ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
December 27, 2024 | Artificial Intelligence Just Revolutionized Politics
Last week’s battle over a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the US government into 2025 got a lot of press coverage, much of it unfavorable. But one aspect of the saga was both underreported and, well, revolutionary. Normally, Congress waits until the government is on the verge of shutting down before releasing a thousand+ page monstrosity of […]
December 24, 2024 | Housing Bust: Builders Are Slashing Prices
In early 2023, the stars appeared to align for another housing bust. Home prices were crazy high, consumers were over-indebted, and mortgage rates were rising towards the dreaded 7% level. Add it all up, and a bust at least as dramatic as that of 2007/2008 — when homebuilder stocks fell by 80% — seemed imminent. […]
December 23, 2024 | Health Prepping: Stop Poisoning Your Family
For readers who are busy planning Christmas dinner, let’s get right to it: You might be poisoning yourself and your family. Because “poison” is exactly what many popular “ultra-processed” foods are. Consider: How Do Processed Foods Affect Your Health? (WebMD) – Highly processed food may put you at a higher cancer risk. One study found that your risk of […]
December 22, 2024 | The Euro is Doomed if Germany Fails
Since the creation of Europe’s common currency in 1999, Germany has been the key to the whole project. The European Central Bank stood ready to buy up all the (for instance) Italian debt that the markets couldn’t or wouldn’t absorb, and Germany stood ready to back the ECB with its industrial might and financial wealth. […]
December 19, 2024 | And This Is BEFORE the Coming Recession
Government finances usually look their best at cyclical peaks when lots of people are working and paying taxes, relatively few are drawing unemployment benefits or welfare, and financial asset prices are way up, thus generating lots of capital gains tax revenue. If a government is ever going to balance its budget, that’s when it happens. […]
December 17, 2024 | Are We Back to “Higher For Longer”?
The Fed is expected to cut interest rates today. But that might be it for a while. Consider: Consumer spending is exceeding expectations: Motor vehicles, online purchases boost US retail sales in November (Reuters) – U.S. retail sales increased more than expected in November amid an acceleration in motor vehicle and online purchases, consistent […]
December 14, 2024 | Rhyming History: France’s First Hyperinflation
Back in the 1700s, France was ruled by a small group of inbred idiot aristocrats who started a series of ruinously expensive wars (see, history is rhyming already). As the bills came due, there wasn’t enough gold to pay creditors, and the government faced that era’s version of bankruptcy. Then along came a Scottish economist/con […]
December 11, 2024 | Are We Running Out Of Copper? This Image Says Yes Ah, the good old days…
Lots of people envy some aspects of their grandparents’ lives, with good reason: Houses used to cost $40,000, college tuition used to be a few thousand dollars a year, and the air used to be free of plastic nanoparticles. Those really were the good old days. But you know who would really like to go […]
December 9, 2024 | Crash Alert: Priced for Perfection in an Imperfect World
The last few US inflation reports have been ominous, with the general trend morphing from sharp decline to gradual increase. Here’s the Core Services index, which is now rising at a 4% annual rate: Stocks, meanwhile, are priced for perfection, with the second highest price/earnings ratio on record: Investors are getting cocky, as evidenced by the soaring […]
December 8, 2024 | Becoming Invisible, Part 16: China Just Stole Everything
It’s bad enough that our phones and cars (and vacuum cleaners and doorbells) track, save, and sell our texts, phone calls, and location data. But that may be just the beginning. From Mark Jeftovic’s Axis of Easy daily briefing: China Hacks US Telecom Giants in Massive Espionage Operation The “Salt Typhoon” hacking campaign, attributed to China, has […]
December 5, 2024 | Creeping Fascism: Mike Benz On the Censorship-Industrial Complex
Back in February, I made the ambitious claim that former State Department analyst Mike Benz had released “the single most important thing currently available online.” Here it is: Now Benz is back with a nearly three-hour Joe Rogan episode in which he explains how the US has replaced the most evil bits of the CIA and State […]
December 3, 2024 | Europe is Falling, and France Is Leading the Way
Fiat currency systems usually end with debts soaring to unmanageable levels and governments powerless to stop the resulting carnage. Japan and the US will get there eventually. But Europe is tipping into the abyss in real time. Germany’s self-inflicted deindustrialization is a mess so vast (and sad) that it will get a post of its […]
December 1, 2024 | Art of the Collapse, December 2024 Peanut the Squirrel and WW III
