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 […]

John Rubino Substack - Bombthrower.com’s Mark Jeftovic just posted a must-read story from one of his favorite techies. As you’ll see, it’s something we should all be aware of. Your WiFi Can See You Follow Mr. E on Substack and Twitter! When police suspected Danny Kyllo, an Oregon man, of growing cannabis in his home they drove to his house with a thermal imaging […]

John Rubino Substack - Gold’s job is to hold its value while the local currency is inflated away. Which is another way of saying gold goes up when local currencies go down. The most glaring current example is Japan, where a multi-decade experiment in artificially depressed interest rates is finally coming undone. Inflation is rising, the yen is falling versus other […]

John Rubino Substack - Michael Shellenberger’s Public News outlet has been covering a story that provides yet another reason for us to stop trusting “our institutions”. It begins with the concept of offshore wind power, which once seemed to have a lot going for it. Anchoring huge turbines to the ocean floor allowed them to exploit the steady sea breeze […]

John Rubino Substack - So let’s say the idiots running the US (or Canada, the UK, or Australia) have finally forced you to join a protest movement. But you saw what happened to the truckers and their contributors in Canada, and you’re aware of the widening surveillance net spreading over the US. So you’d prefer not to end up on some […]

John Rubino Substack - Well-known economic indicators like consumer debt, money supply growth, and the inverted yield curve have been painting an ominous picture for a while now. But they’re not alone. A bunch of obscure but highly predictive metrics are saying the same thing. Among them: Spiking Mortgage/Treasury spread 30-year Treasury bonds and 30-year mortgages are loans with the same maturity but different […]

John Rubino Substack - The warning comes in the middle of the night: There’s a fire (or hurricane or flood or riot) headed your way. You get dressed, grab your bug-out bag, hop in the car, and head to the designated safe spot to wait out the trouble. Well done. But then your significant other says “What about the […]

John Rubino Substack - On Greg Hunter’s show last week I said something like: If five years ago you’d asked me to name the country least likely to go authoritarian, I’d have picked Canada. It always seemed like a well-run place full of mature people with good intentions. So it’s a shock to see what’s happening up there. To which a […]

John Rubino Substack - We of course have to start with Oliver Anthony, the good ol’ boy from Virginia who wrote a little protest song called Rich Men North of Richmond, recorded it on his phone, posted it on YouTube — and watched it blow up into the number-one song in the world. Here’s the original video … … and the […]

John Rubino Substack - It’s hard to “survive and thrive” in turbulent times if you’re sick, or even just low-energy. So the most important prepping we can do is on ourselves. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to get optimized, some of them old-school, some exotic, and some cutting-edge. This series will highlight health strategies for today and […]

John Rubino Substack - The Kobeissi Letter just posted some nightmarish housing stats: BREAKING: Median cost to buy a house hits a new record of $2,748/mo, up a MASSIVE 90% since 2020. In other words, buying a house today costs nearly $33,000 per year. This is 46% of the median PRE-TAX household income in the US. Post-tax, homebuyers in the US […]

John Rubino Substack - In a nice bit of misdirection, the BRICS countries distracted the West with hints of a “gold-backed currency” at their August 22 – 24 meeting. Then, while everyone was looking over there, they did something potentially even bigger by admitting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as members, with Iran, Argentina, Egypt, and Ethiopia […]

John Rubino Substack - Seasonality is an investment thesis that shouldn’t work. It’s just too easy. If there are regular and recurring fluctuations in demand for something, traders will simply front-run the process, canceling out the price impact. Right? Apparently not always. Gold and silver tend to languish in spring and summer (recall the old saying “Sell in May […]

John Rubino Substack - Back when the US was a functional country, wages and corporate profits rose more or less in tandem. That is, each group tried to steal all the money but in the end had to compromise and settle for only half. It was contentious but manageable, and it allowed a broad, stable middle class to emerge, […]

John Rubino Substack - A big part of prepping is about our families rather than ourselves. That is, we want to set things up so our loved ones are protected from the risks they’ll face in the coming hard times. This isn’t usually a problem because buying and organizing precious metals, guns, and food-producing land is fun. But there’s […]

John Rubino Substack - When a Russian spokesman announced that the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries were going to introduce a gold-backed currency at their August 22 – 24 Johannesburg meeting, that prospect — coupled with a complete absence of details — set off a frenzy of speculation about what exactly was coming. Will it […]

John Rubino Substack - The three crucial pieces of the world’s energy future just fell into place for me. First, I saw this graphic about the energy density of uranium, which pretty much explains where humanity is going to have to end up: Then came this graphic from Ahead of the Herd’s Rick Mills depicting nuclear power’s “capacity factor,” which means […]

John Rubino Substack - The three crucial pieces of the world’s energy future just fell into place for me. First, I saw this graphic about the energy density of uranium, which pretty much explains where humanity is going to have to end up: Then came this graphic from Ahead of the Herd’s Rick Mills depicting nuclear power’s “capacity factor,” which means […]

John Rubino Substack - One of the things that kept many Americans financially afloat these past few years is the fact that student loan payments were suspended. That bought some time but apparently didn’t solve the underlying problem of low wages in an increasingly expensive world. Because it’s now becoming common to use credit cards to cover day-to-day expenses. […]

John Rubino Substack - Martin Armstrong has led a complex and tempestuous life — see this and this. But we’re not going there. His current work is what lands him on the list of People We Should Know. Armstrong is a consultant and forecaster who uses a prediction model he calls Socrates to identify and extrapolate trends in politics, economics, and finance. […]

John Rubino Substack - This is a reprint [with a few edits] of an article I wrote way back in 2010 — when a supercycle crash was already overdue: The fascinating thing about “long wave” analysis (broadly defined to include Kondratieff waves,  Elliott waves, and William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning) is that while each theory uses its own indicators and terminology to show […]

John Rubino Substack - Google makes its (many) billions by spying on its customers, mining the resulting personal information, and using/selling the profitable bits. So it’s no surprise that phones based on Google’s Android platform have default settings that violate rather than protect customer privacy. But Android phones — especially the latest versions — do offer settings that allow […]

John Rubino Substack - For a while there, the Japanese government had a sweet deal going. By pushing interest rates into negative territory — which forced bond buyers to pay for the privilege of owning said bonds — it was able to earn money on its national debt. So the more the government borrowed, the more it earned. And borrow it […]

John Rubino Substack - Remember those scary charts of the US government’s rising interest expense? Here’s an example from a few months ago, when the annualized cost of our national debt was approaching $900 billion: Well, that wasn’t the peak. The latest reading shows interest payments approaching $1 trillion. And that’s not the end. Not even close. The current average interest […]

John Rubino Substack -   As we stumble towards World War III, it’s instructive to meet the people who are fronting for the Empire these days. The president, as everyone knows by now, is the modern equivalent of a B-movie zombie, pumped full of Adderall and shuffled out for public appearances — though even these controlled environments are now […]