ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
October 9, 2023 | Recession Watch: Red Flags Everywhere You Look
The hardest part of writing this kind of post is sorting through all the red flags. There are just too many these days. So here are the handful that look scariest at the moment: Interest rates are above 2007 levels in a world with twice as much debt. This shouldn’t have been possible, but here […]
October 7, 2023 | People We Should Know: Russell Brand
British comedian/actor/podcaster Russell Brand by his own admission ran a bit wild when he first got famous, abusing various substances and behaving, as he puts it, “very, very promiscuously.” It’s not surprising, then, that he’d end up being accused of some questionable behavior. And recently that happened, as 10-year-old accounts of sexual harassment and assault have surfaced […]
October 6, 2023 | Health Prepping, Part 2: Interval Training
This is the second in a series (the first is here) based on the idea that to be cheerfully ungovernable in the coming dark times, first and foremost you have to be healthy. And there are lots of ways (many of which your doctor won’t bother mentioning) to achieve that. At the top of the list […]
October 5, 2023 | Japan Is In That Box
People keep talking about the “box” in which profligate countries will someday find themselves, where the tools that used to work no longer do and everything falls apart. Japan might be in that box. After years of soaring government debt and central bank “financial repression” to make that debt manageable, it now finds itself in the […]
October 4, 2023 | JP Morgan Predicts A Housing Market Crash
Here’s a quick video explaining how soaring interest rates always and everywhere break the housing market. To summarize: A tsunami of homes for sale is about to swamp the tiny number of buyers who can afford 7% mortgages, leading to a precipitous drop in home prices. And of course mass bankruptcies in related industries. If […]
October 3, 2023 | Art of the Collapse, October 2023
Maybe it’s just my particular Twitter feed, but the Aristocracy seems to be making an especially easy target of itself lately. In September, the resulting abuse fell into several broad categories: Incompetence/evil/senility Videos of gun battles, classroom fights, and organized looting are everywhere these days. And we all know whose fault it is: City Of […]
September 29, 2023 | Recession Watch: When Big Trends Collide
Let’s start with the US borrowers who can’t make their credit card payments: Is there a subprime credit card crisis on the horizon? (MarketWatch) – Subprime consumers are falling behind on their credit card bills. Borrowers with a VantageScore between 300 and 600 experienced an 8.9% delinquency rate — of 30 to 59 days — […]
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 […]