John Rubino Substack - One of the fun things about bull markets is watching resistance levels turn into support. Gold, for instance, spent three years banging into $2000/oz and recently broke through, touching $2125 on December 1. Then the selling started, pushing the price down to, as this is written, $1997. If the “$2000 is now support” thesis holds, buyers will […]

John Rubino Substack - De-dollarization events that would once have been a big deal have become common lately. Some examples: UAE officially stops using dollar for oil trades (Watcher) – The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is asking BRICS countries to settle oil trade in local currencies and not the U.S. dollar. The Middle Eastern nation is aiming to diversify […]

John Rubino Substack - Henry Kissinger died in November, launching a zillion memes: Back in the land of the alive but hungry, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman declared that inflation is not nearly as bad as ignorant Americans believe. Some begged to differ: A big holiday thanks to the FBI for protecting us from an upsurge in terrorist activity: FBI Closely […]

John Rubino Substack - In March 2022, there was a disruption in the nickel market that spiked the metal’s price. The lucky investors and market-makers who owned long futures contracts made fortunes. Just kidding. The exchange on which the futures traded canceled them and stiffed the contract owners. Some of the victims understandably brought suit and were awarded a […]

John Rubino Substack - Signs are multiplying that the US housing bubble is about to pop. To start with the headline number, home sales are back at Great Recession levels: Declining sales are no surprise when viewed against a backdrop of the worst affordability in American housing history. The following chart explains why Boomers are such a cocky generation: […]

John Rubino Substack - Some readers responded to last Wednesday’s post on gold’s trading pattern (Gold: Resistance Is … Finite) with shock that I didn’t know gold is a manipulated market where technicals don’t matter. This gives us a good jumping-off point for a look at several forms of gold manipulation that have been practiced over the years: Wall […]

John Rubino Substack - The human mind likes big round numbers. Which is why, when a tradable asset is rising, sell orders tend to cluster in predictable spots. The frequent result is a repeating pattern of strong gains running into waves of selling that knock the price back down. Traders refer to this as “resistance,” and it’s maddening for […]

John Rubino Substack - “Your only rights are those you can defend” — Thomas Jefferson or someone similar Many readers of this newsletter are already well-armed. If you’re one of them, this article is not for you — though you might want to check it out and post constructive criticism or pro tips in the comments. Anyhow, here goes: […]

John Rubino Substack - One of the many surprising things about the Everything Bubble was the way interest rates kept rising. A lot of observers (including this one) believed that in each successive bubble, the “terminal” interest rate — that is, the rate that starts to break things, causing a crash — would be lower because the amount of […]

John Rubino Substack - Nuclear power is back in favor, the price of uranium has more than tripled from its 2020 lows, and the technology’s future looks even brighter than its recent past. But there’s more. A new reactor design, the “small modular reactor” (SMR), is set to turbocharge the industry. Where traditional nuclear plants are huge, expensive, and […]

John Rubino Substack - With financial collapse and global war inching closer every day, you’d have to be an anxiety junkie to worry about distant things like demographic trends. Still, the population debate is interesting, with economists, statisticians, and techies disagreeing over whether the world of 2100 will have too many people, too few, or just the right number. […]

John Rubino Substack - The Nestmann Group just posted a useful primer on the historical roots and likely future of the war on cash. Governments have been at this for a long, long time. Next up: CBDCs. The War On Cash Escalates Economists and governments have long had a very low opinion of the cash you carry in your wallet or […]

John Rubino Substack - Mainstream economics portrays inflation — defined as a currency that loses a bit of purchasing power each year — as necessary to lubricate the gears of commerce. What they don’t seem to understand (or would like the rest of us to not understand) is that inflation is also a tool for redistributing wealth from one […]

John Rubino Substack - Let’s start with an appealing vision of the afterlife… … and contrast that with the real world, where hedge fund assholes turn necessities like shelter into casino chips: Meanwhile, geopolitics is making life hard for the “I support current thing” crowd:

John Rubino Substack - Recessions are necessary to clear out malinvestment before it poisons the whole economy. But they also hurt a lot of people who don’t deserve it, so they’re not a cause for celebration. Except when the people being hurt are private equity firms like Blackstone that have been buying up houses (sometimes entire neighborhoods) at inflated prices and then converting them […]

John Rubino Substack - Let’s start with regional and local banks, where two bad things are happening. First, their “safe” bond portfolios have tanked in the past year, embedding paper losses of around $700 billion industry-wide. These losses will produce a steady drumbeat of bad earnings reports in the coming year. But in the meantime, as interest rates rise, money market […]

John Rubino Substack - This is the third in a series (the other two are here and 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. Here’s an easy one. Intermittent […]

John Rubino Substack - Central banks have morphed recently from net sellers of gold to increasingly aggressive net buyers. And the buying is even more aggressive than it seems. Here’s the story in three charts: When the global financial system nearly imploded in 2008, central banks stopped selling gold and started buying. To put this buying into context, the […]

John Rubino Substack - 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 […]

John Rubino Substack - 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 […]

John Rubino Substack - 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 […]

John Rubino Substack - 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 […]

John Rubino Substack - 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 […]

John Rubino Substack - 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 […]

John Rubino Substack - 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 — […]