Britain fixes its failed government energy company with a second one

Before the 2024 election, Britain’s Labour Party promised that a new state-owned company called Great British Energy would help families save up to £300 a year on their energy bills.

So far electric bills have increased instead.

Not to worry. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced his fix: create a SECOND state-owned energy company to basically do the same job as the first.

After all, when one state-owned enterprise fails miserably, the only logical solution is to create a second state-owned enterprise and expect a different result.

Canada’s plan to balance the budget: change the definition of ‘spending’

We’ve long said that when the deficit and inflation numbers become bad enough, politicians will simply reinvent the way they calculate these figures.

Canada has now done just that.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has promised to balance Canada’s gruesome budget deficit. But his plan is to change the definition of the word ‘spending’.

Carney’s big idea is to only count day-to-day operating costs as ‘spending’. And anything else that he deems to be an ‘investment’ won’t count.

We all understand the difference. In your own household, the electric bill is considered an expense. Purchasing shares of Newmont Mining is considered an investment.

Now, my wife has tried to stretch this definition a time or two by insisting that a beach vacation or pretty necklace is actually an investment.

Carney is applying this same logic to an entire national economy. It’s completely subjective and inconsistent, plus it lacks any transparency.

Giving money away on woke priorities? Not an expense! It’s an investment in community! Paying Canadians to turn in their completely legal firearms? Not an expense! It’s an investment in safety! (more on this below)

Carney has now reinvented the math, making Canada look just as ridiculous as WeWork when then CEO Adam Neumanm spoke of his company’s “Community-Adjusted Earnings”.

Canada’s last line of defense is the gun owners it’s disarming

Mark Carney isn’t done with his insanity. He recently told the New York Times that it’s his job to look at the “extreme tail risk” that Donald Trump orders military action against Canada.

According to Carney himself, in the absurd likelihood of a US invasion, US forces would overrun Canada’s defenses within a week, possibly within two days. After that, Carney will be counting on “small groups of irregular military or armed civilians” to fight on with ambushes and sabotage, like the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets.

The trouble is that Canada has banned more than 2,500 makes and models of “assault-style” firearms since 2020, and the government is paying gun owners to hand them in.

So apparently Canadians are expected to fight house to house with hockey sticks… until the government comes for those too.

Boston paid $335,000 to call itself racist… and failed

If any place in America can say it made the right call on slavery early in its history, it’s Massachusetts. The state’s chief justice declared slavery finished in 1783; he cited the state constitution that “all men are born free and equal.”

Yet the city government in Boston has still chosen to put itself on trial more than two centuries later.

In 2022 local politicians set up a task force to study reparations for slavery, with one member positively giddy that the research would give it the “evidentiary pool from which to argue for [reparations].”

So the city spent $335,000 of taxpayer money to hire a Tufts University team led by historian Kerri Greenidge.

She came with all the right awards. Her 2022 book The Grimkes, about a slaveholding family that produced two famous abolitionist sisters, had been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won a prize from the American Historical Association.

Apparently if you write about slavery, no one bothers to check whether it’s accurate. They just give you awards.

But it turns out Greenidge’s book was “riddled with factual errors.” It cites letters held at the University of Michigan which don’t actually exist. It references other historians’ research that doesn’t exist. In short, it’s about as accurate as a Hollywood adaptation.

Ms. Greenidge naturally clapped back and claimed that pointing out her errors is an “attack on Black women [in] academics…”

So, Boston was willing to spend taxpayer money to call its own taxpayers racists, and the expert they hired turned out to be another race grifter with no credibility.

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His doctors in Auckland, New Zealand, tried several rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy. None of it worked.

Then they told him about CAR-T, a treatment that takes a patient’s own immune cells out, re-engineers them in a lab to attack the cancer, and puts them back in.

A hospital in Melbourne, Australia, quoted him as much as $600,000, far more than his family could pay.

So in late June, Walters flew to Shanghai, where the same therapy costs a fraction as much.

It’s not that the Chinese invented it; CAR-T is an American technology.

But China is running the exact same playbook that Japan used on American technology after World War II— copy the American invention, perfect the manufacturing, and flood the market with cheap, state-subsidized products.

CAR-T’s big breakthrough came in 2012 at the University of Pennsylvania, where a 6-year-old became the first child to beat leukemia with it.

China took it from there. Its regulators let hospitals launch their own trials with far less central oversight than America requires, and by 2017 China was running more CAR-T trials than the US.

“China has basically done to CAR-T cell therapy the same thing that it’s done to other industries, which is, they’ve industrialized it,” said Dr. Sairah Ahmed, who runs a CAR-T program at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

According to Ahmed, CAR-T costs $150,000 to $230,000 in China, versus $550,000 to $850,000 in America. She has even advised some of her overseas patients to go to China for it.

Michael Walters did his CAR-T in China. And on August 18, he learned his lymphoma was in complete remission.

In 2021 China opened CAR-T to foreign patients, and now they’re flying in from all over. Walters’ hospital alone has treated patients from 12 countries.

To be clear, we’re not lamenting this at all. If China can take American research and sell the treatment for a fraction of the price, that’s a win for humanity.

But it also highlights how China has been working on its global image as a tourism hotspot.

Citizens of dozens of countries can now visit China for up to 30 days without a visa. Nearly 23 million foreigners entered China in the first half of this year, up 20% from a year earlier.

With their medical advances, they’re trying to push into medical tourism as well. It’s the same idea: open the doors and bring in foreign money.

It’s strange when you think about it— advanced medical tourism in one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes. No one had that on their bingo card 20 years ago.

Because that’s the crazy thing about China— while foreign tourists are arriving in record numbers, any Chinese national with the means to leave is moving out of the country.

Moreover, wealthy Chinese are flooding overseas “citizenship by investment” programs in places like Antigua and St. Lucia in order to quickly obtain a second passport.

They’re not stupid. They know their wealth and prosperity exists in China only as long as the government says it does. They know their freedom exists only as long as the government says it does… which is really to say there’s no freedom or prosperity at all.

They know they’re only one misstep away from being disappeared like Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder who criticized state regulators.

Or tennis star Peng Shuai, who disappeared after accusing a senior CCP official of sexual assault.

Or real estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who disappeared after speaking out against China’s COVID policies.

Or countless others.

Wealthy Chinese can also see the crumbling fiscal facade. Behind the modern skylines and futuristic robotics, they know that China in deep financial trouble, especially at the regional and provincial levels.

By Bloomberg’s count, 21 of China’s 31 provincial governments have budget deficits exceeding 100% of tax revenue. It would be like the US government having a $6 trillion deficit every single  year.

Last year China’s general government deficit (national, regional, local) was roughly 10% of GDP… which is just absurd.

And local tax officials are now turning their sights on China’s rich (and eventually middle class) to make ends meet.

According to Bloomberg, Chinese tax authorities have formed special squads to hunt down the wealthy; sometimes an entire team is assigned to target a single individual.

Often these tax bills are not even based on the law, or any sensible calculation of taxable income. Instead it’s just demands and extortion: give us money, otherwise we’ll confiscate your assets and send you to a reeducation camp.

All of this is prompting wealthy Chinese to hit the exits, or at least prepare their Plan B’s.

China certainly does have some shiny bright spots. But they’re vastly outweighed by an authoritarian government of central planners.

America’s government is also weighed down by debt and bureaucracy, and some American politicians are already proposing similar ideas: wealth taxes, plus exit taxes on anyone who gives up their citizenship to escape them.

The difference is that America’s problems can still be fixed with some rational thinking. China needs a time machine. Nobody can go back and reverse the one-child policy or undo decades of communism or vote the Communist Party out of office.

But hoping the politicians come to their senses is not a plan, and that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

P.S. The Chinese families rushing for foreign passports now are doing it in a hurry, with a tax bill already on the table.

Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service, Plan B Confidential, covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from all over the world, so you can put the pieces in place before you’re scrambling.

Click here to learn more.

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It took more than a year for a Social Security employee to look into it. And it was painfully obvious— Social Security was paying too much ‘supplemental security income’ to the recipient.

In fact, the guy receiving the benefits check every month was legally obligated to report this overpayment… but he did not.

The Social Security employee then contacted the recipient to question him. No response. The employee tried a second time. No response.

Then, in the words of Social Security’s inspector general, “the employee took no further action.”

The government worker just shrugged and closed the case. There was no attempt to recoup the overpaid money. The recipient continued to be overpaid. No follow-up.

Today, eight years after the waste was discovered, literally nothing has happened to correct the mistake.

And that’s just one case.

It comes from a report that the inspector general just released, in which he audited 100 random transactions that had been flagged by the same automated monitoring system.

Every single one of the 100 flagged transactions were all similar instances of waste or outright fraud.

Yet out of the 100 flagged transactions, Social Security employees simply ignored 63 of them. 17 were marked ‘complete’ when they were not complete. Only 20 out of the 100 were actually handled properly.

That means that Social Security failed to fix fraudulent and/or wasteful overpayments 80% of the time.

Bear in mind that, in total, the automated monitoring system has flagged over 400,000 cases of potential waste and fraud. At a similar 80% failure rate, that’s potentially billions of dollars that taxpayers are flushing down the drain.

And that’s only for Supplemental Security Income; it doesn’t count fraud and waste from the actual Social Security retirement checks. Or Medicare. Or Medicaid. Or anything else for that matter.

Everyone knows about the rampant fraud at Minnesota’s infamous ‘Learning Centers’. And fraud like that requires courageous people to put their safety at risk to document the fraud.

In this case, Social Security’s own internal system flags nearly EVERY SINGLE CASE of fraud and waste. And yet the agency still did nothing 80% of the time.

So taxpayers are essentially footing the bill TWICE— once for the overpayment, and then more money to pay lazy workers who do nothing about it.

Social Security is hardly alone. Earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance said his anti-fraud task force had found 186,000 dead people collecting food stamps.

In January, the FCC’s inspector general found phone companies billing Lifeline, the federal program that pays for low-income phone service, for 94,000 dead customers in California.

And by the government’s own accounting, improper payments— money sent to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason— come to about $3 trillion since 2003.

None of this is secret. Yet nothing ever changes.

When the inspector general asked why Social Security employees didn’t work the alerts, he said the agency bureaucrats “could not provide an explanation.”

I’d say the explanation is pretty obvious. They’re either in on it, or they don’t care. Either way it should be grounds for termination.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to fire anyone who works for the federal government.

Remember when the executive branch tried mass layoffs across more than a dozen agencies last year? 20 state attorneys general sued. Judges issued injunctions. And the job cuts were tied up in court for months, with taxpayers footing the legal bills.

A private company full of workers being paid to do nothing would quickly go bankrupt. The federal government just piles on more debt to cover it, and then pretends the exploding debt is consequence-free.

Well, the bond market disagrees.

The 10-year Treasury yield has skyrocketed past 5.25%, its highest level in decades. And one of the reasons is that bond investors are tired of lending to a government that operates like this.

We’re supposed to believe that ‘democracy’ will deliver us from this, that voters will hold politicians accountable and elect a Congress that will cut the deficit. I’m not holding my breath.

Given the astonishing rise in yields, it looks like the bond market is going to hold Congress accountable. As yields continue to rise, borrowing will eventually become so expensive that Congress will be forced to cut spending.

Maybe that happens when government bond yields hit 6%. Maybe 8%. Maybe 10%. Nobody knows for sure. But there is an interest rate that will be so high, Congress will be forced to take action and cut spending.

When those cuts do finally come, they’ll be far more painful than what it would take to fix this now.

Seriously, cutting the deficit today should be simple: fire the people who ignore the alerts. Stop the fraud the government already knows about. It should be pretty easy.

But at the moment, no one seems interested in any meaningful cuts… which means the bond market will keep pushing yields up.

In finance, whenever bond investors get tired of loaning money to governments and push yields higher, they’re known as ‘vigilantes’. In this case, vigilante justice for Congress can’t come fast enough.

P.S. When the bond market finally forces the issue, spending cuts will only be part of the answer.

A government that can’t borrow cheaply prints the difference, and that inflation comes straight out of your paycheck and your retirement account.

That’s what a Plan B is for. Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, is built for exactly this.

It covers everything from real assets that hold their value when the dollar doesn’t, to foreign residency and second citizenships, offshore banking, and legal ways to cut your tax bill, all backed by boots-on-the-ground research from countries around the world. You can learn more about it here.

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As with any merger that size, the US Justice Department reviewed it to make sure it wouldn’t hurt competition or consumers. Federal regulators approved the deal a few months later, and that should have been the final hurdle.

But not in the State of California.

California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta decided to insert himself into the transaction, arguing that the merger would mean higher prices and fewer movies in theaters. Bonta is a lawyer and career politician… but apparently he has some special knowledge about the film industry that no one else possesses.

And so, by July of this year, Bonta had decided that out of all the other problems on his desk— massive violent crime, fentanyl deaths, uncontrolled fraud— the one issue that needed his attention the most was a movie studio merger.

Paramount asked Bonta what it would take to make him happy. The company offered a binding commitment to release 30 films per year in theaters, and to keep both of its Los Angeles studio lots open. Bonta wouldn’t even engage in negotiations.

Instead he sued Paramount to block the deal. “There is no debate here,” he said.

Asked about reports that Paramount might leave California over the fight, he called it “a desperate last-ditch effort to try to blackmail my office.”

A week later, a judge froze the merger.

But the real risk his lawsuit created was for Californians. Paramount is the last major studio still headquartered in Hollywood, and Bonta was giving it every reason to take its headquarters, its jobs, and its taxes to another state.

And that’s what Paramount started to do: move.

State officials in Tennessee wrote to Paramount CEO David Ellison and invited the company to move there. Paramount’s board signed off on a relocation plan, with the headquarters going first.

They event started shopping for 400,000 square feet of office space in Nashville.

It was literally a Plan B for Paramount. And they worked swiftly to build it.

Ellison then set October 1 as the deadline for a settlement; either California would negotiate, or Ellison would leave the state.

So at that point they had both their Plan B (a relocation to Tennessee) AND a clear red line under which circumstances they would execute it (no settlement by October 1).

This is really a great example for how to think about a Plan B: Paramount decided in advance that they would leave California if the state rejected their Warner Bros. acquisition. The company knew exactly where it would go, and identified the specific instance that would set the whole plan in motion.

Attorney General Bonta called it “blackmail”. But he’s an idiot who has never run a private company in his life. Honestly, he’s such a moron that he thinks he can freeze a perfectly legal and valid deal, sue a company, insult the executives… and still expect them to remain in the state.

Eventually Governor Gavin Newsom had to step in… a moron in his own right, but smart enough to realize that Paramount was actually going to leave. Newsom also realized that Bonta would almost certainly lose the lawsuit and come away with nothing.

So the governor pushed his own attorney general aside and worked behind the scenes to get a deal done.

Last week, with Paramount’s deadline just days away, California finally settled. Paramount now expects to close the merger within weeks.

And what did Bonta get for all of the trouble he caused?

Paramount agreed to spend an extra $1.5 billion on US production over five years. That’s $300 million a year, a big fat 1% on top of the roughly $30 billion a year it already spends on content.

It also agreed to keep both studio lots open and release the same 30 films a year it offered before he sued. So essentially no real additional benefit.

Bonta tied up months of time in federal court, all on state taxpayers’ dime, haggling over how many movies Hollywood should release each year. They ended up with essentially the deal Paramount offered before the lawsuit, plus 1% additional spending on movies.

It’s genius.

But Paramount was in the driver’s seat because the CEO had a Plan B. He could see the writing on the wall and recognized that he needed another option if things continued to get worse  in California.

It’s a great way to think about risks and having a Plan B, and the thinking doesn’t change with size: decide in advance where your red lines are, and put the pieces in place while things are calm.

This includes options like having a second residency already lined up or legally approved (just like Paramount’s proposed move to Tennessee). That second residency might be out of state, or even out of the country.

Other options include having some assets outside of your home jurisdiction— like a foreign bank account, or even precious metals stored abroad.

This way, if your red lines get crossed, you’ll already know exactly what to do, and be able to execute with ease.

P.S. Understanding and executing on your options is exactly what our Plan B Confidential service is for. Every month it covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from more than 120 countries and a Rolodex of vetted service providers for when you decide to act.

Click here to learn more.

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If they really cared about CO2 emissions, they’d skip the event entirely, because the only thing coming out of their mouths is lies and hot air.

But a few days ago when it was Argentina’s turn, President Javier Milei spoke honestly and boldly.

He told the auditorium the UN “has become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.”

He then piled on a heap of charges to prove his point.

Milei said the UN “allowed chaos, violence and international terrorism to flourish,” and that it had “sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets.”

Of course, this type of hypocrisy is nothing new for the UN.

We’re talking about a body that has appointed China, Cuba, and Venezuela to their Human Rights Council.

Then Milei turned to the pandemic. He said UN agencies pushed lockdowns that were “a global experiment in social control disguised as science,” which he said is why Argentina quit the World Health Organization.

“There’s no shortage of words or resolutions. What is lacking is consequences.”

He’s right, and the proof is the people in that very room who run  the place.

The United Nations, along with other ‘supranational’ bodies like the EU and NATO, has become a sort of retirement home for failed politicians who destroyed their own countries with terrible ideas and worse execution.

In June 2024, after running his country into the ground, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo came out of a national election with barely 5% of the vote.

He resigned that night and left behind a deficit so large that the EU opened disciplinary proceedings against Belgium.

Yet while Belgian voters threw him out for being incompetent, the United Nations made de Croo the head of its its development agency (UNDP) with a $5 billion annual budget to advise poor countries on how to manage their finances.

It’s the same job the UN gave to former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark in 2009, a few months after voters threw her out.

Then theres António Guterres, former Portuguese prime minister who was thrown out of elected office by the voters. The UN then elevated Guterres to the unelected office of running its refugee agency. And he later became Secretary General in 2017.

Speaking of former Portuguese politicians, António Costa resigned as prime minister of Portugal in November 2023, hours after police arrested his chief of staff in a corruption investigation.

Police found more than €75,000 in cash inside the prime minister’s official residence, stuffed in envelopes hidden between books and in champagne crates.

Prosecutors put Costa himself under investigation, after which EU leaders decided he was fit to be President of the European Council, the group of the EU’s 27 national leaders that sets the bloc’s direction.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown was thrown out of office by his voters in 2010. The UN subsequently invented a brand-new title for him: “Special Envoy for Global Education.”

And another ex-prime minister who was ousted from office, the ridiculously unpopular and failed Keir Starmer, is reportedly waiting in the wings for his fancy (and unelected) EU/UN post. Rumor has it that he wants to be the next secretary general of NATO… or even of the UN.

This is the pattern that Argentina’s president has correctly identified: incompetent politicians who couldn’t manage their own countries are often put in charge of global organizations.

Unsurprisingly, the UN’s track record looks exactly like you’d expect.

Last year the world had more armed conflicts than in any year since it was founded in 1945; ironically, the UN was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Great work!

The UN passed nine rounds of sanctions to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. North Korea carried out six nuclear tests anyway.

UN peacekeepers have spent 20 years trying to keep Hezbollah’s weapons out of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah armed itself anyway.

In 2015, it promised to end extreme poverty by 2030. Poverty is still everywhere.

The UN is also a gigantic financial failure. All of these ex-politicians rake in pretty serious salaries, in addition to massive benefits ranging from security details to tax-free earnings. It literally pays to be a failed politician.

Partly as a result of such lavish spending, the UN is now in serious financial straits…

In January, the UN’s secretary-general even warned of the organization’s “imminent financial collapse” and “race to bankruptcy”.

The same guys who want to tell developing nations how to manage their finances can’t manage to stay afloat themselves.

The biggest irony is that these are the same politicians that their respective democratic nations already threw out. Yet now they’ve all been elevated to jobs where they can’t be fired, don’t answer to voters, and were never elected by anyone.

Milei was right: what is lacking is consequences.

The only real consequence the UN may ever face is bankruptcy… and that can’t come fast enough.

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That’s highly unusual. US presidents typically receive foreign leaders at the White House.

In fact, with the exception of popes, no president had met a foreign leader on the tarmac since 1962, when JFK went out to greet British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Judging by the media’s reaction, however, you would think Trump bent the knee and swore fealty to his communist overlords.

There was a short clip of US troops on their hands and knees, smoothing the carpet before Xi stepped out of the plane. It went viral. Chinese were gleeful, and Americans were disgusted, at what appeared to be a humiliation ritual… even though smoothing out the red carpet is pretty standard.

The over-analysis continued. When B-1 bombers passed overhead— Trump flinched and Xi didn’t move a muscle— the Twitterverse exploded with commentary about what that means for American primacy.

Then there were hot takes on Xi’s every smile, every Trump fidget. Commentators claimed that Xi speaking Mandarin through his translator was ‘asserting language dominance’ over Trump.

It’s all ridiculous. I honestly don’t remember an event where so much irrelevant minutia was over-analyzed for hidden meaning.

The larger point is that the US is clearly treating China like an equal— something that America does not do for anyone else. When the President of France, or Ukraine, or anywhere else comes to town, the President receives them at the White House.

China, on the other hand, is now a peer… not a superior. But definitely not a junior partner.

The biggest takeaway, though, seems to be lost on everyone… but hit me right between the eyes.

At a formal White House ceremony the next morning, Xi declared that “the Thucydides Trap can be overcome. . .”

The Thucydides Trap, of course refers to the famous ancient Greek historian who wrote of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. Athens was a declining power and Sparta was the rising power; and the theory asserts that rising and declining powers often go to war against one another.

World War I was an obvious example of the Thucydides Trap. Britain was in decline. Germany was rising fast. War became inevitable.

When Xi made this assertion, most of the media coverage treated his remarks as a wonderful message of peace and reassurance.

BUT NO ONE BOTHERED TO QUESTION HIS PREMISE, i.e. that America is permanently in decline and will be surpassed by China.

Xi obviously likes this analogy because he views China as the rising power… eventually the world’s superpower… and the US as the declining power.

What he essentially said was: America is finished, we’re going to pass you… and while that historically has led to war, I’m going to be super magnanimous and claim that I prefer peace.

Talk about being presumptuous. This guy comes to America’s house and tells everyone that he’s going to dominate?!?

Obviously he believes this— he’s the one who has been steering China for 14 years.

And yes, America is in decline. Between the $40 trillion in debt, Social Security running dry in a few years, foreign central banks dumping dollars for gold, and a Congress too dysfunctional to fix any of it, that much is indisputable.

But America is not in PERMANENT decline.

The problems that the US faces can be fixed with some rational thinking and a few hundred signatures: cutting fraud and waste. Immigration reform. Social Security reform. Regulatory reform to boost productivity growth.

None of this is difficult. But Congress can’t seem to muster the will to make it happen, and voters keep sending the same corrupt idiots to office.

But if you think America has a debt problem, China has even worse debt challenges. Plus their entire economy is run by communist bureaucrats and businesses who ‘innovate’ by stealing other people’s intellectual property.

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of their biggest challenges.

America needs some sensible politicians to fix its problems. China needs a time machine.

They’d have to go back in time to reverse their one-child policy… or undo decades of communism that created a business culture where screwing up means getting shipped off to a ‘reeducation’ facility.

Say the wrong thing and you get disappeared like Jack Ma, who was the richest man in China until he criticized the regulators in 2020, then vanished for three months, and now gets rolled out for the occasional proof of life.

There’s a reason why wealthy Chinese people leave the country. People who have the means hit the exits.

And, seriously, eight decades later, these guys are still whining about Taiwanese independence. Get over it already!

Undoing all of that requires a complete cultural reset.

So when he boasts about becoming the next dominant superpower, Xi is way over his skis.

America has a regulatory problem. China is literally communist. Nothing happens there without the Party’s permission, and it has to steal every idea it can’t come up with itself.

Yes, China has had a good run for the past ~20 years. America’s has been miserable. But past performance is no indication of future returns.

If anything, Xi’s remarks should shame Congress into finally lifting a finger to do the right thing and pass sensible reform.

And you’d think more of the pathetic press would have the dignity to call that out as well.

Unfortunately, Congress and the media tend to attract the worst people on earth, so don’t hold your breath waiting for either one to find a spine.

Time will tell if America can reverse course… and if China can live up to Xi’s fantasy. But that’s why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

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This law had broad, bi-partisan support and passed by a whopping 86-11 margin in the otherwise deadlocked Senate, and 262-159 in the House of Representatives.

Their big idea is to penalize anyone who supports Russia economically by buying their oil & gas, and that specifically singles out China and India— the biggest buyers of Russian crude.

In fairness, India and China aren’t buying Russian oil to help prop up Putin or assist him in winning the war. They don’t really care. They just like the fact that Russian oil is REALLY cheap right now. It’s a good deal, and they like scoring good deals for their country.

At the moment there is no international law preventing anyone from buying Russian oil & gas; this restriction is something the US wants to impose in order to force Russia into a peace over Ukraine.

And it may very well be a good idea in terms of bringing an end to the war in Ukraine. We make no judgment on the moral implications.

Unfortunately the world is not so black and white, especially when you have a $40 trillion national debt. When your fiscal situation is in such dire straits, you have to weight the pro’s and con’s.

And the con’s are numerous: given its gargantuan national debt and the need to borrow an ADDITIONAL $2 trillion per year just to finance the budget deficit and stay afloat, the US government has to rely on foreign creditors more than ever.

In short, America desperately needs cash-rich foreigners to continue buying US government bonds.

It’s a bit difficult to shove this rule down their throats and tell foreign countries, “We will force you to stop buying cheap Russian oil,” yet simultaneously ask those same countries to loan you hundreds of billions of dollars.

The strangest part is that this is nothing new.

Back in February 2022, days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the US and its allies froze about $300 billion of the Russian central bank’s reserves.

Again, whether it was justified is beyond the point. US government bonds had long been considered the safest asset on earth. But every central banker on the planet learned that day that US Treasury bonds were only safe as long as their country stayed on America’s good side.

That’s why foreign governments and central banks have been quietly diversifying away from US government bonds and buying gold… because no other government can freeze the physical gold in their own vaults.

In fact, for the first time in decades, the world’s central banks now hold more gold than they hold US Treasury securities.

China in particular has cut its Treasury holdings in half since 2013, and they’re now at their lowest level since 2008.

Japan, the biggest foreign lender of all, has seen its Treasury holdings fall every month since April.

At peak (in 2011), foreigners owned nearly half of all marketable US Treasury bonds. Now foreigners’ share of Treasury securities is down to just over 30%.

That’s a fairly slow burn over 15 years; it’s not panic selling. But it’s a clear and obvious trend.

These same foreign nations have also been openly discussing how to rely less on the US financial system.

The BRICS countries, led by China, India, Russia, and Brazil, met in Delhi earlier this month and agreed to settle more of their trade in their own currencies.

This is a big deal; if India starts accepting Chinese yuan, or Russia accepts Indian rupee, these nations by definition won’t need to hold as many US dollars. And a decline in demand for US dollars translates into less demand to hold dollar-denominated assets like US government bonds.

