May 17, 2023 | Next Generation Money, Part 1: Texas Re-Imagines The Dollar

With all the (completely justified) angst surrounding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), it’s easy to forget that the concept of digital money isn’t the problem. It’s just a tool like any other and can be used for good or evil, depending on who’s wielding it. Obviously, if a CBDC is managed by some combination of the Federal […]

May 16, 2023 | Becoming Invisible, Part 2: Other Ways They’re Tracking (and Manipulating) Us

Turns out that my original list of ways they’re spying on us was incomplete. Readers have been fleshing out the story: Robert Wilkins I would like to mention that Google owns 23 and Me, the genetic analysis service that many people give as presents to friends and family members or use themselves. They send in a gene sample […]

May 12, 2023 | Becoming Invisible, Part 1: How They Track Us

  In an ideal world, personal information would be more or less private. This includes whom we communicate with and what we say, the location and contents of our financial accounts, our shopping and search habits, and where we are physically at any given time. But this is not an ideal world. Just the opposite, […]

May 8, 2023 | The Epic Failure Of Modern Experts

There’s a debate in the comments section here about whether Americans have gotten suddenly dumber, leading them to elect populist presidents and refuse vaccines. I started to weigh in but quickly realized that the story is broader and deeper than just vaccines and Donald Trump. So here’s some context: Starting in the 1960s, the US […]

May 7, 2023 | Art Of The Collapse, May 2023

There’s a lot going on out there. But not all of it is bad. The Babylon Bee, for instance, broke some (relatively) good news on Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Calculates It Will Be More Efficient To Just Let Humanity Destroy Itself ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Despite stern warnings of artificial intelligence attacking humanity’s digital infrastructure from the […]

May 3, 2023 | How Will The Aristocracy Keep What They’ve Stolen? Part 1

Say you’re a billionaire who’s drained about as much as you can from your employees (who are starting to unionize) and the financial markets (which are crashing as inflation spikes and credit tightens). With financial collapse and political chaos now approaching, your challenge has shifted from how to steal as much as possible, to how […]

May 2, 2023 | Crash Alert: This Market Has Really Bad Breadth

Way back in the late 1990s, as the dot-com bubble was in its blow-off phase, a well-known short seller named Bill Fleckenstein liked to tell interviewers that “The global economy depends on the US economy, the US economy depends on the US stock market, and the US stock market depends on 20 stocks, most of which […]

April 30, 2023 | Fooling Us With Fake Stats: Household Net Worth

Towards the end of a financial bubble, the people who benefit from the bubble’s continuation — politicians hoping to be reelected, bankers hoping to complete the next deal, money managers talking their books — start touting “record household net worth” as a sign of societal health. But they’re wrong, for the following reasons: Deceptive leverage. Pretend […]

April 27, 2023 | Two Experts Agree: Home Prices Are Headed Down Hard

Wealthion’s Adam Taggart tried something different today. Instead of interviewing an expert, he had one expert interview another. It worked perfectly, producing a great discussion with chilling conclusions: If you’re in real estate as either a buyer or seller, the tenor of the market is about to change dramatically. If you’re a landlord, expect a “painful, […]

April 26, 2023 | You Can’t Taper A Ponzi Scheme

You probably hear the term “Ponzi scheme” tossed around frequently out there, but you may not know what it is and why it matters. So here’s a little background from Wikipedia: A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.[1] Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, the scheme leads victims to […]

April 25, 2023 | Jimmy Dore: Is This Why Tucker Carlson Was Fired?

April 23, 2023 | Can The Euro Be Saved?

With all the talk about de-dollarization, this might be a good time to consider the world’s second reserve currency, the euro. Spoiler alert: It’s not a pretty picture, and Germany, believe it or not, is largely to blame. It didn’t have to be this way For most of the post-WWII era, Germany was the country that got it […]

April 21, 2023 | Is Everybody Lying?

It took a while, but some of the biggest “official narrative” scams and cons of the past few years are finally being exposed. High-ranking US officials have apparently been lying about public health, election integrity, and (of course) war. Among the things that have just come to light: The Secretary of State created the laptop letter […]

April 19, 2023 | Recession Watch: Cars and Houses Join The List

Banks were already tightening lending standards before Silicon Valley Bank imploded. This chart is from Q4 2022:   Since then the tightening has become a full-fledged rout. It’s now much harder to get a mortgage or a car loan, especially for less-credit-worthy borrowers in overheated markets. Meanwhile, interest rates are rising again, with the average 30-year fixed-rate […]

April 18, 2023 | Art Of the Collapse, April 2023

Societies under stress become erratic and often violent. But sometimes they also become more creative. Think back to the Vietnam War/civil rights era of the 1960s (for younger readers, those were scary, chaotic times) and consider the music that was created in response. Today’s world is, by many measures, a lot more ominous and stressful […]

April 12, 2023 | Check Out Gold’s Quiet Bull Market

Gold just set a couple of records, but you’d never know it from the relatively modest level of investor enthusiasm. The metal’s March 31 price of $2,008/oz was its highest-ever monthly and quarterly close. That’s admittedly a ways below the all-time daily close of $2,069. But still, record highs of any kind deserve a certain […]

April 10, 2023 | People We Should Know: Ron Paul

Very few of you need an introduction to Ron Paul. So think of this instead as an homage, inspired by this T-shirt I just found on Amazon:   Fully Formed Ron Paul didn’t grow into himself over the course of a lifetime. He seems to have emerged fully formed, a libertarian with total conviction and […]

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: