ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
July 15, 2025 | Housing Bust Intensifies As Inventories Surge
One of the reasons so few houses were on the market over the past few years was the disparity between 7% current mortgage rates and the 3% mortgages that many homeowners had. It made no sense to sell a house with a cheap mortgage and buy a new house with an expensive mortgage, so millions […]
July 14, 2025 | Smart States Are Embracing Gold And Silver
It’s nice that states are separating themselves into “smart” and “stupid” categories so Americans can tell where and where not to live. The issue of sound money, in particular, is indicative of a whole range of other likely tax/spend/regulate policies that affect quality of life. Let’s start with a flashing “don’t move here” signal […]
July 13, 2025 | Jesse Colombo: Silver Has Broken Out
Jesse Colombo’s Bubble Bubble Report produces a lot of high-quality, in-depth reporting on precious metals. His latest digs into silver’s technicals and concludes that the long-anticipated run to $50 and beyond is now underway. Here’s an excerpt: Silver’s Bull Market Has Officially Begun Silver has officially broken out in a big way, kicking off its bull market. […]
July 11, 2025 | Art of the Collapse, Epstein Edition
Let’s just put it out there: Team Trump has decided to hold onto the Epstein files and use them to blackmail swamp creatures. This makes strategic sense, but leaves the administration looking us in the eye and lying, apparently in the hope that something else will come along to distract us shortly (maybe another pandemic?) But […]
July 10, 2025 | A Closer Look At Germany’s Death Spiral
Subscriber Bill G responded to yesterday’s post on Germany’s financial/cultural death spiral by asking: “And when did debt to GDP cease to be a good measure of economic health? https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/germany/usa?sc=XE02” His point is that if Germany’s government debt is only 65% of GDP, that country is — by definition— in way better shape than the US […]
July 9, 2025 | Europe’s Death Spiral: Now Germany Is the Problem
The flaws in Europe’s financial system — and the eurozone dissolution that will inevitably result — have been obvious for a while. Here’s a list of posts on this topic from the past few years: Can The Euro Be Saved? (4/23/23) Easy Money Makes You Stupid, Europe Edition (6/19/23) Europe is Falling, and France Is Leading the […]
July 2, 2025 | Why the Gold Bull Market Has Legs, in Six Charts And silver…
There are a lot of “xx priced in gold” charts floating around, most of which show that stocks, houses, and pretty much everything else aren’t actually going up in real (i.e., gold-adjusted) terms. They only appear to be in bull markets because we’re measuring them with declining fiat currencies. Here’s an unusual example: The Porsche […]
June 30, 2025 | Art of the Collapse, July 2025
Another month, another war. And more AI babies… This week, Florida opened “Alligator Alcatraz.” Speaking of AI, it seems to no longer care what we think:
June 28, 2025 | Is Tokenized Gold the Future of Money?
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 […]
June 27, 2025 | Black Swans: What If Mexico Nationalizes Silver?
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 […]
June 26, 2025 | Copper Squeeze: A Great Story Playing Out as Expected
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 […]
June 25, 2025 | How to Finance Foreign Real Estate
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 […]
June 22, 2025 | It’s Official: We’re Back in the 1970s But with Even Bigger Risks and Opportunities
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 […]
June 18, 2025 | Recession Watch: Should We Really Be Piling Into Equities and Options?
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 […]
June 16, 2025 | Evaporating Silver
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 […]
June 15, 2025 | Goldman Sachs: Uranium’s Structural Deficit Makes the Miners a “Buy
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 […]
June 12, 2025 | The Precious Metals Bull Market Enters “Normal” Territory
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 […]
June 11, 2025 | Why Platinum Is In Our Portfolio
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 […]
June 10, 2025 | The End of the Fiat Currency Experiment, in Seven Charts
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 […]
June 9, 2025 | The Housing Bust Is Here: Sellers Outnumber Buyers by 500,000
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 […]
June 5, 2025 | Gold Is Outperforming Stocks and Bonds – and Silver is Outperforming Gold
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 […]
June 4, 2025 | Becoming Invisible, Part 17: Next-Gen PCs Riddled With AI Spyware
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 […]
May 31, 2025 | Art of the Collapse, June 2025
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 […]
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 […]