Xi Jinping arrived at the White House yesterday, and he came to negotiate on trade as the leader of one of America’s three largest creditors.

China has serious leverage; even though they have been selling their Treasury bonds slowly over time, they still own a ton of them. And if Xi wanted to, he could dump them in a heartbeat and cause a complete collapse of the bond market. Interest rates would skyrocket.

To be clear, such a move would wound China as well. But America would be hurt the most. It’s a nuclear option he could exercise, and it gives him real negotiating power.

America seems to think it’s still the 1990s when everyone was begging to buy US government bonds… which is exactly what gave them the leverage to be able to weaponize the US dollar.

That is simply no longer the world we live in. US finances are incredibly weak. And every time America tries to flex its US dollar power over the financial system, more foreign lenders walk away.

It’s not clear to me if anyone in Washington even understands this reality. No one seems to be questioning, “Will this action increase or decrease foreigners’ demand to buy US dollars and US government bonds?”

And I doubt anyone is really doing any real analysis to weight the benefits of, say, peace in Ukraine, against the potential costs of losing more foreign lenders.

By the way, if you’re thinking, “Big deal, America can finance its own deficits,” it cannot.

The entirety of ALL net private savings in the US, i.e. the total amount that corporations and households manage to save, is only about $2.2 trillion each year. The budget deficit for FY2026 is projected to be about $2.1 trillion.

So basically the US economy would need to dump 95% of its total net savings into US government bonds, leaving just $100 billion to finance EVERYTHING ELSE in the economy, from data centers to mortgages to every other investment.

This is why the US needs foreigners so much. When you burn up that much money, you can’t afford to turn away any lender.

If they keep alienating foreigners, there will essentially be only one lender remaining— and that’s the Federal Reserve, which has the ability to create money out of thin air.

We all saw how that works during the pandemic, when the Fed created roughly $5 trillion to finance all of the debt-fueled government bailouts. The result of that money creation was 9% inflation.

This is why we continue to write that real assets make so much sense.

The Fed can create money by the trillion, and the government can borrow to oblivion. Neither can print an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil. And that’s why real assets tend to hold their value, and often climb, exactly when paper money is falling apart.

Owning a piece of the companies that produce real assets— metals, energy, productive technology— is a great way to protect yourself from higher prices and inflation.

P.S. Since 2022, Schiff Sovereign’s investment research service, Strategic Assets, has focused on exactly those companies: the metals, energy, food, and ships an economy actually runs on.

A company gets featured only when it is already profitable, carries little or no debt, and trades cheap against the cash it is generating. Two precious metals producers on our research list are up more than 300% and nearly 400%, and earlier this year we locked in gains of more than 10x on a small silver producer.

You can learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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He was one of China’s top missile scientists, and his specialty was the equations that steer a rocket to its target.

In 1978 Song traveled to Helsinki for an engineering conference, where he came across researchers applying the same kind of math to human beings. Their idea was that a country’s population could be steered toward a target number, just like a missile.

Back home, Song ran China’s population through the model. It took about five minutes on his missile ministry’s computers, and the answer came back: if Chinese women kept having three children apiece, China would top 4 billion people by 2080.

China’s population was about 1 billion at the time.

In 1980 Song’s projection landed on the desks of the Communist Party’s leaders, and by September they had their solution: one child per family, enforced with fines, forced abortions, and sterilizations.

The policy stayed in place until 2016, and China is still living with the results.

Just 7.9 million babies were born in China last year, down from 9.5 million the year before and the fewest in modern China’s history. Deaths outnumbered births by more than 3 million, and the population shrank for the fourth year in a row.

A shrinking population is horrible for an economy. Economic growth comes from greater productivity (like technological breakthroughs). But it can also come from higher population, i.e. MORE people producing more goods and services.

China has fewer workers every year; its working-age population peaked in 2011 and fell by another 6.6 million last year, to about 850 million.

Worse, China’s population pyramid is upside down: four grandparents and two parents lean on one grown child. Already 323 million Chinese are over 60, nearly a quarter of the country.

Sure, there’s AI and robotics. In 2024 China installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined. But that might be a partial fix at some point in the future. The shortage of young workers is a huge problem today.

I wrote a few weeks ago that China needs a time machine, because no government can go back and conjure up a bunch of 25-year-olds.

China is trying to raise the birth rate anyway, paying parents about $540 a year for every child under three. But even if that works, a baby born today won’t show up for work until the 2040s.

That leaves immigration as the only way to raise the population and increase the number of young workers in the labor pool.

China has never been a country of immigrants, but they’re desperate enough to try.

Last October they launched the “K visa” for young science and technology graduates. Unlike America’s H-1B work visa, it doesn’t require a job offer.

Before the pandemic China had also become the second most popular destination for African students, behind only France. And last year China promised thousands of scholarships across Latin America and the Caribbean.

No one really wants to live in a totalitarian surveillance state, but the one advantage that China has is value for the money: it offers a high standard of living, while the cost of living is fairly low.

The average production worker at a mid-size or large Chinese company makes about $1,000 a month. In an inland city like Chengdu, a one-bedroom apartment outside the center rents for about $260— about a quarter of the paycheck.

Obviously an American manufacturing worker makes a lot more money, but the typical American rental goes for almost $2,000 a month, almost 8x as much. So there’s a lot more value for the money, i.e. value for the salary, in China.

And for young workers from Africa or the Caribbean, that’s an attractive enough deal that they’re willing to overlook the totalitarianism.

So far the results are modest. The last census counted about 850,000 foreigners living in China, a country of 1.4 billion. It won’t necessarily always be this way, but for now the arrivals don’t come close to filling the hole.

And here’s the flip side: the Chinese who have the means to leave the country are moving abroad.

For a decade China has ranked first or second in the world for millionaires lost to emigration— an estimated 15,000 of them in 2024 alone.

All told, the UN estimates that China loses about 300,000 more people than it gains every year. That’s small for a country of 1.4 billion. But the people leaving are the ones with money and options.

So China has two problems stacked on top of each other: too few births, and more people leaving than arriving. As I said, China still needs a time machine to fix its problems.

America’s problems are nothing like that. Problems that the US faces can be fixed with some rational thinking and a few hundred signatures.

It shouldn’t be hard. But they can’t seem to muster the will to make it happen.

Social Security’s main trust fund runs dry in 2032, which triggers an automatic 22% cut to every retirement check. Every single year, the program’s own actuaries publish a menu of fixes. Congress hasn’t picked one.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s own auditor, estimates the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion a year to fraud. Congress hasn’t stopped that either.

None of this takes a miracle. It takes a vote and a pen. And the politicians refuse, which is exasperating.

America’s own population problem is the same kind of unforced error.

China had a one-child policy. America, informally, has a no-child policy. It isn’t written down anywhere. It’s made of prices.

The average age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old— the oldest ever. And with median home prices selling at record levels, those same homebuyers have to scratch together six-figures in savings just for a down payment.

They’re contending with 7% mortgages too, meaning that housing has become completely unaffordable for the young.

The government deserves much of the credit— the National Association of Home Builders calculates that federal, state, and local regulation now adds about $132,000 to the price of a new home, more than a quarter of the total. Each of those rules was signed into law by some level of government, and each can be signed back out.

Then comes the kid. Just having the baby runs about $20,000 in medical bills, and even parents with good insurance pay about $2,700 of that themselves. After that come the diapers, child care, and more.

What a surprise: the US fertility rate is down to about 1.6 children per woman, the lowest ever recorded, and well short of the 2.1 it takes to hold a population steady.

That’s a real problem. But unlike China’s, it’s fixable. Nobody has to invent a time machine. The politicians just have to stop making so many unforced errors.

P.S. Fixable isn’t the same as fixed. Congress has had the answers on its desk for years and does nothing. Hoping the politicians come to their senses is not a plan, and that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

That’s what Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service, Plan B Confidential, is for— actionable research on second residencies, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from more than 120 countries. Click here to learn more.

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His father was a Roman politician, his mother was Greek, and young Cassius Dio grew up in a bilingual household speaking Greek and Latin at a time when the Roman Empire was at its absolute peak.

There was widespread peace and prosperity— so much so that the emperor at the time, Antoninus Pius, spent his entire 20+ year reign without ever coming within 500 miles of a Roman legion.

His was the most peaceful reign the empire ever had. The imperial government busied itself with foreign trade missions, including to Han China; and with perfecting the delivery of clean drinking water across the empire— a feat that wouldn’t be repeated until 1804.

In short, the Romans had a 19th century standard of living as far back as the 2nd century AD, and this is the environment of wealth and abundance in which young Cassius Dio grew up.

But by the time he was an adult and had followed in his father’s footsteps to become a politician, things had changed.

In the decades between his childhood and adulthood, Rome had taken a turn for the worse. The empire had seen multiple wars, plague, barbarian incursions, and assassinations of several emperors.

At one point the Praetorian Guard had even auctioned off the empire to the highest bidder.

But Cassius Dio knew his history, and he knew that Rome had seen tough times before. There had been the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, the depravity of Caligula, and the insanity of Nero. Yet Rome always came back better and stronger than ever.

So Cassius Dio assumed at first that this time would be no different. Rome was in the midst of difficult times by the 190s and early 200s, but it would recover stronger than ever, just as it had in the past.

It was only later in life, after watching things go from bad to worse that he realized this time actually was different. Rome was not coming back.

And it was at this point that he wrote, rather bitterly in his histories of the empire, “Our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.”

This is how we opened our Plan B conference this past weekend in Panama City, Panama— with a historical tale. We told the story of Cassius Dio and explained that, yes, dominant superpowers often go through tough times, and they often recover.

France under Louis XIV went through multiple peasant rebellions and a civil war, yet it recovered and maintained its status as a superpower.

The US went through World Wars and financial crises, and also maintained its status as the dominant superpower.

But sometimes superpowers reach a point where this time really is different. Nothing is certain, and recovery is still possible. But it makes perfect sense to prepare for challenging times ahead.

If the US dollar, for example, loses its status as the global reserve currency, there will absolutely be consequences, and the impact will be widely felt. Ditto for the rising US national debt.

The rest of our event focused ways to mitigate those consequences.

We had attendees and speakers from all over the world, which was quite refreshing. We even had the mayor of Panama City open the event, welcoming our guests at dinner on Thursday night, and come again to our farewell dinner on Saturday night.

It was really nice to see someone of influence in government who was bending over backwards to support anything and everything that our members needed.

My friend and partner Peter Schiff was also on stage with me, and he told the audience where he sees serious cracks in the bond market. This has major implications for the US dollar, the prospect for inflation, and the general future of the United States.

Peter and I both agree that not all is lost. I presented some very simple ideas for the US to get back on track, none of which are remotely controversial.

Bottom line, with the prospect of continued productivity growth from AI, robotics, small modular nuclear reactors, and cheap energy, combined with some modicum of fiscal responsibility, the US can still be OK.

But, at least at the moment, there does not seem to be any interest in Congress to rein in spending and stop the explosion of the national debt.

And this is why having a Plan B is so important. It would be completely foolish to believe that a $40 trillion national debt, the looming insolvency of Social Security, $2 trillion annual deficits, and an annual interest bill that mops up 25% of tax revenue will all be consequence-free.

That’s why we presented so many options from around the world. We had speakers presenting about second citizenship programs, foreign residency, global real estate, tax planning, multiple options for gold storage, as well as some discussion about tokenization and crypto.

We even had bankers from a well-capitalized private bank opening accounts for people on the spot.

This is important stuff. A good Plan B is like an insurance policy— you don’t wait until your house burns down, you get sensible coverage in advance to mitigate specific risks.

The whole point of a Plan B is to be in a position of strength regardless of what happens, or doesn’t happen, next. It’s not complicated, but it takes some sensible and deliberate planning.

For more than 15 years we’ve been providing some of the best research in the world on these topics.

Every month it covers second citizenships, foreign residency, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from more than 120 countries and a Rolodex of vetted service providers for when you decide to take action.

So even if you weren’t at our event, make sure you have access to Plan B Confidential. Click here to learn more.

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By the time he sang it, the crowd had already been told that not caring wasn’t an option.

His opening act was the rapper Macklemore, who used his set to explain: “One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America, and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart. Free Palestine.”

Then he performed his protest song “Hind’s Hall” while footage of the destruction in Gaza played on the screens.

Doing that, two nights in a row, got him kicked off the tour.

Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium outside Boston, refused to host Macklemore at Sheeran’s two upcoming shows there, citing “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” Other stadium owners on the tour joined him.

With stadiums refusing to have Macklemore, the tour’s promoter cut him from the remaining dates.

Macklemore didn’t care. He said his mission was accomplished. “I didn’t need 10 shows from Ed,” he wrote on Instagram afterward. “I needed two. Two chances to stand in front of 90,000 people.”

To be clear, Macklemore has every right to say whatever he wants at his own shows, to people who paid to hear it. But activists don’t seem to think the venue owners, stage crews, and Ed Sheeran himself have the right to refuse to be a part of Macklemore’s protests.

Biting the hand that feeds, Macklemore criticized Sheeran, who he said “couldn’t get past his public facing, ‘I don’t take sides.'”

Sheeran answered like a normal adult.

“There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics— my audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds,” he wrote. “Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum.”

In other words, some people just want to go to a damn concert.

It was Macklemore or the tour, the promoter had warned, and Sheeran said he would never “abandon the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living.”

But fanatics argue that nobody gets to stay out of it.

Macklemore said so himself: “There is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed.” The logic is that Gaza has to be solved, so Gaza has to be shoved down people’s throats.

And for his heinous crime of neutrality, Ed Sheeran is being canceled.

The day Sheeran posted his statement, every supporting act on the tour quit in protest. One of them wrote that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.”

In Ireland, a radio station pulled Sheeran’s music from its playlists.

An Irish newspaper op-ed called him a “gutless coward.” The Irish actor Liam Cunningham wrote, “We know who Ed Sheeran is now.”

Even the children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel piled on. No surprise there— her toddler show features a nonbinary “they/them” co-star and she now campaigns on Gaza, so she’s in the business of promoting political views where they don’t belong.

“Ed Sheeran is making a political statement to his fans when he does a concert to support Ukraine,” she wrote, “but considers Palestine too dangerous and political.”

And yes, Sheeran played a Ukraine benefit in 2022. But everyone there bought a ticket FOR the cause. Nobody at MetLife bought a ticket for Gaza.

Sadly, the fanatics do it because it works.

Macklemore pledged the $1 million he’d earned on the tour to Palestinian relief groups, and challenged Kraft to match it.

Kraft answered that Sheeran had already called him, told him he was donating $2 million “to aid in the region to fight this humanitarian crisis,” and asked Kraft to match it, which Kraft did.

It hasn’t bought Sheeran any peace. Tomorrow he plays Philadelphia, and two activist groups have announced a protest outside the stadium. They call it “his first show after caving to Zionist threats.”

Even when the activists successfully bully people into supporting their cause, it’s not enough for them. Nothing is acceptable but total, undying fealty to their political opinions.

And every cause claims the same right to your attention and support.

If nobody is allowed to be neutral about Gaza, nobody is allowed to be neutral about the climate, or race, or gender. Each of those causes has its own true believers, and they’re just as certain as Macklemore that THEIR emergency can’t wait.

So climate activists glue themselves to the road you take to work, and deface priceless works of art. Your kid’s school teaches gender ideology, and the parents who object get treated like domestic terrorists.

Then the ballgame opens with a knee for BLM. Try to get a coffee and the Starbucks baristas write their political slogans on your cup. Go to the movies and get lectured by Hollywood. Watch a football game and get shamed by the shaving brand Gillette, somewhat ironically, over toxic masculinity.

And what are you supposed to do? Raise a fist in solidarity? Be aware…? Give some corrupt activists money, so they can spend it on mansions for personal use, as the leaders of Black Lives Matter did?

Taken to its logical conclusion, your life gets consumed by things you’re forced to care about and can’t affect anyway. And it’s all at the service of people who’d rather hold you captive than entertain you, or teach your kids, or serve you coffee— the things you’re paying them to do.

Not every place lives like this. There are many cities, states, and countries where this type of behavior is not tolerated.

Most of the time I write about a Plan B as a way to protect your savings, and your freedom, from a bankrupt US government.

But this is also what a Plan B is for. Freedom is about lifestyle too, including freedom from the fanatics who insist that nobody gets to stay out of it.

It’s the option to opt out— somewhere to live where you can raise your kids, drive to work, watch a ballgame, order a coffee, and go to a concert without any of it turning into somebody else’s protest.

P.S. If you’d rather choose where you live by how you want to live, that’s what Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service, Plan B Confidential, is for— actionable research on second residencies, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from more than 120 countries.

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The US economy was growing at one of its fastest paces ever; GDP was up nearly 5% the year before— and that’s real growth, before adding inflation, which itself was just 1.4%.

Unemployment was 4%, the lowest in thirty years. And there was no other country on the planet that could come close to rivaling America’s dominance.

Best of all, the federal government was running a surplus… a real one. It was so strong that, even excluding the Social Security surplus, the government took in $86 billion more than it spent.

So the Treasury didn’t need to borrow any money. Naturally it still held bond auctions, because when you issue the global reserve currency, you have to give investors a safe place to park their money. But Treasury was retiring more debt than it issued, and even started buying its own bonds back early.

And after wondering what “the meaning of the word is is”, Bill Clinton bragged that the country was “on track to pay down nearly $300 billion in debt” by the end of the year.

And in the middle of all that, the 10-year Treasury yield hit 6.79%.

In other words, investors wanted a 6.79% annual return to hold extremely safe US government bonds… at a moment when America was on top of the world and the government’s finances were in their best shape in decades.

That interest rate was not a crisis. After all, the government didn’t have to borrow to keep the lights on or the military funded or Social Security solvent. So they didn’t really care.

The Treasury’s interest bill was shrinking as a share of tax revenue every single year.

Imagine that.

Fast forward to earlier this week, and after a hot inflation report and with oil back above $100, the same 10-year yield briefly crossed 5%.

The reaction was instant panic.

Imagine being able to go back in time for a moment… back to January 2000. Imagine talking to an economist back then. You explain that you’re from the future, and that in 2026, the national debt is $40 trillion and growing faster than the economy. The foreign central banks that used to buy America’s debt are dumping Treasuries and buying gold instead.

You explain that there are wars in Ukraine and Iran, socialism is creeping back into American politics, and Congress can barely function.

You then ask the economist from January 2000 to guess where they think the 10-year yield would be, given all of that bad news.

They’d probably guess 10%, maybe 12%, and they’d be amazed to hear it only just crossed 5%.

So why did it take so long?

Because after the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed cut rates to zero… and left them there for seven years. There were a few ceremonial hikes, but when COVID arrived, the Fed slashed rates right back to zero.

It was able to do this because the Fed conjured trillions of dollars out of thin air… and used that money to buy bonds and suppress yields.

The 10-year was so low, in fact, that the federal government could issue those notes at less than 0.5%.

For thirteen years money was essentially free, and an entire generation came to believe that was normal. It wasn’t, and that era is clearly over.

Think about what an opportunity that was: when you can borrow at 0.5%, $2 trillion in debt costs just $10 billion a year. Investing that money at even a measly 1% means the government would be making money on its debt.

A 1% hurdle rate is not particularly high. But Congress couldn’t manage even that much.

Despite racking up tens of trillions in debt, there’s realistically nothing to show for all of that money: the national debt has quadrupled since the financial crisis, while the economy has only doubled.

Now, each year, much of the national debt matures, and the Treasury doesn’t have the money to pay it back. So they have to issue new debt to repay the old debt.

Problem is, the new debt is issued at much higher rates. They were paying 0.5% on the old debt. The new yield of 5% is TEN times the interest on the same amount of debt.

And with an average maturity of about six years, most of the $40 trillion rolls over within just a few years… which means before long the annual interest bill will reach $2 trillion per year.

Add nearly $3 trillion for Social Security and Medicare, and that’s the vast majority of tax revenue.

Literally everything else, including the military, roads, and light bill at the White House, is funded with more debt.

In 2000, the government could shrug at a 6.79% yield because it was paying debt down. Today everyone’s panicking at 5% because Congress borrows $2 trillion a year and can’t stop.

So, is Congress going to suddenly find its inner fiscal discipline?

I’m not holding my breath.

That leaves exactly one way to get the 10-year back down, and it’s the same way the Fed did it back in 2020: conjure more money out of thin air and make capital infinite.

And as the world discovered shortly after in 2021 and 2022, the consequence of that policy is inflation.

P.S. In 2000, a 6.79% Treasury with 1.4% inflation was a fantastic deal. Today’s 5% Treasury with the inflation that’s coming is a losing one.

Real assets are where you come out ahead: gold, energy, and industrial metals rise when the dollar falls. The profitable, debt-free companies that produce them are what we research in Schiff Sovereign’s Strategic Assets.

You can learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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Oil refineries run at tremendous heat and pressure, so whenever the power goes out, all that heat and pressure has to go somewhere. It’s basic physics. Hence why the plant burned it off through the flare stacks, with black smoke visible for miles.

The power came back around 7 p.m., but the plant stayed down, and as of Monday ExxonMobil still hadn’t said when it would restart, likely up to a week.

Bear in mind this is a plant that processes about 275,000 barrels of crude a day— close to 10% of the region’s fuel supply.

But that’s not what caused the highest diesel prices ever.

Even before this refinery was taken out of commission, the national average price of diesel went above $6 a gallon last week for the first time ever. Filling up a long-haul semi truck now costs more than $1,000.

It’s important to note that a barrel of crude oil is almost useless until somebody turns it into something. A refinery cooks the crude and breaks it apart into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, the raw material for plastics, etc.

Everyone knows about the squeeze on oil due to the war with Iran. But the shortage of REFINERIES is another issue.

Sure, the wars have taken a toll on refineries and other fuel plants. Iran bombed Bahrain’s only refinery, shut ever since. It also wrecked half of Shell’s Pearl GTL in Qatar, the world’s largest plant for turning natural gas into diesel, jet fuel and lubricants. Ukrainian drones, meanwhile, have cut Russia’s refining by roughly a third.

And the rest of the world’s refineries can’t pick up the slack.

US refineries are already running at almost 98% of capacity. There’s no spare refining capacity, and that’s because governments have treated refining as the enemy of humanity for the past decade.

For example, ten years ago Britain had six refineries. Then the UK government announced a ban on new gasoline and diesel cars and piled punitive taxes specifically on refineries, and today Britain is down to four.

I guess the “Just Stop Oil” fanatics are happy now. They actually declared victory last year and hung up their hi-vis (oil-based) vests, and quit (oil-based) gluing themselves to things, because “no new oil” had become official government policy in the UK.

California, meanwhile, imposed a new penalty tax on refinery margins, and then passed climate change regulations for refineries that are virtually impossible to achieve.

Unsurprisingly, in the past year, California lost two refineries: Phillips 66’s in Los Angeles and Valero’s in Benicia near San Francisco. That’s 17% of California’s refining capacity.

Then Newsom panicked and changed his tune, realizing that California fuel prices would surge. He suddenly promised to “work closely with refiners.” He directed his own energy commission to pause the punitive refinery tax for five years. He even pushed legislators to consider paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Valero to keep their plant open.

Too little, too late. The refiners left, or idled their plants. You can only bite the hand that feeds so many times before they take action.

But of course, everyone will pay for Newsom’s idiocy, because diesel moves everything. So much of American imports arrive at California ports (like the Port of Long Beach), and trucks haul it across the country from there. Trains do the rest.

And nearly every big truck and freight train runs on diesel, which is now a lot more expensive in California. So the cost of Newsom’s lunacy is paid by every consumer.

Harvest is starting across the Midwest right now, and everything from tractors to grain dryers burns fuel. Phosphate (another critical fertilizer ingredient) is mined and hauled with diesel.

So the farmer pays $6 a gallon, the trucker pays $6 a gallon… and consumers reimburse these costs in the form of higher prices.

And let’s not forget, winter is coming.

Heating oil is diesel by another name (it comes out of the same refinery), and about 5 million American homes heat with it, more than 80% of them in the Northeast. One Gulf oil executive warned last week of “a very difficult winter coming in Northwest Europe. This is only the beginning.”

Bottom line, the power outage at Channahon is a problem. But it’s a small problem compared to the larger war on refineries.

With the spare refineries gone, even the slightest issue at remaining refineries now shows up in the price of diesel, food and everything else that moves on a truck.

Unexpected disruptions from war and power outages are one thing.

But governments deliberately villainizing refiners and chasing them out of town, for the crime of creating the energy the world desperately relies on, is another.

Their green policies and ESG mandates also helped drive a decade of underinvestment in the physical things civilization runs on: ships, mines, oil fields, smelters… and refineries.

Now the world is in the midst of a destructive war. When there is no spare capacity, every disruption has to be resolved by price, and the companies that own the scarce, strategic assets collect the difference.

And owning a piece of those companies yourself is the best way to protect yourself from higher prices and inflation.

P.S. That’s the whole point of Schiff Sovereign’s investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets: profitable, low-debt companies that own or move real things, bought while they’re still cheap.

Two oil tanker owners we featured when nobody wanted them are up more than 180% and 130%— one of them runs the ships that haul diesel— and our palm oil grower is up nearly 140%.

If you’d like to see the full research, you can learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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“We don’t have a revenue problem,” he said. “We have a spending problem.” Contain the spending, add 3% growth, and America can “grow our way out of this.”

That’s a nice idea… and, it’s possible. The key part there is the spending freeze: arrest the growth in federal spending, and the deficit will eventually melt away.

The problem, of course, is that Congress won’t even cut obvious fraud. So I don’t think taxpayers should hold their breath for sudden fiscal responsibility.

The growth side of his approach is feasible. But what does “grow our way out” of the debt actually mean?

The national debt is now a little over $40 trillion. Meanwhile the entire US economy— everything produced by every business and every worker in the country over a full year— is about $32.5 trillion.

This means the debt is 123% of GDP, i.e. the all-important debt-to-GDP ratio is 123%.

That ratio is the key indicator that bond investors watch. And it’s the number Secretary Bessent is talking about when he says the US can grow its way out of debt.

The whole point is to bring that percentage down, from 123% today to something more like 80% or 90%.

Notice what he did NOT say. He didn’t say the debt would shrink. He didn’t say the deficit would go away. Growing your way out means the debt keeps getting bigger… it just grows at a slower pace, while the economy grows at a much more rapid pace.

Specifically, the US national debt has been growing at an average 6.7% per year over the past few years… which means ‘growing our way out’ will require the US economy to expand by at LEAST 7% per year, just to make a dent in the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Now go back to Bessent’s number: he’s talking about 3% growth.

And when he says 3%, he means real growth, i.e. the economy producing 3% more goods and services than it did the year before. That means more cars, more houses, more software, more oil… more actual stuff.

But we just established that the economy will require 7% growth in order to fix the debt challenge.

So where, exactly, is the other 4% supposed to come from?

It comes from inflation. In short the economy produces 3% more stuff, but the stuff costs 4% more. In total that gets you to more or less 7% GDP growth, while the debt increases by 6.7%.

