Executive Summary

• Bubble markets short-circuit our assessment of risk
• Bubble markets are hard to resist, and wear down your resolve
• How to avoid the pain of the coming market downturn
• The 9 steps to increase your true wealth

If you have not yet read Part 1: Believing The Impossible, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

I truly despise the many bubbles the central bankers have blown. I consider them ill-advised and distracting at a critical moment of history.

Where we should be attending to serious matters -- like accelerating ecosystem destruction, reigning in the practice of borrowing more than can ever be paid back, and transitioning rapidly off of fossil fuels -- people instead cheer the latest new shiny Dow Jones price record. Folks are just too distracted to have any interest in acknowledging the sobering predicaments we face.

It’s all rather cartoonish. The thinking, if I can call it that, goes like this; “But if any of your concerns were indeed true, certainly we’d not all be getting rich in the stock markets?”

Rising prices seem to be all the comfort these folks need to conclude that everything is A-OK.

“Your arguments are invalid because I'm richer today than I was yesterday.” As if a few more printed-up claims on wealth were the same thing as a better future.

So the prime reason that I hate the central banker-created bubbles is that they short-circuit the important conversations we should be having.

Rising equity prices coupled with the endless cheerleading they receive on the TV and in the press blunt people’s sense that we maybe should be doing things differently. And there is so much we need to be doing differently right now -- in the long run to secure a prosperous future, and in the immediate term, to protect against the inevitable destruction when these bubble markets burst.

Specifically, we need to...

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