One of the people in the crowd was a young man named Leon Czolgosz… who was patiently waiting with a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief. When he reached the front, he fired twice into the president’s abdomen.

McKinley died eight days later, and, Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker, went to the electric chair without a trace of remorse. He insisted it was his duty to strike down a symbol of oppression.

Czolgosz wasn’t a crazed madman, but rather a product of his time. The America of 1901 was 125 years into its history— the exact midpoint between the Declaration of Independence and today.

And despite the US economy already being the largest in the world at that point, the year 1901 did not feel like a nation striding confidently into the American Century.

The US financial system lurched from panic to panic, and to a great many observers, the young republic looked less like a rising power and more like a country unraveling.

The rich versus poor divide was growing, and violent socialist movements spread. Political assassinations, terrorism, and bombings became a recurring feature of public life.

The political violence did not end with McKinley’s assassination, either. Followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani waged a years-long bombing campaign against judges, politicians, and businessmen.

It peaked at noon on September 16, 1920, when a horse-drawn wagon packed with explosives detonated in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan on Wall Street, killing thirty people and wounding hundreds more. The case was never solved.

Many of these anarcho-socialists were immigrants, which poured gasoline on the raging blaze of backlash against widespread immigration.

In 1907 alone, more than a million people passed through Ellis Island. Immigrants were arriving faster than anyone knew how to absorb them, and people were getting tired of it.

Congress passed legislation that imposed a literacy test on immigrants, then banned entire countries. At first, people from Asia and the Middle East were shut out. Subsequent legislation set strict quotas, slamming the door on the southern and eastern Europeans who were considered undesirable.

Yet the instability continued… as did the government’s push to consolidate power.

After the Panic of 1907 nearly brought down the financial system, Congress used the scare to establish the Federal Reserve in 1913. This was the first step toward money that could be printed at will.

Also in 1913, the Constitution was amended, giving Congress the power to tax income.

The income tax (16th Amendment) was sold to the American people as a tax on the very rich that would only affect the top 2% of US households. Idiotic socialists at the time believed the lie and supported the amendment; after all, the rich should pay their fair share.

Within decades, three quarters of Americans were paying income tax.

With a new central bank and tax power in place, Washington then raced to join World War I (despite being an ocean away), and borrowed on an unimaginable scale to do it.

Frankly it all looked pretty bleak.

And yet, while all the bad news and turmoil was ongoing, America was simultaneously producing miracles.

Henry Ford put the country on wheels with the Model T and the moving assembly line. Motion pictures went from novelty to industry. Radio turned from a tinkerer’s hobby into a machine that could broadcast to every home in the nation.

These were American breakthroughs that rewired the entire global economy and powered better times ahead.

Seventy-five years later, America’s 200th birthday looked little better. In 1976, the economy was mired in stagflation that “experts” had previously sworn was impossible.

Oil shocks had humiliated the country at the gas pump. American dominance looked spent in the wreckage of Vietnam, and the nation had watched President Richard Nixon resign in disgrace.

Terrorism was back. Plane hijackings were somewhat commonplace. Crime rampaged across the cities.

And yet what followed was the personal computer, the Internet, the longest peacetime expansion in the country’s history, and a comeback almost nobody standing in a gas line in 1976 would have believed.

Which brings us to the 250th birthday, today.

Political violence is back in American life. Immigration is once again a major issue. Fraud and corruption are rampant (and hardly anyone pays the price). And Washington’s finances are in worse shape than at any point in the country’s history, with the national debt larger than the entire economy.

Yet at the same time, American companies are building artificial intelligence, next-generation nuclear power, robotics, and biotech breakthroughs that could rewire the global economy even more than the assembly line and the Internet did. Chaos and invention have always lived side by side in the US, and they still do.

America was born out of revolution, and it has endured a civil war, two world wars, a depression, a decade of stagflation, and repeated financial panics.

Every one of those episodes brought years of real pain, but every time, the country that looked terminally ill came back stronger than ever.

There is an old saying in politics (usually credited to Winston Churchill, though apparently first quipped by an Israeli diplomat): Americans will always do the right thing… after exhausting all the alternatives.

Apocryphal or not, that is the pattern: the right thing comes eventually, but the pain comes first.

America is not just a country; it is an idea, and it may be the most extraordinary idea human beings have ever assembled. It stands on the shoulders of giants— Greek thought, Roman law, Judeo-Christian values, and free-market capitalism, fused with a conviction about individual liberty balanced by personal responsibility.

Betting against that idea has been the worst trade of the past 250 years.

To be clear, having a Plan B is not a bet against America either. The concept is not to hide in a bunker with canned food and guns because the end is near.

The point of a Plan B is to be honest about the road between here and the recovery: more inflation, higher taxes, and a stretch of instability, and to make sure you have the options available to come at it from a position of strength.

At 250 years, I truly believe the best days are still ahead. But there will be some rough ones in between.

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He spent the next 11 years building China’s first-ever modern missile program, with unparalleled knowledge and experience he had accumulated in the West.

But when he came home for lunch on the afternoon of June 8, 1968, a gang of thugs from a rival political faction was waiting for him. They beat him to death in his own apartment. He was forty-five years old.

Yao’s crime was that he was educated, expert, and Western-trained— exactly the kind of man that Mao’s Cultural Revolution had taught the country to hate.

From 1966 to 1976, Mao turned China against its own educated class, rooting out political opposition and handing the power to young revolutionaries.

Professors were dragged before their students in dunce caps and beaten mercilessly. Universities shut their doors. Millions of educated young people were shipped off to work camps. And engineers were ranked near the bottom of the social order.

China spent ten years treating intelligence as a crime, and the country paid the price for a generation.

Meanwhile, over in the West at the same time that Mao’s Red Guards were beating engineers to death, American technological geniuses developed the world’s first microprocessor and lit up the first nodes of the internet… effectively giving birth to the digital age.

It was a night-and-day difference between the US and China. China was actively, stupidly making itself worse off, while the US was developing the technology that would change the world forever.

America remained the epicenter of technological innovation for decades; in fact, the unofficial ‘scoreboard’ of the world’s most technologically advanced nation was whoever could build the fastest supercomputer.

And the answer was obviously the United States… until Japan shocked the world in 1995 and beat the fastest US supercomputer. America quickly reclaimed the top spot, only to be bested by Japan again in 2002.

The two great technological powers jostled for #1 for the next several years until the unthinkable happened in 2010: China developed the world’s fastest supercomputer.

For the past sixteen years, those three powers— America, Japan, and China, have traded the trophy. And China just retook it from the US again last week.

This is a symbolic, albeit critical competition— especially now as there are so many challenges to America’s economic, military, and geopolitical leadership.

Why is America falling behind? Because of its own soft “Cultural Revolution” driving out competence and rewarding the people who build nothing.

During COVID, the government and media conspired to destroy the careers of anyone who questioned Tony Fauci.

Shortly thereafter, the DEI cult took over. From transgender Bud Light influencers to absurdly woke Disney movies to mandatory diversity quotas in corporate boardrooms… and it went all the way to the most powerful institutions in America.

Joe Biden promised a female running mate as his Vice President, and a black woman as a Supreme Court justice. His obsession with diversity over merit resulted in two extremely unqualified people in some of the nation’s highest offices.

He appointed Rachel Levine to Assistant Secretary for Health for being transgender; Levine’s big contribution to America was trying to get tech companies to censor “misinformation” about gender affirming care.

Biden further appointed Sam Brinton, a non-binary LGBTQRSTUVWZYZ activist to oversee America’s nuclear waste program. Brinton turned out to be a kleptomaniac and was criminally charged with repeatedly stealing women’s luggage from airport carousels while serving in government.

The end result has been predictable across the military, public health, medicine, and the media, institutions that increasingly selected for ideology over competence.

Mao destroyed his most capable people on purpose, and it cost China a generation. America is now doing the same thing to itself in a softer way.

But regardless of the tactics, any country that pushes out people who can design the chips, fly the planes, run the labs, and keep the lights on, is shooting itself in the foot.

Here’s another interesting example—

On a recent, private call for our top-tier Total Access members, we spoke with a really unique American entrepreneur based in Africa who sees this DEI rot every single day.

China, he told us, runs a “full court press” in Africa. The Chinese government fights for its businesses and helps them invest aggressively in the strategic resources that China needs back home. Food production. Energy. Water. Minerals.

Meanwhile, as China rapidly scoops up critical resources and builds relationships on the continent, the US-funded Western NGOs are busy with DEI and climate change initiatives.

He told us about one particular NGO, a group that pulled out of a critical agricultural investment over concerns that there weren’t enough women involved and too much CO2.

The difference in priorities between China and the West could not be more obvious.

Now, none of this means that China takes over the world. America has faced down a rising manufacturing rival before. It absorbed Japan’s challenge in the 1980s, and it out-produced and out-innovated the Soviet Union as well.

The United States still commands the deepest capital markets on earth, enormous pools of talent, and a genius for inventing and building that no rival has ever matched.

China’s problems, by contrast, are far greater.

It shares borders with fourteen countries, including North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. It doesn’t have trusted relations with a single one of them.

China is the largest oil importer in the world by a wide margin and has astonishingly thin per-capita reserves. It is lean on water and quality farmland. Its regional governments are buried under mountains of debt.

And it is, quite bizarrely, facing a massive demographic crisis of its own making (from years of its idiotic one child policy) while simultaneously and precariously trying to keep a population of 1.4 billion people under strict authoritarian control.

Plus, let’s be honest— a centrally planned economy will not deliver maximum innovation. Yes, America has its own idiots in office. But for every Lizzie Warren and AOC, China has plenty of its own morons in government service who make painfully idiotic decisions.

America’s problems are gargantuan, yes. But at their core, they are completely fixable. Three simple approaches would dramatically move the needle. Quickly.

• Cut the federal deficit by reducing obvious fraud and exercising common sense restraint.
• Boost economic productivity by eliminating pointless federal and state regulations.
• Focus exclusively on merit rather than DEI credentials.

Those three are very simple and straightforward, and they would dramatically move the needle. And that’s before tackling other challenges like Social Security, immigration, and election reform.

China might have temporarily taken the top spot in supercomputing. But this is still America’s race to lose.

The plan is maddeningly simple. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, Congress will probably do nothing until there’s a bad-enough crisis to force them to act. And that’s why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

PS: That conversation with the investor in Africa came from a private call for our Total Access members. Total Access is the top tier of Schiff Sovereign membership, built for those who value global networks of like-minded people.

Members get all of our research — Plan B Confidential, Strategic Assets, along with the deepest second-passport discounts we can negotiate, events, boots-on-the-ground explorations, and a network of people quietly building their own Plan B.

There are still a few opening for our exclusive Total Access event in Panama in September. Click here to learn more.

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Romania had gambled its way into the Great War a few months earlier, sending its army across the Carpathian Mountains to grab Austro-Hungarian Transylvania, believing that Germany and Austria-Hungary were too exhausted to stop them.

But Romania’s gamble fell apart in weeks. German and Austro-Hungarian were exhausted. But not so exhausted to allow Romania to waltz across the border and grab territory uncontested.

The Central Powers quickly reacted, beat the Romanian army all the way back to Bucharest, and then converged on the capital. The King of Romania and his court fled the country just before it fell.

Just before surrendering, however, Romania’s Prime Minister Ion Brătianu made a bold decision to seal up the country’s gold reserves. He ordered more than 90 tonnes of gold to be loaded in over 1,700 crates onto seventeen railcars, and had it shipped to the one ally Romania was certain it could trust: Russia.

The arrangement made sense on paper. Tsar Nicholas II was Romania’s wartime partner, and an overland route to ship the national gold reserves to Moscow seemed far safer than risking German submarines on the sea route to London.

Fortunately the crates arrived safely; Russian officials locked the gold securely inside the Kremlin and provided a written guarantee that the gold remained Romanian property.

But the Russian Revolution broke out only months later. The Bolsheviks seized power, arrested the Tsar, and eventually murdered him and his family. In January 1918, Leon Trotsky severed ties with Romania and declared its gold “untouchable for the Romanian oligarchy.”

It’s been more than a century, and Romania is still asking for its gold back from Russia. The gold is worth about $12 billion today and has never been returned.

For most of human history, a king kept his gold where he could see it. It sat behind his own walls, in his own keep, guarded by his own men. The idea of loading your treasure onto a ship and sending it to a rival capital for safekeeping would have struck any medieval monarch as total insanity.

The King of France did not store his gold in London. You did not hand a rival your treasury to seize the moment relations soured.

What changed first was London. By the nineteenth century, Britain ruled an empire that spanned the globe. Its navy went unchallenged. And the British pound was redeemable for gold.

The City of London sat at the center of world finance and ran the deepest gold market on earth.

For foreign governments, keeping gold in the Bank of England’s vaults was not a surrender but an upgrade. The metal was safer behind Britain’s guns than behind its own, and given the advances of British finance, the gold could be sold, lent, or borrowed against in an afternoon.

The gravity of financial power shifted to New York a century later as Nazi forces conquered Europe. Allowing your national gold reserves to be confiscated by Hitler became a much greater risk than shipping everything to America.

So country after country scrambled to move their gold before German tanks crossed the border.

America was the safest vault on earth: a nation with an ocean on either side, an economy the war had only strengthened, and a bright future ahead of it.

After the war, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement pinned the dollar to gold— and pegged every global currency to the US dollar. And from then on New York (and London to a lesser degree) were the obvious places for foreign governments to hold their gold reserves.

A country could settle international debts without moving a single ounce, just by having a clerk slide its bars from one stack to another within the same vault.

The arrangement held for eighty years because the US remained the most powerful, most trusted government in the world. But now that trust is vanishing quickly.

According to a recent report published by the World Gold Council, the number of foreign central banks storing gold in New York or London slipped 17% and 11% respectively. And that’s just in a single year.

And the number of central banks bringing their gold home (or at least moving it to neutral third-party vaults) nearly tripled. Gold, for the most part, is going home.

They’re also buying more of it, with central bank gold purchases running at roughly double the historic rate for the third year in a row.

To fund those purchases, central banks are selling US Treasuries… or letting them mature without reinvesting.

Over the past year, gold passed both US Treasuries and the euro to become the single largest reserve asset on earth. And for the first time since 1996, central banks now hold more gold than US Treasuries.

Central banks almost never sell gold. On the rare occasion that some country does sell, it’s usually because they’re in a genuine crisis (like Turkey selling gold to defend a collapsing currency).

Or, as was the case with the British government in the late 1990s, they’re the dumbest people alive.

Absent that kind of emergency or stupidity, governments and central banks “hodl” their gold.

Bottom line, these countries are not shipping their gold out of London and New York to sell it. Just the opposite. It is proof they intend to hold the metal for a very long time, and that they are willing to give up using it as a financial instrument.

None of this is about the gold price on any given morning.

Over the last few weeks, gold slipped below $4,000 an ounce for the first time since November.

Since last fall, as retail investors entered the market driving the price of gold sharply higher, we warned that a pullback like this was likely.

But we also said that nothing about the thesis was changing. The US was still spending far beyond its means and weaponizing the dollar. Washington was still dysfunctional— full of AOCs and Elizabeth Warrens. Therefore global central banks were continuing to diversify their reserves.

We’re not fanatical about gold. But it’s clear that the long-term catalysts to drive prices higher are not going away anytime soon.

The world is more fractured than it was even a few years ago, and dollar dominance is slipping.

So what does everyone own instead? China is pushing for international use of its yuan… and you can see a flicker of it in the payments data. But it is not a real alternative.

The one asset every central bank on earth can hold without worrying who controls it is gold. Plus they all have confidence that gold will still have strategic value 5, 10, 20+ years from now.

That’s why these central banks view $4,000 gold as a reasonable entry point to accumulate more, and they likely will not miss the chance to do so.

P.S. The same opportunity is open to everyone else. As gold sold off, so did shares in the companies that dig it out of the ground. Even at gold’s all-time highs, many of these producers traded at low multiples while selling their gold for far more than their projections ever assumed.

Their costs stayed roughly fixed, so margins exploded, and some have started paying dividends or raised the ones they had. At $4,000 gold they are still enormously profitable, yet fickle investors are dumping them as if the gold story is over.

It is not. Nothing has changed about why central banks buy, and so far they have moved only a small share of their reserves into gold.

If you want to learn more about these gold companies, and other real assets we research in our newsletter, Strategic Assets, click here.

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This species of bat is federally recognized as endangered, and it nests in a stretch of forest in upstate New York. And it’s the reason why tech companies can’t build a $100 billion memory plant there.

Memory is a big deal in tech right now. Apple CEO Tim Cook blamed global memory chip shortages for the coming iPhone price hikes.

And the Wall Street Journal estimated that memory prices could rise as much as four-fold this year, adding somewhere between $200 and $300 to the price of an iPhone. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are raising prices on consoles and laptops.

Congress, of course, already spent a fortune to prevent exactly this. In 2022 they passed the CHIPS Act, containing roughly $53 billion in subsidies plus a 25% tax credit to drag chip manufacturing back onto American soil.

So four years later, where are the chips!?!?!?!?

New York Senator Chuck Schumer wrote and championed that law, and then made sure his home state landed the prize.

In October 2022 he stood beside Governor Kathy Hochul to announce that Micron, America’s largest memory chipmaker, would build chip plants in the town of Clay, near Syracuse, in part with those federal subsidies.

“With the CHIPS and Science bill I wrote and championed as the fuse,” Schumer boasted, the investment would transform the region into a global manufacturing hub.

Yet four years later, almost nothing has been built.

Start with the problem nobody mentioned at the first press conference: the finished plant will draw more electricity than New Hampshire and Vermont combined— about 1.85 gigawatts, running around the clock.

That would be a problem in any state. But it is even more of a catastrophe in New York, because state politicians have spent the last decade methodically dismantling their own power generation.

In 2019, New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, mandating 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040.

To get there, the state inexplicably went after its two cleanest sources of reliable power. It started forcing natural gas plants, the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, to shut down.

Then it closed the Indian Point nuclear plant in 2021, two gigawatts of zero-carbon baseload.

New Yorkers now pay roughly 70% more for electricity than the national average and still lean on imported power from neighboring states and Canada to keep the lights on, while the state’s own grid operator warns of shortfalls.

So the government that legislated away its own power has promised a single factory more electricity than two states combined can produce.

But before Micron can even worry about the electricity, it has to deal with the bats.

Schumer sold the site as “open fields.” What’s actually there is hundreds of acres of forest and wetland that happen to house protected bat species.

Federal and state rules forbid Micron from cutting a single tree between April and October, while the bats are roosting.

Micron agreed to spend $1 million protecting them and to install ten “bat houses.” The environmental review ran 719 pages, backed by some 20,000 pages of supporting material.

Tree clearing was supposed to begin two years ago; it finally started this January, at which point environmental groups promptly sued to stop it.

The whole thing pretty well sums up modern American government.

Washington borrowed money it doesn’t have to end a chip shortage, then handed it to the Senator who wrote the law.

He sent it to the state he represents— but that state outlawed the very power that the new chip plant needs to operate.

Then federal and state regulations drowned the facility in environmental reviews.

Then activist groups filed a lawsuit to stop production entirely.

Congress did not need to bother spending $53 billion to bring chip-making home. They just needed to stop making business in America so difficult.

If New York could generate cheap power and let companies build, Micron wouldn’t need a subsidy, and the federal government wouldn’t be borrowing money to create one.

Every regulation that blocks a factory also blocks the tax revenue that factory would have generated. They create the problem, borrow money to “solve” it, and then block their own solution.

That is the real cost here. Not the billions wasted, and certainly not the bats. It is an economy where nothing can get built by anyone, subsidy or not, run by people whose answer to every failure is to borrow more and spend it on the next one.

Here’s the bottom line. Washington won’t cut spending. And it doesn’t look like they’re  going to cut regulations either. They seem to have no interest in shoring up an abusive judicial system. They won’t even tackle obvious fraud when it smacks them in the face.

I wouldn’t count on that pattern to change. Which is exactly why you need a Plan B.

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The first time I came to Panama was about 16 years ago, and I felt like someone was always yelling… either yelling at me, towards me, through me, about me…

The place felt chaotic (in an irritating way) and loud, with construction zones on every other block. And the traffic was enough to drive a Zen monk completely insane.

There are places I’ve been to in the world that I fell in love with immediately. Capetown, South Africa is one of them. Japan. The Croatian coastline.

Panama was on my rolling-eyes-can’t-wait-to-leave-at-first-sight list. And I never would have imagined splitting my time between Panama and Mexico. That’s how much I disliked it.

Back then, the Panamanian government was practically handing out residencies. It was one of the easiest places in the world to get legal residency– a real Plan B option on paper. But personally it just wasn’t for me. That was in 2010.

Yet, over the years, Panama kept appearing in my itinerary. A layover and a cancelled flight that stretched into a multi-day stint. Another connection that turned into a week’s stopover.

Each time, I’d meet more people, see a different part of the country, and quietly recalibrate my thoughts. The place was changing— and I’ll admit I had been too dismissive early on to notice the potential.

Panama 16 years ago was simply not the Panama that exists today. The country kept growing, kept modernizing, and kept attracting serious people. Internationally connected professionals, entrepreneurs, retirees who’d done their research and figured out that their money goes significantly further here than back home.

Infrastructure improved. The expat community deepened. And somewhere along the way, slowly and without much fanfare, Panama earned my respect.

One of the obvious benefits today is that Panama is one of the few spots in the Americas where you can still buy a modern, elegant home in a safe, dollar-based, tax-friendly country. And home prices are quite modest compared to the US.

Property is a good deal. And foreigners can own it outright without restriction.

Plus, in Panama, the right property purchase can qualify you for residency— status that gives you the legal right to live, work, and invest.

We think of a foreign residency as an insurance policy: the right to pick up and go somewhere stable if your home country stops feeling right.

Depending on what country you are from, any Panamanian property in the $200,000–$300,000 range is enough to qualify you for residency.

But real estate isn’t the only way in. Panama has built some of the most accessible residency programs in the world, with pathways for investors, professionals, and people living on independent income. There’s a door here for almost everyone.

The residency Panama is best known for is built for retirees—and it reflects something most countries still haven’t figured out: retirees are worth attracting.

The “Pensionado” visa has been around for decades and remains one of the most generous residency programs in the world. The qualification threshold is modest, requiring only a lifetime pension or annuity income of around $1,000 per month.

And once you have it, Panama actually gives you a permanent discount card for the rest of your life— meaningful cuts on everything from flights and restaurants to medical care and entertainment. The country isn’t just tolerating retirees; it built an entire incentive structure to keep them happy. That’s rare, and it’s smart.

But Panama isn’t just a lifestyle destination. It’s a legitimate financial center.

Despite what people might think about the country’s past financial issues, Panama is now the largest banking hub in Latin America. Bank failures are few, and nearly every institution is well-capitalized and liquid.

Foreigners can open a solid bank account here in US dollars (which Panama uses as its official currency). Surprisingly, service is quite good. I have an account at a private bank (the account minimums are trivial for foreigners) and I personally WhatsApp with my banker for anything I need.

For anyone thinking seriously about financial diversification, this is a useful box to tick.

And then there’s the piece that I find even more interesting: physical asset storage.

Panama has developed a small but serious industry of private vault facilities for precious metals and other tangible wealth.

I’ve visited some of these personally— sat down with the owners, walked through the operations— these are facilities built to serious international standards: multi-layer physical security, reinforced construction, full insurance, and total privacy.

In short, this is not a country where you park money and assets because you have no better option. It’s a country that sophisticated people increasingly choose on purpose.

P.S. A few weeks ago, we sent our Plan B Confidential members a detailed report on real estate opportunities in Panama— properties that work not just as Plan B infrastructure, but as genuine investments in a country that has quietly appreciated for a decade. If you’re not a member yet, now’s the time to take a closer look.

Here’s an added reason: on September 18–19, 2026, we’re hosting a conference right here in Panama City— two days on residency, international diversification, and the practical moves that actually matter, spent around people who ask the same questions you do. It’s normally open only to Total Access members, but join Plan B Confidential now and you can attend too.

Click here to learn more.

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Interest rates remained sky-high, inflation was still hovering around 7%, and deficits continued to rise. But even with all that despair, the US government had a more immediate problem to tackle: Social Security.

It had been roughly fifty years since Social Security’s creation back in the 1930s, and the program was almost insolvent. In fact, the trustees warned Congress in 1982 that Social Security’s main trust fund would run out of money the following year (in 1983).

In short, tens of millions of retirees were about 15 months away from having their benefits cut.

Reagan formed a commission, chaired by the recently departed Alan Greenspan, to study the shortfall.

And in a matter of months, Congress passed legislation based on Greenspan’s recommendations. Essentially, they waited until the money almost ran out, and then aggressively took action.

So what did they do? Well, for starters, they jacked up payroll taxes— from just over 10% to 15.3%.

They also increased the retirement age… and monkeyed around with the program’s annual cost-of-living increases.

In short, they made the program solvent again by forcing everyone to chip in. Workers paid more. Businesses paid more. Young people had to contribute longer to receive benefits. And even Social Security recipients took ‘cuts’ after adjusting for inflation.

