September 28, 2023 | Did Gold Bars Just Become An Impulse Buy?
One of the tough things about buying gold is the complexity. You have to find a dealer and look up their prices, choose a coin or bar from dozens of options, call in the order, and wire a large amount of money to people you’ve never met. Then comes the stressful wait while your cash […]
September 26, 2023 | Wolf Richter On Why We Should Short The Homebuilder Stocks
Wolf Street’s Wolf Richter is doing a great job of dissecting the real estate market. Definitely consider supporting his efforts. His latest post is particularly on point for us since our portfolio contains short positions in three big homebuilders. Here’s an excerpt featuring some charts that illustrate the industry’s (apparently insoluble) problem: Prices of New Houses Drop, Sales […]
September 24, 2023 | Mark Jeftovic: Cash Isn’t The Solution To CBDCs
Bombthrower Media’s Mark Jeftovic just posted some provocative thoughts on the timing of the forced migration to CBDS and how today’s seemingly omnipotent governments are dancing on the edge of the abyss. Here’s an excerpt: Cash will be no refuge under CBDCs The world is headed toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and everybody knows it, even […]
September 22, 2023 | Finally, The Housing Crash
Spiking interest rates are normally a death knell for homebuilders, for obvious reasons. Higher mortgage rates raise monthly payments, which crash house prices, which make existing houses cheaper than newly built ones, which causes demand for new houses to shrink, which causes homebuilders to lay off their workers and sell their spec houses and excess […]
September 21, 2023 | Quick Video: CBDCs “Sound Like Fascism
From today’s Jimmy Dore show: Digital Currency = Total Control The G-20 just announced a global regulatory framework for central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. The central banks have been partnering with governments and private corporations to usher this in. Kind of sounds like fascism, doesn’t it? You’ve already witnessed how central banks have been using […]
September 20, 2023 | Peter Zeihan: China Is Collapsing — Now
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 […]
September 19, 2023 | Becoming Invisible, Part 10: Your WiFi Can See you
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 […]
September 18, 2023 | Gold Is Doing Great — In Other Currencies
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 […]
September 11, 2023 | Wind Power, Dead Whales, and the Shrinking Trust Horizon
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 […]
September 10, 2023 | Becoming Invisible, Part 9: Burner Phones
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 […]
September 5, 2023 | Recession Watch: Obscure But Scary
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 […]
September 4, 2023 | Your Bug-Out Bag Needs a Grab-and-Go Binder
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 […]
September 2, 2023 | What Happened To Canada?
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 […]
September 1, 2023 | Art of the Collapse, September 1 2023
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 […]
August 29, 2023 | Health Prepping, Part 1: Stem Cell Breakthrough
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 […]
August 28, 2023 | How the Aristocracy Ate the Housing Market
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 […]
August 24, 2023 | BRICS Summit Ends With a Bang — And a Tease
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 […]
August 23, 2023 | Gold Seasonality, Part 1: Are We There Yet?
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 […]
August 22, 2023 | Wage Inflation Is a Thing Now, Part 1
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, […]
August 18, 2023 | Things We Should Do: Make An Estate Plan
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 […]
August 15, 2023 | The BRICS Currency: We’ll Know Soon
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 […]
August 14, 2023 | The Car of the Future Runs on Hydrogen
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 […]
August 13, 2023 | The Car of the Future Runs on Hydrogen
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 […]
August 11, 2023 | Recession Watch: October Surprise?
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. […]
August 9, 2023 | People We Should Know: Martin Armstrong
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. […]