ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
July 14, 2024 | Two Takes on the Assassination Attempt
A friend just emailed about the Trump assassination attempt, predicting that it guarantees his election in November. I tentatively agreed, and responded with a story: You’re too young to remember Ronald Reagan. But back in the 1980s, his political honeymoon was fading and his approval ratings were dropping. Then someone shot him in the chest, […]
July 12, 2024 | “Fake Organic” Food and the Shrinking Trust Horizon
Once you understand the concept of the microbiome, it’s easy to see the problem with pesticide-laden food: Pesticides are poisons designed to kill small lifeforms, and ingesting such poisons risks wiping out or disrupting the good bacteria that keep us alive and functional. The obvious solution is to eat only organic produce and meat. But that’s […]
July 8, 2024 | Recession Watch: Jobs and Real Estate Head South
US financial headlines remain in Goldilocks territory (prompting all those “Why don’t Americans know how good they have it??” diatribes from the MSM). But under the surface, the drumbeat of negative data continues. Today, let’s consider jobs and real estate: Jobs Official reports of plentiful jobs and low unemployment are possible because the government is […]
July 4, 2024 | Where You Store It: Choosing a Country for Offshore Gold
Deciding to store gold and/or silver offshore is just the first step in a long process. Choosing a country and a storage service, then contracting to buy or ship the metal, are all make-or-break decisions. And very few newcomers to offshore storage understand everything. So here’s a just-released article from offshore specialist Nestmann Group that answers the […]
July 3, 2024 | From the Archives: Ancient Evil…
As this newsletter’s archives expand, it’s becoming clear that some posts didn’t age well at all. They should stay buried. But others were early and have actually become more relevant as things unfold. So once a week I’m going to republish one of the latter posts The following (from July 28, 2023) needs no explanation in light […]
July 2, 2024 | Art of the Collapse, July 2024
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 […]
June 29, 2024 | Health Prepping: Microbiome Maintenance is Key to…Everything
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 […]
June 24, 2024 | Scary Stat Alert: The Government Liquidity Index
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 […]
June 23, 2024 | If Hackers Can Shut Down 15,000 Car Dealerships, Is Your Bank Safe?
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 […]
June 19, 2024 | Millions of Debt Slaves, Created Right Before Our Eyes
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 […]
June 15, 2024 | Carol Roth: The Death of Property Rights
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 […]
June 14, 2024 | De-Dollarization Update: Saudis Cancel The Petrodollar
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 […]
June 13, 2024 | Estate Planning: The Big Question
“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 […]
June 11, 2024 | People We Should Know: Rep. Thomas Massie
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 […]
June 8, 2024 | Gold Hit With One-Two Punch
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, […]
June 3, 2024 | Art of the Collapse, June 2024
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 […]
May 31, 2024 | Japan Death Spiral Update: Now Inflation Is Spiking
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 […]
May 30, 2024 | “Peer Reviews” And The Shrinking Trust Horizon
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 […]
May 24, 2024 | De-Dollarization: The Trend Continues
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 […]
May 22, 2024 | Creeping Fascism, Part 1: Just The Beginning
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 […]
May 21, 2024 | Where You (Shouldn’t) Store It: Nine Places
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 […]
May 17, 2024 | Why The Gold Rush Is Just Beginning, In Six Charts
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 […]
May 14, 2024 | Breakthroughs, Part 1: Three Potential Threats To Oil, Gas, Uranium
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 […]
May 12, 2024 | Wall Street Journal Boosts Gold FOMO
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 […]
May 10, 2024 | Because We’re Still Not Sufficiently Indebted…
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 […]