In a dream one night you see the New York Times headline, “Yellowstone Erupts! Thousands Missing, Presumed Dead.” and the date five years in the future. When you wake up you “know” that it’s true and going to happen.
Being the Great American Entrepreneur that you are, you immediately start brainstorming how to capitalize on your inside track.
Sure, you can tell everyone what you’ve seen, but your only evidence is “I had a dream.” so good luck with that. If you’ve got friends or family in the area you can probably convince them to take a vacation with you, or in the worst case, abduct them the day before and apologize the day after.
If you’re talking full-bore, 100% power, once-every-300,000-years eruption, the only way to cash in is to move yourself, your assets, and and as much family as you can convince to the Southern Hemisphere, because the N. Hemisphere is going to be, and I say this as politely as possible, fucked.
Keep in mind that there are a few things to capitalise on here:
The fact that dreams can actually foretell the future.
The fact that the NYT will still be in business in 5 years.
The fact that Yellowstone will erupt but the NYT will still be able to publish the following day (was the title written on newsprint?)
The fact that the title mentions only “thousands”.
The fact that there will have been no nuclear apocalypse in the next 5 years.
So:
Try dreaming about the stock market for about 4 years. Lotteries are good too. If you can’t dream on demand, you have about 3 years to learn.
Invest in the New York Times.
Invest in gold. People will be buying gold in 5 years. Maybe Bitcoin, too, but that’s a bit fickle.
Short companies that are heavily invested in solar power in the continental U.S.
Short banks that sell mortgages close to Yellowstone.
Invest in companies that make breathing masks.
Stockpile canned foods that you can resell: crops will be very poor for several years. Prepare to guard the doors.
Build some large housing units with steeply angled, heavily reinforced, Teflon-covered roofs with large stockpiles of food and water. (Or build underground, of course.) In 4 years, start saturating the media about your chain of end-times shelters that only accept cash (or gold, or Bitcoin). “Projammer’s Ark” or something similar. If you build underground, you can call them nuclear fallout shelters, it sounds less silly than “end-times”. Prepare to guard the doors.
Only thousands missing, presumed dead? Me thinks the fact that you have this advanced knowledge of the future had led to a butterfly effect somehow, something you did or said, that lead to a mass exodus of people from the US, and large parts of Mexico and Canada. Brazil is now one of the dominate global superpowers. Did you get in on the real estate market in Rio before the Mass Migration of 2027?
Spend the next five years telling everyone Yellowstone’s gonna go boom in December 2022. Start a website, Youtube channel, whatever. Try to get on TV; create as much media presence as you can.
Now this is the important bit: Tell everyone this was revealed to in a vision from the great god Vulcan.
The day after Yellowstone goes boom, you are the head priest of major world religion. Ka-ching!
Options. Short everything in the three-six month period before the eruption. Then get the hell out of dodge and wait. If the financial system survives in some form you’ll be rich AND in Tierra del Fuego.
About a year before the event start purchasing as much land as you can (and I’m talking hundreds of thousands of acres) around the park. All purchases to be at no principal payments for the first year and low initial interest with a huge interest increase after one year and a balloon payment in ten.
After the eruption everyone you bought it from is probably dead and you now have title without the sellers being around to quibble about payment. Of course, it will take a hundred years for the land to recover so you’ll be dead too. But your heirs will own huge ranches next to Yellowstone.
Start stockpiling large amounts of food now. Store in strategically placed bunkers. Recruit army of goons to help you guard and manage your stores. Recruit key scientists to help humanity survive. Build bunkers for your chosen few. Watch disaster flicks for additional ideas.
Kind of hard to cash in on this. Any insurance gimmick would have to go through a company somewhere else in the world, maybe South Africa. But even there the resulting economic disaster could affect the entire world.
I think the religious cult idea is the best. The world will be a much different place after this cataclysmic event, money may not be worth much, power is what you’ll need in this hypothetical future.
This is incorrect, imo. The southern hemisphere will be just as devastated as the north because the sun will be blocked and agriculture will be mostly impossible around the world.
Why would the missing total be more? Take a look at a map. You have to go a couple of hundred miles downwind before you hit a city of any size (Boise). Wipe out everybody within 100 miles of Yellowstone and the total will still read “thousands.”
That is not really true. There is relatively little atmospheric circulation transfer between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, especially within the troposphere. The Yellowstone Caldera is at approimately 44.4° N, which puts it squarely in the northern Ferrel cell. From the three previously known eruptions around the Yellowstone hotspot, which formed. The Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, the Henrys Forks Caldera, and Yellowstone Caldera produced ash that was distributed as far as the Eastern Seaboard that likely devastaed great swaths of Central and Eastern North America but did not result in the kind of global destruction and mass extinction that would result from blocking sunlight around the world. The volcano would eject a large mass of gases into the stratosphere including CO[SUB]2[/SUB], SO[SUB]2[/SUB], HCl, HF, which would result in a variety of impacts to the biosphere, potentially including degradation of the ozone layer, produing sulpuric and nitric acid condensates, chlorine nitrate, nitrogen pentoxide, which would result in a short-to-medium term globalcooling effect and potential long term warming.
If a massive volcanic eruption at Yellowstone occurred today, we would expect significant disruption in agriculture in the American Midwest which would likely have global consequences, and significant impacts on industry in the East as the caustic and erosive as several centimeters thick would be distributed across the continent. However, while geophysicists have observed signs of building pressure under the existing caldera and we are ostensibly due for another eruption (which have occurred on roughly 650 kyr intervals, the last occurred ~640 kyr ago), there is no sign of imminent eruption, and the estimated odds of an eruption occuring within the remaining century are cummulatively about 0.01% based upon prior activity. If such an eruption were to occur, however, there is essentially nothing that could be done to stop it, and the only mitigation would be mass evacuation and stockpiling food and other vital resources until such time that the land could be reclaimed for habitation and agriculture.
Evil options. I hadn’t really considered them, but that could work.
Vegas takes bets on anything. I’d probably get great odds for a specific date.
Everyone likes a little ass. No one likes a smart ass.
The problem with shorting is that you have to have a 25% maintenance margin so this becomes a situation where you have to start with a lot of money to make a lot of money. The best you can do is quadruple whatever you start with.
Likewise, you can’t take out insurance policies on someone you have no relationship to.
The NYT was chosen because it’s a major publication furthest from the event and most likely to publish the next day.
You don’t really have any indication of the size of the eruption other than the “Thousands Missing” subheadline. If it’s on the ash-ice-age scale then profit becomes more moot so hopefully it won’t be the big one and life will go on.
I’m pretty sure that there will be a financial market if there is any civilization left, after all, the IRS has a plan to be back in operation 30 days after a nuclear war…
ETA: Stranger posted while I was composing this… Interesting analysis, we should talk more later.
Be aware that most general property and many life insurance policies have some kind of force majeure clause that limits liability in the case of so-called “Acts of God” (unforeseeable natural disasters). A mass casualty event that killed millions of people at once would likely overwhelm the insurance industry and result in bankruptcy for affected companies regardless.
Everyone likes a little ass. No one likes a smart ass.