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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America’s fiscal burden is fixable.

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

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

Unfortunately for China, they cannot go back in time and create more people to fill the void.

So ultimately this game of thrones is America’s to lose. Winning requires changing course and making responsible decisions. Losing means Inspired Idiots continue making terrible decisions guided by deranged ideology rather than factual analysis.

Which brings me back to Professor Saez.

If you asked any rational policymaker, “Would it be beneficial for a state to lose a substantial portion of its tax base?” the answer would be a resounding “NO.” It is mathematically impossible to credibly make that argument.

And even if an ‘expert’ like the Professor were to try, they would at least have to heavily caveat their conclusion by stating the obvious risks and uncertainties involved.

But that’s precisely the problem: these people aren’t objective researchers and policymakers; they’re irrationally evangelical. They view their ideas as fully righteous and self-evident, with zero degree of uncertainty.

California had a giant deficit before they started chasing away their wealthiest citizens and businesses. Now it’s going to be far worse.

Businesses and billionaires alike have been leaving for years, not to mention countless others who are fed up and have had enough.

It’s also interesting how experts like the professor only focus on taxes. They rarely consider how effectively it is spent.

Consider that California voters approved a rail bond in 2008 on the promise that trains would be running by 2020.

The state has since spent roughly $14 billion on the project, yet not a single foot of working track has been laid in the seventeen years since. Zero passenger miles.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s own Draft 2026 Business Plan now puts the full-system cost at $231 billion by 2045.

That’s about as much as NASA spent, adjusted for inflation, for the entire Apollo program, and more than the current Artemis program.

Every audit comes back the same way: nobody can tell you where the money went. The failure never produces accountability. And the answer is always to spend more.

Unfortunately there is no more money to spend. So the experts have churned out a wealth tax proposal which makes the state even less competitive… and will drive away the very people they aim to tax.

This is not the type of objective thinking that is going to bring America back from the brink. Yet it is exactly the kind of thinking that voters continue to reward.

America’s trajectory will not change until voters demand it. Will that happen in time? Perhaps.

There are plenty of signs of optimism that people all over the world are starting to wake up; the recent humiliating defeat of Britain’s Labour Party is just one example. So we can certainly hope that the tide will turn before it’s too late.

But, as we used to say in the military, hope is not a course of action. And that’s why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

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For the previous decade, he had served as a crewman on several Portuguese commercial expeditions to haul physical resources like gold, ivory, and fish from Asia back to European ports.

These voyages were treacherous; they all crossed into maritime territory controlled by the Venetians, Ottomans, or Egyptian Malmuk. So there was a high likelihood of a vessel being confiscated and its crew being captured or killed.

But through his marriage into a Portuguese navigator’s family, this sailor had inherited a small library of nautical charts. And he spent years studying them and corresponding with scientists who studied cosmology.

Over time, he became convinced that a small fleet could reach Asia by sailing WEST, not east, and arrive to the spice markets of the Indies without passing through enemy territory.

The sailor’s name was Christopher Columbus. And he took his idea to the King of Portugal, John II.

The King was interested enough to convene a royal panel, but the ‘experts’ decided that Columbus had badly underestimated the size of the Earth and recommended against funding the voyage.

Columbus spent the next several years pitching his idea to anyone who would listen.

He sent his brother to make the case to Henry VII in England. He approached the French court. He crossed the border into Spain, secured an audience with Ferdinand and Isabella at Córdoba, and watched a second royal commission argue for nearly four years… before rejecting him for the same reasons the Portuguese had.

He gave up on Spain and was riding north to try the French court again when a royal courier caught up with him. Ferdinand and Isabella had just taken Granada on January 2, 1492 — a conquest that ended a decade-long war and brought the southern Mediterranean coast and its ports under their control.

With the war finally over and the southern frontier secured, the monarchs had excess cash to fund the next strategic venture.

So in April of that year, at the siege camp of Santa Fe outside Granada, Isabella signed the contract. A few months later, three small ships set sail— with the crew probably all assuming that they would not survive the voyage.

The Spanish crown’s investment paid off… and they spent the next century pulling staggering amounts of silver and gold out of the new continent Columbus had stumbled upon; Spain became the wealthiest power in Europe as a result.

This is how governments used to invest. They were like venture capital funds of their day, financing long-term bets on ports, territory, trade routes, and resources, all in an effort to secure strategic assets that compound over generations.

But for the last eighty years or so, the world has run a different experiment.

After 1945, the United States built a system in which the rest of the world manufactured goods, sold them to American consumers, and recycled their trade surpluses back into US Treasury bonds.

This system worked for decades; in fact the most rational thing a foreign government could do with its national savings was invest in US dollars and US government bonds. Any foreign country with a stockpile of Treasurys was considered stable and creditworthy.

But this system is now cracking. Rapidly.

After the Biden administration froze Russia’s dollar reserves in 2022, foreign central banks understood that US government bonds were ‘safe’ only as long as their country stayed on America’s good side.

Consequently, most foreign governments have been diversifying out of dollars ever since.

This year’s Iran war drove the lesson home: the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes, has been closed since late February.

And every foreign country holding hundreds of billions of US government bonds has been reminded that, no matter how big their Treasury stockpile, they cannot feed their population with it. They cannot fill their people’s gas tanks with it. They cannot power homes with it.

So governments are reconsidering their US dollar positions more than ever.

Just like Ferdinand and Isabella, governments around the world started by acquiring gold; central banks have been buying it at the fastest pace in modern history since 2022.

But gold is only the leading indicator.

The next phase is foreign governments and central banks stockpiling other critical resources and materials— energy, fertilizer, copper, uranium, rare earths, food production, and even fresh water.

These are all strategic assets that no government can conjure out of thin air. And no amount of paper bonds can magically summon.

China has been running this playbook for fifteen years: they’ve purchased farmland in Africa, copper concessions in the Congo, rare-earth processing across central Asia, and the Belt and Road infrastructure that physically connects the resource to the buyer.

A large part of China’s investment capital has come from their steady liquidation of US Treasury holdings.

This is the Columbus-era calculus all over again. Whereas governments around the world used to stockpile US government bonds, they are now stockpiling strategic resources.

One obvious consequence is lower demand for US government bonds— which drives up interest rates, mortgage rates, and more. It probably also leads to a lot more inflation, i.e. the 1970s all over again.

But it also means that these critical resources— and the companies which produce them— should have a very, very bright future as foreign governments throw potentially trillions of dollars at the commodities sector.

This is the primary thesis behind Schiff Sovereign’s monthly investment research service, Strategic Assets.

We look for profitable, well-managed real-asset businesses with pristine balance sheets that are trading at a low multiple of free cash flow— with clear catalysts for growth.

And those catalysts include our fragmenting world and the scramble to secure physical, critical assets.

Click here to learn more about Strategic Assets and our exceptional track record.

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There are 186,000 dead Americans still listed as active recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

Another 355,000, he said, are drawing SNAP benefits in more than one state at the same time.

Vance’s task force also managed to identify recipients of taxpayer-funded food assistance who are wealthy enough to drive Lamborghinis.

“Finding fraud in the federal government,” Vance told the crowd, “is kind of like fishing in a barrel with dynamite.”

He’s right. Because this is not the first time someone has wandered into a federal database and tripped over piles of dead beneficiaries.

Earlier this year, the FCC’s inspector general announced that Lifeline— a federally funded program which subsidizes mobile phone service— had been billing the government for phone and internet service to 94,000 dead people.

In total, there were $3.8 million worth of calls that were never made, from phones that were never used, by people who were no longer alive.

Zoom out and it gets uglier. Last year alone, the federal government made $186 billion in “improper payments” — money sent to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.

The Treasury Secretary estimated that outright fraud in the federal budget totals $600 billion each year.

The President signed an executive order on March 16 to set up the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud explicitly to go after that pile, and Vance is chairman.

Every benefit-paying agency in the federal government has near-term deadlines to identify their most fraud-prone programs and start screening recipients for things like… you know… being alive.

Federal investigators are still picking through the fake-daycare and phony-autism-clinic operation that Minnesota’s Somali networks used to bilk US taxpayers out of billions— fraud so brazen it has already produced 90+ federal charges and helped end Tim Walz’s political career.

It is a good start and long overdue.

Unfortunately the fraud that Vance is uncovering is dwarfed by the interest bill on America’s nearly $40 trillion national debt.

That interest bill is now $1.2 trillion annually, up from ‘only’ $500 billion in 2020.

Meanwhile, mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other mandatory entitlements grew by another $245 billion in FY2025 alone— an 8% jump in a single year.

These are the programs that neither party will touch. In fact, every election cycle, nearly every Congressional incumbent and candidate vows not to touch Social Security, virtually guaranteeing the problem will be kicked down the road until the main trust fund runs dry in a few years.

But even the modest cleanup Vance is talking about will run into a brick wall of litigation.

Whenever the executive branch tries to actually cut something— terminate workers, verify citizenship, clean up voter rolls, claw back fraudulent payments— someone files a lawsuit and a judge issues an injunction.

Federal judges blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury payment systems. A coalition of 20 state attorneys general sued to halt layoffs at more than a dozen agencies. Even relatively modest cuts were tied up in litigation for months.

The ‘justice’ system functions as a ratchet: spending goes up easily, but it almost never comes down. The moment Vance’s task force tries to actually pull a benefit check away from a “dead” recipient, the same injunctions will land on his desk.

But they can’t litigate their way out of reality.

The United States now spends more on interest than on its military, and runs $2 trillion annual deficits with no recession, pandemic, or major war to justify it.

That kind of spending has consequences, and they are already showing up.

It is why inflation has refused to come back down to the Fed’s 2% target. It is why foreign central banks have been buying physical gold at a record pace for four straight years, and now hold more gold than US Treasury bonds for the first time since 1996.

It is why the 30-year Treasury yield is back to 5%, because no one thinks this spending is sustainable.

That also means every new dollar Washington borrows costs more to service. And the same wave hits mortgages, car loans, and small-business credit lines.