These reforms eliminated the immediate crisis, and Social Security would remain solvent for at least 75 years (i.e. into the late 2050s).

Alan Greenspan just died a few days ago at the age of 100. And ironically this is part of the reason why those long-term Social Security projections did not hold.

Americans live far longer than the actuaries calculated in 1983, meaning that Social Security recipients collect benefits for far longer. More importantly, the fertility rate of subsequent generations has collapsed behind them.

To put this in context, back in 1960, more than five workers contributed to Social Security for every retiree drawing benefits. Today that ratio is less than 3:1.

Now the program is at a similar cliff; earlier this month, Social Security’s trustees stated that the fund would be fully depleted by 2032. That’s just six years away.

So, if history is any guide, it means politicians will likely wait another five years to solve the problem… then around 2031 they’ll act aggressively to force everyone to chip in.

The one recent development is that they are sort of acknowledging the problem.

House Speaker Mike Johnson recently said Social Security and Medicare have to be “adjusted and fixed”, and that Republicans have a plan to do so next year. Of course, he didn’t say what the plan was, let alone introduce a bill.

That’s probably because this is an election year, and talking about real solutions is not a viable election strategy.

Perhaps that’s why pretty much the only other members of Congress who are willing to talk about Social Security are those that won’t be coming back— whether because they’re retiring, or they lost their primary, like Senators Bill Cassidy, Dick Durbin, and Thom Tillis.

There are a few outliers, including Rand Paul, who are pressing for urgent action. But Social Security reform clearly is not a priority for this Congress.

And that’s unfortunate, because inaction makes the eventual solution even more painful.

If they had taken action 5 years ago, the resulting payroll tax increase would have been negligible. Taking action today would require about a 4% increase. Waiting until 2031 will require a far greater tax increase.

It will be the same with other Social Security reforms. The longer they wait, the more severe the inflation-adjusted benefit cuts will be. The longer they wait, the higher they’ll have to hike the retirement age.

Realistically those are the only solutions.

There has been some discussion about ‘privatizing’ Social Security… which is a great idea in theory.

Just imagine handing Social Security’s $2.3 trillion trust fund over to the greatest asset manager in US history— Congressman Ro Khanna of California, who, since joining Congress, has outperformed the S&P 500 by over 112%!

Mr. Khanna could invest that $2.3 trillion trust fund so effectively that not only would Social Security become solvent on an infinite timeline, but he’d probably pay off the national debt too!

Unfortunately privatization of Social Security is a complete fantasy.

Let’s even forget about political opposition (because Bernie Sanders will be clinging to Social Security with his cold, dead hands). The larger issue is practicality.

Technically, yes, Social Security’s key trust fund holds about $2.3 trillion; but that balance is depleting rapidly, and, again, will run completely out of money in six years.

So in a few years there will be nothing left to privatize!

But even now, the trust fund’s $2.3 trillion isn’t money, but rather a mountain of IOUs— special “non-marketable” US government bonds that cannot be sold or traded. They can only be redeemed to the Treasury Department.

Unfortunately the Treasury Department does not have a spare $2.3 trillion lying around to repay the trust fund.

So before Social Security could even be privatized, Treasury would first have to borrow $2.3 trillion to repay the trust fund… which is a pretty tall order in this bond market. Interest rates would likely spike as a result.

That’s why, ultimately, it’s smart to expect higher payroll taxes, inflation-adjusted cuts to benefits, and (if you’re 55 or younger), a hike in the retirement age.

One sensible strategy is maxing out tax-advantaged retirement accounts; they can not only reduce your taxable income, but they help grow your retirement savings in a tax-efficient way.

We’ve also been vocal about owning real assets. When Congress refuses to balance the budget or act responsibly, it seems pretty clear that the only real option is for the Fed to ‘print’ trillions of dollars to make up the difference.

Real assets tend to hold their values in inflationary environments. And the businesses that produce them (gold miners, energy producers, etc.) often perform spectacularly well.

Our premium investment research, Strategic Assets, is focused exclusively on these businesses: deeply undervalued real-asset producers with pristine balance sheets, high-growth earnings, and catalysts the market hasn’t priced yet.

Many of the companies featured in our research are up 5x and beyond, and we believe several others are primed for similar growth. You can learn more about our investment research here.

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Eaton was also close friends with the incoming president Andrew Jackson.

Peggy, on the other hand, was rumored to be somewhat of a harlot. She was openly flirtatious and allegedly promiscuous, and her wedding to Sen. Eaton came only a few months after the mysterious death of her first husband.

The elite “power wives” of Washington DC considered Peggy scandalous and immoral, and so they simply refused to engage with her. They would not attend any event where Peggy would be present. They would not invite her to their parties. They spoke ill of her behind her back.

So when Andrew Jackson made Sen. Eaton his Secretary of War in March of 1829, the snub against Peggy became a federal problem.

President Jackson, whose own late wife had been savaged by similar gossip during the brutal 1828 campaign, took the shunning of Peggy as a personal insult. And he actually demanded that his cabinet bring their wives into line and accept her.

Jackson’s cabinet could not (or would not) demand this of their wives. And for more than two years, the so-called “Petticoat Affair” consumed federal attention.

It finally ended in the spring of 1831 with something America had never seen: Jackson’s entire cabinet resigned except for the Postmaster General. The Secretaries of State, Treasury, etc. all left. Even Eaton as Secretary of War resigned.

In short, a dispute over whether the power wives of Washington were willing to invite another lady to dinner had resulted in the effective dissolution of the executive branch.

Nearly two centuries later, that remains almost unimaginable. High-level resignation is something the American government simply does not do.

In its entire history exactly one president has resigned— Richard Nixon, in 1974, and only to avoid impeachment.

Only two vice presidents have resigned, including Spiro Agnew in 1973 due to pending criminal charges.

American politicians only give up power under extreme duress— likely a family emergency… or the imminent arrival of a criminal indictment. It is a “from-my-cold-dead-hands” political culture. We even treat a President declining to seek reelection as a major event.

In Britain, by contrast, prime ministers resign all the time. When they lose the confidence of their party, they step down… and the machine produces another.

I used to think that was a genuine strength— that American politics might be healthier if resigning were less taboo.

I am no longer sure.

Keir Starmer is the perfect illustration. By this spring his net approval had collapsed to the lowest rating recorded for any prime minister since Ipsos began measuring in 1977.

Failure didn’t bother him. In fact Starmer’s government kept criminalizing criticism— Britain now jails its own citizens for anti-migrant posts while the actual migrant criminals walk free and receive taxpayer assistance.

Even last month, with dozens in his own party urging him to resign, Starmer remained defiant: “The country expects us to get on with governing. That is what I am doing and what we must do as a cabinet.”

What finally forced him out was not voters. Yes, his own party helped push him out after disastrous local elections cost Labour more than a thousand races last month.

But underneath that sat the bond market.

Investors had been dumping British government debt for weeks, and in early May the yield on the 30-year gilt spiked to the highest level in decades.

Bond investors want fiscal restraint. And they had concluded that Starmer would respond to his electoral beating by spending even more money.

So naturally, investors sold their UK government bonds… and the British government’s borrowing costs soared.

This is nothing new; less than four years ago, then Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned after just 44 days because the bond market didn’t like her economic plan. Bond yields surged and the British pound went into free fall.

Calm returned only after Truss resigned in disgrace.

The sad irony is that Starmer’s likely successor is worse. Andy Burnham— the longtime mayor of Greater Manchester— campaigns on what he calls “business friendly socialism“, which makes as much sense as “vegan wolf”.

He also wants more borrowing, higher taxes, and bringing utilities and “public essentials” back under state control.

Bizarrely, Burnham has complained that Britain is “in hock to the bond markets,” as though the people lending to the government should simply hand over their capital with no questions asked.

(Given Mr. Burnham’s penchant for nationalization, he may in fact get his way. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more wealth tax proposals in the UK.)

The actual solution is embarrassingly simple. You are only “in hock to the bond market” if you borrow. Balance the budget, live within your means, and the bond market gets no vote at all.

Yet basic fiscal responsibility is an impossible idea— and it tells you everything about the modern Western politician. This most certainly will not improve under a “business friendly” socialist.

Ultimately, the last institution still imposing any discipline on government is not the voter— it’s the creditor. And the United States, with its own debt arithmetic getting worse every year, is approaching that the same line.

One day the bond market will start calling the shots in Washington too, voters’ wishes be damned, and it will do it through higher yields and a weaker dollar.

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Banks were handing out mortgages to people who plainly couldn’t afford them. Wall Street bundled those mortgages by the millions and sold them on as some of the safest investments around. And the whole structure rested on the assumption that home prices would never fall, so a bank could simply sell the home for more in case of a default.

Chief among the “experts” selling this fiction was Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, who said in 2005, “We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis.”

In March 2007, with subprime loans already going bad, Bernanke, by then Fed Chairman, told Congress the damage “seems likely to be contained.”

That May he said he didn’t expect “significant spillovers… to the rest of the economy.”

As late as July 2008, weeks before the two mortgage giants collapsed into government hands, he called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac adequately capitalized and in no danger of failing.

Then on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history, and the structure came down. Prices fell, those homes were suddenly worth less than the loans against them, and the safest investments around turned toxic.

By 2009, Washington was spending, bailing out, and printing at record scale, and the obvious question was how long it could possibly go on.

That was the world the very first Sovereign Man letter dropped into, in June 2009, exactly 17 years ago.

We wrote about a real man named William “Bud” Post who had gone flat broke, on food stamps, with lawsuits, jail time, and bankruptcy behind him. What made it strange was that in 1988 he’d won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery.

Bud, we wrote, is the United States of America.

America hit its own lottery after World War II, coming out the only major economy left standing, the dollar enthroned as the world’s reserve currency. And like Bud, it spent the next several decades certain the money would never run out.

LBJ got bogged down in Vietnam while building the Great Society. George W. Bush entered two wars and told Americans to go shopping, and Obama, fresh off the bailouts, was promising universal healthcare.

It was the steady avoidance of every hard choice. We called it winner’s syndrome: “we’ve been winners for so long we don’t know any other reality.”

In 2009, that was an unpopular thing to say.

The consensus treated the crisis as a stumble the economy would walk off, and calling America structurally broke got you labeled a crank.

We didn’t say it was a death sentence, though. We argued the opposite, that clear thinking could still save America: take the hit, let failing businesses fail, restructure, and come out stronger.

“Unfortunately,” we wrote, “there are no near-term indications of rationality in Washington.”

17 years later, that is more true than ever. If anything, Washington has gone backwards.

For example, Social Security’s own trustees now project the main retirement trust fund runs dry in 2032, after which scheduled benefits get cut by roughly 22% automatically.

That’s not some distant future where maybe at some point someone will have to start thinking about a solution. It is 6 years away.

And the fixes are no secret; the trustees themselves lay out the options, from higher payroll taxes to benefit cuts.

But they’ve ignored it for so long that simply hearing a few members of Congress acknowledge the scale of the problem now feels like progress, even though acknowledging it is a long way from fixing it.

We were early; the reckoning we kept warning about has taken longer to arrive than we thought.

But early isn’t wrong: everything that first letter described is more true today than it was in 2009. Washington could still choose to fix it, exactly as it could have back then. It simply has to want to, and seventeen years of evidence says it doesn’t.

Your Plan B, fortunately, doesn’t require Congress to find its courage.

And that was the entire reason this company was founded.

That was the promise at the end of that first letter: while the country may be on a slide, clear thinking could still save you, “and that’s where we come in.”

That’s still exactly what we do. 

Sovereign Man grew into Schiff Sovereign, and one daily letter became a full body of research.

Every month, our co-founder James Hickman gives his in-depth view of the world in the Macro Brief, mapping where the debt, the dollar, and global events are heading. He points to specific real assets that can protect your savings; the gold, energy, and resource businesses that hold their value as the dollar slips.

It’s available to members of Premium for just $9 per month.

Members of our flagship membership, Plan B Confidential, get even more.

This is the original idea the first letter was built on: don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and don’t hand one government the keys to your entire life. Plan B Confidential is the playbook for second citizenship so you always have another way out, foreign residency so you always have another place to live, offshore banking so your savings aren’t trapped in one banking system, and the legal tax strategy that lets you keep as much of your money as possible.

It’s built on boots-on-the-ground research across more than 120 countries.

And because so much of the threat from a bankrupt government printing money and draining the value of your savings is financial, we’ve zeroed in on real assets through our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

A real asset is something with worth of its own, the kind of thing people need no matter what the dollar is doing: gold as a store of value, energy, the metals that build everything. A government can print money by the trillion, but it can’t print an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil, so real assets tend to hold their value, and often climb, exactly when paper money is falling apart.

And for readers who want it all, we offer Total Access.

Members get everything we publish, from the macro analysis to the investment research, and all the international strategies in between.

But Total Access members also get the community: other members who they meet at in-person events, conferences, dinners, and most recently, small group boots-on-the-ground trips around the world.

From a superyacht along the Croatian coast to a trek through the Patagonian Andes, members explore the world together, and finally find their tribe in each other.

That’s the part we could never have planned 17 years ago.

Back then, we wrote to a handful of people willing to question what everyone else accepted as obvious. You were one of them, or you found your way here since, because you see the world through that same lens.

That’s what built this. Not us. You.

Here’s to the next chapter.

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That’s because this city clears its main beach road of traffic every morning from 5 to 8am, and it feels like half the population is already out walking, running, and cycling on it before the tropical heat arrives.

The water is warm, the way it stays all year round. A 25-minute Uber across town just cost about five dollars. A dinner in a simple but nice cafe on the beach is sub $10.

This is João Pessoa, a midsize beach capital on Brazil’s northeast coast, at the easternmost tip of the Americas, where locals like to say the sun rises first in the New World.

It’s safer and calmer than the Brazilian cities you’ve probably heard of, a good deal cheaper, and almost no foreign buyers have found it yet.

But the few who have bought here figured out something the rest haven’t.

A beach apartment here isn’t only a vacation home. Buy one and you become a legal resident of Brazil— a home and a Plan B in one.

This type of Plan B usually starts by accident. You travel somewhere, you like it, you go back. A few days becomes a few weeks. Eventually you find yourself scrolling the local property listings, and one day you buy the place you keep returning to.

At first it is just a home you use a few weeks a year. But the world keeps getting stranger, and slowly it dawns on you that if things ever got truly crazy back home, you already have somewhere else to be. That quiet knowledge is worth more than the view.

Brazil makes this an easy choice. Foreigners can buy property in their own name, with the same ownership rights as locals.

Here’s where it becomes a Plan B. Brazil offers a path to residency through real estate: buy a qualifying property and you can apply to live there legally. 

Brazil wants investment flowing into its poorer, less-developed north, so it set the price threshold lower in certain regions. The north is already cheaper to buy in. So not only do you spend less to qualify, you get more for what you spend.

Plus, to keep the residency active, you only need to spend two weeks in Brazil every two years.

Most people get this part wrong. They picture uprooting their life, learning a new bureaucracy, becoming an expat.

You don’t have to move anywhere. You hold the option from a beach chair, two weeks at a time.

And it doesn’t have to sit empty the rest of the year. You can rent it out to cover your costs. Tourist demand on a warm-water beach runs year-round, and the costs are low— condo fees on a big coastal apartment often run a couple hundred dollars a month.

The real value shows up on the day you hope never comes… again.

When governments slammed their borders shut in 2020, a tourist visa meant nothing— non-residents were turned away at the gate. Legal residents were still let in.

That’s the whole point of residency, and it’s an invisible insurance policy right up until you need it. In a crisis, being a resident versus a tourist makes all the difference.

That’s the trick of a good Plan B: not a bunker you flee to, but a place you already love that happens to come with the right to stay.

It helps that Brazil is, right now, about the cheapest place in the Western Hemisphere to run this play.

It got here the hard way. When the commodity boom broke in 2014, Brazil fell into recession, impeached a president, churned through corruption scandals, and rode out COVID and brutal interest rates. In dollar terms, property got cheap: the average asking price is about $1,947 per square meter, roughly where it sat in 2010— and cheaper still after inflation.

Mexico, the obvious alternative, got the opposite. Remote-work money and North American buyers flooded in after COVID and ran prices up. Brazil never got that rush. It’s farther, it speaks Portuguese, it’s more of a hassle to reach— and that’s exactly why it’s still cheap.

Of course, Brazil still has its problems. And it is not for everyone.

The point is not that Brazil is the right Plan B destination, but that building a Plan B is not as radical as it sounds. 

It can start as simply as taking a few good vacations somewhere you might actually want to live one day.

This week, our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, published the first part of a deep dive on Brazil’s coast— the best beach markets, the residency thresholds, and the mechanics of buying, renting, and the tax side.

But Brazil is only one option.

You can gain residency through property purchases in places like Greece, Panama, Latvia, and Cyprus as well. Others, such as Mexico, Spain, and Costa Rica only ask you to prove you have a certain amount of savings or income so you won’t become a burden to the state.

Our research walks through all of them— what each country asks for, what it costs, and what it actually takes to qualify. You can read through it from your couch and narrow the whole world down to the two or three places worth a real look.

That’s the cheapest way to start: exploring the world on paper, before you spend any real time or money on the ground.

If you’d like to see everything Plan B Confidential covers, you can learn more here.

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The man he dialed was his chief rival at Bell Labs. Cooper wanted him to hear the news firsthand: that Motorola had beaten him to it, from the middle of a New York City sidewalk, on a telephone connected to nothing at all.

It took another decade before ordinary people could join in. In October 1983, the first commercial cellular network in America switched on in Chicago, and the “car phone” arrived— a handset on a coiled cord, wired into the console of a sedan.

I doubt a single one of the engineers who built these systems imagined that the descendants of the car phone would one day know where you sleep, whom you talk to, what you read at 2 a.m., and every place you’ve ever been.

Most privacy-conscious people believe they’ve handled this. They install a VPN to hide their internet traffic, use Brave for more private browsing, message friends through an encrypted app like Signal, and they feel covered.

And those tools are genuinely beneficial for privacy.

But beneath the apps sits the cellular network itself, the layer that connects your phone to the world, and at that layer you are wide open.

While your phone sits in your pocket apparently doing nothing, it is actually announcing itself to the towers around it, because that is the only way the network can find your phone when a call comes in.

Those introductions rely on two ID numbers. The first lives on your SIM card and identifies your account; the industry calls it the IMSI, and it exists so the network knows whom to bill.

The second, the IMEI, is a serial number burned permanently into the hardware, which is how a carrier can block a stolen handset even after the thief swaps in a fresh SIM. You will never see either number, but the network sees both, every day.

And anyone with the right equipment can trick your phone into revealing them.

A device called an IMSI catcher does nothing more sophisticated than pretend to be a cell tower; your phone, trusting by design, walks up and introduces itself just as it would to the real thing.

Police departments own these devices, and so do people with worse intentions; whoever operates one learns precisely which phones are in a given crowd.

The location part surprises people most, because everyone assumes location means GPS, and GPS has an off switch. But the network never needed GPS.

Locating you is plain physics. To hand your call from one tower to the next as you move, the network has to know which tower you’re closest to, how strong your signal is, and how long that signal takes to arrive.

Put those three measurements together and you can place a phone within about a city block, even tighter where the towers are dense.

Wireless companies knowing your location is a side effect of the call connecting at all, not a feature somebody added.

All of that housekeeping — the introductions, the handoffs, the location math— travels on a hidden channel the industry calls the “control plane”, and it is where your metadata lives.

The networks that exchange it were built to trust one another completely: when your carrier needs something from a network overseas, it asks, and the foreign network complies without verification.

Surveillance firms figured out they could rent access to that trust, and they now use it to locate phones and reroute text messages anywhere on earth.

In 2016, security researchers went on 60 Minutes and proved the point by tracking a sitting US Congressman using nothing but his phone number.

Then comes the paperwork. Every call you make, every text you send, every data session you open gets written down— your IDs, the towers you touched, the time, the location— in a file called a Call Data Record.

The official purpose is billing, but the practical effect is a diary of your movements, which carriers keep, some retaining location records for years. A stranger with the right access could reconstruct where you stood on an afternoon you’ve long forgotten.

Here’s the bottom line: almost none of this is necessary.

Connecting your call requires a couple of identifiers and a rough location, held briefly. It does not require a multi-year archive of everywhere you have ever stood.

Carriers keep all of it because they can, and because the data is worth real money— to advertisers, to data brokers, to governments, to anyone willing to pay.

In that arrangement you are not the customer; you are the inventory.

And for the entire history of the cell phone, you had no vote in the matter. Every carrier ran the same plumbing, logged the same records, leaked the same identifiers, and the only way to opt out was to not carry a phone.

That is finally changing.

There is now a US carrier called Cape, built specifically to collect as little as possible: it deletes those call records after about a day instead of warehousing them for years, and it can rotate the ID number on your SIM so it becomes a moving target rather than a permanent name tag.

We have no connection to the company, and this isn’t a sales pitch. We just came across it and thought it was worth sharing, because it’s good to see someone finally working on these problems. The bigger the market for this kind of privacy grows, the more options you’ll have— and we’re all about options.

Source

Running fiber-optic cable down a twelve-mile dirt road costs a fortune, and the handful of households scattered along that road will never pay enough in monthly bills to justify the cost of laying the cable.

That’s why private companies don’t bother laying fiber in rural areas: the math doesn’t work.

But living out in the country is a choice— one that plenty of people gladly make. Some people value the space, the quiet, and the empty horizon far more than same-day Amazon delivery or 1 gigabit Internet.

And most people typically know about these trade-offs before they move out to the country. Urban and suburban conveniences are just that— conveniences. They are not inalienable “rights”. No one is entitled to fast internet.

Yet Congress has decided at least 133 times that fast Internet, is, in fact, a right. And one that they have decided to provide with your money.

Its biggest program is the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, known as BEAD. It was created in 2021 as part of Joe Biden’s staggering infrastructure bill, and over $42 billion was allocated to wire up rural America.

Five years later it has connected almost nobody. The first BEAD-funded household in the entire country came online only this spring— a single home near Ogallala, Nebraska, hooked up in May 2026. About a hundred more followed in rural Louisiana. That was the triumphant achievement of five years and ridiculous money spent: a couple hundred connected homes.

BEAD is far from alone. In 2023, the Government Accountability Office— Congress’s own watchdog— set out to count the federal government’s broadband programs and found more than 133 of them, scattered across 15 separate agencies.

These programs are largely similar yet have no coordinated plan to prevent overlap, or wiring the same stretch of dirt twice.

The GAO told them to sort it out. When it checked back in 2025, most of the work hadn’t been touched.

So what do you do about 133 overlapping programs and a flagship that spent billions to connect a couple hundred homes?

If you’re the United States Congress, you add a 134th broadband program!

On June 3, the House Rules Committee advanced next year’s Agriculture spending bill with  fresh loans and grants for the US Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect program— the 134th rural broadband fund, stacked on the $42 billion one that barely works and the 133 others nobody can keep track of.

A private company that spends so much money to connect a couple hundred homes would be bankrupt, and its executives likely facing criminal charges. A federal agency that does it gets a sequel.

What makes it worse is that the problem was already solved by the free market.

Anyone at the end of a dirt road can order a Starlink dish online and have high-speed internet running within about a week— no federal fiber, no years-long wait, no act of Congress.

For that $42 billion price tag, the US taxpayer could have bought a Starlink dish for every one of the top-end estimate of 12 million unserved households in America AND prepaid their internet service for the next five years.

So where did that money go?

It is egregious. The government borrows $2 trillion a year to do this sort of garbage, and acts like a single dollar cut from the budget would throw single mothers out on the streets. They literally wail that “people will die”.

And half the country thinks the answer is to collect more in taxes!

Keep in mind, this $42 billion is part of the legitimate spending — not the $600 billion a year the Treasury Secretary estimates is lost to outright fraud, the $186 billion in improper payments the government admits to, or the hundreds of billions in legal graft on top.

All that borrowing and waste gets paid for one way or another— a weaker dollar, higher taxes, more inflation.

You can’t change any of that. But just like those people without internet on a dead-end road, you do have a choice.

That choice is a Plan B.

The tools to route around Congress already exist.

Owning real assets— gold, silver, energy, productive technology, and the well-managed businesses that produce them— protects your purchasing power when the government reaches for the printing press.

Moving some savings into stronger jurisdictions, establishing a second residency, and taking every legal step to cut your tax bill all mean that no single government’s incompetence has total claim over your life.

None of it requires predicting the next crisis. It benefits you, and gives you options, no matter what happens next.

Source

Bystanders screamed that he was trying to decapitate the man before someone intervened. The victim survived, though he lost his left eye. And within hours the footage had traveled around the world.

The perpetrator caught on video is Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker who flew from Paris to Dublin in 2023, rode a bus across the completely unchecked border into Belfast, and claimed asylum on arrival.

Within months he was granted permission to remain for at least five years. Hadi Alodid has now been charged with attempted murder.

Yet for the woke media covering the story, “attempted murder” was far too harsh a term. After all, the poor Sudanese man clearly had a ‘troubled background’ and fled from an ‘oppressive regime’.

