ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
April 9, 2023 | The Commercial Real Estate Bust Isn’t Coming. It’s Here
Remember that imminent commercial real estate bust? It seems to have started. Beginning with a little background, the second half of the 2010s was a great time for massive buildings that could be financed for next to nothing and filled with pre-pandemic workers who still thought a “job” meant commuting to an office every day. The average […]
April 8, 2023 | People We Should Know: Eric Brakey
Normally, the “People We Should Know” series is at most a once-a-week thing. Twice in a single day will almost never happen. But this Kim Iverson video just popped up in which she interviews Maine State Senator Eric Brakey, whose anti-Ukraine war speech apparently went viral a couple of weeks ago. His explanation of libertarian principles like […]
April 7, 2023 | People We Should Know: Jimmy Dore
Something interesting is happening on the left side of the US political spectrum. People who view themselves as liberal or even socialist are concluding that we’re now ruled by a single “uniparty” — in effect an aristocracy — that profits from wars, pandemics, and financial crises, and actively creates these events in order to impoverish, distract, and […]
April 2, 2023 | What Blows Up Next? Commercial Real Estate
Commercial real estate — i.e., America’s $20 trillion of office buildings, warehouses, strip malls, and apartments — is all about financing. The lower the interest rate, the easier it is to justify marginal projects toward the end of a business cycle when only cheap money gets the deal done. That’s why the sector typically booms late and […]
March 31, 2023 | Me, With Jason Burack and Kerry Lutz
Some of you have asked to see (or listen to) the podcast interviews I do. So here you go. I’ll start posting a few every week or two, with the caveats that for some reason this kind of self-promotion makes me a little anxious and — possibly the cause of the first caveat — some […]
March 30, 2023 | Me, With Jason Burack and Kerry Lutz
Some of you have asked to see (or listen to) the podcast interviews I do. So here you go. I’ll start posting a few every week or two, with the caveats that for some reason this kind of self-promotion makes me a little anxious and — possibly the cause of the first caveat — some […]
March 29, 2023 | De-Dollarization Follow-Up: Three Crucial Videos
De-dollarization is a meme whose time has apparently come, as a lot of big video platforms devote entire shows to the subject. Here are three good examples from the past month:
March 27, 2023 | De-Dollarization Just Got Real
Since the 1970s it’s been virtually impossible for a country to function without access to US dollars. And Washington maintained this highly-favorable status quo by putting various kinds of pressure — from sanctions to election theft to outright invasion — on anyone who stepped out of line. This weaponization of the world’s reserve currency has, […]
March 25, 2023 | People We Should Know: James Howard Kunstler
There are a lot of writers in this — let’s call it the “rational” — space, where limited government, individual freedom, and sound money are considered basic common sense. Stylistically, most of us fall into the journalist category, which is to say we convey what we hope is useful information as clearly and accessibly as […]
March 23, 2023 | The World’s Best Chartbook, A Preview
Incrementum (profiled in this post from January) is about to release the 2023 version of its massive chartbook. Click here to download a preview, or scroll down for nine sample charts that point to a great decade for precious metals.
March 21, 2023 | And Just Like That, The Tight Money Era Is Over
At the beginning of last week, everyone expected central banks to “tighten until something breaks”. By the end of the week it was clear that they’d already broken everything. Two middling US banks imploded, European mega-bank Credit Suisse finally died a well-justified death, and “who’s next?” speculation ran wild. And just like that, the era of […]
March 17, 2023 | Morons We Should Know: Janet Yellen
Watching almost any U.S. policymaker try to explain what they’re doing these days is a surreal experience. Whether it’s foreign policy — especially our multi-front plan to start World War 3 — or public health or border security, it’s clear that these guys have absolutely no idea how their tools work or what the result […]
March 16, 2023 | Deep Fakes, Artificial Intelligence and the Shrinking Trust Horizon
Some astoundingly consequential things have just happened, and in coming years they’ll reshape — if not end — our connection to the virtual world. Two examples: Deep Fakes It is now apparently possible to create videos of people doing and saying things they haven’t actually done or said. Imagine a YouTube video of a politician […]
March 10, 2023 | People We Should Know: Marjory Wildcraft
While we’re thinking about prepping, let’s segue from bugging out to staying put, with the following premise: In a world where we can’t trust factory farms, Big Pharma, or any regulatory agency, a family that makes most of its own food and medicine has a vastly better chance of surviving and thriving than one that’s dependent on […]
March 9, 2023 | Are We As Prepped As We Think?
My wife and I live in a place that’s pretty but hazardous. Earthquakes (there’s a big offshore subduction zone), forest fires (lots of trees), war (a nearby military installation), and civil unrest (a city a couple of hours away) are all at least theoretically possible here. And of course there’s the shared American problem of […]
March 4, 2023 | How a Country Goes Bankrupt, In 10 Steps
The past few decades of unnaturally easy money have created a world of “moral hazard” in which a ridiculous number of people borrowed far more than they should have. Now, with money getting tighter, not just businesses and individuals but some governments are staring at the “suddenly” part of that old saying about bankruptcy. Japan is […]
February 28, 2023 | Imminent Bankruptcies, Part 1: Carvana and Beyond Meat
One of the signposts on the road to recession (or in today’s case Depression) is a sudden increase in the number of former Wall Street favorites going bankrupt. The reason this happens when it does is that when money is easy, new companies are able to finance their emergence by selling a “disruptive” story to […]
February 27, 2023 | Is The Copper Story As Good As Everyone Says?
How does “energy transition metal in chronic shortage” sound? Copper is about as old-school as it gets. A metal that was used as low-denomination coinage from the Roman Empire through modern times and as an electrical conductor since the invention of the light bulb, it’s been both in demand and relatively easy to find, basically […]
February 26, 2023 | Will 7% Mortgages Crush Housing?
Between 2020 and 2022 houses in America’s hottest real estate markets went from unaffordable to 50% above unaffordable. Put another way, they did what would have been impossible in an economy where market forces determined interest rates and home prices. But ours was not that kind of market. Central banks around the world had lost […]
February 25, 2023 | People We Should Know: Catherine Austin Fitts
These days we all have our theories about how and why the 1% have become so rabidly predatory (find my recent take here). But the most sophisticated – and scariest – analysis comes from Catherine Austin Fitts. As an Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the Bush Jr administration, Catherine noticed that huge […]