Nothing on the horizon breaks this loop.

Which is exactly why it makes so much sense to own the real assets that actually thrive when fiat currency loses its grip: gold, silver, energy, industrial metals, and the well-managed businesses that produce them.

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But the King was hilariously wrong.

Despite centuries of warfare, invasions, and plagues, English rulers prior to Henry had been remarkably disciplined in maintaining 92.5% silver in their coins.

In fact, England’s kings were so serious about their coinage that, at one point in the 1100s, one of Henry VIII’s forebears rounded up every private minter who skimped on the silver content in their coins— and had the man’s testicles removed.

But Henry VIII did not share his ancestors resolve. So, drowning in debt, divorce, and too much war, he started to reduce the silver content and replace it with copper.

His new coins still looked vaguely similar to the original ones because they were given a cheap, silver wash. But the wash wore off quickly— especially on the side where Henry’s profile was carved.

Londoners soon began to notice that the king’s nose would turn orange once the silver sheen wore off, giving rise to the nickname “Old Coppernose”.

And yet the debasement continued— and this was Henry’s ‘clever’ idea.

There wasn’t a single shock or dramatic crash. Henry’s ‘Great Debasement’ was a years-long operation of slowly robbing prosperity from his subjects. Each year their coins would buy less. Prices would rise. Their cost of living increased. And overall they were worse off.

This is the same story of our own time.

Gallup reported last week that 55% of Americans believe their personal finances are getting worse; that’s the absolute rock bottom reading in 25 years of the survey.

It is worse than 2008, when the financial system was actually breaking. It is worse than the pandemic, when the economy was shut off.

And that 55% statistic is in a year when headline employment numbers and stock indices are supposed to be telling everyone they’re doing fine.

Perhaps even more alarming is a recent analysis by a group called MoneyLion, which looked at Census data and found that, in 12 states in the US, a $100,000 income is now considered LOWER middle class.

For those who remember what life was like 25 years ago, making six figures was solid “made it” territory.

Not anymore. In Massachusetts, the lower-middle ceiling has crept up to $116,476. In New Jersey, $115,882. In California, $111,277.

Of course, it isn’t hard to see what those states have in common. They tax heavily, regulate aggressively, and treat business and wealth as plump dairy cows to milk.

This isn’t magically going away if the Strait of Hormuz opens, or Congress passes a ban on corporations buying homes to rent.

The federal government runs trillion-dollar deficits every year, the Treasury borrows the difference, and the Federal Reserve accommodates the whole arrangement by expanding the money supply by trillions.

Long term inflation doesn’t slow down until Washington decides to be fiscally responsible— and there is little evidence that’s about to happen.

If you bought a house in 2010, or even 2021, the same forces hollowing out the dollar have been inflating the value of your assets; your house cannot be printed by the Federal Reserve, so as the money supply increases, your house costs more in nominal dollars.

That’s why the people who feel worst about this economy are young people.

A recent Generation Lab survey found that more than 8 in 10 Americans aged 18-29 — the cohort least likely to own a home or hold meaningful investments — now describe the economy as bad or terrible. Only 2 percent of them call it “excellent.”

This is why real assets matter. The Fed can manufacture as many dollars as it wants, but it cannot manufacture the things that actually have value: precious metals, energy, critical resources like uranium or copper, a profitable business producing something the world cannot function without.

Because every single time governments are given the choice between inflation and discipline, they pick inflation.

And just like Henry VIII, they think no one is going to notice.

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The Cold War was over. The Internet and cell phones were starting to take off. And America’s biggest problem was the President getting frisky in the Oval Office.

The US economy was certifiably booming in 1998; unemployment was at a thirty-year low, the economy was growing leaps and bounds, and Washington was, by its own modest standards, somewhat functional.

The federal government had just posted its first budget surplus in three decades, and America’s debt-to-GDP ratio was falling. Plus there was zero geopolitical competition. China was still an impoverished backwater. Russia was toast. The euro didn’t even exist yet.

So foreign investors flocked to America as the ONLY place to invest. Capital inflows surged… and as a result, the US 30-year Treasury yield fell to around 5%.

Remember that rates had been 15% or more in the 80s, and 10% in the 90s. So for the 30-year yield to touch 5% was almost shocking. And rates remained low for the decades that followed— with the 30-year reaching an all-time low of 1.89% in 2020.

Today, the 30-year Treasury yield is back near 5%. But this is no 1998 America.

The federal government is not running surpluses, rather $2 trillion annual deficits. Debt-to-GDP is rising (now well over 100%) instead of falling. Treasury is on track to spend more than $1 trillion this fiscal year just on interest, nearly triple what it spent just six years ago.

And unlike the booming economy of the 90s, Q4/2025 GDP growth came in at a pathetic 0.5%. The labor market is soft. Energy prices are rising. Inflation is stubbornly high.

Most importantly, back in the 90s, foreign central banks were flooding the US with capital. Today they’ve sold more than $80 billion in US Treasuries— JUST since the Iran war started in late February. And they’re buying gold at the fastest pace in modern history.

As a result of weak foreign demand for US government bonds, yields are rising.

In 1998, yields fell to 5% because America was winning. Today yields have risen to 5% because the US is a hot financial mess.

The increase in the 30-year yield from 1.89% in 2020 to 5% today took six years. But I’d expect that pace to accelerate as it hits 6% then 7% then 8%.

Almost nobody in Congress is doing anything to fix it. Politicians laugh at the idea of spending discipline; they won’t lift a finger to eliminate rampant fraud.

That’s why so many foreign countries are heading for the exit.

Case in point: this past Monday, nearly 50 leaders of the European Political Community — including France, Britain, Poland, etc. gathered to declare themselves a “third superpower” in addition to the United States and China.

Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney showed up as the first non-European leader ever invited— the implicit message being that Canada is now picking Europe over the US.

Of course, the whole concept is laughable; these people honestly think signing papers can make them a superpower.

These are the same governments that spent two decades dismantling their own economies in the name of net zero and multiculturalism, then destroyed their own rule of law to prosecute anyone who complained.

The state of Mississippi — the poorest in the United States by GDP per capita — now produces more than France, Italy, or the United Kingdom.

The gap between Canadian and US GDP per capita became twice as bad under former PM Justin Trudeau-Castro, and the OECD projects Canada will rank dead last in the developed world for growth through 2060.

They have gutted every actual engine of becoming a superpower status; now they’re just cosplaying.

BUT America does depend on them for one thing: buying its massive amount of US government bonds.

These are the long-duration, sticky foreign buyers that have absorbed Washington’s debt for decades and kept yields artificially low, even when the fiscal numbers got ugly.

And they are looking for the exit. Countries that used to stampede INTO Treasuries during a crisis are now stampeding the other way.

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In an employee conference call, he had to quell a great deal of panic over the company’s performance.

Growth at Facebook/Meta is slowing, the stock price is down, and the company is dealing with significant regulatory and economic headwinds. And workers are unsettled.

So Zuckerberg took the mic and tried to assuage those concerns by explaining to everybody why ad revenue growth is slowing.

He said plainly, “If oil prices go up, then consumers spend more of their money on oil, on gas, and less on things that they would just buy that are kind of discretionary things that the advertising might serve.”

Without really meaning to, Mark Zuckerberg made a really strong case for real assets.

It ultimately starts with energy costs. Energy costs are higher. And everyone wants to blame Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, but this trend has been building for a long time.

For years, oil was the second most hated asset on the planet, only edged out by coal.

Think about it— liberal elites hold conferences where they fly to dictator states in their private jets, only to parade oil and gas CEOs on stage and publicly shame them.

Then you have the legions of inspired idiots who glitter-bomb art and glue themselves to pavement to stop traffic (ironically increasing emissions), all in the name of “just stop oil.”

They deface buildings and commit crimes, but they’ve been so successful that many oil companies themselves have turned their back on oil.

National governments, especially the previous Biden administration, have gone out of their way to tax, fleece, subvert, frustrate, and publicly ridicule oil companies.

Furthermore, the industry itself has been starved of capital because investors jumped on the bandwagon. Financial institutions stopped making loans, in some cases even debanking oil companies as a ridiculous form of virtue signaling.

Pension funds stopped investing in oil companies. Hedge funds tried to take over oil companies solely to turn them into fantasy green projects.

The dearth of capital— in a capital intensive industry— made it very difficult for exploration companies to finance new discoveries.

Even in the labor market, young people around the world have been so brainwashed that no one wants to go into the oil and gas sector— even though it pays quite well— for fear of public humiliation and “being on the wrong side of history.”

To be frank, it’s actually kind of extraordinary that an industry deprived of capital and labor, suffering an endless onslaught of media hysteria and political assault, has managed to continue delivering, day after day, the energy that our civilization requires to function.

Blaming today’s higher oil prices exclusively on Iran totally misses this history; the problems have been building for years.

Solving this energy challenge will take a long time— to finance new projects, find new discoveries, build the right kinds of infrastructure, and commercialize those discoveries in a way that keeps up with the rising energy demands of a growing world.

In the meantime, higher energy prices increase the production cost of just about everything else— food, housing, automobiles, consumer goods, even your monthly electricity bill. So, in the end, most things become more expensive.

This is ultimately what Mark Zuckerberg was saying— without fully saying it. For years there was an abundance of energy and global cooperation. Combined with low interest rates, the result was negligible price inflation and a feeling of widespread prosperity.

That feeling of prosperity meant consumers had plenty of disposable income for the sorts of things advertisers would sell on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

As Zuckerberg explained, those same retail-focused companies are now selling to consumers and individuals who have less disposable income— precisely because they have to spend more money on essentials like energy and food.

We’ve been predicting this for the last several years, and we think this trend will continue for some time.

This is why a very sensible place to consider investing, even if just as a hedge against rising prices, is in the companies that produce these critical resources.

This is the core of our investment ethos, and to be frank, it has been very successful.

We’ve seen our mining stocks multiply by as much as ten times, with several others doubling, tripling, and quadrupling.