So the terminology for NPR, CNN, the Washington Post, etc. quickly shifted to phrases like “alleged assault”, or, at worst, “knife attack”.

Anger boiled over among the Irish, and riots broke out the following night.

But Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill saved her harshest words— not for the Sudanese criminal, but for the angry crowds. She described their rage as “outright thuggery”.

Note the Left’s changing definitions: an African migrant’s attempt to behead a local citizen was an “alleged assault.” People being upset about it is “outright thuggery”.

But those aren’t the only definitions that changed this week. So in the spirit of public service, here’s the rest of your vocabulary update.

In Albany, New York lawmakers just passed a bill replacing the word “mother” with “gestating parent” and “father” with “non-gestating parent” throughout the state’s family court and custody laws.

The Left has also updated its definition of the term “Nazi”. We’ve all gotten used to the word describing anyone who questions immigration policy or supports free speech.

But now the Left has made it clear that “Nazi” does not include people who get literal Nazi tattoos, like Graham Platner, Maine’s new Democratic Senate nominee.

Several stories broke recently where Platner’s ex-girlfriends described him as physically abusive. Others called him demeaning and serially unfaithful— on top of earlier reports of sexually explicit texts he sent to other women while married.

He won Tuesday’s primary anyway. “We all have skeletons in our closet, and we’ve all made mistakes,” one supporter explained. Senator Bernie Sanders suggested “maybe we have to do a little bit of forgiveness.”

Forgiveness is a wonderful principle. We just seem to remember that, in 2018, a single uncorroborated allegation about a house party in 1982 was treated as disqualifying for Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.

The updated definition seems to be that everyone has a past— unless you’ve been nominated by the wrong party, in which case a forty-year-old rumor is sufficient to smear you.

And then there is Los Angeles, where “protecting democracy” got its annual revision.

Spencer Pratt, the reality-TV personality who ran for mayor, ended election night nine points ahead of Councilmember Nithya Raman for the runoff’s second spot. By the next day his lead topped 40,000 votes.

Then mail-in-ballots ballots started pouring in… counted at an overwhelming margin for Raman. Nearly a week after election day, she passed Pratt and was up nearly 22,000 votes when the media called the race.

Less than a week before the election, Governor Gavin Newsom had signed a law making it illegal for election observers to challenge vote counters if a mail-ballot signature is questionable. So now county officials in California have the final say on which signatures count, i.e. which ballots count. And nobody is allowed to challenge them.

So we’re being told to believe that a weeks-long vote count— with a dramatic mid-count swing— is completely normal election administration. Asking questions about it is “election denial”. And making it illegal to challenge the ballot counting is “protecting democracy.”

Here’s the thing: people aren’t that stupid. They know they’re being screwed. And they’re angry.

The politicians know it. Perhaps that’s why police in places like the UK are making roughly 33 arrests per day for online messages deemed “grossly offensive” or likely to cause “annoyance” or “anxiety.”

In other words, they have to criminalize free speech in order to keep their critics in check.

And this week, as Belfast burned, Northern Ireland’s police chief pledged to pursue not only the rioters but “those inciting and encouraging it” online, using “every piece of legislation, every resource and every tactic available.”

Let’s be honest— burning down your own neighborhood is a terrible idea and will not solve anything. But it is a natural response to feeling helpless and powerless.

All over the UK, people tired of having their civilization destroyed are fighting back with whatever outlet they have. Many of them no longer trust the electoral process— as I imagine a great many people in LA now feel.

For people in Belfast, the decision of housing African refugees isn’t even made by local politicians; it’s the UK Home Office in London that decides who gets settled in Northern Ireland, and where.

So there is no one to vote out, and no policy referendum to repeal. They’re just stuck with the dolts who keep foisting more and more refugees upon them. And as the police chief just reminded everyone, complaining about it online can be a crime.

Rage is the natural byproduct of all of this.

When you feel like your vote doesn’t count, or literally is NOT counted, then it’s hard to have confidence that democracy is the answer.

And when the problem is as serious as being potentially beheaded in your own hometown— and the cops arrest the people who complain about it— then rage becomes the only language people feel like they have left.

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It arrives without a press conference and with barely any news coverage — just a few hundred pages of actuarial tables quietly uploaded to a government website.

The 2026 edition came out on Tuesday; it is the 86th annual report. And its headline finding is that Social Security’s main retirement trust fund — formally Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, or OASI — is now projected to run out of money in 2032. That’s one year earlier than last year’s projection.

In other words, the fund that pays benefits to America’s retirees is six years away from running dry.

Last year the program collected $1.449 trillion, mostly from payroll taxes, and spent $1.609 trillion.

That $160 billion shortfall was covered by draining the trust fund, whose reserves fell from $2.72 trillion to $2.56 trillion over the course of the year. The program’s costs have exceeded its non-interest income every single year since 2010.

And when it runs dry in six years, they estimate that payroll taxes will cover 78% of scheduled benefits. So the tens of millions of retirees who depend on the program would face an automatic 22% benefit cut on day one.

And it deteriorates from there.

Here’s the part that really boggles the mind: the solutions are already published. The report itself spells them out — raise the payroll tax from 12.40% to 16.65%, or cut everyone’s benefits by 25.2%, or cut benefits 30.3% for future retirees only. Social Security’s own actuaries even maintain an entire catalog of scored reform options, with the financial impact of each one calculated for Congress’s convenience.

The Trustees practically beg lawmakers to act “sooner rather than later,” because every year of delay makes the eventual fix more painful.

And yet there is no serious legislation pending, no emergency commission, not even a hearing on the calendar. The date just keeps creeping closer.

What actually happens when the fund hits zero? It affects far more than retirees.

Option A is that Congress does nothing and retirees absorb a 22% cut on day one. That would be political suicide, which makes it an unlikely outcome.

Option B is that the government borrows the difference — hundreds of billions of dollars per year, on top of roughly $2 trillion annual deficits and a national debt north of $50 trillion by then.

And they’d be borrowing at a time when foreign central banks have already been reducing their Treasury purchases. Coaxing the market into absorbing that much new debt means paying higher yields, and higher Treasury yields ripple into everything: mortgage rates, auto loans, business credit.

Option C is that the Federal Reserve steps in and effectively prints the money. We all saw how that works during the pandemic, when the Fed created roughly $5 trillion out of thin air and the result was 9% inflation.

Then there’s the option that may be the most realistic of all: Congress waits until the fund is nearly dead and then rams through a major payroll tax increase. The report prices out procrastination, too — deferring action pushes the required payroll tax to 17.30%, nearly five percentage points above today’s rate, carved out of every paycheck in America. And the longer they wait, the bigger that bite gets.

And it doesn’t really matter how young you are, or if you’re not depending on Social Security for retirement.

If retirees take the cut, that 22% reduction in purchasing power for 70 million Americans ripples through the economy.

Or if interest rates increase to coax more borrowing, everyone pays higher interest rates.

Or if the Fed prints, everyone pays through inflation.

Most likely it will be some combination of all three.

Which is exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B — not a bunker in the woods, just rational steps to ensure your retirement doesn’t depend on the US Congress finding its courage.

That can mean maximizing tax-advantaged retirement structures, so that you’re building your own income stream instead of relying on a government IOU.

It can mean establishing legal residency in a country where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the US, and where even a reduced benefit check funds a comfortable retirement.

And because the most likely “solutions” all point toward higher rates and higher inflation, it means owning real assets — gold, productive businesses, energy — that hold their value when the government reaches for the printing press.

None of this requires predicting exactly which option Washington chooses, because a sensible Plan B works under all of them.

The point is to put it in place now, calmly and on your own terms — so that when 2032 arrives, you’re not scrambling in a crisis like Congress.

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His name was John Rockefeller. And within twenty years he would control close to 90% of the oil in America. And his Standard Oil would become the largest and most powerful company ever seen.

The trouble was holding it together. Standard Oil was comprised of a complex network of subsidiaries, and you practically had to be an engineer just to understand the structure.

The problem was that, in most states, a corporation wasn’t even allowed to own another corporation.

That restriction sounds strange today, but back then the corporation was still a young, distrusted creature of the state, chartered to do one thing— for example, run a railroad or a bank— with privileges no ordinary person enjoyed.

Industrialization was minting a handful of staggeringly rich men— the titans a later generation would call “robber barons”— and the public watched them swallow up entire industries. People feared that letting one corporation own another corporation would stack company on company until the combination was beyond the reach of any single state.

So Rockefeller ran his empire through a workaround.

On January 2, 1882, he and eight fellow “trustees” signed the agreement creating the Standard Oil Trust, a small group of men who held the stock of some forty companies— refiners, pipelines, and distributors— and ran the whole thing as a single entity.

Great idea, but it was fragile. The trust had no real legal home, and the states Standard Oil operated in were beginning to notice.

In 1892, Ohio’s attorney general hauled the company before the state Supreme Court and successfully argued his case; the court agreed, and ruled that Standard Oil had no right to hand itself over to out-of-state trustees. Consequently, Rockefeller had to cut all ties with the trust. And it appeared on paper that the whole arrangement was broken up.

Rockefeller went shopping to find a friendly state government that would let him keep control. And back in the late 1800s, there was exactly one place to do that.

New Jersey, hungry for revenue, rewrote its corporation law in 1888 and 1889 to let state-chartered companies own as many subsidiary companies as they wanted.

Under this new New Jersey law, for the first time a giant could put its whole empire under one legal roof— for a modest fee to the state.

It was purpose-built for the kind of company Rockefeller had. So in 1899, he reincorporated the entire empire as the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey: a single holding company that owned everything.

Initially, other states felt betrayed.

In 1905 the muckraker Lincoln Steffens branded New Jersey a “Traitor State” for getting rich by selling friendly charters to the monopolies while other states were trying to rein in those same monopolies.

New Jersey had made itself the best place in America to be a big, successful company, and it was eating everyone else’s lunch.

That is, until New Jersey’s own governor, Woodrow Wilson, ruined it. In 1913, in his final weeks as governor before leaving for the White House, he pushed through seven antitrust laws aimed at the very corporations the state had courted for a generation.

(Of course Wilson was just warming up. That same year he’d help ruin the whole country with the Federal Reserve and the federal income tax.)

Companies shopping for a friendly charter then shifted to Delaware, which had quietly copied New Jersey’s law in 1899. New Jersey repealed Wilson’s anti-trust laws within a few years, but by then it was too late; Delaware had become the gold standard.

(Now Delaware has screwed it up and companies are redomiciling in Texas and Wyoming.)

Over the next century New Jersey became one of the most heavily taxed and regulated states in the country, and today it carries the highest corporate tax rate in the nation.

Yet Rockefeller’s old empire kept its New Jersey home through it all.

When the Supreme Court broke Standard Oil into 34 companies in 1911, the largest piece was Standard Oil of New Jersey— which became Exxon, then ExxonMobil. And they remaind incorporated in New Jersey for 127 years.

Until now.

Just a few weeks ago, ExxonMobil shareholders voted 71% to move the company’s legal home from New Jersey to Texas.

Perhaps the final straw came in 2022, when New Jersey’s attorney general sued the company, along with the other oil majors, for allegedly “deceiving” the public about climate change.

Apparently it’s a private company’s responsibility to preach the Green Gospel to the world. Courts disagreed, and a judge threw out the lawsuit in 2025.

But the message was unmistakable: the companies that produce the energy powering modern life were no longer welcome in New Jersey.

New Jersey was joining a pile-on that had been building for years. In 2021, a tiny activist fund called Engine No. 1, holding a tiny amount of Exxon’s stock, won three seats on its board. That hedge fund’s big idea was that the largest oil company on earth should pump less oil.

But Exxon refused to be run by people who wanted it to shrink. It beat the activists back— and its shareholders finished the job, voting the company out of New Jersey for good.

Granted, the move was almost ceremonial.

A company’s legal home and its actual headquarters aren’t the same thing: Exxon has been headquartered in Texas since 1989, while only its legal state of incorporation remained in New Jersey.

The vote didn’t move a single desk. It just made the paperwork match a reality that had been true for decades— and fully aligned the company with a state that treats a profitable energy producer as a value creator, not a defendant.

And that is actually the point.

Exxon didn’t bolt in a panic. It had watched New Jersey turn hostile for years. Slowly, over time, it weighed its options and prepared. The move wasn’t impulsive— it was calculated long in advance.

This is not disloyalty, any more than New Jersey was a “traitor” for once being the friendliest place in America to do business.

Both were rational moves dressed up as betrayal (just as ExxonMobil is now being blasted for leaving New Jersey). You cannot expect to keep a company, or a person, or their capital, in a place that punishes them for succeeding.

In fact, for Exxon it was more than rational; it was a fiduciary duty. A board is legally bound to do what’s best for its shareholders.

And as a father, I’d say a man owes his family the same kind of obligation to prepare— to study the world honestly and rationally, to line up options early, and to keep them ready, so that if the day ever comes, the groundwork is already done.

That is what having a Plan B actually means.

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Staley’s A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company made cornstarch… which is hardly sexy by modern business standards. But over time his company was a huge sucess and grew it into a major Midwest food processor.

Like a lot of companies back in that day, Staley ran a “Fellowship Club” for his workers. And in the year 1919, some of the members of that club formed an intramural sports team to play what was then a strange and relatively new game called gridiron football.

The game was starting to become a lot more popular. And both the sport, and the team, took off.

By 1920 the Decatur Staleys had already won a state championship and had become a charter member of the brand new league that would become the National Football League. Shortly after the team, now professional, moved to the city of Chicago and renamed itself to da Bears.

What started off as a little intramural team survived everything the twentieth century threw at it: the Great Depression, World War II, brutal riots, political violence, domestic terrorism, and the gangland chaos of Al Capone’s Chicago.

For more than a century, though, the Bears stayed true to the city of Chicago. But everyone has a breaking point, even the Chicago Bears.

Late last week, the Bears’ board of directors voted to advance a stadium development project across the border in Hammond, Indiana… signaling what could very well be their permanent  departure from Chicago.

For more than fifty years, the Bears have leased Soldier Field from the city of Chicago. Five years ago, they decided to build their own stadium, paying $197 million for a nearby 326-acre parcel.

Da Bears further earmarked $2 billion of private capital to build a stadium on that site.

But the organization is not stupid. They know Illinois is broke. The state’s pension system is $143 billion in the hole (the worst in America), and Chicago faces a $1.2 billion annual shortfall.

So before sinking billions into the ground, the team wanted assurances that politicians wouldn’t tax the new stadium to death.

They asked for reasonable concessions— the sort of deal that any large business negotiates with cities and states before making major investments.

This is totally normal. Cities routinely grant some property-tax certainty or minor tax breaks, and in exchange they get billions in private investment, jobs, tourism, and a new tax base. Everyone comes out ahead.

This, after all, is the entire basis of capitalism: You win AND I win.

The medieval world was a zero-sum game, where one side got richer only by taking from another; capitalism’s radical idea is that the pie itself can grow, so everyone can win if they work together towards a common goal.

Sadly, that remains a foreign concept on the political left.

The tax negotiation required Illinois lawmakers’ approval, and the legislature had five years to get it done. Yet they never did. After this spring’s legislative session ended last week without the Bear’s tax deal getting done, the team finally made the decision to move on.

It’s just a short drive across the border to Indiana. But the business environment is completely different. Indiana runs a budget surplus, sits on $2.5 billion in reserves, and carries a coveted AAA rating.

And it only took Indiana’s legislature a couple of months to pass a variety of incentives— worth up to $1 billion. Illinois is squeezing the team. Indiana is rolling out the red carpet.

It’s not hard to understand why: billions in private construction, thousands of jobs, and lots of new tourism dollars.

Illinois could have had that. But the Left simply does not want to do win/win deals.

Governor JB Pritzker, himself a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, said he “wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to give it to a billionaire-owned family, or team.”

Think about that. They’d rather lose the team— lose the tax base, lose prosperity, make the city worse off— than make a single concession to the Bears, simply because the owner is a billionaire.

This is what I call Billionaire Derangement Syndrome.

It was the same thing in 2019 when New York progressives (led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) chased Jeff Bezos out of town. Amazon was considering New York City for its “HQ2” location, bringing billions in investment and tens of thousands of highly paid jobs.

But AOC wasn’t having any of that; Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, would have benefited from the deal, so AOC killed it… then took a victory lap to celebrate hollowing out the city’s tax base.

In the end, Bezos and Amazon did just fine. New York City has suffered. The Bears will be just fine. Chicago will suffer.

The Left only knows chaos and destruction. And their endless affliction with Billionaire Derangement Syndrome is one of the great risks to American prosperity.

There was once a time in America when successful people were admired as proof that anyone willing to build something could rise.

Now, across much of the Left, “the rich” are enemies of the state to be taxed into the ground, driven out town, or, as the activists chant, imprisoned or even ‘eaten’.

This derangement drives away the very people and capital that create prosperity and pay for everything that politicians claim to care about.

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.

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We were sitting in the eighth row when it happened: the slap heard ‘round the stadium.

Tessa Blanchard’s opponent smacked her across the chest so hard that the sound— a sharp crack— carried all the way through the area.

Talk about a Plan B: Tessa is an American professional wrestler who has managed to diversify abroad by competing in Mexico’s “lucha libre” circuit. It’s basically the Mexican version of WWE, which looks pretty much exactly like you think it would.

(For the record, Tessa didn’t go down. She didn’t even pause. She shook off the slap and ‘won’ the match, much to the crowd’s delight.)

This went down last Friday; a group of our Total Access members had joined me in Mexico City for a long weekend wanting to experience some real local flavor. So there we were, cheering our butts off at Lucha Libre for an American girl.

(James and Peter warned me to not call wrestling ‘fake’ lest I end up getting slapped like John Stossel did all those years ago…)

But that was just a small part of the trip… and honestly that’s part of the point: you show up somewhere, let the city surprise you, break bread and make incredible contacts, and go home with stories you didn’t plan to have.

Mexico City surprised a lot of people on this trip. It always does.

I wrote recently about my time in Monterrey— a bustling, business city in northern Mexico for people who want to build great things.

Mexico City (where I actually live) is totally different.

I have to start with the most common misconception that people have about Mexico City: that it’s dangerous and chaotic. I understand where that image comes from. But that idea is a few decades out of date.

Of course there are rough neighborhoods here— just as there are in London, Hong Kong, and Miami. But it’s not prevalent. I never feel unsafe… and I’m a short, blond, European female.

Truthfully, Mexico City is one of the most cosmopolitan, genuinely livable cities I’ve ever been to— and I’ve been to more than 100 countries.

It’s very walkable. Parks and world-class museums are everywhere. Architecture constantly shifts from Aztec ruins to colonial grandeur to sleek modernism, sometimes within the same block.

There’s also an amazing restaurant scene that will be impossible to exhaust— Michelin stars and all.  The food alone is worth the trip. And you don’t pay much for any of it.

There’s a LOT of wealth here; there are more private jets in Mexico (most of them here in the city) than anywhere else outside of the US. Mexico City’s middle class is also massive and lives very well.

The city is extremely cultured, advanced, and if you took someone who loves London or Madrid or Berlin and dropped them into local neighborhoods here like Colonia Roma or Polanco, they would feel entirely at home.

We like this city so much that we’ve held multiple events here in the past. A few years back, we organized a large Total Access conference in the city. Vicente Fox— former President of Mexico— attended. That gives you a sense of the level of conversation when our group gets together.

This trip was smaller, more relaxed. We took trajineras— wide, painted wooden boats that look like something between a gondola and a parade float— through the canals of Xochimilco, singing La Bamba alongside mariachis who had simply attached their trajinera to ours and made themselves at home.

Xochimilco is a UNESCO World Heritage site, an ancient network of canals in the south of the city. It’s festive and slightly chaotic and completely unlike anything else in the world.

We ate tacos standing on the sidewalk at a local stand I’ve been going to for years; they’re so good that even Anthony Bourdain said it was his favorite taco spot.

We also ate at one of the finest restaurants in the city. Both were excellent for completely different reasons. That combination— street food and Michelin stars, ancient canals and gleaming business parks— is Mexico City in a nutshell.

But let me give you the bigger picture, because there’s a real investment angle here that goes beyond lifestyle.

The global order is restructuring. Trade relationships, alliances, supply chains— all of it is moving. Think about it like a very large, very messy divorce between the US and China. And the kids are being forced to pick sides.

Mexico, practically speaking, is going to end up on the US side of that split, if for no other reason than geography, economic gravity, and thirty years of deeply integrated trade.

That matters, because Mexico brings a lot to its relationship with the US. Vast manufacturing infrastructure. Enormous natural resources. A large labor force. And— as I wrote about at length in the Monterrey piece— it’s the natural destination for the reshoring of the type of manufacturing that China used to dominate.

You can’t make a lot of stuff in China anymore; the geopolitical risk is too high. You can’t make it in the US either, realistically. The cost is prohibitive. Mexico sits right in the middle and is already absorbing that shift. This isn’t a prediction. It’s happening.

We think Mexico has strong long-term prospects. That’s not a casual observation. It’s a view built on time spent here, conversations with business owners and operators, and watching which way the economic current is actually moving.

One more practical note: getting residency in Mexico is relatively straightforward. The cost of living is low by any developed-world standard. The quality of life— the food, the culture, the weather, the people— is genuinely high.

So as a Plan B destination, this could make sense for a lot of people. But given the significant opportunities on the horizon, it might also be a Plan A.

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And in the grander ambitions of its architects, it was meant to do something more: to grow up into a true global currency, the first serious rival the US dollar had faced since World War II.

Last week, the European Central Bank published its 2025 report card, with ECB President Christine Lagarde celebrating “an opening for the euro to enhance its global appeal.”

The report bragged that the euro remains the second most used currency in the world, as well as the second most held in reserve, behind only the dollar.

The key word is “currency.”

Because in reality, 2025 was the year that gold took the top spot, making up 27% of global reserves held by governments and central banks. That pushed US Treasuries into second place with 22%, and the euro into third, making up 15% of global reserves.

A metal that pays no interest and earns no yield is now the biggest slice of global reserves, up from just 20% a year earlier.

The world is, in fact, trying to diversify away from the dollar. Central banks have spent years quietly trimming their dollar exposure, looking for somewhere safer to park their national savings.

But they are not choosing euros.

Then why, the ECB may counter, was 2025 a record year for international borrowing in euros?

Because there is more debt in everything than ever — global debt keeps smashing new highs, so a record pile of euro IOUs is less an achievement than a symptom of the times.

But to give credit where it’s due, the euro is genuinely in first place in one market, according to Lagarde: “The euro became the leading currency in the green and sustainable international bond market.”

That’s the debt Europe sells to bankroll the very net-zero crusade that gutted its own economy. So the euro’s crowning achievement of 2025 was becoming the world champion at borrowing money to make itself poorer.

If you ever needed one sentence to explain why nobody wants this currency, there it is.

Because leading the world in the things that make you poorer is the entire European model. Across the continent, governments spent two decades waging war on their own cheap energy in the name of net zero — turning their backs on nuclear power that supplied a third of Europe’s electricity in 1990 and barely 15% today.

They saddled themselves with some of the highest power prices in the developed world and watched their industry pack up and leave. They threw open their borders, then aimed their police and courts at the citizens who objected.

The result is a continent so hollowed out that Mississippi, the poorest state in America, now produces more wealth per person than France or Italy.

But sure, this is the euro’s moment…

Meanwhile, central banks added roughly 850 tonnes of physical gold in 2025, a slight step down from the record-shattering pace of the prior two years, but bought at the highest prices in human history.

Poland led the gold-buying pack last year, followed by China, Turkey, and India.

But for a stretch of 2025, the single biggest gold buyer on the planet wasn’t a country at all — it was Tether, the company behind the world’s biggest dollar-backed stablecoin.

In the third quarter alone it bought more gold than any central bank on earth, and by the end of January it was sitting on roughly 148 tonnes — nearly 4.8 million ounces, worth about $22 billion — enough to rank among the top 30 gold holders in the world, ahead of the likes of Australia and South Korea.

This is exactly why the gold story is far from over.

The extra gold central banks have bought since 2022 laid the foundation for a price that has nearly tripled since — yet even that represents only a modest reallocation out of US dollars.

So what happens when they move even another 5% of their $10 trillion in reserves into gold?

With no single currency able to replace the dollar, and the reasons to diversify only growing, gold looks set to keep climbing as the world’s largest reserve asset.

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Like many young people in the early 1900s who came from a prominent Russian family (his father was a successful physician), Boris developed a sense of guilt… almost remorse for the ‘privilege’ that he had enjoyed in his youth.

He was 16 when the revolution took hold in Russia in 1917, at which point he became completely radicalized to the Communist movement and its promise of equality for all.

His energy and dedication led him to rocket through the ranks of the Communist Party until, at just 23 years of age, he became personal assistant to none other than Joseph Stalin.

Boris spent years shadowing Stalin. He was practically in every room, every meeting… privy to every decision and conversation.

And it didn’t take long for Boris to finally learn that “equality” under Communism actually meant that the vast majority of people were “equal” in their poverty and misery… while party bosses like Stalin lived lives of fantastic wealth, power, and privilege.

After watching the brutal suppression of popular dissent, petty power struggles from within the party, murder, poisoning, intrigue, assassination, political persecution, and the general impoverishment of his country, Boris had finally had enough.

So, on New Year’s Eve in the year 1927, he used his position and influence to travel to the city of Ashgabat in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkmen— supposedly on official business.

Boris reportedly brought a treasure trove of secret Kremlin documents with him… then quietly slipped across the nearby border into Iran as the clock struck midnight into 1928.

From there, he made his way to British-controlled India where he received help to make his way to Europe, and then he eventually settled in France (only to become a KGB target for the rest of his life).

Boris was an ardent anti-communist for the rest of his life, and he eventually published a book which exposed the corruption and incompetence of the Communists in the Soviet politburo.

In one passage in his book, Boris wrote about a meeting with Stalin in which the dictator remarked, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

This quote is sometimes miswritten as “it is not he who votes that counts, but he who counts the votes.”

Or perhaps better put in California, “it is not they/them who votes that counts, but they/them who counts the votes.”

Sometimes this quote is the only way my brain can explain certain election outcomes to itself.

For example– like many people, I was astonished that Spencer Pratt did not completely dominate yesterday’s LA mayoral race with 99.9999% of the vote.

Pratt’s entire platform is based on a promise to enforce the law in order to make LA safer for children. This is literally the most sane and reasonable promise a candidate could make.

Yet multiple whack job celebrities denounced him as a “MAGA FASCIST” while “journalists” whined that he constitutes a threat to democracy.

His opponent, incumbent mayor Karen Bass, believes that taxpayers should pay for new teeth for the city’s homeless meth addicts, while the even more loony candidate Nithya Raman complains that Mayor Bass isn’t socialist enough.

Sure, there will always be some lunatics who go in for that sort of policy: f**k the kids, let’s get them meth addicts new teeth!

Perhaps there are still others who haven’t noticed $6+ gas prices, or the obvious decline in the local economy or quality of basic services.

But are the majority of voters (the roughly 70% who voted for Bass, Raman, etc.) that suicidal to want more destruction?

Perhaps. But one thing I find noteworthy is that six different states held primary elections yesterday—California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota.

Yet at the time of this writing (around 9am central time on Wednesday morning), FIVE of those six states have counted nearly all of their votes. Iowa is at 99%. New Mexico is at 97%. Even New Jersey is at 95%.

But California, whose elected leaders shriek more about ‘threats to democracy’ than just about everyone else, are still sitting at just 58% of votes counted.

They love democracy… they just can’t seem to do the very thing that democracy depends on, i.e. count the votes. Or at least count the votes that living, breathing, verified US citizens actually fill out.

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Unemployment was hovering around 9%. Youth unemployment was a staggering 25%. And government finances were in the toilet, with official debt-to-GDP at 100% and annual budget deficits at nearly 8% of GDP.

The deficit issue was especially troubling; as part of the Eurozone, Greece was legally obliged to keep its annual budget deficit below 3% of GDP. But the government was simply incapable of doing so.

Yet if they didn’t significantly reduce their deficit-to-GDP ratio, Greek politicians faced the prospect of EU bureaucrats from Brussels taking charge of the government and imposing austerity.

So, rather than cut spending and reduce the deficit, the Greeks cooked up a creative way to magically increase their GDP—overnight.

And on September 26, 2006, the Greek National Statistical Service announced they were changing the way they were calculating GDP; among other things, the Greek government would include “illegal activities like drug trafficking and prostitution” in their GDP estimates.

Laughter and facepalming ensued immediately around the world as global economists collectively groaned at the Greek government’s desperation.

And yet, they still went through with it: poof. Overnight, Greece’s GDP magically grew by 25% because of the change in their calculation.

Frankly this idea is not uncommon in economics; plenty of countries have seen overnight surges in their GDP simply by changing the way they count economic activity.

Italy famously increased its GDP by nearly 20% overnight back in 1987 when they started including estimates of their shadow economy in the GDP numbers.

Nigeria ‘rebased’ its economy in 2014, nearly DOUBLING its GDP. One day it was a $270 billion economy, and literally the next day it was a $510 billion economy.

Ghana did the same in 2010, increasing its GDP by 60%.

But the world record goes to west Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, which, in 2005, increased GDP by a whopping 142%. Overnight.

Now, sometimes these updates aren’t completely ludicrous. Econometrics is an imprecise field that often relies on outdated modes of information gathering.

More importantly, statistical agencies over-concentrate their efforts collecting data on has-been industries while ignoring ‘new economy’ sectors. And this can seriously distort the picture.

That’s why, even in the United States, government agencies occasionally make changes to their econometric methods. Measuring an economy as dynamic as America’s absolutely has to change from time to time. And they have.

In 1999, for example, the Bureau of Economic Analysis began classifying software as a long-term asset (rather than an expense), immediately adding about 0.4% to the prior year’s GDP growth.

In 2013 the same agency went even further and began counting R&D expenses, artistic content, and more in GDP calculations. This change added $560 billion to the US economy.

To be fair, these were not political mandates or desperation moves. Instead, they were necessary adjustments to reflect changes that had taken place in the US economy; it makes sense to include R&D in GDP calculations when so much of the economy is R&D.

Typically, these adjustments to US methodologies take place every few years. And, as of yet, the US government has NOT yet updated its measurements to include AI.

And this is what may ultimately lead to a Greek, Ghana, or even Guinea-Bissau boost to GDP.

Economic activity from AI is extremely difficult to measure. Sure, there are sales of Nvidia GPUs and data center spending.

But think about all of the things that people are doing with AI—things which have economic value, but the government has no credible way to count.

Here’s an easy example: every time I’m at the grocery store, I browse the meager selection of children’s books for my kids. I almost never buy anything, though, because most of them are garbage… so the resulting economic activity is very low.

Lately I’ve been using AI to create my own books for the kids—which they seem to be enjoying very much. But since no dollars actually changed hands (i.e. I make the books myself), there is no economic activity recorded in this case either.

This is a critical point to understand, so I’ll say it again: in both situations, i.e. me NOT buying a book at the store, versus me creating one with AI, no recorded economic activity took place.

And yet, when I make my own books, something of economic value IS being created. I value them. My kids value them. The books have some value, hence value is being created.

I’m just one guy. Hundreds of millions of people are doing the same thing. And none of that value is being recorded, i.e. none of it is showing up in the GDP numbers.

It turns out the US government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis is already considering ways to incorporate AI into the GDP numbers.

And frankly that impact could be dramatic… for a couple of reasons.

First, because the impact of AI really IS dramatic. And growing. But second—because the US government REALLY needs to cut its deficit-to-GDP and debt-to-GDP ratios.

And since, like Greece, they seem to have no interest in actually cutting spending and reducing the debt, they’ll use AI as a way to suddenly boost GDP.

So don’t be surprised if we wake up one day and are told that the US economy is now $50 trillion because of AI… and hence America’s debt-to-GDP level immediately falls to 80%.

I suppose counting the economic value of cat memes and unicorn stories is better than drug traffickers and prostitutes. And it would be an interesting way for the US government to dramatically improve its fiscal condition overnight.

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Last year, it killed more people in just three months than the number of civilians killed in the war in Ukraine all year.

It killed three times as many people as traffic accidents do.

And it killed FOUR times more Europeans than gun violence killed in America.

I’m not talking about COVID. Or even the legions of migrants invading the continent.

This deadly scourge that kills tens of thousands of Europeans each year is the lack of air conditioning.

Heat killed 62,775 people across the continent in the summer of 2024, according to a study in Nature Medicine.

The World Health Organization calls it the leading “climate-related” cause of death in the region.

But in reality, these deaths are directly related to the fanatical green environmental policies of European governments, which have made the electricity to run air conditioning prohibitively expensive.

Roughly 19% of European homes have A/C, versus 90% in the US.

The simple reason is the bill: electricity in Germany costs about 2.5 times what it does in the US. Starting in 2011, Germany shut down every one of its nuclear reactors and bet its grid on wind and solar — in a country where the sun barely shines.

European media and politicians have also spent a generation making anyone who even thinks about buying A/C feel like a moral failure.

The result is a continent that has made cooling both unaffordable and shameful; then they act surprised when 60,000 people die in a heat wave.

The dead are not the only price paid. For decades, German manufacturing thrived because one machine could produce more than a thousand workers in the developing world.

But Germany’s high-tech manufacturing model only worked because the electricity to run those machines was reliable and affordable.  But the German government has spent twenty years making energy either too expensive or, on certain days, simply unavailable.

Germany used to have inexpensive electricity thanks to its nuclear reactors. But the green fanatics have succeeded in shutting those reactors down, resulting in higher electric prices.

The bill for that policy lands on the factory floor. The German Association of the Automotive Industry reported on May 13, 2026 that German automakers have already shed 100,000 jobs since 2019, with another 125,000 projected to disappear by 2035.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the nuclear phase-out “a mistake,” and said “I regret this.” Yet in the same breath he explained that “it is the way it is, and we are now concentrating on the energy policy we have.”

In other words, they acknowledge that they made a huge mistake. But they also admit that they aren’t going to fix it.

Perversely, the simple act of admitting a mistake (even without fixing it) is actually progress for a politician.

Just look at their immigration policy— they won’t even admit the mistake of importing legions of gang-raping foreigners who do not respect laws and have no problem committing violence.

The bill for that policy has come due in the same way the energy bill came due: in bodies.

In August 2024, Solingen’s Festival of Diversity got a firsthand demonstration of what they were celebrating when a Syrian asylum seeker stabbed three people to death.

Four months later, a Saudi national drove a rented SUV through Magdeburg’s Christmas market, killing six and injuring 200.

In January 2025, an Afghan asylum seeker— already under an active deportation order German authorities had failed to enforce— stabbed a two-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man to death in a public park in Aschaffenburg.

By November 2025, German cities had begun canceling their Christmas markets outright. One reopened after spending more than €250,000 on concrete barriers to keep trucks from being driven into shoppers a second time.

The state’s response to imported violence is not to stop importing it. It is to cancel Christmas.

The pattern is always the same: even when governments make an enormous mistake,  they lean into it. They rarely fix anything, they just continue with a destructive policy.

And anyone who actually does try to fix it gets ridiculed, canceled, or shot.

One current example from the US is the LA mayoral election.

The incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, has presided over the worst destruction the city has seen in decades. She does nothing about the homeless problem— in fact recently stated that taxpayers should pay for new teeth for homeless meth addicts so that they can have dignity.

Her only positive contribution, in her own words, is that she was “out of the country” when the Palisades wild fires started in January 2025 and that she did “not start the fires” herself. That’s a pretty low bar for success.

Her opponent, Spencer Pratt, just wants to fix the city. He presents real solutions to real problems, yet he is the one that the media paints as a fringe lunatic— not the lady who wants to give taxpayer-funded teeth to meth addicts.

Politicians do not just refuse to fix their mistakes; they save their loudest contempt for whoever is rude enough to mention them, or daring enough to fix them.

There may still be a way forward here. Maybe more responsible, more sensible people start running… and maybe voters will be responsible and sensible enough to elect them. Maybe this happens before it’s too late, and America can finally turn things around.

But there’s also a rational possibility that doesn’t happen… and that’s why it’s worth having a Plan B.

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Banks often require multiple forms of ID, proof of address, proof of employment, plus detailed explanations of where your money came from, what you plan to do with it, and who you plan to send it to.

And that’s just to get the account open. Once you’ve actually been deemed worthy of handing over your money to them, the surveillance really kicks in.

If you wire money to someone new, prepare for a phone call from the fraud department. Send a wire to a foreign bank and prepare for your account to be flagged by compliance.

The Cato Institute recently published a study showing that banks file 28 million reports to the federal government, flagging customer transactions as “suspicious”.

Yet the government’s own data show that 99.98% of these reports were filed on innocent people for completely frivolous reasons, i.e. people like my own mother who simply like to deal in physical cash.

Yet in the mind of a financial bureaucrat, using completely legal tender in the United States of America is suspicious and deserves to be reported.

Banking is a completely soulless industry devoid of any humanity or common sense.

We recently almost had a bank account shut down because one of our customers sent us a routine payment for his Total Access renewal.

Unfortunately our customer happens to have the same name as someone on a US government watch list.

Now, banks obviously shouldn’t be doing business with known criminals… so I have no problem that the transaction was flagged. But our team was quickly and easily able to prove that it wasn’t the same person. Not even close. Just two people who happen to have the same name.

But it didn’t matter. After several days of scrutiny and document gopher hunts, the bank not only rejected the transaction, but they nearly shut down our account.

Multiply that across every account, every business, every wire, every customer. American banking is now mostly a compliance apparatus that happens to do some occasional financial transactions on the side.

Yet for all the bureaucratic gauntlet your bank puts you through, the average savings account in the US pays a measly 0.38% interest right now.

It’s one reason why I like crypto.

I’m not someone who thinks Bitcoin is going to magically become larger than the GDP of the known universe. But I do like that it’s decentralized— that you can effectively be your own bank, without begging permission from someone whose entire job is to assume you’re guilty.

Ironically, it turns out there’s another option; there’s at least one place in America to put your money that asks no questions.

They open accounts in no time with little more than a Social Security number. They don’t demand to know where your funds came from. You don’t have to fill out 10,000 forms or show a single form of ID.

Frankly, these guys are deliberately and willfully violating every single Anti-Money Laundering rule and Treasury regulation on the books.

Fortunately no one is going to haul them off in handcuffs… because I’m talking about the Treasury Department itself!

The US government runs a website called Treasury Direct which allows anyone with a Social Security number to sign up and buy US government bonds.

Of course, as we discussed yesterday, it would be insane to buy long-term bonds and lock up money for thirty years, ten years, or even five years. The US has nearly $40 trillion in debt, runs $2 trillion deficits every year, and has no plan to slow either down.

But the shortest-term security the US government sells is just FOUR WEEKS; it’s known as the 28-day T-bill. It’s essentially the same as a 1-month CD, and right now it pays 3.7%.

28 days is no time at all. And while I would in NO WAY be willing to hold a 30 year bond, I’m happy to loan a portion of my funds to the federal government for a couple of weeks.

Naturally the Treasury Direct website sucks. The User Interface is clunky and looks like a 15-year old designed it in 1997.

But none of that matters; they make it REALLY easy to sign up and buy bonds. You link your bank account select which bond you want to buy, and you can set yourself up for automatic reinvestments or payouts.

Crazy enough, the Treasury Department even allows you to transfer certain T-bills to third parties… which is effectively the same as making a cash or wire transfer.

There’s no hoops to jump through, no one flagging your transaction, no demands to prove that you’re not a member of Hezbollah or the Russian government.

The federal government ignores every single one of its own anti-money laundering rules. And I’d wager that criminals and terrorists are using Treasury Direct to launder and transfer money… because the Treasury Department literally performs zero compliance checks.

It’s pretty sad, and deeply ironic. But it’s also the easiest and safest way to earn a reasonable rate of return on a measly 4-week commitment.

Source

Pension funds, foreign governments and central banks, giant commercial banks— they are collectively sitting on tens of trillions of dollars worth of capital that they have to invest in a safe, stable asset.

The stock market doesn’t really work— it’s far too volatile. Real estate doesn’t really work either— it’s not liquid.

That is where the bond market comes in: it’s both massive (far larger than the stock market), so it can absorb enormous flows of capital. And it’s highly liquid. This allows large investors to quickly move huge sums of money in/out of the bond market.

That’s why, for the better part of a century, the single deepest and most trusted piece of that market has been US government bonds. With the US national debt of nearly $40 trillion, this makes America’s bond market REALLY big. And Congress keeps adding to it.

The federal government runs roughly $2 trillion annual deficits— which you could think of as the new ‘supply’ of Treasury securities added to the bond market each year.

In other words, when the government spends more, they have to borrow more money by issuing more Treasury bonds. So the supply of US Treasury securities in the bond market increases.

‘Demand’ for US government bonds, on the other hand, comes from everyone on the planet who buys them. Pension funds, foreign governments and central banks, big corporations, banks, money market funds, etc.

And as any high school economics student can tell you, the ‘price’ is where supply meets demand. In the bond market, we usually think of price as the bond yield, e.g. right now the US 10-year yield is 4.5%, and the 30-year Treasury is over 5%.

To put those yields in a historical context, they haven’t been this high in decades— and it’s a direct result of rising supply and waning demand.

On the supply side, the US government keeps borrowing money at an insane pace, i.e. the Treasury Department keeps flooding the market with more and more bonds, notes, and yields.

But on the demand side, investors are backing off— especially foreigners. Foreign ownership of US government bonds (as a percentage of total public debt) has fallen by roughly HALF since the early 2010s… with a significant drop recorded just over the past twelve months according to the Treasury Department’s own data.

Few people in Congress seem to mind; there is no serious discussion in Washington about slowing the growth of the deficit, i.e. the bond supply, let alone actually shrinking supply by paying off debt.

Ultimately this supply and demand imbalance means that bond yields will continue to rise— which affects just about everything else from auto loans to the 30-year mortgage rate.

And just take a look around the rest of the developed world:

Bond yields in Germany are far lower (by about 1.5%) than US yields. So are yields in Japan, France, Italy, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea, and China.

Even GREECE, with its 3.6% 10-year government bond yield, has lower yields than the United States.

You’d think that such attractive yields in the United States compared to the rest of the world would entice a lot more capital into the US bond market. After all, investors generally chase the highest returns.

But buyers are signaling that they don’t think the return is worth the risk— that even a 4.5% yield on a 10-year Treasury note is not worth the risk of holding a US government IOU for an entire decade.

Think about how much has changed over the past decade… and how much more can change over the next decade. Inflation, government shutdowns, debt ceiling showdowns, political theater, war, Social Security’s looming insolvency, etc.

Foreign governments and central banks aren’t willing to lock themselves in for ten years, let alone thirty years, with so much chaos on the horizon.

And with less demand from foreigners in the bond market, it’s likely that bond yields will continue to rise, until the Treasury Department is paying 5, 6, and 7% to borrow money.

With a ~$40 trillion national debt, that’s almost $3 trillion per year just to pay interest— roughly 60% of last year’s tax revenue.

This is why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B… because the most likely ‘solution’ to this problem will be for the Federal Reserve to ‘print’ trillions of dollars of capital.

This approach may succeed in lowering yields. But it will lead to substantially higher inflation, for a lot longer.

Source

Their drama opens in Afghanistan’s Ghor province, where fathers line up before dawn at a dusty square hoping to find a day’s work. One man weeps that he is preparing to sell his seven-year-old daughter to feed the rest of his children.

The reporter then explains how nearly five million Afghans are food deprived; she goes on to describe graveyards of dead infants, and then tells the story of another man who already sold his five-year-old daughter for about $3,200.

It is all genuinely terrible. But when the BBC starts explaining WHY any of this is happening— is where the journalism ends and the propaganda begins.

Famine, in almost every modern case, is not a weather event. It is a political outcome.

Afghanistan has fertile river valleys and enough arable land to feed several times its current population. Whenever a country is starving, it is due to bad policy— not bad soil.

It was the same issue when Venezuela ran out of food a few years ago. People were starving. Supermarkets were stripped bare. Zoo animals turned up on dinner plates.

Yet Venezuela has a tropical climate, a year-round growing season, abundant water, and some of the most productive farmland on the planet.

It really takes a special kind of incompetence to starve citizens in a place like that. And the same kind of incompetence is at work in Kabul at the hands of the Taliban overlords.

The BBC mentions none of this. Instead it points the finger at the legacy media’s two favorite villains: Donald Trump and climate change.

To make the case, the reporter sits down with a senior Taliban official, who insists that their regime “inherited poverty, hardship, unemployment and other problems”.

These “problems” were entirely due to the US presence, he explains, which had built “an artificial economy due to the influx of US dollars.”

In other words, the men who reconquered the country, kicked girls out of school, and locked half the workforce in their homes, are blaming their economic problems on the US investing too much money in Afghanistan.

Yet the BBC nods along enthusiastically.

Ironically, despite blaming America’s substantial investments in Afghanistan for the country’s problems, the Taliban’s solution is for America to give them more money.

“Humanitarian assistance should not be politicized,” said the Taliban spokesman, parroting the exact talking that point Western NGOs use to demand more no-strings cash for regimes that whip women in public.

The BBC nods along enthusiastically again.

They follow this up with more emotional propaganda, telling stories of dead babies and infant graveyards, all to tug at the heartstrings of their readers.

Then comes their coup-de-grace: blasting the Trump administration for cutting nearly all US aid to Afghanistan last year. The unspoken conclusion is that America is responsible for a graveyard of dead Afghan babies.

The naïveté is breathtaking. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that a single dollar in aid to the Taliban will end up in the hands of the old man sobbing at the labor square, and not in the hands of the warlords?

We do not have to guess.

A US Inspector General report found that at least $293 million in foreign aid earmarked for Afghan NGOs had already been stolen by the Taliban after they took the country in 2021. A large part of this was through fake NGOs that the regime invented to defraud donor nations.

The only thing that “humanitarian assistance” in Afghanistan actually buys is a better-funded Taliban.

What is most extraordinary is that this came from the British Broadcasting Corporation.

They didn’t need to fly halfway across the world to find children going hungry, being abused, or being sold. Britain has each of those stories on its own soil.

For nearly two decades, organized grooming gangs of overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men raped thousands of underage British girls, some as young as ten.

Yet police, social workers, and hospital staffs dismissed the obvious signs. And the BBC had remarkably little to say about any of it.

This raises the BBC’s other unspoken conclusion: “we” need to help these people by bringing more of them into the West.

Think about it: if men from this culture are willing to buy and sell their own children, imagine what they’re willing to do to yours.

Yet these are the values that Western politicians want to import into Europe and North America as a glorious example of multiculturalism. And anyone who has a problem with this is a racist Islamophobe.

Inspired Idiots like the BBC are the very reason it makes sense to have a Plan B.

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I’ve landed in a lot of cities. Most of them take a day or two before they show you who they really are. Monterrey, Mexico showed me in about fifteen minutes– on the highway, before I’d even reached the hotel.

On both sides of the highway, as far as you can see: business parks, industrial parks, factories, logistics hubs.

Coca-Cola (or more precisely, FEMSA, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in Latin America) is headquartered here.

LEGO (yes, the ones you step on in the middle of the night if you have kids) operates its largest manufacturing facility in Monterrey.

There are also plenty of car manufacturers; in fact, this week I’m visiting a major brand’s automotive plant.

Bottom line, Monterrey makes things. Lots of things. Real things. Physical things. And not just useless knick-knacks and trinkets– the kinds of things that people and businesses actually want– things which fill shipping containers and cross borders and end up in people’s homes.

I was last here about seven years ago in the same part of town. Now I barely recognize it.

That’s not entirely surprising when you know the data. Monterrey is consistently ranked as the wealthiest city in Mexico – and it’s not close. This is a city that has been compounding quietly for a very long time.

Steel, glass, cement, beer– these industries built Monterrey’s original wealth in the 20th century.

The old Fundidora steel mill, which once defined the skyline, has since been converted into a park. That’s what a city looks like when the first wave of industrialization is already in the history books and the second wave is already underway.

And that second wave, in case you haven’t been following, is “nearshoring”; companies that spent decades manufacturing in Asia are quickly relocating supply chains closer to the US border.

Monterrey, just south of the Texas border– is one of the clearest answers to where.

Bosch opened a new production facility here in 2024. Unilever committed $960 million to a new plant as recently as April 2025.

Tesla announced plans for a Gigafactory near the city; that project is currently on pause while US-Mexico tariff politics play out, but the fact that Tesla chose this city tells you something about what the world’s most prominent manufacturers think of Monterrey.

People who’ve spent time in China’s industrial corridors will feel something familiar here. Not the aesthetics; Monterrey is very much its own place, very much Mexico.

But the energy is comparable: cranes on the skyline, trucks on the roads, and the sense that somewhere nearby, someone is signing a lease on a new factory floor.

The streets are clean, organized, more developed than most people picture when they think of northern Mexico. It’s the most industrialized and most westernized city in this country, and that didn’t happen by accident.

I think about economic growth a lot; it’s a big part of my job at Schiff Sovereign. And I’ve learned to distrust what the ‘experts’ say with statistics and press releases.

Governments can juice their economies by dumping tons of subsidies… and the end result is ghost cities or (as we wrote about yesterday) billions of dollars in losses on EV plants because no one wants to buy the cars.

Here you can feel the economic growth. It’s in the air. You can smell it as the trucks go by carrying construction materials for a new building that was pre-leased three years ago and already has factory orders.

You can hear it– in regular conversations as people here talk business and close deals as they race from meeting to meeting. It’s part of the fabric of this town now.

Monterrey is not a city chasing investment. The investment is already here. Capital came to Monterrey, liked what it saw, and brought plenty of its friends.

And then there are the people. I almost forgot this part. People in this town are genuinely, disarmingly warm. They open their homes to you. They want to show you their favorite places, introduce you to their city the way they actually experience it – not the version in a guidebook, but the real one.

There’s a pride here that isn’t boastful, just generous. They want you to see what they see. That’s a rare quality in a city this driven.

