John Rubino Substack - The human mind likes big round numbers. Which is why, when a tradable asset is rising, sell orders tend to cluster in predictable spots. The frequent result is a repeating pattern of strong gains running into waves of selling that knock the price back down. Traders refer to this as “resistance,” and it’s maddening for […]

John Rubino Substack - “Your only rights are those you can defend” — Thomas Jefferson or someone similar Many readers of this newsletter are already well-armed. If you’re one of them, this article is not for you — though you might want to check it out and post constructive criticism or pro tips in the comments. Anyhow, here goes: […]

John Rubino Substack - One of the many surprising things about the Everything Bubble was the way interest rates kept rising. A lot of observers (including this one) believed that in each successive bubble, the “terminal” interest rate — that is, the rate that starts to break things, causing a crash — would be lower because the amount of […]

John Rubino Substack - Nuclear power is back in favor, the price of uranium has more than tripled from its 2020 lows, and the technology’s future looks even brighter than its recent past. But there’s more. A new reactor design, the “small modular reactor” (SMR), is set to turbocharge the industry. Where traditional nuclear plants are huge, expensive, and […]

John Rubino Substack - With financial collapse and global war inching closer every day, you’d have to be an anxiety junkie to worry about distant things like demographic trends. Still, the population debate is interesting, with economists, statisticians, and techies disagreeing over whether the world of 2100 will have too many people, too few, or just the right number. […]

John Rubino Substack - The Nestmann Group just posted a useful primer on the historical roots and likely future of the war on cash. Governments have been at this for a long, long time. Next up: CBDCs. The War On Cash Escalates Economists and governments have long had a very low opinion of the cash you carry in your wallet or […]

John Rubino Substack - Mainstream economics portrays inflation — defined as a currency that loses a bit of purchasing power each year — as necessary to lubricate the gears of commerce. What they don’t seem to understand (or would like the rest of us to not understand) is that inflation is also a tool for redistributing wealth from one […]

John Rubino Substack - Let’s start with an appealing vision of the afterlife… … and contrast that with the real world, where hedge fund assholes turn necessities like shelter into casino chips: Meanwhile, geopolitics is making life hard for the “I support current thing” crowd:

John Rubino Substack - Recessions are necessary to clear out malinvestment before it poisons the whole economy. But they also hurt a lot of people who don’t deserve it, so they’re not a cause for celebration. Except when the people being hurt are private equity firms like Blackstone that have been buying up houses (sometimes entire neighborhoods) at inflated prices and then converting them […]

John Rubino Substack - Let’s start with regional and local banks, where two bad things are happening. First, their “safe” bond portfolios have tanked in the past year, embedding paper losses of around $700 billion industry-wide. These losses will produce a steady drumbeat of bad earnings reports in the coming year. But in the meantime, as interest rates rise, money market […]

John Rubino Substack - This is the third in a series (the other two are here and here) based on the idea that to be cheerfully ungovernable in the coming dark times, first and foremost you have to be healthy. And there are lots of ways (many of which your doctor won’t bother mentioning) to achieve that. Here’s an easy one. Intermittent […]

John Rubino Substack - Central banks have morphed recently from net sellers of gold to increasingly aggressive net buyers. And the buying is even more aggressive than it seems. Here’s the story in three charts: When the global financial system nearly imploded in 2008, central banks stopped selling gold and started buying. To put this buying into context, the […]

John Rubino Substack - The hardest part of writing this kind of post is sorting through all the red flags. There are just too many these days. So here are the handful that look scariest at the moment: Interest rates are above 2007 levels in a world with twice as much debt. This shouldn’t have been possible, but here […]

John Rubino Substack - British comedian/actor/podcaster Russell Brand by his own admission ran a bit wild when he first got famous, abusing various substances and behaving, as he puts it, “very, very promiscuously.” It’s not surprising, then, that he’d end up being accused of some questionable behavior. And recently that happened, as 10-year-old accounts of sexual harassment and assault have surfaced […]

John Rubino Substack - This is the second in a series (the first is here) based on the idea that to be cheerfully ungovernable in the coming dark times, first and foremost you have to be healthy. And there are lots of ways (many of which your doctor won’t bother mentioning) to achieve that. At the top of the list […]

John Rubino Substack - People keep talking about the “box” in which profligate countries will someday find themselves, where the tools that used to work no longer do and everything falls apart. Japan might be in that box. After years of soaring government debt and central bank “financial repression” to make that debt manageable, it now finds itself in the […]

John Rubino Substack - Here’s a quick video explaining how soaring interest rates always and everywhere break the housing market. To summarize: A tsunami of homes for sale is about to swamp the tiny number of buyers who can afford 7% mortgages, leading to a precipitous drop in home prices. And of course mass bankruptcies in related industries. If […]

John Rubino Substack - Maybe it’s just my particular Twitter feed, but the Aristocracy seems to be making an especially easy target of itself lately. In September, the resulting abuse fell into several broad categories: Incompetence/evil/senility Videos of gun battles, classroom fights, and organized looting are everywhere these days. And we all know whose fault it is: City Of […]

John Rubino Substack - Let’s start with the US borrowers who can’t make their credit card payments: Is there a subprime credit card crisis on the horizon? (MarketWatch) – Subprime consumers are falling behind on their credit card bills. Borrowers with a VantageScore between 300 and 600 experienced an 8.9% delinquency rate — of 30 to 59 days — […]

John Rubino Substack - One of the tough things about buying gold is the complexity. You have to find a dealer and look up their prices, choose a coin or bar from dozens of options, call in the order, and wire a large amount of money to people you’ve never met. Then comes the stressful wait while your cash […]

John Rubino Substack - Wolf Street’s Wolf Richter is doing a great job of dissecting the real estate market. Definitely consider supporting his efforts. His latest post is particularly on point for us since our portfolio contains short positions in three big homebuilders. Here’s an excerpt featuring some charts that illustrate the industry’s (apparently insoluble) problem: Prices of New Houses Drop, Sales […]

John Rubino Substack - Bombthrower Media’s Mark Jeftovic just posted some provocative thoughts on the timing of the forced migration to CBDS and how today’s seemingly omnipotent governments are dancing on the edge of the abyss. Here’s an excerpt: Cash will be no refuge under CBDCs The world is headed toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and everybody knows it, even […]

John Rubino Substack - Spiking interest rates are normally a death knell for homebuilders, for obvious reasons. Higher mortgage rates raise monthly payments, which crash house prices, which make existing houses cheaper than newly built ones, which causes demand for new houses to shrink, which causes homebuilders to lay off their workers and sell their spec houses and excess […]

John Rubino Substack - From today’s Jimmy Dore show: Digital Currency = Total Control The G-20 just announced a global regulatory framework for central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. The central banks have been partnering with governments and private corporations to usher this in. Kind of sounds like fascism, doesn’t it? You’ve already witnessed how central banks have been using […]

John Rubino Substack - Demographer and geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan is known for his brutally harsh take on China’s prospects. But the collapse he saw coming was always in the indeterminate future. But in his latest video, he seems to have moved the terminal date up to … today. Some bullet points: Chairman Xi has eliminated anyone capable of […]