But it goes beyond mining; one agricultural company has doubled, and a fertilizer producer is up double digits in just a few months. We’ve been collecting dividends from industrial producers while their stocks tick higher.

Only a few companies we have researched are down, and we think they still have plenty of upside.

And we are still finding some really great real-asset businesses that are surprisingly, deeply undervalued. That includes energy companies.

There are a lot of reasons for high quality businesses being undervalued; but I think it’s because people believe this is some sort of aberration— that tomorrow the spigots turn on and oil drops back to $40 a barrel.

The reality is all these challenges can be solved, but it’s going to take a while. And in the meantime, we think these real-asset companies are going to be cash machines.

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His methods were absolutely insane; Gottlieb set up a brothel in San Francisco where CIA-paid prostitutes dosed unsuspecting men while government agents watched through one-way mirrors.

He also authorized CIA officers to dose their own colleagues with LSD— without their knowledge— just to see what would happen.

One of Gottlieb’s own colleagues, a biochemist named Frank Olson, was slipped LSD at a work retreat in November 1953. Olsen went out a tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York.

The program became known as MK-Ultra, and for the next twenty years it ran almost entirely in the dark. Congress did not know. The press did not know. Even most of the CIA did not know.

By 1973, Watergate convinced CIA Director Richard Helms that the press was finally willing to dig into the intelligence agencies. So he gave one last order on his way out the door: destroy the MK-Ultra files.

Twenty years of records — experiments, payments, deaths — were fed into burn bags and shredders.

By the time the government held hearings two years later, almost no evidence remained. Fortunately an incompetent clerk had misplaced the program’s financial records, so eventually roughly 16,000 pages emerged about MK-Ultra. Everything we know about the program today is because of those misplaced financial records.

Yet no one was ever punished for the experiments… or for the for the federal crime of destroying the documents.

So it’s a tiny step in the right direction that, last week, the Justice Department indicted Dr. David Morens, a former senior advisor to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, on charges of obstructing a federal investigation into the origins of Covid-19.

The NIH gave roughly $8 million in grants to a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance (run by Peter Daszak) which in turn routed some of that money to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Yet the NIH had publicly insisted, for years, that it was not funding any gain-of-function research.

As the lab leak hypothesis gained traction in 2020, the indictment alleges that Dr. Morens instructed EcoHealth’s president to send all correspondence to his personal Gmail.

Dr. Morens also told colleagues that he had “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts.”  Yet when a Senate document request arrived in June 2021, Dr. Morens claimed that he had “retained very few documents on these matters.”

Federal records law requires every one of his emails to be preserved.

Now we know why Francis Collins, then director of NIH, was so determined in early 2020 to crush any public discussion of a possible lab origin. In April of that year, Collins emailed Fauci calling the lab leak hypothesis a “very destructive conspiracy” and asking what NIH could do to “put it down.”

He was not asking a scientific question. He was asking how to suppress an inquiry that pointed back at money his own agency had distributed.

This is one of the premier institutions Americans were told to “trust the science” on.

The behavior across NIH, the CDC, and the FDA destroyed public trust in institutions that should have been protecting public health. The agencies served a narrative instead, and they wanted higher case numbers to scare the public into compliance.

Patients hospitalized for car accidents or hip replacements were logged as Covid if a routine swab came back positive. Patients who arrived testing positive were counted as Covid deaths even when something else (like a motorcycle accident) had killed them.

These “experts” said masks worked, after months of telling people they did not.

They said natural immunity was not a real factor, contradicting decades of immunology.

They said ivermectin was a “horse dewormer,” though it had been an FDA-approved human medication for decades.

They told the public that vaccinated people could NOT transmit the virus, when the data clearly showed they could.

Meanwhile, the pandemic’s collateral damage piled up.

The CDC’s own 2021 survey of high school students found 44% reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness, 55% emotionally abused at home, and more than one in ten physically abused.

One in four had experienced hunger. Not to mention the alcoholism, the record overdose deaths, the diseases that went undiagnosed, the learning loss the next generation will not catch up from.

Dr. Morens deleted his emails to protect an industrial level of deceit which incalculably harmed the US economy and American society.

And it wasn’t just the technical question of whether NIH funded dangerous research; it’s the broader implication that the institutions Americans were told to trust, had, in reality, spent two years telling lies.

And the costs of those lies were paid by teenagers locked in their bedrooms, small business owners watching their savings evaporate, and the roughly 1.2 million Americans who died.

The indictment of Dr. Morens will not suddenly repair all of that. But a bit of accountability is at least a step in the right direction.

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But it’s true: William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican vote (with Roosevelt starting his own “Bull Moose” ticket). Woodrow Wilson was on the Democratic side. And Eugene V. Debs ran as a Socialist, garnering 6% of the popular vote.

Realistically, the 1912 election was a contest over who could convince voters that he hated trusts and monopolies the most.

The early 1900s was a time Americans felt that big corporate monopolies (US Steel, Standard Oil, etc.) were fleecing them to drive up prices. And politicians felt the pressure to take action.

In the end, Wilson won the 1912 election, and his Democrats took a whopping 291 seats in the House.

With their agenda assured, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 swiftly followed, and it remains to this day one of the signature pieces of US legislation aimed at preventing monopolistic behavior.

This was precisely the law that was used to prevent the JetBlue–Spirit Airlines merger that both companies inked in 2022.

The big news over the weekend, of course, was that Spirit has now failed and ceased operations. The Internet is full of hot takes blaming Elizabeth Warren and the Biden administration for their role in destroying this airline.

And while that blame is accurate, it’s also far too simplistic. More fully, Spirit’s demise represents a complete failure of modern American “stakeholder capitalism.”

For starters, it’s important to point out that the officers, managers, boards of directors, and shareholders of both JetBlue and Spirit ALL agreed to the merger.

Business in general is tough. The airline industry is especially tough. And both companies agreed the best way forward was to merge.

But inspired idiots like Elizabeth Warren, who collectively have zero experience in business, finance, or aviation, decided that this merger (like all mergers in their opinion) was bad.

So they fought tooth and nail to dismantle it.

Ultimately the case was decided in federal court by a Reagan-appointed judge named William Young. I actually read his entire 113-page opinion over the weekend. And to be frank, my conclusion is that the judge made his best effort to do his duty and interpret the Clayton Act with respect to the JetBlue–Spirit merger.

In his written opinion, the judge himself acknowledges that his responsibility is to “predict the future of a dynamic market recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, in markedly uncertain times.”

Sounds like a recipe for success!

But I found the analysis truly bizarre, because the judge, like Elizabeth Warren, Merrick Garland, Joe Biden, Lina Khan, and the rest, has no experience in aviation, finance, or accounting. He has never run a business.

Yet, throughout his analysis, he opined on whether it was appropriate, for example, for JetBlue to take on such a large amount of debt to consummate the merger.

This is ridiculous. The decision should be left to the board of directors of JetBlue, not to a federal judge.

The judge further acknowledged that he was completely out of his element and had to rely on the testimony of expert witnesses.

Ultimately the trial came down to which ‘expert’ the court found the most credible. And in his written opinion, Judge Young assigned “significant weight” to the government’s ‘expert’, a Columbia University economics professor.

It didn’t matter that the “Big Four”, i.e. United, Delta, AA, and Southwest all engaged in mergers and acquisitions over the past 20 years. The government felt compelled to deny what would have been the fifth largest airline— JetBlue/Spirit— from ever existing.

And so, based largely on the testimony of a single expert, the merger was denied.

Plenty of comments this weekend lamented the Spirit employees who are now out of work, or the impact to passengers who won’t be able to fly Spirit’s routes anymore. And they all blame Elizabeth Warren— who was instrumental in making sure the lawsuit happened.

But again, I think this is an overly simplistic view.

If those routes, say San Juan to Fort Lauderdale, are remotely profitable, they’ll be picked up by another airline. Probably JetBlue.

Spirit’s fleet of aircraft will not disintegrate. They’ll be bought by another airline. Probably JetBlue.

Even those employees who are now collecting federal unemployment benefits will probably be rehired as those routes are restarted. Probably by JetBlue.

In short, JetBlue is now in a position to buy— out of liquidation at bargain-basement prices— everything it was prepared to pay $3.8 billion for just two years ago.

So realistically, this is a major victory for JetBlue.

Who loses? Spirit’s former employees will eventually find work. The passengers will find new airlines.

But the stockholders of Spirit Airlines will be completely wiped out.

Keep in mind, Spirit wasn’t owned by some “evil billionaire.” It was owned by mutual funds and pension funds— places where the retirement savings of firefighters and schoolteachers were invested.

In fact Spirit was held by multiple mutual funds managed by Fidelity Investments… which happens to be domiciled in Elizabeth Warren’s home state of Massachusetts. Fidelity, and all the people invested in those funds, are worse off today.

Meanwhile, JetBlue stock is up about 8% since the government proposed rescue of Spirit crashed.

Capitalism is supposed to be an economic system built on freedom, in which all participants get to decide what’s in their best interest.

More often than not, a capitalist system produces win-win deals that are in everyone‘s best interest. And both JetBlue and Spirit decided four years ago that a merger was a win-win deal.

What happened instead is the ultimate demonstration of how America has changed: a country where inspired idiots like Elizabeth Warren have not only managed to seize power, but continue to be reelected by the very people they are harming.

Warren insisted that a lawsuit be brought to disrupt a win-win deal. And the government brought that case not because of its merits, but to virtue-signal their woke economic justice.

The judge in the case was completely unqualified to render an opinion on such business complexities, and was forced to apply a law that was created in 1914 before there was even a civil aviation industry.

This same law was not applied to the four largest companies in the industry. Only to Spirit and JetBlue.

And in the end, investors in Spirit paid the price.

Ultimately there were two paths. One path was a win-win. The other path was a total wipeout — $3.8 billion that could have gone to Spirit Airlines shareholders.

The government did everything in its power to ensure the wipeout. And absolutely zero people will be held accountable.

