Thoughts from the Front Line - Economic news is increasingly hard to follow these days, mainly because it changes so fast and it gives so many mixed signals. Less than three months ago, we were all in shock from President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement. While he paused the worst parts of that plan, US import taxes are still at their […]

John Rubino Substack - When cryptocurrencies first emerged, the blockchain (a distributed ledger that tracks ownership of bitcoin and other cryptos) caught the attention of gold-standard proponents. What if, they mused, gold is the base money of the post-reset financial system, but — without ever leaving its vaults — it transacts on a blockchain, giving it the frictionless mobility […]

John Rubino Substack - Bad for some miners, great for physical silver Mexico is by far the world’s biggest source of silver: So what happens there matters to all silver investors. And things seem to be changing: Sheinbaum maintains Mexico’s freeze on new mining concessions (BNAmeicas) – Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated that no new mining concessions will be […]

John Rubino Substack - Gold and silver have generated a lot more buzz than copper in the past couple of years. But that might be changing. On metals exchanges, copper inventories are falling while demand surges, leading to speculation that a “squeeze” will soon spike the metal’s price. As Bloomberg reports: Copper Faces Historic Squeeze With LME Stockpiles Depleting […]

John Rubino Substack - Geographic diversification — that is, buying and/or storing assets overseas — is a good way to hedge against the increasingly real possibility that the US government will go a little crazy when the fiat currency experiment fails. But it’s not simple. Over the years, I’ve come close to buying real estate in Costa Rica and […]

John Rubino Substack - Okay, let’s see: We now (as of yesterday) have a Middle East war that’s threatening to interrupt the supply of oil. And… Deteriorating government finances. Civil unrest and political chaos. A revolting bond market. Soaring gold and rising silver. Yep, it’s official. We are back in the 1970s, which, for younger readers, was a decade […]

John Rubino Substack - Auto prices have soared in the past decade, while auto loan interest rates have more or less doubled in the past two years. The result: hugely expensive “car mortgages” and spiking loan delinquencies: But as ominous as auto loans seem, they pale next to credit cards and student loans, where delinquencies have gone parabolic. Over […]

John Rubino Substack - The world is riveted to middle-of-the-night images of Tel Aviv, as missiles rain down from the sky and buildings explode. This is horrifying in terms of human suffering. And it’s exhausting, watching humans find yet another reason to kill each other. But it’s validating for us cynical stackers, as all the silver in those missiles is […]

John Rubino Substack - As recently as 2023, nuclear power was seen as a fringe idea, and the uranium miners were on virtually no one’s radar screens. What a difference a couple of years can make. Nuclear is now leading the energy transition, and Wall Street is predicting a multi-decade boom for the miners. Consider this from Goldman Sachs: Is nuclear […]

John Rubino Substack - The past few years have been great for gold but “meh” for silver and precious metals mining stocks. At one point in April, gold was 104 times more valuable than silver, an extreme reading for a ratio that normally tops out in the 80s or low 90s. As for the miners, as “leveraged bets on […]

John Rubino Substack - For most of the past couple of years, our gold, silver, and copper ETFs have done pretty well. But the lone platinum ETF in our Portfolio just sat there, hardly moving at all. Then, seemingly out of the blue, platinum’s price spiked, taking our ETF along for the ride: What Happened?   Several things combined to convert platinum from […]

John Rubino Substack - Anyone with a grasp of human nature in 1971 would have understood that giving governments monetary printing presses untethered to anything real would produce a world awash in debt. And that’s exactly what we got: For a sense of the scale we’re now working with, consider the concept of “trillion”: A million seconds ago was May 23rd […]

John Rubino Substack - Here, in very short form, is how housing busts normally happen: A “seller’s market” evolves, where buyers have to pay up to get their first choice. Prices rise gradually, and then quickly, as buyers start to panic and sellers are emboldened to hold out for more. This boom continues until the average buyer can’t afford […]

John Rubino Substack - Congratulations, gold bugs, your long, painful wait is ending. The following chart shows the three-year rolling average annualized returns for stocks, bonds, and gold, with the latter now winning. Gold is holding its gains even as it moves into its seasonally weakest stretch. No “sell and May and go away” so far. This is great […]

John Rubino Substack - About a decade ago, my son built himself a gaming computer, but soon decided he didn’t need it. I bought it from him and have used it for work ever since. Despite its age, it’s still fast, with massive memory and the horsepower to multitask pretty much any combination of programs or websites. I would […]

John Rubino Substack - Looks like we’ve finally found some political common ground: No Tax On Tips Passes Senate Unanimously After Clarification That Bribes Can Count As Tips (Babylon Bee) – In a rare display of full bipartisan support, President Donald Trump’s “No Tax On Tips” bill passed through the Senate unanimously after legislators received clarification that bribes can […]

John Rubino Substack - With its family-friendly bulk packages, high-quality Kirkland store brand, and, more recently, competitively priced gold and silver bars, Costco has always taken care of its customers. So its introduction of yet another way to accumulate ruinous debt feels like a betrayal: Costco launches ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ service for online purchases (ABC News) – Costco is introducing its […]

John Rubino Substack - After the past year’s epic run, you’d think gold would have displaced at least some other assets in mainstream investors’ portfolios. But apparently not. These two charts have been making the rounds on X, showing that during the previous decade’s gold bull market, gold-related ETFs saw their share of “implied allocations” rise dramatically. But that […]

John Rubino Substack - “Global warming” has been a thing ever since “global cooling” went out of style in the 1980s. But two recent developments make it worth a closer look. Most other Establishment narratives, from vaccines to Ukraine to Biden’s health to Trump/Russia collusion, have failed catastrophically over the past decade. Some very dangerous-sounding geo-engineering schemes are being […]

John Rubino Substack - Collapse Life just posted an article on house hunting that anyone who’s in that market will relate to. Basically, this is what inflation does to our idea of an acceptable home — and to our understanding of basic terms like “luxury,” “cozy,” and “affordable.” The end of truth comes with luxury vinyl plank flooring What real […]

John Rubino Substack - This week, Moody’s, the last bond rating agency that still gave the US a perfect score, joined its peers by cutting Treasury bonds from Aaa to Aa1. To which you might respond, “Duh. How can a country with a debt-to-GDP of 124% be an investment-grade credit at all, let alone AAA? You’d be right, of course. […]

John Rubino Substack - After the mess the public health establishment made of the COVID-19 outbreak, it seems like the last thing anyone should want is to grant those idiots more power for the next pandemic. But that’s what the “supranational” health organizations are trying for. Here’s an excerpt from an article by health analyst Meryl Nass on the shocking deals now being pursued out […]

John Rubino Substack - A return to some version of a gold standard has morphed from “gold bug fever dream” to “conceivable” in the past few years. Here’s why: Since the 1990s, when Fed chair Alan Greenspan became a global celebrity nicknamed “the Maestro” by a credulous press … … governments have borrowed ever-greater sums, forcing central banks to […]

John Rubino Substack - The UK, like much of the rest of Europe, has been committing slow-motion cultural suicide in recent years. By piling up unsustainable debts, deindustrialising in pursuit of “net zero” fantasies, atomising into multiple incompatible subcultures via unconstrained immigration, and persecuting citizens for tweets and other previously accepted forms of dissent, the former liberal democracy had […]

John Rubino Substack - This is the first in a series of “heads up” posts on things that might go very wrong very fast, and how to prepare for them. An obvious place to begin is AGI: The global race to develop ever-smarter AIs has an interim goal called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which refers to a system capable […]