ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
May 27, 2025 | Et tu, Costco?
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 […]
May 26, 2025 | Believe It or Not, Gold is Still Out of Favor
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 […]
May 23, 2025 | Is Global Warming Just Another Establishment Scam?
“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 […]
May 22, 2025 | Inflation and the Lies Realtors Have to Tell
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 […]
May 20, 2025 | Recession Watch: Unsustainable Interest Rates And falling Credit Scores
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. […]
May 19, 2025 | Creeping Fascism: Global Healthcare Takeover
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 […]
May 16, 2025 | How Would a New Gold Standard Work? Very well…
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 […]
May 11, 2025 | Britain Steps Back From the Brink
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 […]
May 5, 2025 | Black Swans: What If Bad People Get Next-Level AI?
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 […]
April 30, 2025 | Art of the Collapse, May 2025
Let’s start, once again, with a warning to never, ever believe anything you see online: April was tax month, so people were more than normally aware of the gap between what we think we’re paying for and what we get: What’s even dumber than taxes and debt? War, of course: Then there’s the trade war. […]
April 28, 2025 | Recession Watch: Real Estate Is Already There
As always, when it comes to real estate, Wolf Richter’s analysis and charts are very helpful. Let’s take the office building story step-by-step: Between 2010 and 2020, millions of square feet of office space were financed with unnaturally cheap credit. During the pandemic, millions of Americans discovered that they prefer working from home and refused to return […]
April 27, 2025 | Health Prepping: Seed Oils Are Poison
Seed oils are getting a lot of bad press, so I’ve been reading ingredient lists with them in mind. The results are heartbreaking. Things that seemed healthy have turned out, thanks to their reliance on seed oils, to fall into the “heavily processed, do not eat” category. A couple of examples: This Thai curry paste […]
April 25, 2025 | More Tales From the Gold Bull Market: Earnings Beats and High-Premium M&A
Agnico Eagle, generally seen as the best-run senior gold miner, just reported blow-out earnings: Agnico Eagle Smashes Q1 Expectations with Record Earnings and Soaring Gold Prices (Kitco News) – Another quarterly earnings report means another record broken for Canada’s largest gold producer. On Thursday, after the North American equity close, Agnico Eagle Mines Limited (NYSE: […]
April 22, 2025 | Mining is Hard: The End of the Cobre Panama Story?
Once-favorable mining jurisdictions are becoming battlegrounds, adding a new layer of risk to an already challenging business. The most ominous example of this trend is the Cobre Panama copper mine, on which one of our portfolio’s royalty companies had bet big. See: Just How Bad Was Franco-Nevada’s Bad News? Franco-Nevada Takes Its Cobre Panama Hit The mine’s […]
April 21, 2025 | How to Judge Those Gold Miner “Free Cash Flow” Numbers
We’re entering the age of free cash flow (FCF), in which gold miners start trumpeting the size and growth of this metric in every public utterance. So we’ll need an analytical tool for judging whose FCF — and by implication, stock — is most valuable. Resourceful Insights’ George Billman just posted a quick way to put a […]
April 20, 2025 | Gold Is Becoming “Monetary Infrastructure”
Why is gold marching steadily higher while everything else is trading chaotically? An X thread from @mcm_ct_usa offers a useful— and for gold bugs, very exciting —explanation. Here’s a condensed version: Gold is quietly being re-monetized—and most people don’t see it. Here’s what’s happening, why it matters, and why it’s not priced in. This is for anyone […]
April 16, 2025 | Poetic Justice For Private Equity
Private equity, like so many other Wall Street “innovations,” is a benign-sounding idea that has morphed into a kind of financial cancer. Let’s see if it kills the patient. First, the concept: Private equity refers to the practice of rich guys pooling their money and hunting for companies to buy. Once they get one, they […]
April 15, 2025 | Health Prepping: Did AI Just Cut Cancer Risk by 90%?
Artificial intelligence promises a lot of things. And sometimes it delivers. One possible case in point: Doctors Justus R. Hope and Paul E. Marik specialize in finding new uses for existing drugs, and recently asked an AI to look through all available studies (something way beyond the abilities of human researchers) involving supplements’ impact on cancer risk. […]
April 14, 2025 | Confused? Join the Club: Inflation Plunges While Inflation Expectations Spike
Talk about cross-currents. Oil, which affects the cost of pretty much everything, is down about 15% so far this month. That’s extremely deflationary. Housing, meanwhile, is right up there with oil for its impact on the cost of living. And home price inflation is rapidly headed for zero overall, with many formerly hot markets already […]
April 13, 2025 | Time to Take Profits in Gold Mining Stocks? Jim Rickards Says Not Yet
Suddenly, gold miner shareholders have the problem everyone wants: They’ve made fairly serious recent money and now must decide whether to convert some of their paper profits to cash. Anyone who’s been round-tripped in a big position understands how serious this question is. Jim Rickards, author of a series of best-selling investment books, just weighed […]
April 10, 2025 | Gold Miners: Great Q1 Earnings Coming
We’re heading into another earnings season, and with gold outperforming pretty much everything else, this one is looking even better for the miners than Q4. For context, here’s the XAU gold/silver miners index for the past six months. Note the nice run that started when excellent Q4 miner earnings combined with a rising gold price: And for […]
April 8, 2025 | Watch the Gold/Silver Ratio
Just a quick reminder that in times of market stress, gold and silver will sometimes diverge, with gold catching a safe haven bid and silver selling off as a cyclical industrial commodity. During such times, silver can get very cheap relative to gold, an imbalance that’s usually rectified by silver outperforming for a while. This […]
April 6, 2025 | Deflation Watch: Cheaper Oil = Cheaper Everything = Plunging Interest Rates
This post’s title sketches out a formula that ends with the world’s governments panic-printing their currencies. To flesh out the thesis, let’s start with energy’s impact on our cost of living: Energy Is In Everything Pretty much all of life’s necessities have an energy component. A car, for instance, requires electricity and petrochemicals to build […]
April 4, 2025 | How Do We Play This Bear Market?
Pretty much every “buy” recommendation in this newsletter has come with a version of this caveat: We’re in the late stages of a long credit expansion, which means a potentially brutal recession and/or bear market is likely imminent. So approach these stocks with caution. Don’t jump in all at once. Instead, add to positions in […]
April 3, 2025 | What Just Happened? Part 1: Gold and Silver Fall Hard
Gold and silver are being pulled down by a general equities bear market this morning. That’s not surprising, but the details are interesting. Some background: Rush to get gold to the U.S. halts abruptly with tariff exemption (Bloomberg) – A massive arbitrage trade that has drawn tens of billions of dollars’ worth of gold and […]