Hypersonic missiles are flying, the people (still!) in charge are strangely okay with that…and Peanut the Squirrel dies tragically. New York Authorities Announce Peanut The Squirrel Died Of COVID (Babylon Bee) – Following the public outcry about the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation raiding a local man’s home and euthanizing his pet squirrel who had hundreds of thousands […]
November 27, 2024 | Recession Watch: Bad News From Around the World
China From the Kobeissi Letter: China’s consumer confidence index dropped to 86 points in August, near the lowest in 30 years. Over the last 3 years, consumer confidence in China is down ~ 50 points. Such a drop in consumer assessment of the Chinese economy has almost never been seen before. Foreign firms are also […]
November 26, 2024 | Health Prepping: How to Offset All That Sitting
By now we’ve all seen at least one article titled “Sitting is the New Smoking.” That’s a clever title that instantly engages the reader. It’s also apparently true. People who sit for most of the day tend to have all kinds of circulatory and metabolic problems that frequently end up killing them. Here’s an overview […]
November 25, 2024 | On The Edge of World War 3
So in his last act before shuffling off the stage, the US president … greenlights Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia. The latter then fires — for the first time ever — a hypersonic ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear payload to pretty much anywhere in a matter of minutes. And just like […]
November 24, 2024 | Rhyming History: Rome’s Hyperinflation
As the old saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” Which means there are plenty of lessons to be learned from our ancestors’ screw-ups. This post is the first in a series covering some of humanity’s more useful cautionary tales. The logical starting point is of course ancient Rome, with its many disturbing […]
November 20, 2024 | Corporate Bond Spreads Are Flashing Red
Every once in a while, the term “bond spread” pops up in financial reporting. Most people (who aren’t money nerds) don’t know what this means and how big a deal it sometimes is. So — since it’s a major red flag at the moment — this might be a good time to discuss it: Bond […]
November 16, 2024 | Housing Bust Update: It’s Not Just the Cost of Buying, It’s the Cost of Owning
Home prices are at all-time highs, and — amazingly — are still rising. Compare today’s average price to that of 2007, which is generally thought to be the peak of America’s biggest-ever housing bubble: And mortgage rates, which were supposed to fall when the Fed started easing in September, are instead rising. 7%, here we […]
November 12, 2024 | Justice Files, Part 1: Firings, Civil Suits, and Jury Awards
Our recent drift into authoritarianism hurt a lot of innocent people. And even before last week’s election, the process of “truth and reconciliation” was gaining momentum. This is the first in a series that tracks some of the more notable cases of justice restored. 6 BART employees who refused COVID-19 vaccine to receive more than […]
November 10, 2024 | Does There Still Have To Be A Currency Crisis?
A decade ago, the world seemed like a complex place. But in retrospect, it was pretty simple: The fiat currency experiment had produced a hyper-leveraged financial system that would soon fail spectacularly. Existing currencies would be replaced via a monetary reset, probably involving some kind of gold standard. This would be a messy but survivable […]
November 6, 2024 | These Two Things Don’t Go Together Which one wins?
The election is over, and the result is pretty close to a best-case scenario. The victory margin is big enough to head off the expected civil unrest, giving us a more-or-less peaceful transfer of power. And if Trump and his team keep their promises, they’ll quickly address the existential threats of global war and mass […]
November 5, 2024 | Health Prepping: A Legit Anti-Cancer Diet?
There are a million diets out there, most of which are simply common sense combined with one marketable hook (grapefruit, red meat, etc). But one — the Ketogenic diet — just got some intriguing scientific backing. From today’s Epoch Times: Researchers Discover New Mechanism Linking Diet and Cancer Risk Epoch Times, November 3, 2024 MGO, a glucose […]
November 4, 2024 | Recession Watch: Interest Rates Spike, Warren Buffett Sells
Higher For Longer (than expected) When the Fed started cutting interest rates in September, the assumption was that rates would fall and the Fed would maintain the downward trajectory well into 2025. But interest rates didn’t cooperate. Across the yield curve, days like this one (November 2) have become the norm. A rising 10-year […]
November 2, 2024 | Becoming Invisible, Part 15: Don’t Let Roomba See You Hide Your Gold
Yes, your new car tracks your location and records your conversations. Your smart speaker listens to and records your conversations. Your TV watches you while you watch it. Virtually every new device we install in our increasingly high-tech homes collects data and (at least potentially) sends it to criminals, corporations, and/or governments to use however they like. […]