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The listings appear on Facebook pages openly named “Renting room in London for Muslims” and “Muslim rents,” with language like “only for Muslims,” “for 2 Muslim boys or 2 Muslim girls,” “prefer Punjabi boy.” A single letting agency, Roshan Properties, posted dozens of them on TikTok before anyone noticed.

Personally I think property owners should be able to rent out their flats to whoever they want.

For example, if I want to rent my guest cottage exclusively to English-speaking retired couples, I should be able to do that.

But this practice is illegal in a multitude of countries, including the UK.

Section 33 of Britain’s 2010 Equality Act states that property owners and landlords “must not discriminate” based on “protected characteristics” including “age; disability; gender reassignment; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; sexual orientation”.

Point is, renting to someone based on their religion is against the law, subject to fines of up to £7,000 per violation.

Yet according to the Telegraph’s investigation, no one has been fined.

This is the latest sign that the United Kingdom is splitting into two societies with two different sets of laws, customs, and social norms. To see how literal that is, look at what the British state does and does not punish.

Last December, a 36-year-old man named Luke Yarwood was sentenced to 18 months in prison in Bournemouth Crown Court. His crime was posting two anti-immigrant tweets in the weeks after the 2024 Magdeburg Christmas market attack in which a Saudi immigrant killed six people.

To be fair, the tweets were over the top, calling for migrant hotels to be burned down and for “Brits to gang together and start the slaughter,” then to “head to MPs’ houses and Parliament.”

The tweets were viewed thirty-three times in total — eighteen months in prison for two posts that almost no one saw.

Four months earlier, the same British justice system had handed down a very different sentence to a different man.

His name is Ayomide Famakinde. He is twenty-three, a gym instructor based in south London, and he had been convicted of sexually assaulting a nineteen-year-old woman near Bournemouth beach.

Famakinde had approached the woman late at night, put his hand down her pants, and ignored her when she screamed for him to stop. She had to fight him off until his friend pulled him away.

Three years passed before the case got to court. When it was finally time for justice, the judge sentenced Famakinde to 150 hours of community service.

The judge described the assault as a “momentary aberration” and cited Famakinde’s “very troubled background and difficult life.”

Yarwood was sentenced to eighteen months of prison for two tweets. Famakinde got no prison for putting his hands down a stranger’s clothes. Both sentences came out of British courts within four months of each other.

This is not the first time the British state has protected rapists.

For nearly two decades, organized grooming gangs of overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men raped thousands of underage British girls, some as young as ten, while police, NHS staff, and social workers looked the other way.

Health professionals dismissed twelve-year-olds with multiple pregnancies as making “lifestyle choices.”

When Parliament was forced to decide on whether to conduct a formal inquiry in January 2025, every single Labour MP under Prime Minister Keir Starmer voted it down.

The Prime Minister himself, a former prosecutor, insisted that the public’s outcry for an investigation was “the bandwagon of the far right.”

Meanwhile, the British state has plenty of energy for the things it does want to enforce. Every household with a television is required to pay £174.50 a year for a license, and the BBC sends Christmas-card threats of £1,000 fines and promises door-knocks on December 25th.

And a single offensive tweet can get you swarmed at the airport: in September 2025, the British comedy writer Graham Linehan was met at Heathrow by five armed officers and arrested over three tweets criticizing transgender activists.

In a single school year, 94 British primary-school children were disciplined for wrongthink against the trans narrative, including a three-year-old suspended from nursery.

This same machinery runs the British economy, picking which industries to protect and which to choke. And it is driving the country off a cliff.

For starters, the British government is actively dismantling its own oil and gas industry.

All new North Sea exploration licenses have been halted. The government additionally slapped a 78% windfall tax on existing production — one of the highest production-tax rates in the world.

The result is what anyone could have predicted. A decade ago, Britain had ten operating oil refineries. It now has four, after losing two in 2025 alone.

Yet demand for energy within the UK has not fallen by a single barrel. Brits are still consuming the same amount of oil; they’re just importing it from other countries now.

Norway is pumping oil from the very same North Sea basin that Britain abandoned and selling it back to the UK. It’s crazy.

The Office for Budget Responsibility projects roughly £50 billion in lost tax revenue over the life of the policy because there is no production left to tax.

Unsurprisingly, British motorists pay roughly three times what Americans pay at the pump.

It’s crazy to think that Britain used to be the largest and most prosperous empire on earth. Yet today, on a per capita basis, it’s poorer than the poorest state in the US (Mississippi). Strip out London from the calculation and the difference becomes even more stark.

This is what happens when incompetent fools refuse to enforce the law equally, charge outrageously high taxes, and prioritize woke, leftist fantasies over productivity and national interest.

America has major, major problems. But Britain is in much deeper trouble that should serve as a cautionary tale to the West.

For all of the pomp and circumstance of the King’s visit to America this week, I sincerely hope his crumbling nation provides sufficient inspiration for Congress to pull its head out.

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Detroit was making tanks, not automobiles. Factories were making bullets, not baby carriages. Food was rationed. Fuel was scarce.

And, overall, life in America had been bleak for the better part of two decades. The Great Depression gave way to a stretch of war that led many Americans to fear that their kids would soon be speaking German and goose-stepping with the Hitler Youth.

Government finances were equally bleak. Between all of the massive public works programs of the Great Depression and eye-popping costs of World War II, the US national debt topped 100% of GDP by the mid-1940s.

And yet that moment was the beginning of a new Golden Age.

Think about the world at the time: Britain was bankrupt. Germany and Japan had been turned to rubble. And the Soviets had won their part of the war by feeding twenty million bodies into the meat grinder.

America came out the other side with full manufacturing capacity intact, the dollar enthroned as the world’s reserve currency, and virtually no economic competition anywhere.

What followed was two decades of suburb-building, highway-laying, automobile-making, and semiconductor-launching prosperity. There were bumps along the way, but on balance the economic trajectory of America was up and to the right.

Consequently, the US national debt started falling. And it’s easy to understand why. By 1946 there was no more war, no more depression.

The United States had just spent four years consuming every available resource to defeat the Nazis. But once the war ended, military spending (and hence the budget deficit) dropped like a rock. Congress started to run budget surpluses and used them to pay down the debt.

Over the next three decades, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio fell from 106% in 1946 to just 23% by the mid-1970s.

This week, fresh data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis confirmed that America’s debt-to-GDP ratio has officially crossed 100% once again.

One caveat: this number is based on what the government calls “debt held by the public”; it conveniently leaves out the trillions of dollars that Washington “owes itself”, including Social Security trust fund IOUs, federal pension obligations, and other intragovernmental holdings.

Well, that money has to be repaid too. Pretending otherwise might make the debt appear smaller. But a broader, most honest measure of the debt right now is actually 130% of GDP, well beyond the WWII record.

But fine, we’ll use the government’s official number of 100%, which is just announced this morning.

Yes, America has been here before. 100% is not unprecedented. But there is a major difference.

Back in 1946, the debt was at 100% of GDP because the US had just defeated the Nazis. The debt binge ended when the war ended.

In 2026, the United States is not fighting Hitler. There is no once-in-a-century pandemic. There is no specific crisis that, once over, will allow Congress to bring spending back into line.

Rather, the debt is so high because the debt is so high.

Interest on the federal debt is over $1 trillion per year. That’s a huge chunk of tax revenue. The rest of America’s tax revenue is consumed by mandatory entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.

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

So in other words, the deficit is structural and permanent. It will be there no matter how much Congress cuts… if they were even interested in fiscal reform.

And yet Congress shows no interest in spending cuts. Even when the most rampant and obvious fraud is presented with a bow on it, Congress does nothing.

Even worse— people who actually try to stop the fraud get publicly crucified, arrested, or sued.

In 1946, the political momentum of the United States focused on growth, productivity, and fiscal discipline. In 2026, all of it points the other way.

And the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency— a major advantage that helped pay down the postwar debt— is also slipping.

Foreign central banks have been quietly selling US Treasuries and buying physical gold at the fastest pace in modern history. Since the start of the year, they have unloaded tens of billions of dollars worth of US government bonds, and the interest rate on Treasurys have climbed in response.

That shows foreign confidence draining out of the dollar in real time.

Now, none of this means the world is ending.

We are not pessimistic people. Humanity’s best days are still ahead. The technological advances now arriving in robotics, artificial intelligence, nuclear power, and biotech are not incremental upgrades; they are giant leaps for mankind.

Civilization will improve, productivity will rise, and the economic problems will sort themselves out.

But getting there requires persevering through the next several years of challenges… during which time we expect the average American to see a lower standard of living driven by higher taxes, persistent inflation, and a regulatory burden that gets heavier by the day.

Of the three, inflation looks the most baked in. Foreign governments are abandoning the dollar at a rapid pace, so the Federal Reserve will almost certainly step in to ‘print money’ and bail out the Treasury.

The impact will be more inflation.

This is why we continue to write that real assets are the right place to be. In difficult and conflict-prone times, the basics like food, water, energy, critical industrial metals, and productive technology become the world’s most valuable resources. They hold their value regardless of which currency happens to be in fashion, or how high inflation goes.

And the key point is that, right now, many of the best real asset producers— which have huge upside ahead— are trading at absurd discounts. So it’s a great time to consider this strategy.

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Nations were too interlinked, he argued. Capital was too entangled. Trade was too valuable. And no nation would put that prosperity at risk. War and conquest were things of the past.

But think about the world back then: Europe was in the middle of la Belle Époque, a stretch of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It had been nearly 40 years since the last major war (Franco-Prussian War) in 1871.

Gold-standard money moved across borders without friction. British capital financed German factories, German banks lent to Russian railways. And one of the largest trading relationships in the world was between supposed rivals Britain and Germany.

Mr. Angell’s book sold over two million copies; it was translated into 25 languages and became a fixture in educated households. Diplomats quoted it. CEOs planned around it. Angell’s conclusions seemed true, without question.

Then the Great War broke out five years later, and the world’s great powers went on to vaporize 16 million human beings and their collective economies. Global trade did not recover its 1913 level for roughly half a century.

