitable collapse of our currency, you will suffer incredibly over the next decade.

Good investing,

Porter Stansberry
for The Daily Reckoning

How to Protect Your Family from the Greatest Economic Disaster in Recorded History originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.