And yet, despite stocks being up and investors positively effervescent, it is indeed a sad day, because today marks the first real capitulation by the Treasury Department.

Stocks are up because the Treasury Department announced this morning that it will double repurchases of long-dated government bonds. If that sounds boring and mundane, it’s not.

For the past several weeks, Treasury yields have been skyrocketing. Our readers won’t be surprised by this— we’ve been predicting this and telling the story for quite some time.

In short, the bond market is rapidly losing confidence in America. And that’s especially true for foreign governments and central banks.

For most of the past eighty years, pretty much every foreign government on the planet parked their national savings in US government bonds. It was a no-brainer. US Treasury bonds paid interest. They were extremely liquid and could be sold in seconds. And they are backed by the wealthiest, most powerful, most creditworthy nation on Earth.

So the rest of the world happily lent their financial surpluses to the US government and asked few questions.

At peak (in 2011), foreigners owned nearly half of all marketable US Treasury bonds. Fifteen years later they hold less than a third, and that proportion is sliding quickly.

Earlier this week the Treasury Department reported that foreigners continue to trim their holdings of US government bonds. In fact, so far this year, foreigners have only purchased 7% of net US debt issuance. In June, their purchases of Treasury bonds and notes fell 88% in a single month, and once you add in the Treasury bills they sold, foreigners were net SELLERS of US government debt.

It’s not hard to understand why; between the political theater, rising deficits, and inability to cut even obvious fraud, foreigners are no longer as willing to risk lending money to America… especially when they have to take that risk for three decades (i.e. holding a 30-year Treasury bond).

As a result, foreigners are selling. And as they sell, the natural consequence of the bond market is that Treasury yields have been rising… especially for the least popular securities like the 30-year Treasury bond.

This morning the US government officially staged an intervention. They signaled to the bond market, and to the world, that they’re willing to step in and buy back their own debt in order to prop up the market.

Investors cheered. But, again, this is actually quite sad news. It is tantamount to the Treasury Department capitulating and acknowledging that they have lost the confidence of foreign investors.

We’ve been writing about this trend for quite some time, encouraging our readers to consider investing in gold… as well as gold producers.

In our most recent edition of Schiff Sovereign: Premium, for example, we wrote about three major gold companies that we believed were significantly undervalued. They’re all up 10% just this morning… because gold is on an absolute tear.

Why gold?

As foreign governments and central banks have been moving out of US dollars, they’ve had to park that money into some other asset. At the moment, gold is realistically the only viable strategic reserve asset that is extremely liquid, widely accepted around the world, and carries zero counter-party risk.

Foreign countries have already been buying up gold over the past few years as their confidence in the US has waned; from 2022 through 2025 they bought a few hundred billion dollars’ worth— roughly 2% of their financial reserves. And that modest purchase alone took the gold price from about $1,600 to more than $4,000.

Global central banks are back in the gold market buying again today. And since we can’t exactly hold our breath that the US government is going to get its fiscal house in order anytime soon, we can only conclude that the central bank gold-buying trend will continue… and accelerate.

This trend is bad for America. But it’s good for gold. And it’s even better for gold producers.

P.S. One of the other companies we’ve covered in Premium, a gold producer, is up a bit this week, but we still think it is wildly undervalued. So does its own CEO, who told analysts on this week’s earnings call that the company is “significantly undervalued.”

It has no debt, just reported the most profitable first half in its history, and trades at roughly two times its annual cash flow.

We walk through the numbers in our latest edition of Schiff Sovereign: Premium, which is just $9 per month. Click here to learn more.

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Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius!

Among its various provisions, part of the legislation authorized the government to negotiate prescription drug prices. Seems like a nice idea in principle… but in practice it’s been a disaster.

The Congressional Budget Office released the results late last month: the Medicare drug provisions that were supposed to generate $129 billion in savings will now add $700 billion to the deficit.

Sometimes it seems like this is the whole idea; given the rampant Medicare fraud that gets uncovered on a daily basis, it’s clear that politicians have an incentive to steer MORE money into the program.

Healthcare is the easiest spending in Washington to justify. Every dollar comes with the same argument: if we don’t spend on healthcare, people will die!

It ends up being so much money— a giant, dark pool of corruption— and a lot of it gets funneled straight back into the political process as campaign contributions. And it’s been going on for ages.

Back in 2002, for example, America’s biggest health-care workers union spent about $800,000 electing Rod Blagojevich governor of Illinois. He later thanked them “for electing me governor.”

Weeks after he took office, Blagojevich signed multiple executive orders that fattened the union’s pockets, like forcing more healthcare workers to join… and automatically deducting union dues from their paychecks. Bad for the unionized workers, but great for the union bosses.

In New York, the Greater New York Hospital Association wrote two checks totaling more than $1 million to the state Democratic Party in August 2018, at then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign’s request.

Three months later the state ordered its first across-the-board Medicaid rate increase since 2008, worth about $140 million a year. Great news for the hospital association.

The cycle never ends— the unions and associations scratch the politicians’ backs, and in turn get their backs scratched. No one can rationally expect those parties to walk away from their mutual benefit.

And this is just the ‘honest’ graft and corruption… it doesn’t take into account the outright fraud.

During COVID, Medicare paid for eight test kits per month, per person, in America. Yet an inspector general later found it paid up to $454 million for nearly 39 million kits over that limit.

In June, the Justice Department found over $6.5 billion in fake health-care claims. Yet agents recovered only $182 million in cash and assets, less than three cents per dollar of fraud.

In one instance, a pair of adult day care operators fraudulently billed Medicare and Medicaid $120 million over a decade. One of their centers claimed 1,041 attendees in a single day while the building’s occupancy limit was 81.

Then Nick Shirley walked into the neighborhood’s facilities with a camera this summer and turned up $190 million more in suspicious billing.

And yet very little of the fraud gets stopped… in large part because a portion of what they steal from the government is funneled back to the politicians (mostly on the Left) who vote for more Medicare spending.

These same politicians install activist judges at the state and federal level, ensuring that anyone who tries to stop the fraud will be sued… and blocked by the courts.

As an example, last year Congress voted to cut off Planned Parenthood from Medicaid for one year.

Planned Parenthood sued. Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee in Boston, dutifully blocked the cut within weeks, and the appeals court had to overrule her twice before the law could take effect.

Feeding Our Future, the Minnesota child-meal Somali fraud network, had the audacity to sue the state for racial discrimination when the fraudulent money train slowed down.

It’s extraordinary; there are so many checks-and-balances in place to keep the graft  going.

The politicians vote to keep the money moving. The judges defend it to the last Somali. And the activists and the media scream that anyone asking questions is racist; Governor Tim Walz called the fraud talk “vile, racist lies.”

The teachers’ unions march the kids out of school for union causes and No Kings rallies, as if the kids had any idea what they were marching for. And the universities continue the socialist indoctrination.

Media, education, courts: the whole institutional layer exists to keep the money flowing.

So of course they want more of it.

Senator Bernie Sanders reintroduced Medicare for All last year, and the movement that just made Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York wants to make this slush fund the entire health-care system.

Even the most conservative estimate puts the price at $32.6 trillion over the first decade; that’s an astonishing amount of potential fraud.

The US could get its fiscal house in order if it shut this slush fund down. But the graft is deeply entrenched… so it’s likely that US deficit spending will continue in order to pay for it all.

Foreign governments have reached the same conclusion: The US has to go deeper into debt in order to finance hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud.

That’s a major reason why foreign governments and central banks are diversifying away from the dollar. And with no obvious global currency to park their financial reserves into, they buy gold.

We have been making this argument for the past few years, since gold was below $1800. This sort of news makes the case even more strongly: the story hasn’t changed… and gold remains a great hedge for the fiscal uncertainty to come.

PS: In this month’s Schiff Sovereign Premium, we made the case for a gold producer built for exactly this outlook: a debt-free, dividend-paying, highly successful gold company which just had the most profitable first-half in its company history. But it only trades at 2x cash flow.

If the fraud and deficits continue, gold should do very well… and successful producers can do even better.

Click here to learn more about Schiff Sovereign Premium.

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And if he were still alive today, Walton would be the second-richest man in the world, just behind Elon Musk… and ahead of Zuckerberg, Ellison, the Google guys, etc.

That’s a pretty impressive feat for a guy whose core business is basically being a gigantic grocery store.

Selling food is an extremely low margin business. And Walton’s success was built on a fanatical adherence to cost control and efficiency— being able to squeeze every penny of savings possible from the entire supply chain, and passing those savings on to the customer.

In short, he made a fraction of a cent on every sale… but generated more sales than any company in the history of the world.

It’s fascinating that Sam Walton dedicated his life to perfecting this business model. Yet Comrade-Mayor Zohran Mamdani— who has never operated a business in his entire life— thinks he can do a better job than Walton.

A few weeks ago, Mamdani’s team published their formal RFP (request for proposal) for contractors to build five city-owned grocery stores in New York City— one per borough.

Mamdani’s objective is to sell staple foods like milk, eggs, bread, etc. at a 30% discount to the supermarkets down the street.

So apparently these socialists believe that 30% is the amount that “Big Grocery” is gouging them… which shows just how little they understand about business.

Again, groceries are notoriously low margin businesses. If they sell you something for $1, their gross profit is about a penny. Cutting prices by 30% guarantees they will lose money.

Staple consumer items like milk, eggs, chicken, and bread— exactly the products that Mamdani intends to sell at a discount— are some of the LOWEST margin products in the grocery store. Grocers already sell those at rock bottom prices just to get shoppers in the door.

For example, the Giant Eagle supermarket chain sold eggs at or below cost in all of its stores during last year’s bird flu outbreak. Costco sells over 150 million rotisserie chickens a year at $4.99 and loses tens of millions of dollars on them.

Grocers treat these staples as loss-leaders; they make up for it by generating small profits from the rest of the shopping cart, i.e. items like soda, snacks, prepared foods, and specialty items.

There is simply no fat to cut on staple items… and certainly nowhere near 30%. In fact, let’s take a quick look at how the supply chain works— starting from the grocery store and working backwards.

We already showed how grocers will barely break even, i.e. they sell a staple food for $1, and they make no money.

Before them are the major food distributors who supply the grocery stores.

Sysco, the country’s biggest food distributor, keeps about two cents out of of every dollar it charges. The transportation companies hauling the food keep around three cents.

One step further back is the food processor. Tyson Foods, the largest meat company in America lost a billion dollars selling beef last year. Its core chicken business is generally profitable, but highly cyclical, and they have swung to nine-figure losses when feed costs spike.

Yet even the farmers themselves who supply the processors or grow the grain typically lose money; over 1,000 American dairy farms closed last year alone, and Illinois farmers growing the feed corn are on track to lose $70 to $110 an acre on this year’s crop, their fourth losing year in a row. And that’s after their government subsidy checks.

Nobody in the food chain for staple goods is making real money. Farming, feed, processing, trucking, distribution, retail: every link runs on pennies. A 30% price cut cannot come out of anyone’s profit, because the profit does not exist.

Comrade-Mayor Mamdani and his merry band of socialists either don’t understand that, or have decided it doesn’t matter because the taxpayer will absorb it.

Now, the city won’t run the stores itself. Mamdani will pay a contractor to run them… But since the stores are designed to lose money, the city will send the operator a check every year to cover the losses.

How big will the check be? Nobody knows.

But on opening day, if the city really is selling the cheapest chicken in the borough, people will come buy all of it. Restaurant managers will stock up on cheap chicken to resell to their customers. Consumers will fill their freezers with it.

All that chicken will vanish in an instant, just like a deep-discount TV during a Black Friday sale.

Naturally the Comrade-Mayor will take steps to prevent this. But how?

Initially they said you would need to show ID at the grocery store. But they quickly backtracked because, obviously, ID is racist. So now they’re pitching the idea of something like a library card.

You need to show ID to get the card, and the card to buy the chicken. But apparently that’s not racist?

Naturally the card would need to track how much chicken a single consumer purchases in order to prevent people from going to multiple stores and buying out the whole inventory.

But if that’s the case, it’s not a library card. It’s a ration card. And that’s been a staple of every socialist disaster for over a century.

Running a grocery on a tiny margin is one of the hardest operating problems in retail. Order too much fresh food and it rots in the back room; order too little and the shelves sit empty.

Walmart survives on that knife’s edge with some of the most advanced logistics technology on earth.

For example, they discovered decades ago that that strawberry Pop-Tarts sell at seven times their normal pace ahead of a hurricane— which is why trucks full of them roll toward the Florida coast before a storm hits.

Capitalism works through specialization— specialists spend their entire careers perfecting one tiny sliver of that machine to claw back a fraction of a point of margin.

The farmer, the trucker, and the supply-chain engineer each spend a lifetime becoming ruthlessly good at one narrow thing, and the penny of margin is the reward for doing it almost perfectly.

Mamdani quotes Karl Marx and thinks he can do a better job… even though his government cannot even reliably pick up the garbage.

These are the same people who want to run health care, housing, and energy.

Frankly I couldn’t be happier. The socialists finally got what they wanted: they’re in power, in the spotlight. And they’re about to prove once and for all that their entire ideology is a complete and total disaster.