Bizarrely, Angell later won the Nobel Peace Prize “for having exposed by his pen the illusion of war and presented a convincing plea for international cooperation and peace.” There would not be a less deserving recipient until Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.

But this same mistake has been repeated again in our own time.

After the Soviet Union fell and American technology took the world by storm in the 1990s, it seemed that global peace and prosperity would last forever.

Even after 9/11 and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the world organized itself around America’s leadership.

The dollar was the world’s dominant reserve currency. The World Trade Organization tore down tariffs across the board. NATO and the United States Navy guaranteed no major power would risk war.

America supplied the security, the currency, and the rules; in exchange, the world traded and grew under an American-led system. Goods, capital, and supply chains ignored borders.

And for decades it worked reasonably well. But we’re now witnessing its breakdown in real time.

As I write this letter to you, gas stations in Asia are rationing fuel. Hospitals are running out of medical supplies. Major petrochemical producers in South Korea and Singapore (Yeochun and PCS) have declared force majeure, meaning they cannot fulfill their commitments to customers.

The cause is simple: the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for weeks.

The Middle East ships roughly 25% of the world’s polypropylene, 20% of its polyethylene, 25% of its sulphur, and 15% of its fertilizer. When that flow stops, factories stop. And remember that about half of what Americans buy comes from those same Asian factories.

Capital Economics, a global research firm, estimates that it could take three months for the resulting plastic shortages to spread globally, and four months until US automakers face aluminum shortages severe enough to cut production.

S&P Global’s April survey of manufacturers worldwide shows supplier delivery times lengthening at the fastest pace since August 2022.

Purchasing activity is near a four-year high as companies scramble to stockpile while they still can. Respondents are using “panic” and “emergency” buying language for the first time since the pandemic supply crunch— when Americans waited months for a new car, lumber prices tripled, and store shelves sat empty.

Yet rather than work together to ease the strain, governments are making it worse. With trust between major powers in collapse, every cross-border deal is now treated as a security threat…  so they are blocking deals, capping technology transfer, and walling off entire industries.

China just blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of an AI startup called Manus; Beijing argues that Manus was developed by Chinese founders with Chinese capital, and therefore an American giant cannot own it.

The United States has been doing the same thing for years— to its strongest allies, no less.

The Biden administration blocked Japanese company Nippon Steel’s $15 billion acquisition of US Steel on “national security” grounds, even though Nippon had offered to invest $2.7 billion of Japanese capital into Pennsylvania steel mills.

(Trump later reversed this, and the deal went through with additional government stipulations.)

That is what de-globalization actually looks like in practice: not one dramatic rupture, but the slow accumulation of friction— a closed strait here, a blocked deal there, escalating tariffs,  sanctions, “national security” reviews.

Stack enough of this friction together and the world looks entirely different.

Travel becomes harder and more expensive. Raw materials and finished goods become costlier. Specialization and trade become economic drags rather than efficiencies as nations are forced to make more things at home— including the goods that other countries can already manufacture more efficiently.

This is already happening, and it’s difficult to fix. It’s unlikely that anyone can wave a magic wand and bring back the geopolitical cooperation that fueled the world for decades.

The world is not coming to an end. Far from it. But it is changing rapidly.

Less cooperation, more conflict, and more tension has profound implications for future prosperity.

One of the obvious implications we see is that real assets— energy, food, gold, industrial metals— grow in value during times of conflict and global friction.

Tension and protectionism don’t reduce demand for any of them; they just make supply harder to get, so prices rise. When supply chains snap and borders tighten, these are the assets that benefit most.

So if you agree with our thesis, i.e. that the world is heading towards more conflict and less cooperation, real assets (and the companies which produce them) are an excellent hedge to offset that risk with financial gain.

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Three stories caught our attention this week which show just how much of politics is pure manipulation.

Representative Ilhan Omar quietly amended her 2025 financial disclosure last week, revising her household assets from a range of $6 to $30 million, down to a range of $18,004 to $95,000, and blamed her husband’s accountant.

Apparently it was just an ‘accounting oversight’. I’m not entirely sure how someone who claims to have almost no net worth would sign off on a financial disclosure indicating up to $30 million in equity.

She’s either lying, or financially illiterate. I’m betting on the former. But even if she’s telling the truth, it’s pretty scary that such a financial dullard is in charge of taxpayer funds.

It’s also worth pondering how someone who entered Congress with a negative net worth and no assets, and now earns $174,000 a year, become a multi-millionaire in under a decade.

Omar uses the Nancy Pelosi defense: it’s my husband’s money.

How did her husband make that money?

For starters, his consulting firm collected nearly $3 million from Omar’s own campaign between 2018 and 2020. That was half of her total campaign expenditures, funneled into the couple’s own pockets.

Of course, her district does include the area of Minneapolis inundated with Somali welfare fraudsters. So maybe her voters see this as an inspiring tale of the new American dream to bilk your neighbors for all they are worth.

California Governor Gavin Newsom ran the same play in a more expensive suit.

His political action committee, the Campaign for Democracy, spent more than $1.5 million of donors’ money on 67,000 copies of his own memoir, which was two-thirds of every copy sold.

That’s how to use donor funds to not only manufacture a New York Times bestseller that can launch your presidential bid, but also funnel campaign contributions back into your own pocket.

This is California in miniature. The state funnels roughly $100 billion in federal grants into DEI programs, homelessness nonprofits that burned through $24 billion with no measurable reduction in homelessness, and progressive advocacy groups that recycle political support back to the same politicians who voted the funding.

At least on the personal level, Newsom is screwing his own supporters. As governor, he’s screwing the taxpayers.

But the third example is actually the most grotesque of the three.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a civil rights nonprofit founded in 1971 that made its name suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy in the 1980s, and spent the decades since building itself into the country’s self-appointed referee on who counts as a “hate group.”

The DOJ indicted the organization this week on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering for paying over $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to informants inside the KKK, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America.

The indictment alleges the SPLC used shell accounts with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse” to move donor money to the very groups it was publicly warning the country about.

One of those informants, known in the indictment as F-37, helped plan the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and attended at the SPLC’s direction.

SPLC donations surged after that rally. The civil rights group was paying the hate groups to produce the hate, then raised money to fight the hate that they were manufacturing.

An organization that built its reputation labeling ordinary conservatives as “hate groups” got caught paying the actual hate groups to help stage the events that justified its own fundraising.

This is like Jussie Smollett on steroids.

It does make you wonder about those masked ‘Nazis’ who keep materializing in random American cities for a weekend of choreographed menace and then vanish.

The decade-long moral panic over “white supremacy” that deplatformed, defunded, and fired so many Americans, and the entire industry of consultants, diversity officers, HR commissars, and legacy journalists whose salaries depended on the threat being real…

Is any of it real?

Or are we just being managed, taxed, pitched, and outraged on cue, so a small class of operators can keep destroying Western civilization for a couple million in kickbacks?

PS — If these are the people running the show, it is pretty obvious why you need a Plan B. That is exactly what Plan B Confidential is built for: second residencies, offshore banking, tax optimization, and real asset strategies. These are practical, legal steps with no downside. They leave you with real options and a position of strength, whatever comes next.

Click here to learn more.

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Whether or not that action was justified is beyond the point. US government bonds had long been considered the safest asset on earth. But every central banker on the planet learned an important lesson that day– US Treasury bonds were only safe as long as their country stayed on America’s good side.

Consequently, foreign governments and central banks began quietly moving a portion of their strategic financial reserves into assets that Washington could not freeze or sanction. And the most important of those assets was physical gold.

Within months, the collective buying of foreign central banks was running faster than at any point in modern history.

Compared to a previous baseline of about 650 metric tons per year in 2018 and 2019, central bank gold purchases jumped to over 1,000 tons starting in 2022. 

It stayed there through 2023. It hit a record 1,100 tons in 2024. Even in 2025, when gold went parabolic to $4,500 an ounce and they could have paused or even taken profits, they were still net buyers of roughly 800 tons.

Holding Treasury bonds requires trusting that the US government  will not freeze their assets, will not weaponize the dollar, and will not run deficits large enough to force the debasement of the dollar itself.

None of those three conditions holds anymore.

The United States ran a $2 trillion deficit last year— no recession, no economic crisis, no war, no bailouts. It was just business as usual. Congress won’t lift a finger to cut even the most blatant fraud and graft.

Consequently, the national debt is now pushing $40 trillion, with interest costs eating $1.2 trillion per year— nearly a quarter of total tax revenue. And foreigners are rapidly losing confidence.

In the first quarter of 2026, the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves fell 2.3 points, a quarter of the previous decade’s entire decline in ninety days. Non-dollar transactions gained ground quickly on the SWIFT payment network, rising from 18% to 31% in the Middle East and from 35% to 42% in Asia.

And for the first time since 1996, the world’s central banks now hold more gold than they hold US Treasury securities.

The big picture is that foreign governments are setting up for a new monetary order, one in which physical reserves matter more than paper promises from Washington.

So governments are securing as many physical reserves as they can. 

It’s not just gold, either. Energy, fertilizer, industrial metals, and shipping are all getting the same treatment as gold: repatriated, stockpiled, or rerouted to suppliers inside friendly borders.

Countries across the Western Hemisphere are rebuilding domestic production for fuel, uranium, copper, and food, because they can no longer count on the old, postwar order to deliver the goods on schedule at a price they can live with.

We can already see the early signs– the same loss of trust that has driven central banks to buy so much gold is starting to lead to bulk buying of other real assets… which means that the prices of these strategic resources will likely rocket higher.

This means that the companies which produce those real assets (as well as their shareholders) are likely set to make a LOT of money in the future. 

With assets like gold or silver, you could buy the metals outright. But today that means paying near all-time highs. 

In our analysis it’s a much better deal to own the companies that produce them. As real asset prices rise, margins expand and profits multiply. 

For example, gold has roughly tripled in three years. But one mining company we featured in Strategic Assets (Schiff Sovereign’s monthly investment research service), is up 5x in the same period. And a silver miner we featured went up nearly 10x.

Energy, industrial metals, and shipping can offer the same leverage.

