John Rubino Substack - Let’s start with the ongoing debate over who owns public spaces. In New York’s subways, is it mental patients or commuters (with their “sometimes delicious faces”)? In Australia, is it government bureaucrats or so-called “peaceful protesters”? On a less contentious note, Oxi-Clean has released a new ‘Clinton-Strength’ Formula guaranteed to get blood out of carpet:   In […]

John Rubino Substack - Sometimes you have to be outside a situation to see it clearly. And never has that been more true than with today’s late-stage, decadent, pseudo-capitalist global order. Libertarians, who are emphatically not part of the fiat currency/fractional reserve money system, understand that this financial arrangement is a recipe for disaster. What remains of the left, […]

John Rubino Substack - The US just reported that core PCE, “the Fed’s favorite inflation measure,” accelerated in April. This worsens the central bank’s dilemma: Growth is clearly slowing, while inflation, already at crisis levels, is rising. Luckily, the genius chart makers at Incrementum AG are on hand with a new “In Gold We Trust” report that addresses this very issue. Here’s a short […]

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John Rubino Substack - firmly in the rearview mirror. Most Americans still have jobs. And the debt limit pseudo crisis is in its final inning and — if history is any guide — will be resolved soon. So why does it seem like we’re tipping into a recession, or something much worse? The general answer is that behind the […]

John Rubino Substack - The ultimate goal, of course, is to completely dispense with Google, Facebook, and all their surveillance capitalist brethren. But for most people (including me) that’s a huge leap into the unknown. So … baby steps. For now let’s say you’re using Gmail, the Chrome browser, and/or Google Search and you’d like to minimize the amount […]

John Rubino Substack - I’m old enough to have followed Sam Zell during the second half of his storied real estate career. And in that time he’s been right in a big way on the major financial turning points. At the bubble peaks of 1999 and 2007, for instance, he sold most of his commercial real estate and loaded […]

John Rubino Substack - With all the (completely justified) angst surrounding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), it’s easy to forget that the concept of digital money isn’t the problem. It’s just a tool like any other and can be used for good or evil, depending on who’s wielding it. Obviously, if a CBDC is managed by some combination of the Federal […]

John Rubino Substack - Turns out that my original list of ways they’re spying on us was incomplete. Readers have been fleshing out the story: Robert Wilkins I would like to mention that Google owns 23 and Me, the genetic analysis service that many people give as presents to friends and family members or use themselves. They send in a gene sample […]

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 […]