ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
November 27, 2023 | Next Year’s Housing Crash, In Charts and Anecdotes
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: […]
November 24, 2023 | Is Gold A Manipulated Market?
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 […]
November 22, 2023 | Gold: Resistance Is…Finite
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 […]
November 21, 2023 | Your First Gun
“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: […]
November 16, 2023 | Recession Watch: Wow, That Was Fast
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 […]
November 14, 2023 | Uranium Stocks: What Just Happened to SMRs?
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 […]
November 8, 2023 | Are There Too Many People Or Too Few?
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. […]
November 7, 2023 | Mark Nestmann: The War On Cash, Past And Future
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 […]
November 6, 2023 | This Is What Inflation Does To Our Kids
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 […]
October 31, 2023 | Art of the Collapse, November 2023
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:
October 23, 2023 | Private Equity “Landlords” Endangered By Falling House Prices
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 […]
October 19, 2023 | Crash Alert: That “Spinning Out Of Control” Feeling
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 […]
October 13, 2023 | Health Prepping, Part 3: Intermittent Fasting
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 […]
October 12, 2023 | Central Bank Gold Demand Is Even Stronger Than It Looks
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 […]
October 9, 2023 | Recession Watch: Red Flags Everywhere You Look
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 […]
October 7, 2023 | People We Should Know: Russell Brand
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 […]
October 6, 2023 | Health Prepping, Part 2: Interval Training
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 […]
October 5, 2023 | Japan Is In That Box
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 […]
October 4, 2023 | JP Morgan Predicts A Housing Market Crash
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 […]
October 3, 2023 | Art of the Collapse, October 2023
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 […]
September 29, 2023 | Recession Watch: When Big Trends Collide
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 — […]
September 28, 2023 | Did Gold Bars Just Become An Impulse Buy?
One of the tough things about buying gold is the complexity. You have to find a dealer and look up their prices, choose a coin or bar from dozens of options, call in the order, and wire a large amount of money to people you’ve never met. Then comes the stressful wait while your cash […]
September 26, 2023 | Wolf Richter On Why We Should Short The Homebuilder Stocks
Wolf Street’s Wolf Richter is doing a great job of dissecting the real estate market. Definitely consider supporting his efforts. His latest post is particularly on point for us since our portfolio contains short positions in three big homebuilders. Here’s an excerpt featuring some charts that illustrate the industry’s (apparently insoluble) problem: Prices of New Houses Drop, Sales […]
September 24, 2023 | Mark Jeftovic: Cash Isn’t The Solution To CBDCs
Bombthrower Media’s Mark Jeftovic just posted some provocative thoughts on the timing of the forced migration to CBDS and how today’s seemingly omnipotent governments are dancing on the edge of the abyss. Here’s an excerpt: Cash will be no refuge under CBDCs The world is headed toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and everybody knows it, even […]
September 22, 2023 | Finally, The Housing Crash
Spiking interest rates are normally a death knell for homebuilders, for obvious reasons. Higher mortgage rates raise monthly payments, which crash house prices, which make existing houses cheaper than newly built ones, which causes demand for new houses to shrink, which causes homebuilders to lay off their workers and sell their spec houses and excess […]