We look for profitable, well-managed real asset businesses with clean balance sheets and clear catalysts, trading at a low multiple of free cash flow, positioned to benefit from the exact shift central banks are already executing.

None of this makes us permabulls on gold, silver, or anything else. The environment is too volatile for certainty, and our edge is not in calling the next move. Our edge is applying the same disciplined criteria to very well run businesses and adjusting when the facts shift. 

We chase returns, not attachment to any particular company or commodity.

And our approach has worked. Out of 20+ companies we have featured, one we sold at 10x and another at 6x, several current positions are up 2-4x, and only three are in the red. However we think those three have substantial upside from here.

If you would like to see the specific companies behind these examples, and the rest of our featured research, click here to try Strategic Assets risk-free with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

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At the time, the company’s stock was trading at a low, single-digit price/earnings multiple.

We knew the precious metals boom wasn’t a fluke. By April 2025 when we first published our research on the company, gold had already been rallying for some time, and we expected silver to follow.

So at a minimum our analysis showed that the company’s profits would skyrocket.

But there were also a number of other factors that we identified– some serious, hidden value that had been buried inside of the company’s financial statements.

We were right. And within just six months, the company’s stock price surged by over 6x.

But even then we knew that was not the end of the story. The rest of the market was just starting to realize how much money gold and silver miners were going to be making. Precious metals prices were soaring to all-time highs… and we were convinced that prices would remain high.

By January the share price was up a total of 10x. But we noticed that central bank gold purchases had slowed slightly… and silver markets at that point were looking positively frothy.

So three months ago we suggested to our readers that it was time to take profits.

We were lucky in the timing, because, just two days later, silver prices fell 40% in a single session— the largest one-day drop in its history. Gold prices flattened. And the company’s stock dropped hard.

It kept falling for weeks and ended up down by more than 50% from its peak. Fortunately, we exited the position at the very top.

But here’s the crazy part.

Even though precious metals prices had come down significantly from their all-time highs, the company was still generating enormous profits.

We did the math, updated our analysis, and concluded that, even assuming much more modest gold and silver prices, the company was trading at just 4x forward earnings after the steep correction.

More importantly, we identified several important, brand new catalysts on the horizon that could generate even more shareholder value.

So, earlier this month in the latest issue of Strategic Assets, we once again made the case for the company. It’s already up 14% since then, but we believe it has vastly greater upside potential.

Our analysis is based on a simple premise: the US– and much of the western world– is in debt up to its eyeballs… and a major debt reckoning is coming.

We can already see the warning signs, which we discuss regularly in our daily conversations. Just yesterday we told you how both US dollar reserves AND international US dollar transfers in the global SWIFT banking system have declined dramatically just in the first quarter of 2026.

We believe this will ultimately lead to the world’s central banks ‘printing’ unfathomable sums of money. Inflation will rise dramatically as a result. And real assets (including energy and precious metals) will soar in value. It will be like the 1970s all over again.

Our focus is finding the highest quality yet most overlooked businesses in the real asset space, i.e. companies that are profitable (often dividend-paying) and extremely well managed with pristine balance sheets… yet deeply undervalued.

Every issue of Strategic Assets includes plain-language, highly-indepth research and analysis on companies that meet our standards. The precious metals mining company above is just one example.

It’s important to note that we are not ‘permabulls’. This investing environment is extraordinarily volatile, and our edge isn’t predicting where it goes next. It’s applying strict criteria to very well run companies, and adapting when the facts change.

We are rational. We don’t fall in love with companies or assets. Instead, we love our returns.

And those returns are pretty great. Out of 20+ companies that we’ve featured– in addition to the 10x miner above, we have another at 6x gains, and a multitude of others that are up 2-4x. Only three out of twenty are in the red right now, and we think they have substantial upside.

If you’d like to see the specific company behind this example — and the rest of our portfolio — click here to try Strategic Assets risk-free with a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

Or start with the free sample issue that is available to read right now, no credit card required.

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The banking system collapsed. Financial transactions ground to a halt. Desperate people looted supermarkets for food, and then grocery shelves emptied. Energy ran short.  Riots broke out in the streets, and police were shooting citizens in the face.

The crisis raged so much that the President of Argentina fled the country by helicopter. Five presidents rotated through the office in two weeks. Then the country defaulted on $93 billion in sovereign debt— the largest default in history at the time.

Argentina was left in such a deep constitutional crisis that it didn’t even have the money or the legal framework to hold an immediate election.

This wasn’t exactly a surprise.

For years leading up to the crisis, Argentina had been struggling. The country was in the midst of a major economic depression. Unemployment was high. GDP was shrinking. Inflation was increasing. Crime was rising.

And yet, even with all of that negativity, life was at least in the ballpark of normal.

Basic services still functioned. Grocery stores had food. Banks were open and had money. And, even though unemployment was high, the vast majority of people still had jobs.

But it all collapsed in the span of three weeks. Poof. All because of too much debt.

To its credit, one of the groups that saw this coming was the IMF, which had warned the Argentine government multiple times about a looming crisis.

Even in early 2001, the same year as the crisis, IMF reports flagged Argentina’s soaring debt-to-GDP ratio, citing its “sharp deterioration in the public finances,” and deficits running well above the targets Buenos Aires had agreed to.

Well, the United States just received the same warning from the IMF last week. Even the language in the report is eerily similar.

In its 2026 Article IV consultation on the United States of America, the IMF warned that America’s “persistently high fiscal deficits [and] the continued rise in debt‑GDP ratio” creates a “growing financial stability tail risk” for both the US and the global economy.

They stressed “the pressing need to address the US’s longstanding fiscal imbalances through a frontloaded fiscal adjustment.”

That last part means that Congress must make critical spending cuts NOW. Not later. Time is running out.

The IMF cites US government debt reaching 123.9% of GDP and deficits equal to 7.5% of GDP. More importantly, they point out that the US government has no credible plan to reduce them.

To be fair, America is not Argentina, and the US boasts major advantages— including one of the world’s most innovative economies and the deepest capital markets on earth.

But it’s nearly impossible to argue that the US isn’t heading towards a major debt crisis. The rest of the world has already figured this out— and the data prove it.

For example, in the first quarter of 2026, the share of global foreign exchange reserves denominated in US dollars fell by 2.3 percentage points, down to 56.1%.

That’s an unprecedented move in global reserves. To put that quarterly decline in perspective, the US dollar’s reserve share declined by roughly 10 percentage points over the previous decade…

… which means that roughly a quarter of that 10-year decline happened in the past 90 days! That’s evidence of a significant acceleration in the world’s loss of confidence in America.

The SWIFT international payments network tells the same story. The dollar’s share of international payments dropped substantially in Q1. In the Middle East, for instance, non-dollar transactions jumped from 18% to 31% in three months. In Asia, from 35% to 42%.

Another data point: the world’s central banks now hold more gold than US Treasury securities for the first time since 1996.

This comes as no surprise to our readers. We’ve been writing about this for the past 17 years.

Back in 2009, we were laughed at for suggesting that the United States could one day face a debt crisis. Today even the IMF is saying it.

We often cite that line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises — “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” The de-dollarization data suggests we’re entering the “suddenly” phase.

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It was basically an antique typewriter that you plugged into a television (sort of like a Nintendo or other gaming console). And they called it a Commodore “64” because it had a whopping 64 kilobytes of RAM.

“Kilobytes” is not a typo. For context, most mobile phones today have 8 gigabytes of RAM, and a gigabyte is roughly 1 million times a kilobyte.

The average email today (without attachments) is nearly 100 kilobytes, i.e. 50% more than the entire memory of my Commodore. Yet, back in the 80s, software developers were able to do miraculous things with that tiny amount of memory.

64 kilobytes was somehow enough to play games like Pitfall and Impossible Mission, bang out a school report on a dot-matrix printer, and all sorts of other things.

And it wasn’t just Commodore— Nintendo and Sega put out hundreds of titles on consoles that had comparably tiny amounts of memory.

In order to make all of this magic happen, programmers had to be absolutely ruthless about every single line of code. Every byte mattered. There was zero bloat. Zero inefficiency.

And software teams routinely fought with each other about what features would be in a game, versus what features would be thrown out— because there simply wasn’t enough memory to include what everyone wanted.

In short, the software industry had to live within its means. Yet despite those severe memory limitations, they put out timeless classics. It was a Golden Age for software development.

But then something happened. Technological and manufacturing breakthroughs made memory abundant… and cheap. Whereas 64 kilobytes of memory was considered a luxury in the 80s, soon megabytes of RAM… and then gigabytes of RAM, became readily available.

Memory eventually became so abundant that it felt practically infinite. No one had to make any tough decisions to optimize their code for RAM limitations… because there was always more memory available.

As a result, bloat eventually crept in. Here are a few examples.

Literally right now as I write this, I have a number of tabs open in my browser (I use Brave, by the way). ProtonMail takes up 409 megabytes of RAM… for a single tab. And a web-based PowerPoint presentation in my browser takes up 957 megabytes of RAM!

And don’t get me started on Windows.

Microsoft has been rolling out a ‘feature’ to “pre-load” data in its File Explorer application that consumes 67.4 megabytes of RAM. That’s more than 1,000x the memory requirement as my Commodore 64 had… for the sole purpose of being able to look at files and folders on your computer.

The level of bloat and memory waste is absurd (and also why I use Linux).

There’s hardly anyone in the industry today who remembers the bygone days of having to make ruthless decisions over every line of code; rather, the software industry today is accustomed to being able to publish bloated code… because memory has been so abundant for so long.

Unfortunately conditions have now dramatically changed.

Thanks in large part to surging AI demand, there is now a global memory shortage. RAM supply is scarce and has skyrocketed in price.

The industry, quite predictably, is fretting over the supply side, complaining that memory manufacturers need to build new factories and produce more RAM.

Very few prominent voices in software are saying, “Gee guys, maybe we should be more efficient in our code and use less RAM. Maybe it shouldn’t take 67 megabytes to look at our system files… Or 400+ megabytes for a single browser tab.”