It’s not for everyone– I’ll be honest about that. If you’re looking for beaches, colonial architecture, or a laid-back expat scene, keep looking. Monterrey is a city for builders and producers. It’s also blazing hot right now, and I’m suffering.

But there is a certain intensity; it isn’t romantic in the traditional sense, but it is exciting if you’re wired a certain way.

I am wired that way. And if you are too, this city is worth checking out.

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World War II had been over for ten years. Soldiers had come home to GI Bill mortgages in brand-new suburbs. Detroit was building cars faster than anywhere else on the planet.

And the economy was booming— in fact that year a milkshake-machine salesman named Ray Kroc had just franchised his first McDonald’s on a roadside in Illinois.

Half a world away, in a country still rebuilding from the rubble of that war, a scrappy little Japanese company called Honda was selling cheap motorcycles to people who couldn’t afford cars.

That year, 1955, was the last year that Honda lost money. Starting in 1956, and for seven decades after that, the company became one of the most consistently profitable carmakers on the planet.

Until now.

A few days ago, Honda announced billions in losses for the first time since Eisenhower was President. And the reason isn’t because of a major scandal, financial crisis, or moonshot bet on flying cars.

Honda’s executives had simply made a sensible business decision to believe the US government.

When Joe Biden promised that America was going all-electric, Honda took him at his word. That promise has now cost the company roughly $10 billion in writedowns and impairments and pushed Honda into its first annual loss in decades.

Biden’s plan was carrot-and-stick. The carrot was part of the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act in the form of a $7,500 federal tax credit on every new EV sold.

The stick came from sweeping new regulations requiring roughly two-thirds of new vehicles sold in the US to be electric by 2032. Either automakers built EVs, or they got regulated out of the American market.

In the background, Biden squeezed the oil supply to make driving a gasoline car more expensive.

He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, paused new federal oil and gas leases a week later, and in his final days withdrew more than 625 million acres of US offshore waters from any future drilling.

To automakers, this EV push looked like a once-in-a-generation opportunity; Washington was writing checks, mandating the switch, and selling the whole thing as permanent. So, Honda, along with Ford, GM, and Stellantis, built the EV factories.

Consumers didn’t cooperate. Less than 10% of new cars sold in America were electric.

Then the rules changed.

When Trump took office, his administration’s EPA sensibly rolled back the emissions rule. Congress (rightly) killed the $7,500 tax credit. And automakers’ EV math collapsed overnight.

Ford swallowed a $17.4 billion hit on its EV business. Over at Stellantis, the parent of Jeep, Ram, and Chrysler, a $29.7 billion writedown produced the first annual loss in the company’s history.

GM has chalked up another $7 billion of EV-related losses. Add it up and you get roughly $64 billion of real capital that was incinerated in less than a year.

Automakers weren’t designing cars for customers; they were designing cars for subsidies and regulations. When the subsidies and regulations went away, the profits went with them.

And it isn’t Honda’s fault either. They made the call on the best information available, which was supposedly a “permanent” change in how the US government rewarded and punished automakers.

It’s sad, really. Biden cooked up a stupid policy, Trump reversed it, and the companies lost billions.

What it teaches every CEO in Tokyo, Seoul, Munich, and Detroit is to think twice before trusting Washington again. That’s the exact wrong message for a country that desperately needs continued capital investment from abroad.

Reagan saw all of this coming forty years ago. “Government’s view of the economy,” he said in 1986, “could be summed up in a few short phrases: if it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Four decades later, that’s still the entire playbook.

There’s only one path out of America’s debt trap, and it’s less government. Cut the rules, cut the spending, and let markets— not Senate committee chairs and EPA administrators— decide where capital flows.

GDP has to grow faster than the borrowing, and that won’t happen if Washington keeps torching $60 billion of industrial capital every time it changes its mind about which industry to bless.

They never learn. Which is exactly why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

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As the results slowly trickled in and it became clear that Brexit would prevail, the news anchors could not hide their shock and horror; the idea that British voters would actually choose to leave the European Union was, to them, incomprehensible.

A decade later, things like that which once seemed incomprehensible are now becoming mainstream. Britain is just the tip of the iceberg— it’s happening all across the west.

Earlier this month in Wales, voters elected the ‘Plaid Cymru’ party to its first majority ever; this is the party that has campaigned for decades to secede from the United Kingdom and make Wales independent.

The same dynamic is now playing out in Canada.

A decade under Justin Trudeau-Castro’s policies, which sacrificed the Canadian economy on the twin altars of climate religion and identity politics, has produced a country measurably poorer than the United States across the border.

In 2014 the per-capita GDP gap between Canada and the US was around 24%. Today it has grown to 43%.

And the OECD now projects Canada will rank dead last among developed economies for real GDP per capita growth through 2060.

So, on May 2, organizers in the province of Alberta handed-in over 300,000 signatures, more than 10% of Alberta’s registered voters, demanding a referendum on independence.

People have a breaking point. And when they reach it, they vote with with their ballots… with their wallets… and with their feet.

Take corporate America. For as long as anyone can remember, the standard practice for any serious American company was to incorporate in Delaware. And for more than two centuries, any serious financial firm was based almost entirely on Wall Street.

But in January 2024, the Delaware Court of Chancery rescinded Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla compensation package— a single ruling that told every public company in America that corporate law could be relitigated on a whim.

Tesla and SpaceX reincorporated in Texas. Coinbase followed them. Dropbox decamped to Nevada. Dell is redomiciling to Texas. One company after another is leaving Delaware for good.

It’s the same with Wall Street.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was blunt about the changing dynamic in his April shareholder letter: “Individuals vote with their feet. You can already see a fairly large exodus of people and jobs out of some states with high taxes and high expenses.”

In his own estimate, JPMorgan now employs 32,000 people in Texas, up from 26,000 a decade ago. Its New York headcount over the same period fell from 30,000 to 24,000.

The IRS migration data tells the same story one household at a time. Between 2019 and 2023, California’s cumulative net outflow amounted to $91.4 billion in Adjustable Gross Income; that’s a huge loss of their tax base.

Meanwhile, Florida’s cumulative net inflow came to $137 billion.

Hollywood is also instrumental.

One, the audience has voted with its wallets, hence the string of box office bombs. People don’t go to the movies to be lectured on social justice. They want to be entertained.

But for the past decade, Hollywood decided audiences needed to hear about racial injustice, gender identity, and climate change instead. Studios have racked up enormous losses as a result.

Second, no one wants to make films in Hollywood anymore because of the insane costs and regulations of doing business in California.

Instead, Atlanta wins because Georgia offers an uncapped 30% tax credit. Plenty of foreign countries offer far more. Plus production companies filming outside of California don’t have to deal with unions, taxes, or political hostility.

Consumers have been delivering the same lesson for years.

Bud Light decided in 2023 that its core demographic was, apparently, trans activists. American beer drinkers knocked the brand from #1 to #3 in the country and stripped more than $1 billion in lost sales out of its parent company.

Gillette tried it during #metoo, with a 2019 ad lecturing its male customers about how to be “the best men they can be.” P&G took an $8 billion write-down on the brand the same year.

Personally I have never bought a Gillette product since.

But think about the trend: a decade ago, almost none of this was thinkable.

Brexit was treated as a national psychotic break. A large voting bloc interested in in their province seceding from Canada was ludicrous. And why on earth would a serious company leave Delaware, any serious banker leave Wall Street, or any red-blooded American stop buying Bud Light?

And yet it’s all happened.

Frankly it’s a cause for optimism. The people running these institutions are finding out the hard way that everyone has a vote— at the ballot box, with their feet, and with their wallets.

Just imagine what another 10 years of this trend will look like.

Source

A PhD economist from UC Berkeley, Saez has devoted his entire career to diligent research in a complex and dynamic field. He has numerous publications and citations under his belt, and his “h-index” (which tracks research productivity) is off the charts.

So when Saez came out in support of California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires, it must have been from a position of rational, grounded analysis.

Clearly he considered the potential costs versus benefits and carefully weighed the risks. Then, only after painstaking analysis, he concluded that a ‘one time’ 5% tax on the state’s billionaires was sensible policy that would enhance long-term prosperity in the state.

Except that’s not what happened. And, to be clear, Saez didn’t just support the billionaire tax—he helped to write it.

Saez has been a key figure in pitching the tax to voters, selling it as a necessary, single dose, emergency measure. One time. Not a permanent feature of the tax code.

But a few days ago, Saez stood on a debate stage and admitted to the audience that he had been lying to them for months.

Contrary to everything he had said before, he finally acknowledged that “I don’t think it’s going to be a one-time tax,” and, “I’m not there to pretend that it’s once and never again.”

At a separate interview when asked whether a wealth tax would drive the most productive people out of the state, his response was three words: “So be it.”

(At least he used three full words; Seattle mayor Katie Wilson’s answer to the same question about wealthy people fleeing her city’s aggressive taxation was simply, “bye!”)

It’s difficult to characterize this as anything other than a severe mental derangement.

America needs to be competitive, now more than ever. President Trump just spent the past few days in China where, for the first time ever, it appeared like the two superpowers were on equal footing.

Xi Jinping even pontificated aloud about the ‘Thucydides Trap’, a geopolitical theory (with plenty of historical examples) where rising powers and declining powers go to war.

Xi obviously likes this analogy because he views China as the rising power and the US as the declining power. But this assessment is far too simplistic.

The US certainly has enormous challenges. But so does China. And some of China’s are unsolvable.

America’s fiscal burden is fixable.

If Congress gets serious about cutting both spending and the regulatory burden, US GDP growth would significantly outpace nominal debt growth. The critically important debt-to-GDP ratio would fall. Borrowing costs would fall, bringing mortgage rates down with them. Oh yeah— and inflation would drop too.

China has its own mountain of debt— at the consumer and provincial level. But their even more important problem is a demographic time bomb brought on by decades of a “one child” policy.

Unfortunately for China, they cannot go back in time and create more people to fill the void.

So ultimately this game of thrones is America’s to lose. Winning requires changing course and making responsible decisions. Losing means Inspired Idiots continue making terrible decisions guided by deranged ideology rather than factual analysis.

Which brings me back to Professor Saez.

If you asked any rational policymaker, “Would it be beneficial for a state to lose a substantial portion of its tax base?” the answer would be a resounding “NO.” It is mathematically impossible to credibly make that argument.

And even if an ‘expert’ like the Professor were to try, they would at least have to heavily caveat their conclusion by stating the obvious risks and uncertainties involved.

But that’s precisely the problem: these people aren’t objective researchers and policymakers; they’re irrationally evangelical. They view their ideas as fully righteous and self-evident, with zero degree of uncertainty.

California had a giant deficit before they started chasing away their wealthiest citizens and businesses. Now it’s going to be far worse.

Businesses and billionaires alike have been leaving for years, not to mention countless others who are fed up and have had enough.

It’s also interesting how experts like the professor only focus on taxes. They rarely consider how effectively it is spent.

Consider that California voters approved a rail bond in 2008 on the promise that trains would be running by 2020.

The state has since spent roughly $14 billion on the project, yet not a single foot of working track has been laid in the seventeen years since. Zero passenger miles.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s own Draft 2026 Business Plan now puts the full-system cost at $231 billion by 2045.

That’s about as much as NASA spent, adjusted for inflation, for the entire Apollo program, and more than the current Artemis program.

Every audit comes back the same way: nobody can tell you where the money went. The failure never produces accountability. And the answer is always to spend more.

Unfortunately there is no more money to spend. So the experts have churned out a wealth tax proposal which makes the state even less competitive… and will drive away the very people they aim to tax.

This is not the type of objective thinking that is going to bring America back from the brink. Yet it is exactly the kind of thinking that voters continue to reward.

America’s trajectory will not change until voters demand it. Will that happen in time? Perhaps.

There are plenty of signs of optimism that people all over the world are starting to wake up; the recent humiliating defeat of Britain’s Labour Party is just one example. So we can certainly hope that the tide will turn before it’s too late.

But, as we used to say in the military, hope is not a course of action. And that’s why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

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For the previous decade, he had served as a crewman on several Portuguese commercial expeditions to haul physical resources like gold, ivory, and fish from Asia back to European ports.

These voyages were treacherous; they all crossed into maritime territory controlled by the Venetians, Ottomans, or Egyptian Malmuk. So there was a high likelihood of a vessel being confiscated and its crew being captured or killed.

But through his marriage into a Portuguese navigator’s family, this sailor had inherited a small library of nautical charts. And he spent years studying them and corresponding with scientists who studied cosmology.

Over time, he became convinced that a small fleet could reach Asia by sailing WEST, not east, and arrive to the spice markets of the Indies without passing through enemy territory.

The sailor’s name was Christopher Columbus. And he took his idea to the King of Portugal, John II.

The King was interested enough to convene a royal panel, but the ‘experts’ decided that Columbus had badly underestimated the size of the Earth and recommended against funding the voyage.

Columbus spent the next several years pitching his idea to anyone who would listen.

He sent his brother to make the case to Henry VII in England. He approached the French court. He crossed the border into Spain, secured an audience with Ferdinand and Isabella at Córdoba, and watched a second royal commission argue for nearly four years… before rejecting him for the same reasons the Portuguese had.

He gave up on Spain and was riding north to try the French court again when a royal courier caught up with him. Ferdinand and Isabella had just taken Granada on January 2, 1492 — a conquest that ended a decade-long war and brought the southern Mediterranean coast and its ports under their control.

With the war finally over and the southern frontier secured, the monarchs had excess cash to fund the next strategic venture.

So in April of that year, at the siege camp of Santa Fe outside Granada, Isabella signed the contract. A few months later, three small ships set sail— with the crew probably all assuming that they would not survive the voyage.

The Spanish crown’s investment paid off… and they spent the next century pulling staggering amounts of silver and gold out of the new continent Columbus had stumbled upon; Spain became the wealthiest power in Europe as a result.

This is how governments used to invest. They were like venture capital funds of their day, financing long-term bets on ports, territory, trade routes, and resources, all in an effort to secure strategic assets that compound over generations.

But for the last eighty years or so, the world has run a different experiment.

After 1945, the United States built a system in which the rest of the world manufactured goods, sold them to American consumers, and recycled their trade surpluses back into US Treasury bonds.

This system worked for decades; in fact the most rational thing a foreign government could do with its national savings was invest in US dollars and US government bonds. Any foreign country with a stockpile of Treasurys was considered stable and creditworthy.

But this system is now cracking. Rapidly.

After the Biden administration froze Russia’s dollar reserves in 2022, foreign central banks understood that US government bonds were ‘safe’ only as long as their country stayed on America’s good side.

Consequently, most foreign governments have been diversifying out of dollars ever since.

This year’s Iran war drove the lesson home: the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes, has been closed since late February.

And every foreign country holding hundreds of billions of US government bonds has been reminded that, no matter how big their Treasury stockpile, they cannot feed their population with it. They cannot fill their people’s gas tanks with it. They cannot power homes with it.

So governments are reconsidering their US dollar positions more than ever.

Just like Ferdinand and Isabella, governments around the world started by acquiring gold; central banks have been buying it at the fastest pace in modern history since 2022.

But gold is only the leading indicator.

The next phase is foreign governments and central banks stockpiling other critical resources and materials— energy, fertilizer, copper, uranium, rare earths, food production, and even fresh water.

These are all strategic assets that no government can conjure out of thin air. And no amount of paper bonds can magically summon.

China has been running this playbook for fifteen years: they’ve purchased farmland in Africa, copper concessions in the Congo, rare-earth processing across central Asia, and the Belt and Road infrastructure that physically connects the resource to the buyer.

A large part of China’s investment capital has come from their steady liquidation of US Treasury holdings.

This is the Columbus-era calculus all over again. Whereas governments around the world used to stockpile US government bonds, they are now stockpiling strategic resources.

One obvious consequence is lower demand for US government bonds— which drives up interest rates, mortgage rates, and more. It probably also leads to a lot more inflation, i.e. the 1970s all over again.

But it also means that these critical resources— and the companies which produce them— should have a very, very bright future as foreign governments throw potentially trillions of dollars at the commodities sector.

This is the primary thesis behind Schiff Sovereign’s monthly investment research service, Strategic Assets.

We look for profitable, well-managed real-asset businesses with pristine balance sheets that are trading at a low multiple of free cash flow— with clear catalysts for growth.

And those catalysts include our fragmenting world and the scramble to secure physical, critical assets.

Click here to learn more about Strategic Assets and our exceptional track record.

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There are 186,000 dead Americans still listed as active recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

Another 355,000, he said, are drawing SNAP benefits in more than one state at the same time.

Vance’s task force also managed to identify recipients of taxpayer-funded food assistance who are wealthy enough to drive Lamborghinis.

“Finding fraud in the federal government,” Vance told the crowd, “is kind of like fishing in a barrel with dynamite.”

He’s right. Because this is not the first time someone has wandered into a federal database and tripped over piles of dead beneficiaries.

Earlier this year, the FCC’s inspector general announced that Lifeline— a federally funded program which subsidizes mobile phone service— had been billing the government for phone and internet service to 94,000 dead people.

In total, there were $3.8 million worth of calls that were never made, from phones that were never used, by people who were no longer alive.

Zoom out and it gets uglier. Last year alone, the federal government made $186 billion in “improper payments” — money sent to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.

The Treasury Secretary estimated that outright fraud in the federal budget totals $600 billion each year.

The President signed an executive order on March 16 to set up the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud explicitly to go after that pile, and Vance is chairman.

Every benefit-paying agency in the federal government has near-term deadlines to identify their most fraud-prone programs and start screening recipients for things like… you know… being alive.

Federal investigators are still picking through the fake-daycare and phony-autism-clinic operation that Minnesota’s Somali networks used to bilk US taxpayers out of billions— fraud so brazen it has already produced 90+ federal charges and helped end Tim Walz’s political career.

It is a good start and long overdue.

Unfortunately the fraud that Vance is uncovering is dwarfed by the interest bill on America’s nearly $40 trillion national debt.

That interest bill is now $1.2 trillion annually, up from ‘only’ $500 billion in 2020.

Meanwhile, mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other mandatory entitlements grew by another $245 billion in FY2025 alone— an 8% jump in a single year.

These are the programs that neither party will touch. In fact, every election cycle, nearly every Congressional incumbent and candidate vows not to touch Social Security, virtually guaranteeing the problem will be kicked down the road until the main trust fund runs dry in a few years.

But even the modest cleanup Vance is talking about will run into a brick wall of litigation.

Whenever the executive branch tries to actually cut something— terminate workers, verify citizenship, clean up voter rolls, claw back fraudulent payments— someone files a lawsuit and a judge issues an injunction.

Federal judges blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury payment systems. A coalition of 20 state attorneys general sued to halt layoffs at more than a dozen agencies. Even relatively modest cuts were tied up in litigation for months.

The ‘justice’ system functions as a ratchet: spending goes up easily, but it almost never comes down. The moment Vance’s task force tries to actually pull a benefit check away from a “dead” recipient, the same injunctions will land on his desk.

But they can’t litigate their way out of reality.

The United States now spends more on interest than on its military, and runs $2 trillion annual deficits with no recession, pandemic, or major war to justify it.

That kind of spending has consequences, and they are already showing up.

It is why inflation has refused to come back down to the Fed’s 2% target. It is why foreign central banks have been buying physical gold at a record pace for four straight years, and now hold more gold than US Treasury bonds for the first time since 1996.

It is why the 30-year Treasury yield is back to 5%, because no one thinks this spending is sustainable.

That also means every new dollar Washington borrows costs more to service. And the same wave hits mortgages, car loans, and small-business credit lines.

Nothing on the horizon breaks this loop.

Which is exactly why it makes so much sense to own the real assets that actually thrive when fiat currency loses its grip: gold, silver, energy, industrial metals, and the well-managed businesses that produce them.

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But the King was hilariously wrong.

Despite centuries of warfare, invasions, and plagues, English rulers prior to Henry had been remarkably disciplined in maintaining 92.5% silver in their coins.

In fact, England’s kings were so serious about their coinage that, at one point in the 1100s, one of Henry VIII’s forebears rounded up every private minter who skimped on the silver content in their coins— and had the man’s testicles removed.

But Henry VIII did not share his ancestors resolve. So, drowning in debt, divorce, and too much war, he started to reduce the silver content and replace it with copper.

His new coins still looked vaguely similar to the original ones because they were given a cheap, silver wash. But the wash wore off quickly— especially on the side where Henry’s profile was carved.

Londoners soon began to notice that the king’s nose would turn orange once the silver sheen wore off, giving rise to the nickname “Old Coppernose”.

And yet the debasement continued— and this was Henry’s ‘clever’ idea.

There wasn’t a single shock or dramatic crash. Henry’s ‘Great Debasement’ was a years-long operation of slowly robbing prosperity from his subjects. Each year their coins would buy less. Prices would rise. Their cost of living increased. And overall they were worse off.

This is the same story of our own time.

Gallup reported last week that 55% of Americans believe their personal finances are getting worse; that’s the absolute rock bottom reading in 25 years of the survey.

It is worse than 2008, when the financial system was actually breaking. It is worse than the pandemic, when the economy was shut off.

And that 55% statistic is in a year when headline employment numbers and stock indices are supposed to be telling everyone they’re doing fine.

Perhaps even more alarming is a recent analysis by a group called MoneyLion, which looked at Census data and found that, in 12 states in the US, a $100,000 income is now considered LOWER middle class.

For those who remember what life was like 25 years ago, making six figures was solid “made it” territory.

Not anymore. In Massachusetts, the lower-middle ceiling has crept up to $116,476. In New Jersey, $115,882. In California, $111,277.

Of course, it isn’t hard to see what those states have in common. They tax heavily, regulate aggressively, and treat business and wealth as plump dairy cows to milk.

This isn’t magically going away if the Strait of Hormuz opens, or Congress passes a ban on corporations buying homes to rent.

The federal government runs trillion-dollar deficits every year, the Treasury borrows the difference, and the Federal Reserve accommodates the whole arrangement by expanding the money supply by trillions.

Long term inflation doesn’t slow down until Washington decides to be fiscally responsible— and there is little evidence that’s about to happen.

If you bought a house in 2010, or even 2021, the same forces hollowing out the dollar have been inflating the value of your assets; your house cannot be printed by the Federal Reserve, so as the money supply increases, your house costs more in nominal dollars.

That’s why the people who feel worst about this economy are young people.

A recent Generation Lab survey found that more than 8 in 10 Americans aged 18-29 — the cohort least likely to own a home or hold meaningful investments — now describe the economy as bad or terrible. Only 2 percent of them call it “excellent.”

This is why real assets matter. The Fed can manufacture as many dollars as it wants, but it cannot manufacture the things that actually have value: precious metals, energy, critical resources like uranium or copper, a profitable business producing something the world cannot function without.

Because every single time governments are given the choice between inflation and discipline, they pick inflation.

And just like Henry VIII, they think no one is going to notice.

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The Cold War was over. The Internet and cell phones were starting to take off. And America’s biggest problem was the President getting frisky in the Oval Office.

The US economy was certifiably booming in 1998; unemployment was at a thirty-year low, the economy was growing leaps and bounds, and Washington was, by its own modest standards, somewhat functional.

The federal government had just posted its first budget surplus in three decades, and America’s debt-to-GDP ratio was falling. Plus there was zero geopolitical competition. China was still an impoverished backwater. Russia was toast. The euro didn’t even exist yet.

So foreign investors flocked to America as the ONLY place to invest. Capital inflows surged… and as a result, the US 30-year Treasury yield fell to around 5%.

Remember that rates had been 15% or more in the 80s, and 10% in the 90s. So for the 30-year yield to touch 5% was almost shocking. And rates remained low for the decades that followed— with the 30-year reaching an all-time low of 1.89% in 2020.

Today, the 30-year Treasury yield is back near 5%. But this is no 1998 America.

The federal government is not running surpluses, rather $2 trillion annual deficits. Debt-to-GDP is rising (now well over 100%) instead of falling. Treasury is on track to spend more than $1 trillion this fiscal year just on interest, nearly triple what it spent just six years ago.

And unlike the booming economy of the 90s, Q4/2025 GDP growth came in at a pathetic 0.5%. The labor market is soft. Energy prices are rising. Inflation is stubbornly high.

Most importantly, back in the 90s, foreign central banks were flooding the US with capital. Today they’ve sold more than $80 billion in US Treasuries— JUST since the Iran war started in late February. And they’re buying gold at the fastest pace in modern history.

As a result of weak foreign demand for US government bonds, yields are rising.

In 1998, yields fell to 5% because America was winning. Today yields have risen to 5% because the US is a hot financial mess.

The increase in the 30-year yield from 1.89% in 2020 to 5% today took six years. But I’d expect that pace to accelerate as it hits 6% then 7% then 8%.

Almost nobody in Congress is doing anything to fix it. Politicians laugh at the idea of spending discipline; they won’t lift a finger to eliminate rampant fraud.

That’s why so many foreign countries are heading for the exit.

Case in point: this past Monday, nearly 50 leaders of the European Political Community — including France, Britain, Poland, etc. gathered to declare themselves a “third superpower” in addition to the United States and China.

Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney showed up as the first non-European leader ever invited— the implicit message being that Canada is now picking Europe over the US.