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Two weeks earlier, students and factory workers had risen up against the Soviet-installed puppet government in Hungary. They pulled down Stalin’s statue, rampaged across the city, and even managed to push Soviet forces out of Budapest.

Moscow initially signaled that it was ready to negotiate and consider a full withdrawal. The bells of freedom started ringing. But it turned out to be a ruse— and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev swiftly sent in the tanks.

The Soviets brutally crushed the uprising in days, killing around 2,500 Hungarians and displacing 200,000 who fled the country.

In the reprisals that followed, tens of thousands more were arrested, and hundreds were hanged— including Hungary’s prime minister, who was tricked into surrendering with a promise of safe passage.

President Dwight Eisenhower condemned the invasion and opened America’s doors to roughly 30,000 Hungarian refugees. He then made his case to the United Nations, where the UN General Assembly demanded a full Soviet withdrawal from Hungary. Kruschev ignored them.

Eisenhower was clearly opposed to Soviet aggression. But America did exercise restraint— the President did not touch Soviet money that was held in the US.

It’s crazy to think that, even during the height of the Cold War, the Soviets held a stockpile of US dollars within the US financial system. They had no choice. Global commerce (including oil sales) took place in dollars, so even America’s mortal enemy needed to hold US currency.

Eisenhower could have easily confiscated Soviet assets. Yet not one Soviet account was frozen. Not one asset blocked… even as Soviet tanks shelled a defenseless European capital.

Similarly, twenty-three years later when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter reacted harshly. He cut off certain trade with the USSR, including grain and technology. And most famously he led a 65-country boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

But even Jimmy Carter did not freeze Soviet assets.

Decades later, in August 2008, Russia invaded the Republic of Georgia. President George W. Bush condemned the invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Georgia, and ended support for Russia’s World Trade Organization bid.

Yet he did not touch any Russian money held in the US.

Three presidents from both parties, across five decades, watched America’s biggest adversary invade other countries… but they still chose to keep the money out of it.

America had become Switzerland: a neutral custodian that fiercely protected anyone’s savings, regardless of politics. The trust ran so deep that through every proxy war and nuclear standoff, even the Soviet Union held their enemy’s currency inside their enemy’s financial system. That’s how confident the Soviets were in America’s financial neutrality.

That wasn’t about keeping Moscow happy. It showed the world that assets in America were safe… and that was traditionally a huge reason why foreign governments parked trillions of dollars in US government bonds… and why the Treasury Department could borrow endlessly to fund its deficits.

But this policy of financial neutrality changed in February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. The US pushed its allies to freeze roughly $300 billion of Russian assets.

To be clear, this is not a moral discussion. I’m not arguing whether it was right or wrong; rather, this is about setting precedent. Russia did not attack or invade the United States; they attacked Ukraine— a country with which the US did not have a mutual defense treaty.

For years leading up to the Ukraine invasion, the US government had started politicizing its financial system, weaponizing the dollar, and levying occasional sanctions when foreign countries or banks stepped out of line.

But freezing the reserves of a major power was a massive acceleration.

Consequently, America’s reputation as a financial safe haven vanished on the spot.

Foreign governments were already worried about the gigantic US national debt, political dysfunction in Washington, and deep social divisions. The Russian asset freeze was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

The first lesson that foreign nations concluded was the importance of holding gold as a strategic financial reserve.

Rather than deposit US dollars in a big Wall Street bank, or hold US government bonds, foreign governments concluded that it was much safer to have physical gold sitting in their own country— no one could confiscate it, freeze it, or inflate it away.

That’s why central banks around the world began diversifying out the US dollar and into gold: roughly 2% of strategic reserves (above normalized annual net purchases) between 2022 and 2025 was invested in gold.

And that modest shift— just 2%— caused the gold price to more than double. As we covered earlier this week, central banks plan on investing a whole lot more into gold.

Gold was the key lesson of Ukraine. Then came the lesson of Iran.

Until this year, few governments worried much about the availability of critical assets like energy, food, fertilizer, microprocessors, etc.

But then US and Israeli forces struck Iran in late February, and Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz. More than five months later, the strait is still too dangerous for most commercial traffic, and many countries are running short on those same critical resources that transit the Gulf.

The lesson of Iran is that the world runs on strategic assets, and access to them can vanish overnight.

Their conclusion is that, again, rather than stockpile US dollars via government bonds and bank deposits, it makes a lot more sense to stockpile strategic assets— like fertilizer, energy, etc.

At a minimum, whenever the situation in Iran comes to its conclusion, countries will have to buy oceans of oil just to top off their strategic petroleum reserves. Our guess is they’ll go far beyond that and build the capacity to store even more.

And not just oil. Anything critical and strategic is now a candidate for the stockpile, because the old days of global cooperation and easy trade are gone, replaced by mistrust, conflict, and resource nationalism.

That means base metals, rare earths, and technology itself, from memory chips to sovereign compute capacity.

This trend is still in its early stages, and the companies that own and produce these critical assets stand to do very well.

We’ve featured many of them, from energy to metals, in Schiff Sovereign’s investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

And this environment has been very good to them: several are trading at all-time highs right now; the crude tanker company we covered just reported the best quarter in its history, and a zinc producer is up almost 3x in under nine months.

In the most recent issue, we told readers about a small oil producer which is becoming wildly successful profit machine; it has no debt, excellent management, yet trades at just three times its current free cash flow.

If you would like to read the full case, you can try Strategic Assets with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. Click here to learn more.

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Through his fame and creativity, Voltaire managed to attract a small army of Swiss watchmakers to relocate across the border into France and set up shop in Ferney. As part of the deal, he personally negotiated special tax incentives for his watchmakers, exempting them from some of the most onerous French national taxes.

Voltaire’s tax incentives were personally signed off by France’s comptroller general, Jacques Turgot… and all of Ferney celebrated their success.

Unfortunately, even a formal deal with the French government didn’t stop the local “tax farmers” from coming to collect.

For most of the 1700s, the royal court in France had delegated the collection of its complex system of taxes and duties to private citizens who were known as tax farmers. Tax farmers would essentially bid against each other to pay the government a fixed sum of money up front each year, which the treasury would then claim as tax revenue. Tax farmers would then have the full authority of the state to go all over the cities and the countryside to collect.

As they were obviously running a business, their primary motivation was to generate the highest possible return on investment by any means necessary. And it didn’t take long for tax farmers to turn into mafia-like organizations that would send roaming gangs across the country to threaten and extort every last penny they could get from French citizens.

Even though Voltaire had negotiated directly with the French government for his region’s tax exemptions, the tax farmers still came to Ferney and brutalized the local population. Voltaire wrote to a friend in late 1775 that the tax farmers “marched about in groups of fifty, stopped all the vehicles, searched all the pockets, forced their way into all the houses and made every kind of damage,” to collect money from the citizens of Ferney.

This was not an aberration; stories of widespread abuse by tax farmers were legendary in pre-revolutionary France. In the year 1783 alone, tax farmers carried out more than 4,000 house searches and arrested roughly 20,000 people. Confiscation of property, homes, clothes, and horses was routine. And the financial incentives were perverse, with the person who ratted out a suspected tax delinquent earning one-third of the confiscated property.

Unsurprisingly, most of these tax farmers would be put to the guillotine after 1789.

Sadly, this concept is starting to make a comeback in the land of the free, where governments are outsourcing tax collection to private businesses, which have a financial incentive to be excessive and overly suspicious.

A large part of this is because roughly half of the states are in financial distress. This is a consequence of the federal government pulling the plug on certain slush fund programs that have fattened state coffers since the COVID days.

As a result, states are having to find ways to make ends meet. And that starts with keeping their tax codes deliberately complex and outdated. Doing so means that almost everybody is going to be guilty of some violation, because it’s nearly impossible to remain in compliance with a tax code that often contradicts itself.

States then empower private companies to go out and collect, to find infractions wherever they may be, and extort money from productive citizens. This is a much easier approach for them than doing the hard work to balance their budgets and live within their means.

Here’s an easy example: it’s completely normal now for a business to have remote workers. And often those workers might be in another city, another state, or even another country.

Tax rules in many states have never caught up to this new paradigm. Hence, many state governments still want their pound of flesh, even though workers don’t set foot anywhere near their jurisdictions.

Rules in New York state, for example, are completely incomprehensible. A nonresident employee who works remotely from another state can still be considered a New York worker whenever staying home is for the employee’s convenience rather than the employer’s necessity.

There is, of course, no guidance on how necessity versus convenience is determined. It’s a gray area and leaves a lot of room for interpretation by a tax collector who has a financial incentive to extort businesses with out-of-state remote workers.

The fact is, it’s impossible for businesses with several employees in several states to get all of this right.

Every multi-state business is in violation of something, somewhere, and the only question is who finds it first.

And this is only one small example. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of outdated tax regulations at the state and local levels for which compliance is simply not feasible.

Private companies receive anywhere from 12% to 20% of the amount they collect, and they engage in any number of creative ways to find delinquents. They’ll license proprietary location data, including cell phone tower logs, toll records, and even credit card statements, and when all else fails, sometimes they’ll just make stuff up to intimidate taxpayers into writing a big check.

You will absolutely hear more about this, if not experience it for yourself. Readers of this letter know without a doubt that the US federal government is in deep financial turmoil, with a national debt of nearly $40 trillion and roughly $2 trillion in annual deficits.

But many states are in far worse shape. And they don’t have the luxury of being able to print the world’s reserve currency to make ends meet. Rather than make the difficult choices to balance their budgets, they will turn to milking their citizens like dairy cows and outsourcing the collection to a new generation of tax farmers.

P.S. Working out where your business, your assets, and your family legally belong is exactly what our flagship research service, Schiff Sovereign’s Plan B Confidential, was built for.

Every month it covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, legal tax reduction, and real assets, reported from more than 120 countries so the options come with real costs attached.

You can learn more here.

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These stockpiles of cash around the world are known as a nation’s “reserves”, and the people who manage those funds are called reserve managers.

Due to America’s superpower status, managers tend to hold the vast majority of their nations’ reserves in US dollars— most commonly in US government bonds like the 10-year note.

Now, every year, a London institute called OMFIF surveys dozens of these reserve managers who collectively hold more than $10 trillion— and OMFIF asks the same question each year:

What does your central bank plan to do with its US dollars?

This year, for the first time, more reserve managers said they planned to cut their dollar holdings than increase them.

Reserve managers are the least excitable people in finance. Their job is to be boring, to hold safe assets, and to never make news. So this is not an emotional knee-jerk reaction. It is a decision that has been decades in the making and accelerated over the past few years.

The critical moment came in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine; the US government froze roughly $300 billion of Russia’s reserves, i.e. assets that were held outside of Russia.

Interestingly enough, many of those frozen Russian assets were actually held in EUROPE, not the United States. But the US government still exerted control, pushing Europe to freeze those Russian-owned bonds.

Every reserve manager on the planet learned the same lesson that day: if you ever land on America’s bad side, the US government will lock you out of your national savings in an instant.

And it was at that point that central banks around the world started shopping around for more secure reserve assets that the Treasury Department cannot freeze.

Given that foreign countries collectively hold tens of trillions of assets (most of which is denominated in US dollars), they couldn’t exactly dump their holdings overnight. No one is willing to shout “FIRE” in a crowded theater; but they are, however, calmly making their way to the door.

But this process will take years, perhaps even a decade or more.

The key question is— where are they going to park their reserves, if not US dollars? There certainly have been a number of lingering options, from the “BRICs dollar” to China’s digital currency.

But the obvious answer (as we have been writing about for years here) is gold.

From 2022 through 2025, central banks bought a few hundred billion dollars worth of gold (above their normal purchases). This amounts to roughly 2% of their reserves.

Yet by parking just 2% of their reserves into gold, gold prices more than doubled from ~$1,600 back then to more than $4,000 today.

It’s important to note that the sudden spike in gold prices to $5,600 early this year wasn’t from central bank purchases— that was mostly hedge funds and retail investors piling in.

Gold prices slid back down to $4,000 as those investors exited. But central banks have started buying again; net central bank purchases amounted to 244 tonnes in the first quarter of 2026— well above their five-year average. And net purchases continued in April and May.

The big headline is that those same central bank reserve managers recently told OMFIF that they plan on moving AT LEAST another 7% of reserves out of dollars over the next decade.

Most likely the bulk of this reserve diversification will go into gold.

In other words, 2% of reserves more than doubled the gold price between 2022 and 2026. Now they plan to invest over three times that amount over the next decade. Any guesses where the gold price is headed?

These bankers also expect to pay more for gold; 61% of the central banks OMFIF surveyed estimated a gold between $5,000 and $6,000 an ounce by June 2027. And yet, even at record prices, most of them still plan to buy gold over the next two years.

Think about that. The institutions that just bought the gold price dip expect the price to go up within a year… and their stated plan is to keep buying more.

Most individual investors are very short-term in their thinking. They look at day-to-day price fluctuations and tend to follow popular trends.

