ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
May 17, 2024 | Why The Gold Rush Is Just Beginning, In Six Charts
Gold blew through $2400/oz this morning: And the world’s central banks continue to add gold to their monetary reserves. Note that the real action coincided with the outbreak of the Ukraine war, when the US started slapping sanctions on everyone in sight. De-dollarization is a trend with legs. A case can be made that China alone is […]
May 14, 2024 | Breakthroughs, Part 1: Three Potential Threats To Oil, Gas, Uranium
This is the first in a series about breakthroughs in energy and other sectors that might affect some of our basic investment themes. Heading in, keep two things in mind: The vast majority of breathlessly hyped developments in science and engineering never make it out of the lab. Scaling up turns out to be too […]
May 12, 2024 | Wall Street Journal Boosts Gold FOMO
The Wall Street Journal just published a long article (reposted via MSN) lamenting the fact that everyone suddenly wants gold. So thanks, WSJ, for the FOMO boost: Inside the 21st Century Gold Rush (MSN) – Eric Vazquez, a lineman for a power company in southwest Florida, says he’s holding a lot more gold than most […]
May 10, 2024 | Because We’re Still Not Sufficiently Indebted…
Zero Hedge just posted a long look at how the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) industry now accounts for about $700 billion of largely unreported “phantom debt”. This, speculates ZH, is why the economy hasn’t fallen into recession. Now come the unintended consequences: Pernicious effects of BNPL credit are piling up: the Harris Poll survey conducted […]
May 9, 2024 | Finally, Some Good-Looking Gold/Silver Miner Charts
Long-suffering mining investors have been wondering how high gold and silver would have to go to finally breathe some life into their portfolios. It looks like $2300/oz gold and $27/oz silver have done the trick. Behold the (suddenly very pretty) price charts: Higher Metals Prices = Wider Profit Margins These price moves aren’t […]
May 7, 2024 | So That’s Who’s Screwing Everything Up
Most normal Americans have a sense that the people now running the country are off in some fundamental way. But the specifics have been fuzzy. Are they morons or evil geniuses? Are they controlled by foreign powers or home-grown mind viruses? Or are the aliens pulling their strings? Venerable pollster Scott Rasmussen claims to have found a […]
May 4, 2024 | More Good News On The Silver Deficit
Ah, the silver story. It just keeps getting better. Here’s an update from the Silver Institute: Industrial Silver Demand Sets Record Record use of silver in industrial applications set a new high in 2023 at 654.4 million ounces (Moz). Ongoing structural gains from green economy applications underpinned these advances as they did in 2022. Higher […]
May 2, 2024 | Art of the Collapse, May 2024
There are so many wars (and related civil unrest) these days, that it’s hard to keep track of which meme/satire/diatribe is aimed at which crisis. But April included April Fools’ Day, so at least we have a logical place to start: CNN Publishes Real News Story For April Fools’ Day (Babylon Bee) – Fooling thousands […]
April 30, 2024 | Recession Watch: Why Isn’t “Inevitable” Becoming “Imminent”?
So that recession I keep whining about still hasn’t arrived. What’s going on out there to keep “inevitable” from becoming “imminent”? It might be as simple as a government borrowing insane amounts of money and giving it to arms makers, banks, and AI companies. This “fiscal dominance” strategy invokes some serious unintended consequences, including stubborn […]
April 28, 2024 | The Day We Stopped Trusting Media
One of the first posts in this newsletter’s Shrinking Trust Horizon series was about how “deep fake” technology will make fake images, videos, and audio recordings almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This will kill millions of modeling and acting jobs, while weaponizing audio and video in all kinds of disturbing ways. That day has apparently arrived: […]
April 26, 2024 | How Far Can The Yen Fall Before Japan Goes Bankrupt? We may be about to find out
Japan’s ongoing march to national bankruptcy has been a recurring theme here. See: Japan Is In That Box Japan Takes Another Step Towards the Cliff How a Country Goes Bankrupt, In 10 Steps Now the death spiral has entered a new phase, with the yen/dollar exchange rate heading straight down: To restate the “Japan collapse” […]
April 22, 2024 | Is The AI Bubble Bursting? Wolf Richter’s WTF Charts
Artificial intelligence, which a few years ago existed only in science fiction (check out William Gibson’s Neuromancer), has morphed into an epic stock bubble. Nvidia, maker of the leading AI microchips, saw its market cap surge from $200 billion in 2019 to $2 trillion in 2023. I haven’t actually checked, but that might be the fastest […]
April 12, 2024 | The MSM Is Dying, NPR Edition
Not so long ago, almost everyone listened to NPR, and people of every political persuasion donated to help fund its ad-free, long-form journalism. Then everything changed. The reporting became weirdly biased and listeners — correctly perceiving that NPR was playing for Team Establishment rather than objectively reporting on big issues — started tuning out. Today’s […]
April 10, 2024 | Health Prepping Update: So Intermittent Fasting Kills? Really?