And with that, you have a tiny improvement to America’s dismal debt-to-GDP ratio.

This is already the path that they’re on; in the last year, America’s total (i.e. nominal) GDP growth was 6.5%. Of that, only 2% was real growth, i.e. the production of more goods and services.

The rest, about 4.5%, was from rising prices.

So “growing our way out” is really just a polite way of saying inflation. And the government is effectively telegraphing a 4% inflation target. As it happens, that’s about where inflation already is right now.

In other words, the plan is to make everything else more expensive faster than the debt grows, and to call that a fix.

Four percent a year doesn’t sound like much. But it compounds, and at that rate a dollar loses about a third of its purchasing power in ten years.

The solution is to own the stuff they can’t conjure out of thin air.

A government can print money by the trillion, but it can’t print an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil, or anything else that’s real or critical to the economy.

That’s why real assets tend to hold their value when the currency is losing value… and why the businesses that produce those assets— gold miners, energy companies, copper producers, chip makers, etc.— often do spectacularly well.

P.S. Real assets are the whole premise of Schiff Sovereign’s investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets: profitable, well-run companies that produce the things a government can’t print, researched while they’re still cheap.

We locked in gains of more than 10x on a small silver producer we featured last year, and a gold producer has gone up 5x yet still trades cheaper against its earnings than the day we wrote it up. Two oil tanker owners we covered when nobody wanted them are up more than 150% and 110%.

The subscription comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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Whenever my unit wasn’t deployed or in the field, most of my duty days were spent in a top-secret facility called a SCIF— the kind of place that was guarded by military police and didn’t have any windows.

But every Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. sharp, my unit would formally assemble at the brigade motor pool to conduct routine PMCS checks— Army-speak for vehicle maintenance.

September 11, 2001, started like any other Tuesday morning.

Being on time in the Army is considered late, so naturally we all showed up to the motor pool around 10 minutes early.  And the regular business after the formation only lasted about 5 minutes.

But in that brief 15-minute window, from the time we were milling around the motor pool to the time I was going back to the SCIF, the entire world changed.

I was about to walk into the building when one of my sergeants approached me and said, “Sir, I don’t know if you heard, but terrorists just flew planes into the World Trade Center.”

My reaction was disbelief. This dude is crazy. But the look on his face suggested he was serious.

I mumbled some meekish “whaaaaat” sort of reaction and exhaled a pfff of confusion, but then walked inside where the military police at the desk were refreshing CNN.com. I saw the screen. Images of carnage in New York. It was real.

After handing over my little Nokia bar phone, I was buzzed in and walked down one of the halls where someone had set up a TV— an old-school cathode ray tube mounted on a big rolling cart, just like the ones my teachers used back in middle school.

NBC was on. The chipper, perma-smile morning crew was still trying to anchor the horrific news coverage and doing their best to make sense of what was happening. Then legendary news veteran Tom Brokaw took over and brought those of us in the room— and the rest of America— up to speed.

Everyone over the age of 35 or so has their own version of this ‘where was I’ story about 9/11.

They’re called ‘flashbulb memories,’ and they’re forever emblazoned in our brains. It made me realize that my dad wasn’t kidding around when he once went into vivid detail about the moment he heard that JFK had been shot.

We’ve experienced a few others over the past 25 years.

Many of us remember where we were when we heard about the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I certainly do— my best friend called me and told me to turn on CNBC. It was Sunday September 14, 2008… and they were broadcasting live footage of Lehman Brothers employees filing into their office with cardboard boxes to clean out their desks.

The global financial system nearly collapsed the following day.

Similarly, many of us remember where we were when we first realized that COVID was real.

All of these flashbulb events over the past quarter century— with today being the 25th anniversary of 9/11— are reminders that the world can change in an instant.

Even if you’re too young to remember 9/11, you probably at least remember the pandemic. Everything changed, practically overnight.

To be frank, there will be others. We may see a day similar to the September 2008 financial crisis, when Americans tune in to see the bond market collapsing and Treasury yields surging… because foreigners are dumping their US government bonds all at once.

The irony is that a large part of America’s $40 trillion national debt… and hence the challenges with deficits, inflation, etc… is in large part due to the seismic shift after 9/11.

Before 9/11, America was in solid shape. The federal government was running a small budget surplus. And while the economy was slowing a bit and working off its hangover from the excesses of the tech boom in the 1990s, life was good.

But America went to war less than four weeks later on October 7, 2001. It lasted for twenty years and cost trillions upon trillions of dollars. Spending surged. The bureaucracy expanded. The surveillance state exploded.

And it all kicked off a borrowing spree that continues to this day. With the national debt now in excess of $40 trillion, more than 125% of GDP, America’s standing is waning rapidly.

Yes, there’s plenty of good news today and cause for optimism.

But the reality is that foreign ownership of US government bonds is falling. Even allies are starting to diversify. And it’s not hard to understand why: the US debt situation is a complete disaster.

So if this trend continues, we could absolutely experience another flashbulb-type event, where the whole world witnesses, in real time, the loss of America’s primacy.

The reaction will be similar to what most of us experienced on 9/11: total disbelief.

To be clear, nobody dies when yields spike, and a bond market crash is nothing like watching the towers fall. But the disbelief will be identical, because almost no one thinks it can happen here. It’s not supposed to happen here.

But it can. It just might. And if it does, just like the other flashbulb events—  9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the pandemic— the world could change dramatically in just 15 minutes.

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Cigar Lake itself was fine, nothing was wrong with the mine. The problem was their sulfuric acid plant— a crucial ingredient in processing uranium ore— broke down.

Normally they would have just bought sulfuric acid from somewhere else while they fixed their company-owned acid plant. But this year that’s not so easy.

About half the world’s seaborne sulfur moves through the Strait of Hormuz, and since the war with Iran began, those shipments have almost completely stopped. China, the world’s largest exporter of sulfuric acid, restricted its own exports in May to make sure they had enough.

So a simple mechanical problem at an acid plant caused a two-week shutdown of the world’s largest uranium mine.

Two weeks is a really long time for a huge mine like Cigar Lake to have an unscheduled shutdown; that’s because uranium is already in critical supply— there simply isn’t enough uranium being produced right now to keep up with demand.

The math is easy: miners produced roughly 155 million pounds of uranium in year. Reactors burn about 185 million pounds. So there’s already a significant deficit.

For the past several years, the deficit between uranium production versus reactor demand was covered by stockpiles that had been building up over decades. So the nuclear industry effectively burned through its uranium ‘savings’.

But those stockpiles of uranium are now basically depleted… which means that nuclear power companies will need to rely on uranium production in order to meet their needs.

This is a problem… and one that we can quantify.

Because uranium is literally THE most important resource for a nuclear reactor, the reactor companies tend to line up their uranium supply needs years and years in advance through forward contracts and term agreements.

There’s no black magic here— it’s a pretty predictable quantity. A 2GW nuclear plant, for example, already knows exactly how much electrical capacity they have, so they know how much fuel they need to serve their customers… hence they can forecast their future uranium needs.

For this year at least, US nuclear power companies have more or less the amount of uranium that they anticipate needing. But next year they’ll be in a deficit… and one that grows each year.

By 2030, US nuclear power companies will be short 40% of their anticipated uranium needs. By 2033, they’ll be short 91%. Basically all of it.

Big deal, right? Existing uranium producers can simply mine more.

But that’s not really happening… at least, not at current prices.

Kazatomprom (based in Kazakhstan) is the largest uranium miner in the world. And their management is deliberately pulling back on production right now.

The company believes that it’s simply not worth mining and selling uranium at the current price. Why bother producing at your full potential now when they KNOW the price is going to rise in the future, hence they make a LOT more money in the future if they mine less now.

OK well, the big shortage in the 2030s is still a few years away. So the industry has time to start more mines and bring new uranium production online.

Well, that’s easier said than done.

A company called NexGen Energy discovered a major uranium deposit in Saskatchewan back in 2014. They finally got their construction license this March, started building in August, and expect their first ore in 2030.

In other words, SIXTEEN years from discovery to production— and that’s about average for the industry.

You can’t just turn on uranium production like a light switch; it takes years and years to make most things happen in business, and uranium mining is no different.

This is common across many real assets— there has been years of underinvestment. Very few new uranium mines. Very little oil & gas exploration. Not enough new shipyards, refineries, smelters, etc.

It takes several years… plus a lot of risk capital… to discover a new resource deposit and bring a mine to life. Years.

Demand can grow much more quickly. Just look at the increase in electricity demand (thanks in large part to data centers). When electricity demand surges, but the supply of the fuel required to generate electricity is stagnant, the end result is higher prices.

And not just higher electricity prices— higher prices for the fuel as well, i.e. higher natural gas prices, higher uranium prices, and even higher coal prices.

(Coal is especially interesting— it was basically chased out of town. NO ONE wanted to invest in a new coal mine thanks to Greta Thunberg. Yet the International Energy Agency now expects coal-fired power generation to rise this year to make up for energy imbalances. Stagnant supply meets rising demand.)

That’s tough news for anyone with an electricity bill. But you can also be on the other side of it and make money from this trend.

When supply and demand is so fundamentally unbalanced, the companies that produce these scarce resources tend to perform extremely well.

This is the primary investment ethos for our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

We look for the most critical resources that the economy runs on; we find sectors where there has been chronic underinvestment and focus on undervalued yet successful companies with great management and balance sheets.

Energy has been good to us. Two oil tanker owners we featured when nobody wanted them are up more than 150% and 110%.

A small South American oil producer we featured last month has no debt and sells every barrel at the wellhead to one of the largest oil companies on earth— so shipping is someone else’s problem. A typical new well takes years to pay for itself. This company’s fastest did it in 37 days.

Learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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The man currently polling in second place to become the next President of France has put forward an ingenious solution to tackling France’s national debt, currently standing at around 117% of the country’s GDP.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon says, “All we have to do is take the 18% held by the Bank of France and chuck it in the fire.”

This is the guy who has a real shot at running the second-largest economy in the eurozone, and he’s telling voters that roughly €636 billion of what their government owes can simply be erased.

And the voters like the sound of it. Of course they do, who doesn’t love getting something for nothing?

Quick economics lesson for the brilliant man who wants to lead France: the Bank of France bought those bonds with euros it created for the purpose… the European Central Bank’s own explainer says buying bonds “creates money in the banking system.”

Normally those euros come back out of circulation as the debt gets repaid. Mélenchon’s plan skips that part: the government ‘throws the debt in the fire’ and doesn’t pay it back. So the central bank eats the loss… meaning that the €636 billion conjured out of nothing stays in the system.

This creates inflation, plain and simple.

Goods and services cannot be created out of nothing. Euros can. So when there’s suddenly more money in the system relative to the same amount of goods and services, the end result is inflation.

The other obvious implications is that France would still owe the rest of its debt… and those lenders will have seen that France is willing to default. I wonder what that would do to French bond yields?

Or maybe they’ll rest easy with Mélenchon’s assurance that “I’m not going after private creditors, not at this step in any case.”

Why do French voters even care about the national debt? Because they’ve been feeling the consequences of idiotic fiscal policy for years.

Interest alone costs the French government more than its entire defense budget. There’s no taxing their way out, either: the French are already the second-most-taxed people in the developed world, at about 44% of GDP.

So every fix takes some benefit away from taxpayers. Last year’s plan canceled two public holidays, froze pensions, and cut civil-service jobs… and the prime minister who proposed the solutions was thrown out.

The plan before that raised the retirement age from 62 to 64 brought the biggest protests France had seen in decades; that plan has now been suspended to keep the current government alive.

Meanwhile, growth was less than 1% last year, and unemployment is at its highest since 2020.

And here comes Mélenchon with a plan that costs nobody anything: delete a portion of the debt and go back to spending as if everything is OK.

However dumb the solution, at least the French are talking about the problem.

The US government crossed $40 trillion in debt last month. That’s roughly 123% of GDP, worse than France.

America gets away with it, for now, because the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. Central banks hold a lot of their strategic financial reserves in US Treasury bonds, so Congress has always had a line of foreigners waiting to lend it money no matter how large the deficit.

But that line of foreigners is now getting shorter. Foreign holdings of Treasuries fell by $72 billion in June alone, China’s are at their lowest since 2008, and so far this year foreigners have bought just 7% of the new debt the US government issued.

The reasons aren’t a mystery: a dysfunctional government that can’t even pass a budget or eliminate fraud from its spending, while increasingly weaponizing access to the US dollar system.

When the foreign buyers stop showing up, America finds itself with France’s problem. Automatic cuts to Social Security are only six years away. Interest on the debt is already larger than the defense budget.

Extreme government spending is already pushing inflation higher… and socialists are everywhere now promising to spend even more.

These people genuinely believe that money is something you can conjure out of thin air with no consequence.

But whether they cancel the debt, or simply continue to ignore it, the consequence ultimately comes back to inflation.

That’s because conjuring money out of thin air, or borrowing from future generations to spend today, doesn’t produce one more barrel of oil, one more bushel of wheat, or one more pound of copper. It just produces more euros and dollars.

America has been here before.

Through the 1970s the US government ran deficits for Vietnam AND a historic expansion of welfare spending… then cut the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. They created new money to cover the difference.

Consumer prices doubled over the decade, and the Dow finished 1979 where it started 1970, which after inflation was a loss of about half in real terms.

Meanwhile, gold went from $35 an ounce to $850. And oil went from about $3.40 a barrel to nearly $30. The world’s most important (and scarce) resources not only held their value, but they dominated. And the companies that produced them did far better.

Over roughly the same stretch, Barron’s index of gold mining stocks rose more than 1,200% while the S&P 500 managed 43%.

The new money has to go somewhere, and it flows into whatever the government cannot create more of.

Today, a lot of the companies that produce those real assets like metals, energy, food, and the ships that carry them, are still cheap.

We find them for subscribers of our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

Gold and silver moved first, as central banks started diversifying out of the dollar. A small silver producer we featured in April 2025 rose more than 10x in ten months. A gold producer has gone up 5x, yet it’s earning money so fast that the stock is cheaper against its earnings today than the day we wrote it up. It pays a dividend, too.

Now the rest is showing life. A zinc producer we featured is up more than 150% in under a year. A tin miner is up more than 230% and trading at all-time highs. Two oil tanker owners we bought when nobody wanted them are up more than 150% and 110%, and one just reported the best quarter in its history.

Learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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The Left Party (the former communists) wants a wealth tax on billionaires… it’s Bernie Sanders’ dream come true. They’ve also floated a new property tax on expensive homes, plus an exit tax on any billionaire who tries to leave.

Then there’s the Green Party, which has its own ideas about how the top 1% should contribute more. They back the billionaire wealth tax too… but they differ with the communists on how it should be spent (climate change versus redistribution).

Obviously it’s not a done deal yet— the Greens and the Communists still have to win… and then hammer out the details. But Sweden’s wealthiest citizens aren’t waiting around to find out what happens next.

Bloomberg reports that Swedish tax lawyers are already busy; clients are setting up foreign structures, rewriting their succession plans, and asking whether their companies should keep their headquarters in Sweden at all.

Klas Tikkanen, a senior executive at the private equity firm Nordic Capital, told Bloomberg: “I think it could turn into a real exodus, especially if they announce an exit tax.”

Notice the word “if.” Nothing has passed, and nobody has even voted yet. The mere threat is a tangible enough risk that anyone in the cross hairs is planning to move.

It’s not hard to understand why; wealthy people are, by far, the most mobile social class… and there are lots of nice places in the world that don’t come with six harsh months of winter.

It’s interesting that this experiment has already run twice, and both times the rich people left.

Norway’s center-left government raised the wealth tax in 2022, and for business owners the bill roughly doubled in a single year, by one estimate.

By the end of 2022, more wealthy Norwegians had left the country than in the previous thirteen years combined. Kjell Inge Røkke, who had been Norway’s richest man, paid about $20 million in tax in 2021 and moved to Lugano the next year.

But even Sweden itself already ran this wealth tax experiment once. And it was an abject failure.

Sweden introduced a wealth tax in 1911 and kept it for the next 96 years. By the end it was taking 1.5% a year on net worth above roughly $200,000 for a single person— not exactly billionaire territory. Roughly 280,000 Swedes were paying it.

People were leaving in droves to avoid paying the oppressive levy.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, left Sweden in 1973 and eventually settled in Switzerland. He had plenty of companionship: by the 2000s the Swedish tax authority estimated that some $70 billion had been parked abroad for tax reasons.

When H&M’s main owner, Stefan Persson, threatened to leave in the 1990s, the Social Democrats simply exempted him— from 1997, controlling owners of listed companies paid no wealth tax on their shares.

As always, a tax that was originally meant for ‘the wealthy’ increasingly fell on middle class homeowners whose assessed values kept rising.

And what did the tax collect for all that trouble? By the end it was bringing in about $800 million a year, around 0.3% of Sweden’s tax revenue— a rounding error.

So in 2007, Sweden gave up on taxing wealth entirely, i.e. even one of the most socialist nations on earth had figured out that a wealth tax doesn’t work.

Less than twenty years later, the Communists have completely forgotten this lesson and think that they can do it better.

It’s amazing when you think about it— Sweden’s nearly century-long wealth tax experiment failed miserably…. but the Communists are apparently so smart that their wealth tax will be successful.

The arrogance is extraordinary. But all too common.

Across the pond in the Land of the Free, America’s communists think that their wealth tax ideas are also brilliant and original.

California voters will decide in November on a supposedly “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires. Yet even Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist who co-wrote the proposal, acknowledges that it’s not really a one-time tax: “I’m not there to pretend that it’s one, once, and never again.”

Meanwhile New York’s state legislature has a bill to tax billionaires’ unrealized gains… every year.

And Senator Elizabeth Warren isn’t satisfied with billionaires; her ultra-millionaire tax proposal bundles a wealth tax on centimillionaires, plus an additional 40% exit tax on anyone who renounces US citizenship.

When the place you live starts treating productive people and their money as enemies to punish, rather than partners to welcome, the rational move is to think about your own Plan B.

Notice that wealthy Swedes haven’t actually left. But they are making plans, setting up the structures etc., now, while they still can. This way, if the tax passes, they already have somewhere to go. If they are lucky, most of them will never use it.

That’s the entire logic of a Plan B.

You don’t have to go anywhere. The point is to make sure you have an option in case you ever need to use it.

P.S. The hardest part is knowing where to start.

That’s what our Plan B Confidential service is for— actionable research on second residencies, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, drawn from sixteen years of boots-on-the-ground work and a network of trusted providers around the world.

Plus a Rolodex of vetted service providers when you decide to take action.

Click here to learn more about Schiff Sovereign’s Plan B Confidential.

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New York’s top socialist has a fake union card and a townhouse from Dad

Gustavo Gordillo tells a great story.

He’s the son of Peruvian immigrants who “had nothing”. He worked fast food and cleaned houses. He rose up to become a unionized electrician, renting a modest apartment and fighting for every New Yorker squeezed by landlords and capitalist pigs.

And today he’s co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Then the New York Post started pulling records.

It turns out his grandfather came to America in 1958 to practice medicine and became president of the Ohio Psychiatric Association. That’s pretty accomplished for a family that “had nothing”.

It’s true that Gordillo joined the electricians’ union as an apprentice in April 2024. But he quickly stopped showing up for work and was thrown of the union for “prolonged absence.”

A union source told the Post that Gordillo took the slot “just for show.”

And it turns out his ‘modest apartment’ that he rents to burnish his working class street cred is also for show; Gordillo doesn’t actually live there, he actually lives in a posh townhome that his parents spent millions renovating with nonunion labor.

Last week, Gordillo’s fellow comrades on the New York City DSA’s leadership committee voted him into one of their top jobs— coordinating their socialist agenda with Mayor Mamdani’s office.

It’s such a joke… everything these people do is a con.

It’s the same con when the Chicago’s teachers union boss said school choice was for “racists,” then put her son in a private Catholic high school.

Or people like Barack Obama who spent years warning that rising seas would make homes uninhabitable, then bought a waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard.

They’re all frauds.

The EU has found €10 trillion of “idle” money. Guess where?

Ursula von der Leyen is the unelected President of the European Commission, i.e. the de facto head of the European Union. Last week she gave a speech to French business leaders in Paris and announced an amazing discovery: Europe has €10 trillion just lying around!

So where is it? It’s in regular people’s bank accounts. It’s their savings.

“Unfortunately, these savings are lazy,” she said. The EU’s official translation quickly changed it to “sitting idle.” She talks about other people’s money as if it were hers to spend and says she and her unelected members need to “put these savings to work.”

Her plan, called the Savings and Investments Union, would rewrite the rules for banks and insurers, essentially forcing banks to make certain investments that the European Commission wants… and doing it all with funds that regular, everyday Europeans are trying to save.

Hooray Democracy!

Some of these investments would go towards bankrupt governments. Others would go towards European companies that are deemed ‘too risky’ to private capital. Great. So when investors aren’t willing to back a company, the answer is to force banks to do it with their customers’ savings?

What could possibly go wrong??

Well, Germany serves as the perfect answer. It shut down its nuclear reactors, which had supplied a third of its electricity, and bet the grid on solar panels in a country where the sun barely shines.

German electricity now costs about 2.5 times what it does in the US, and the factories are leaving.

Von der Leyen herself admitted in March that abandoning nuclear was “a strategic mistake”— one she personally voted for, and one she has done nothing to reverse.

But this is how these people think: your savings are Europe’s resource, more dairy cows to be milked through the banking system.

Birmingham is going to the High Court to get the Union Jack off its lampposts

Birmingham is England’s second-largest city, and its local council has spent the past year pulling the country’s own flags— the British Union Jack and England’s St George’s Cross— off lampposts.

People kept putting them back up. So on Aug 26 the council, now run by a Liberal Democrat and Green coalition, asked the High Court for an injunction against “unauthorised attachments on the highway, including flags,” naming seven of the flag-hangers and “persons unknown.”

Breaching a High Court injunction is contempt of court— up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine, and the council’s draft order adds, in capital letters, that “YOUR ASSETS MAY BE SEIZED.”

Bear in mind, hanging something on a lamppost is otherwise a £2,500 fine. The council went to the High Court to turn that into a prison sentence, and its stated reasons are “public safety” and “community cohesion.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian flags have hung from Birmingham lampposts since the Gaza war started in 2023, and as far as we can tell nobody went to court over them.

And twelve days before it went to court, the council lit up the Library of Birmingham in green and white for Pakistan’s independence day.

My guess is that the council won’t sue anyone putting up a Pride flag. And judging by what gets waved at the city’s protests, you could probably get away with an Islamic State flag.

But the British flag in Britain, and the English flag in England, are now a safety hazard and grounds for contempt of court.

So what “community” is the council so keen to keep cohesive?

Britain let in nearly a million net migrants a year at the peak and housed a great many of them at taxpayer expense. Taxes are now at their highest since the 1940s, and the wealthiest and most mobile taxpayers have been leaving in droves.

What stays behind are all those “doctors and lawyers” arriving by dinghy from Africa and the Middle East… like the Afghan who crossed the Channel from Calais in 2022, won asylum by saying Afghanistan was too dangerous to go back to. He then spent eight weeks on vacation there in 2024, posting videos from a national park.

It really is pathetic. And governments like these are exactly why we keep telling readers to have a Plan B.

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This light-producing rival, of course, was the sun.

And Bastiat satirically demanded “a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains… in short, all openings, holes, chinks and fissures” to ensure that no sunlight could enter French homes.

Think of the jobs this would create. “If more tallow [curtains] be consumed, there will arise a necessity for an increase of cattle and sheep,” the petition argued. “Thousands of vessels would soon be employed in the whale fisheries [for oil].”

Bastiat, one of history’s most famous proponents of free markets, was obviously joking. He wrote the petition to mock the tariff wall that sheltered France’s industries from cheap foreign goods— block the cheaper competitor, protect the domestic producer, count the jobs saved.

No one counted the cost of protectionism: everyone else paying more for everything, and the whole country became poorer.

Yet decade after decade since, every new innovation has been met with exactly this kind of uproar. And nobody is joking.

It wasn’t so long ago that taxi drivers were up in arms over Uber undercutting their prices. In June 2015, nearly 3,000 of them shut down parts of Paris, burning tires and blocking airport roads, because Uber’s cheap service didn’t require the professional taxi license that could cost $270,000.

The French government caved within a day, ordering police to seize the unlicensed Uber drivers’ cars.

Now the wheel has turned. Waymo’s robotaxis launched in Atlanta in June 2025, bookable through the Uber app of all places. And Uber drivers say the competition is cutting their pay.

Naturally the Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union wants the city to slap a $0.50 to $1.00 fee on every robotaxi ride, paid into a “driver transition fund,” plus a ban on robo pickups at the Atlanta airport.

If only they could tax the sun for the candlestick makers.

The federal government runs the same play, just bigger.

In January 2025, the Commerce Department finalized its ‘Connected Vehicle Rule’, which bans cars with Chinese-linked software from the US market, starting with the 2027 model year.

The stated reason is national security: keeping foreign adversaries out of the cameras, microphones, and GPS units on American streets.

That’s a real concern, to be fair. But then came the carve-outs.

Volvo, majority-owned by China’s Geely, got authorization in May to keep selling. Ford, after talks with the department, decided its China-built Lincoln Nautilus doesn’t need an exemption at all.

But Polestar— owned by the same Chinese parent as Volvo— was shut out and is leaving the US market.

The Commerce Department doesn’t publish these decisions or its reasoning, so nobody outside the building knows why one Geely brand got a green light and the other got kicked out of America.

Let’s be honest: if these Chinese cars were really a security threat, there would be no carve-outs to negotiate. There would be a flat ban. No exceptions.

The real threat of cheap Chinese cars is to the profits of American automakers; Chinese cars are very inexpensive— like a decent quality mid-size SUV for around $20k. So many US buyers would start driving Chinese that the American automakers would either have to adapt and compete… or suffer catastrophic losses.

The end result of these bans is less competition, meaning Americans end up paying more for their vehicles.

Just add this to the long list of things which governments, from city councils to federal regulators, make more expensive.

Yesterday we wrote about how federal influence over local building codes adds $132,000 to the average new home.

Today it’s how they’re making buying a car and taking a quick trip more expensive.

Ask California how it’s doing on that nonexistent high-speed rail… $15 billion and 18 years in, without a mile of track. Or ask Europeans, where climate fuel mandates are already tacking surcharges onto every plane ticket.

The receipts are everywhere: everything the government touches becomes more expensive.

College tuition is up about 1,200% since 1980— the surge began as soon as the federal government made itself the nation’s student lender.

Since Obamacare passed, the average family health insurance premium has nearly doubled.

Even junk food became more expensive due to government  food subsidies; in fact the moment 18 states pulled soda and snacks off the food stamp list, PepsiCo cut prices on Doritos and Lay’s by up to 15%.

Housing, transportation, food, healthcare, education— all swamped by government interference, all quickly became less affordable.