Central bankers, on the other hand, ignore daily, monthly, and quarterly noise. They think strategically… and their time horizon is in years if not decades.

They’re not doing this to make money; they aren’t planning to trade their US dollars for gold, only hoping to trade their gold back for more US dollars down the road.

Rather, they’re trying to protect their national savings by purchasing strategic assets that the US government cannot confiscate.

Ultimately this is why we believe that the long-term direction of gold is still much higher— because the largest buyers in the market are still buying, and they plan to continue buying for years to come.

P.S. When retail investors dumped gold this year, they dumped the gold producers too. But these companies were built to survive far lower prices, so at today’s gold they are still enormously profitable, still throwing off cash, and still trading at low multiples of the cash they generate.

Schiff Sovereign’s Strategic Assets is monthly investment research on exactly these kinds of businesses: already profitable, little or no debt, trading at a low multiple of free cash flow, with catalysts the market has not priced in.

Strategic Assets comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Click here to learn more.

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His story, as told in a decade of glowing profiles, was the stuff of Hollywood. Arday was autistic and nonverbal until age 11, and could not read or write until 18. He was epileptic, yet ran 30 marathons in 35 days, and later 600 miles in six days.

He beat a brain tumor around the time he finished his PhD. He had played both soccer and snooker at a professional level, raised millions of pounds for charity, and even appeared as a child in “Seven Up,” the most famous documentary series in British history.

Everyone printed his story without question: the BBC, CBS News, the universities themselves. For years, nobody blinked.

There was just one problem. It was all made up.

And it should have been obvious. “Seven Up” began filming twenty-one years before Arday was born.

Arday made the claim he was on the original show in a 2022 interview, and no one bothered to do the math to realize that it was impossible for him to be on the show. It was the same as claiming that he had been part of the cast of Gone with the Wind.

Yet only this summer, when confronted with the arithmetic, did he start to change his story and insist that he had been talking about some other project, not “Seven Up”.

The rest of his resume crumbled the same way. On July 30, the University of Bath corrected a blog post that had him playing professional soccer and touring professional snooker, and apologized to Arday for allegedly misquoting him.

His fallback claim, semi-professional soccer for a club he never names, conveniently can’t be checked; snooker’s databases record one amateur match with zero prize money.

Reporters hunting for the money behind his claimed £5.5 million in charity found traceable donations in the thousands.

So how does a resume this fake survive for eleven years? Because at every step, the institutions whose job it was to check decided to just believe instead.

It started in 2015, when Liverpool John Moores University awarded Arday his PhD. His examiners missed more than 100 passages copied nearly verbatim from another academic’s 2009 thesis.

By September 2025, Times Higher Education, Britain’s leading academic publication, had built a 63-page dossier documenting the plagiarism. Arday’s defamation firm, Carter-Ruck, sent the magazine a letter calling its reporting a “targeted campaign” that “may be, whether consciously or unconsciously, racially motivated.” The magazine killed its own story.

Its reporter, Jack Grove, kept asking questions anyway. So the Metropolitan Police opened a harassment investigation into Grove, for emailing a professor questions about his resume, and warned him to stop because Arday’s mental health was suffering.

In March 2026, Liverpool John Moores University finally examined the plagiarism and ruled it “honest and reasonable error.” An analysis commissioned by the Telegraph would later put the odds of that “honest” overlap occurring at roughly one in 100 billion.

The PhD stood. Arday never disputed the copying itself; his defense was that he hadn’t received adequate supervision, given his autism and learning disabilities.

Cambridge knew about all of it and did nothing. So in June, one of its own faculty members gave up and handed the case to an outside academic, Nathan Cofnas. He published everything in late July, and within days the real story of Arday’s lies were being reported in the press.

Cambridge’s response was to declare Arday the “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”

As the scandal grew, Arday sat for an interview with the Guardian, a paper with no history of hostility toward progressive academics, and piled on new details to the story of his victimhood.

Arday claimed that a masked man had confronted him at his faculty building on two occasions, producing a knife the second time. Someone had mailed a severed pig’s head to his parents.

Then the paper did something Arday clearly wasn’t expecting. It checked.

Cambridge’s security cameras had captured no masked man on either occasion. The Metropolitan Police said Arday’s account of the pig’s head was “categorically” incorrect, and the London butchers the reporters contacted said no police officer had ever investigated. As one put it, “That’s the kind of thing we’d remember.”

When the Guardian came back empty-handed, Arday explained the entire phenomenon in two sentences: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

Unquestioned belief was the only treatment he had ever known. That sounds like quite a privilege.

On August 1, the Guardian published its full fact-check of Arday’s persecution story. Cambridge held out for four more days, then announced on August 5 an investigation into Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments.” Bear in mind, those are the same qualifications it had spent three years celebrating. Arday resigned within hours.

It took eleven years, a whistleblower, a killed exposé, a police file, and national headlines to get one professor’s resume checked. Who knows how many others never make the papers.

Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime. Elizabeth Warren faked being a Native American to be labeled a minority professor at Harvard.

Arday said hold my beer and watch this. And, shielded by his victim status in the world of academia, he got away with the most egregiously absurd lies for over a decade.

A fraud in an ivory tower would be harmless if the ivory tower stayed out of your life. It doesn’t.

Academia is where government shops for its experts: Lina Khan went from Columbia law professor to running the Federal Trade Commission at age 32, where she spent her tenure protecting Americans from cheaper groceries, discounted liquor, video game mergers, and a handbag monopoly.

The COVID lockdowns arrived stamped with academic credentials, and so did gender ideology, critical race theory, and every other policy with “the research shows” attached.

The scandal was never one fibbing professor; it’s that the entire “expert” class gets vetted this carefully.

Arday, at least, finally quit. The institutions that spent eleven years enabling him are still there, still certifying the next crop of experts, still expecting you to just believe them.

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It’s been about 15 years since I moved away from the tiny village in rural Lithuania where I grew up… and back then it still felt run down, backward, post-Soviet.

My whole childhood was basically subsistence farming with my family. Everyone I knew was the same way. Even by the late 1990s we considered touch-tone telephones to be “high tech”, and no one had ever heard of the Internet. 

But last week I led a group of our Total Access members on an intimate tour of Lithuania– from the capital city of Vilnius, to the quiet countryside where my family still lives. And I was blown away by how much had changed.

Sure, the smoke off the charcoal smelled exactly the way I remembered it. Same woods, same white birch pressing in from every side. My niece and her husband ran the whole thing– plates moving, drinks appearing, everyone was handed something before they’d even asked.

But the atmosphere was totally different.

Here’s what it is now. A country of 2.8 million people– smaller than São Paulo–  that’s produced six unicorns since 2020. Vinted. Nord Security. Oxylabs. Cast AI. The former employees of the first wave are now founding the next.

A former textile factory in Vilnius is now Cyber City, housing more than 3,000 tech workers. Robinhood opened a crypto centre there in 2025. Checkout.com followed in 2026.

They aren’t coming for the birch trees. The Bank of Lithuania approves fintech licenses in about three months, the fastest process in Europe, and a Lithuanian license lets a company operate across the entire EU. 

Around 280 fintech firms now operate from the country, and no other EU member has licensed more of them.

There’s also an extremely high level of education tech workers; Vilnius has become a major hub for talent in Europe, hence why so many AI companies are starting here.

The taxes help too. The corporate rate is 17% against an EU average above 21%, and small companies pay nothing at all for their first two years.

None of this is an accident. Lithuania spent decades under Soviet occupation, with Moscow deciding what people could build, buy, and say. When that ended in 1990, the country swung hard in the opposite direction.

The business friendliness isn’t a marketing strategy but a reaction, built by people who remember exactly what the alternative looked like and don’t want to go back.

You can see it on the streets: nice cars, new construction, restaurants that would hold their own in any European capital, and rising over all of it is a well-preserved “old town”, the original medieval city center from 1,000 years ago. 

Apartments in Vilnius average around 3,000 euros per square meter. That puts a 100-square-meter apartment, around 1,100 square feet, in an EU capital at roughly $340,000; in Boston, where condos average about $710 per square foot, the same space runs more than double. 

But just twenty minutes outside the center, extremely well-built houses still go for under 2,000 euros per square meter, with the land practically thrown in for free.

(Our Plan B Confidential research service published a full report on Lithuanian property in November, covering neighborhoods, taxes, and mortgages for foreigners.)

Lithuania grants temporary residency to foreigners who start a business there, and its startup visa fast-tracks founders, family included.

And anyone with a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent who held Lithuanian citizenship before the Soviets invaded in 1940, and who left the country before 1990, may qualify to have that citizenship reinstated without giving up their current passport. That’s an EU passport hiding in the family tree.

My family isn’t in tech. They’re not investors. But the tech-driven economic boom has reached them too… everyone is benefitting. And we took an intimate tour of all of it, so our group could see the transformation from the inside. 

Our Total Access group had just spent four days walking through a former Cold War KGB prison, touring a Nazi execution fort, crawling through crypts beneath a medieval cathedral, and eating at Michelin-starred restaurants.

Now they were standing in my family’s backyard outside Kaunas, looking more relaxed than I’d seen them the entire trip.

I watched one of them– a guy who splits his time between Florida and Medellín, not easily impressed– take a bite of šašlykai and go completely quiet. Šašlykai is what you eat when someone in Lithuania wants to show you they care: meat on skewers, marinated overnight, cooked slowly over charcoal until the whole yard smells like something your body recognizes even if your brain doesn’t.

The next day, we drove Soviet-era and older tanks through a field. It’s loud in a way that rearranges your organs, slower than you’d expect and more violent than you’d hope. Nobody in the group had done it before. And everyone loved it.

But underlying all of it is a quiet economic boom in a place that almost no one has heard about.

If you’ve never heard much about Lithuania, that’s the point. The window on places like this doesn’t stay open forever.

One honest warning: Lithuania in winter is genuinely awful. We went in the right season. Plan accordingly.

P.S. This trip was part of Total Access–  our membership that takes a small group of people to places most travelers never see, with access they wouldn’t find on their own. If that sounds like something you want to be part of, you can learn more and apply here.

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Tar-iq’s army was the western tip of a new Islamic empire that had just finished sweeping across North Africa. Spain’s Visigothic kings— the Germanic dynasty that had taken the peninsula from a collapsing Roman Empire— were busy fighting a civil war among themselves, and by some accounts one faction invited the Muslim invaders in to help settle it. The invaders stayed.

Within seven years, the Moors, as the Muslim Arabs and Berbers of Iberia came to be known, ruled nearly all of Spain… and taking it back took the Spanish nearly 800 years of grinding reconquest— a war that finally ended in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada.

Five centuries later, Spain has apparently decided it wants its invaders back.

In a ruling that surfaced in early July, Spain’s own Supreme Court decided that migrants intercepted at sea while swimming toward Ceuta (the Spanish exclave in North Africa) can no longer be turned back on the spot.

The judges reasoned that the normal rules by which Spanish authorities can refuse illegals at the border DO NOT APPLY because a swimmer never actually crosses a physical border. Triathletes— take note.

Word traveled fast. Last week, as you probably saw, roughly 60,000 people poured into Ceuta from the sea. Bear in mind that Ceuta’s entire permanent population is only about 83,000.

According to Spanish officials at least 88 people died either having drowned at sea or crushed against the breakwater.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the crossings “an attack” and “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity” and sent in the army, apparently without pausing to reflect that it was his own country’s policies that had opened the door.

Here is what Spain currently offers an asylum seeker:

• The state provides up to 18 months of housing and meals
• Plus a monthly cash allowance
• Plus reimbursements for clothing, transportation, and education
• Healthcare is free, even for those who enter illegally
• Legal and interpreter services are paid by the government
• Work permits arrive after just six months

On top of all that was this past spring’s amnesty declaration for migrants who entered illegally.

The irony is that Spain used to have a Golden Visa program to entice wealthy real estate investors. But they killed it.

People inside the Spanish government honestly thought it was a better idea to pay for illegal migrants than to collect tax revenue from wealthy foreigners.

None of this is an argument against immigrants. There are people of tremendous value and talent all over the world, and the nations that attract them have always prospered because of it.

America is the proof. Between 1892 and 1954, more than 12 million people came through Ellis Island.

They came to work, because work was the entire offer; there was no taxpayer-funded housing, and there were no cash handouts. Newcomers leaned on family, churches, and mutual aid groups which helped to support and find jobs for arrivals who had nothing.

Mass immigration was not without controversy back then, and the government eventually put tighter controls, rigorous checks, and strict quotas in place.

But the incentive structure was 100% correct: all immigrants received was the opportunity to work their asses off. Nothing more. And adopting American values and integrating into the culture was part of the deal. It was an honor to become more American.

The Cubans who fled to Florida highlight the same point.

After Fidel Castro’s communist revolution took over the island in 1959, roughly half a million Cubans came to the US over the next 15 years, most settling in Miami, often arriving with nothing at all.

Wealthy Cubans who had once owned successful businesses ended up pumping gas. Educated professionals cleaned houses. They worked hard to climb back up… because they understood better than anyone what freedom and hard work were actually worth.

