John Rubino Substack - FBI Firearm Training Facility Replaces Paper Targets With Copies Of The Constitution Babylon Bee, Washington, D.C. — In a completely innocuous and in no way concerning recent update, the FBI Training Facility for Firearms and Small Weaponry has replaced all of its paper targets with copies of the Constitution of the United states. According to […]

John Rubino Substack - Among the keys to a long, healthy life are exercise, sunshine, and not smoking. But the most important of all might be maintaining a balanced microbiome. Here’s a quick primer: The term “microbiome” refers to the trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microscopic living things that exist mainly inside our intestines and on our […]

John Rubino Substack - Not that we need any more scary statistics, but here’s one that might be worth watching. From the Brave browser’s AI summarizer: Government liquidity index The government liquidity index is a metric that measures the ease or difficulty of trading in government securities, such as U.S. Treasury bonds. It is a gauge of deviations in yields from a […]

John Rubino Substack - On the list of things that might disrupt our increasingly fragile financial system, cyberattacks have always been up there with pandemics, real estate busts, war, and inflation. But those other things have, in one form or another, been happening while cyber disruptions have been limited to small-time extortion and the occasional data breach. That might […]

John Rubino Substack - I just got this offer from a credit card: But it’s not just credit cards: Buy Now, Pay Later Craze Coming To Apple Pay (Zero Hedge) – iPhones and iPads will soon be integrated with Affirm’s buy now, pay later (BNPL) feature. This product will soon be available for Apple Pay users. “This will enable […]

John Rubino Substack - We all sense that our basic rights are under attack, but the nature of the enemy and the weapons at their disposal aren’t always clear. Here’s a video that spells out the who, what, and how of the New World Order. A few bullet points: Property rights are the bedrock of a free society. Wealthy […]

John Rubino Substack - Over the past couple of decades, the US has invaded and/or destabilized multiple countries — including Iraq, Libya, and Syria — for accepting currencies other than the dollar for oil. That’s how big a deal the petrodollar was for the Empire. But now it’s over: Saudi Arabia ends petrodollar agreement (Kitco News) – The established […]

John Rubino Substack - “Getting your affairs in order” requires a lot of sometimes tricky decisions, the biggest and potentially thorniest of which is choosing someone to make sure your assets go where they’re supposed to. The lucky among us will have someone who’s trustworthy and willing to take on the job, but for many others it’s not so […]

John Rubino Substack - There are maybe 10 currently serving US politicians who have managed to avoid looking corrupt, stupid, senile, and/or mindlessly bloodthirsty in recent years. One of the most interesting of that tiny group is Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, a consistent libertarian who is anti-war (including the latest one in the Middle East), opposed to foreign aid, in favor […]

John Rubino Substack - On Friday, two announcements combined to hit gold and silver about as hard as they’ve ever been hit. First, the US jobs report, as usual, came in far hotter than expected, which led credulous headline readers to conclude that the economy is booming and interest rates will have to stay higher for longer. If true, […]

John Rubino Substack - Looks like the Aristocracy has finally stopped pretending to be the good guys. George Washington is not impressed: ‘250 Years Wasn’t A Bad Run,’ Says George Washington Looking On From Heaven Babylon Bee — Watching as the last vestige of the nation he helped found crumbled, George Washington sighed and remarked that America still had […]

John Rubino Substack - Pretend you’re running a central bank and your primary job is to maintain a stable currency. Then assume that your long-term interest rates are around 1% and an important inflation measure is spiking to near 3%. What do you do? Normally, you’d raise interest rates to one or two percentage points above the rate of […]

John Rubino Substack - It’s now widely understood that science faces a “replication crisis” where attempts to re-do experiments frequently fail to yield the same results. In other words, a lot of cheating and/or incompetence is showing up in peer-reviewed journals these days, making it impossible for, say, doctors to know how to treat their patients or the rest […]

John Rubino Substack - Big parts of the world continue to migrate away from the US dollar. And lately the process has met some important milestones. Russia Confiscates €800 Million From Deutsche Bank, Unicredit And Commerzbank (Zero Hedge) – After two years of being on the receiving end of a weaponized global reserve currency, getting booted from SWIFT, countless […]

John Rubino Substack - I keep a “creeping fascism” file with the intention of tracking governments’ erosion of their citizens’ rights and freedoms. But the file is filling up so fast that the first few articles in this series will have to be “data-dump” cut-and-past jobs rather than in-depth analyses of any specific depredation. So here goes: JK Rowling […]

John Rubino Substack - A marketing email just came from Michael Major, author of a book called No Grid Survival Projects, on where NOT to hide your valuables. His ideas are sometimes counterintuitive, which makes them potentially useful: 9 Hiding Spots In Your House Where Looters Always Look First You may think you already have it figured out for how […]

John Rubino Substack - Gold blew through $2400/oz this morning: And the world’s central banks continue to add gold to their monetary reserves. Note that the real action coincided with the outbreak of the Ukraine war, when the US started slapping sanctions on everyone in sight. De-dollarization is a trend with legs. A case can be made that China alone is […]

John Rubino Substack - This is the first in a series about breakthroughs in energy and other sectors that might affect some of our basic investment themes. Heading in, keep two things in mind: The vast majority of breathlessly hyped developments in science and engineering never make it out of the lab. Scaling up turns out to be too […]

John Rubino Substack - The Wall Street Journal just published a long article (reposted via MSN) lamenting the fact that everyone suddenly wants gold. So thanks, WSJ, for the FOMO boost: Inside the 21st Century Gold Rush (MSN) – Eric Vazquez, a lineman for a power company in southwest Florida, says he’s holding a lot more gold than most […]

John Rubino Substack - Zero Hedge just posted a long look at how the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) industry now accounts for about $700 billion of largely unreported “phantom debt”. This, speculates ZH, is why the economy hasn’t fallen into recession. Now come the unintended consequences: Pernicious effects of BNPL credit are piling up: the Harris Poll survey conducted […]

John Rubino Substack - Long-suffering mining investors have been wondering how high gold and silver would have to go to finally breathe some life into their portfolios. It looks like $2300/oz gold and $27/oz silver have done the trick. Behold the (suddenly very pretty) price charts:     Higher Metals Prices = Wider Profit Margins These price moves aren’t […]

John Rubino Substack - Most normal Americans have a sense that the people now running the country are off in some fundamental way. But the specifics have been fuzzy. Are they morons or evil geniuses? Are they controlled by foreign powers or home-grown mind viruses? Or are the aliens pulling their strings? Venerable pollster Scott Rasmussen claims to have found a […]

John Rubino Substack - Ah, the silver story. It just keeps getting better. Here’s an update from the Silver Institute: Industrial Silver Demand Sets Record Record use of silver in industrial applications set a new high in 2023 at 654.4 million ounces (Moz). Ongoing structural gains from green economy applications underpinned these advances as they did in 2022. Higher […]

John Rubino Substack - There are so many wars (and related civil unrest) these days, that it’s hard to keep track of which meme/satire/diatribe is aimed at which crisis. But April included April Fools’ Day, so at least we have a logical place to start: CNN Publishes Real News Story For April Fools’ Day (Babylon Bee) – Fooling thousands […]

John Rubino Substack - So that recession I keep whining about still hasn’t arrived. What’s going on out there to keep “inevitable” from becoming “imminent”? It might be as simple as a government borrowing insane amounts of money and giving it to arms makers, banks, and AI companies. This “fiscal dominance” strategy invokes some serious unintended consequences, including stubborn […]