And underneath all of it, bringing the whole pot to a boil, is the inflation that politicians and regulators caused with their own spending.

Yet who do they blame? Greedy corporations.

Inflation has nothing to do with greed. It has everything to do with incompetence and irresponsibility.

Bastiat’s joke was that nobody would ever actually file the candlestick makers’ petition. Yet 181 years later, what started as satire is taking place every single day.

A political class that treats cheaper goods and services as a threat is deliberately choosing to make the country poorer.

P.S. A government that treats cheaper as a threat isn’t going to start choosing growth anytime soon. That’s exactly why we publish Plan B Confidential— our flagship research on legal, practical ways to diversify your savings, your income, and even your residency beyond any single government’s bad decisions. Click here to learn more.

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Another one dictates what your fence can be made of, and a third sets how many square feet of window your house needs. A few spell out the dimensions of particular features down to a quarter of an inch.

The National Association of Home Builders, the trade group for the companies that build American homes, has been adding up what rules like these cost since 2011.

Its reasoning is simple: the country is short about 1.2 million homes, and rising regulatory costs are one of the things keeping builders from closing that gap. So anyone writing new rules ought to know what the existing ones already cost.

Government regulation now adds about $132,000 to the price of a new home.

That’s just over a quarter of the roughly $500,000 the average new house sold for in January.

Builders said that ten years of changes to the building code added about $40,000 to the cost of a house. That’s the cost to buy the extra materials and labor each new edition of the code demands… whether or not the buyer wanted them.

Some of those rules are reasonable— hurricane-rated windows on a house within a mile of the shore, or shock-proof breakers on the circuits that run the stove and the dryer.

But those same code changes also decided that a hot-water pipe can’t run more than 100 feet, that the outlet on a kitchen island has to pop up out of the countertop, and that an ordinary draft-vented furnace needs its own sealed, insulated room with an outside air vent.

None of those is a matter of life or death; even the furnace is an energy-efficiency rule, and the homeowner doesn’t get to decide whether the upfront cost is worth the long term savings.

Codes get adopted locally, but the model codes that cities and counties copy are drafted with help from the Energy Department, FEMA, and the EPA.

The study notes, almost in passing, that “DOE also has a budget to persuade state and local governments to adopt more stringent codes.”

In other words, a federal agency spends tax money persuading your county to make your house more expensive.

Just the energy part of the code adds between $9,600 and $21,400 to a home built to the 2021 version, and NAHB estimates it can take the buyer up to 90 years to recoup that money in lower utility bills. So maybe your grandkids will thank you, assuming the house is still standing.

This cost was made a federal requirement— a condition of every FHA and USDA loan on a new house— until a judge ruled in March that it violated the government’s own affordable-housing law. But it still stands as the building code in roughly a dozen states.

Then come the fees. Permits, inspections, impact charges, and utility hookups add about $20,000 per house after the builder buys the lot.

Like any medieval lord, the local government also takes its tribute in land. More than 85% of developers have to hand part of their parcel to the town for a park or keep it as open space, at a cost of about $13,600 per home. Of course that cost is passed on to the buyer.

Regulation also costs time, and the study only quantifies about half that cost. More than 90% of developers report delays averaging about seven months, and more than a year passes between the zoning application and the first day of work on the site.

The study puts the delay itself at about $4,000 a house. It doesn’t count the opportunity cost, or how delaying new housing supply raises the costs of everything else on the market.

And it’s quickly getting worse. Five years ago the same study put the total regulatory cost per home at about $94,000. It’s up more than 40% since then— and it has doubled since 2011.

Disposable income in the US rose 18% over the same five years. So the cost of obeying the rules is growing twice as fast as anyone’s ability to pay it.

Notice that these costs have nothing to do with greedy builders or Wall Street landlords.

Many builders have been cutting prices every month for well over a year, and new homes still aren’t selling. They’re sitting unsold— in a country that’s short 1.2 million homes— because a builder can only cut so far before he’s selling at a loss.

Ironically, on top of the federal government pushing a rule that violated its own affordable-housing law, NAHB suspects some of the rules have less to do with safety or efficiency and more to do with “aesthetics, or possibly even, in some cases, a desire to price less affluent residents out of particular neighborhoods.”

Yet the same city councils that pass them will tell you affordable housing is their top priority.

And homebuilding is just the one industry that bothered to add up the cost of insane government regulation.

The same thing happens anywhere the government writes the rule book.

Want to build a power line, a pipeline, or a mine? The White House’s own environmental council found that the average federal environmental review takes four and a half years before anyone breaks ground.

The National Association of Manufacturers puts the cost of complying with federal rules at about $3 trillion a year, roughly 11% of GDP.

All of this strangling regulation is a big part of why the economy can’t grow faster, and right now the US needs growth badly.

The national debt just crossed $40 trillion, and Congress refuses to cut a cent, even when the spending is obvious fraud.

That leaves two ways out. Either the economy grows faster than the debt, which means the country builds more, makes more, and starts more businesses than it does now… or the government prints the difference.

Without a regulation-destroying bonanza, it’s obvious which one happens. If the government can’t rein in the rules, it can’t rein in the debt. And if it can’t rein in the debt, it can’t rein in inflation, because printing the money is the only option left.

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A gigawatt is a billion watts of electricity. Running around the clock, one gigawatt is enough to supply about 800,000 average American homes— and a single large data center is now built at that scale.

The data center that Meta is building near El Paso is designed for a full gigawatt and comes online in 2028.

Plus Meta just announced plans to grow its campus in Louisiana to 5GW. And OpenAI’s Stargate program, spread across sites in several states, is planned for 10GW.

These projects are also spectacularly expensive, and even the richest companies on earth have stopped paying for them out of pocket.

Earlier this month Google borrowed $25 billion from the bond market. It was the company’s third major bond sale this year, which brings its 2026 borrowing to more than $70 billion.

Google needs the money because its capital expenditures budget this year is about $200 billion, and in Q2 they spent more cash than they brought in for the first time in more than two decades.

Meta is doing the same thing. In late July, a BlackRock-led group raised $12.5 billion of debt for that El Paso site, where Meta will be the sole tenant for twenty years.

The group had to pay about 7.5% to get the deal done, one of the highest yields on any blue-chip data center bond to date. That comes on top of the $25 billion in bonds that Meta sold in May, and another $30 billion borrowed for the Louisiana campus.

And that’s just two borrowers. The total borrowings right now related to AI and data centers is truly staggering.

But it’s not just tech spending that’s driving the bond market. Let’s not forget about the US federal government, which is on track for a $2.1 trillion deficit this fiscal year.

That’s just the NEW amount of debt they have to borrow this year just to keep the lights on and pay all the Somalis.

The White House is asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget next year, more than 40% above this year’s and the largest defense request (as a percentage of GDP) since World War II.

So between tech spending and the federal deficit, that’s already several trillion dollars in capital that needs to be borrowed from the bond market… THIS YEAR.

Here’s the problem: America’s “net private savings”, i.e. the sum of ALL undistributed corporate profits, plus total household net income, is only about $2.2 trillion.

In short, the federal government already requires nearly ALL of the net private savings from literally every household and every company across America… just to make ends meet.

Meanwhile the biggest foreign lenders are backing away.

Japan, the UK, and China— the three largest foreign lenders to the US government— all cut their Treasury holdings in June. China now has their lowest Treasury holdings since 2008, down more than 13% from last year.

In short, foreigners are not coming to the rescue. So there is very little capital left over to lend for data centers and AI expansion.

And that says nothing about the tens of millions of other borrowers— small businesses, home buyers, etc. who need to borrow money.

This is why interest rates are rising— it’s simple supply and demand: demand for capital is at an all-time high. Yet supply of capital (at the moment) is fixed. And when the supply/demand fundamentals of capital get out of whack, interest rates rise.

Families who need to buy a home now are standing in the same line as Google, Meta, and the Treasury Department, competing for the same money.

That’s why the average 30-year mortgage rate is 6.7%, and will likely go MUCH higher from here…

… unless the Fed starts printing money again.

Technically the Fed doesn’t physically ‘print’ anything, it’s all electronic. And they don’t call it ‘money printing’, because that would be too embarrassing. They refer to it as ‘quantitative easing’. But it has the same effect— increasing the supply of capital to meet the demand, thus causing interest rates to fall.

Mortgage rates fall. Treasury yields fall. Everyone is able to borrow for less.

Which sounds great… except that conjuring money out of thin air invariably triggers more inflation. So if you can borrow more cheaply but have to pay more for everything, are you really any better off?

It’s obvious the White House wants the Fed to cut rates… which means firing up a fresh round of Quantitative Easing. And Congress certainly won’t mind being able to borrow more.

Pretty much all politicians, regardless of party affiliation, want lower interest rates. Given the choice between high mortgage rates and higher inflation, politicians will pick higher inflation every time.

And that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

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It was supposed to be fast enough to make the journey in under three hours. And passengers could hop on by 2020, for a total cost of $33 billion.

Eighteen years later, there is nothing to ride.

Emblematic of the progress so far is a field outside Fresno, where lonely viaducts poke into the sky with no rail connecting them. The locals call it their own Stonehenge.

And the state’s 2026 revised business plan now says it will cost $126 billion to complete… by 2040. Eighteen years into a 12-year project, they’re now saying they need another $93 billion and 14 more years.

Why is the price nearly four times higher than the original estimate?

Well, let’s try to answer that by tracking where the $15 billion already spent has gone.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s own business plan shows that about $9.1 billion went to three construction contracts covering 119 miles of the project. Those contracts are for the civil work only, meaning dirt, pipes, power lines, and concrete.

For that, California got about 80 miles of finished roadbed, i.e. the raised, graded earth that the track will eventually sit on, plus various bridges and overpasses.

In case you’re not keeping score, that works out to $77 million per mile… but that doesn’t include the actual train tracks.

No, California plans on building the rail, the electric wire, and the signals with an additional $3.5 billion contract— which was just awarded in June (i.e. 18 years in to a 14-year project).

And $3.5 billion of rail only encompasses a very small portion of the total distance they need to build.

For a rough comparison, Brightline— a private company in Florida— finished a Miami to Orlando line in 2023, with 235 miles of track, stations, and trains, for about $6 billion, or $25 million a mile.

So California’s is three times what Florida’s cost WITHOUT including the cost of the rail, the trains, and the stations.

Extraordinary. Where did all this money go?

They claim that $1.57 billion went to buying property— the narrow strip of land under the 119 miles (i.e. less than a third of the project).

But if you look at real estate prices in the area (Central Valley farmland went for about $12,000 an acre when the buying started), the actual land value was worth maybe $35 million at the time.

In other words, the state OVERPAID what the land was worth by 30x. I’m sure absolutely zero politicians or their families profited from that overpayment.

The next $3.6 billion went to studies, i.e. environmental reviews, and something the state calls “program-wide support”. That’s the second-biggest item on the bill.

The Authority started in 2008 with ten employees and hired a consulting firm to run the project. By 2018 the state had grown its own staff to about 190, with the consulting firm employing 485 people on the job.

This outside firm is generating hundreds of millions of dollars per year to do nothing.

When the state auditor went looking for what all those people had produced, 145 of the 184 deliverables were missing.

Not deliverables like rails and bridges. We’re talking about reports. The consultants couldn’t even manage that.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s reaction was to promise a purge. Yet the same firm still runs the project. And every slip in the schedule means the firm gets paid more. In fact this year’s plan added another $145 million for consultants.

In July the project’s own Inspector General wrote that the Authority “has obscured basic facts about the project” and made oversight harder for the legislature.

For example, in January, the Authority agreed to pay one of its contractors $537 million to settle nearly 600 claims for extra costs.

What claims? Were the claims real? Nobody knows, because nobody has audited it. The Inspector General, whose job that is, says his office is half-staffed. Maybe he should hire an outside consulting firm.

How could anyone look at all this and not see the same kind of fraud the Somalis are running in Minneapolis?

You take tax dollars and funnel them through layers of government employees, consultants, contractors, and unions, all of them tied to the political establishment. In return, those people spend a slice of their ill-gotten gains keeping the politicians who make it possible in office.

California’s version may be ‘legal’ graft. But that hardly makes it different. It might be worse, since at least in Minneapolis the people on the take can be prosecuted.

Who’s to say the contractor didn’t earn an extra $537 million? Who’s to say the consultants’ reports weren’t worth every dollar of the $3.6 billion?

And when someone tries to get to the bottom of it, they make asking questions illegal.

Nick Shirley, the YouTuber whose video of empty tax-funded Minneapolis day cares went viral last Christmas, walked into a Los Angeles immigrant-services nonprofit this summer and asked where the $80 million in government money it has taken over the last four years went.

But they were ready to silence him, because two months after the Minneapolis video, that same nonprofit had co-sponsored a bill letting its staff sue anyone who posts videos of them online. Newsom signed it into law on Saturday.

Starting in October 2027, anyone who works at, volunteers at, or gets help from an immigration nonprofit can sue whoever posts their picture online, for at least $4,000 plus attorney’s fees.

And these are the same people who mock anyone who suggests an election might not be secure.

Why wouldn’t you trust them to count the mail-in ballots at 3 a.m.?

Nobody should bet a family’s future on these people getting better. The tax-funded gravy train isn’t slowing down if they have anything to do with it.

And that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

PS- Schiff Sovereign Premium is our guide to building that Plan B: legally cutting your tax bill, gold and precious metals strategies, research on undervalued real asset businesses, and diversification moves that keep your money and your freedom of movement out of any one government’s reach.

It’s just $9 a month. You can learn more here.

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Xinhua is the Chinese government’s official news agency, and they published a scathing commentary comparing the US national debt to Frankenstein and his monster. They noted both were “destroyed by the forces they had set in motion,” and that America “risks a similar end.”

Another Xinhua social media account mocked the US government for borrowing new debt to pay back old debt, joking, “sounds like a perfect plan.”

And a different Xinhua piece warned that US Treasuries were transforming from a rock-solid “risk-free” safe haven asset into a source of volatility.

Xinhua’s comments are not wrong. $40 trillion an insane amount of debt, and if you include state and local debt across the United States— New York, California, Chicago, etc., the total gross debt grows to $44 trillion.

The worst part is that few politicians are serious about cutting the debt, or even slowing down the borrowing. Congress can’t even cut hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of obvious fraud.

But the criticism is pretty rich coming from the Chinese Communist Party.

America’s federal debt is roughly 125% of GDP. Even including state and local debt it’s 135% of GDP.

But China’s is 107% of GDP— so it’s not like the CCP is some paragon of spending restraint! And that 107% number is just what they publicly acknowledge.

Here’s one example of an accounting trick China uses to keep its full debt off the books.

For decades, Chinese cities weren’t allowed to borrow directly. So as an alternative they set up government-owned companies to do the borrowing for them.

These government-owned companies built the subways, the industrial parks, and the apartment towers, but the debt sat on the companies’ books instead of the government’s.

In November 2024 China’s government finally admitted to trillions of dollars worth of this hidden debt. And they announced a five-year plan to move it onto their official balance sheet.

America’s debt has been growing steadily: a horribly grotesque, absurdly wasteful $2 trillion per year since 2020. But China’s debt takes a quantum leap every time the CCP tells a little more truth.

And by the IMF’s count, China’s real government debt comes to 135% of GDP this year… dead even with America’s.

But Chinese debt pulls way ahead of the US when you factor in actual private debt held by companies and citizens.

Chinese corporate debt, for example, sits at 143% of GDP. US company debt is about HALF of that level. And let’s not forget that the biggest Chinese borrowers are state-owned enterprises where the politicians are ultimately in charge. So I’m suuuuure those company audits are totally above board…

The real question is HOW is this money going to be paid back. And by WHOM?

In January, China’s statistics bureau reported that just 7.9 million babies were born in 2025, down from 9.5 million the year before… and the fewest in modern China’s history. China’s fertility rate is 0.96, not even half of what it takes to keep a population steady. And China’s population shrank for the fourth year in a row.

America’s debt will land on the next generation, which is bad. But at least America HAS a next generation.

Decades of the idiotic one-child policy left China with families with (hopefully) one worker supporting two parents and four grandparents. That same worker will now inherit his share of China’s debt at 135%+ of GDP.

America’s fiscal challenges are immense. But they can be solved with common sense solutions— eliminating obvious fraud, making government more efficient, scaling back regulations that hamstring small business growth, reforming the immigration system, reforming Social Security.

China, on the other hand, needs a time machine to solve its problems. And since no such time machine exists, they just cook the books.

Seriously. A shrinking population is deadly for a nation’s economy. China can’t go back in time to reverse its one-child policy. And they can’t fix it with immigration either— because few people want to move to China!

This is why so many Chinese companies are developing robotics— it’s an absolute necessity there. But even this comes with a major social cost, i.e. higher unemployment.

And China cooks the books on those numbers as well.

When youth unemployment hit 21.3% in June 2023, the bureau suddenly decided that its methods of calculating unemployment needed immediate changes.

Plus any criticism or complaining leads to imprisonment… or worse.

In October 2020, Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder and then the richest man in China, gave a speech in Shanghai saying China’s banks ran on a “pawnshop mentality” and its regulators were out of date.

Two weeks later the Chinese government killed his payments company’s stock listing, which would have been the biggest in history, and Ma disappeared for three months.

This method of control is why no one can really trust anything from the Chinese government.

That includes their attitude that they will some day rule the world.

When President Trump visited Beijing earlier this year, Xi Jinping asked whether China and the United States could “overcome the so-called Thucydides Trap,” the theory that a rising power and the one it threatens end up at war.

China’s government has spent years telling anyone who’ll listen that America is finished and China’s time has come.

America does have challenges. And there is still some time left to get its house in order to avoid serious consequences.

But China is not its replacement.

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That was law #229, carved in stone almost 4,000 years ago. And some version of this rule has existed for most of human history. Even to this day, it’s a tradition among architects to spend the night under a bridge they designed to prove that it’s safe.

Bottom line, people who built things were often expected to eat their own cooking and suffer the successes and consequences of their work.

The United States Congress has spent decades perfecting the opposite arrangement.

Start with the salary. Members of Congress earn $174,000 a year, more than double what the median American household makes. Yet Congress would like you to know how painful that is.

Senator Tommy Tuberville calls the job a “sacrifice.” Representative Pramila Jayapal complains that “most of us get paid less than our chiefs [of staff] at this point.”

Current and former members are suing the government, demanding retroactive cost-of-living raises, with claims as high as $420,000 apiece.

Bear in mind, again, that Congressmen already make $174,000 per year. Yet the House of Representatives averages just 150 days in session per year. And last year’s legislative calendar scheduled just 137 days.

Most Americans work at least 250 days a year. So, adjusting for actual days worked, Congressmen are actually earning nearly $300,000 based on a normal work year. So the pay gap between everyday Americans and their Congressional representatives is even greater than at first glance.

And just how do they fill their 150ish work days? The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee once handed its incoming freshmen a model schedule:

Four hours of the day went to fundraising calls. Another hour to something called “strategic outreach”, i.e. being aligned with the party bosses. The actual job of representing constituents gets, maybe, 3-4 hours per day.

By the party’s own math, half of a congressman’s day goes to keeping the job rather than doing it.

This is insane. A welder doesn’t get to spend half of his day persuading people to let him keep his job; rather, if he doesn’t want to get fired, he simply has to do a good job. Pretty simple.

But members of Congress can’t run on their records, because their record is the insane world that we all live in.

So they spend their days telling lies to donors in order to raise enough money to tell more lies in TV commercials and email blasts. Anywhere else, this cascade of lies would be considered criminal fraud. In politics it’s just campaigning.

And in a few weeks, those campaign pitches will even receive a special pass around Gmail’s inbox filter: starting September 8, 2026, Google will let verified political committees bypass it entirely, just in time for the midterms. Your inbox has rules; their fundraising has an exemption.

But the exemptions don’t stop there.

Thanks to Congress, Americans are required by law to have some overpriced health insurance plan. But politicians have a special plan, with taxpayers footing the vast majority of the premium… plus coverage for life once a member qualifies for retirement after serving just FIVE years in Congress.

So the same people who built the most unaffordable healthcare system in the world exempted themselves from ever feeling the pain.

Pensions repeat the pattern: members elected before 2013 earn a pension that accrues nearly twice as fast as a regular federal worker’s, collectible as early as 50. They let Social Security drift toward insolvency for you. For themselves, they built a backup.

Then there’s the stock trading. A corporate executive who trades on confidential information goes to prison. Congress never bothered to apply those rules to itself until the 2012 STOCK Act.

That might explain how former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went from a roughly $3 million net worth when she entered Congress in 1987 to an estimated $280 million today. It’s all apparently due to her husband’s extreme investment prowess.

But she’s far from the only one. Must all be a wild coincidence.

Even after the 2012 STOCK Act which required politicians to disclose their stock trades, nothing changed. Seventy-eight members broke that law in a single term— yet in the fourteen years since the STOCK Act, not a single one has been prosecuted for insider trading.

Even Speaker Mike Johnson says, “Look, at least let them, like, engage in some stock trading, so that they can continue to, you know, take care of their family.”

Imagine the private-sector version: if JP Morgan announced a new campus in Texas and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, bought up the surrounding land to sell to his own company, he’d be indicted before the concrete cured.

Congress runs that trade every day, on information you’ll never see, and calls it “taking care of their family”.

Then you’ve got their housing perks.

Representatives can bill taxpayers for their living costs in Washington DC— up to $276 a night for lodging, plus a $92 meal allowance.

What’s interesting is that this is a recent adjustment going back to just 2023. Congressmen were ‘suffering’ the worst inflation in four decades. Rather than acknowledge that they themselves were instrumental in creating that inflation, they cooked up a bailout for themselves so that they wouldn’t have to pay sky-high prices.

In short, you pay higher living costs. Congressmen bill you for theirs.

Congressmen also routinely get sweetheart deals from banks and mortgage brokers; during the 2008 financial crisis, for example, America’s largest housing lender at the time ran a VIP program that waived fees and cut prices on home loans for politicians and key staffers.

Everyone else pays the going rate— 6% to 7% today. Politicians get special terms, and I’m sure there are no strings attached.

An organization that never feels its own failures has no reason to fix them. The debt, the inflation, and the fraud keep compounding no matter who wins.

Hammurabi figured out the fix 4,000 years ago: make the builder liable for his own construction. Congress has spent decades making sure the roof always comes down on somebody else.

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The United States was still at peace at the time. World War II had not yet broken out, and global trade was still relatively seamless.

But anyone reading a newspaper could see what was coming. Hitler had annexed Austria the year before and swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia that March. Japan had been at war in China for two years.

Every commodity on Roosevelt’s list had one thing in common: America produced next to none of it. Nearly all of the rubber used by US companies, for example, came from British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. A lot of tin came from Malaya as well.

Congress and Roosevelt were being appropriately cautious. And within a short time they had stockpiled hundreds of thousands of tons of these strategic assets.

Then came the War. Then Pearl Harbor. And then full-blown economic chaos.

By March 1942, for example, Japanese troops had overrun Malaya and the Dutch East Indies… meaning that about 90% of America’s rubber supply vanished overnight. Fortunately, their foresight to build stockpiles cushioned the blow.

This critical lesson in self-sufficiency is easily forgotten. As long as global peace and cooperation feel permanent, governments never think about resource scarcity. They assume they will always be able to trade for what they need… so why waste money stockpiling?

But global peace and cooperation can quickly turn to conflict and tension, and that is the environment we are in today.

The last major global conflict was World War II. Before it was over, 730 delegates from 44 nations literally sat down at a conference and hammered out a new framework for economic cooperation that made the US dollar the world’s undisputed reserve currency.

As a result, every country on earth has parked its savings in US government bonds for the past eight decades.

It hasn’t always been easy. The US formally ended the convertibility between the dollar and gold in the 1970s, and there was some thought to creating a new financial system. But the dollar managed to survive as king.

The dollar’s status has also been at risk throughout this century, between the skyrocketing US national debt and heavy-handed legislation (like FATCA) that the US government forced on the rest of the world.

But, still, the dollar survived. And foreign countries kept buying dollars and Treasury bonds.

But everyone has a breaking point, including foreign countries.

The US government’s response to freeze Russian assets in 2022 was the start. Then came last year’s so-called “Liberation Day”, when decades of trade policy were upended, overnight. Then came the Iran war. And now a $40 trillion national debt with no end in sight.

This has all been enough for foreign governments and central banks to finally reverse course; at first they slowed their purchases of US Treasury bonds. Now they’re actually selling… and diversifying away from the dollar.

The immediate beneficiary has been gold. And we’ve written about this— gold is the most logical asset for central bank diversification because it is already a traditional reserve asset… plus the gold market is very large and liquid.

We believe this trend will continue; gold prices will rise as a result, and quality mining companies should prosper.

But there’s a second element to this diversification story.

After Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz— which carried a fifth of the world’s oil and a host of other critical resources— every government on the planet re-learned the same lesson of World War II: trade and cooperation can vanish in an instant.

And now the entire globe feels a sense of urgency to prepare for the next conflict.

Will China invade Taiwan? Will the US and China go to war? Will Russia and NATO come to blows? Nobody knows, and no government wants to be caught flat-footed, unable to import the critical resources that their economies need to function.

In Roosevelt’s era it was things like rubber and tin.

Today, these critical resources (what we refer to as ‘real assets’) start with energy— oil, natural gas, even coal… plus uranium for some countries.

Now, not every commodity is a real asset. Sugar is a commodity… but the world would be just fine without it. No government is going to stockpile orange juice, lumber, or wool. Or even rubber anymore.

But cut off a country’s oil supply and it reverts to the Dark Ages.

That’s why countries are now stockpiling the strategic assets that are the vital inputs to their economies: copper, rare earths, and even the IP and hardware that power AI.

China is the clearest example. In 2025 alone it added more than a million barrels a day to an oil stockpile and now holds roughly 1.4 billion barrels— the world’s largest reserve.

When Hormuz closed and the US and 31 other countries released 400 million barrels from their emergency reserves, China barely touched its pile and by July was adding to it again.

Its nuclear-fuel imports hit a record last year too, far beyond what its reactors burn; the excess went into stockpiles. And this summer Beijing put a new $9 billion state company in charge of buying mines around the world.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, produces plenty of oil, so they don’t need to stockpile it. But they are building nearly two gigawatts of data centers at home rather than risk being cut off from computing power.

A government that sells a Treasury still has to put the money somewhere, and the sensible places are the assets that the US government cannot freeze… and that no central bank can print. That is why the long-term direction of gold is still up.

But it’s also why energy, industrial metals, productive technology, and other vital resources— plus the companies which produce them— have a bright future.

This is the thesis behind Schiff Sovereign’s investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets. A world that no longer trusts the US government moves into gold, and a world that can no longer count on trade cooperation secures its own stockpiles.

We provide research on companies that mine, pump, and build what governments are stockpiling.

Subscribers who acted on our research locked in more than 10x on a small silver producer and more than 6x on a gold and silver producer, both in under a year.