Within a generation they turned Miami into the business hub of Latin America, and by 2004 US-born Cubans were already out-earning the average American household.

Countries are very similar to private businesses in a number of ways— and one of the most important ones is that both survive or fail based on the quality of their people.

The most successful companies in the world attract the smartest, most talented employees who are mission-focused and genuinely want to work hard to build innovative products and services. More importantly, they have a culture that prioritizes getting rid of bad workers.

Conversely, companies that hire lazy employees, elevate the incompetent, and make it impossible to get rid of toxic employees are destined for failure.

It’s the same with a country. If your policy is to attract the best and brightest across the world to come, work hard, and adopt your values, your country will do well. If you advertise free benefits to illegals, you’ll get exactly what you asked for.

Immigration by itself is not the problem. The problem is when there’s bad incentives.

Spain’s government now insists that most of the illegals have gone back home. But even if that’s true, the bad incentive structure still remains… so the invasion will only continue.

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The Senate’s answer to childhood diabetes: ban Tony the Tiger

Senator Bernie Sanders— himself quite a wealthy man— has spent his career warning America about the greed of the capitalist pigs. Now he’s adding capitalist tigers to his rant.

Earlier this month he named the true enemies of the people: Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch, and the rest of the breakfast-aisle bourgeoisie.

Sanders’ Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act cleared the Senate health committee last week on a 12 to 10 vote. The bill puts warning labels on anything high in sugar, salt, or saturated fat, and it bans child-directed ads featuring cartoon characters, athletes, celebrities, influencers, games, and contests.

If it becomes law, the federal government will officially be in the mascot-policing business.

Now, I’m not a defender of the refined sugar industry. It’s poison. I eat very little, and my kids even less.

But the irony is loud. Remember, this is the same government that spent roughly $18 billion subsidizing corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, and soy oils— the core ingredients of the junk food it now wants to slap warning labels on.

And that doesn’t take into account all the money given to consumers to buy this poison; the US Department of Agriculture’s own study found that about 20 cents of every grocery dollar spent by food stamp households goes to sweetened drinks, desserts, candy, etc., with soft drinks at the top of the list.

Then the government pays for the consequences: treating diabetes costs over $300 billion a year in direct medical care, and government insurance picks up about two-thirds of the tab.

So taxpayers subsidize the sugar, buy the soda, and fund the dialysis, and the Senate’s answer to this pipeline is to ban Tony the Tiger.

They’ll regulate everything about the problem except their own role in creating it.

There was a man in the girls’ locker room. The city’s solution was curtains.

A mother in Lynnwood, Washington says she walked into the women’s locker room at the local recreation center during her daughter’s swim meet on July 12 and found an adult male showering there.

When questioned why he was there, the man answered, “I’m trans.” And that ended the matter.

It had to, because in Washington state, the [biological] woman has no rights, and the local city government doesn’t have the authority to overrule state law. So if anyone tries to stop this grown man from showering in front of little girls, THEY would be the ones in legal trouble!

This leaves the city with very few options to address parents’ concerns. Rather than be able to exercise common sense, the city stated that “our facilities team has installed new full-sized shower curtains in the locker rooms and is exploring other modifications.”

The FDA still requires drug information on paper, thanks to a rule from 1962.

If you’ve ever opened a medication box and found that sheet of paper folded down to the size of a postage stamp, printed in type that practically requires a microscope to read, you’ve experienced a 64-year-old federal mandate in its natural habitat.

Drug companies don’t produce it by choice; the Food and Drug Administration requires it, on paper, based on a rule written in 1962. By the FDA’s own math, the ritual burns through roughly 90 billion sheets of paper a year.

That sheet is the drug’s instruction manual for professionals: dosing, warnings, side effects, interactions. It isn’t even meant for you; it’s meant for doctors and pharmacists, every one of whom already looks that information up on the Internet where it’s kept current.

The FDA proposed the obvious fix back in 2014, letting manufacturers post the document online instead of printing it.

What followed was classic government: eleven straight years of Congress attaching riders to its spending bills forbidding the switch, followed by this year’s bills, which merely encourage it.

So Congress needed six decades to start reconsidering a paper mandate from JFK’s administration, but only one committee vote to go after Tony the Tiger.

That’s the modern government business model in a single week: boundless energy for writing new rules, and glacial pacing for fixing their own.

Hackers took down Minnesota water systems, and the state took a victory lap.

Over roughly 48 hours in late July, a coordinated cyberattack hit the computerized controls of dozens of community water systems across Minnesota.

In the small town of Braham, the attack knocked the well and the treatment plant offline entirely, and the city needed about two hours to get them back; officials blamed “a malicious cyber-attack of computerized operating systems by unknown actors.”

The Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth lost communications at two water towers and several lift stations and had to run its water system by hand.

Officially, nobody knows who did it: days into a federal investigation, the attribution is still “unknown actors.”

Yet federal agencies warned four days before the attack that Iranian-linked hackers were breaking into exactly this kind of equipment at US water utilities. Plus private security researchers needed just three days to name a suspect— an Iranian-linked group called CyberAv3ngers.

A failure of government? Not according to Minnesota’s chief information security officer, who bragged: “Our response worked as intended, enabling agencies at every level of government to rapidly coordinate, contain the incident, and help prevent more serious impacts to critical services.”

More than 30 utilities attacked, a treatment plant knocked offline, zero attackers officially identified. If that’s the response working as intended, we’d hate to see the version that doesn’t.

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The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just released 1,141 pages of his near-daily entries from the COVID era, days before he appeared yesterday. They read like the diary of a nine year old girl.

Weeks later, in early April 2020, 22 million Americans were newly out of work thanks in large part to Fauci. Yet he was still focused on himself: “Intense publicity about me continues with stories of grandmothers who have crushes on me.”

He noted a “beautiful profile” from the BBC. He logged the online petitions to vote him People’s Sexiest Man Alive. He made 641 entries cataloging his own press coverage, and beamed over having to turn down Dancing with the Stars.

“The situation with my national and international fame,” he wrote, “is explosive and really unimaginable.”

Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel kept calling, Fauci wrote, wanting to come to dinner “to explain to me how naive I am and not fully appreciating just how much money I can get from book deals, films and speeches.”

His narcissism and fixation on money and fame is one thing. The lies are entirely another.

On November 17, 2021, after spending hours in a crowded room with fully-vaccinated guests, Fauci lamented, “I’m well aware that many people who are vaccinated are still getting infected and that worried me a lot.”

Yet at the same time he insisted that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus… and helped to censor people who suggested otherwise.

The people who said natural immunity was real were treated as cranks.

“Trust the science” became the catchphrase of the era, and anyone who doubted masks was dismissed as “anti-science.”

The problem was that “the science” kept changing its mind.

In March 2020, Fauci told 60 Minutes there was “no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Within weeks his guidance reversed, and masks went from pointless to mandatory.

By January 2021, Fauci was on national television telling Americans that wearing two masks “just makes common sense.”

Then actual science arrived. In 2023, Cochrane, medicine’s gold standard, analyzed the masking data and found they didn’t make any conclusive difference.

Even the six-foot “social distancing” rule turned out to be made up; Fauci admitted to Congress that it “sort of just appeared.”

The people who were against school closures were accused of wanting teachers to die. Then the nation’s report card showed nine-year-olds posting the first math decline in history.

The people who suggested COVID escaped the Wuhan lab, the one Fauci’s own institute helped fund through a New York nonprofit, had their posts deleted from Facebook until 2021. Today this is considered the most plausible origin theory.

Of course, Fauci had sworn to Congress that his institute “has never funded nor does it fund now gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Pressed by Paul to retract it in July 2021, he answered, “I have never lied before Congress.”

Three months later the NIH informed Congress that it had, in fact, funded gain of function research at that very lab.

On Wednesday, Paul asked Fauci the same questions under oath— and the man who had never lied to Congress pleaded the Fifth rather than answer them. His own explanation was that anything he said might be used to prosecute him for perjury.

Yet the questions that mattered most were never allowed to be asked.

When did being unvaccinated turn you into a threat to society? Nobody has ever been called a murderer for skipping a flu shot, which kills tens of thousands of Americans in a bad year.

But by late 2021 your neighbor’s health had become your personal responsibility, and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was joking that unvaccinated patients shouldn’t get ICU beds: “Rest in peace, wheezy.”

When did it become an essential social value to put something into your own body to protect somebody else? Never before had Washington made a vaccine a condition of employment for tens of millions of workers, let alone a shot that didn’t stop transmission.

And when did voters approve any of it? Closing the schools, shutting down businesses, masking toddlers, firing the unvaccinated: none of it was ever on a ballot. Unelected bureaucrats wrote the rules of daily life… which seems strange for the most advanced representative democracy in the world.

The whole premise was flawed: they treated COVID as the worst thing ever that must be stopped at any cost.

In reality the risk was concentrated among the very old and the chronically unhealthy, and for anyone under 60 the fatality rate was a few hundredths of a percent.

Yet they torched the economy, the schools, and much of the social fabric… all because of a flawed premise.

Amazingly, no one was fired. No one was indicted. And no one apologized.

Republican Senators spent Wednesday’s hearing reading him the rap sheet.

Rand Paul told him the lockdowns “could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime.”

Senator Rick Scott asked whether he ever told anyone to destroy records.

Fauci pleaded the Fifth to all of it.

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, at least admitted the obvious: the lab leak got dismissed as a “right-wing” theory, and he himself may have been “blinded by the partisan idea that maybe the truth might come from a side that’s different than you are.”

The other Democrats spent the day consoling Fauci and praising his heroics. Extraordinary. Years later, despite overwhelming evidence of deceit, narcissism, and terrible decisions, they still treat the guy like he’s the second coming of Jonas Salk.

One thing that was said over and over in yesterday’s hearing is that “another pandemic is coming.” Great. They’re prepping us already for the lockdowns.

Bear in mind that many of the people who were wrong about everything STILL run the same state and local institutions. They’re still unelected. And they’re still certain they were the heroes.

This means the next emergency will be handled by the same class of “experts,” with the same lack of oversight and accountability.

That’s the whole point of having a Plan B.

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Last month, one shipowner agreed to make that run— through the Strait of Hormuz— for nearly $470,000 per day.

For perspective, in the first few months of last year, before the war, the biggest crude tankers on earth were earning as little as $36,000 a day.

The ships collecting these fortunes don’t produce anything at all. They don’t pump oil, they don’t refine it, and they don’t sell it. They just carry it from one place to another.

And that is exactly why they have become the biggest winners of this war.

When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February, oil spiked to $120 a barrel in March, then calmed as ceasefires came and went. But all the while, tanker rates just kept climbing.

That’s because of the arithmetic that drives the shipping business; it’s simple to understand— when the strait became too dangerous to navigate, everything had to be rerouted. So instead of a quick voyage through the strait, cargo had to be transported through far more complicated means… and ships had to sail much longer routes to avoid the danger.

The end result is that oil from the region now crosses far more ocean, and every voyage takes a LOT longer. This means ships are tied up for longer… driving demand higher for shipping.

And it’s not like this problem can be eliminated by simply adding more ships to the global fleet; supertankers take years to build, and shipyards spent the past decade producing very few.

That last part matters, because it is the reason this windfall was visible long before anyone had heard of this war.

One of the largest supertanker owners earned more than $100 million in the first quarter, excluding one-off gains from selling ships, as its fleet was making roughly two and a half times as much per day as a year earlier.

The company paid out every penny of it as a dividend, extending a streak of quarterly payouts stretching back more than fifteen years. And the second quarter will be even better: by early May, it had already booked most of its available days at nearly double its first-quarter rate.

Another major tanker owner reported nearly $200 million in profit for the quarter and declared the largest dividend in its history.

Tankers are not the only winners. One owner of bulk carriers— the ships that haul iron ore, grain, and coal— has become the target of a takeover battle in which a rival has raised its offer again and again, and the board keeps rejecting bids it says still undervalue the fleet.

All three companies are on the research list of Schiff Sovereign’s investment newsletter, Strategic Assets.

They were featured in 2023 and 2024, back when shipping was about as unloved as a business can be. That was the point. Shipping moves in long cycles, and the bottom is where the next shortage is easiest to see… because years of terrible rates had stopped owners from ordering ships, and a ship ordered today does not carry cargo for three years.

Counting the ships that would exist in 2026 took no view on Iran— only a public order book.

They met a strict set of criteria: profitable, little or no debt, trading cheap against current cash flow, and operating in an industry with an aging fleet and hardly any new construction on order.

The war revealed that setup; it did not create it. As of early July, one tanker owner had more than doubled since being featured, the other was up more than 90%, and the bulk carrier owner was up more than 50% on a takeover bid rather than a rate spike.

The tankers keep paying quarterly dividends, and one payout alone equals almost 10% of the share price when that company was first featured.

We expect this pattern to repeat across real assets.

The world spent a decade underinvesting in the physical things civilization runs on: ships, mines, oil fields, refineries, smelters. Now geopolitics has turned violent. When there is no spare capacity, every disruption has to be resolved by price, and the companies that own the scarce assets collect the difference.