Of course, the whole concept is laughable; these people honestly think signing papers can make them a superpower.

These are the same governments that spent two decades dismantling their own economies in the name of net zero and multiculturalism, then destroyed their own rule of law to prosecute anyone who complained.

The state of Mississippi — the poorest in the United States by GDP per capita — now produces more than France, Italy, or the United Kingdom.

The gap between Canadian and US GDP per capita became twice as bad under former PM Justin Trudeau-Castro, and the OECD projects Canada will rank dead last in the developed world for growth through 2060.

They have gutted every actual engine of becoming a superpower status; now they’re just cosplaying.

BUT America does depend on them for one thing: buying its massive amount of US government bonds.

These are the long-duration, sticky foreign buyers that have absorbed Washington’s debt for decades and kept yields artificially low, even when the fiscal numbers got ugly.

And they are looking for the exit. Countries that used to stampede INTO Treasuries during a crisis are now stampeding the other way.

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In an employee conference call, he had to quell a great deal of panic over the company’s performance.

Growth at Facebook/Meta is slowing, the stock price is down, and the company is dealing with significant regulatory and economic headwinds. And workers are unsettled.

So Zuckerberg took the mic and tried to assuage those concerns by explaining to everybody why ad revenue growth is slowing.

He said plainly, “If oil prices go up, then consumers spend more of their money on oil, on gas, and less on things that they would just buy that are kind of discretionary things that the advertising might serve.”

Without really meaning to, Mark Zuckerberg made a really strong case for real assets.

It ultimately starts with energy costs. Energy costs are higher. And everyone wants to blame Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, but this trend has been building for a long time.

For years, oil was the second most hated asset on the planet, only edged out by coal.

Think about it— liberal elites hold conferences where they fly to dictator states in their private jets, only to parade oil and gas CEOs on stage and publicly shame them.

Then you have the legions of inspired idiots who glitter-bomb art and glue themselves to pavement to stop traffic (ironically increasing emissions), all in the name of “just stop oil.”

They deface buildings and commit crimes, but they’ve been so successful that many oil companies themselves have turned their back on oil.

National governments, especially the previous Biden administration, have gone out of their way to tax, fleece, subvert, frustrate, and publicly ridicule oil companies.

Furthermore, the industry itself has been starved of capital because investors jumped on the bandwagon. Financial institutions stopped making loans, in some cases even debanking oil companies as a ridiculous form of virtue signaling.

Pension funds stopped investing in oil companies. Hedge funds tried to take over oil companies solely to turn them into fantasy green projects.

The dearth of capital— in a capital intensive industry— made it very difficult for exploration companies to finance new discoveries.

Even in the labor market, young people around the world have been so brainwashed that no one wants to go into the oil and gas sector— even though it pays quite well— for fear of public humiliation and “being on the wrong side of history.”

To be frank, it’s actually kind of extraordinary that an industry deprived of capital and labor, suffering an endless onslaught of media hysteria and political assault, has managed to continue delivering, day after day, the energy that our civilization requires to function.

Blaming today’s higher oil prices exclusively on Iran totally misses this history; the problems have been building for years.

Solving this energy challenge will take a long time— to finance new projects, find new discoveries, build the right kinds of infrastructure, and commercialize those discoveries in a way that keeps up with the rising energy demands of a growing world.

In the meantime, higher energy prices increase the production cost of just about everything else— food, housing, automobiles, consumer goods, even your monthly electricity bill. So, in the end, most things become more expensive.

This is ultimately what Mark Zuckerberg was saying— without fully saying it. For years there was an abundance of energy and global cooperation. Combined with low interest rates, the result was negligible price inflation and a feeling of widespread prosperity.

That feeling of prosperity meant consumers had plenty of disposable income for the sorts of things advertisers would sell on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

As Zuckerberg explained, those same retail-focused companies are now selling to consumers and individuals who have less disposable income— precisely because they have to spend more money on essentials like energy and food.

We’ve been predicting this for the last several years, and we think this trend will continue for some time.

This is why a very sensible place to consider investing, even if just as a hedge against rising prices, is in the companies that produce these critical resources.

This is the core of our investment ethos, and to be frank, it has been very successful.

We’ve seen our mining stocks multiply by as much as ten times, with several others doubling, tripling, and quadrupling.

But it goes beyond mining; one agricultural company has doubled, and a fertilizer producer is up double digits in just a few months. We’ve been collecting dividends from industrial producers while their stocks tick higher.

Only a few companies we have researched are down, and we think they still have plenty of upside.

And we are still finding some really great real-asset businesses that are surprisingly, deeply undervalued. That includes energy companies.

There are a lot of reasons for high quality businesses being undervalued; but I think it’s because people believe this is some sort of aberration— that tomorrow the spigots turn on and oil drops back to $40 a barrel.

The reality is all these challenges can be solved, but it’s going to take a while. And in the meantime, we think these real-asset companies are going to be cash machines.

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His methods were absolutely insane; Gottlieb set up a brothel in San Francisco where CIA-paid prostitutes dosed unsuspecting men while government agents watched through one-way mirrors.

He also authorized CIA officers to dose their own colleagues with LSD— without their knowledge— just to see what would happen.

One of Gottlieb’s own colleagues, a biochemist named Frank Olson, was slipped LSD at a work retreat in November 1953. Olsen went out a tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York.

The program became known as MK-Ultra, and for the next twenty years it ran almost entirely in the dark. Congress did not know. The press did not know. Even most of the CIA did not know.

By 1973, Watergate convinced CIA Director Richard Helms that the press was finally willing to dig into the intelligence agencies. So he gave one last order on his way out the door: destroy the MK-Ultra files.

Twenty years of records — experiments, payments, deaths — were fed into burn bags and shredders.

By the time the government held hearings two years later, almost no evidence remained. Fortunately an incompetent clerk had misplaced the program’s financial records, so eventually roughly 16,000 pages emerged about MK-Ultra. Everything we know about the program today is because of those misplaced financial records.

Yet no one was ever punished for the experiments… or for the for the federal crime of destroying the documents.

So it’s a tiny step in the right direction that, last week, the Justice Department indicted Dr. David Morens, a former senior advisor to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, on charges of obstructing a federal investigation into the origins of Covid-19.

The NIH gave roughly $8 million in grants to a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance (run by Peter Daszak) which in turn routed some of that money to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Yet the NIH had publicly insisted, for years, that it was not funding any gain-of-function research.

As the lab leak hypothesis gained traction in 2020, the indictment alleges that Dr. Morens instructed EcoHealth’s president to send all correspondence to his personal Gmail.

Dr. Morens also told colleagues that he had “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts.”  Yet when a Senate document request arrived in June 2021, Dr. Morens claimed that he had “retained very few documents on these matters.”

Federal records law requires every one of his emails to be preserved.

Now we know why Francis Collins, then director of NIH, was so determined in early 2020 to crush any public discussion of a possible lab origin. In April of that year, Collins emailed Fauci calling the lab leak hypothesis a “very destructive conspiracy” and asking what NIH could do to “put it down.”

He was not asking a scientific question. He was asking how to suppress an inquiry that pointed back at money his own agency had distributed.

This is one of the premier institutions Americans were told to “trust the science” on.

The behavior across NIH, the CDC, and the FDA destroyed public trust in institutions that should have been protecting public health. The agencies served a narrative instead, and they wanted higher case numbers to scare the public into compliance.

Patients hospitalized for car accidents or hip replacements were logged as Covid if a routine swab came back positive. Patients who arrived testing positive were counted as Covid deaths even when something else (like a motorcycle accident) had killed them.

These “experts” said masks worked, after months of telling people they did not.

They said natural immunity was not a real factor, contradicting decades of immunology.

They said ivermectin was a “horse dewormer,” though it had been an FDA-approved human medication for decades.

They told the public that vaccinated people could NOT transmit the virus, when the data clearly showed they could.

Meanwhile, the pandemic’s collateral damage piled up.

The CDC’s own 2021 survey of high school students found 44% reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness, 55% emotionally abused at home, and more than one in ten physically abused.

One in four had experienced hunger. Not to mention the alcoholism, the record overdose deaths, the diseases that went undiagnosed, the learning loss the next generation will not catch up from.

Dr. Morens deleted his emails to protect an industrial level of deceit which incalculably harmed the US economy and American society.

And it wasn’t just the technical question of whether NIH funded dangerous research; it’s the broader implication that the institutions Americans were told to trust, had, in reality, spent two years telling lies.

And the costs of those lies were paid by teenagers locked in their bedrooms, small business owners watching their savings evaporate, and the roughly 1.2 million Americans who died.

The indictment of Dr. Morens will not suddenly repair all of that. But a bit of accountability is at least a step in the right direction.

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But it’s true: William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican vote (with Roosevelt starting his own “Bull Moose” ticket). Woodrow Wilson was on the Democratic side. And Eugene V. Debs ran as a Socialist, garnering 6% of the popular vote.

Realistically, the 1912 election was a contest over who could convince voters that he hated trusts and monopolies the most.

The early 1900s was a time Americans felt that big corporate monopolies (US Steel, Standard Oil, etc.) were fleecing them to drive up prices. And politicians felt the pressure to take action.

In the end, Wilson won the 1912 election, and his Democrats took a whopping 291 seats in the House.

With their agenda assured, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 swiftly followed, and it remains to this day one of the signature pieces of US legislation aimed at preventing monopolistic behavior.

This was precisely the law that was used to prevent the JetBlue–Spirit Airlines merger that both companies inked in 2022.

The big news over the weekend, of course, was that Spirit has now failed and ceased operations. The Internet is full of hot takes blaming Elizabeth Warren and the Biden administration for their role in destroying this airline.

And while that blame is accurate, it’s also far too simplistic. More fully, Spirit’s demise represents a complete failure of modern American “stakeholder capitalism.”

For starters, it’s important to point out that the officers, managers, boards of directors, and shareholders of both JetBlue and Spirit ALL agreed to the merger.

Business in general is tough. The airline industry is especially tough. And both companies agreed the best way forward was to merge.

But inspired idiots like Elizabeth Warren, who collectively have zero experience in business, finance, or aviation, decided that this merger (like all mergers in their opinion) was bad.

So they fought tooth and nail to dismantle it.

Ultimately the case was decided in federal court by a Reagan-appointed judge named William Young. I actually read his entire 113-page opinion over the weekend. And to be frank, my conclusion is that the judge made his best effort to do his duty and interpret the Clayton Act with respect to the JetBlue–Spirit merger.

In his written opinion, the judge himself acknowledges that his responsibility is to “predict the future of a dynamic market recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, in markedly uncertain times.”

Sounds like a recipe for success!

But I found the analysis truly bizarre, because the judge, like Elizabeth Warren, Merrick Garland, Joe Biden, Lina Khan, and the rest, has no experience in aviation, finance, or accounting. He has never run a business.

Yet, throughout his analysis, he opined on whether it was appropriate, for example, for JetBlue to take on such a large amount of debt to consummate the merger.

This is ridiculous. The decision should be left to the board of directors of JetBlue, not to a federal judge.

The judge further acknowledged that he was completely out of his element and had to rely on the testimony of expert witnesses.

Ultimately the trial came down to which ‘expert’ the court found the most credible. And in his written opinion, Judge Young assigned “significant weight” to the government’s ‘expert’, a Columbia University economics professor.

It didn’t matter that the “Big Four”, i.e. United, Delta, AA, and Southwest all engaged in mergers and acquisitions over the past 20 years. The government felt compelled to deny what would have been the fifth largest airline— JetBlue/Spirit— from ever existing.

And so, based largely on the testimony of a single expert, the merger was denied.

Plenty of comments this weekend lamented the Spirit employees who are now out of work, or the impact to passengers who won’t be able to fly Spirit’s routes anymore. And they all blame Elizabeth Warren— who was instrumental in making sure the lawsuit happened.

But again, I think this is an overly simplistic view.

If those routes, say San Juan to Fort Lauderdale, are remotely profitable, they’ll be picked up by another airline. Probably JetBlue.

Spirit’s fleet of aircraft will not disintegrate. They’ll be bought by another airline. Probably JetBlue.

Even those employees who are now collecting federal unemployment benefits will probably be rehired as those routes are restarted. Probably by JetBlue.

In short, JetBlue is now in a position to buy— out of liquidation at bargain-basement prices— everything it was prepared to pay $3.8 billion for just two years ago.

So realistically, this is a major victory for JetBlue.

Who loses? Spirit’s former employees will eventually find work. The passengers will find new airlines.

But the stockholders of Spirit Airlines will be completely wiped out.

Keep in mind, Spirit wasn’t owned by some “evil billionaire.” It was owned by mutual funds and pension funds— places where the retirement savings of firefighters and schoolteachers were invested.

In fact Spirit was held by multiple mutual funds managed by Fidelity Investments… which happens to be domiciled in Elizabeth Warren’s home state of Massachusetts. Fidelity, and all the people invested in those funds, are worse off today.

Meanwhile, JetBlue stock is up about 8% since the government proposed rescue of Spirit crashed.

Capitalism is supposed to be an economic system built on freedom, in which all participants get to decide what’s in their best interest.

More often than not, a capitalist system produces win-win deals that are in everyone‘s best interest. And both JetBlue and Spirit decided four years ago that a merger was a win-win deal.

What happened instead is the ultimate demonstration of how America has changed: a country where inspired idiots like Elizabeth Warren have not only managed to seize power, but continue to be reelected by the very people they are harming.

Warren insisted that a lawsuit be brought to disrupt a win-win deal. And the government brought that case not because of its merits, but to virtue-signal their woke economic justice.

The judge in the case was completely unqualified to render an opinion on such business complexities, and was forced to apply a law that was created in 1914 before there was even a civil aviation industry.

This same law was not applied to the four largest companies in the industry. Only to Spirit and JetBlue.

And in the end, investors in Spirit paid the price.

Ultimately there were two paths. One path was a win-win. The other path was a total wipeout — $3.8 billion that could have gone to Spirit Airlines shareholders.

The government did everything in its power to ensure the wipeout. And absolutely zero people will be held accountable.

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The listings appear on Facebook pages openly named “Renting room in London for Muslims” and “Muslim rents,” with language like “only for Muslims,” “for 2 Muslim boys or 2 Muslim girls,” “prefer Punjabi boy.” A single letting agency, Roshan Properties, posted dozens of them on TikTok before anyone noticed.

Personally I think property owners should be able to rent out their flats to whoever they want.

For example, if I want to rent my guest cottage exclusively to English-speaking retired couples, I should be able to do that.

But this practice is illegal in a multitude of countries, including the UK.

Section 33 of Britain’s 2010 Equality Act states that property owners and landlords “must not discriminate” based on “protected characteristics” including “age; disability; gender reassignment; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; sexual orientation”.

Point is, renting to someone based on their religion is against the law, subject to fines of up to £7,000 per violation.

Yet according to the Telegraph’s investigation, no one has been fined.

This is the latest sign that the United Kingdom is splitting into two societies with two different sets of laws, customs, and social norms. To see how literal that is, look at what the British state does and does not punish.

Last December, a 36-year-old man named Luke Yarwood was sentenced to 18 months in prison in Bournemouth Crown Court. His crime was posting two anti-immigrant tweets in the weeks after the 2024 Magdeburg Christmas market attack in which a Saudi immigrant killed six people.

To be fair, the tweets were over the top, calling for migrant hotels to be burned down and for “Brits to gang together and start the slaughter,” then to “head to MPs’ houses and Parliament.”

The tweets were viewed thirty-three times in total — eighteen months in prison for two posts that almost no one saw.

Four months earlier, the same British justice system had handed down a very different sentence to a different man.

His name is Ayomide Famakinde. He is twenty-three, a gym instructor based in south London, and he had been convicted of sexually assaulting a nineteen-year-old woman near Bournemouth beach.

Famakinde had approached the woman late at night, put his hand down her pants, and ignored her when she screamed for him to stop. She had to fight him off until his friend pulled him away.

Three years passed before the case got to court. When it was finally time for justice, the judge sentenced Famakinde to 150 hours of community service.

The judge described the assault as a “momentary aberration” and cited Famakinde’s “very troubled background and difficult life.”

Yarwood was sentenced to eighteen months of prison for two tweets. Famakinde got no prison for putting his hands down a stranger’s clothes. Both sentences came out of British courts within four months of each other.

This is not the first time the British state has protected rapists.

For nearly two decades, organized grooming gangs of overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men raped thousands of underage British girls, some as young as ten, while police, NHS staff, and social workers looked the other way.

Health professionals dismissed twelve-year-olds with multiple pregnancies as making “lifestyle choices.”

When Parliament was forced to decide on whether to conduct a formal inquiry in January 2025, every single Labour MP under Prime Minister Keir Starmer voted it down.

The Prime Minister himself, a former prosecutor, insisted that the public’s outcry for an investigation was “the bandwagon of the far right.”

Meanwhile, the British state has plenty of energy for the things it does want to enforce. Every household with a television is required to pay £174.50 a year for a license, and the BBC sends Christmas-card threats of £1,000 fines and promises door-knocks on December 25th.

And a single offensive tweet can get you swarmed at the airport: in September 2025, the British comedy writer Graham Linehan was met at Heathrow by five armed officers and arrested over three tweets criticizing transgender activists.

In a single school year, 94 British primary-school children were disciplined for wrongthink against the trans narrative, including a three-year-old suspended from nursery.

This same machinery runs the British economy, picking which industries to protect and which to choke. And it is driving the country off a cliff.

For starters, the British government is actively dismantling its own oil and gas industry.

All new North Sea exploration licenses have been halted. The government additionally slapped a 78% windfall tax on existing production — one of the highest production-tax rates in the world.

The result is what anyone could have predicted. A decade ago, Britain had ten operating oil refineries. It now has four, after losing two in 2025 alone.

Yet demand for energy within the UK has not fallen by a single barrel. Brits are still consuming the same amount of oil; they’re just importing it from other countries now.

Norway is pumping oil from the very same North Sea basin that Britain abandoned and selling it back to the UK. It’s crazy.

The Office for Budget Responsibility projects roughly £50 billion in lost tax revenue over the life of the policy because there is no production left to tax.

Unsurprisingly, British motorists pay roughly three times what Americans pay at the pump.

It’s crazy to think that Britain used to be the largest and most prosperous empire on earth. Yet today, on a per capita basis, it’s poorer than the poorest state in the US (Mississippi). Strip out London from the calculation and the difference becomes even more stark.

This is what happens when incompetent fools refuse to enforce the law equally, charge outrageously high taxes, and prioritize woke, leftist fantasies over productivity and national interest.

America has major, major problems. But Britain is in much deeper trouble that should serve as a cautionary tale to the West.

For all of the pomp and circumstance of the King’s visit to America this week, I sincerely hope his crumbling nation provides sufficient inspiration for Congress to pull its head out.

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Detroit was making tanks, not automobiles. Factories were making bullets, not baby carriages. Food was rationed. Fuel was scarce.

And, overall, life in America had been bleak for the better part of two decades. The Great Depression gave way to a stretch of war that led many Americans to fear that their kids would soon be speaking German and goose-stepping with the Hitler Youth.

Government finances were equally bleak. Between all of the massive public works programs of the Great Depression and eye-popping costs of World War II, the US national debt topped 100% of GDP by the mid-1940s.

And yet that moment was the beginning of a new Golden Age.

Think about the world at the time: Britain was bankrupt. Germany and Japan had been turned to rubble. And the Soviets had won their part of the war by feeding twenty million bodies into the meat grinder.

America came out the other side with full manufacturing capacity intact, the dollar enthroned as the world’s reserve currency, and virtually no economic competition anywhere.

What followed was two decades of suburb-building, highway-laying, automobile-making, and semiconductor-launching prosperity. There were bumps along the way, but on balance the economic trajectory of America was up and to the right.

Consequently, the US national debt started falling. And it’s easy to understand why. By 1946 there was no more war, no more depression.

The United States had just spent four years consuming every available resource to defeat the Nazis. But once the war ended, military spending (and hence the budget deficit) dropped like a rock. Congress started to run budget surpluses and used them to pay down the debt.

Over the next three decades, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio fell from 106% in 1946 to just 23% by the mid-1970s.

This week, fresh data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis confirmed that America’s debt-to-GDP ratio has officially crossed 100% once again.

One caveat: this number is based on what the government calls “debt held by the public”; it conveniently leaves out the trillions of dollars that Washington “owes itself”, including Social Security trust fund IOUs, federal pension obligations, and other intragovernmental holdings.

Well, that money has to be repaid too. Pretending otherwise might make the debt appear smaller. But a broader, most honest measure of the debt right now is actually 130% of GDP, well beyond the WWII record.

But fine, we’ll use the government’s official number of 100%, which is just announced this morning.

Yes, America has been here before. 100% is not unprecedented. But there is a major difference.

Back in 1946, the debt was at 100% of GDP because the US had just defeated the Nazis. The debt binge ended when the war ended.

In 2026, the United States is not fighting Hitler. There is no once-in-a-century pandemic. There is no specific crisis that, once over, will allow Congress to bring spending back into line.

Rather, the debt is so high because the debt is so high.

Interest on the federal debt is over $1 trillion per year. That’s a huge chunk of tax revenue. The rest of America’s tax revenue is consumed by mandatory entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.

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

So in other words, the deficit is structural and permanent. It will be there no matter how much Congress cuts… if they were even interested in fiscal reform.

And yet Congress shows no interest in spending cuts. Even when the most rampant and obvious fraud is presented with a bow on it, Congress does nothing.

Even worse— people who actually try to stop the fraud get publicly crucified, arrested, or sued.

In 1946, the political momentum of the United States focused on growth, productivity, and fiscal discipline. In 2026, all of it points the other way.

And the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency— a major advantage that helped pay down the postwar debt— is also slipping.

Foreign central banks have been quietly selling US Treasuries and buying physical gold at the fastest pace in modern history. Since the start of the year, they have unloaded tens of billions of dollars worth of US government bonds, and the interest rate on Treasurys have climbed in response.

That shows foreign confidence draining out of the dollar in real time.

Now, none of this means the world is ending.

We are not pessimistic people. Humanity’s best days are still ahead. The technological advances now arriving in robotics, artificial intelligence, nuclear power, and biotech are not incremental upgrades; they are giant leaps for mankind.

Civilization will improve, productivity will rise, and the economic problems will sort themselves out.

But getting there requires persevering through the next several years of challenges… during which time we expect the average American to see a lower standard of living driven by higher taxes, persistent inflation, and a regulatory burden that gets heavier by the day.

Of the three, inflation looks the most baked in. Foreign governments are abandoning the dollar at a rapid pace, so the Federal Reserve will almost certainly step in to ‘print money’ and bail out the Treasury.

The impact will be more inflation.

This is why we continue to write that real assets are the right place to be. In difficult and conflict-prone times, the basics like food, water, energy, critical industrial metals, and productive technology become the world’s most valuable resources. They hold their value regardless of which currency happens to be in fashion, or how high inflation goes.

And the key point is that, right now, many of the best real asset producers— which have huge upside ahead— are trading at absurd discounts. So it’s a great time to consider this strategy.

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Nations were too interlinked, he argued. Capital was too entangled. Trade was too valuable. And no nation would put that prosperity at risk. War and conquest were things of the past.

But think about the world back then: Europe was in the middle of la Belle Époque, a stretch of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It had been nearly 40 years since the last major war (Franco-Prussian War) in 1871.

Gold-standard money moved across borders without friction. British capital financed German factories, German banks lent to Russian railways. And one of the largest trading relationships in the world was between supposed rivals Britain and Germany.

Mr. Angell’s book sold over two million copies; it was translated into 25 languages and became a fixture in educated households. Diplomats quoted it. CEOs planned around it. Angell’s conclusions seemed true, without question.

Then the Great War broke out five years later, and the world’s great powers went on to vaporize 16 million human beings and their collective economies. Global trade did not recover its 1913 level for roughly half a century.

Bizarrely, Angell later won the Nobel Peace Prize “for having exposed by his pen the illusion of war and presented a convincing plea for international cooperation and peace.” There would not be a less deserving recipient until Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.

But this same mistake has been repeated again in our own time.

After the Soviet Union fell and American technology took the world by storm in the 1990s, it seemed that global peace and prosperity would last forever.

Even after 9/11 and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the world organized itself around America’s leadership.

The dollar was the world’s dominant reserve currency. The World Trade Organization tore down tariffs across the board. NATO and the United States Navy guaranteed no major power would risk war.

America supplied the security, the currency, and the rules; in exchange, the world traded and grew under an American-led system. Goods, capital, and supply chains ignored borders.

And for decades it worked reasonably well. But we’re now witnessing its breakdown in real time.

As I write this letter to you, gas stations in Asia are rationing fuel. Hospitals are running out of medical supplies. Major petrochemical producers in South Korea and Singapore (Yeochun and PCS) have declared force majeure, meaning they cannot fulfill their commitments to customers.

The cause is simple: the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for weeks.

The Middle East ships roughly 25% of the world’s polypropylene, 20% of its polyethylene, 25% of its sulphur, and 15% of its fertilizer. When that flow stops, factories stop. And remember that about half of what Americans buy comes from those same Asian factories.