A tin producer featured last summer is up more than 3x, a zinc producer more than 2.5x, and a tanker company about 2.5x. Across the companies we have closed out, winners and losers together, the average return is 172%.

We cordially invite you to learn more about Strategic Assets by clicking here.

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Then his doctor told him two things: he had terminal cancer, and he could not fly. Meekins asked for his money back. Spirit said no.

He offered a letter from his oncologist, hospice paperwork, even his prepaid funeral package. Spirit wouldn’t look. CEO Ben Baldanza publicly blamed the dying man for not buying travel insurance. A week of national outrage later, Baldanza caved and refunded the fare himself.

It was not out of character. Five years earlier, Baldanza hit reply-all on a complaint from a passenger whose delayed flight cost him the concert he was flying to see. “We owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned,” the CEO wrote. “Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”

That was Spirit’s business model: treat customers like garbage and bet they’ll crawl back for a penny. Unsurprisingly, they went bankrupt.

Rule #1 in business is ‘the customer is always right’. At a minimum, businesses know that they need to treat paying customers with basic courtesy. Duh.

But governments never learn that lesson; they don’t have to extend any courtesy because they take your money at the point of a gun.

Rob Streeper has lived in his San Antonio home for 18 years. In June, the city’s code enforcement office sent him a notice of violation because a tree on his property had a branch that was hanging too low over the public sidewalk.

Fair enough. Keeping the sidewalks passable is all part of the mundane administrivia of municipal government. But there was just one problem: a bird was nesting on that particular branch of Mr. Streeper’s tree.

Streeper is apparently a staunch rule follower, because he called the US Fish and Wildlife Service to ask what to do. A federal agent told him that removing an active nest violates the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which carries up to six months in prison and a $15,000 fine.

In other words, the local government was threatening to fine him for failing to commit a federal crime. And he pays taxes to fund both his city council as well as the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Streeper reported this back to the city, and even made clear that once nesting season ends, “we have no problem with cutting the branch.”

None of it mattered. Two months later, a $300 citation appeared. “Nobody talked to us,” he said. “They just taped it to the door.”

Eventually a code enforcement officer told him what was really going on: a neighbor had been calling the city every single day to complain about the branch.

From a bureaucrat’s perspective, the path of least resistance was to simply issue the fine, and ignore the injustice of it. After all, the bureaucrat wouldn’t suffer for any of it.

And at no point in this story does a judge or jury appear. Streeper could have technically contested the ticket in municipal court, and a jury of random strangers would have sided with him in a heartbeat. But that means a court date, days off work, and more weeks of the machine, all over a $300 ticket that should never have existed.

In many respects the process IS the punishment. The government never needs to be right— but it is more expensive to fight them than to obey them.

What finally fixed it was a TV camera. On August 14 at 10:59 a.m., one minute before a KSAT 12 news crew pulled up to the house, Streeper’s phone rang. It was a city official named Michael Uresti, calling to say the matter had “reached my level.”

The ticket was dismissed, the branch received a stay of execution (until late September), and the common sense that went missing for two months turned up in sixty seconds.

“It took telling the code compliance people that [local news crews] were involved for them to finally back off,” Streeper said.

Until then, not a single bureaucrat who touched this case felt compelled to stop it.

This is how the whole system works. In 2021, for example, the Biden administration ordered its contractors to vaccinate their employees, while Texas banned employers from mandating vaccines at all.

Companies faced an impossible choice: break state law, or lose their federal contracts. It took lawsuits from 26 states and a federal injunction to sort out the mess.

Or ask Mike and Chantell Sackett, who bought a $23,000 lot in Idaho and started building a home. The EPA showed up, declared their land a federally protected wetland, and threatened penalties of over $40,000 per day.

Better yet, the agency insisted no court in America even had the power to review its order. The Sacketts needed sixteen years and two unanimous Supreme Court decisions to win— the first just to establish their right to be heard at all.

And those were the lucky ones. The contractors had 26 state attorneys general. The Sacketts had a public-interest law firm and sixteen years of patience. Streeper had a news crew.

But if you don’t have lawyers, politicians, or cameras on your side, you just get pummeled by the system.

That’s what happens when there are so many rules, so many agencies, and so many levels of government. Compliance with the law becomes impossible.

Meanwhile, government doesn’t uphold its end of the bargain. It can’t be bothered to stop the riot outside a citizen’s house or clear the drug pushers from his sidewalk. But bureaucrats will happily wreck someone’s life over an errant tree branch.

And the tree branch is the smallest version of the story. The Federal Reserve destroyed a quarter of the dollar’s value in five years. Congress ran the national debt to $40 trillion while letting Social Security race toward insolvency.

Nobody has answered for any of this incompetence, and nobody ever will. The consequences and penalties are reserved for a man with a bird’s nest in his tree.

A government that does this has lost its way, lost its moral compass.

This is simply not how you treat anyone, let alone your own citizens. And it is not what a functioning free society looks like.

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Back home, Americans gave everything they had. Some 85 million bought war bonds. The top income tax rate hit 94%, the highest in US history. Even ordinary people paid more and more income tax to support the war effort.

This was the absolute peak of American patriotism and record high tax rates. And yet overall government tax revenue still only came to just 20.5% of GDP.

This matters. In the eight decades since the end of World War II, tax revenue in the United States has averaged between 17% and 18% of GDP… with very little variation.

The low was 14.2% in 1950, coming out of a recession, and the high was 20.0% in 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom when capital gains tax rates were through the roof.

Yet throughout those eight decades, the overall average has remained quite steady— 17% to 18%… even though corporate and individual tax rates have been all over the board over the same period.

The reason is simple: as tax rates go up and down, people and businesses adjust their behavior. If marginal tax rates skyrocket, people stuff their earnings into tax shelters. Or they defer revenue. Or they come up with any number of ways to legally reduce what they owe.

It’s human nature.

You probably heard that the US national debt just crossed $40 trillion yesterday. And on its current trajectory, there is no end in sight to the growth of that debt.

The federal government now routinely posts ~$2 trillion annual deficits… during periods of relative peace and prosperity.

Plenty of people (especially on the left) believe the answer is to tax the rich: sky-high marginal rates, wealth taxes, etc. But the historical data show that higher tax rates cannot and will not solve the problem.

According to IRS data, imposing a tax rate of 90% on people earning $2MM per year or more would theoretically generate $200 to $300 billion in additional tax revenue.

But remember human nature: people would very quickly change their behavior and restructure their affairs, and so the real additional tax revenue would collapse to less than $50 billion per year.

The same goes for a wealth tax. Charging billionaires and centimillionaires a percentage of their unrealized gains sounds like a nice idea to a socialist. But the consequences would offset most (if not all) of the additional revenue.

If Elon Musk were forced to sell 10% of his stock to pay a wealth tax, the share prices of Tesla and SpaceX would plummet.

Sure, the IRS would collect more money from Musk himself. But, nationwide, overall capital gains tax revenue would fall dramatically. So net tax revenue would barely budge.

The point is there are always consequences to raising taxes: less economic activity, slower growth, and higher unemployment. No country in history has ever taxed its way to prosperity.

What’s crazy is that an economy as large and dynamic as America’s doesn’t even need to run a balanced budget. Even a $1 trillion annual deficit would be OK— and a huge step in the right direction. The national debt would still grow, but as a percentage of GDP, it would shrink.

And it’s not hard to get there. The low-hanging fruit is obvious: the Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s own watchdog, estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars are lost to outright fraud and theft every single year.

Yet Congress doesn’t seem to want to even try to eliminate obvious fraud.

And that’s the easy stuff.

The harder part would be streamlining government operations and cutting waste and inefficiency… which could easily generate hundreds of billions in savings.

Harder still would be reforming entitlements, fixing immigration, and taking a chainsaw to the Code of Federal Regulations… all of which could trim spending and/or grow the economy (and hence increase tax revenue).

Again, the national debt is $40 trillion, yet Congress won’t even do the easy stuff to fix it. Even worse, the media and the courts actively block and obstruct the people who do try.

We can hope that common sense will one day prevail, and that AI and nuclear power will supercharge the US economy to the point where America grows its way out of debt.

But in the meantime, there are now 40 trillion reasons to have a Plan B.

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And yet, despite stocks being up and investors positively effervescent, it is indeed a sad day, because today marks the first real capitulation by the Treasury Department.

Stocks are up because the Treasury Department announced this morning that it will double repurchases of long-dated government bonds. If that sounds boring and mundane, it’s not.

For the past several weeks, Treasury yields have been skyrocketing. Our readers won’t be surprised by this— we’ve been predicting this and telling the story for quite some time.

In short, the bond market is rapidly losing confidence in America. And that’s especially true for foreign governments and central banks.

For most of the past eighty years, pretty much every foreign government on the planet parked their national savings in US government bonds. It was a no-brainer. US Treasury bonds paid interest. They were extremely liquid and could be sold in seconds. And they are backed by the wealthiest, most powerful, most creditworthy nation on Earth.

So the rest of the world happily lent their financial surpluses to the US government and asked few questions.

At peak (in 2011), foreigners owned nearly half of all marketable US Treasury bonds. Fifteen years later they hold less than a third, and that proportion is sliding quickly.

Earlier this week the Treasury Department reported that foreigners continue to trim their holdings of US government bonds. In fact, so far this year, foreigners have only purchased 7% of net US debt issuance. In June, their purchases of Treasury bonds and notes fell 88% in a single month, and once you add in the Treasury bills they sold, foreigners were net SELLERS of US government debt.

It’s not hard to understand why; between the political theater, rising deficits, and inability to cut even obvious fraud, foreigners are no longer as willing to risk lending money to America… especially when they have to take that risk for three decades (i.e. holding a 30-year Treasury bond).

As a result, foreigners are selling. And as they sell, the natural consequence of the bond market is that Treasury yields have been rising… especially for the least popular securities like the 30-year Treasury bond.

This morning the US government officially staged an intervention. They signaled to the bond market, and to the world, that they’re willing to step in and buy back their own debt in order to prop up the market.

Investors cheered. But, again, this is actually quite sad news. It is tantamount to the Treasury Department capitulating and acknowledging that they have lost the confidence of foreign investors.

We’ve been writing about this trend for quite some time, encouraging our readers to consider investing in gold… as well as gold producers.

In our most recent edition of Schiff Sovereign: Premium, for example, we wrote about three major gold companies that we believed were significantly undervalued. They’re all up 10% just this morning… because gold is on an absolute tear.

Why gold?

As foreign governments and central banks have been moving out of US dollars, they’ve had to park that money into some other asset. At the moment, gold is realistically the only viable strategic reserve asset that is extremely liquid, widely accepted around the world, and carries zero counter-party risk.

Foreign countries have already been buying up gold over the past few years as their confidence in the US has waned; from 2022 through 2025 they bought a few hundred billion dollars’ worth— roughly 2% of their financial reserves. And that modest purchase alone took the gold price from about $1,600 to more than $4,000.

Global central banks are back in the gold market buying again today. And since we can’t exactly hold our breath that the US government is going to get its fiscal house in order anytime soon, we can only conclude that the central bank gold-buying trend will continue… and accelerate.

This trend is bad for America. But it’s good for gold. And it’s even better for gold producers.

P.S. One of the other companies we’ve covered in Premium, a gold producer, is up a bit this week, but we still think it is wildly undervalued. So does its own CEO, who told analysts on this week’s earnings call that the company is “significantly undervalued.”

It has no debt, just reported the most profitable first half in its history, and trades at roughly two times its annual cash flow.

We walk through the numbers in our latest edition of Schiff Sovereign: Premium, which is just $9 per month. Click here to learn more.

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Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius!

Among its various provisions, part of the legislation authorized the government to negotiate prescription drug prices. Seems like a nice idea in principle… but in practice it’s been a disaster.

The Congressional Budget Office released the results late last month: the Medicare drug provisions that were supposed to generate $129 billion in savings will now add $700 billion to the deficit.

Sometimes it seems like this is the whole idea; given the rampant Medicare fraud that gets uncovered on a daily basis, it’s clear that politicians have an incentive to steer MORE money into the program.

Healthcare is the easiest spending in Washington to justify. Every dollar comes with the same argument: if we don’t spend on healthcare, people will die!

It ends up being so much money— a giant, dark pool of corruption— and a lot of it gets funneled straight back into the political process as campaign contributions. And it’s been going on for ages.

Back in 2002, for example, America’s biggest health-care workers union spent about $800,000 electing Rod Blagojevich governor of Illinois. He later thanked them “for electing me governor.”

Weeks after he took office, Blagojevich signed multiple executive orders that fattened the union’s pockets, like forcing more healthcare workers to join… and automatically deducting union dues from their paychecks. Bad for the unionized workers, but great for the union bosses.

In New York, the Greater New York Hospital Association wrote two checks totaling more than $1 million to the state Democratic Party in August 2018, at then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign’s request.

Three months later the state ordered its first across-the-board Medicaid rate increase since 2008, worth about $140 million a year. Great news for the hospital association.

The cycle never ends— the unions and associations scratch the politicians’ backs, and in turn get their backs scratched. No one can rationally expect those parties to walk away from their mutual benefit.

And this is just the ‘honest’ graft and corruption… it doesn’t take into account the outright fraud.

During COVID, Medicare paid for eight test kits per month, per person, in America. Yet an inspector general later found it paid up to $454 million for nearly 39 million kits over that limit.

In June, the Justice Department found over $6.5 billion in fake health-care claims. Yet agents recovered only $182 million in cash and assets, less than three cents per dollar of fraud.

In one instance, a pair of adult day care operators fraudulently billed Medicare and Medicaid $120 million over a decade. One of their centers claimed 1,041 attendees in a single day while the building’s occupancy limit was 81.

Then Nick Shirley walked into the neighborhood’s facilities with a camera this summer and turned up $190 million more in suspicious billing.

And yet very little of the fraud gets stopped… in large part because a portion of what they steal from the government is funneled back to the politicians (mostly on the Left) who vote for more Medicare spending.

These same politicians install activist judges at the state and federal level, ensuring that anyone who tries to stop the fraud will be sued… and blocked by the courts.

As an example, last year Congress voted to cut off Planned Parenthood from Medicaid for one year.

Planned Parenthood sued. Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee in Boston, dutifully blocked the cut within weeks, and the appeals court had to overrule her twice before the law could take effect.

Feeding Our Future, the Minnesota child-meal Somali fraud network, had the audacity to sue the state for racial discrimination when the fraudulent money train slowed down.

It’s extraordinary; there are so many checks-and-balances in place to keep the graft  going.

The politicians vote to keep the money moving. The judges defend it to the last Somali. And the activists and the media scream that anyone asking questions is racist; Governor Tim Walz called the fraud talk “vile, racist lies.”

The teachers’ unions march the kids out of school for union causes and No Kings rallies, as if the kids had any idea what they were marching for. And the universities continue the socialist indoctrination.

Media, education, courts: the whole institutional layer exists to keep the money flowing.

So of course they want more of it.

Senator Bernie Sanders reintroduced Medicare for All last year, and the movement that just made Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York wants to make this slush fund the entire health-care system.

Even the most conservative estimate puts the price at $32.6 trillion over the first decade; that’s an astonishing amount of potential fraud.

The US could get its fiscal house in order if it shut this slush fund down. But the graft is deeply entrenched… so it’s likely that US deficit spending will continue in order to pay for it all.

Foreign governments have reached the same conclusion: The US has to go deeper into debt in order to finance hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud.

That’s a major reason why foreign governments and central banks are diversifying away from the dollar. And with no obvious global currency to park their financial reserves into, they buy gold.

We have been making this argument for the past few years, since gold was below $1800. This sort of news makes the case even more strongly: the story hasn’t changed… and gold remains a great hedge for the fiscal uncertainty to come.

PS: In this month’s Schiff Sovereign Premium, we made the case for a gold producer built for exactly this outlook: a debt-free, dividend-paying, highly successful gold company which just had the most profitable first-half in its company history. But it only trades at 2x cash flow.

If the fraud and deficits continue, gold should do very well… and successful producers can do even better.

Click here to learn more about Schiff Sovereign Premium.

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And if he were still alive today, Walton would be the second-richest man in the world, just behind Elon Musk… and ahead of Zuckerberg, Ellison, the Google guys, etc.

That’s a pretty impressive feat for a guy whose core business is basically being a gigantic grocery store.

Selling food is an extremely low margin business. And Walton’s success was built on a fanatical adherence to cost control and efficiency— being able to squeeze every penny of savings possible from the entire supply chain, and passing those savings on to the customer.

In short, he made a fraction of a cent on every sale… but generated more sales than any company in the history of the world.

It’s fascinating that Sam Walton dedicated his life to perfecting this business model. Yet Comrade-Mayor Zohran Mamdani— who has never operated a business in his entire life— thinks he can do a better job than Walton.

A few weeks ago, Mamdani’s team published their formal RFP (request for proposal) for contractors to build five city-owned grocery stores in New York City— one per borough.

Mamdani’s objective is to sell staple foods like milk, eggs, bread, etc. at a 30% discount to the supermarkets down the street.

So apparently these socialists believe that 30% is the amount that “Big Grocery” is gouging them… which shows just how little they understand about business.

Again, groceries are notoriously low margin businesses. If they sell you something for $1, their gross profit is about a penny. Cutting prices by 30% guarantees they will lose money.

Staple consumer items like milk, eggs, chicken, and bread— exactly the products that Mamdani intends to sell at a discount— are some of the LOWEST margin products in the grocery store. Grocers already sell those at rock bottom prices just to get shoppers in the door.

For example, the Giant Eagle supermarket chain sold eggs at or below cost in all of its stores during last year’s bird flu outbreak. Costco sells over 150 million rotisserie chickens a year at $4.99 and loses tens of millions of dollars on them.

Grocers treat these staples as loss-leaders; they make up for it by generating small profits from the rest of the shopping cart, i.e. items like soda, snacks, prepared foods, and specialty items.

There is simply no fat to cut on staple items… and certainly nowhere near 30%. In fact, let’s take a quick look at how the supply chain works— starting from the grocery store and working backwards.

We already showed how grocers will barely break even, i.e. they sell a staple food for $1, and they make no money.

Before them are the major food distributors who supply the grocery stores.

Sysco, the country’s biggest food distributor, keeps about two cents out of of every dollar it charges. The transportation companies hauling the food keep around three cents.

One step further back is the food processor. Tyson Foods, the largest meat company in America lost a billion dollars selling beef last year. Its core chicken business is generally profitable, but highly cyclical, and they have swung to nine-figure losses when feed costs spike.

Yet even the farmers themselves who supply the processors or grow the grain typically lose money; over 1,000 American dairy farms closed last year alone, and Illinois farmers growing the feed corn are on track to lose $70 to $110 an acre on this year’s crop, their fourth losing year in a row. And that’s after their government subsidy checks.

Nobody in the food chain for staple goods is making real money. Farming, feed, processing, trucking, distribution, retail: every link runs on pennies. A 30% price cut cannot come out of anyone’s profit, because the profit does not exist.

Comrade-Mayor Mamdani and his merry band of socialists either don’t understand that, or have decided it doesn’t matter because the taxpayer will absorb it.

Now, the city won’t run the stores itself. Mamdani will pay a contractor to run them… But since the stores are designed to lose money, the city will send the operator a check every year to cover the losses.

How big will the check be? Nobody knows.

But on opening day, if the city really is selling the cheapest chicken in the borough, people will come buy all of it. Restaurant managers will stock up on cheap chicken to resell to their customers. Consumers will fill their freezers with it.

All that chicken will vanish in an instant, just like a deep-discount TV during a Black Friday sale.

Naturally the Comrade-Mayor will take steps to prevent this. But how?

Initially they said you would need to show ID at the grocery store. But they quickly backtracked because, obviously, ID is racist. So now they’re pitching the idea of something like a library card.

You need to show ID to get the card, and the card to buy the chicken. But apparently that’s not racist?

Naturally the card would need to track how much chicken a single consumer purchases in order to prevent people from going to multiple stores and buying out the whole inventory.

But if that’s the case, it’s not a library card. It’s a ration card. And that’s been a staple of every socialist disaster for over a century.

Running a grocery on a tiny margin is one of the hardest operating problems in retail. Order too much fresh food and it rots in the back room; order too little and the shelves sit empty.

Walmart survives on that knife’s edge with some of the most advanced logistics technology on earth.

For example, they discovered decades ago that that strawberry Pop-Tarts sell at seven times their normal pace ahead of a hurricane— which is why trucks full of them roll toward the Florida coast before a storm hits.

Capitalism works through specialization— specialists spend their entire careers perfecting one tiny sliver of that machine to claw back a fraction of a point of margin.

The farmer, the trucker, and the supply-chain engineer each spend a lifetime becoming ruthlessly good at one narrow thing, and the penny of margin is the reward for doing it almost perfectly.

Mamdani quotes Karl Marx and thinks he can do a better job… even though his government cannot even reliably pick up the garbage.

These are the same people who want to run health care, housing, and energy.

Frankly I couldn’t be happier. The socialists finally got what they wanted: they’re in power, in the spotlight. And they’re about to prove once and for all that their entire ideology is a complete and total disaster.

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Two weeks earlier, students and factory workers had risen up against the Soviet-installed puppet government in Hungary. They pulled down Stalin’s statue, rampaged across the city, and even managed to push Soviet forces out of Budapest.

Moscow initially signaled that it was ready to negotiate and consider a full withdrawal. The bells of freedom started ringing. But it turned out to be a ruse— and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev swiftly sent in the tanks.

The Soviets brutally crushed the uprising in days, killing around 2,500 Hungarians and displacing 200,000 who fled the country.

In the reprisals that followed, tens of thousands more were arrested, and hundreds were hanged— including Hungary’s prime minister, who was tricked into surrendering with a promise of safe passage.

President Dwight Eisenhower condemned the invasion and opened America’s doors to roughly 30,000 Hungarian refugees. He then made his case to the United Nations, where the UN General Assembly demanded a full Soviet withdrawal from Hungary. Kruschev ignored them.

Eisenhower was clearly opposed to Soviet aggression. But America did exercise restraint— the President did not touch Soviet money that was held in the US.

It’s crazy to think that, even during the height of the Cold War, the Soviets held a stockpile of US dollars within the US financial system. They had no choice. Global commerce (including oil sales) took place in dollars, so even America’s mortal enemy needed to hold US currency.

Eisenhower could have easily confiscated Soviet assets. Yet not one Soviet account was frozen. Not one asset blocked… even as Soviet tanks shelled a defenseless European capital.

Similarly, twenty-three years later when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter reacted harshly. He cut off certain trade with the USSR, including grain and technology. And most famously he led a 65-country boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

But even Jimmy Carter did not freeze Soviet assets.

Decades later, in August 2008, Russia invaded the Republic of Georgia. President George W. Bush condemned the invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Georgia, and ended support for Russia’s World Trade Organization bid.

Yet he did not touch any Russian money held in the US.

Three presidents from both parties, across five decades, watched America’s biggest adversary invade other countries… but they still chose to keep the money out of it.

America had become Switzerland: a neutral custodian that fiercely protected anyone’s savings, regardless of politics. The trust ran so deep that through every proxy war and nuclear standoff, even the Soviet Union held their enemy’s currency inside their enemy’s financial system. That’s how confident the Soviets were in America’s financial neutrality.

That wasn’t about keeping Moscow happy. It showed the world that assets in America were safe… and that was traditionally a huge reason why foreign governments parked trillions of dollars in US government bonds… and why the Treasury Department could borrow endlessly to fund its deficits.

But this policy of financial neutrality changed in February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. The US pushed its allies to freeze roughly $300 billion of Russian assets.

To be clear, this is not a moral discussion. I’m not arguing whether it was right or wrong; rather, this is about setting precedent. Russia did not attack or invade the United States; they attacked Ukraine— a country with which the US did not have a mutual defense treaty.

For years leading up to the Ukraine invasion, the US government had started politicizing its financial system, weaponizing the dollar, and levying occasional sanctions when foreign countries or banks stepped out of line.

But freezing the reserves of a major power was a massive acceleration.

Consequently, America’s reputation as a financial safe haven vanished on the spot.

Foreign governments were already worried about the gigantic US national debt, political dysfunction in Washington, and deep social divisions. The Russian asset freeze was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

The first lesson that foreign nations concluded was the importance of holding gold as a strategic financial reserve.

Rather than deposit US dollars in a big Wall Street bank, or hold US government bonds, foreign governments concluded that it was much safer to have physical gold sitting in their own country— no one could confiscate it, freeze it, or inflate it away.

That’s why central banks around the world began diversifying out the US dollar and into gold: roughly 2% of strategic reserves (above normalized annual net purchases) between 2022 and 2025 was invested in gold.

And that modest shift— just 2%— caused the gold price to more than double. As we covered earlier this week, central banks plan on investing a whole lot more into gold.

Gold was the key lesson of Ukraine. Then came the lesson of Iran.

Until this year, few governments worried much about the availability of critical assets like energy, food, fertilizer, microprocessors, etc.

But then US and Israeli forces struck Iran in late February, and Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz. More than five months later, the strait is still too dangerous for most commercial traffic, and many countries are running short on those same critical resources that transit the Gulf.

The lesson of Iran is that the world runs on strategic assets, and access to them can vanish overnight.

Their conclusion is that, again, rather than stockpile US dollars via government bonds and bank deposits, it makes a lot more sense to stockpile strategic assets— like fertilizer, energy, etc.

At a minimum, whenever the situation in Iran comes to its conclusion, countries will have to buy oceans of oil just to top off their strategic petroleum reserves. Our guess is they’ll go far beyond that and build the capacity to store even more.

And not just oil. Anything critical and strategic is now a candidate for the stockpile, because the old days of global cooperation and easy trade are gone, replaced by mistrust, conflict, and resource nationalism.

That means base metals, rare earths, and technology itself, from memory chips to sovereign compute capacity.

This trend is still in its early stages, and the companies that own and produce these critical assets stand to do very well.

We’ve featured many of them, from energy to metals, in Schiff Sovereign’s investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

And this environment has been very good to them: several are trading at all-time highs right now; the crude tanker company we covered just reported the best quarter in its history, and a zinc producer is up almost 3x in under nine months.

In the most recent issue, we told readers about a small oil producer which is becoming wildly successful profit machine; it has no debt, excellent management, yet trades at just three times its current free cash flow.

If you would like to read the full case, you can try Strategic Assets with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. Click here to learn more.

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Through his fame and creativity, Voltaire managed to attract a small army of Swiss watchmakers to relocate across the border into France and set up shop in Ferney. As part of the deal, he personally negotiated special tax incentives for his watchmakers, exempting them from some of the most onerous French national taxes.

Voltaire’s tax incentives were personally signed off by France’s comptroller general, Jacques Turgot… and all of Ferney celebrated their success.

Unfortunately, even a formal deal with the French government didn’t stop the local “tax farmers” from coming to collect.

For most of the 1700s, the royal court in France had delegated the collection of its complex system of taxes and duties to private citizens who were known as tax farmers. Tax farmers would essentially bid against each other to pay the government a fixed sum of money up front each year, which the treasury would then claim as tax revenue. Tax farmers would then have the full authority of the state to go all over the cities and the countryside to collect.