To be clear, we are not permabulls, and rates like these will not last forever. A durable peace would bring tanker earnings down hard, and shipping has punished euphoric buyers many times before.

Our edge is not predicting wars or commodity prices. It is applying strict criteria to well-run companies, making the case to buy when they meet the bar, and to sell when they no longer do.

That discipline is working. Of the more than twenty companies currently on the research list, six are showing a loss. The companies that we closed out returned an average of 172%.

A silver producer gained more than 950% in under a year, and others returned 540%, 240%, and 150%.

If you would like to see the full research, including the companies we believe are positioned for the next disruption, you can try Strategic Assets with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

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In the private sector, such a trophy office property would fetch north of $1 billion per year in rental income.

Yet for the federal government, two-thirds of the space sits empty according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government’s own internal watchdog. 

This is based on real data; the GAO toured the department’s buildings last fall and counted the empty desks.

And this is far from an isolated case. Of the 189 government buildings around the country that were analyzed by the GAO, 168 were underutilized– with occupancy averaging just 37%. 

One of the worst offenders is One Aviation Plaza in Queens, which sits at 13% occupancy. 

Ironically, Congress actually set a MINIMUM standard for all government buildings to be at least 60% occupied. This is the law of the land in the United States, set by the 2023 USE IT Act. 

So, Congress was surprisingly trying to make things more efficient and save taxpayer money– potentially billions each year. They passed a law. But the government doesn’t follow it.  

The big consequence for the government violating its own law so far has been this GAO report. Nobody was fined, nobody was fired, and nothing was sold. Basically we got a PDF. 

And all of that is just one category of waste at just one department. The bigger losses are to outright fraud.

In June, the Justice Department announced a record-setting healthcare fraud takedown: 455 defendants, the most ever charged in a single healthcare fraud operation, including 90 doctors and licensed medical professionals, all accused in schemes involving $6.5 billion in fraudulent claims. 

Yet federal agents only managed to seize $182 million in cash and assets. No word on what happened to the other $6.3 billion. 

By the government’s own accounting, federal agencies made close to $200 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2025 alone… $24 billion more than the year before.

That’s money which should never have gone out the door, went out in the wrong amount, or can’t be documented.  And that was only across 64 programs at 15 agencies… a small fraction of the government’s total footprint.

This keeps happening for a simple reason: the federal government’s ~$7 trillion annual budget is too vast for anyone to keep track of… and no one is ever held accountable.

Bureaucrats who waste the money never get fired; in fact it is damn near impossible to fire a federal employee. And voters continue electing the same incompetent, crooked politicians to public office. 

Even when there’s public outcry over obvious fraud, the legacy media closes ranks around their party and insists that voters are racist for criticizing “Learning Centers”.

None of this is free. The empty buildings, the stolen billions, the money nobody can track: it all gets paid for with borrowed money. And that deficit spending is what fuels inflation.

June’s Consumer Price Index came in at 3.5%. By the Fed’s own admission, inflation has now missed its 2% target for five years running.

And after all that failure, few in Washington will name the cause.

A lot of people blame oil, especially after the war with Iran sent crude above $126 a barrel. But oil has been all over the board for the last five years; it was under $60 a barrel just last fall. So why wasn’t inflation falling when oil was cheap?

Because, through all of it, there has been exactly one constant: insane levels of government spending. Deficits keep rising, and the more money the government wastes, the more stubborn inflation becomes.

The central bank can’t fix that; the Fed doesn’t pass spending bills, Congress does. And as long as the spending stays out of control, inflation is not coming down.

And Washington has shown no appetite to bring it under control. They refuse to cut even the easiest, most obvious waste and fraud.

Nothing about this changes on its own. A government that can’t bring itself to sell an empty building is not going to take on the spending that actually matters, and inflation is how they’ll pay for the difference.

Which is exactly why it makes so much sense to own the real assets that hold their value when the dollar doesn’t: gold, silver, and well-managed, productive businesses.

It’s definitely time to be thinking about a Plan B.

PS: Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, is built for exactly this: real asset strategies to protect your savings from Washington’s spending, and residency options in countries where your money buys far more. It’s backed by boots-on-the-ground research from all over the world– and you can learn more about it here.

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The Revolutionary War was still raging, and Adams would only remain home with his wife and children for a precious few months before he would need to sail back to Europe.

But this brief respite was not a vacation. Adams had been tasked with an urgent mission by the leadership of his native Massachusetts: they needed a state constitution. Quickly.

State officials were desperate to form a proper government and get to work… but first they needed a constitution that would pass muster with the voters. Their first attempt had already failed the previous year, so they leaned on Adams to get the job done.

Adams worked swiftly and diligently. And, before he left for Europe again a few months later, Massachusetts had its constitution.

One of the interesting clauses Adams wrote was a requirement for top elected officials to declare that they “believe the Christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth.”

In other words, elected officials in Massachusetts had a constitutional requirement to be Christian.

Americans are taught that ‘separation of church and state’ was a founding principle of the country. It was not, at least not the way most people think.

It’s true that the US Constitution’s First Amendment creates a wall between the federal government and religion. But states were left free to do whatever they wanted. And they did. In fact, eleven of the original thirteen states had religious requirements woven into their constitutions.

Delaware required officeholders to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son. . .” Maryland demanded a declaration of “belief in the Christian religion.”

Massachusetts went further and directed taxpayer funds to the church. It was 100% a Christian state.

Eventually, however, the citizens of Massachusetts saw fit to change their constitution and eliminate the formal link between church and state; even John Adams himself supported this change in the twilight of his life.

So in 1833, voters in Massachusetts passed the Eleventh Amendment to their constitution— ending compulsory religious taxes and mandates of Christianity.

It’s not that the Christian faith was waning in Massachusetts, or in the United States. Far from it. Voters at that point simply felt that government was civic, religion was personal, and the two should be separate.

Sadly, nearly two centuries later, Massachusetts is getting back into the religion business. But not for Christianity.

Massachusetts State Senator James Eldridge has a bill moving rapidly through the legislature that would create a permanent, official government Islam commission: an 11-member body whose statutory duties include recommending Muslims for government jobs.

S.2134 parades as “An Act promoting the civil rights and inclusion of American Muslims in the commonwealth.”

But the text does something else entirely. The commission shall “identify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions.”

It shall recommend “legislation to combat Islamophobia.”

It shall “foster unity among the American Muslim community and organizations in the commonwealth.” And it may “accept and solicit funds, including any gifts, donations, grants, or bequests, or any federal funds.”

In other words, a taxpayer-run Islamic hiring commission inside the state government with an unfettered pipeline to crooked funds.

Think about it— Iran, or any Islamic terrorist group, could easily funnel money into this state Islamic commission… It’s absolutely insane.

Bear in mind that Massachusetts already operates nine permanent identity commissions, covering women, Latinos, LGBTQ youth, Black men and boys, and more.

So at first, this seems like just another part of the DEI machine.

But Islam is not just another census category, because Islam is not merely a private faith. It is a complete political and legal system with its own laws, its own courts, and its own political hierarchy that many Muslim nations still adhere to today.

This is why places like Yemen have no minimum marriage age, and child brides are still shipped off to creepy old men. Senator Eldridge and his supporters seem to think that these values should have a taxpayer-funded commission.

The Left tells us to “believe all women” and celebrates feminism. Most Islamic countries hold the opposite view.

The Left hosts an entire month of LGBTQ pride. Roughly a dozen Muslim countries still impose the death penalty for homosexuality.

It’s astonishing how the far left actually believes that Islam is their ally… when in fact the woke fanatics will be the first ones thrown off the rooftops under Shariah law.

The Left is just too stupid to realize it… which is why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

P.S. It took Massachusetts half a century to correct its first experiment mixing government and religion. You do not have to wait around to see how the new one ends.

That is the entire point of a Plan B: legal residency abroad, a second citizenship, and assets beyond the reach of any single government, all arranged calmly while things are still normal.

Our Plan B Confidential service shows you exactly how, with actionable intelligence on foreign residency programs, second citizenships, international banking, legal tax strategies, and real asset investments, drawn from sixteen years of boots-on-the-ground research across more than 120 countries.

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

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The Soviet Union had just finished its worst harvest in over a decade and was on the verge of starvation… and Belousov was tasked with the nearly impossible mission of buying enough wheat to feed an entire nation.

So he flew to America.

His first meeting was with Michel Fribourg, the head of Continental Grain. The two shook hands and closed a deal for Russia to buy millions of tons of American wheat.

Belousov’s next stops were the other biggest grain traders in America: Cargill, Cook, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, and Garnac.

He worked through every major American grain firm in a matter of weeks— each deal negotiated in complete secrecy… and each firm assumed they were the only American grain house that the Soviets were talking to.

In reality, Belousov was closing deals with all of them.

By the time word got out that the Soviets had been buying from everyone, everywhere, all at once, Belousov had already locked up roughly 440 million bushels of wheat, about a quarter of the entire American crop, for ~$700 million.

And here’s the wild part: this was the peak of the Cold War… yet America’s staunchest adversary didn’t even pay full price for US wheat.

That’s because, for years prior, the US Department of Agriculture had been funding subsidies to make American grain cheaper abroad, covering the gap between the higher domestic price and the lower global price.

So the end result was that the Soviet Union drained American wheat inventory— and that’s when the Law of Supply and Demand kicked in. Wheat prices nearly doubled. Corn prices more than tripled by the following summer. Bread, beef, and eggs all followed.

Yet while Americans were suffering major food inflation at home, the US government was subsidizing the Soviet Union’s wheat purchases to the tune of $300 million in taxpayer funds.

The American taxpayer had financed the largest grain purchase the world had ever seen, for the benefit of its sworn enemy.

Then the second shoe dropped. The following autumn, in October 1973, the Arab oil-producing countries announced an embargo on the United States in response to America backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

Consequently, the price of crude oil roughly quadrupled… and it made the food inflation much worse.

Many people don’t realize just how much modern agriculture runs on oil and gas. Nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from natural gas. Phosphate (another critical fertilizer ingredient) is mined and hauled with diesel. And everything from tractors to grain dryers burns fuel.

Because of the embargo, fertilizer prices more than doubled in 1973 and 1974, and food prices quickly followed. Inflation was eating quite aggressively into consumers’ standards of living.

All of this had a major impact on the stock market; as inflation raged throughout the 1970s, even America’s largest companies suffered. Their earnings shrank (especially when adjusted for inflation) and stock prices went nowhere.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index closed at 1,000 in November 1972… and literally ten years later in November 1982, it was still at 1,000. The market went nowhere over the course of an entire decade.

And adjusted for inflation, of course, most stocks were losers.

The only real winners were REAL ASSET producers— especially gold and energy companies. Gold went from $35 an ounce in the early 1970s to a peak of $850 within a decade— though there were downturns in between.

Gold miners (and silver miners as well) were the best performers of the decade, with the Barron’s Gold Mining Index returning a phenomenal 1,247% in ten years.

Similarly, oil went from about $3 a barrel to nearly $40, and companies like Exxon completely trounced the S&P 500.

More than fifty years later, similar conditions are building again.

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since late February, except for the tankers Iran waves through from China and its other friends while everyone else waits outside.

Some oil is moving, for sure. But given that about a quarter of the world’s sulfur and roughly 15% of its fertilizer exports normally move through that strait, there are significant implications for the agricultural sector.

Many consequences are already on the books.

Urea, the world’s most common nitrogen fertilizer, climbed above $850 a tonne this spring, up roughly 80% since February and the highest price since 2022. Sulfur, an essential input for phosphate fertilizer, has doubled since January to record levels.

And in a recent American Farm Bureau survey, 70% of farmers said they cannot afford all the fertilizer they need this season.

Here’s why that matters: spring planting is over. Farmers either paid those high fertilizer prices… or they skimped. And skimping means smaller harvests this fall.

Either way, higher food prices are already locked in. The shock has already happened. The impact just hasn’t been felt yet in the grocery stores because the harvest hasn’t taken place yet.

Meanwhile, agricultural markets are trading as if nothing has changed. Crop prices haven’t come close to keeping pace with energy and fertilizer costs, and governments are already hoarding: China has temporarily banned phosphate fertilizer exports to keep supplies at home.

The last time this happened, the people who owned fertilizer production made money. Everyone else just got the grocery bill.

The featured research in Schiff Sovereign’s investment newsletter, Strategic Assets, already includes a potash producer, a phosphate producer, and a palm oil grower, and we’re watching a fantastic fertilizer company for the right entry point.

Our palm oil grower has nearly doubled since we published the research. The potash producer is up more than 16%… with a lot more room to grow. Our phosphate producer, which we recently featured, is still trading inside our suggested buy range.

If you’d like to read that research, you can try Strategic Assets with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. Click here to learn more.

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Marcus Aurelius never realized it, but he was sealing Rome’s fate… and essentially marking an end to the Empire’s golden age.

Commodus was quite popular in his youth— reportedly handsome, athletic, and gregarious. But after Marcus Aurelius died a few years later, the popularity and support that Commodus had enjoyed for so long began to wane.

It didn’t help that he heavily debased Rome’s currency, contributing to widespread inflation and economic decline. He spent lavishly at taxpayer expense, ignored even the most basic affairs of imperial administration, and murdered his enemies.