A new family of weight loss drugs — including Ozempic and Wegovy — recently hit the market to extreme fanfare. The drugs’ makers claim… wait for it… great results with minimal side effects (other than the fact that the drugs have to be taken for a lifetime to sustain the results). Wall Street analysts responded by raising Big Pharma […]
April 8, 2024 | Becoming Invisible, Part 14: Proton’s Latest Tools
The biggest hurdle for non-techies trying to avoid the world’s data predators is the need to cobble together solutions from different sources, each of which has to be installed correctly, monitored, and upgraded. This can be a nearly full-time job—and still end up failing. So a one-stop privacy shop that plugs all the holes and […]
April 5, 2024 | Gold Porn, Part 1: Gold Bugs Are Suddenly Cool
Suddenly the rest of the world is “gold curious.” With the current spot price piercing $2300/oz this morning … … we long-suffering stackers (and gold/silver mining stock investors!) can be forgiven for wanting to enjoy the moment. So let’s survey the headlines. Start by Googling “gold price” and note that even CBS’s audience is wondering […]
April 4, 2024 | Is This “Silver Squeeze” For Real?
How long has it been since silver generated any real excitement? So long that even most stackers would have to look it up to say for sure. The answer is mid-2020, when a bunch of online traders called “Redditors” decided to chase the metal like it was a meme stock, nearly doubling its price in […]
March 31, 2024 | Art of the Collapse, April 2024
Gold is interesting again … … because everything else is terrifying: New Boeing 737 Toy Features Wings That Really Fall Off (Babylon Bee) – A new airplane toy modeled after the Boeing 737 features “real in-flight damage” in which the jet’s wings really fall off. “Wow! The wings really fall off, just like in real […]
March 28, 2024 | How Inflation Hurts Our Kids, In 5 Charts
In 1971 the US, along with most of the rest of the world, tried something new. They ditched their previously gold-backed money in favor of “fiat” currencies backed only by citizens’ trust in central banks and politicians. The results were profound, as the dollar lost about 90% of its purchasing power. But the real damage […]
March 25, 2024 | Elites, Commoners, And The Shrinking Trust Horizon
Charles Hugh Smith is doing a great job of covering inequality and the pathologies it creates. Here, he explains why the trust horizon is shrinking for some but not others: Why Social Trust Is Cratering: The Difference Between Elites and Commoners We trust what we own / control, and the difference between elites and commoners is […]
March 20, 2024 | Becoming Invisible, Part 13: Glenn Meder Explains “De-Googled” Phones
Three days after privacy expert Glen Meder offered a free cryptocurrency seminar (to which I posted a link here), he published a primer on removing Google’s malign presence from Android phones. The guy is on a roll. Below is an excerpt from that post. But first, the usual disclaimer: I don’t profit in any way from highlighting other […]
March 17, 2024 | Welcome To The Third World, Part 3: Just Leave Your Keys Where The Car Thieves Can Find Them
This video from Toronto, Canada is both chilling and self-explanatory. Here you go: “Toronto Police advise the public to reduce the risk of home invasions aimed at car theft by placing their key fobs near the front door. This strategy is suggested because culprits are primarily entering homes to access cars, not to steal other […]
March 14, 2024 | Accidentally Funny CNBC Grapples With Costco Gold Sales
The legacy media has never understood gold, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Costco and Walmart stocking precious metals — to booming demand — would seem a bit odd. But CNBC just outdid itself with a piece that can be divided into two parts: A befuddled but more or less factual accounting of the trends and numbers, followed […]
March 13, 2024 | Welcome To The Third World, Part 2: When The Cops Don’t Come
Most Americans call or otherwise interact with the police very infrequently. So our sense of how that public service works may not be up to date. For instance, it’s generally believed that if you call the cops, they’ll respond. But that’s not always how it works these days. One 2023 study found big increases in […]
March 12, 2024 | Welcome To The Third World, Part 2: When The Cops Don’t Come
Most Americans call or otherwise interact with the police very infrequently. So our sense of how that public service works may not be up to date. For instance, it’s generally believed that if you call the cops, they’ll respond. But that’s not always how it works these days. One 2023 study found big increases in […]