As they were obviously running a business, their primary motivation was to generate the highest possible return on investment by any means necessary. And it didn’t take long for tax farmers to turn into mafia-like organizations that would send roaming gangs across the country to threaten and extort every last penny they could get from French citizens.

Even though Voltaire had negotiated directly with the French government for his region’s tax exemptions, the tax farmers still came to Ferney and brutalized the local population. Voltaire wrote to a friend in late 1775 that the tax farmers “marched about in groups of fifty, stopped all the vehicles, searched all the pockets, forced their way into all the houses and made every kind of damage,” to collect money from the citizens of Ferney.

This was not an aberration; stories of widespread abuse by tax farmers were legendary in pre-revolutionary France. In the year 1783 alone, tax farmers carried out more than 4,000 house searches and arrested roughly 20,000 people. Confiscation of property, homes, clothes, and horses was routine. And the financial incentives were perverse, with the person who ratted out a suspected tax delinquent earning one-third of the confiscated property.

Unsurprisingly, most of these tax farmers would be put to the guillotine after 1789.

Sadly, this concept is starting to make a comeback in the land of the free, where governments are outsourcing tax collection to private businesses, which have a financial incentive to be excessive and overly suspicious.

A large part of this is because roughly half of the states are in financial distress. This is a consequence of the federal government pulling the plug on certain slush fund programs that have fattened state coffers since the COVID days.

As a result, states are having to find ways to make ends meet. And that starts with keeping their tax codes deliberately complex and outdated. Doing so means that almost everybody is going to be guilty of some violation, because it’s nearly impossible to remain in compliance with a tax code that often contradicts itself.

States then empower private companies to go out and collect, to find infractions wherever they may be, and extort money from productive citizens. This is a much easier approach for them than doing the hard work to balance their budgets and live within their means.

Here’s an easy example: it’s completely normal now for a business to have remote workers. And often those workers might be in another city, another state, or even another country.

Tax rules in many states have never caught up to this new paradigm. Hence, many state governments still want their pound of flesh, even though workers don’t set foot anywhere near their jurisdictions.

Rules in New York state, for example, are completely incomprehensible. A nonresident employee who works remotely from another state can still be considered a New York worker whenever staying home is for the employee’s convenience rather than the employer’s necessity.

There is, of course, no guidance on how necessity versus convenience is determined. It’s a gray area and leaves a lot of room for interpretation by a tax collector who has a financial incentive to extort businesses with out-of-state remote workers.

The fact is, it’s impossible for businesses with several employees in several states to get all of this right.

Every multi-state business is in violation of something, somewhere, and the only question is who finds it first.

And this is only one small example. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of outdated tax regulations at the state and local levels for which compliance is simply not feasible.

Private companies receive anywhere from 12% to 20% of the amount they collect, and they engage in any number of creative ways to find delinquents. They’ll license proprietary location data, including cell phone tower logs, toll records, and even credit card statements, and when all else fails, sometimes they’ll just make stuff up to intimidate taxpayers into writing a big check.

You will absolutely hear more about this, if not experience it for yourself. Readers of this letter know without a doubt that the US federal government is in deep financial turmoil, with a national debt of nearly $40 trillion and roughly $2 trillion in annual deficits.

But many states are in far worse shape. And they don’t have the luxury of being able to print the world’s reserve currency to make ends meet. Rather than make the difficult choices to balance their budgets, they will turn to milking their citizens like dairy cows and outsourcing the collection to a new generation of tax farmers.

P.S. Working out where your business, your assets, and your family legally belong is exactly what our flagship research service, Schiff Sovereign’s Plan B Confidential, was built for.

Every month it covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, legal tax reduction, and real assets, reported from more than 120 countries so the options come with real costs attached.

You can learn more here.

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These stockpiles of cash around the world are known as a nation’s “reserves”, and the people who manage those funds are called reserve managers.

Due to America’s superpower status, managers tend to hold the vast majority of their nations’ reserves in US dollars— most commonly in US government bonds like the 10-year note.

Now, every year, a London institute called OMFIF surveys dozens of these reserve managers who collectively hold more than $10 trillion— and OMFIF asks the same question each year:

What does your central bank plan to do with its US dollars?

This year, for the first time, more reserve managers said they planned to cut their dollar holdings than increase them.

Reserve managers are the least excitable people in finance. Their job is to be boring, to hold safe assets, and to never make news. So this is not an emotional knee-jerk reaction. It is a decision that has been decades in the making and accelerated over the past few years.

The critical moment came in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine; the US government froze roughly $300 billion of Russia’s reserves, i.e. assets that were held outside of Russia.

Interestingly enough, many of those frozen Russian assets were actually held in EUROPE, not the United States. But the US government still exerted control, pushing Europe to freeze those Russian-owned bonds.

Every reserve manager on the planet learned the same lesson that day: if you ever land on America’s bad side, the US government will lock you out of your national savings in an instant.

And it was at that point that central banks around the world started shopping around for more secure reserve assets that the Treasury Department cannot freeze.

Given that foreign countries collectively hold tens of trillions of assets (most of which is denominated in US dollars), they couldn’t exactly dump their holdings overnight. No one is willing to shout “FIRE” in a crowded theater; but they are, however, calmly making their way to the door.

But this process will take years, perhaps even a decade or more.

The key question is— where are they going to park their reserves, if not US dollars? There certainly have been a number of lingering options, from the “BRICs dollar” to China’s digital currency.

But the obvious answer (as we have been writing about for years here) is gold.

From 2022 through 2025, central banks bought a few hundred billion dollars worth of gold (above their normal purchases). This amounts to roughly 2% of their reserves.

Yet by parking just 2% of their reserves into gold, gold prices more than doubled from ~$1,600 back then to more than $4,000 today.

It’s important to note that the sudden spike in gold prices to $5,600 early this year wasn’t from central bank purchases— that was mostly hedge funds and retail investors piling in.

Gold prices slid back down to $4,000 as those investors exited. But central banks have started buying again; net central bank purchases amounted to 244 tonnes in the first quarter of 2026— well above their five-year average. And net purchases continued in April and May.

The big headline is that those same central bank reserve managers recently told OMFIF that they plan on moving AT LEAST another 7% of reserves out of dollars over the next decade.

Most likely the bulk of this reserve diversification will go into gold.

In other words, 2% of reserves more than doubled the gold price between 2022 and 2026. Now they plan to invest over three times that amount over the next decade. Any guesses where the gold price is headed?

These bankers also expect to pay more for gold; 61% of the central banks OMFIF surveyed estimated a gold between $5,000 and $6,000 an ounce by June 2027. And yet, even at record prices, most of them still plan to buy gold over the next two years.

Think about that. The institutions that just bought the gold price dip expect the price to go up within a year… and their stated plan is to keep buying more.

Most individual investors are very short-term in their thinking. They look at day-to-day price fluctuations and tend to follow popular trends.

Central bankers, on the other hand, ignore daily, monthly, and quarterly noise. They think strategically… and their time horizon is in years if not decades.

They’re not doing this to make money; they aren’t planning to trade their US dollars for gold, only hoping to trade their gold back for more US dollars down the road.

Rather, they’re trying to protect their national savings by purchasing strategic assets that the US government cannot confiscate.

Ultimately this is why we believe that the long-term direction of gold is still much higher— because the largest buyers in the market are still buying, and they plan to continue buying for years to come.

P.S. When retail investors dumped gold this year, they dumped the gold producers too. But these companies were built to survive far lower prices, so at today’s gold they are still enormously profitable, still throwing off cash, and still trading at low multiples of the cash they generate.

Schiff Sovereign’s Strategic Assets is monthly investment research on exactly these kinds of businesses: already profitable, little or no debt, trading at a low multiple of free cash flow, with catalysts the market has not priced in.

Strategic Assets comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Click here to learn more.

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His story, as told in a decade of glowing profiles, was the stuff of Hollywood. Arday was autistic and nonverbal until age 11, and could not read or write until 18. He was epileptic, yet ran 30 marathons in 35 days, and later 600 miles in six days.

He beat a brain tumor around the time he finished his PhD. He had played both soccer and snooker at a professional level, raised millions of pounds for charity, and even appeared as a child in “Seven Up,” the most famous documentary series in British history.

Everyone printed his story without question: the BBC, CBS News, the universities themselves. For years, nobody blinked.

There was just one problem. It was all made up.

And it should have been obvious. “Seven Up” began filming twenty-one years before Arday was born.

Arday made the claim he was on the original show in a 2022 interview, and no one bothered to do the math to realize that it was impossible for him to be on the show. It was the same as claiming that he had been part of the cast of Gone with the Wind.

Yet only this summer, when confronted with the arithmetic, did he start to change his story and insist that he had been talking about some other project, not “Seven Up”.

The rest of his resume crumbled the same way. On July 30, the University of Bath corrected a blog post that had him playing professional soccer and touring professional snooker, and apologized to Arday for allegedly misquoting him.

His fallback claim, semi-professional soccer for a club he never names, conveniently can’t be checked; snooker’s databases record one amateur match with zero prize money.

Reporters hunting for the money behind his claimed £5.5 million in charity found traceable donations in the thousands.

So how does a resume this fake survive for eleven years? Because at every step, the institutions whose job it was to check decided to just believe instead.

It started in 2015, when Liverpool John Moores University awarded Arday his PhD. His examiners missed more than 100 passages copied nearly verbatim from another academic’s 2009 thesis.

By September 2025, Times Higher Education, Britain’s leading academic publication, had built a 63-page dossier documenting the plagiarism. Arday’s defamation firm, Carter-Ruck, sent the magazine a letter calling its reporting a “targeted campaign” that “may be, whether consciously or unconsciously, racially motivated.” The magazine killed its own story.

Its reporter, Jack Grove, kept asking questions anyway. So the Metropolitan Police opened a harassment investigation into Grove, for emailing a professor questions about his resume, and warned him to stop because Arday’s mental health was suffering.

In March 2026, Liverpool John Moores University finally examined the plagiarism and ruled it “honest and reasonable error.” An analysis commissioned by the Telegraph would later put the odds of that “honest” overlap occurring at roughly one in 100 billion.

The PhD stood. Arday never disputed the copying itself; his defense was that he hadn’t received adequate supervision, given his autism and learning disabilities.

Cambridge knew about all of it and did nothing. So in June, one of its own faculty members gave up and handed the case to an outside academic, Nathan Cofnas. He published everything in late July, and within days the real story of Arday’s lies were being reported in the press.

Cambridge’s response was to declare Arday the “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”

As the scandal grew, Arday sat for an interview with the Guardian, a paper with no history of hostility toward progressive academics, and piled on new details to the story of his victimhood.

Arday claimed that a masked man had confronted him at his faculty building on two occasions, producing a knife the second time. Someone had mailed a severed pig’s head to his parents.

Then the paper did something Arday clearly wasn’t expecting. It checked.

Cambridge’s security cameras had captured no masked man on either occasion. The Metropolitan Police said Arday’s account of the pig’s head was “categorically” incorrect, and the London butchers the reporters contacted said no police officer had ever investigated. As one put it, “That’s the kind of thing we’d remember.”

When the Guardian came back empty-handed, Arday explained the entire phenomenon in two sentences: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

Unquestioned belief was the only treatment he had ever known. That sounds like quite a privilege.

On August 1, the Guardian published its full fact-check of Arday’s persecution story. Cambridge held out for four more days, then announced on August 5 an investigation into Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments.” Bear in mind, those are the same qualifications it had spent three years celebrating. Arday resigned within hours.

It took eleven years, a whistleblower, a killed exposé, a police file, and national headlines to get one professor’s resume checked. Who knows how many others never make the papers.

Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime. Elizabeth Warren faked being a Native American to be labeled a minority professor at Harvard.

Arday said hold my beer and watch this. And, shielded by his victim status in the world of academia, he got away with the most egregiously absurd lies for over a decade.

A fraud in an ivory tower would be harmless if the ivory tower stayed out of your life. It doesn’t.

Academia is where government shops for its experts: Lina Khan went from Columbia law professor to running the Federal Trade Commission at age 32, where she spent her tenure protecting Americans from cheaper groceries, discounted liquor, video game mergers, and a handbag monopoly.

The COVID lockdowns arrived stamped with academic credentials, and so did gender ideology, critical race theory, and every other policy with “the research shows” attached.

The scandal was never one fibbing professor; it’s that the entire “expert” class gets vetted this carefully.

Arday, at least, finally quit. The institutions that spent eleven years enabling him are still there, still certifying the next crop of experts, still expecting you to just believe them.

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It’s been about 15 years since I moved away from the tiny village in rural Lithuania where I grew up… and back then it still felt run down, backward, post-Soviet.

My whole childhood was basically subsistence farming with my family. Everyone I knew was the same way. Even by the late 1990s we considered touch-tone telephones to be “high tech”, and no one had ever heard of the Internet. 

But last week I led a group of our Total Access members on an intimate tour of Lithuania– from the capital city of Vilnius, to the quiet countryside where my family still lives. And I was blown away by how much had changed.

Sure, the smoke off the charcoal smelled exactly the way I remembered it. Same woods, same white birch pressing in from every side. My niece and her husband ran the whole thing– plates moving, drinks appearing, everyone was handed something before they’d even asked.

But the atmosphere was totally different.

Here’s what it is now. A country of 2.8 million people– smaller than São Paulo–  that’s produced six unicorns since 2020. Vinted. Nord Security. Oxylabs. Cast AI. The former employees of the first wave are now founding the next.

A former textile factory in Vilnius is now Cyber City, housing more than 3,000 tech workers. Robinhood opened a crypto centre there in 2025. Checkout.com followed in 2026.

They aren’t coming for the birch trees. The Bank of Lithuania approves fintech licenses in about three months, the fastest process in Europe, and a Lithuanian license lets a company operate across the entire EU. 

Around 280 fintech firms now operate from the country, and no other EU member has licensed more of them.

There’s also an extremely high level of education tech workers; Vilnius has become a major hub for talent in Europe, hence why so many AI companies are starting here.

The taxes help too. The corporate rate is 17% against an EU average above 21%, and small companies pay nothing at all for their first two years.

None of this is an accident. Lithuania spent decades under Soviet occupation, with Moscow deciding what people could build, buy, and say. When that ended in 1990, the country swung hard in the opposite direction.

The business friendliness isn’t a marketing strategy but a reaction, built by people who remember exactly what the alternative looked like and don’t want to go back.

You can see it on the streets: nice cars, new construction, restaurants that would hold their own in any European capital, and rising over all of it is a well-preserved “old town”, the original medieval city center from 1,000 years ago. 

Apartments in Vilnius average around 3,000 euros per square meter. That puts a 100-square-meter apartment, around 1,100 square feet, in an EU capital at roughly $340,000; in Boston, where condos average about $710 per square foot, the same space runs more than double. 

But just twenty minutes outside the center, extremely well-built houses still go for under 2,000 euros per square meter, with the land practically thrown in for free.

(Our Plan B Confidential research service published a full report on Lithuanian property in November, covering neighborhoods, taxes, and mortgages for foreigners.)

Lithuania grants temporary residency to foreigners who start a business there, and its startup visa fast-tracks founders, family included.

And anyone with a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent who held Lithuanian citizenship before the Soviets invaded in 1940, and who left the country before 1990, may qualify to have that citizenship reinstated without giving up their current passport. That’s an EU passport hiding in the family tree.

My family isn’t in tech. They’re not investors. But the tech-driven economic boom has reached them too… everyone is benefitting. And we took an intimate tour of all of it, so our group could see the transformation from the inside. 

Our Total Access group had just spent four days walking through a former Cold War KGB prison, touring a Nazi execution fort, crawling through crypts beneath a medieval cathedral, and eating at Michelin-starred restaurants.

Now they were standing in my family’s backyard outside Kaunas, looking more relaxed than I’d seen them the entire trip.

I watched one of them– a guy who splits his time between Florida and Medellín, not easily impressed– take a bite of šašlykai and go completely quiet. Šašlykai is what you eat when someone in Lithuania wants to show you they care: meat on skewers, marinated overnight, cooked slowly over charcoal until the whole yard smells like something your body recognizes even if your brain doesn’t.

The next day, we drove Soviet-era and older tanks through a field. It’s loud in a way that rearranges your organs, slower than you’d expect and more violent than you’d hope. Nobody in the group had done it before. And everyone loved it.

But underlying all of it is a quiet economic boom in a place that almost no one has heard about.

If you’ve never heard much about Lithuania, that’s the point. The window on places like this doesn’t stay open forever.

One honest warning: Lithuania in winter is genuinely awful. We went in the right season. Plan accordingly.

P.S. This trip was part of Total Access–  our membership that takes a small group of people to places most travelers never see, with access they wouldn’t find on their own. If that sounds like something you want to be part of, you can learn more and apply here.

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Tar-iq’s army was the western tip of a new Islamic empire that had just finished sweeping across North Africa. Spain’s Visigothic kings— the Germanic dynasty that had taken the peninsula from a collapsing Roman Empire— were busy fighting a civil war among themselves, and by some accounts one faction invited the Muslim invaders in to help settle it. The invaders stayed.

Within seven years, the Moors, as the Muslim Arabs and Berbers of Iberia came to be known, ruled nearly all of Spain… and taking it back took the Spanish nearly 800 years of grinding reconquest— a war that finally ended in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada.

Five centuries later, Spain has apparently decided it wants its invaders back.

In a ruling that surfaced in early July, Spain’s own Supreme Court decided that migrants intercepted at sea while swimming toward Ceuta (the Spanish exclave in North Africa) can no longer be turned back on the spot.

The judges reasoned that the normal rules by which Spanish authorities can refuse illegals at the border DO NOT APPLY because a swimmer never actually crosses a physical border. Triathletes— take note.

Word traveled fast. Last week, as you probably saw, roughly 60,000 people poured into Ceuta from the sea. Bear in mind that Ceuta’s entire permanent population is only about 83,000.

According to Spanish officials at least 88 people died either having drowned at sea or crushed against the breakwater.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the crossings “an attack” and “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity” and sent in the army, apparently without pausing to reflect that it was his own country’s policies that had opened the door.

Here is what Spain currently offers an asylum seeker:

• The state provides up to 18 months of housing and meals
• Plus a monthly cash allowance
• Plus reimbursements for clothing, transportation, and education
• Healthcare is free, even for those who enter illegally
• Legal and interpreter services are paid by the government
• Work permits arrive after just six months

On top of all that was this past spring’s amnesty declaration for migrants who entered illegally.

The irony is that Spain used to have a Golden Visa program to entice wealthy real estate investors. But they killed it.

People inside the Spanish government honestly thought it was a better idea to pay for illegal migrants than to collect tax revenue from wealthy foreigners.

None of this is an argument against immigrants. There are people of tremendous value and talent all over the world, and the nations that attract them have always prospered because of it.

America is the proof. Between 1892 and 1954, more than 12 million people came through Ellis Island.

They came to work, because work was the entire offer; there was no taxpayer-funded housing, and there were no cash handouts. Newcomers leaned on family, churches, and mutual aid groups which helped to support and find jobs for arrivals who had nothing.

Mass immigration was not without controversy back then, and the government eventually put tighter controls, rigorous checks, and strict quotas in place.

But the incentive structure was 100% correct: all immigrants received was the opportunity to work their asses off. Nothing more. And adopting American values and integrating into the culture was part of the deal. It was an honor to become more American.

The Cubans who fled to Florida highlight the same point.

After Fidel Castro’s communist revolution took over the island in 1959, roughly half a million Cubans came to the US over the next 15 years, most settling in Miami, often arriving with nothing at all.

Wealthy Cubans who had once owned successful businesses ended up pumping gas. Educated professionals cleaned houses. They worked hard to climb back up… because they understood better than anyone what freedom and hard work were actually worth.

Within a generation they turned Miami into the business hub of Latin America, and by 2004 US-born Cubans were already out-earning the average American household.

Countries are very similar to private businesses in a number of ways— and one of the most important ones is that both survive or fail based on the quality of their people.

The most successful companies in the world attract the smartest, most talented employees who are mission-focused and genuinely want to work hard to build innovative products and services. More importantly, they have a culture that prioritizes getting rid of bad workers.

Conversely, companies that hire lazy employees, elevate the incompetent, and make it impossible to get rid of toxic employees are destined for failure.

It’s the same with a country. If your policy is to attract the best and brightest across the world to come, work hard, and adopt your values, your country will do well. If you advertise free benefits to illegals, you’ll get exactly what you asked for.

Immigration by itself is not the problem. The problem is when there’s bad incentives.

Spain’s government now insists that most of the illegals have gone back home. But even if that’s true, the bad incentive structure still remains… so the invasion will only continue.

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The Senate’s answer to childhood diabetes: ban Tony the Tiger

Senator Bernie Sanders— himself quite a wealthy man— has spent his career warning America about the greed of the capitalist pigs. Now he’s adding capitalist tigers to his rant.

Earlier this month he named the true enemies of the people: Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch, and the rest of the breakfast-aisle bourgeoisie.

Sanders’ Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act cleared the Senate health committee last week on a 12 to 10 vote. The bill puts warning labels on anything high in sugar, salt, or saturated fat, and it bans child-directed ads featuring cartoon characters, athletes, celebrities, influencers, games, and contests.

If it becomes law, the federal government will officially be in the mascot-policing business.

Now, I’m not a defender of the refined sugar industry. It’s poison. I eat very little, and my kids even less.

But the irony is loud. Remember, this is the same government that spent roughly $18 billion subsidizing corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, and soy oils— the core ingredients of the junk food it now wants to slap warning labels on.

And that doesn’t take into account all the money given to consumers to buy this poison; the US Department of Agriculture’s own study found that about 20 cents of every grocery dollar spent by food stamp households goes to sweetened drinks, desserts, candy, etc., with soft drinks at the top of the list.

Then the government pays for the consequences: treating diabetes costs over $300 billion a year in direct medical care, and government insurance picks up about two-thirds of the tab.

So taxpayers subsidize the sugar, buy the soda, and fund the dialysis, and the Senate’s answer to this pipeline is to ban Tony the Tiger.

They’ll regulate everything about the problem except their own role in creating it.

There was a man in the girls’ locker room. The city’s solution was curtains.

A mother in Lynnwood, Washington says she walked into the women’s locker room at the local recreation center during her daughter’s swim meet on July 12 and found an adult male showering there.

When questioned why he was there, the man answered, “I’m trans.” And that ended the matter.

It had to, because in Washington state, the [biological] woman has no rights, and the local city government doesn’t have the authority to overrule state law. So if anyone tries to stop this grown man from showering in front of little girls, THEY would be the ones in legal trouble!

This leaves the city with very few options to address parents’ concerns. Rather than be able to exercise common sense, the city stated that “our facilities team has installed new full-sized shower curtains in the locker rooms and is exploring other modifications.”

The FDA still requires drug information on paper, thanks to a rule from 1962.

If you’ve ever opened a medication box and found that sheet of paper folded down to the size of a postage stamp, printed in type that practically requires a microscope to read, you’ve experienced a 64-year-old federal mandate in its natural habitat.

Drug companies don’t produce it by choice; the Food and Drug Administration requires it, on paper, based on a rule written in 1962. By the FDA’s own math, the ritual burns through roughly 90 billion sheets of paper a year.

That sheet is the drug’s instruction manual for professionals: dosing, warnings, side effects, interactions. It isn’t even meant for you; it’s meant for doctors and pharmacists, every one of whom already looks that information up on the Internet where it’s kept current.

The FDA proposed the obvious fix back in 2014, letting manufacturers post the document online instead of printing it.

What followed was classic government: eleven straight years of Congress attaching riders to its spending bills forbidding the switch, followed by this year’s bills, which merely encourage it.

So Congress needed six decades to start reconsidering a paper mandate from JFK’s administration, but only one committee vote to go after Tony the Tiger.

That’s the modern government business model in a single week: boundless energy for writing new rules, and glacial pacing for fixing their own.

Hackers took down Minnesota water systems, and the state took a victory lap.

Over roughly 48 hours in late July, a coordinated cyberattack hit the computerized controls of dozens of community water systems across Minnesota.

In the small town of Braham, the attack knocked the well and the treatment plant offline entirely, and the city needed about two hours to get them back; officials blamed “a malicious cyber-attack of computerized operating systems by unknown actors.”

The Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth lost communications at two water towers and several lift stations and had to run its water system by hand.

Officially, nobody knows who did it: days into a federal investigation, the attribution is still “unknown actors.”

Yet federal agencies warned four days before the attack that Iranian-linked hackers were breaking into exactly this kind of equipment at US water utilities. Plus private security researchers needed just three days to name a suspect— an Iranian-linked group called CyberAv3ngers.

A failure of government? Not according to Minnesota’s chief information security officer, who bragged: “Our response worked as intended, enabling agencies at every level of government to rapidly coordinate, contain the incident, and help prevent more serious impacts to critical services.”

More than 30 utilities attacked, a treatment plant knocked offline, zero attackers officially identified. If that’s the response working as intended, we’d hate to see the version that doesn’t.

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The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just released 1,141 pages of his near-daily entries from the COVID era, days before he appeared yesterday. They read like the diary of a nine year old girl.

Weeks later, in early April 2020, 22 million Americans were newly out of work thanks in large part to Fauci. Yet he was still focused on himself: “Intense publicity about me continues with stories of grandmothers who have crushes on me.”

He noted a “beautiful profile” from the BBC. He logged the online petitions to vote him People’s Sexiest Man Alive. He made 641 entries cataloging his own press coverage, and beamed over having to turn down Dancing with the Stars.

“The situation with my national and international fame,” he wrote, “is explosive and really unimaginable.”

Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel kept calling, Fauci wrote, wanting to come to dinner “to explain to me how naive I am and not fully appreciating just how much money I can get from book deals, films and speeches.”

His narcissism and fixation on money and fame is one thing. The lies are entirely another.

On November 17, 2021, after spending hours in a crowded room with fully-vaccinated guests, Fauci lamented, “I’m well aware that many people who are vaccinated are still getting infected and that worried me a lot.”

Yet at the same time he insisted that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus… and helped to censor people who suggested otherwise.

The people who said natural immunity was real were treated as cranks.

“Trust the science” became the catchphrase of the era, and anyone who doubted masks was dismissed as “anti-science.”

The problem was that “the science” kept changing its mind.

In March 2020, Fauci told 60 Minutes there was “no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Within weeks his guidance reversed, and masks went from pointless to mandatory.

By January 2021, Fauci was on national television telling Americans that wearing two masks “just makes common sense.”

Then actual science arrived. In 2023, Cochrane, medicine’s gold standard, analyzed the masking data and found they didn’t make any conclusive difference.

Even the six-foot “social distancing” rule turned out to be made up; Fauci admitted to Congress that it “sort of just appeared.”

The people who were against school closures were accused of wanting teachers to die. Then the nation’s report card showed nine-year-olds posting the first math decline in history.

