ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
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 […]
May 9, 2024 | Finally, Some Good-Looking Gold/Silver Miner Charts
Long-suffering mining investors have been wondering how high gold and silver would have to go to finally breathe some life into their portfolios. It looks like $2300/oz gold and $27/oz silver have done the trick. Behold the (suddenly very pretty) price charts: Higher Metals Prices = Wider Profit Margins These price moves aren’t […]
May 7, 2024 | So That’s Who’s Screwing Everything Up
Most normal Americans have a sense that the people now running the country are off in some fundamental way. But the specifics have been fuzzy. Are they morons or evil geniuses? Are they controlled by foreign powers or home-grown mind viruses? Or are the aliens pulling their strings? Venerable pollster Scott Rasmussen claims to have found a […]
May 4, 2024 | More Good News On The Silver Deficit
Ah, the silver story. It just keeps getting better. Here’s an update from the Silver Institute: Industrial Silver Demand Sets Record Record use of silver in industrial applications set a new high in 2023 at 654.4 million ounces (Moz). Ongoing structural gains from green economy applications underpinned these advances as they did in 2022. Higher […]
May 2, 2024 | Art of the Collapse, May 2024
There are so many wars (and related civil unrest) these days, that it’s hard to keep track of which meme/satire/diatribe is aimed at which crisis. But April included April Fools’ Day, so at least we have a logical place to start: CNN Publishes Real News Story For April Fools’ Day (Babylon Bee) – Fooling thousands […]
April 30, 2024 | Recession Watch: Why Isn’t “Inevitable” Becoming “Imminent”?
So that recession I keep whining about still hasn’t arrived. What’s going on out there to keep “inevitable” from becoming “imminent”? It might be as simple as a government borrowing insane amounts of money and giving it to arms makers, banks, and AI companies. This “fiscal dominance” strategy invokes some serious unintended consequences, including stubborn […]
April 28, 2024 | The Day We Stopped Trusting Media
One of the first posts in this newsletter’s Shrinking Trust Horizon series was about how “deep fake” technology will make fake images, videos, and audio recordings almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This will kill millions of modeling and acting jobs, while weaponizing audio and video in all kinds of disturbing ways. That day has apparently arrived: […]
April 26, 2024 | How Far Can The Yen Fall Before Japan Goes Bankrupt? We may be about to find out
Japan’s ongoing march to national bankruptcy has been a recurring theme here. See: Japan Is In That Box Japan Takes Another Step Towards the Cliff How a Country Goes Bankrupt, In 10 Steps Now the death spiral has entered a new phase, with the yen/dollar exchange rate heading straight down: To restate the “Japan collapse” […]
April 22, 2024 | Is The AI Bubble Bursting? Wolf Richter’s WTF Charts
Artificial intelligence, which a few years ago existed only in science fiction (check out William Gibson’s Neuromancer), has morphed into an epic stock bubble. Nvidia, maker of the leading AI microchips, saw its market cap surge from $200 billion in 2019 to $2 trillion in 2023. I haven’t actually checked, but that might be the fastest […]
April 12, 2024 | The MSM Is Dying, NPR Edition
Not so long ago, almost everyone listened to NPR, and people of every political persuasion donated to help fund its ad-free, long-form journalism. Then everything changed. The reporting became weirdly biased and listeners — correctly perceiving that NPR was playing for Team Establishment rather than objectively reporting on big issues — started tuning out. Today’s […]
April 10, 2024 | Health Prepping Update: So Intermittent Fasting Kills? Really?
A new family of weight loss drugs — including Ozempic and Wegovy — recently hit the market to extreme fanfare. The drugs’ makers claim… wait for it… great results with minimal side effects (other than the fact that the drugs have to be taken for a lifetime to sustain the results). Wall Street analysts responded by raising Big Pharma […]
April 8, 2024 | Becoming Invisible, Part 14: Proton’s Latest Tools
The biggest hurdle for non-techies trying to avoid the world’s data predators is the need to cobble together solutions from different sources, each of which has to be installed correctly, monitored, and upgraded. This can be a nearly full-time job—and still end up failing. So a one-stop privacy shop that plugs all the holes and […]