Finally, on New Year’s Eve in 192 AD, Commodus was assassinated, kicking off a period of political instability in which five different men would sit on the throne in a single year; in fact 193 AD became known as the Year of the Five Emperors.

Eventually Rome landed on Septimius Severus, who ruled for nearly two decades with an iron fist. His reign— though stable— is regarded as one of the cruelest in Roman history. And he, too, contributed immensely to inflation and rising taxes.

His successor, Caracalla, ruled briefly and incompetently. Soon came Elagabalus— history’s first transgender emperor who promised to give away half of the empire to any physician who could turn him into a woman.

Along the way the infamous “Crisis of the Third Century” became worse and worse: migrant invasions, economic depression, hyperinflation, plague, and unprecedented political instability— including the year 238 AD in which six different men claimed the title of Emperor.

It was as if Rome lost the ability to produce a decent, capable leader anymore.

I thought of this historical lesson yesterday morning watching Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, become Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade.

That’s an unprecedented level of instability for a modern, major power. Even worse, Britain’s leaders have become more incompetent over time, each one chipping away at the country’s economy and social stability.

Liz Truss lasted just 49 days, the shortest tenure of any prime minister in British history. Her plan for £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts set off a panic in the bond market, launching the pound into freefall.

And government borrowing costs spiked so violently as a result of Ms. Truss that the Bank of England had to step in to prevent British pension funds from collapsing.

Prior to Truss was Boris Johnson— a one-man scandal machine who was fined for quite hypocritically throwing big parties in Downing Street during his own COVID lockdowns.

Then came Rishi Sunak, who threw Britain’s doors wide open to immigration. Sunak seemingly woke up every morning and said: Give me more Somalis. Give me more Islamic terrorists.

Along the way, Britain imported some of the worst ideas of the American Left and made them its own.

Britain is now the wokest place on the planet, and to an Orwellian standard; British police arrest people over tweets, and the England flag itself is now treated as a symbol of racism.

To cap it all off, Sunak was succeeded by Keir Starmer, probably the worst leader of a major power in modern history— and that includes Joe Biden.

When Parliament took up a national inquiry into the grooming gangs that had raped thousands of English girls over decades while local officials looked away, Starmer’s party voted it down, and Starmer dismissed the calls as “the bandwagon [of] the far right.”

Starmer spent his tenure finishing off the oil industry, taking the headline tax rate on North Sea producers to 78% and banning new exploration licenses.

By the time Starmer resigned last month, the UK had a tax burden heading to its highest level since records began in 1948. Borrowing costs are higher than any other major economy, with 10-year government bond yields well above those in the US, France, Germany, and Japan.

Plus, wealthy Brits are heading for the exits in record numbers after Starmer abolished the centuries-old non-dom tax regime.

Starmer was so widely despised that his own party finally threw him out. Their solution? A slightly younger, slightly less vapid version of Starmer.

His name is Andy Burnham, and all of his ideas come straight from the Communist Manifesto.

In his opening remarks as prime minister, Burnham said not one word about the national debt or Britain’s borrowing costs. Nothing about the migration crisis. Nothing about justice for the grooming gang victims. Nothing about turning the economy around.

His first order of business, Burnham announced, was taking care of homeless/migrants with a new £340 million benefit program.

To his credit, Burnham has sense enough to know that he cannot throw around that kind of money without a way to pay for it. Borrowing more money is out; in fact he spent the past year complaining that Britain must get beyond “being in hock to the bond markets.”

That only means one thing: higher taxes.

So, days before taking office, his team began preparing approvals for two North Sea oil and gas fields— the same ones that his own party spent years trying to shut down.

This is not because Burnham suddenly cares about energy security. He’s just looking for more money to steal.

All of those homeless migrants need handouts, so Burnham needs a new revenue stream, i.e. something else to tax.

So he’s allowing two new North Sea fields— with the existing 78% rate in place.

In short, Burnham did not decide that energy matters. He decided it hasn’t been milked entirely dry yet.

This is a cannibalist mentality. Britain is sliding into its own Crisis of the 21st Century, and the “conservative” politicians who presided over the first half of the decline were anything but. Starmer and now Burnham are straight-up Marxists.

We wrote about Argentina just yesterday, where nearly every asset in the country is surging. It’s not hard to understand why: Argentina hit rock bottom, threw out the people who destroyed the  country, and started climbing under new leadership.

Britain can reverse its fortunes the same way. Unfortunately, it is probably going to have to hit rock bottom first. And we can already see the shape of how this ends.

First the money will run out, the benefits will be cut, and the people who came for free stuff will go home.

Then, with markets in the dumps, this highly educated and productive country will eventually reverse all of its idiotic policies from the past and one day become among the most interesting places in the world to invest.

There’s an old saying credited to a Rothschild about investing when there’s “blood in the streets.” He may turn out to be right. But he probably wasn’t picturing London when he said it.

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But right now, $179,000 buys a typical three-room apartment in Buenos Aires, the “Paris of South America” (minus the Islamic terrorists).

Studio apartments in Argentina’s capital are going for $108,000. All of it is quoted and paid in US dollars, because Argentina’s property market gave up on their local currency for real estate transactions a long time ago.

But this is arguably the last cheap sector of Argentina. Prices of every other asset have gone up dramatically thanks to country’s general economic recovery; ever since President Milei was elected, he has slashed government spending and delivered the country’s first budget surplus in over a decade. The stock market has surged. Every asset is up. Except for apartments.

Remember, a century ago, Argentina was one of the ten richest countries in the world; its people were better off per capita than the French or Germans.

Then came Juan Perón. Elected in 1946, he nationalized everything— railways, utilities, etc. He regulated wages and prices. It was full-blown command socialism.

Perón was thrown out in 1955, but the machine he built outlived him by seventy years. He had created a permanent bloc of voters— paid by the state— and every government that tried to cut spending found out it could not survive doing so. So they printed money instead.

That is where the price controls, the capital controls, the repeated defaults, and the chronic inflation all came from.

Milei took office at the end of 2023 and started taking the machine apart. He cut the number of federal ministries in half and fired tens of thousands of government employees. He scrapped the price controls and stopped the central bank from printing money to cover the government’s bills.

It hurt. Poverty jumped before it came down, and real wages fell before they recovered.

The month Milei took office, prices rose 25.5%. That was the MONTHLY inflation figure, not the annual one. By June 2026, monthly inflation was down to 1.9%.

To be clear, that is still astronomical by North American or European standards. Argentina is still a high-inflation country. But they’ve come a long way in bringing inflation down, and the country is no longer collapsing. There’s clearly a light at the end of the tunnel.

And it got there using the same playbook every country that climbed out of a hole this deep has run.

For example, in 1965 Singapore was an impoverished backwater with no resources and a third of its population squatting in slums. Lee Kuan Yew cut the tariffs, kept taxes low, and threw the doors open to foreign companies. Today Singapore produces more than $90,000 per person— more than the United States.

No country is permanently rich, and no country is permanently poor. For the first time in a very long time, Argentina is heading the right direction.

Foreign capital has noticed. Under a new incentive regime, companies have launched roughly $95 billion of projects. The state oil company YPF filed a $25 billion shale development in Vaca Muerta in May, and Chevron committed more than $10 billion to the same basin.

Companies do not pour concrete and steel into countries they expect to collapse.

The financial markets repriced accordingly. Argentine stocks have run hard, and the main US-listed Argentina fund is up more than 230% over five years.

After a run like that, you could argue the stocks are no longer even cheap. Even the bonds have moved: the extra interest Argentina must pay to borrow compared to US government bonds fell in July to its lowest level in eight years.

Which brings us back to that $179,000. The citywide Buenos Aires apartment index rose just 1.6% over the past twelve months. And that’s in US dollars.

In other words, every asset in Argentina has repriced, but the apartments aren’t even keeping pace with inflation.

The reason is credit, or rather the total absence of it; nine out of ten home purchases in Buenos Aires are paid in cash, without a mortgage.

And prices settle at whatever buyers can pay in cash.

The same condition holds across much of Latin America, and Colombia shows where it leads. Only around 3% of Colombian adults carry a mortgage, so prices sat at cash levels there too.

Then foreigners discovered Medellín. Buyers from North America and Europe arrived with money and bought apartments that looked absurdly cheap to them. In El Poblado, the neighborhood the expats favor, prices have jumped 66% in three years.

We think the same thing is going to happen in Argentina, with a bigger catalyst behind it, because the country is becoming an investment destination and an expat destination at once. It happened in Medellín, Mexico City, and other places in Latin America. It’s basic supply and demand.

There is still risk— Argentines vote again on October 24, 2027… so if Milei’s political movement  collapses, the country could return to its old ways. But that’s pretty much the same anywhere. Every country carries risk.

For example, I doubt anyone is rushing to buy British assets right now. Britain’s finances and politics have genuinely deteriorated, and its government now pays close to 6% to borrow money, the most since 1998.

Now that Marxist Andy Burnham has taken over as Prime Minister as of this morning, the situation will likely get worse before it gets better. At some point Britain will get cheap enough that its stocks and bonds become attractive again. But today is not that day.

And American assets are no automatic refuge either. Just wait and see what happens if Gavin Newsom gets the chance to do to the whole country what he did to California.

Argentina, at least, pays you to take its risk. The apartments are cheap, and the catalyst pushing them up is already arriving.

It is also a serious Plan B destination. Living there costs roughly half of what it does in the United States, and it draws far fewer foreigners than the places everyone has already found.

Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, just published a full report on Argentine real estate, covering which neighborhoods hold their value, how to move money in and out, and where residency and citizenship stand.

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

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The practice belongs to Dr. Sarah Jukaku, who used to be co-chief of psychiatry at University of Michigan Health— a hospital system that accepts Medicare— before she left to open a practice that doesn’t.

According to records cited by the Washington Free Beacon, Jukaku formally opted out of Medicare in March 2025, not long after her cash-only practice opened its doors.

Under normal circumstances, that would be nobody’s business but the doctor’s. But her husband, Abdul El-Sayed, is running for US Senate in Michigan on a promise of Medicare for “every single American from cradle to grave.”

In fact, he co-wrote the book Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, with a foreword by Senator Bernie Sanders— who has also endorsed him and campaigned with him.

His platform promises Medicare that is “automatic, for everyone, and accepted everywhere,” without premiums, copays, or deductibles.

Meanwhile his own household runs the counterexample.

To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with cash-only clinics. I think many Americans would welcome more cash-only medical options, without the bureaucracy of government and insurance companies.

Opting out of the insurance bureaucracy is a perfectly rational response to a system that buries doctors in paperwork and pays them late, and plenty of good physicians have made the same call.

But her husband’s platform doesn’t say Medicare should be one option among many. And it certainly doesn’t celebrate the doctors who refuse it. It says “accepted everywhere,” in writing, and it adds that Medicare for All should make private insurance “redundant and unnecessary.”

The irony doesn’t stop with Medicare.

The Free Beacon also took a look at the candidate’s wrists and found a rotation of luxury watches, including a roughly $10,000 Omega Speedmaster and what appears to be a Rolex Submariner worth up to $15,000.

Those are bold accessories for a man who campaigns against the wealthy and eviscerates the super-rich. Just like Bernie Sanders and AOC, the Left always seems to define “the rich” as “anyone with more money than I have.”

If this feels familiar, it’s because it keeps happening.

An oyster farmer from Maine named Graham Platner came out of nowhere raging against the billionaire class, collected his own Bernie Sanders endorsement, and turned out to have carried a Totenkopf tattoo— the skull emblem of the Nazi SS— for 18 years.

Ex-girlfriends described him as physically abusive, and Maine Democrats nominated him for US Senate anyway. The party that calls everyone who disagrees with it a “Nazi”, and told the country to “believe all women”, chose the guy with an actual Nazi tattoo and allegations that haven’t stopped: a new sexual assault claim surfaced last week, and he quit the race.

The pattern holds after they win, too. New York elected Letitia James attorney general largely on her promise to go after Donald Trump for whatever she could find.

What she found was that he had put optimistic valuations on his properties in loan paperwork, something so routine that Deutsche Bank’s own banker testified they didn’t care and would gladly do business with him again. The loans were repaid in full.

Then last October, James was indicted for mortgage fraud herself, over false statements on the paperwork for a Virginia house occupied by a relative who was wanted by police.

The list goes on.

Lisa Cook was accused of lying on her own mortgage documents while sitting as a Federal Reserve governor helping to supervise the banking system.

James Comey, who once ran the nation’s top law enforcement agency, lied to Congress about authorizing a leak.

Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee helped an illegal immigrant, in her courtroom for beating his roommate, slip out a back door past federal agents.

Stacy Davis Gates fought school choice as head of the Chicago Teachers Union while sending her own kid to private school.

And Kamala Harris spent years warning that sea levels are rising, then bought an $8.2 million beach house in Malibu.

These people don’t believe a word of what they’re saying, and they certainly don’t practice it.

I remember being a young Army officer in my early 20s going to buy a Ford Explorer at the dealership; the sales guy was pushing me hard… really hard… on all the wonderful features of this car and why I just HAD to buy it.