The people who suggested COVID escaped the Wuhan lab, the one Fauci’s own institute helped fund through a New York nonprofit, had their posts deleted from Facebook until 2021. Today this is considered the most plausible origin theory.

Of course, Fauci had sworn to Congress that his institute “has never funded nor does it fund now gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Pressed by Paul to retract it in July 2021, he answered, “I have never lied before Congress.”

Three months later the NIH informed Congress that it had, in fact, funded gain of function research at that very lab.

On Wednesday, Paul asked Fauci the same questions under oath— and the man who had never lied to Congress pleaded the Fifth rather than answer them. His own explanation was that anything he said might be used to prosecute him for perjury.

Yet the questions that mattered most were never allowed to be asked.

When did being unvaccinated turn you into a threat to society? Nobody has ever been called a murderer for skipping a flu shot, which kills tens of thousands of Americans in a bad year.

But by late 2021 your neighbor’s health had become your personal responsibility, and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was joking that unvaccinated patients shouldn’t get ICU beds: “Rest in peace, wheezy.”

When did it become an essential social value to put something into your own body to protect somebody else? Never before had Washington made a vaccine a condition of employment for tens of millions of workers, let alone a shot that didn’t stop transmission.

And when did voters approve any of it? Closing the schools, shutting down businesses, masking toddlers, firing the unvaccinated: none of it was ever on a ballot. Unelected bureaucrats wrote the rules of daily life… which seems strange for the most advanced representative democracy in the world.

The whole premise was flawed: they treated COVID as the worst thing ever that must be stopped at any cost.

In reality the risk was concentrated among the very old and the chronically unhealthy, and for anyone under 60 the fatality rate was a few hundredths of a percent.

Yet they torched the economy, the schools, and much of the social fabric… all because of a flawed premise.

Amazingly, no one was fired. No one was indicted. And no one apologized.

Republican Senators spent Wednesday’s hearing reading him the rap sheet.

Rand Paul told him the lockdowns “could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime.”

Senator Rick Scott asked whether he ever told anyone to destroy records.

Fauci pleaded the Fifth to all of it.

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, at least admitted the obvious: the lab leak got dismissed as a “right-wing” theory, and he himself may have been “blinded by the partisan idea that maybe the truth might come from a side that’s different than you are.”

The other Democrats spent the day consoling Fauci and praising his heroics. Extraordinary. Years later, despite overwhelming evidence of deceit, narcissism, and terrible decisions, they still treat the guy like he’s the second coming of Jonas Salk.

One thing that was said over and over in yesterday’s hearing is that “another pandemic is coming.” Great. They’re prepping us already for the lockdowns.

Bear in mind that many of the people who were wrong about everything STILL run the same state and local institutions. They’re still unelected. And they’re still certain they were the heroes.

This means the next emergency will be handled by the same class of “experts,” with the same lack of oversight and accountability.

That’s the whole point of having a Plan B.

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Last month, one shipowner agreed to make that run— through the Strait of Hormuz— for nearly $470,000 per day.

For perspective, in the first few months of last year, before the war, the biggest crude tankers on earth were earning as little as $36,000 a day.

The ships collecting these fortunes don’t produce anything at all. They don’t pump oil, they don’t refine it, and they don’t sell it. They just carry it from one place to another.

And that is exactly why they have become the biggest winners of this war.

When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February, oil spiked to $120 a barrel in March, then calmed as ceasefires came and went. But all the while, tanker rates just kept climbing.

That’s because of the arithmetic that drives the shipping business; it’s simple to understand— when the strait became too dangerous to navigate, everything had to be rerouted. So instead of a quick voyage through the strait, cargo had to be transported through far more complicated means… and ships had to sail much longer routes to avoid the danger.

The end result is that oil from the region now crosses far more ocean, and every voyage takes a LOT longer. This means ships are tied up for longer… driving demand higher for shipping.

And it’s not like this problem can be eliminated by simply adding more ships to the global fleet; supertankers take years to build, and shipyards spent the past decade producing very few.

That last part matters, because it is the reason this windfall was visible long before anyone had heard of this war.

One of the largest supertanker owners earned more than $100 million in the first quarter, excluding one-off gains from selling ships, as its fleet was making roughly two and a half times as much per day as a year earlier.

The company paid out every penny of it as a dividend, extending a streak of quarterly payouts stretching back more than fifteen years. And the second quarter will be even better: by early May, it had already booked most of its available days at nearly double its first-quarter rate.

Another major tanker owner reported nearly $200 million in profit for the quarter and declared the largest dividend in its history.

Tankers are not the only winners. One owner of bulk carriers— the ships that haul iron ore, grain, and coal— has become the target of a takeover battle in which a rival has raised its offer again and again, and the board keeps rejecting bids it says still undervalue the fleet.

All three companies are on the research list of Schiff Sovereign’s investment newsletter, Strategic Assets.

They were featured in 2023 and 2024, back when shipping was about as unloved as a business can be. That was the point. Shipping moves in long cycles, and the bottom is where the next shortage is easiest to see… because years of terrible rates had stopped owners from ordering ships, and a ship ordered today does not carry cargo for three years.

Counting the ships that would exist in 2026 took no view on Iran— only a public order book.

They met a strict set of criteria: profitable, little or no debt, trading cheap against current cash flow, and operating in an industry with an aging fleet and hardly any new construction on order.

The war revealed that setup; it did not create it. As of early July, one tanker owner had more than doubled since being featured, the other was up more than 90%, and the bulk carrier owner was up more than 50% on a takeover bid rather than a rate spike.

The tankers keep paying quarterly dividends, and one payout alone equals almost 10% of the share price when that company was first featured.

We expect this pattern to repeat across real assets.

The world spent a decade underinvesting in the physical things civilization runs on: ships, mines, oil fields, refineries, smelters. Now geopolitics has turned violent. When there is no spare capacity, every disruption has to be resolved by price, and the companies that own the scarce assets collect the difference.

To be clear, we are not permabulls, and rates like these will not last forever. A durable peace would bring tanker earnings down hard, and shipping has punished euphoric buyers many times before.

Our edge is not predicting wars or commodity prices. It is applying strict criteria to well-run companies, making the case to buy when they meet the bar, and to sell when they no longer do.

That discipline is working. Of the more than twenty companies currently on the research list, six are showing a loss. The companies that we closed out returned an average of 172%.

A silver producer gained more than 950% in under a year, and others returned 540%, 240%, and 150%.

If you would like to see the full research, including the companies we believe are positioned for the next disruption, you can try Strategic Assets with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

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In the private sector, such a trophy office property would fetch north of $1 billion per year in rental income.

Yet for the federal government, two-thirds of the space sits empty according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government’s own internal watchdog. 

This is based on real data; the GAO toured the department’s buildings last fall and counted the empty desks.

And this is far from an isolated case. Of the 189 government buildings around the country that were analyzed by the GAO, 168 were underutilized– with occupancy averaging just 37%. 

One of the worst offenders is One Aviation Plaza in Queens, which sits at 13% occupancy. 

Ironically, Congress actually set a MINIMUM standard for all government buildings to be at least 60% occupied. This is the law of the land in the United States, set by the 2023 USE IT Act. 

So, Congress was surprisingly trying to make things more efficient and save taxpayer money– potentially billions each year. They passed a law. But the government doesn’t follow it.  

The big consequence for the government violating its own law so far has been this GAO report. Nobody was fined, nobody was fired, and nothing was sold. Basically we got a PDF. 

And all of that is just one category of waste at just one department. The bigger losses are to outright fraud.

In June, the Justice Department announced a record-setting healthcare fraud takedown: 455 defendants, the most ever charged in a single healthcare fraud operation, including 90 doctors and licensed medical professionals, all accused in schemes involving $6.5 billion in fraudulent claims. 

Yet federal agents only managed to seize $182 million in cash and assets. No word on what happened to the other $6.3 billion. 

By the government’s own accounting, federal agencies made close to $200 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2025 alone… $24 billion more than the year before.

That’s money which should never have gone out the door, went out in the wrong amount, or can’t be documented.  And that was only across 64 programs at 15 agencies… a small fraction of the government’s total footprint.

This keeps happening for a simple reason: the federal government’s ~$7 trillion annual budget is too vast for anyone to keep track of… and no one is ever held accountable.

Bureaucrats who waste the money never get fired; in fact it is damn near impossible to fire a federal employee. And voters continue electing the same incompetent, crooked politicians to public office. 

Even when there’s public outcry over obvious fraud, the legacy media closes ranks around their party and insists that voters are racist for criticizing “Learning Centers”.

None of this is free. The empty buildings, the stolen billions, the money nobody can track: it all gets paid for with borrowed money. And that deficit spending is what fuels inflation.

June’s Consumer Price Index came in at 3.5%. By the Fed’s own admission, inflation has now missed its 2% target for five years running.

And after all that failure, few in Washington will name the cause.

A lot of people blame oil, especially after the war with Iran sent crude above $126 a barrel. But oil has been all over the board for the last five years; it was under $60 a barrel just last fall. So why wasn’t inflation falling when oil was cheap?

Because, through all of it, there has been exactly one constant: insane levels of government spending. Deficits keep rising, and the more money the government wastes, the more stubborn inflation becomes.

The central bank can’t fix that; the Fed doesn’t pass spending bills, Congress does. And as long as the spending stays out of control, inflation is not coming down.

And Washington has shown no appetite to bring it under control. They refuse to cut even the easiest, most obvious waste and fraud.

Nothing about this changes on its own. A government that can’t bring itself to sell an empty building is not going to take on the spending that actually matters, and inflation is how they’ll pay for the difference.

Which is exactly why it makes so much sense to own the real assets that hold their value when the dollar doesn’t: gold, silver, and well-managed, productive businesses.

It’s definitely time to be thinking about a Plan B.

PS: Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, is built for exactly this: real asset strategies to protect your savings from Washington’s spending, and residency options in countries where your money buys far more. It’s backed by boots-on-the-ground research from all over the world– and you can learn more about it here.

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The Revolutionary War was still raging, and Adams would only remain home with his wife and children for a precious few months before he would need to sail back to Europe.

But this brief respite was not a vacation. Adams had been tasked with an urgent mission by the leadership of his native Massachusetts: they needed a state constitution. Quickly.

State officials were desperate to form a proper government and get to work… but first they needed a constitution that would pass muster with the voters. Their first attempt had already failed the previous year, so they leaned on Adams to get the job done.

Adams worked swiftly and diligently. And, before he left for Europe again a few months later, Massachusetts had its constitution.

One of the interesting clauses Adams wrote was a requirement for top elected officials to declare that they “believe the Christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth.”

In other words, elected officials in Massachusetts had a constitutional requirement to be Christian.

Americans are taught that ‘separation of church and state’ was a founding principle of the country. It was not, at least not the way most people think.

It’s true that the US Constitution’s First Amendment creates a wall between the federal government and religion. But states were left free to do whatever they wanted. And they did. In fact, eleven of the original thirteen states had religious requirements woven into their constitutions.

Delaware required officeholders to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son. . .” Maryland demanded a declaration of “belief in the Christian religion.”

Massachusetts went further and directed taxpayer funds to the church. It was 100% a Christian state.

Eventually, however, the citizens of Massachusetts saw fit to change their constitution and eliminate the formal link between church and state; even John Adams himself supported this change in the twilight of his life.

So in 1833, voters in Massachusetts passed the Eleventh Amendment to their constitution— ending compulsory religious taxes and mandates of Christianity.

It’s not that the Christian faith was waning in Massachusetts, or in the United States. Far from it. Voters at that point simply felt that government was civic, religion was personal, and the two should be separate.

Sadly, nearly two centuries later, Massachusetts is getting back into the religion business. But not for Christianity.

Massachusetts State Senator James Eldridge has a bill moving rapidly through the legislature that would create a permanent, official government Islam commission: an 11-member body whose statutory duties include recommending Muslims for government jobs.

S.2134 parades as “An Act promoting the civil rights and inclusion of American Muslims in the commonwealth.”

But the text does something else entirely. The commission shall “identify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions.”

It shall recommend “legislation to combat Islamophobia.”

It shall “foster unity among the American Muslim community and organizations in the commonwealth.” And it may “accept and solicit funds, including any gifts, donations, grants, or bequests, or any federal funds.”

In other words, a taxpayer-run Islamic hiring commission inside the state government with an unfettered pipeline to crooked funds.

Think about it— Iran, or any Islamic terrorist group, could easily funnel money into this state Islamic commission… It’s absolutely insane.

Bear in mind that Massachusetts already operates nine permanent identity commissions, covering women, Latinos, LGBTQ youth, Black men and boys, and more.

So at first, this seems like just another part of the DEI machine.

But Islam is not just another census category, because Islam is not merely a private faith. It is a complete political and legal system with its own laws, its own courts, and its own political hierarchy that many Muslim nations still adhere to today.

This is why places like Yemen have no minimum marriage age, and child brides are still shipped off to creepy old men. Senator Eldridge and his supporters seem to think that these values should have a taxpayer-funded commission.

The Left tells us to “believe all women” and celebrates feminism. Most Islamic countries hold the opposite view.

The Left hosts an entire month of LGBTQ pride. Roughly a dozen Muslim countries still impose the death penalty for homosexuality.

It’s astonishing how the far left actually believes that Islam is their ally… when in fact the woke fanatics will be the first ones thrown off the rooftops under Shariah law.

The Left is just too stupid to realize it… which is why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

P.S. It took Massachusetts half a century to correct its first experiment mixing government and religion. You do not have to wait around to see how the new one ends.

That is the entire point of a Plan B: legal residency abroad, a second citizenship, and assets beyond the reach of any single government, all arranged calmly while things are still normal.

Our Plan B Confidential service shows you exactly how, with actionable intelligence on foreign residency programs, second citizenships, international banking, legal tax strategies, and real asset investments, drawn from sixteen years of boots-on-the-ground research across more than 120 countries.

Click here to learn more about Schiff Sovereign’s Plan B Confidential.

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The Soviet Union had just finished its worst harvest in over a decade and was on the verge of starvation… and Belousov was tasked with the nearly impossible mission of buying enough wheat to feed an entire nation.

So he flew to America.

His first meeting was with Michel Fribourg, the head of Continental Grain. The two shook hands and closed a deal for Russia to buy millions of tons of American wheat.

Belousov’s next stops were the other biggest grain traders in America: Cargill, Cook, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, and Garnac.

He worked through every major American grain firm in a matter of weeks— each deal negotiated in complete secrecy… and each firm assumed they were the only American grain house that the Soviets were talking to.

In reality, Belousov was closing deals with all of them.

By the time word got out that the Soviets had been buying from everyone, everywhere, all at once, Belousov had already locked up roughly 440 million bushels of wheat, about a quarter of the entire American crop, for ~$700 million.

And here’s the wild part: this was the peak of the Cold War… yet America’s staunchest adversary didn’t even pay full price for US wheat.

That’s because, for years prior, the US Department of Agriculture had been funding subsidies to make American grain cheaper abroad, covering the gap between the higher domestic price and the lower global price.

So the end result was that the Soviet Union drained American wheat inventory— and that’s when the Law of Supply and Demand kicked in. Wheat prices nearly doubled. Corn prices more than tripled by the following summer. Bread, beef, and eggs all followed.

Yet while Americans were suffering major food inflation at home, the US government was subsidizing the Soviet Union’s wheat purchases to the tune of $300 million in taxpayer funds.

The American taxpayer had financed the largest grain purchase the world had ever seen, for the benefit of its sworn enemy.

Then the second shoe dropped. The following autumn, in October 1973, the Arab oil-producing countries announced an embargo on the United States in response to America backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

Consequently, the price of crude oil roughly quadrupled… and it made the food inflation much worse.

Many people don’t realize just how much modern agriculture runs on oil and gas. Nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from natural gas. Phosphate (another critical fertilizer ingredient) is mined and hauled with diesel. And everything from tractors to grain dryers burns fuel.

Because of the embargo, fertilizer prices more than doubled in 1973 and 1974, and food prices quickly followed. Inflation was eating quite aggressively into consumers’ standards of living.

All of this had a major impact on the stock market; as inflation raged throughout the 1970s, even America’s largest companies suffered. Their earnings shrank (especially when adjusted for inflation) and stock prices went nowhere.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index closed at 1,000 in November 1972… and literally ten years later in November 1982, it was still at 1,000. The market went nowhere over the course of an entire decade.

And adjusted for inflation, of course, most stocks were losers.

The only real winners were REAL ASSET producers— especially gold and energy companies. Gold went from $35 an ounce in the early 1970s to a peak of $850 within a decade— though there were downturns in between.

Gold miners (and silver miners as well) were the best performers of the decade, with the Barron’s Gold Mining Index returning a phenomenal 1,247% in ten years.

Similarly, oil went from about $3 a barrel to nearly $40, and companies like Exxon completely trounced the S&P 500.

More than fifty years later, similar conditions are building again.

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since late February, except for the tankers Iran waves through from China and its other friends while everyone else waits outside.

Some oil is moving, for sure. But given that about a quarter of the world’s sulfur and roughly 15% of its fertilizer exports normally move through that strait, there are significant implications for the agricultural sector.

Many consequences are already on the books.

Urea, the world’s most common nitrogen fertilizer, climbed above $850 a tonne this spring, up roughly 80% since February and the highest price since 2022. Sulfur, an essential input for phosphate fertilizer, has doubled since January to record levels.

And in a recent American Farm Bureau survey, 70% of farmers said they cannot afford all the fertilizer they need this season.

Here’s why that matters: spring planting is over. Farmers either paid those high fertilizer prices… or they skimped. And skimping means smaller harvests this fall.

Either way, higher food prices are already locked in. The shock has already happened. The impact just hasn’t been felt yet in the grocery stores because the harvest hasn’t taken place yet.

Meanwhile, agricultural markets are trading as if nothing has changed. Crop prices haven’t come close to keeping pace with energy and fertilizer costs, and governments are already hoarding: China has temporarily banned phosphate fertilizer exports to keep supplies at home.

The last time this happened, the people who owned fertilizer production made money. Everyone else just got the grocery bill.

The featured research in Schiff Sovereign’s investment newsletter, Strategic Assets, already includes a potash producer, a phosphate producer, and a palm oil grower, and we’re watching a fantastic fertilizer company for the right entry point.

Our palm oil grower has nearly doubled since we published the research. The potash producer is up more than 16%… with a lot more room to grow. Our phosphate producer, which we recently featured, is still trading inside our suggested buy range.

If you’d like to read that research, you can try Strategic Assets with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. Click here to learn more.

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Marcus Aurelius never realized it, but he was sealing Rome’s fate… and essentially marking an end to the Empire’s golden age.

Commodus was quite popular in his youth— reportedly handsome, athletic, and gregarious. But after Marcus Aurelius died a few years later, the popularity and support that Commodus had enjoyed for so long began to wane.

It didn’t help that he heavily debased Rome’s currency, contributing to widespread inflation and economic decline. He spent lavishly at taxpayer expense, ignored even the most basic affairs of imperial administration, and murdered his enemies.

Finally, on New Year’s Eve in 192 AD, Commodus was assassinated, kicking off a period of political instability in which five different men would sit on the throne in a single year; in fact 193 AD became known as the Year of the Five Emperors.

Eventually Rome landed on Septimius Severus, who ruled for nearly two decades with an iron fist. His reign— though stable— is regarded as one of the cruelest in Roman history. And he, too, contributed immensely to inflation and rising taxes.

His successor, Caracalla, ruled briefly and incompetently. Soon came Elagabalus— history’s first transgender emperor who promised to give away half of the empire to any physician who could turn him into a woman.

Along the way the infamous “Crisis of the Third Century” became worse and worse: migrant invasions, economic depression, hyperinflation, plague, and unprecedented political instability— including the year 238 AD in which six different men claimed the title of Emperor.

It was as if Rome lost the ability to produce a decent, capable leader anymore.

I thought of this historical lesson yesterday morning watching Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, become Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade.

That’s an unprecedented level of instability for a modern, major power. Even worse, Britain’s leaders have become more incompetent over time, each one chipping away at the country’s economy and social stability.

Liz Truss lasted just 49 days, the shortest tenure of any prime minister in British history. Her plan for £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts set off a panic in the bond market, launching the pound into freefall.

And government borrowing costs spiked so violently as a result of Ms. Truss that the Bank of England had to step in to prevent British pension funds from collapsing.

Prior to Truss was Boris Johnson— a one-man scandal machine who was fined for quite hypocritically throwing big parties in Downing Street during his own COVID lockdowns.

Then came Rishi Sunak, who threw Britain’s doors wide open to immigration. Sunak seemingly woke up every morning and said: Give me more Somalis. Give me more Islamic terrorists.

Along the way, Britain imported some of the worst ideas of the American Left and made them its own.

Britain is now the wokest place on the planet, and to an Orwellian standard; British police arrest people over tweets, and the England flag itself is now treated as a symbol of racism.

To cap it all off, Sunak was succeeded by Keir Starmer, probably the worst leader of a major power in modern history— and that includes Joe Biden.

When Parliament took up a national inquiry into the grooming gangs that had raped thousands of English girls over decades while local officials looked away, Starmer’s party voted it down, and Starmer dismissed the calls as “the bandwagon [of] the far right.”

Starmer spent his tenure finishing off the oil industry, taking the headline tax rate on North Sea producers to 78% and banning new exploration licenses.

By the time Starmer resigned last month, the UK had a tax burden heading to its highest level since records began in 1948. Borrowing costs are higher than any other major economy, with 10-year government bond yields well above those in the US, France, Germany, and Japan.

Plus, wealthy Brits are heading for the exits in record numbers after Starmer abolished the centuries-old non-dom tax regime.

Starmer was so widely despised that his own party finally threw him out. Their solution? A slightly younger, slightly less vapid version of Starmer.

His name is Andy Burnham, and all of his ideas come straight from the Communist Manifesto.

In his opening remarks as prime minister, Burnham said not one word about the national debt or Britain’s borrowing costs. Nothing about the migration crisis. Nothing about justice for the grooming gang victims. Nothing about turning the economy around.

His first order of business, Burnham announced, was taking care of homeless/migrants with a new £340 million benefit program.

To his credit, Burnham has sense enough to know that he cannot throw around that kind of money without a way to pay for it. Borrowing more money is out; in fact he spent the past year complaining that Britain must get beyond “being in hock to the bond markets.”

That only means one thing: higher taxes.

So, days before taking office, his team began preparing approvals for two North Sea oil and gas fields— the same ones that his own party spent years trying to shut down.

This is not because Burnham suddenly cares about energy security. He’s just looking for more money to steal.

All of those homeless migrants need handouts, so Burnham needs a new revenue stream, i.e. something else to tax.

So he’s allowing two new North Sea fields— with the existing 78% rate in place.

In short, Burnham did not decide that energy matters. He decided it hasn’t been milked entirely dry yet.

This is a cannibalist mentality. Britain is sliding into its own Crisis of the 21st Century, and the “conservative” politicians who presided over the first half of the decline were anything but. Starmer and now Burnham are straight-up Marxists.

We wrote about Argentina just yesterday, where nearly every asset in the country is surging. It’s not hard to understand why: Argentina hit rock bottom, threw out the people who destroyed the  country, and started climbing under new leadership.

Britain can reverse its fortunes the same way. Unfortunately, it is probably going to have to hit rock bottom first. And we can already see the shape of how this ends.

First the money will run out, the benefits will be cut, and the people who came for free stuff will go home.

Then, with markets in the dumps, this highly educated and productive country will eventually reverse all of its idiotic policies from the past and one day become among the most interesting places in the world to invest.

There’s an old saying credited to a Rothschild about investing when there’s “blood in the streets.” He may turn out to be right. But he probably wasn’t picturing London when he said it.

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But right now, $179,000 buys a typical three-room apartment in Buenos Aires, the “Paris of South America” (minus the Islamic terrorists).

Studio apartments in Argentina’s capital are going for $108,000. All of it is quoted and paid in US dollars, because Argentina’s property market gave up on their local currency for real estate transactions a long time ago.

But this is arguably the last cheap sector of Argentina. Prices of every other asset have gone up dramatically thanks to country’s general economic recovery; ever since President Milei was elected, he has slashed government spending and delivered the country’s first budget surplus in over a decade. The stock market has surged. Every asset is up. Except for apartments.

Remember, a century ago, Argentina was one of the ten richest countries in the world; its people were better off per capita than the French or Germans.

Then came Juan Perón. Elected in 1946, he nationalized everything— railways, utilities, etc. He regulated wages and prices. It was full-blown command socialism.

Perón was thrown out in 1955, but the machine he built outlived him by seventy years. He had created a permanent bloc of voters— paid by the state— and every government that tried to cut spending found out it could not survive doing so. So they printed money instead.

That is where the price controls, the capital controls, the repeated defaults, and the chronic inflation all came from.

Milei took office at the end of 2023 and started taking the machine apart. He cut the number of federal ministries in half and fired tens of thousands of government employees. He scrapped the price controls and stopped the central bank from printing money to cover the government’s bills.

It hurt. Poverty jumped before it came down, and real wages fell before they recovered.

The month Milei took office, prices rose 25.5%. That was the MONTHLY inflation figure, not the annual one. By June 2026, monthly inflation was down to 1.9%.

To be clear, that is still astronomical by North American or European standards. Argentina is still a high-inflation country. But they’ve come a long way in bringing inflation down, and the country is no longer collapsing. There’s clearly a light at the end of the tunnel.

And it got there using the same playbook every country that climbed out of a hole this deep has run.

For example, in 1965 Singapore was an impoverished backwater with no resources and a third of its population squatting in slums. Lee Kuan Yew cut the tariffs, kept taxes low, and threw the doors open to foreign companies. Today Singapore produces more than $90,000 per person— more than the United States.

No country is permanently rich, and no country is permanently poor. For the first time in a very long time, Argentina is heading the right direction.

Foreign capital has noticed. Under a new incentive regime, companies have launched roughly $95 billion of projects. The state oil company YPF filed a $25 billion shale development in Vaca Muerta in May, and Chevron committed more than $10 billion to the same basin.

Companies do not pour concrete and steel into countries they expect to collapse.

The financial markets repriced accordingly. Argentine stocks have run hard, and the main US-listed Argentina fund is up more than 230% over five years.

After a run like that, you could argue the stocks are no longer even cheap. Even the bonds have moved: the extra interest Argentina must pay to borrow compared to US government bonds fell in July to its lowest level in eight years.

Which brings us back to that $179,000. The citywide Buenos Aires apartment index rose just 1.6% over the past twelve months. And that’s in US dollars.

In other words, every asset in Argentina has repriced, but the apartments aren’t even keeping pace with inflation.

The reason is credit, or rather the total absence of it; nine out of ten home purchases in Buenos Aires are paid in cash, without a mortgage.

And prices settle at whatever buyers can pay in cash.

The same condition holds across much of Latin America, and Colombia shows where it leads. Only around 3% of Colombian adults carry a mortgage, so prices sat at cash levels there too.

