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 […]

John Rubino Substack - One of the first posts in this newsletter’s Shrinking Trust Horizon series was about how “deep fake” technology will make fake images, videos, and audio recordings almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This will kill millions of modeling and acting jobs, while weaponizing audio and video in all kinds of disturbing ways. That day has apparently arrived: […]

John Rubino Substack - Japan’s ongoing march to national bankruptcy has been a recurring theme here. See: Japan Is In That Box Japan Takes Another Step Towards the Cliff How a Country Goes Bankrupt, In 10 Steps Now the death spiral has entered a new phase, with the yen/dollar exchange rate heading straight down: To restate the “Japan collapse” […]

John Rubino Substack - Artificial intelligence, which a few years ago existed only in science fiction (check out William Gibson’s Neuromancer), has morphed into an epic stock bubble. Nvidia, maker of the leading AI microchips, saw its market cap surge from $200 billion in 2019 to $2 trillion in 2023. I haven’t actually checked, but that might be the fastest […]

SilverRadio.FM - Has the Fed Given Up on Rate Cuts This Year?

John Rubino Substack - Not so long ago, almost everyone listened to NPR, and people of every political persuasion donated to help fund its ad-free, long-form journalism. Then everything changed. The reporting became weirdly biased and listeners — correctly perceiving that NPR was playing for Team Establishment rather than objectively reporting on big issues — started tuning out. Today’s […]

John Rubino Substack - A new family of weight loss drugs — including Ozempic and Wegovy — recently hit the market to extreme fanfare. The drugs’ makers claim… wait for it… great results with minimal side effects (other than the fact that the drugs have to be taken for a lifetime to sustain the results). Wall Street analysts responded by raising Big Pharma […]

John Rubino Substack - The biggest hurdle for non-techies trying to avoid the world’s data predators is the need to cobble together solutions from different sources, each of which has to be installed correctly, monitored, and upgraded. This can be a nearly full-time job—and still end up failing. So a one-stop privacy shop that plugs all the holes and […]

John Rubino Substack - Suddenly the rest of the world is “gold curious.” With the current spot price piercing $2300/oz this morning … … we long-suffering stackers (and gold/silver mining stock investors!) can be forgiven for wanting to enjoy the moment. So let’s survey the headlines. Start by Googling “gold price” and note that even CBS’s audience is wondering […]

John Rubino Substack - How long has it been since silver generated any real excitement? So long that even most stackers would have to look it up to say for sure. The answer is mid-2020, when a bunch of online traders called “Redditors” decided to chase the metal like it was a meme stock, nearly doubling its price in […]