John Rubino Substack - At the beginning of last week, everyone expected central banks to “tighten until something breaks”. By the end of the week it was clear that they’d already broken everything. Two middling US banks imploded, European mega-bank Credit Suisse finally died a well-justified death, and “who’s next?” speculation ran wild. And just like that, the era of […]

John Rubino Substack - Watching almost any U.S. policymaker try to explain what they’re doing these days is a surreal experience. Whether it’s foreign policy — especially our multi-front plan to start World War 3 — or public health or border security, it’s clear that these guys have absolutely no idea how their tools work or what the result […]

John Rubino Substack - Some astoundingly consequential things have just happened, and in coming years they’ll reshape — if not end — our connection to the virtual world. Two examples: Deep Fakes It is now apparently possible to create videos of people doing and saying things they haven’t actually done or said. Imagine a YouTube video of a politician […]

John Rubino Substack - While we’re thinking about prepping, let’s segue from bugging out to staying put, with the following premise: In a world where we can’t trust factory farms, Big Pharma, or any regulatory agency, a family that makes most of its own food and medicine has a vastly better chance of surviving and thriving than one that’s dependent on […]

John Rubino Substack - My wife and I live in a place that’s pretty but hazardous. Earthquakes (there’s a big offshore subduction zone), forest fires (lots of trees), war (a nearby military installation), and civil unrest (a city a couple of hours away) are all at least theoretically possible here. And of course there’s the shared American problem of […]

John Rubino Substack - The past few decades of unnaturally easy money have created a world of “moral hazard” in which a ridiculous number of people borrowed far more than they should have. Now, with money getting tighter, not just businesses and individuals but some governments are staring at the “suddenly” part of that old saying about bankruptcy. Japan is […]

John Rubino Substack - One of the signposts on the road to recession (or in today’s case Depression) is a sudden increase in the number of former Wall Street favorites going bankrupt. The reason this happens when it does is that when money is easy, new companies are able to finance their emergence by selling a “disruptive” story to […]

John Rubino Substack - How does “energy transition metal in chronic shortage” sound? Copper is about as old-school as it gets. A metal that was used as low-denomination coinage from the Roman Empire through modern times and as an electrical conductor since the invention of the light bulb, it’s been both in demand and relatively easy to find, basically […]

John Rubino Substack - Between 2020 and 2022 houses in America’s hottest real estate markets went from unaffordable to 50% above unaffordable. Put another way, they did what would have been impossible in an economy where market forces determined interest rates and home prices. But ours was not that kind of market. Central banks around the world had lost […]

John Rubino Substack - These days we all have our theories about how and why the 1% have become so rabidly predatory (find my recent take here). But the most sophisticated – and scariest – analysis comes from Catherine Austin Fitts. As an Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the Bush Jr administration, Catherine noticed that huge […]