At one point I asked him, “What do you drive?”. A Chevy. Lol.

It’s the same thing here; these politicians are just here to sell a product. And the product is socialism— because that’s (what they think) the people want to buy.

Obviously the only people who can actually sell socialism are those who don’t live under it, have never lived under it, and will never live under it.

I respect Sarah Jukaku, the politician’s wife: she looked at government-run healthcare and opted out. It’s the most sensible policy position anyone in the campaign has taken.

Her “opt-out” strategy is also worth copying… and that’s the entire idea of a Plan B: having a second bank account, a second residency, real assets, etc. arranged calmly and legally— before you need them— gives you the ability to opt-out of their idiotic ideas.

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Officially it’s a one-year moratorium while Albany designs a “regulatory framework.”

She’s not wrong that New Yorkers are hurting. They already pay roughly 70% above the national average for electricity, and utility bills are the kind of issue that decides elections, because everybody pays one.

Hochul is running for re-election in November and needed someone to blame for those bills. So she blamed data centers, because she couldn’t blame the real culprit, her own government.

In 2019, New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, a law committing the state to a zero-emission grid. Since then, the state has deactivated 4.4 gigawatts of fossil fuel generation, shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant in 2021 for good measure, and added back just 2.9 gigawatts, almost all of it intermittent wind and solar.

In other words, New York destroyed more reliable power than it built, as deliberate policy, and then acted shocked when electricity became scarce and expensive.

Even the New York Independent System Operator, the organization that runs the state’s power grid, blames Albany. In June it warned that the grid is losing the dispatchable plants that keep the system stable, the ones that work on a windless night in January.

The same grid operator projects that New York’s electric vehicle and building electrification mandates will pile on more than twice the demand of data centers through 2040. The biggest new strain on the grid isn’t AI at all; it’s Albany’s own mandates.

But true to form, New York’s politicians didn’t bother doing the math.

The moratorium hits any new data center drawing 50 megawatts or more. Yet Hochul spent years championing Micron’s $100 billion chip fab near Syracuse, a facility that will draw 1.85 gigawatts around the clock. That’s more electricity than New Hampshire and Vermont use combined, and 37 times the limit she just imposed on everyone else.

(That is, it will draw 1.85 gigawatts if it ever gets built. So far the project has produced a 719-page environmental review, ten bat houses for the endangered northern long-eared bat, and a lawsuit from activists who want production stopped entirely. But no chips.)

But the truly wild thing about Hochul’s ban is what New York is giving up. It isn’t AI; it’s the tax revenue the state claims to desperately need, from the very corporations it keeps saying should pay more.

For example, Meta’s giant data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, one of the poorest corners of that state, made its first local sales tax payment of $22.4 million this year. The school district used some of the money to hand its certified teachers bonuses of up to roughly $50,000.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers pay about $895 million a year in property taxes against a county operating budget of roughly $940 million. That covers about 95% of the budget and saves a typical homeowner around $5,800 a year.

And New York has run this exact play before.

In December 2014, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo banned fracking statewide, right as the shale boom was making landowners across the border wealthy. Pennsylvania kept drilling; by 2022, an industry study counted 123,000 jobs, $41 billion in economic activity, and $6.3 billion in royalties in a single year.

New York’s slice of the same Marcellus Shale sat untouched beneath struggling farmland. And Albany never reconsidered. To this day, New York bans the practice within its borders while importing fracked Pennsylvania gas to heat New York homes.

(Sort of like when the UK did the same thing with the North Sea: it halted all new oil and gas licenses in the name of climate change, then kept buying oil that Norway pumps from the very same basin. The oil is identical; the jobs, the taxes, and the profits are just Norwegian now.)

Albany never repeals the policy that caused the problem; it just piles a new ban on top. New York’s power scarcity is self-inflicted, and the official answer to that scarcity is to ration demand rather than restore supply.

The AI buildout is going to happen either way. The data centers will be built, the taxes will be paid, and somebody’s teachers will get the bonuses, or whatever else they decide to do with the money.

New York has simply decided that none of it will happen there. They will have to find other wealthy people to fleece to fund the state’s priorities, such as housing illegal immigrants in Manhattan hotels, restocking the city’s crack pipe vending machines, and handing money to welfare fraudsters.

I wouldn’t count on Albany coming to its senses. It has had more than a decade to reconsider the fracking ban and hasn’t blinked.

When a government manufactures its own scarcity and refuses to reverse course no matter the cost, the sensible move is to make sure your prosperity doesn’t depend on its competence.

That’s the whole point of having a Plan B.

P.S. The corporations New York just turned away all have one advantage in common: they can choose their jurisdiction. So can you.

Plan B Confidential is Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service on doing exactly that, covering legal second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, tax reduction strategies, and boots-on-the-ground intelligence from more than 120 countries. It exists so that your income, your savings, and your family’s options never depend on a single government’s competence. Click here to learn more.

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The sign in the hills above Los Angeles might be the most famous advertisement on earth, and the industry built the state’s fame, its mythology, and a good part of its fortune.

That industry is dying now. And on Monday, California’s attorney general stood in front of the sign and showed the world exactly why.

Rob Bonta announced that California is leading twelve states in a lawsuit to block Paramount’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that would combine two of Hollywood’s five major studios.

Asked about reports that Paramount might respond by pulling out of California entirely, Bonta called them “a desperate last-ditch effort to try to blackmail my office.”

Think about that. In Bonta’s mind, a company weighing whether to stay in his state isn’t a customer he’s about to lose; it’s a criminal trying to extort him.

Paramount is doing what it thinks is best for itself. California is suing to make it stop.

And the state’s top lawyer says that taking your business elsewhere is blackmail.

Gee, I wonder what’s making them want to leave?

It’s even more absurd once you know that Paramount had been begging to stay.

According to the news outlet Semafor, the company offered regulators a consent decree committing it to release 30 films a year in theaters, keep both of its historic California studio lots open, and keep spending roughly $30 billion a year on content, a huge share of it in a state that has been bleeding entertainment jobs for years.

Bonta sued anyway, despite the fact that the US Justice Department had already spent eight months reviewing the merger and approved it in June, concluding the deal would actually increase competition. Antitrust enforcers from Australia to China signed off without a peep.

Yet twelve state attorneys general apparently understand the media business better.

Even the people who do mergers for a living can’t figure out what Bonta is after. One M&A lawyer put it this way: “He doesn’t know what he wants, but he knows he needs to want something.”

Actually, he knows exactly one thing: this merger is something a billionaire wants. Paramount’s CEO is David Ellison, whose father, Larry Ellison, co-founded Oracle and is one of the richest men alive.

Bonta is on the ballot for re-election this year, and he understands his voters: blocking a rich man’s deal counts as fighting for the people, even when it costs those same people the studios, the jobs, and the spending that Paramount was begging to keep in the state.

The merger and Paramount’s offer to stay added up to a win/win, for the company and for California. But Bonta will happily trade a win/win for a lose/lose, as long as the billionaire ends up one of the losers.

So Ellison is now listening to the advisers pushing to move the corporate headquarters out of California, redirect much of that $30 billion in annual spending to friendlier states, and expand the nearly 300,000-square-foot studio lease Paramount signed last year in Bayonne, New Jersey.

The only problem… New Jersey happens to be one of the twelve states suing to block the merger. The state positioned to catch billions of dollars in fleeing Hollywood production is simultaneously in court trying to strangle the company doing the fleeing.

New Jersey, of all states, should know how this movie ends. Its own attorney general sued ExxonMobil in 2022 for supposedly deceiving the public about climate change; a judge eventually threw the case out, but the message landed, and just a few weeks ago Exxon’s shareholders voted to move the company’s legal home to Texas after over a century in the state. Apparently the lesson didn’t take.

Other states can smell the opportunity. Tennessee’s deputy governor, Stuart McWhorter, sent Ellison a letter earlier this month inviting Paramount to move its headquarters to a state built on “fiscal discipline, low taxes, predictable governance,” a pitch that reads less like salesmanship than a list of everything California has abandoned.

And Ellison wouldn’t need a map. He kept a home in Tennessee for more than a decade, and the Oracle campus rising in Nashville belongs to his father’s company, which pulled its own headquarters out of California in 2020.

Bonta shouldn’t need a crystal ball. Since 2022, America has lost some 73,000 film and television production jobs, two-thirds of them in Los Angeles. Eighty-one countries now dangle film incentives to lure productions away, and Los Angeles production workers have started comparing their city to Detroit.

Capital goes where it’s welcome and leaves where it’s punished, and California keeps finding new ways to punish it: one of the highest income tax rates in the country, a proposed “one-time” wealth tax on billionaires that even its own architect admits won’t be one-time, and now an attorney general who calls a company’s freedom to relocate blackmail.

And what’s true for a $110 billion company is true for anyone.

Notice what actually gave Paramount its leverage this week. It wasn’t the lawyers, and it wasn’t the size; it was the ability to exit. Paramount already has other options. It set them up in advance so it didn’t have to scramble for them now.

That is the entire logic of a Plan B.

You set up the second residency, the foreign account, the assets beyond one government’s reach while everything is still calm, precisely so you never end up begging an ambitious politician for permission to run your own life.

P.S. Paramount has an army of advisers mapping its exit. Most people just need a place to start. That’s exactly what our Plan B Confidential service is for: actionable intelligence on foreign residency programs, second citizenships, international banking, legal tax strategies, and real asset investments, drawn from sixteen years of boots-on-the-ground research and a global network of trusted service providers.

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

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That same day, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, reported its largest monthly gold purchase since 2023.

Of course, June marked its twentieth consecutive month of adding gold to its reserves. Central banks are relatively price insensitive. They buy gold as a long term hedge to preserve value, not to trade back for more paper.

But they aren’t stupid either, and this shows they are buying the dip.

Gold peaked at $5,589 per ounce on January 28 and trades around $4,000 today, roughly 28% below the high. The second quarter was gold’s worst since 2013. Investors have pulled about $18 billion out of gold ETFs since the peak, much of it late money that piled in during last year’s frenzy and bolted the moment momentum broke.

But the price is not the story. The story is what central banks are doing.

Central banks have been the dominant force in gold since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the US froze $300 billion of Russia’s central bank reserves, and every finance ministry on earth learned that dollar assets were not the safe havens they’d believed.

In 2024, central banks bought 1,090 tons of gold, close to an all-time record.

That massive demand made gold expensive. The price nearly doubled from its 2025 low, and central bank buying slowed to 863 tons. That was still higher than historical averages, but down 21% from the year before.

The slowdown was not fading interest; it was price discipline. Central banks are not traders chasing momentum. They are savers accumulating a reserve asset, and like any sensible saver, they buy less when the thing they are saving in gets expensive.

And they speed back up when it goes on sale. In the first quarter of this year central banks bought 244 tons, more than the previous quarter and above the five-year average. China alone has added about 40 tons in the first six months of 2026, compared to just 27 tons in all of 2025. The People’s Bank of China bought more gold last month, with the price down nearly 30% from its high, than in any single month of the entire run-up.

The reason is simple: nothing has changed about why they buy.

The World Gold Council, the industry group that tracks official gold demand, surveyed 76 central banks this year. Seventy-four percent said they expect the dollar’s share of global reserves to be lower five years from now.

These are the institutions that actually hold the world’s reserves, and they are telling you, on the record, that they plan to keep moving away from the dollar.

None of their reasons went away when the price fell. The US national debt keeps growing by trillions, Congress has no plan beyond borrowing more, and Washington keeps proving it will continue to weaponize the dollar.

A central bank holding dollars is holding the liability of a government that is both overextended and unpredictable. Gold sitting in its own vault carries neither risk.

That calculus was true at $5,589, and it is just as true at $4,000.

A trader who is down 28% has a problem if they are trying to quickly turn a profit, and accumulate more paper dollars.

But a saver who plans to accumulate gold for the next decade just got a better price. That is why the sell-off did not scare away the biggest buyers in the market.

It may be exactly what they were waiting for.

We made this argument to our subscribers of our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets, in January.

With gold near its all-time high, we said that this was no longer the early stage of a bull market, that a major drawdown was a real possibility, and that it was time to take some profits.

In fact, subscribers who took action on our research locked in gains of more than 950% on a small silver producer and 540% on a gold and silver producer, both in under a year.

Now the sell-off has come for the miners too. Even solid, debt-free producers are trading as much as 50% below their highs from earlier this year.

But again, as nothing had changed about the long term gold thesis, little has changed about the profitability of these companies. They are still wildly profitable at $4,000 gold, which is far above projections they had planned for.

Some of these companies are still pulling gold out of the ground at a cost of just $1,000 an ounce, which is an amazing margin.

So we are starting to buy again.

It is the same discipline the central banks just demonstrated: slow down when the asset is expensive, step up when it gets cheap, and never confuse a price correction with a change in the story.

Nobody knows where gold trades next month. But the biggest buyers on earth just showed you what they do when gold gets cheaper. They buy more.