In other words, there’s very little push to be more efficient and live within their means.

If you’re starting to see where I’m going, this story should sound familiar… because it’s very similar to how the government spends our money.

Once upon a time in America, Congress fought passionately over every dollar. They knew they had to live within their means, and every budget item mattered. Politicians debated passionately about which programs stayed and which had to go.

But that was the past. America has been the world’s superpower, and the US dollar the world’s reserve currency, for eight decades.

Consequently, the US government has been able to run massive deficits and rack up a gargantuan national debt with impunity, leading politicians to believe that America’s financial resources are infinite.

Today there’s no one in government who remembers the days of responsible spending. That’s why there’s so much bloat and why deficits are so high.

But, just like the memory market, a sudden scarcity is emerging. Foreign creditors— who used to provide ample funds to the Treasury market— are starting to invest their capital elsewhere.

We can see this impact with interest rates, which are now hovering near multi-decade highs… as well as gold prices, which remain near all-time highs.

Faced with a sudden scarcity of financial resources— and the shocking realization that government spending cannot be infinite— Congress is choosing the predictable route.

Rather than look to themselves to become more efficient, to make objective and ruthless decisions about what programs stay and what programs go, to live within their means… they are instead demanding more resources.

Of course they always start with calls to “tax the rich”. But these taxes invariably trickle down to the middle class; just ask anyone who had to submit an AMT return this week.

But the point here isn’t to argue whether Jeff Bezos should or shouldn’t pay more tax. The point is that Congress’s approach is entirely wrong.

As we discussed yesterday, they fail to understand a very simple point: higher tax rates don’t generate higher overall tax revenue. Higher tax revenue comes from a booming economy.

So they should instead invest their energy into ensuring maximum productivity… which ultimately means fewer regulations, and in general staying out of the way.

It’s also insane that they are specifically refusing to cut spending. Despite hundreds of billions worth of documented fraud, they do nothing about it. They’ve also pledged to NOT reform Social Security and Medicare, i.e. the single biggest budget items in government.

It’s the exact opposite of what they should be doing. They still don’t have the right mentality to solve America’s #1 problem… and it’s why having a Plan B makes so much sense.

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Over the following year the rest of the Rolling Stones rotated through the house and nearby properties to record the double album that became Exile on Main St., while staying deliberately out of reach of the British tax authorities.

The top marginal income tax rate in Britain at the time was 75%, and a surcharge on the highest earners pushed the effective rate on the wealthiest past 90%.

Three years later, under Denis Healey’s 1974 budget, the top rate on earned income would climb to 83% and the rate on investment income would reach 98%.

Britain would spend the rest of the decade watching capital flee and begging the IMF for emergency loans.

David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and a long line of less famous wealthy Britons eventually ran the same arithmetic as the Stones and reached a similar conclusion. Capital left the country in every form it could fit into, including bonds, businesses, luxury cars, and rock stars.

But politicians never learn.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey has backed legislation that would push the top federal income-tax rate to 43%.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is pushing a version that lands at 49%.

Both men describe it, as they always do, as wealthy Americans finally paying their “fair share.”

What exact percent is their fair share? Are we to believe they will be satisfied at 43% or 49%?

As always, that phrase is deliberately left undefined.

Never-mind that the top 1% of filers already paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes in 2022 while the bottom 50% paid roughly 3%.

They are also conveniently ignorant of the fact that raising the top marginal rate doesn’t actually raise revenue at all.

Since the end of the Second World War, U.S. federal tax revenue has averaged around 17% to 18% of GDP, dipping toward 15% in deep recessions and climbing near 20% in booms. The swings track the business cycle, not tax policy.

The top marginal rate, over that same stretch, has been all over the map: 91% under Eisenhower, 28% under Reagan by 1988, 39.6% under Clinton, 37% today. Yet regardless of whether tax rates were 91% or 37%, the IRS always collects around 17% of GDP.

The conclusion is obvious: if the government wants to collect more tax revenue, they should focus on setting the right conditions for an economic boom. In short, make the pie bigger for EVERYONE, and hence the government’s slice will grow as well.

Making the pie bigger isn’t that hard, either. America’s private economy is legendary. All Congress has to do is get out of the way. Attempt to run a balanced budget. Restore credibility. Make it easier for businesses and individuals to be productive. REMOVE idiotic laws instead of creating new ones.

But they’re not interested in any of those things.

Congress has documented evidence of hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud. Yet they  do nothing. They have also pledged to do nothing about Social Security— which is set to run out of money in six years.

The regulatory code in the Land of the Free already runs over 188,000 pages. Yet they expand it every session.

This is the opposite of what they should be doing. And instead of figuring out how to live within their means, they just demand more resources… even though it never works.

Britain tried its 98% tax experiment in the 1970s and spent a decade regretting it.

Ironically the current Labour government has forgotten that painful lesson; they recently abolished the 110-year-old “non-dom” regime, and more than 10,000 millionaires have already left the country.

In the United States, Elizabeth Warren’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax proposal does not just impose a wealth tax. It bundles her wealth tax with an additional 40% exit tax on anyone who renounces US citizenship.

You do not create a 40% tollbooth at the border unless you fully expect people to try to walk through it.

These are not serious ideas to grow an economy. Rather, they are insidious policies designed to trap people in a system which steals their prosperity.

That is why a Plan B makes so much sense.

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At the time, gold was trading around $1,800, so that low cost of production really mattered for the company’s profit margin.

Even at $1800 gold, the company was profitable, debt-free, and sitting on a growing pile of cash.

So after completing our exhaustive research, we concluded the company had tremendous potential. The macro backdrop was obvious— the US government was running $2 trillion annual deficits, the Treasury Department was increasingly weaponizing the dollar, and Congress showed zero interest in fixing anything.

Risk-averse foreign central banks who were looking to diversify some of their financial reserves away from US dollars had few alternatives… except for gold. We anticipated a major gold boom, and we felt strongly that this company would benefit.

Since then, our “why gold” thesis has only become stronger. The national debt continues surging higher, Congress appears even less competent than before, and the rest of the world is rapidly losing confidence.

That’s why gold roughly tripled over the past three years— primarily due to central banks around the world buying it by the metric ton.

But while gold tripled, our miner’s share price shot up 5x.

Here’s the crazy part: the stock is actually cheaper than when we first found it.

This isn’t a riddle; the idea is that the company is cheaper on a valuation basis, i.e. it’s price/earnings ratio is lower (hence “cheaper”) than when we first discovered it. This is what happens when profits grow faster than the share price.

Now, the Price/Earnings ratio can be a bit of a blunt instrument… which is why we tend to favor an Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow (EV/FCF) metric.

If you’re not familiar, Enterprise Value nets out cash and debt from a company’s market capitalization, while Free Cash Flow reduces accounting trickery that can impact a company’s bottom line.

In this way, EV/FCF is a better proxy than Price/Earnings, because it tells us how much we’re truly paying for a business relative to the actual cash it has available to pay dividends to shareholders.

Initially, our gold miner’s Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow was just 4x. That’s an incredible bargain.

Since then, the stock price has surged. Profits have climbed even more. So, incredibly, the Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow has become even cheaper— to less than 3x.

Again, this is a business with no debt AND pays a dividend. The absurd part is that, when gold prices pulled back from the $5,600 record high, investors actually sold the stock.

Amazing. People actually said, “I don’t want to own this wildly profitable, debt-free, dividend-paying business. . .”

Even at $4,700 gold, Free Cash Flow is still far higher than what was factored into the company’s guidance, i.e. they’re earning WAY more than projected. And yet people panicked.

We bought more.

If you’re interested in hearing more about this, we have found dozens of similar stories for subscribers of our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

We publish detailed research on companies like these every month, including specific buy-up-to prices, full financial breakdowns, and portfolio updates, including good times to sell.

For example, we recently locked in gains of nearly 10x on a silver company.

If you’d like to see the specific company behind this example — and the rest of our portfolio — you can try it risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Click here to learn more.

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And between 1862 and 1934, the federal government distributed 270 million acres under the program — roughly 10% of all the land in the United States.

Even as far back as the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers understood that property ownership made people more engaged, more productive citizens. Ownership meant that you had a vested financial interest in your community… and your country.

Over time, that idea fused with the concept of “the American Dream”. And for decades that dream was a reality for millions of people.

After World War II, for example, America underwent a massive construction boom. Between  postwar prosperity, the GI Bill, and the arrival of the modern 30-year fixed mortgage,  home ownership surged from about 44% in 1940 to 62% by 1960.

More importantly, housing was affordable.

In 1950, median family income was about $3,000, yet the median home cost roughly $7,350. That’s just ~2.5 times median household income. Plus, with prevailing mortgage rates back then 4.5%, the monthly payments were trivial.

Because of that, families across America could easily make ends meet on a single income.

Today the median home sells for about $412,000. Median household income is roughly $83,700. That puts housing at 5x household income— double what it was in the 1950s.

More importantly, at today’s mortgage rate of roughly 6.4%, the monthly payment on a median home (assuming a 20% down payment) consumes roughly 30% of household income.

The down payment is also so high these days that buying a home is nearly impossible, especially for young people or low-income workers. Even in dual-income households, homeownership is increasingly out of reach.

As we discussed on Friday, America’s housing problems go far beyond the ‘greedy’ Wall Street investors that are getting most of the blame for rising home prices.

Construction materials cost 40% more than they did five years ago, courtesy of the Federal Reserve printing trillions during the pandemic and igniting inflation.

Plus the regulatory permitting maze adds enormous costs. In Fremont, California, development fees alone run $157,000 per home before a single nail is hammered. And that doesn’t even include additional permitting costs and utility connection fees.

The government used to give away 160 acres for free. Now local governments charge six figures for permission to build.

Go figure that California, with its endless lip service about affordable housing, is also the epicenter of American homelessness.

But it turns out there’s a ready-made solution staring policymakers in the face.

