My childhood was spent growing up in a northern English coal mining town with relative tranquility then unemployment. Followed by a pretty regular life as an adult during the 1990s, graduating from University, obtaining my first full-time employment, buying a house, meeting a new partner and then, by the millenium, we had our first child. Work was going well, earnings were rising and I was saving and investing in all the things we are told to save and invest in for a nice, safe, healthy financial future – Cash savings accounts, Stocks and Shares, pensions and for a while, they all went up nicely. Life was safe, secure and normal.
Then a series of financial crashes occurred that hammered the supposedly safe portfolio of investments. I didn’t set out to invest in technology shares, but in 2000, many got their fingers burnt with a huge crash on the NASDAQ – not only that but many old economy stocks got dragged down along with them. Just as things were recovering, along came the World Trade Center in November 2001 and stock markets plummeted. Along with that, so did my savings. In fact, some of the shares were now well below the levels invested in them years before, an early lesson in the financial advice small print – share prices can go down as well as up.
Meanwhile, the cash savings accounts didn’t quite seem to be keeping up with prices of goods and services generally, and not keeping up with the increase in house prices at all. How had it all gone wrong? The advice regularly regurgitated in mainstream media had been followed almost to the letter and yet life was now tougher than ever. Especially when, in 2002 I found myself unemployed with no income at all and a growing family to feed.
All these things led me to delve into my own alternative research into the world of finance, leading to my first discovery of Gold and soon after, Silver and their role in representing real money. Of course, I had previously realised the metals could be used to make jewellery and that once upon a time, less enlightened people had used coins made of these metals in their everyday transactions essential to their lives. Luckily we live in a more enlightened and cleverer financial age, eh?
Maybe not.
In 2006-07, originally as a hobby project, I wrote my first book, imaginatively entitled “How to Invest in Gold and Silver”. It was meant to just be a self-published work, distributed to a few friends and relatives, no further than that. However, in late 2007 and early 2008, strange things began to occur in world financial markets again, culminating with the BBC showing footage of people queueing outside Northern Rock, a UK-based bank, patiently waiting their turn to withdraw their savings from the bank in cash. These scenes looked exactly like something being replayed from history, familiar, common even. They were well-documented from a 1907 financial crisis in the USA, when the imaginatively-named Knickerbocker Trust got into trouble and history books tell us decisive action by the financier James Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan saved the day and more commonly-known, the 1930s in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Only, whereas the BBC was subtly mocking them as fools and playing lots of footage of experts saying they were silly to worry, history showed something written in the book
Contrary to Popular opinion, banks do go bust
Alan Dunwiddie, 2007
Seeing this occurring geed me up to get focussed on getting the book onto Amazon and other online booksellers. Not even sure if it would sell at all, it was fun to see it out there for public consumption, at least. After the initial excitement, it sold a total of a few thousand copies over the next few years. Not enough to change anyone’s life, but a bit of fun, nevertheless. The proceeds were invested into gold, following the premise of the thoughts expressed in the book.
The research and reading has carried on and a sequel was often considered. There didn’t seem to be an endgame or phase switch to justify it though and I am glad to have waited, because in March 2020 Corona came along and changed life for the vast majority of us worldwide. Not only that but it’s helping to confirm suspicions that the world is a much murkier, dangerous and sinister place than ever considered when talking about financial manipulations and subtle theft of your hard-earned savings back in 2007. It even brings two of my major interests together – finance and technology.
This book will go over some of the Gold and Silver basics that were covered back then, but more so, it attempts to highlight some of the dark incidents that have and are taking place in the world today, in relation to money and society. You may be surprised, entertained and disbelieving. You may get angry with what seems to be really happening, or you may think the author is mad, but hey, isn’t that the beauty of free speech and the beauty of the wide range of human emotions we have – a mutual transaction where the author can write this and the reader can read it and agree or disagree with it? In fact, given the possible endings described in the later chapters, let’s be grateful we can still express our differing opinions at all without penalty.