Capital Economics, a global research firm, estimates that it could take three months for the resulting plastic shortages to spread globally, and four months until US automakers face aluminum shortages severe enough to cut production.

S&P Global’s April survey of manufacturers worldwide shows supplier delivery times lengthening at the fastest pace since August 2022.

Purchasing activity is near a four-year high as companies scramble to stockpile while they still can. Respondents are using “panic” and “emergency” buying language for the first time since the pandemic supply crunch— when Americans waited months for a new car, lumber prices tripled, and store shelves sat empty.

Yet rather than work together to ease the strain, governments are making it worse. With trust between major powers in collapse, every cross-border deal is now treated as a security threat…  so they are blocking deals, capping technology transfer, and walling off entire industries.

China just blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of an AI startup called Manus; Beijing argues that Manus was developed by Chinese founders with Chinese capital, and therefore an American giant cannot own it.

The United States has been doing the same thing for years— to its strongest allies, no less.

The Biden administration blocked Japanese company Nippon Steel’s $15 billion acquisition of US Steel on “national security” grounds, even though Nippon had offered to invest $2.7 billion of Japanese capital into Pennsylvania steel mills.

(Trump later reversed this, and the deal went through with additional government stipulations.)

That is what de-globalization actually looks like in practice: not one dramatic rupture, but the slow accumulation of friction— a closed strait here, a blocked deal there, escalating tariffs,  sanctions, “national security” reviews.

Stack enough of this friction together and the world looks entirely different.

Travel becomes harder and more expensive. Raw materials and finished goods become costlier. Specialization and trade become economic drags rather than efficiencies as nations are forced to make more things at home— including the goods that other countries can already manufacture more efficiently.

This is already happening, and it’s difficult to fix. It’s unlikely that anyone can wave a magic wand and bring back the geopolitical cooperation that fueled the world for decades.

The world is not coming to an end. Far from it. But it is changing rapidly.

Less cooperation, more conflict, and more tension has profound implications for future prosperity.

One of the obvious implications we see is that real assets— energy, food, gold, industrial metals— grow in value during times of conflict and global friction.

Tension and protectionism don’t reduce demand for any of them; they just make supply harder to get, so prices rise. When supply chains snap and borders tighten, these are the assets that benefit most.

So if you agree with our thesis, i.e. that the world is heading towards more conflict and less cooperation, real assets (and the companies which produce them) are an excellent hedge to offset that risk with financial gain.

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Three stories caught our attention this week which show just how much of politics is pure manipulation.

Representative Ilhan Omar quietly amended her 2025 financial disclosure last week, revising her household assets from a range of $6 to $30 million, down to a range of $18,004 to $95,000, and blamed her husband’s accountant.

Apparently it was just an ‘accounting oversight’. I’m not entirely sure how someone who claims to have almost no net worth would sign off on a financial disclosure indicating up to $30 million in equity.

She’s either lying, or financially illiterate. I’m betting on the former. But even if she’s telling the truth, it’s pretty scary that such a financial dullard is in charge of taxpayer funds.

It’s also worth pondering how someone who entered Congress with a negative net worth and no assets, and now earns $174,000 a year, become a multi-millionaire in under a decade.

Omar uses the Nancy Pelosi defense: it’s my husband’s money.

How did her husband make that money?

For starters, his consulting firm collected nearly $3 million from Omar’s own campaign between 2018 and 2020. That was half of her total campaign expenditures, funneled into the couple’s own pockets.

Of course, her district does include the area of Minneapolis inundated with Somali welfare fraudsters. So maybe her voters see this as an inspiring tale of the new American dream to bilk your neighbors for all they are worth.

California Governor Gavin Newsom ran the same play in a more expensive suit.

His political action committee, the Campaign for Democracy, spent more than $1.5 million of donors’ money on 67,000 copies of his own memoir, which was two-thirds of every copy sold.

That’s how to use donor funds to not only manufacture a New York Times bestseller that can launch your presidential bid, but also funnel campaign contributions back into your own pocket.

This is California in miniature. The state funnels roughly $100 billion in federal grants into DEI programs, homelessness nonprofits that burned through $24 billion with no measurable reduction in homelessness, and progressive advocacy groups that recycle political support back to the same politicians who voted the funding.

At least on the personal level, Newsom is screwing his own supporters. As governor, he’s screwing the taxpayers.

But the third example is actually the most grotesque of the three.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a civil rights nonprofit founded in 1971 that made its name suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy in the 1980s, and spent the decades since building itself into the country’s self-appointed referee on who counts as a “hate group.”

The DOJ indicted the organization this week on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering for paying over $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to informants inside the KKK, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America.

The indictment alleges the SPLC used shell accounts with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse” to move donor money to the very groups it was publicly warning the country about.

One of those informants, known in the indictment as F-37, helped plan the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and attended at the SPLC’s direction.

SPLC donations surged after that rally. The civil rights group was paying the hate groups to produce the hate, then raised money to fight the hate that they were manufacturing.

An organization that built its reputation labeling ordinary conservatives as “hate groups” got caught paying the actual hate groups to help stage the events that justified its own fundraising.

This is like Jussie Smollett on steroids.

It does make you wonder about those masked ‘Nazis’ who keep materializing in random American cities for a weekend of choreographed menace and then vanish.

The decade-long moral panic over “white supremacy” that deplatformed, defunded, and fired so many Americans, and the entire industry of consultants, diversity officers, HR commissars, and legacy journalists whose salaries depended on the threat being real…

Is any of it real?

Or are we just being managed, taxed, pitched, and outraged on cue, so a small class of operators can keep destroying Western civilization for a couple million in kickbacks?

PS — If these are the people running the show, it is pretty obvious why you need a Plan B. That is exactly what Plan B Confidential is built for: second residencies, offshore banking, tax optimization, and real asset strategies. These are practical, legal steps with no downside. They leave you with real options and a position of strength, whatever comes next.

Click here to learn more.

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Whether or not that action 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 an important lesson that day– US Treasury bonds were only safe as long as their country stayed on America’s good side.

Consequently, foreign governments and central banks began quietly moving a portion of their strategic financial reserves into assets that Washington could not freeze or sanction. And the most important of those assets was physical gold.

Within months, the collective buying of foreign central banks was running faster than at any point in modern history.

Compared to a previous baseline of about 650 metric tons per year in 2018 and 2019, central bank gold purchases jumped to over 1,000 tons starting in 2022. 

It stayed there through 2023. It hit a record 1,100 tons in 2024. Even in 2025, when gold went parabolic to $4,500 an ounce and they could have paused or even taken profits, they were still net buyers of roughly 800 tons.

Holding Treasury bonds requires trusting that the US government  will not freeze their assets, will not weaponize the dollar, and will not run deficits large enough to force the debasement of the dollar itself.

None of those three conditions holds anymore.

The United States ran a $2 trillion deficit last year— no recession, no economic crisis, no war, no bailouts. It was just business as usual. Congress won’t lift a finger to cut even the most blatant fraud and graft.

Consequently, the national debt is now pushing $40 trillion, with interest costs eating $1.2 trillion per year— nearly a quarter of total tax revenue. And foreigners are rapidly losing confidence.

In the first quarter of 2026, the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves fell 2.3 points, a quarter of the previous decade’s entire decline in ninety days. Non-dollar transactions gained ground quickly on the SWIFT payment network, rising from 18% to 31% in the Middle East and from 35% to 42% in Asia.

And for the first time since 1996, the world’s central banks now hold more gold than they hold US Treasury securities.

The big picture is that foreign governments are setting up for a new monetary order, one in which physical reserves matter more than paper promises from Washington.

So governments are securing as many physical reserves as they can. 

It’s not just gold, either. Energy, fertilizer, industrial metals, and shipping are all getting the same treatment as gold: repatriated, stockpiled, or rerouted to suppliers inside friendly borders.

Countries across the Western Hemisphere are rebuilding domestic production for fuel, uranium, copper, and food, because they can no longer count on the old, postwar order to deliver the goods on schedule at a price they can live with.

We can already see the early signs– the same loss of trust that has driven central banks to buy so much gold is starting to lead to bulk buying of other real assets… which means that the prices of these strategic resources will likely rocket higher.

This means that the companies which produce those real assets (as well as their shareholders) are likely set to make a LOT of money in the future. 

With assets like gold or silver, you could buy the metals outright. But today that means paying near all-time highs. 

In our analysis it’s a much better deal to own the companies that produce them. As real asset prices rise, margins expand and profits multiply. 

For example, gold has roughly tripled in three years. But one mining company we featured in Strategic Assets (Schiff Sovereign’s monthly investment research service), is up 5x in the same period. And a silver miner we featured went up nearly 10x.

Energy, industrial metals, and shipping can offer the same leverage.

We look for profitable, well-managed real asset businesses with clean balance sheets and clear catalysts, trading at a low multiple of free cash flow, positioned to benefit from the exact shift central banks are already executing.

None of this makes us permabulls on gold, silver, or anything else. The environment is too volatile for certainty, and our edge is not in calling the next move. Our edge is applying the same disciplined criteria to very well run businesses and adjusting when the facts shift. 

We chase returns, not attachment to any particular company or commodity.

And our approach has worked. Out of 20+ companies we have featured, one we sold at 10x and another at 6x, several current positions are up 2-4x, and only three are in the red. However we think those three have substantial upside from here.

If you would like to see the specific companies behind these examples, and the rest of our featured research, click here to try Strategic Assets risk-free with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

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At the time, the company’s stock was trading at a low, single-digit price/earnings multiple.

We knew the precious metals boom wasn’t a fluke. By April 2025 when we first published our research on the company, gold had already been rallying for some time, and we expected silver to follow.

So at a minimum our analysis showed that the company’s profits would skyrocket.

But there were also a number of other factors that we identified– some serious, hidden value that had been buried inside of the company’s financial statements.

We were right. And within just six months, the company’s stock price surged by over 6x.

But even then we knew that was not the end of the story. The rest of the market was just starting to realize how much money gold and silver miners were going to be making. Precious metals prices were soaring to all-time highs… and we were convinced that prices would remain high.

By January the share price was up a total of 10x. But we noticed that central bank gold purchases had slowed slightly… and silver markets at that point were looking positively frothy.

So three months ago we suggested to our readers that it was time to take profits.

We were lucky in the timing, because, just two days later, silver prices fell 40% in a single session— the largest one-day drop in its history. Gold prices flattened. And the company’s stock dropped hard.

It kept falling for weeks and ended up down by more than 50% from its peak. Fortunately, we exited the position at the very top.

But here’s the crazy part.

Even though precious metals prices had come down significantly from their all-time highs, the company was still generating enormous profits.

We did the math, updated our analysis, and concluded that, even assuming much more modest gold and silver prices, the company was trading at just 4x forward earnings after the steep correction.

More importantly, we identified several important, brand new catalysts on the horizon that could generate even more shareholder value.

So, earlier this month in the latest issue of Strategic Assets, we once again made the case for the company. It’s already up 14% since then, but we believe it has vastly greater upside potential.

Our analysis is based on a simple premise: the US– and much of the western world– is in debt up to its eyeballs… and a major debt reckoning is coming.

We can already see the warning signs, which we discuss regularly in our daily conversations. Just yesterday we told you how both US dollar reserves AND international US dollar transfers in the global SWIFT banking system have declined dramatically just in the first quarter of 2026.

We believe this will ultimately lead to the world’s central banks ‘printing’ unfathomable sums of money. Inflation will rise dramatically as a result. And real assets (including energy and precious metals) will soar in value. It will be like the 1970s all over again.

Our focus is finding the highest quality yet most overlooked businesses in the real asset space, i.e. companies that are profitable (often dividend-paying) and extremely well managed with pristine balance sheets… yet deeply undervalued.

Every issue of Strategic Assets includes plain-language, highly-indepth research and analysis on companies that meet our standards. The precious metals mining company above is just one example.

It’s important to note that we are not ‘permabulls’. This investing environment is extraordinarily volatile, and our edge isn’t predicting where it goes next. It’s applying strict criteria to very well run companies, and adapting when the facts change.

We are rational. We don’t fall in love with companies or assets. Instead, we love our returns.

And those returns are pretty great. Out of 20+ companies that we’ve featured– in addition to the 10x miner above, we have another at 6x gains, and a multitude of others that are up 2-4x. Only three out of twenty are in the red right now, and we think they have substantial upside.

If you’d like to see the specific company behind this example — and the rest of our portfolio — click here to try Strategic Assets risk-free with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

Or start with the free sample issue that is available to read right now, no credit card required.

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The banking system collapsed. Financial transactions ground to a halt. Desperate people looted supermarkets for food, and then grocery shelves emptied. Energy ran short.  Riots broke out in the streets, and police were shooting citizens in the face.

The crisis raged so much that the President of Argentina fled the country by helicopter. Five presidents rotated through the office in two weeks. Then the country defaulted on $93 billion in sovereign debt— the largest default in history at the time.

Argentina was left in such a deep constitutional crisis that it didn’t even have the money or the legal framework to hold an immediate election.

This wasn’t exactly a surprise.

For years leading up to the crisis, Argentina had been struggling. The country was in the midst of a major economic depression. Unemployment was high. GDP was shrinking. Inflation was increasing. Crime was rising.

And yet, even with all of that negativity, life was at least in the ballpark of normal.

Basic services still functioned. Grocery stores had food. Banks were open and had money. And, even though unemployment was high, the vast majority of people still had jobs.

But it all collapsed in the span of three weeks. Poof. All because of too much debt.

To its credit, one of the groups that saw this coming was the IMF, which had warned the Argentine government multiple times about a looming crisis.

Even in early 2001, the same year as the crisis, IMF reports flagged Argentina’s soaring debt-to-GDP ratio, citing its “sharp deterioration in the public finances,” and deficits running well above the targets Buenos Aires had agreed to.

Well, the United States just received the same warning from the IMF last week. Even the language in the report is eerily similar.

In its 2026 Article IV consultation on the United States of America, the IMF warned that America’s “persistently high fiscal deficits [and] the continued rise in debt‑GDP ratio” creates a “growing financial stability tail risk” for both the US and the global economy.

They stressed “the pressing need to address the US’s longstanding fiscal imbalances through a frontloaded fiscal adjustment.”

That last part means that Congress must make critical spending cuts NOW. Not later. Time is running out.

The IMF cites US government debt reaching 123.9% of GDP and deficits equal to 7.5% of GDP. More importantly, they point out that the US government has no credible plan to reduce them.

To be fair, America is not Argentina, and the US boasts major advantages— including one of the world’s most innovative economies and the deepest capital markets on earth.

But it’s nearly impossible to argue that the US isn’t heading towards a major debt crisis. The rest of the world has already figured this out— and the data prove it.

For example, in the first quarter of 2026, the share of global foreign exchange reserves denominated in US dollars fell by 2.3 percentage points, down to 56.1%.

That’s an unprecedented move in global reserves. To put that quarterly decline in perspective, the US dollar’s reserve share declined by roughly 10 percentage points over the previous decade…

… which means that roughly a quarter of that 10-year decline happened in the past 90 days! That’s evidence of a significant acceleration in the world’s loss of confidence in America.

The SWIFT international payments network tells the same story. The dollar’s share of international payments dropped substantially in Q1. In the Middle East, for instance, non-dollar transactions jumped from 18% to 31% in three months. In Asia, from 35% to 42%.

Another data point: the world’s central banks now hold more gold than US Treasury securities for the first time since 1996.

This comes as no surprise to our readers. We’ve been writing about this for the past 17 years.

Back in 2009, we were laughed at for suggesting that the United States could one day face a debt crisis. Today even the IMF is saying it.

We often cite that line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises — “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” The de-dollarization data suggests we’re entering the “suddenly” phase.

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It was basically an antique typewriter that you plugged into a television (sort of like a Nintendo or other gaming console). And they called it a Commodore “64” because it had a whopping 64 kilobytes of RAM.

“Kilobytes” is not a typo. For context, most mobile phones today have 8 gigabytes of RAM, and a gigabyte is roughly 1 million times a kilobyte.

The average email today (without attachments) is nearly 100 kilobytes, i.e. 50% more than the entire memory of my Commodore. Yet, back in the 80s, software developers were able to do miraculous things with that tiny amount of memory.

64 kilobytes was somehow enough to play games like Pitfall and Impossible Mission, bang out a school report on a dot-matrix printer, and all sorts of other things.

And it wasn’t just Commodore— Nintendo and Sega put out hundreds of titles on consoles that had comparably tiny amounts of memory.

In order to make all of this magic happen, programmers had to be absolutely ruthless about every single line of code. Every byte mattered. There was zero bloat. Zero inefficiency.

And software teams routinely fought with each other about what features would be in a game, versus what features would be thrown out— because there simply wasn’t enough memory to include what everyone wanted.

In short, the software industry had to live within its means. Yet despite those severe memory limitations, they put out timeless classics. It was a Golden Age for software development.

But then something happened. Technological and manufacturing breakthroughs made memory abundant… and cheap. Whereas 64 kilobytes of memory was considered a luxury in the 80s, soon megabytes of RAM… and then gigabytes of RAM, became readily available.

Memory eventually became so abundant that it felt practically infinite. No one had to make any tough decisions to optimize their code for RAM limitations… because there was always more memory available.

As a result, bloat eventually crept in. Here are a few examples.

Literally right now as I write this, I have a number of tabs open in my browser (I use Brave, by the way). ProtonMail takes up 409 megabytes of RAM… for a single tab. And a web-based PowerPoint presentation in my browser takes up 957 megabytes of RAM!

And don’t get me started on Windows.

Microsoft has been rolling out a ‘feature’ to “pre-load” data in its File Explorer application that consumes 67.4 megabytes of RAM. That’s more than 1,000x the memory requirement as my Commodore 64 had… for the sole purpose of being able to look at files and folders on your computer.

The level of bloat and memory waste is absurd (and also why I use Linux).

There’s hardly anyone in the industry today who remembers the bygone days of having to make ruthless decisions over every line of code; rather, the software industry today is accustomed to being able to publish bloated code… because memory has been so abundant for so long.

Unfortunately conditions have now dramatically changed.

Thanks in large part to surging AI demand, there is now a global memory shortage. RAM supply is scarce and has skyrocketed in price.

The industry, quite predictably, is fretting over the supply side, complaining that memory manufacturers need to build new factories and produce more RAM.

Very few prominent voices in software are saying, “Gee guys, maybe we should be more efficient in our code and use less RAM. Maybe it shouldn’t take 67 megabytes to look at our system files… Or 400+ megabytes for a single browser tab.”

In other words, there’s very little push to be more efficient and live within their means.

If you’re starting to see where I’m going, this story should sound familiar… because it’s very similar to how the government spends our money.

Once upon a time in America, Congress fought passionately over every dollar. They knew they had to live within their means, and every budget item mattered. Politicians debated passionately about which programs stayed and which had to go.

But that was the past. America has been the world’s superpower, and the US dollar the world’s reserve currency, for eight decades.

Consequently, the US government has been able to run massive deficits and rack up a gargantuan national debt with impunity, leading politicians to believe that America’s financial resources are infinite.

Today there’s no one in government who remembers the days of responsible spending. That’s why there’s so much bloat and why deficits are so high.

But, just like the memory market, a sudden scarcity is emerging. Foreign creditors— who used to provide ample funds to the Treasury market— are starting to invest their capital elsewhere.

We can see this impact with interest rates, which are now hovering near multi-decade highs… as well as gold prices, which remain near all-time highs.

Faced with a sudden scarcity of financial resources— and the shocking realization that government spending cannot be infinite— Congress is choosing the predictable route.

Rather than look to themselves to become more efficient, to make objective and ruthless decisions about what programs stay and what programs go, to live within their means… they are instead demanding more resources.

Of course they always start with calls to “tax the rich”. But these taxes invariably trickle down to the middle class; just ask anyone who had to submit an AMT return this week.

But the point here isn’t to argue whether Jeff Bezos should or shouldn’t pay more tax. The point is that Congress’s approach is entirely wrong.

As we discussed yesterday, they fail to understand a very simple point: higher tax rates don’t generate higher overall tax revenue. Higher tax revenue comes from a booming economy.

So they should instead invest their energy into ensuring maximum productivity… which ultimately means fewer regulations, and in general staying out of the way.

It’s also insane that they are specifically refusing to cut spending. Despite hundreds of billions worth of documented fraud, they do nothing about it. They’ve also pledged to NOT reform Social Security and Medicare, i.e. the single biggest budget items in government.

It’s the exact opposite of what they should be doing. They still don’t have the right mentality to solve America’s #1 problem… and it’s why having a Plan B makes so much sense.

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Over the following year the rest of the Rolling Stones rotated through the house and nearby properties to record the double album that became Exile on Main St., while staying deliberately out of reach of the British tax authorities.

The top marginal income tax rate in Britain at the time was 75%, and a surcharge on the highest earners pushed the effective rate on the wealthiest past 90%.

Three years later, under Denis Healey’s 1974 budget, the top rate on earned income would climb to 83% and the rate on investment income would reach 98%.

Britain would spend the rest of the decade watching capital flee and begging the IMF for emergency loans.

David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and a long line of less famous wealthy Britons eventually ran the same arithmetic as the Stones and reached a similar conclusion. Capital left the country in every form it could fit into, including bonds, businesses, luxury cars, and rock stars.

But politicians never learn.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey has backed legislation that would push the top federal income-tax rate to 43%.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is pushing a version that lands at 49%.

Both men describe it, as they always do, as wealthy Americans finally paying their “fair share.”

What exact percent is their fair share? Are we to believe they will be satisfied at 43% or 49%?

As always, that phrase is deliberately left undefined.

Never-mind that the top 1% of filers already paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes in 2022 while the bottom 50% paid roughly 3%.

They are also conveniently ignorant of the fact that raising the top marginal rate doesn’t actually raise revenue at all.

Since the end of the Second World War, U.S. federal tax revenue has averaged around 17% to 18% of GDP, dipping toward 15% in deep recessions and climbing near 20% in booms. The swings track the business cycle, not tax policy.

The top marginal rate, over that same stretch, has been all over the map: 91% under Eisenhower, 28% under Reagan by 1988, 39.6% under Clinton, 37% today. Yet regardless of whether tax rates were 91% or 37%, the IRS always collects around 17% of GDP.

The conclusion is obvious: if the government wants to collect more tax revenue, they should focus on setting the right conditions for an economic boom. In short, make the pie bigger for EVERYONE, and hence the government’s slice will grow as well.

Making the pie bigger isn’t that hard, either. America’s private economy is legendary. All Congress has to do is get out of the way. Attempt to run a balanced budget. Restore credibility. Make it easier for businesses and individuals to be productive. REMOVE idiotic laws instead of creating new ones.

But they’re not interested in any of those things.

Congress has documented evidence of hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud. Yet they  do nothing. They have also pledged to do nothing about Social Security— which is set to run out of money in six years.

The regulatory code in the Land of the Free already runs over 188,000 pages. Yet they expand it every session.

This is the opposite of what they should be doing. And instead of figuring out how to live within their means, they just demand more resources… even though it never works.

Britain tried its 98% tax experiment in the 1970s and spent a decade regretting it.

Ironically the current Labour government has forgotten that painful lesson; they recently abolished the 110-year-old “non-dom” regime, and more than 10,000 millionaires have already left the country.

In the United States, Elizabeth Warren’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax proposal does not just impose a wealth tax. It bundles her wealth tax with an additional 40% exit tax on anyone who renounces US citizenship.

You do not create a 40% tollbooth at the border unless you fully expect people to try to walk through it.

These are not serious ideas to grow an economy. Rather, they are insidious policies designed to trap people in a system which steals their prosperity.

That is why a Plan B makes so much sense.

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At the time, gold was trading around $1,800, so that low cost of production really mattered for the company’s profit margin.

Even at $1800 gold, the company was profitable, debt-free, and sitting on a growing pile of cash.

So after completing our exhaustive research, we concluded the company had tremendous potential. The macro backdrop was obvious— the US government was running $2 trillion annual deficits, the Treasury Department was increasingly weaponizing the dollar, and Congress showed zero interest in fixing anything.

Risk-averse foreign central banks who were looking to diversify some of their financial reserves away from US dollars had few alternatives… except for gold. We anticipated a major gold boom, and we felt strongly that this company would benefit.

Since then, our “why gold” thesis has only become stronger. The national debt continues surging higher, Congress appears even less competent than before, and the rest of the world is rapidly losing confidence.

That’s why gold roughly tripled over the past three years— primarily due to central banks around the world buying it by the metric ton.

But while gold tripled, our miner’s share price shot up 5x.

Here’s the crazy part: the stock is actually cheaper than when we first found it.

This isn’t a riddle; the idea is that the company is cheaper on a valuation basis, i.e. it’s price/earnings ratio is lower (hence “cheaper”) than when we first discovered it. This is what happens when profits grow faster than the share price.

Now, the Price/Earnings ratio can be a bit of a blunt instrument… which is why we tend to favor an Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow (EV/FCF) metric.

If you’re not familiar, Enterprise Value nets out cash and debt from a company’s market capitalization, while Free Cash Flow reduces accounting trickery that can impact a company’s bottom line.