Then foreigners discovered Medellín. Buyers from North America and Europe arrived with money and bought apartments that looked absurdly cheap to them. In El Poblado, the neighborhood the expats favor, prices have jumped 66% in three years.

We think the same thing is going to happen in Argentina, with a bigger catalyst behind it, because the country is becoming an investment destination and an expat destination at once. It happened in Medellín, Mexico City, and other places in Latin America. It’s basic supply and demand.

There is still risk— Argentines vote again on October 24, 2027… so if Milei’s political movement  collapses, the country could return to its old ways. But that’s pretty much the same anywhere. Every country carries risk.

For example, I doubt anyone is rushing to buy British assets right now. Britain’s finances and politics have genuinely deteriorated, and its government now pays close to 6% to borrow money, the most since 1998.

Now that Marxist Andy Burnham has taken over as Prime Minister as of this morning, the situation will likely get worse before it gets better. At some point Britain will get cheap enough that its stocks and bonds become attractive again. But today is not that day.

And American assets are no automatic refuge either. Just wait and see what happens if Gavin Newsom gets the chance to do to the whole country what he did to California.

Argentina, at least, pays you to take its risk. The apartments are cheap, and the catalyst pushing them up is already arriving.

It is also a serious Plan B destination. Living there costs roughly half of what it does in the United States, and it draws far fewer foreigners than the places everyone has already found.

Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, just published a full report on Argentine real estate, covering which neighborhoods hold their value, how to move money in and out, and where residency and citizenship stand.

If you’d like to see everything Plan B Confidential covers, you can learn more here.

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The practice belongs to Dr. Sarah Jukaku, who used to be co-chief of psychiatry at University of Michigan Health— a hospital system that accepts Medicare— before she left to open a practice that doesn’t.

According to records cited by the Washington Free Beacon, Jukaku formally opted out of Medicare in March 2025, not long after her cash-only practice opened its doors.

Under normal circumstances, that would be nobody’s business but the doctor’s. But her husband, Abdul El-Sayed, is running for US Senate in Michigan on a promise of Medicare for “every single American from cradle to grave.”

In fact, he co-wrote the book Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, with a foreword by Senator Bernie Sanders— who has also endorsed him and campaigned with him.

His platform promises Medicare that is “automatic, for everyone, and accepted everywhere,” without premiums, copays, or deductibles.

Meanwhile his own household runs the counterexample.

To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with cash-only clinics. I think many Americans would welcome more cash-only medical options, without the bureaucracy of government and insurance companies.

Opting out of the insurance bureaucracy is a perfectly rational response to a system that buries doctors in paperwork and pays them late, and plenty of good physicians have made the same call.

But her husband’s platform doesn’t say Medicare should be one option among many. And it certainly doesn’t celebrate the doctors who refuse it. It says “accepted everywhere,” in writing, and it adds that Medicare for All should make private insurance “redundant and unnecessary.”

The irony doesn’t stop with Medicare.

The Free Beacon also took a look at the candidate’s wrists and found a rotation of luxury watches, including a roughly $10,000 Omega Speedmaster and what appears to be a Rolex Submariner worth up to $15,000.

Those are bold accessories for a man who campaigns against the wealthy and eviscerates the super-rich. Just like Bernie Sanders and AOC, the Left always seems to define “the rich” as “anyone with more money than I have.”

If this feels familiar, it’s because it keeps happening.

An oyster farmer from Maine named Graham Platner came out of nowhere raging against the billionaire class, collected his own Bernie Sanders endorsement, and turned out to have carried a Totenkopf tattoo— the skull emblem of the Nazi SS— for 18 years.

Ex-girlfriends described him as physically abusive, and Maine Democrats nominated him for US Senate anyway. The party that calls everyone who disagrees with it a “Nazi”, and told the country to “believe all women”, chose the guy with an actual Nazi tattoo and allegations that haven’t stopped: a new sexual assault claim surfaced last week, and he quit the race.

The pattern holds after they win, too. New York elected Letitia James attorney general largely on her promise to go after Donald Trump for whatever she could find.

What she found was that he had put optimistic valuations on his properties in loan paperwork, something so routine that Deutsche Bank’s own banker testified they didn’t care and would gladly do business with him again. The loans were repaid in full.

Then last October, James was indicted for mortgage fraud herself, over false statements on the paperwork for a Virginia house occupied by a relative who was wanted by police.

The list goes on.

Lisa Cook was accused of lying on her own mortgage documents while sitting as a Federal Reserve governor helping to supervise the banking system.

James Comey, who once ran the nation’s top law enforcement agency, lied to Congress about authorizing a leak.

Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee helped an illegal immigrant, in her courtroom for beating his roommate, slip out a back door past federal agents.

Stacy Davis Gates fought school choice as head of the Chicago Teachers Union while sending her own kid to private school.

And Kamala Harris spent years warning that sea levels are rising, then bought an $8.2 million beach house in Malibu.

These people don’t believe a word of what they’re saying, and they certainly don’t practice it.

I remember being a young Army officer in my early 20s going to buy a Ford Explorer at the dealership; the sales guy was pushing me hard… really hard… on all the wonderful features of this car and why I just HAD to buy it.

At one point I asked him, “What do you drive?”. A Chevy. Lol.

It’s the same thing here; these politicians are just here to sell a product. And the product is socialism— because that’s (what they think) the people want to buy.

Obviously the only people who can actually sell socialism are those who don’t live under it, have never lived under it, and will never live under it.

I respect Sarah Jukaku, the politician’s wife: she looked at government-run healthcare and opted out. It’s the most sensible policy position anyone in the campaign has taken.

Her “opt-out” strategy is also worth copying… and that’s the entire idea of a Plan B: having a second bank account, a second residency, real assets, etc. arranged calmly and legally— before you need them— gives you the ability to opt-out of their idiotic ideas.

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Officially it’s a one-year moratorium while Albany designs a “regulatory framework.”

She’s not wrong that New Yorkers are hurting. They already pay roughly 70% above the national average for electricity, and utility bills are the kind of issue that decides elections, because everybody pays one.

Hochul is running for re-election in November and needed someone to blame for those bills. So she blamed data centers, because she couldn’t blame the real culprit, her own government.

In 2019, New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, a law committing the state to a zero-emission grid. Since then, the state has deactivated 4.4 gigawatts of fossil fuel generation, shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant in 2021 for good measure, and added back just 2.9 gigawatts, almost all of it intermittent wind and solar.

In other words, New York destroyed more reliable power than it built, as deliberate policy, and then acted shocked when electricity became scarce and expensive.

Even the New York Independent System Operator, the organization that runs the state’s power grid, blames Albany. In June it warned that the grid is losing the dispatchable plants that keep the system stable, the ones that work on a windless night in January.

The same grid operator projects that New York’s electric vehicle and building electrification mandates will pile on more than twice the demand of data centers through 2040. The biggest new strain on the grid isn’t AI at all; it’s Albany’s own mandates.

But true to form, New York’s politicians didn’t bother doing the math.

The moratorium hits any new data center drawing 50 megawatts or more. Yet Hochul spent years championing Micron’s $100 billion chip fab near Syracuse, a facility that will draw 1.85 gigawatts around the clock. That’s more electricity than New Hampshire and Vermont use combined, and 37 times the limit she just imposed on everyone else.

(That is, it will draw 1.85 gigawatts if it ever gets built. So far the project has produced a 719-page environmental review, ten bat houses for the endangered northern long-eared bat, and a lawsuit from activists who want production stopped entirely. But no chips.)

But the truly wild thing about Hochul’s ban is what New York is giving up. It isn’t AI; it’s the tax revenue the state claims to desperately need, from the very corporations it keeps saying should pay more.

For example, Meta’s giant data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, one of the poorest corners of that state, made its first local sales tax payment of $22.4 million this year. The school district used some of the money to hand its certified teachers bonuses of up to roughly $50,000.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers pay about $895 million a year in property taxes against a county operating budget of roughly $940 million. That covers about 95% of the budget and saves a typical homeowner around $5,800 a year.

And New York has run this exact play before.

In December 2014, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo banned fracking statewide, right as the shale boom was making landowners across the border wealthy. Pennsylvania kept drilling; by 2022, an industry study counted 123,000 jobs, $41 billion in economic activity, and $6.3 billion in royalties in a single year.

New York’s slice of the same Marcellus Shale sat untouched beneath struggling farmland. And Albany never reconsidered. To this day, New York bans the practice within its borders while importing fracked Pennsylvania gas to heat New York homes.

(Sort of like when the UK did the same thing with the North Sea: it halted all new oil and gas licenses in the name of climate change, then kept buying oil that Norway pumps from the very same basin. The oil is identical; the jobs, the taxes, and the profits are just Norwegian now.)

Albany never repeals the policy that caused the problem; it just piles a new ban on top. New York’s power scarcity is self-inflicted, and the official answer to that scarcity is to ration demand rather than restore supply.

The AI buildout is going to happen either way. The data centers will be built, the taxes will be paid, and somebody’s teachers will get the bonuses, or whatever else they decide to do with the money.

New York has simply decided that none of it will happen there. They will have to find other wealthy people to fleece to fund the state’s priorities, such as housing illegal immigrants in Manhattan hotels, restocking the city’s crack pipe vending machines, and handing money to welfare fraudsters.

I wouldn’t count on Albany coming to its senses. It has had more than a decade to reconsider the fracking ban and hasn’t blinked.

When a government manufactures its own scarcity and refuses to reverse course no matter the cost, the sensible move is to make sure your prosperity doesn’t depend on its competence.

That’s the whole point of having a Plan B.

P.S. The corporations New York just turned away all have one advantage in common: they can choose their jurisdiction. So can you.

Plan B Confidential is Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service on doing exactly that, covering legal second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, tax reduction strategies, and boots-on-the-ground intelligence from more than 120 countries. It exists so that your income, your savings, and your family’s options never depend on a single government’s competence. Click here to learn more.

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The sign in the hills above Los Angeles might be the most famous advertisement on earth, and the industry built the state’s fame, its mythology, and a good part of its fortune.

That industry is dying now. And on Monday, California’s attorney general stood in front of the sign and showed the world exactly why.

Rob Bonta announced that California is leading twelve states in a lawsuit to block Paramount’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that would combine two of Hollywood’s five major studios.

Asked about reports that Paramount might respond by pulling out of California entirely, Bonta called them “a desperate last-ditch effort to try to blackmail my office.”

Think about that. In Bonta’s mind, a company weighing whether to stay in his state isn’t a customer he’s about to lose; it’s a criminal trying to extort him.

Paramount is doing what it thinks is best for itself. California is suing to make it stop.

And the state’s top lawyer says that taking your business elsewhere is blackmail.

Gee, I wonder what’s making them want to leave?

It’s even more absurd once you know that Paramount had been begging to stay.

According to the news outlet Semafor, the company offered regulators a consent decree committing it to release 30 films a year in theaters, keep both of its historic California studio lots open, and keep spending roughly $30 billion a year on content, a huge share of it in a state that has been bleeding entertainment jobs for years.

Bonta sued anyway, despite the fact that the US Justice Department had already spent eight months reviewing the merger and approved it in June, concluding the deal would actually increase competition. Antitrust enforcers from Australia to China signed off without a peep.

Yet twelve state attorneys general apparently understand the media business better.

Even the people who do mergers for a living can’t figure out what Bonta is after. One M&A lawyer put it this way: “He doesn’t know what he wants, but he knows he needs to want something.”

Actually, he knows exactly one thing: this merger is something a billionaire wants. Paramount’s CEO is David Ellison, whose father, Larry Ellison, co-founded Oracle and is one of the richest men alive.

Bonta is on the ballot for re-election this year, and he understands his voters: blocking a rich man’s deal counts as fighting for the people, even when it costs those same people the studios, the jobs, and the spending that Paramount was begging to keep in the state.

The merger and Paramount’s offer to stay added up to a win/win, for the company and for California. But Bonta will happily trade a win/win for a lose/lose, as long as the billionaire ends up one of the losers.

So Ellison is now listening to the advisers pushing to move the corporate headquarters out of California, redirect much of that $30 billion in annual spending to friendlier states, and expand the nearly 300,000-square-foot studio lease Paramount signed last year in Bayonne, New Jersey.

The only problem… New Jersey happens to be one of the twelve states suing to block the merger. The state positioned to catch billions of dollars in fleeing Hollywood production is simultaneously in court trying to strangle the company doing the fleeing.

New Jersey, of all states, should know how this movie ends. Its own attorney general sued ExxonMobil in 2022 for supposedly deceiving the public about climate change; a judge eventually threw the case out, but the message landed, and just a few weeks ago Exxon’s shareholders voted to move the company’s legal home to Texas after over a century in the state. Apparently the lesson didn’t take.

Other states can smell the opportunity. Tennessee’s deputy governor, Stuart McWhorter, sent Ellison a letter earlier this month inviting Paramount to move its headquarters to a state built on “fiscal discipline, low taxes, predictable governance,” a pitch that reads less like salesmanship than a list of everything California has abandoned.

And Ellison wouldn’t need a map. He kept a home in Tennessee for more than a decade, and the Oracle campus rising in Nashville belongs to his father’s company, which pulled its own headquarters out of California in 2020.

Bonta shouldn’t need a crystal ball. Since 2022, America has lost some 73,000 film and television production jobs, two-thirds of them in Los Angeles. Eighty-one countries now dangle film incentives to lure productions away, and Los Angeles production workers have started comparing their city to Detroit.

Capital goes where it’s welcome and leaves where it’s punished, and California keeps finding new ways to punish it: one of the highest income tax rates in the country, a proposed “one-time” wealth tax on billionaires that even its own architect admits won’t be one-time, and now an attorney general who calls a company’s freedom to relocate blackmail.

And what’s true for a $110 billion company is true for anyone.

Notice what actually gave Paramount its leverage this week. It wasn’t the lawyers, and it wasn’t the size; it was the ability to exit. Paramount already has other options. It set them up in advance so it didn’t have to scramble for them now.

That is the entire logic of a Plan B.

You set up the second residency, the foreign account, the assets beyond one government’s reach while everything is still calm, precisely so you never end up begging an ambitious politician for permission to run your own life.

P.S. Paramount has an army of advisers mapping its exit. Most people just need a place to start. That’s exactly what our Plan B Confidential service is for: actionable intelligence on foreign residency programs, second citizenships, international banking, legal tax strategies, and real asset investments, drawn from sixteen years of boots-on-the-ground research and a global network of trusted service providers.

Click here to learn more about Schiff Sovereign’s Plan B Confidential.

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That same day, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, reported its largest monthly gold purchase since 2023.

Of course, June marked its twentieth consecutive month of adding gold to its reserves. Central banks are relatively price insensitive. They buy gold as a long term hedge to preserve value, not to trade back for more paper.

But they aren’t stupid either, and this shows they are buying the dip.

Gold peaked at $5,589 per ounce on January 28 and trades around $4,000 today, roughly 28% below the high. The second quarter was gold’s worst since 2013. Investors have pulled about $18 billion out of gold ETFs since the peak, much of it late money that piled in during last year’s frenzy and bolted the moment momentum broke.

But the price is not the story. The story is what central banks are doing.

Central banks have been the dominant force in gold since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the US froze $300 billion of Russia’s central bank reserves, and every finance ministry on earth learned that dollar assets were not the safe havens they’d believed.

In 2024, central banks bought 1,090 tons of gold, close to an all-time record.

That massive demand made gold expensive. The price nearly doubled from its 2025 low, and central bank buying slowed to 863 tons. That was still higher than historical averages, but down 21% from the year before.

The slowdown was not fading interest; it was price discipline. Central banks are not traders chasing momentum. They are savers accumulating a reserve asset, and like any sensible saver, they buy less when the thing they are saving in gets expensive.

And they speed back up when it goes on sale. In the first quarter of this year central banks bought 244 tons, more than the previous quarter and above the five-year average. China alone has added about 40 tons in the first six months of 2026, compared to just 27 tons in all of 2025. The People’s Bank of China bought more gold last month, with the price down nearly 30% from its high, than in any single month of the entire run-up.

The reason is simple: nothing has changed about why they buy.

The World Gold Council, the industry group that tracks official gold demand, surveyed 76 central banks this year. Seventy-four percent said they expect the dollar’s share of global reserves to be lower five years from now.

These are the institutions that actually hold the world’s reserves, and they are telling you, on the record, that they plan to keep moving away from the dollar.

None of their reasons went away when the price fell. The US national debt keeps growing by trillions, Congress has no plan beyond borrowing more, and Washington keeps proving it will continue to weaponize the dollar.

A central bank holding dollars is holding the liability of a government that is both overextended and unpredictable. Gold sitting in its own vault carries neither risk.

That calculus was true at $5,589, and it is just as true at $4,000.

A trader who is down 28% has a problem if they are trying to quickly turn a profit, and accumulate more paper dollars.

But a saver who plans to accumulate gold for the next decade just got a better price. That is why the sell-off did not scare away the biggest buyers in the market.

It may be exactly what they were waiting for.

We made this argument to our subscribers of our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets, in January.

With gold near its all-time high, we said that this was no longer the early stage of a bull market, that a major drawdown was a real possibility, and that it was time to take some profits.

In fact, subscribers who took action on our research locked in gains of more than 950% on a small silver producer and 540% on a gold and silver producer, both in under a year.

Now the sell-off has come for the miners too. Even solid, debt-free producers are trading as much as 50% below their highs from earlier this year.

But again, as nothing had changed about the long term gold thesis, little has changed about the profitability of these companies. They are still wildly profitable at $4,000 gold, which is far above projections they had planned for.

Some of these companies are still pulling gold out of the ground at a cost of just $1,000 an ounce, which is an amazing margin.

So we are starting to buy again.

It is the same discipline the central banks just demonstrated: slow down when the asset is expensive, step up when it gets cheap, and never confuse a price correction with a change in the story.

Nobody knows where gold trades next month. But the biggest buyers on earth just showed you what they do when gold gets cheaper. They buy more.

P.S. The January research that made the case to take profits, and this month’s research making the case to buy again, both ran in Schiff Sovereign’s Strategic Assets, our investment research on deeply undervalued real asset businesses.

The criteria are strict: profitable companies with little or no debt, trading cheap against current cash flow, with catalysts the market has not priced in.

And joining is risk free, you can get a full refund within 30 days if you aren’t satisfied for any reason. Click here to learn more.

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But last week, a man who used to run the numbers for Social Security itself explained why even a measly six years is optimistic.

Jason Fichtner is the former chief economist of the Social Security Administration, which means he spent years inside the building watching the program’s finances deteriorate.

According to the latest annual report from Social Security’s own trustees, the program’s main trust fund will be empty by late 2032. From that moment, incoming payroll taxes cover only 78% of scheduled benefits, which means an automatic 22% cut for every retiree in America.

But Fichtner recently told CNBC that the real deadline has nothing to do with 2032, because the bond market will move first.

He said that well before 2032, “the bond market looks and says, ’Well, you guys have 12 months to get your act in order; you’re going to be looking for another $600-plus billion a year,” which is why, “Fiscal strain could come earlier than trust fund depletion.”

Cutting grandma’s check by 22% overnight is the closest thing to guaranteed electoral suicide that exists in American politics. So they’ll do what they always do and borrow the difference. Fichtner and economist Veronique de Rugy calculate that filling the gap means roughly $600 billion in new borrowing in the first year, growing to about $700 billion a year by 2036.

And that money doesn’t appear out of thin air. The Treasury borrows from the same pool of savings that everyone else uses, the pool that funds mortgages, car loans, and business investment. When the world’s largest borrower suddenly demands another $600 billion a year from that pool, the price of money goes up for everybody.

Markets are forward-looking. An investor buying a 10-year Treasury today is holding paper that matures years after the trust fund runs dry, so the question of whether Congress will fix Social Security is already priced into that bond, every single day. Investors won’t wait politely until the checks shrink in 2032. They will reprice the moment congressional inaction looks locked in, a year or more ahead of the deadline, exactly as Fichtner describes.

And inaction is the base case. Nine months into fiscal year 2026, the federal deficit has already reached $1.4 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office, running ahead of last year’s pace. This is happening with no major crisis draining the coffers, with the economy growing and unemployment low.

Meanwhile, the lenders who would have to fund all this new borrowing are backing away.

The dollar has fallen roughly 8% from its early 2025 peak. In March alone, foreign holdings of US Treasuries fell by about $240 billion, with Japan selling nearly $48 billion and China unloading another $41 billion. China’s holdings now sit at their lowest level since 2008. The single largest pools of foreign capital on the planet are quietly reducing their exposure to the very asset Washington needs them to buy more of.

Worse, they are actively looking for the exits.

China’s alternative fund-transfer systems are increasingly used by sanctioned countries like Russia and Iran.

And on July 9, the European Parliament voted 416 to 169 to push the digital euro into final negotiations, and the stated goal is to reduce Europe’s dependence on non-EU payment providers like Visa and Mastercard, which currently handle 61% of card payments in the eurozone.

That is a bureaucratic way to say: Europe no longer wants its money to be forced to move through American companies.

Consider how deep the dollar’s dominance runs today: when France-based Airbus sells a jet to Air France, the price tag is in US dollars. A French company selling to a French airline, and the invoice is still written in Washington’s currency.

That is the system Europe’s political class just voted, by a two-to-one margin, to start engineering its way out of. Every step in that direction shrinks the pool of foreigners who need dollars, and fewer people who need dollars means fewer natural buyers for US government debt.

The real deadline for the fallout from Social Security’s 2032 depletion is whenever the bond market decides Congress won’t act. And every lender heading for the exit moves that date closer, because a thinner pool of buyers means the repricing, when it comes, will be sharper.

Higher interest rates arriving years ahead of schedule would hit an economy that runs entirely on cheap debt. The government’s interest bill, corporate borrowing, mortgages, the whole structure assumes money stays affordable. And the foreign lenders who could soften that blow by absorbing the new supply are already leaving.

Congress, in other words, is planning around a deadline that exists only on paper.

The bond market keeps its own calendar. And nobody in Washington seems to have asked what happens if the market’s calendar runs faster than theirs.

PS- Our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets, covers the individual solution: owning profitable, cheaply valued real asset producers that benefit when capital flees paper promises.

The companies which make and mine real things the economy cannot function without, such as metals, energy, and food, have historically done very well in inflationary environments like these.

Plus, we find the ones that don’t rely on debt to function. You can learn more here.

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Thomas Edison (with major funding from JP Morgan) had spent roughly two years building the first-ever commercial power plant, located in Manhattan’s financial district. Its total capacity was about 600 kilowatts… barely enough to power a single rack of GPUs today.

But at the time it was nothing short of miraculous.

Edison’s coal-fired DC power plant initially served just 82 customers, and electricity was nothing more than a luxury flex by the ultra-wealthy.

But over time– especially after Westinghouse and Tesla’s alternating current became the gold standard– electrification rates in the United States skyrocketed.

At the turn of the 20th century, hardly anyone had electricity in their homes. By 1920, it was about 35%. By the time the Great Depression hit in 1929, roughly 70% of US homes were electrified, and urban areas were nearly 85%.

The systems were surprisingly reliable given the rudimentary technology of the day. Blackouts were not infrequent, but they were generally short and localized, often just affecting a few streets or houses.

And typically the biggest reason for a short, localized blackout was simply because electrical demand was increasing more rapidly than the grid could create new supply. More and more homes were being electrified, and, after World War II, consumer appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners began consuming more power. We’ll come back to that.

In response, the industry began looking for efficiencies to be able to scale more quickly. They built larger, beefier power plants and connected their independent grids to be able to share reserves and load balance.

In short, they planned for speed and scale. Not resilience. And the end result was an incredibly complex network that was highly vulnerable to systemic failure.

That failure first came at 5:16pm on November 9, 1965: a minor maintenance issue near Niagara Falls triggered a chain reaction across the entire grid. 30 million people went without power– most until the next morning, some for a few days.

It was a wake-up call… and the first catastrophic grid failure of many more to come. So naturally the government stepped in to “fix” it.

With the electrical grid’s vulnerabilities laid bare, Congress held inquiries and hearings. New rules and regulations were passed. And, before long, the US electrical industry became a confusing alphabet soup of state, local, and federal authorities– ISOs and RTOs, FERC, PJM, MISO, CAISO, SPP, and so many more.

Layers and layers of bureaucratic agencies didn’t fix anything. But technology was quite fortunately on America’s side, and over the past few decades, advances (like LED bulbs) made consumer appliances more energy efficient. Power plants also became more productive.

In fact, today the US consumes less electricity per capita than it did in 1995. And the grid produces much more power.

But this balance is starting to change rapidly.

We all know the story of data centers and their insatiable appetites for energy. Electricity is such a critical input, in fact, that data centers are typically described by their power consumption.

For example, Softbank recently announced 5GW of new data centers in France.  The famous StarGate project in the US is targeting 10GW. Facebook is building a 5GW data center in Louisiana.

And various plans over the next few years go in to several hundred gigawatts.

This trend is similar to the 1950s– utility companies struggled to keep up with surging demand from US consumers who were plugging in air conditioners and refrigerators for the first time.

But supply and demand in the electricity market is a funny thing. Demand can surge very quickly… just like we’ve seen over the past year or so. But electrical supply grows more slowly.

New power plants take years to build. Thanks to the aforementioned alphabet soup, the regulatory burden alone is a minefield.

And most electrical producers aren’t willing to go through the effort, risk, and capital expenditure unless they’re sure the new power plant will be profitable. And profitability depends on the price of electricity.

That’s where politicians and the regulators have stepped in to screw it all up.

Naturally, with demand soaring and supply constrained, electricity prices are rising. You’d think that politicians would respond by making it easier for utilities to build new power plants, i.e. reduce the regulatory and permitting process to increase electricity supply.

But no. Instead, they’re capping prices.

Last year, a whole lot of state officials and federal regulators got together to set a ceiling for certain wholesale electricity prices to roughly $333 per megawatt-day.

Clearly, they’re responding to voters’ demands to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living.

Unfortunately, $333/MW-day isn’t high enough to justify investment in new power plants.

Existing power plants are old. Sometimes extremely old. They already own their land, and their construction loans are all paid off. So $333/MW-day is sufficient for them to pay for fuel, conduct maintenance, and turn a small profit.

But $333 isn’t enough to build a new plant– to cover the additional costs of construction, land purchases, permitting, etc.

In fact, the regulators themselves estimate that electricity prices need to be about $500/MW-day (i.e. 50% higher) to justify investment in new power plants.

This means there won’t be enough new commercial power plants built to sufficiently supply the grid. In fact the northeast grid (known as PJM) is already in a 6.5 GW deficit against its own reserve requirement for the first time ever, increasing the chance of failure next summer.

This is essentially a form of shrinkflation. i.e. paying the same amount of money but getting less for it. We’ve all seen it at grocery stores and restaurants– same price, smaller portions.

In this case, electricity prices are supposedly remaining flat. But you’re getting less for it– potential grid failure. All because the maze of political and regulatory authorities won’t do the obvious thing and make it easy for new power plants to be built.

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