P.S. The January research that made the case to take profits, and this month’s research making the case to buy again, both ran in Schiff Sovereign’s Strategic Assets, our investment research on deeply undervalued real asset businesses.

The criteria are strict: profitable companies with little or no debt, trading cheap against current cash flow, with catalysts the market has not priced in.

And joining is risk free, you can get a full refund within 30 days if you aren’t satisfied for any reason. Click here to learn more.

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But last week, a man who used to run the numbers for Social Security itself explained why even a measly six years is optimistic.

Jason Fichtner is the former chief economist of the Social Security Administration, which means he spent years inside the building watching the program’s finances deteriorate.

According to the latest annual report from Social Security’s own trustees, the program’s main trust fund will be empty by late 2032. From that moment, incoming payroll taxes cover only 78% of scheduled benefits, which means an automatic 22% cut for every retiree in America.

But Fichtner recently told CNBC that the real deadline has nothing to do with 2032, because the bond market will move first.

He said that well before 2032, “the bond market looks and says, ’Well, you guys have 12 months to get your act in order; you’re going to be looking for another $600-plus billion a year,” which is why, “Fiscal strain could come earlier than trust fund depletion.”

Cutting grandma’s check by 22% overnight is the closest thing to guaranteed electoral suicide that exists in American politics. So they’ll do what they always do and borrow the difference. Fichtner and economist Veronique de Rugy calculate that filling the gap means roughly $600 billion in new borrowing in the first year, growing to about $700 billion a year by 2036.

And that money doesn’t appear out of thin air. The Treasury borrows from the same pool of savings that everyone else uses, the pool that funds mortgages, car loans, and business investment. When the world’s largest borrower suddenly demands another $600 billion a year from that pool, the price of money goes up for everybody.

Markets are forward-looking. An investor buying a 10-year Treasury today is holding paper that matures years after the trust fund runs dry, so the question of whether Congress will fix Social Security is already priced into that bond, every single day. Investors won’t wait politely until the checks shrink in 2032. They will reprice the moment congressional inaction looks locked in, a year or more ahead of the deadline, exactly as Fichtner describes.

And inaction is the base case. Nine months into fiscal year 2026, the federal deficit has already reached $1.4 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office, running ahead of last year’s pace. This is happening with no major crisis draining the coffers, with the economy growing and unemployment low.

Meanwhile, the lenders who would have to fund all this new borrowing are backing away.

The dollar has fallen roughly 8% from its early 2025 peak. In March alone, foreign holdings of US Treasuries fell by about $240 billion, with Japan selling nearly $48 billion and China unloading another $41 billion. China’s holdings now sit at their lowest level since 2008. The single largest pools of foreign capital on the planet are quietly reducing their exposure to the very asset Washington needs them to buy more of.

Worse, they are actively looking for the exits.

China’s alternative fund-transfer systems are increasingly used by sanctioned countries like Russia and Iran.

And on July 9, the European Parliament voted 416 to 169 to push the digital euro into final negotiations, and the stated goal is to reduce Europe’s dependence on non-EU payment providers like Visa and Mastercard, which currently handle 61% of card payments in the eurozone.

That is a bureaucratic way to say: Europe no longer wants its money to be forced to move through American companies.

Consider how deep the dollar’s dominance runs today: when France-based Airbus sells a jet to Air France, the price tag is in US dollars. A French company selling to a French airline, and the invoice is still written in Washington’s currency.

That is the system Europe’s political class just voted, by a two-to-one margin, to start engineering its way out of. Every step in that direction shrinks the pool of foreigners who need dollars, and fewer people who need dollars means fewer natural buyers for US government debt.

The real deadline for the fallout from Social Security’s 2032 depletion is whenever the bond market decides Congress won’t act. And every lender heading for the exit moves that date closer, because a thinner pool of buyers means the repricing, when it comes, will be sharper.

Higher interest rates arriving years ahead of schedule would hit an economy that runs entirely on cheap debt. The government’s interest bill, corporate borrowing, mortgages, the whole structure assumes money stays affordable. And the foreign lenders who could soften that blow by absorbing the new supply are already leaving.

Congress, in other words, is planning around a deadline that exists only on paper.

The bond market keeps its own calendar. And nobody in Washington seems to have asked what happens if the market’s calendar runs faster than theirs.

PS- Our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets, covers the individual solution: owning profitable, cheaply valued real asset producers that benefit when capital flees paper promises.

The companies which make and mine real things the economy cannot function without, such as metals, energy, and food, have historically done very well in inflationary environments like these.

Plus, we find the ones that don’t rely on debt to function. You can learn more here.

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Thomas Edison (with major funding from JP Morgan) had spent roughly two years building the first-ever commercial power plant, located in Manhattan’s financial district. Its total capacity was about 600 kilowatts… barely enough to power a single rack of GPUs today.

But at the time it was nothing short of miraculous.

Edison’s coal-fired DC power plant initially served just 82 customers, and electricity was nothing more than a luxury flex by the ultra-wealthy.

But over time– especially after Westinghouse and Tesla’s alternating current became the gold standard– electrification rates in the United States skyrocketed.

At the turn of the 20th century, hardly anyone had electricity in their homes. By 1920, it was about 35%. By the time the Great Depression hit in 1929, roughly 70% of US homes were electrified, and urban areas were nearly 85%.

The systems were surprisingly reliable given the rudimentary technology of the day. Blackouts were not infrequent, but they were generally short and localized, often just affecting a few streets or houses.

And typically the biggest reason for a short, localized blackout was simply because electrical demand was increasing more rapidly than the grid could create new supply. More and more homes were being electrified, and, after World War II, consumer appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners began consuming more power. We’ll come back to that.

In response, the industry began looking for efficiencies to be able to scale more quickly. They built larger, beefier power plants and connected their independent grids to be able to share reserves and load balance.

In short, they planned for speed and scale. Not resilience. And the end result was an incredibly complex network that was highly vulnerable to systemic failure.

That failure first came at 5:16pm on November 9, 1965: a minor maintenance issue near Niagara Falls triggered a chain reaction across the entire grid. 30 million people went without power– most until the next morning, some for a few days.

It was a wake-up call… and the first catastrophic grid failure of many more to come. So naturally the government stepped in to “fix” it.

With the electrical grid’s vulnerabilities laid bare, Congress held inquiries and hearings. New rules and regulations were passed. And, before long, the US electrical industry became a confusing alphabet soup of state, local, and federal authorities– ISOs and RTOs, FERC, PJM, MISO, CAISO, SPP, and so many more.

Layers and layers of bureaucratic agencies didn’t fix anything. But technology was quite fortunately on America’s side, and over the past few decades, advances (like LED bulbs) made consumer appliances more energy efficient. Power plants also became more productive.

In fact, today the US consumes less electricity per capita than it did in 1995. And the grid produces much more power.

But this balance is starting to change rapidly.

We all know the story of data centers and their insatiable appetites for energy. Electricity is such a critical input, in fact, that data centers are typically described by their power consumption.

For example, Softbank recently announced 5GW of new data centers in France.  The famous StarGate project in the US is targeting 10GW. Facebook is building a 5GW data center in Louisiana.

And various plans over the next few years go in to several hundred gigawatts.

This trend is similar to the 1950s– utility companies struggled to keep up with surging demand from US consumers who were plugging in air conditioners and refrigerators for the first time.

But supply and demand in the electricity market is a funny thing. Demand can surge very quickly… just like we’ve seen over the past year or so. But electrical supply grows more slowly.

New power plants take years to build. Thanks to the aforementioned alphabet soup, the regulatory burden alone is a minefield.

And most electrical producers aren’t willing to go through the effort, risk, and capital expenditure unless they’re sure the new power plant will be profitable. And profitability depends on the price of electricity.

That’s where politicians and the regulators have stepped in to screw it all up.

Naturally, with demand soaring and supply constrained, electricity prices are rising. You’d think that politicians would respond by making it easier for utilities to build new power plants, i.e. reduce the regulatory and permitting process to increase electricity supply.

But no. Instead, they’re capping prices.

Last year, a whole lot of state officials and federal regulators got together to set a ceiling for certain wholesale electricity prices to roughly $333 per megawatt-day.

Clearly, they’re responding to voters’ demands to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living.

Unfortunately, $333/MW-day isn’t high enough to justify investment in new power plants.

Existing power plants are old. Sometimes extremely old. They already own their land, and their construction loans are all paid off. So $333/MW-day is sufficient for them to pay for fuel, conduct maintenance, and turn a small profit.

But $333 isn’t enough to build a new plant– to cover the additional costs of construction, land purchases, permitting, etc.

In fact, the regulators themselves estimate that electricity prices need to be about $500/MW-day (i.e. 50% higher) to justify investment in new power plants.

This means there won’t be enough new commercial power plants built to sufficiently supply the grid. In fact the northeast grid (known as PJM) is already in a 6.5 GW deficit against its own reserve requirement for the first time ever, increasing the chance of failure next summer.

This is essentially a form of shrinkflation. i.e. paying the same amount of money but getting less for it. We’ve all seen it at grocery stores and restaurants– same price, smaller portions.

In this case, electricity prices are supposedly remaining flat. But you’re getting less for it– potential grid failure. All because the maze of political and regulatory authorities won’t do the obvious thing and make it easy for new power plants to be built.

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Picture the kind of life that, in the West, only the genuinely rich can afford: a full-time housekeeper who cooks and cleans, a concierge doctor you text with directly whenever you need, dinner out with friends several times each week without even thinking about splitting the bill, and a modern condo with pool, gym, and security.

That would easily run $20,000+ per month in the US. The live-in help alone puts it out of reach for most people.

But in Cebu, a coastal city in the Philippines, all of that costs about $3,000 a month.

An ordinary Western middle-class income (even lower middle class) unlocks a lifestyle that looks posh back home.

But cheap is not what makes the Philippines interesting. Plenty of places are cheap. What sets it apart is that it may be the easiest place in Asia for a Westerner to actually live.

Start with the language. English is not a tourist-zone courtesy in the Philippines; it is an official language, used in government, courts, contracts, banks, hospitals, universities, and street signage. Your doctor speaks English. Your lawyer drafts documents in English.

No other major Asian country comes close, and for a retiree or a family building a second base, that changes everything about daily life.

Then there is the familiarity. Spain ruled the islands for more than three centuries and left behind Catholicism, Spanish surnames, town plazas, and a warm, family-centered social culture that feels closer to Latin America than to the rest of Asia.

Then the Americans took over; the Philippines was US territory from 1898 until independence in 1946, which left behind English-language schools, American-style institutions, basketball, and a general comfort with Westerners you will not find in Japan or China.

You can walk through Cebu and pass a Catholic church, a US-style mall, a fresh seafood market, and a group of schoolkids chatting in English, all in the same afternoon.

A comfortable two-bedroom condo in Cebu runs around $450/month.

A couple can live well on $2,500 to $3,500 a month, while retired couples in smaller cities often do it on just $2,000. A private doctor visit costs $10 to $25, a dental cleaning $15 to $30.

The tax picture is friendlier than most people expect too. Foreigners who become Philippine tax residents are generally taxed only on income earned inside the Philippines. A British retiree on a UK pension or a Canadian drawing retirement income will likely owe the Philippines nothing.

The same is true for Americans; the Philippines will not touch their income earned outside of the Philippines. The catch for Americans, of course, is that Uncle Sam taxes citizens on their worldwide income wherever they live.

(Those with earned income can use the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion to shield the first $132,900 of it, but the US tax and reporting obligations follow you regardless.)

What turns all of this from a pleasant vacation into a real Plan B is the residency, which is genuinely easy to get and even easier to keep.

The Philippines’ famous retirement visa has been running since 1985, and despite the name you do not need a pension or to be retired; anyone 40 or older can qualify by placing a refundable deposit in a Philippine bank.

There is no minimum stay requirement at all, so you can hold the residency for life while living somewhere else entirely, visiting when you like, and paying a modest annual fee to keep it current.

To be clear, the Philippines has real trade-offs. Foreigners can own condominium units but can never own land directly. Infrastructure outside the main hubs is uneven, typhoons are a fact of life, and the bureaucracy moves at island speed.

And the Philippine passport is weak enough that citizenship is not worth chasing; this is a residency play, not a passport play.

But that is exactly what a Plan B is. It does not require you to move anywhere; it requires securing the legal right to live somewhere you would actually enjoy, before you need it.

In case the comfortable Western life continues drifting out of reach, with housing, healthcare, and help all rising faster than anyone can comprehend, it makes sense to consider potential options abroad.

On the other side of the world, a great life figures in to a below-average Western income, in English, with no winter.

Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, just published a full report on the Philippines for members: where expats actually live (and the one region to approach with eyes open), realistic budgets, the healthcare and insurance setup, the tax rules for remote workers, the exact deposit tiers for the retirement visa, and what you can and cannot do with the deposit.

The Philippines is one option among many. Plan B Confidential’s research covers residency and citizenship pathways, offshore banking, and legal tax strategies across more than 120 countries, so you can shortlist the handful of places actually worth your time from your couch, before spending any real money on the ground.

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

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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.

Source

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.

Source

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.

Source

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.

Source

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.

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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.

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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.

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