In this way, EV/FCF is a better proxy than Price/Earnings, because it tells us how much we’re truly paying for a business relative to the actual cash it has available to pay dividends to shareholders.

Initially, our gold miner’s Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow was just 4x. That’s an incredible bargain.

Since then, the stock price has surged. Profits have climbed even more. So, incredibly, the Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow has become even cheaper— to less than 3x.

Again, this is a business with no debt AND pays a dividend. The absurd part is that, when gold prices pulled back from the $5,600 record high, investors actually sold the stock.

Amazing. People actually said, “I don’t want to own this wildly profitable, debt-free, dividend-paying business. . .”

Even at $4,700 gold, Free Cash Flow is still far higher than what was factored into the company’s guidance, i.e. they’re earning WAY more than projected. And yet people panicked.

We bought more.

If you’re interested in hearing more about this, we have found dozens of similar stories for subscribers of our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

We publish detailed research on companies like these every month, including specific buy-up-to prices, full financial breakdowns, and portfolio updates, including good times to sell.

For example, we recently locked in gains of nearly 10x on a silver company.

If you’d like to see the specific company behind this example — and the rest of our portfolio — you can try it risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Click here to learn more.

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And between 1862 and 1934, the federal government distributed 270 million acres under the program — roughly 10% of all the land in the United States.

Even as far back as the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers understood that property ownership made people more engaged, more productive citizens. Ownership meant that you had a vested financial interest in your community… and your country.

Over time, that idea fused with the concept of “the American Dream”. And for decades that dream was a reality for millions of people.

After World War II, for example, America underwent a massive construction boom. Between  postwar prosperity, the GI Bill, and the arrival of the modern 30-year fixed mortgage,  home ownership surged from about 44% in 1940 to 62% by 1960.

More importantly, housing was affordable.

In 1950, median family income was about $3,000, yet the median home cost roughly $7,350. That’s just ~2.5 times median household income. Plus, with prevailing mortgage rates back then 4.5%, the monthly payments were trivial.

Because of that, families across America could easily make ends meet on a single income.

Today the median home sells for about $412,000. Median household income is roughly $83,700. That puts housing at 5x household income— double what it was in the 1950s.

More importantly, at today’s mortgage rate of roughly 6.4%, the monthly payment on a median home (assuming a 20% down payment) consumes roughly 30% of household income.

The down payment is also so high these days that buying a home is nearly impossible, especially for young people or low-income workers. Even in dual-income households, homeownership is increasingly out of reach.

As we discussed on Friday, America’s housing problems go far beyond the ‘greedy’ Wall Street investors that are getting most of the blame for rising home prices.

Construction materials cost 40% more than they did five years ago, courtesy of the Federal Reserve printing trillions during the pandemic and igniting inflation.

Plus the regulatory permitting maze adds enormous costs. In Fremont, California, development fees alone run $157,000 per home before a single nail is hammered. And that doesn’t even include additional permitting costs and utility connection fees.

The government used to give away 160 acres for free. Now local governments charge six figures for permission to build.

Go figure that California, with its endless lip service about affordable housing, is also the epicenter of American homelessness.

But it turns out there’s a ready-made solution staring policymakers in the face.

The office property market is a complete bloodbath right now. Between the sluggish economy, AI reducing demand for workers, and the lingering work-from-home paradigm, the prices of office properties across the country have tanked.

More than 200 distressed office buildings changed hands across the country in 2025, with average sale prices down 37% from 2019. In Manhattan, a 920,000-square-foot tower sold for $8.5 million, down from $332.5 million. That’s a 97% decline!

Then there’s 401 South State Street in Chicago, a 485,000-square-foot office building that sold last October for $4.2 million, down from $68.1 million in 2016. That’s less than $9 per square foot.

Housing in Chicago isn’t cheap. So just imagine you’re young, fresh out of college, and staring at the prospect of paying $1,200 per month to live in a cramped apartment with three roommates.

Instead, you could pay about $13,000 for 1,500 square feet worth of space in the 401 South State Street office building that would be yours to own.

Yes, duh, it’s an office building. So it wouldn’t have the conveniences of a traditional home— like private bathrooms and kitchens. But for $13 grand?!!? Who cares. You’d have your own private space, a roof over your head, and a door that locks.

Frankly, that’s not so different from military barracks and university dorms. Americans manage just fine with communal facilities when the price is right.

That’s the beauty of capitalism. Such living accommodations aren’t for everyone. But at a low enough price, a LOT of people would happily trade convenience for affordability. Shower at the gym. Eat at the fast-casual spot around the corner. Live with walking distance to work downtown.

Most 20-somethings might think that’s pretty cool— especially compared to the alternative of paying out the nose for rent and never managing to save enough money to buy a house.

Same logic for a family of six crammed into a two-bedroom public housing unit in decrepit conditions; they could have a few thousand square feet to themselves.

Here’s another scenario. Let’s say a family in Topeka, Kansas locked in a 2% mortgage during the pandemic. Dad got laid off and can’t find another job locally. But they don’t want to sell the house to move across country, uproot the kids, and buy a new house somewhere else at a 6% rate. So they’re stuck.

Instead, Dad buys 1,000 square feet in one of these bankrupt office buildings for less than $10k. His family stays home, he commutes to his new job in a new city, and flies home on the weekends to see his kids. They make it work… which they wouldn’t be able to afford with hotels or an AirBnb.Posted on April 14, 2026

This would be a genuine ‘starter home’— a place where someone could actually save money and build toward a proper mortgage, instead of hemorrhaging rent to Blackrock every month while still falling behind.

But the government won’t allow it.

Zoning codes, building regulations, occupancy requirements— a labyrinth of rules that forbid you from such options.

Let grown adults decide for themselves. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

Nobody would pay $400,000 for a unit with no bathroom. But $13,000? For a lot of Americans, that’s not a sacrifice— it’s an opportunity.

The same politicians who claim to care about the poor, the homeless, and young people priced out of the American Dream have the obvious solution sitting right in front of them.

But they won’t take it, because that would mean getting out of the way.

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It wasn’t announced in a press conference. It wasn’t debated on the front page of any newspaper. It was buried in a routine update to the country’s military service law, tucked in alongside provisions about registration systems and NATO readiness targets.

Nobody noticed for months— until a local newspaper flagged it last week.

The defense ministry is currently “drafting specific regulations for granting exemptions from the requirement for approval.”

Translation: the law is already on the books, and they’ll tell you what it means later.

But don’t worry— a defense ministry spokesperson stressed that military service remains “voluntary.”

Germany isn’t at war. This isn’t martial law. It’s preparing for a changing world. And they’re not alone.

The US is also making its own updates. Starting in December, eligible men will automatically be registered for the military draft. Instead of relying on 18-year olds to fill out Selective Service forms on their own, the government will simply pull from federal databases and register on your behalf.

Congress also appears to be working on making it harder for Americans to take their money and leave.

On March 26, Senator Elizabeth Warren reintroduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, backed by more than 45 lawmakers. The bill proposes a 2% annual tax on net worth above $50 million, an additional 1% surtax on billionaires, and a 40% exit tax on wealthy Americans who try to renounce their citizenship to escape it.

It also includes aggressive new enforcement provisions: third-party reporting on hard-to-value assets, formulaic IRS valuation rules for private businesses and real estate, and a 30% minimum audit rate on everyone the bill covers.

The most productive people in America will be forced to waste countless hours on compliance, instead of working to create prosperity.

That isn’t just a tax. It’s a framework for tracking private wealth— and penalizing anyone who tries to opt out and take it somewhere else.

Governments don’t build this kind of infrastructure unless they think they might use it. Germany is making sure it can stop fighting-age men from leaving. The United States is making sure it is ready to press people into service.

And it is building a stronger fence around the most productive tax cattle so it can milk them for all they’re worth.

Governments are clearly planning for a period of conflict.

One other sign is that they are securing physical, real asset reserves.

For the last two years, the world’s central banks have been buying physical gold faster than at any point in modern history.

At the same time, they have been quietly selling US Treasuries. And the old dynamic has inverted: the kinds of global shocks that used to send investors stampeding into Treasuries as the world’s safe haven are now sending them the other way.

Take the Iran war as an example: normally when there’s a major conflict, foreign countries BUY lots of US government bonds as a safe haven. But since late February, foreign central banks have SOLD over $80 billion worth of US Treasury securities.

This reduction in foreign demand for US government bonds is also a key reason why interest rates have risen— from 3.97% before the war started, to 4.33% today.

But this isn’t a sudden change of heart. Foreign governments and central banks have been losing faith in the US for years.

For decades after World War II, countries around the world relied on an America-dominated framework regarding trade, capital, and energy.

This postwar system required trust in the United States, trust that the rules would be stable, and trust that agreements would be honored.

But that trust is vanishing quickly.

The humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. Routine weaponization of the US dollar for political goals. Budget deficits spiraling and a $39 trillion national debt. A government that shuts down every time it tries to pass a budget.

From a foreign government official’s perspective, physical gold sitting in a vault is a much safer bet than loaning money to the US Treasury.

Near-record gold prices and surging interest rates in the Treasury market are the surest signs yet that the postwar era of seamless global cooperation is unwinding… and inverting.

In a cooperative world, foreign nations are willing to depend on others. In a fragmented, conflict-prone world, governments secure resources. They secure their supply chains. They secure their energy. They secure their financial reserves.

And eventually… inevitably… they secure their people — the livestock can’t be allowed to wander off the farm before it’s time to milk them for taxes or march them off to war.

For now, capital can still flow somewhat freely. You can still apply for legal residency in another country. You can still hold gold overseas in a stable, neutral jurisdiction.

The window is still open to create a Plan B so you can have the options to come at whatever happens from a position of strength.

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The bill was co-written by Republican Chairman Tim Scott and ranking Democrat Elizabeth Warren on the Senate Banking Committee. Before the vote, the committee put out a press release listing more than 25 organizations — including the progressive organizations the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the National Housing Law Project — endorsing the bill.

When psychotic leftist Elizabeth Warren is celebrating the advancement of legislation she co-wrote, you might want to be concerned.

The premise of the bill is that greedy Wall Street investors are gobbling up all the homes in America and driving up prices for regular families.

It’s a great story to rile up the proletariat.

It also has almost nothing to do with reality.

Large institutional investors own less than 1% of single-family housing stock in the United States. And roughly 85% of their tenants can’t qualify for a mortgage — meaning these aren’t people who were outbid by BlackRock. They’re people who have no access to homeownership regardless.

To get to the root of the latest reason housing is unaffordable, you just need to look at the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve held interest rates near zero for years, which fueled a buying frenzy and sent home prices through the roof.

Then inflation hit, and the Federal Reserve jacked rates back up. Now homeowners who locked in a 2.8% mortgage can’t afford to sell — because selling means giving up that rate for a 7% one.

So they stay put, and supply dries up. Meanwhile, builders can’t build because materials cost 40% more than they did five years ago.

None of it has anything to do with institutional investors.

But Washington doesn’t blame itself. It never does.

Which is why I said this is the latest reason for unaffordable housing.

In 1992, Congress told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct 30% of their mortgage purchases toward lower-income borrowers. By 2008, the target had been ratcheted up to 56%. Fannie and Freddie were sitting on a trillion dollars in subprime mortgage-backed securities. And the whole thing collapsed — taking the global economy with it.

The response wasn’t to unwind the interventions that caused the crisis. It was 2,300 pages of new regulations called Dodd-Frank.

This is the same pattern with everything the government touches: it gets more expensive.

College tuition has risen roughly three times faster than inflation since Congress began backing student loans in 1965. The New York Federal Reserve studied this directly and found that for every dollar increase in subsidized student loans, tuition rose by up to 60 cents.

Healthcare is the same story — before Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, the government’s share of healthcare spending was about 31%. Today it’s roughly 64%. The “Affordable” Care Act promised to fix it — and family premiums nearly doubled, from $13,770 to almost $27,000 a year.

We saw the obvious solution earlier this year when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got 18 states to ban SNAP purchases of junk food, and PepsiCo cut Doritos prices by 15%. The moment the government stopped subsidizing demand, the company had to compete.

But it’s not just the federal government strangling housing supply. It’s local government too.

In January 2025, the Palisades fires destroyed roughly 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County. Fifteen months later, 28 have been rebuilt. Only 2,900 permits have been issued out of more than 6,100 applications. Homeowners who lost everything are still waiting on approvals to rebuild on land they already own.

Southern California has some of the strictest permitting requirements in America — and some of the worst housing shortages. The state is short somewhere between 840,000 and 3.5 million units, with median home prices above $850,000.

Now compare that to what happens when government gets out of the way.

Missouri has no mandatory statewide residential building codes — in some Ozark counties you can build a home with nothing more than state septic approval. No plan reviews, no inspections, no 15-month permitting nightmare.

Idaho’s Boundary and Bonner counties have no county-level building codes. In West Texas, counties like Hudspeth and Presidio have no enforcement at all — land goes for $500 to $3,000 an acre.

None of these places have a housing shortage. Vacancy rates run 20-30%. Homes sit on the market for months. Supply meets demand.

Which makes the fine print of this Senate bill even worse than the headline ban. The legislation hands the Treasury Secretary broad authority to redefine the law’s key terms — “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” “excepted purchase” — and to issue new rules as he sees fit.

Penalties for violating the investor ban run up to $1 million per transaction or three times the purchase price — whichever is greater.

Weren’t Republicans supposed to be dismantling the administrative state — the one where unelected bureaucrats rewrite laws instead of Congress?

And Section 205 is the same playbook the federal government has used to drive up costs in healthcare and education — just applied to housing.

First the government hooks communities on federal block grant funding.

Then it uses that funding as a lever: communities that don’t hit Washington’s housing production targets get a 10% cut, and that money gets redistributed to communities that do. The bill even exempts communities that lack the legal authority to change their zoning — which tells you exactly what the penalty is designed to do to everyone else.

The places in America where housing actually works — cheap, available, no 15-month permitting disasters — work precisely because the federal government has left them alone.

This bill starts stretching Washington’s tentacles into local housing rules.

No wonder Elizabeth Warren loves it.

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At the same time, a 34-year-old man named DeCarlos Brown Jr. boarded the train behind her. Within minutes, he pulled a pocketknife from his hoodie and stabbed her three times, including once in the neck.

The video is gut-wrenching. You can see the moment she realized what was happening— her confusion turning to terror. And then she slid down into the seat and bled out in front of an entire train car full of people.

Surveillance footage then captured Brown pacing the train car afterward saying, “I got that white girl.”

Brown was a serial criminal with at least 14 prior arrests including armed robbery and felony larceny. He’d been arrested and released over and over and over again. This man was clearly a danger.

And yet he’d been released onto the streets to commit brutal murder.

It was an absolutely disgusting turn of events… and good-natured Americans were outraged.

Fortunately their outrage was heeded, because Brown was swiftly administered justice for his crime; he was quickly charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced, and he’s already serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Just kidding! Brown has yet to face any justice.

Brown was detained, and the wheels of justice began turning at approximately the speed of tectonic drift. Even in a case like this— caught on camera with multiple witnesses, i.e. a textbook open-and-shut— the system managed to produce a parade of procedural delays, continuances, and jurisdictional tangles between state and federal courts that dragged out for months.

But, hey, at least after all the delays, the trial is finally going to move forward.

Just kidding!

This week Brown was declared unfit to stand trial. So a man with 14 arrests and a brazen murder on his hands is apparently not competent enough to answer for his own crimes.

But if Brown isn’t fit to stand trial, then at least the magistrate who released him onto the streets to commit murder has been arrested and charged for her complicity.

Just kidding! That didn’t happen either.

Teresa Stokes, the local magistrate who declined to incarcerate Brown after 14 arrests, never graduated from law school, nor passed the bar in any state. She wasn’t qualified to adjudicate a traffic ticket, let alone violent crime.

And yet she had broad discretion over whether people like Brown stayed locked up or were released into mental health and addiction treatment programs.

Oh, and by the way— Stokes was simultaneously Director of Operations at Second Chance Services, a mental health and addiction clinic right there in Charlotte.

So the person deciding whether people like Brown walk the streets had a direct financial interest in the very same types of facilities those people get funneled into.

But at least she’s being thoroughly investigated for this conflict of interest.

Just kidding! That’s not happening either.

But at least voters went to the ballot box and tossed out the politicians who appointed her and allowed these systems to rot.

Just kidding!

Well at least the media made a big stink about it, demanding accountability and calling for heads to roll.

Just kidding… the establishment closed ranks, the story faded from the news cycle, and everyone moved on.

And this is precisely why nothing ever really changes in America. There are virtually zero consequences for even the most egregious levels of incompetence. And whenever someone does try to fix things, they get blocked by the system at every turn.

This is the same dynamic that explains why the national debt has barreled past $39 trillion. Why Social Security is racing toward insolvency. Why the Federal Reserve destroyed 25% of the dollar’s value in five years. And not a single person has answered for any of it.

It’s utterly exhausting.

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Hirohito went on what was a relatively new communications medium at the time—the radio— and gave one of the most bizarre speeches in all of human history, in which he told his subjects that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

Talk about an understatement.

It’s one of the more famous examples in a long list throughout history of speeches that have ended conflicts, where leaders paint whatever picture they want.

Perhaps even more famously, Richard Nixon promised “peace with honor” in Vietnam on the campaign trail in 1968.

It was one of the most brilliant political statements of its era, because everyone heard what they wanted to hear. Those who wanted an end to the war heard “peace.” The war hawks heard “honor.” Everyone got what they wanted out of it.

But ultimately there was neither peace nor honor. The war dragged on for seven more years, resulting in a humiliating withdrawal from Saigon in April 1975, complete with desperate helicopter evacuations from the US Embassy rooftop.

This is the sort of stuff that peace deals and conflict resolutions are made of— situations where you can talk out of both sides of your mouth, and both sides of the conflict can declare victory.

And if both sides can claim victory, that’s actually a good thing. Because the only other way to end a war is to have the other side so utterly demolished that they have no choice but to accept defeat.

The alternative is to give both sides an out.

That’s what’s happening with Iran.

It’s a strange situation from a military and strategic perspective given that Iran has been objectively obliterated; major infrastructure is demolished, key leadership was assassinated, the military is weakened, the government is vulnerable— and yet Iran actually thinks they are winning. Or at least they act like it.

It reminds me of when Charlie Sheen was on a three-day cocaine binge giving live interviews and talking about “winning.” That’s Iran right now.

The reason is because the American media is so deranged, so pro-Iran and anti-Trump, that they have managed to convince the Iranians that they are much stronger than they actually are.

But at this point the political realities have started surfacing in the US. The administration is worried about high gas prices and the midterms, and there’s a lot of pressure to end the conflict.

Now there’s an arrangement where both sides can declare victory. The US can say they accomplished their objectives — dismantled Iran’s military and defense capabilities, degraded their nuclear program, eliminated key leadership, and dismantled their ability to fund and spread terror.

And the Iranians can say they stood up to the ‘evil empire’ and forced the Americans to walk away.

That is essentially what both sides are saying right now. And while the full implications remain to be seen, this is where the proverbial rubber meets the road.

We’ve been saying since this war started that it could end up being a very big deal for the fate of the United States… so what happens during negotiations over the next few weeks is crucial.

On one hand, there is a possibility they could strike a deal to lift sanctions against Iran and allow Iranian oil to be sold on the global market— as long as it’s priced in US dollars.

Between Iran and Venezuela, that could create a massive financial incentive for the whole world to continue to hold US dollars, and thus to buy US government bonds.

But it could just as easily go the other way if the Iranians continue to think they are in a position of strength and that they have the advantage.

One thing we can be pretty sure about is that there probably won’t be a resolution in two weeks.

I couldn’t help but think of the infamous “two weeks to stop the spread” when COVID first emerged. That was an unrealistic timetable then, and two weeks is an unrealistic timetable now.

International negotiations are extremely difficult, and the tried and true tactic of rogue-nation geopolitics is to let negotiations drag on.

The Soviets perfected this approach. Their strategy was always to exhaust the negotiation partner. Westerners tend to like quick and speedy deals, but rogue nations in general tend to use that impatience to their advantage. So it’s hard to believe in the two-week time frame.

But the clock has certainly started, however long it takes. And by the end we should have a very good sense for what this means for America.

The consequences could be massive— for inflation, for the dollar, for bond markets, for the trajectory of the entire US economy.

This could still be a deal that helps prop up the dollar and US government bonds for years, if not decades, to come. But if that doesn’t happen, the best-case scenario is probably a stalemate where both sides walk away, flip the switch, turn off the war, almost pretend it never happened. And hopefully the world just ignores it and gives America a pass.

Time will tell. But probably not in the next two weeks.

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I’m not talking about watching it on a screen or catching a glimpse from some corporate hospitality tent. I mean standing close enough to feel the ground shake when eight horses come at full gallop, close enough to hear the mallet connect. It’s the closest thing to medieval combat that still exists – fast, physical, and genuinely impressive.

We had a private match organized just for our group, at one of the most exclusive polo clubs in Argentina.

And somehow, it was the least exciting thing we did all week.

I’m Viktorija, CEO of Schiff Sovereign. I’m based between Mexico City and Panama, but spend most of my time traveling – scouting investments, finding undervalued real estate, meeting the kind of people who actually know what’s happening inside a country before the headlines catch up. I know what momentum looks like. And Argentina has it right now.

Which is remarkable, if you know the backstory.

This was, not long ago, one of the world’s great cautionary tales. Decades of Peronist mismanagement, currency crises that wiped out savings overnight, a sovereign debt default of over $100 billion. By 2023, inflation had hit 211%. Not a typo. Two hundred and eleven percent. Ordinary people were watching their money lose value faster than they could spend it.

So they did something drastic. In late 2023, they elected Javier Milei – an “anarcho-capitalist” economist who campaigned with a literal chainsaw as a prop and promised to use it. And then, in office, he actually did.

The shock therapy was real and it was painful. Poverty spiked to 53% in early 2024. The protests were widespread and angry. Nobody was pretending this was painless.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Argentina’s GDP grew 4.4% in 2025 – the strongest expansion the country had seen in years. Inflation, starting from that 211% ceiling, has now fallen to its lowest level in eight years. Poverty has dropped back to 32% – the lowest since 2018. The turnaround is happening faster than almost anyone expected, and faster than most people outside Argentina realize.

When you’re on the ground, you feel it before you can explain it.

I recently brought a group of 16 people here as part of Total Access, our highest-tier membership. We spent time with real estate developers in Buenos Aires, walked through their projects, and saw firsthand what early-stage capital deployment looks like in a country that’s turning a corner. Construction is booming. Foreign capital is flooding in. The mood is genuinely different from even a year ago.

But the most interesting part of the trip wasn’t the real estate.

I invited a friend to join us for lunch – one of a very small number of people formally approved by the Argentine government to advise on the new citizenship by investment law.

Argentina has become the first South American country to offer citizenship by investment, under Decree 524/2025 signed in July 2025 – with no prior residency requirement and a target processing time of just 30 business days.

The minimum investment is expected to be around $500,000 into qualifying productive sectors. Full program launch is expected in the second half of 2026, and the details are still being finalized – which is exactly why having one of the short list of people worth talking to at our table matters.

This is the stage where having that kind of connection gives you a meaningful head start.

The Argentine passport offers visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to over 170 countries, including the EU Schengen Area, the UK, and Japan – and the US recently kickstarted the process for Argentina to rejoin the Visa Waiver Program.

For a $500,000 investment, that’s a serious passport at a competitive price point.

Later in the week, through one of our Total Access members, we were invited to an Ambassador’s private residence where he showed us how he lives, shared personal stories, and afterwards joined us for dinner.

We hiked and rode horses through the mountains around Bariloche, and had front-row seats at Swan Lake at the iconic Teatro Colón.

One of Argentina’s most celebrated chefs invited us to his home, cooked a traditional Argentine meal from scratch, and shared the recipe with us afterwards.

But the moments that stood out most were the conversations no travel agent can arrange – the kind that happen over long dinners with people who actually know what’s happening inside a country.

And of course, sharing those moments with other members.

The trip was so well-received that I’m heading back next week with a second Total Access group.

This is what we do at Schiff Sovereign.

On one hand, we’re clear-eyed about the problems – the fiscal trajectory of the US, the erosion of the dollar, the risks most people aren’t paying attention to yet. We don’t sugarcoat that.

On the other hand, we spend just as much energy finding the opportunities those same conditions create. Undervalued markets. Second residencies. Real assets.

Places like Argentina – not a perfect place, just a place where the gap between perception and reality is wide enough to be genuinely interesting, and where the story on the ground is more compelling than the one being told about it.

The world isn’t falling apart. It’s reshuffling – and that reshuffle creates real opportunity for people who are paying attention.

You can read about Argentina, study Milei’s policies, follow the data. That’s useful. But what you can’t get from reading is sitting across from the people who are actually building there, on the ground.

That kind of access comes from relationships built over years – and that’s exactly what Total Access is about. The right rooms, the right people, the right conversations at the right time, with a group who share the same values and curiosity about the world.

Information is everywhere. The network is rare.

And in a world reshuffling this fast, that network might be the most valuable asset you have.

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