Your Money’s Not Safe From Sanctions. Hard Assets May Not Be Safe Either.

We all understand that putting your money in the bank is not safe. Once you do that, it’s not your money anymore, it’s the bank’s money. They’ll give it back to you if they feel like it, but sometimes they don’t feel like it.

If you want more than $10,000 in cash, the bank will file a currency transaction report (CTR) with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) based in northern Virginia. Notice the word “crime” in the agency’s name. Your CTR will go into the same filing system as ISIS terrorists and gangsters.

The accounts of non-violent truckers in Canada were frozen recently by the neo-fascist Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland because they dared to oppose the fascist Trudeau regime. (They froze crypto-accounts too, just in case you think that’s a safety valve – it’s not).

The accounts of the Russian Central Bank have been frozen. No matter how you feel about the War in Ukraine (I’m opposed to war), freezing central bank accounts is unprecedented.

There are many other examples and more are on the way. OK, investors understand this.

Many turn to hard assets such as gold, silver, land, fine art, natural resources, and other non-digital assets that are not stored in banks. That’s generally a good approach for part of your assets and I use it myself. Still, we should not fool ourselves into believing hard assets are safe from neo-fascist governments in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere.

This article describes how valuable works of art worth millions of dollars were seized by customs agents in Finland because they were owned by a Russian museum and were on loan to other museums in Tokyo and Udine, Italy. Finnish customs said the works of art were “luxury goods” subject to international sanctions on Russia, even though they were owned by a non-profit museum and put on loan as an act of international goodwill.

This does not mean hard assets cannot be used as a store of wealth. It does mean that you have to be extremely careful about where you store them and how you move them, if necessary.

Paintings are an extremely valuable form of wealth and should be easy to move across borders. A $10 million painting on a three-pound canvas is worth over $200,000 per ounce or over 100 times more valuable than gold when measured by weight. Paintings (and diamonds, which can also have great value by weight), won’t set off metal detectors and should be innocuous on laser scans.

Of course, the safest path is to put them in secure storage in a place you can stay yourself without having to move the valuables. The best security is simply not to tell anyone what you have; then they won’t come looking.

Hard assets are a desirable form of wealth and cannot be frozen digitally. Still, don’t let them pass through the hands of government officials, if possible. That may be the last you see of them.

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