John Rubino Substack - Government finances usually look their best at cyclical peaks when lots of people are working and paying taxes, relatively few are drawing unemployment benefits or welfare, and financial asset prices are way up, thus generating lots of capital gains tax revenue. If a government is ever going to balance its budget, that’s when it happens. […]

John Rubino Substack - The Fed is expected to cut interest rates today. But that might be it for a while. Consider: Consumer spending is exceeding expectations:   Motor vehicles, online purchases boost US retail sales in November (Reuters) – U.S. retail sales increased more than expected in November amid an acceleration in motor vehicle and online purchases, consistent […]

John Rubino Substack - Back in the 1700s, France was ruled by a small group of inbred idiot aristocrats who started a series of ruinously expensive wars (see, history is rhyming already). As the bills came due, there wasn’t enough gold to pay creditors, and the government faced that era’s version of bankruptcy. Then along came a Scottish economist/con […]

John Rubino Substack - Lots of people envy some aspects of their grandparents’ lives, with good reason: Houses used to cost $40,000, college tuition used to be a few thousand dollars a year, and the air used to be free of plastic nanoparticles. Those really were the good old days. But you know who would really like to go […]

John Rubino Substack - The last few US inflation reports have been ominous, with the general trend morphing from sharp decline to gradual increase. Here’s the Core Services index, which is now rising at a 4% annual rate: Stocks, meanwhile, are priced for perfection, with the second highest price/earnings ratio on record: Investors are getting cocky, as evidenced by the soaring […]

John Rubino Substack - It’s bad enough that our phones and cars (and vacuum cleaners and doorbells) track, save, and sell our texts, phone calls, and location data. But that may be just the beginning. From Mark Jeftovic’s Axis of Easy daily briefing: China Hacks US Telecom Giants in Massive Espionage Operation The “Salt Typhoon” hacking campaign, attributed to China, has […]

John Rubino Substack - Back in February, I made the ambitious claim that former State Department analyst Mike Benz had released “the single most important thing currently available online.” Here it is: Now Benz is back with a nearly three-hour Joe Rogan episode in which he explains how the US has replaced the most evil bits of the CIA and State […]

John Rubino Substack - Fiat currency systems usually end with debts soaring to unmanageable levels and governments powerless to stop the resulting carnage. Japan and the US will get there eventually. But Europe is tipping into the abyss in real time. Germany’s self-inflicted deindustrialization is a mess so vast (and sad) that it will get a post of its […]

John Rubino Substack - Hypersonic missiles are flying, the people (still!) in charge are strangely okay with that…and Peanut the Squirrel dies tragically. New York Authorities Announce Peanut The Squirrel Died Of COVID (Babylon Bee) – Following the public outcry about the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation raiding a local man’s home and euthanizing his pet squirrel who had hundreds of thousands […]

John Rubino Substack - China   From the Kobeissi Letter: China’s consumer confidence index dropped to 86 points in August, near the lowest in 30 years. Over the last 3 years, consumer confidence in China is down ~ 50 points. Such a drop in consumer assessment of the Chinese economy has almost never been seen before. Foreign firms are also […]

John Rubino Substack - By now we’ve all seen at least one article titled “Sitting is the New Smoking.” That’s a clever title that instantly engages the reader. It’s also apparently true. People who sit for most of the day tend to have all kinds of circulatory and metabolic problems that frequently end up killing them. Here’s an overview […]

John Rubino Substack - So in his last act before shuffling off the stage, the US president … greenlights Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia. The latter then fires — for the first time ever — a hypersonic ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear payload to pretty much anywhere in a matter of minutes. And just like […]

John Rubino Substack - As the old saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” Which means there are plenty of lessons to be learned from our ancestors’ screw-ups. This post is the first in a series covering some of humanity’s more useful cautionary tales. The logical starting point is of course ancient Rome, with its many disturbing […]

John Rubino Substack - Every once in a while, the term “bond spread” pops up in financial reporting. Most people (who aren’t money nerds) don’t know what this means and how big a deal it sometimes is. So — since it’s a major red flag at the moment — this might be a good time to discuss it: Bond […]

John Rubino Substack - Home prices are at all-time highs, and — amazingly — are still rising. Compare today’s average price to that of 2007, which is generally thought to be the peak of America’s biggest-ever housing bubble: And mortgage rates, which were supposed to fall when the Fed started easing in September, are instead rising. 7%, here we […]

John Rubino Substack - Our recent drift into authoritarianism hurt a lot of innocent people. And even before last week’s election, the process of “truth and reconciliation” was gaining momentum. This is the first in a series that tracks some of the more notable cases of justice restored. 6 BART employees who refused COVID-19 vaccine to receive more than […]

John Rubino Substack - A decade ago, the world seemed like a complex place. But in retrospect, it was pretty simple: The fiat currency experiment had produced a hyper-leveraged financial system that would soon fail spectacularly. Existing currencies would be replaced via a monetary reset, probably involving some kind of gold standard. This would be a messy but survivable […]

John Rubino Substack - The election is over, and the result is pretty close to a best-case scenario. The victory margin is big enough to head off the expected civil unrest, giving us a more-or-less peaceful transfer of power. And if Trump and his team keep their promises, they’ll quickly address the existential threats of global war and mass […]

John Rubino Substack - There are a million diets out there, most of which are simply common sense combined with one marketable hook (grapefruit, red meat, etc). But one — the Ketogenic diet — just got some intriguing scientific backing. From today’s Epoch Times: Researchers Discover New Mechanism Linking Diet and Cancer Risk   Epoch Times, November 3, 2024 MGO, a glucose […]

John Rubino Substack - Higher For Longer (than expected)   When the Fed started cutting interest rates in September, the assumption was that rates would fall and the Fed would maintain the downward trajectory well into 2025. But interest rates didn’t cooperate. Across the yield curve, days like this one (November 2) have become the norm. A rising 10-year […]

John Rubino Substack - Yes, your new car tracks your location and records your conversations. Your smart speaker listens to and records your conversations. Your TV watches you while you watch it. Virtually every new device we install in our increasingly high-tech homes collects data and (at least potentially) sends it to criminals, corporations, and/or governments to use however they like. […]

John Rubino Substack - It’s official: Deepfakes have made it impossible to trust anything we see online: This is epic! pic.twitter.com/pCbVOcHXvQ — Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) October 24, 2024 Meanwhile, there’s an election where both sides expect to be robbed: Dad Decides It’s Time To Have ‘The Talk’ With Son About Rigged Elections (Babylon Bee) – Local dad Dave […]

John Rubino Substack - The late, great Ted Butler spent the final decades of his life railing against the way the silver market was manipulated on the Comex and other exchanges while capitive regulators looked the other way. In very simple terms, he accused big banks, hedge funds, and commercial silver buyers of using futures contracts to suppress the […]

John Rubino Substack - Incrementum is out with its latest In Gold We Trust chartbook, and to call it compelling for gold and silver would be to wildly understate the case. Here are a few of the highlights:

John Rubino Substack - Paul Tudor Jones, a well-known billionaire hedge fund manager, recently went on CNBC to warn about the impact of America’s soaring government debt. As reported by Kitco: The Tudor Investment founder and CIO expressed concerns that if the U.S. continues to spend beyond its means, a major sell-off in the bond market could ensue, leading to a […]