John Rubino Substack -   In an ideal world, personal information would be more or less private. This includes whom we communicate with and what we say, the location and contents of our financial accounts, our shopping and search habits, and where we are physically at any given time. But this is not an ideal world. Just the opposite, […]

John Rubino Substack - There’s a debate in the comments section here about whether Americans have gotten suddenly dumber, leading them to elect populist presidents and refuse vaccines. I started to weigh in but quickly realized that the story is broader and deeper than just vaccines and Donald Trump. So here’s some context: Starting in the 1960s, the US […]

John Rubino Substack - There’s a lot going on out there. But not all of it is bad. The Babylon Bee, for instance, broke some (relatively) good news on Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Calculates It Will Be More Efficient To Just Let Humanity Destroy Itself ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Despite stern warnings of artificial intelligence attacking humanity’s digital infrastructure from the […]

John Rubino Substack - Say you’re a billionaire who’s drained about as much as you can from your employees (who are starting to unionize) and the financial markets (which are crashing as inflation spikes and credit tightens). With financial collapse and political chaos now approaching, your challenge has shifted from how to steal as much as possible, to how […]

John Rubino Substack - Way back in the late 1990s, as the dot-com bubble was in its blow-off phase, a well-known short seller named Bill Fleckenstein liked to tell interviewers that “The global economy depends on the US economy, the US economy depends on the US stock market, and the US stock market depends on 20 stocks, most of which […]

John Rubino Substack - Towards the end of a financial bubble, the people who benefit from the bubble’s continuation — politicians hoping to be reelected, bankers hoping to complete the next deal, money managers talking their books — start touting “record household net worth” as a sign of societal health. But they’re wrong, for the following reasons: Deceptive leverage. Pretend […]

John Rubino Substack - Wealthion’s Adam Taggart tried something different today. Instead of interviewing an expert, he had one expert interview another. It worked perfectly, producing a great discussion with chilling conclusions: If you’re in real estate as either a buyer or seller, the tenor of the market is about to change dramatically. If you’re a landlord, expect a “painful, […]

John Rubino Substack - You probably hear the term “Ponzi scheme” tossed around frequently out there, but you may not know what it is and why it matters. So here’s a little background from Wikipedia: A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.[1] Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, the scheme leads victims to […]

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John Rubino Substack - With all the talk about de-dollarization, this might be a good time to consider the world’s second reserve currency, the euro. Spoiler alert: It’s not a pretty picture, and Germany, believe it or not, is largely to blame. It didn’t have to be this way For most of the post-WWII era, Germany was the country that got it […]

John Rubino Substack - It took a while, but some of the biggest “official narrative” scams and cons of the past few years are finally being exposed. High-ranking US officials have apparently been lying about public health, election integrity, and (of course) war. Among the things that have just come to light: The Secretary of State created the laptop letter […]

John Rubino Substack - Banks were already tightening lending standards before Silicon Valley Bank imploded. This chart is from Q4 2022:   Since then the tightening has become a full-fledged rout. It’s now much harder to get a mortgage or a car loan, especially for less-credit-worthy borrowers in overheated markets. Meanwhile, interest rates are rising again, with the average 30-year fixed-rate […]

John Rubino Substack - Societies under stress become erratic and often violent. But sometimes they also become more creative. Think back to the Vietnam War/civil rights era of the 1960s (for younger readers, those were scary, chaotic times) and consider the music that was created in response. Today’s world is, by many measures, a lot more ominous and stressful […]

John Rubino Substack - Gold just set a couple of records, but you’d never know it from the relatively modest level of investor enthusiasm. The metal’s March 31 price of $2,008/oz was its highest-ever monthly and quarterly close. That’s admittedly a ways below the all-time daily close of $2,069. But still, record highs of any kind deserve a certain […]

John Rubino Substack - Very few of you need an introduction to Ron Paul. So think of this instead as an homage, inspired by this T-shirt I just found on Amazon:   Fully Formed Ron Paul didn’t grow into himself over the course of a lifetime. He seems to have emerged fully formed, a libertarian with total conviction and […]

John Rubino Substack - Remember that imminent commercial real estate bust? It seems to have started. Beginning with a little background, the second half of the 2010s was a great time for massive buildings that could be financed for next to nothing and filled with pre-pandemic workers who still thought a “job” meant commuting to an office every day. The average […]

John Rubino Substack - Normally, the “People We Should Know” series is at most a once-a-week thing. Twice in a single day will almost never happen. But this Kim Iverson video just popped up in which she interviews Maine State Senator Eric Brakey, whose anti-Ukraine war speech apparently went viral a couple of weeks ago. His explanation of libertarian principles like […]

John Rubino Substack - Something interesting is happening on the left side of the US political spectrum. People who view themselves as liberal or even socialist are concluding that we’re now ruled by a single “uniparty” — in effect an aristocracy — that profits from wars, pandemics, and financial crises, and actively creates these events in order to impoverish, distract, and […]

John Rubino Substack - Commercial real estate — i.e., America’s $20 trillion of office buildings, warehouses, strip malls, and apartments — is all about financing. The lower the interest rate, the easier it is to justify marginal projects toward the end of a business cycle when only cheap money gets the deal done. That’s why the sector typically booms late and […]

John Rubino Substack - Some of you have asked to see (or listen to) the podcast interviews I do. So here you go. I’ll start posting a few every week or two, with the caveats that for some reason this kind of self-promotion makes me a little anxious and — possibly the cause of the first caveat — some […]

John Rubino Substack - Some of you have asked to see (or listen to) the podcast interviews I do. So here you go. I’ll start posting a few every week or two, with the caveats that for some reason this kind of self-promotion makes me a little anxious and — possibly the cause of the first caveat — some […]

John Rubino Substack - De-dollarization is a meme whose time has apparently come, as a lot of big video platforms devote entire shows to the subject. Here are three good examples from the past month:

John Rubino Substack - Since the 1970s it’s been virtually impossible for a country to function without access to US dollars. And Washington maintained this highly-favorable status quo by putting various kinds of pressure — from sanctions to election theft to outright invasion — on anyone who stepped out of line. This weaponization of the world’s reserve currency has, […]

John Rubino Substack - There are a lot of writers in this — let’s call it the “rational” — space, where limited government, individual freedom, and sound money are considered basic common sense. Stylistically, most of us fall into the journalist category, which is to say we convey what we hope is useful information as clearly and accessibly as […]

John Rubino Substack - Incrementum (profiled in this post from January) is about to release the 2023 version of its massive chartbook. Click here to download a preview, or scroll down for nine sample charts that point to a great decade for precious metals.