The office property market is a complete bloodbath right now. Between the sluggish economy, AI reducing demand for workers, and the lingering work-from-home paradigm, the prices of office properties across the country have tanked.

More than 200 distressed office buildings changed hands across the country in 2025, with average sale prices down 37% from 2019. In Manhattan, a 920,000-square-foot tower sold for $8.5 million, down from $332.5 million. That’s a 97% decline!

Then there’s 401 South State Street in Chicago, a 485,000-square-foot office building that sold last October for $4.2 million, down from $68.1 million in 2016. That’s less than $9 per square foot.

Housing in Chicago isn’t cheap. So just imagine you’re young, fresh out of college, and staring at the prospect of paying $1,200 per month to live in a cramped apartment with three roommates.

Instead, you could pay about $13,000 for 1,500 square feet worth of space in the 401 South State Street office building that would be yours to own.

Yes, duh, it’s an office building. So it wouldn’t have the conveniences of a traditional home— like private bathrooms and kitchens. But for $13 grand?!!? Who cares. You’d have your own private space, a roof over your head, and a door that locks.

Frankly, that’s not so different from military barracks and university dorms. Americans manage just fine with communal facilities when the price is right.

That’s the beauty of capitalism. Such living accommodations aren’t for everyone. But at a low enough price, a LOT of people would happily trade convenience for affordability. Shower at the gym. Eat at the fast-casual spot around the corner. Live with walking distance to work downtown.

Most 20-somethings might think that’s pretty cool— especially compared to the alternative of paying out the nose for rent and never managing to save enough money to buy a house.

Same logic for a family of six crammed into a two-bedroom public housing unit in decrepit conditions; they could have a few thousand square feet to themselves.

Here’s another scenario. Let’s say a family in Topeka, Kansas locked in a 2% mortgage during the pandemic. Dad got laid off and can’t find another job locally. But they don’t want to sell the house to move across country, uproot the kids, and buy a new house somewhere else at a 6% rate. So they’re stuck.

Instead, Dad buys 1,000 square feet in one of these bankrupt office buildings for less than $10k. His family stays home, he commutes to his new job in a new city, and flies home on the weekends to see his kids. They make it work… which they wouldn’t be able to afford with hotels or an AirBnb.Posted on April 14, 2026

This would be a genuine ‘starter home’— a place where someone could actually save money and build toward a proper mortgage, instead of hemorrhaging rent to Blackrock every month while still falling behind.

But the government won’t allow it.

Zoning codes, building regulations, occupancy requirements— a labyrinth of rules that forbid you from such options.

Let grown adults decide for themselves. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

Nobody would pay $400,000 for a unit with no bathroom. But $13,000? For a lot of Americans, that’s not a sacrifice— it’s an opportunity.

The same politicians who claim to care about the poor, the homeless, and young people priced out of the American Dream have the obvious solution sitting right in front of them.

But they won’t take it, because that would mean getting out of the way.

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It wasn’t announced in a press conference. It wasn’t debated on the front page of any newspaper. It was buried in a routine update to the country’s military service law, tucked in alongside provisions about registration systems and NATO readiness targets.

Nobody noticed for months— until a local newspaper flagged it last week.

The defense ministry is currently “drafting specific regulations for granting exemptions from the requirement for approval.”

Translation: the law is already on the books, and they’ll tell you what it means later.

But don’t worry— a defense ministry spokesperson stressed that military service remains “voluntary.”

Germany isn’t at war. This isn’t martial law. It’s preparing for a changing world. And they’re not alone.

The US is also making its own updates. Starting in December, eligible men will automatically be registered for the military draft. Instead of relying on 18-year olds to fill out Selective Service forms on their own, the government will simply pull from federal databases and register on your behalf.

Congress also appears to be working on making it harder for Americans to take their money and leave.

On March 26, Senator Elizabeth Warren reintroduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, backed by more than 45 lawmakers. The bill proposes a 2% annual tax on net worth above $50 million, an additional 1% surtax on billionaires, and a 40% exit tax on wealthy Americans who try to renounce their citizenship to escape it.

It also includes aggressive new enforcement provisions: third-party reporting on hard-to-value assets, formulaic IRS valuation rules for private businesses and real estate, and a 30% minimum audit rate on everyone the bill covers.

The most productive people in America will be forced to waste countless hours on compliance, instead of working to create prosperity.

That isn’t just a tax. It’s a framework for tracking private wealth— and penalizing anyone who tries to opt out and take it somewhere else.

Governments don’t build this kind of infrastructure unless they think they might use it. Germany is making sure it can stop fighting-age men from leaving. The United States is making sure it is ready to press people into service.

And it is building a stronger fence around the most productive tax cattle so it can milk them for all they’re worth.

Governments are clearly planning for a period of conflict.

One other sign is that they are securing physical, real asset reserves.

For the last two years, the world’s central banks have been buying physical gold faster than at any point in modern history.

At the same time, they have been quietly selling US Treasuries. And the old dynamic has inverted: the kinds of global shocks that used to send investors stampeding into Treasuries as the world’s safe haven are now sending them the other way.

Take the Iran war as an example: normally when there’s a major conflict, foreign countries BUY lots of US government bonds as a safe haven. But since late February, foreign central banks have SOLD over $80 billion worth of US Treasury securities.

This reduction in foreign demand for US government bonds is also a key reason why interest rates have risen— from 3.97% before the war started, to 4.33% today.

But this isn’t a sudden change of heart. Foreign governments and central banks have been losing faith in the US for years.

For decades after World War II, countries around the world relied on an America-dominated framework regarding trade, capital, and energy.

This postwar system required trust in the United States, trust that the rules would be stable, and trust that agreements would be honored.

But that trust is vanishing quickly.

The humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. Routine weaponization of the US dollar for political goals. Budget deficits spiraling and a $39 trillion national debt. A government that shuts down every time it tries to pass a budget.

From a foreign government official’s perspective, physical gold sitting in a vault is a much safer bet than loaning money to the US Treasury.

Near-record gold prices and surging interest rates in the Treasury market are the surest signs yet that the postwar era of seamless global cooperation is unwinding… and inverting.

In a cooperative world, foreign nations are willing to depend on others. In a fragmented, conflict-prone world, governments secure resources. They secure their supply chains. They secure their energy. They secure their financial reserves.

And eventually… inevitably… they secure their people — the livestock can’t be allowed to wander off the farm before it’s time to milk them for taxes or march them off to war.

For now, capital can still flow somewhat freely. You can still apply for legal residency in another country. You can still hold gold overseas in a stable, neutral jurisdiction.

The window is still open to create a Plan B so you can have the options to come at whatever happens from a position of strength.

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The bill was co-written by Republican Chairman Tim Scott and ranking Democrat Elizabeth Warren on the Senate Banking Committee. Before the vote, the committee put out a press release listing more than 25 organizations — including the progressive organizations the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the National Housing Law Project — endorsing the bill.

When psychotic leftist Elizabeth Warren is celebrating the advancement of legislation she co-wrote, you might want to be concerned.

The premise of the bill is that greedy Wall Street investors are gobbling up all the homes in America and driving up prices for regular families.

It’s a great story to rile up the proletariat.

It also has almost nothing to do with reality.

Large institutional investors own less than 1% of single-family housing stock in the United States. And roughly 85% of their tenants can’t qualify for a mortgage — meaning these aren’t people who were outbid by BlackRock. They’re people who have no access to homeownership regardless.

To get to the root of the latest reason housing is unaffordable, you just need to look at the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve held interest rates near zero for years, which fueled a buying frenzy and sent home prices through the roof.

Then inflation hit, and the Federal Reserve jacked rates back up. Now homeowners who locked in a 2.8% mortgage can’t afford to sell — because selling means giving up that rate for a 7% one.

So they stay put, and supply dries up. Meanwhile, builders can’t build because materials cost 40% more than they did five years ago.

None of it has anything to do with institutional investors.

But Washington doesn’t blame itself. It never does.

Which is why I said this is the latest reason for unaffordable housing.

In 1992, Congress told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct 30% of their mortgage purchases toward lower-income borrowers. By 2008, the target had been ratcheted up to 56%. Fannie and Freddie were sitting on a trillion dollars in subprime mortgage-backed securities. And the whole thing collapsed — taking the global economy with it.

The response wasn’t to unwind the interventions that caused the crisis. It was 2,300 pages of new regulations called Dodd-Frank.

This is the same pattern with everything the government touches: it gets more expensive.

College tuition has risen roughly three times faster than inflation since Congress began backing student loans in 1965. The New York Federal Reserve studied this directly and found that for every dollar increase in subsidized student loans, tuition rose by up to 60 cents.

Healthcare is the same story — before Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, the government’s share of healthcare spending was about 31%. Today it’s roughly 64%. The “Affordable” Care Act promised to fix it — and family premiums nearly doubled, from $13,770 to almost $27,000 a year.

We saw the obvious solution earlier this year when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got 18 states to ban SNAP purchases of junk food, and PepsiCo cut Doritos prices by 15%. The moment the government stopped subsidizing demand, the company had to compete.

But it’s not just the federal government strangling housing supply. It’s local government too.

In January 2025, the Palisades fires destroyed roughly 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County. Fifteen months later, 28 have been rebuilt. Only 2,900 permits have been issued out of more than 6,100 applications. Homeowners who lost everything are still waiting on approvals to rebuild on land they already own.

Southern California has some of the strictest permitting requirements in America — and some of the worst housing shortages. The state is short somewhere between 840,000 and 3.5 million units, with median home prices above $850,000.

Now compare that to what happens when government gets out of the way.

Missouri has no mandatory statewide residential building codes — in some Ozark counties you can build a home with nothing more than state septic approval. No plan reviews, no inspections, no 15-month permitting nightmare.

Idaho’s Boundary and Bonner counties have no county-level building codes. In West Texas, counties like Hudspeth and Presidio have no enforcement at all — land goes for $500 to $3,000 an acre.

None of these places have a housing shortage. Vacancy rates run 20-30%. Homes sit on the market for months. Supply meets demand.

Which makes the fine print of this Senate bill even worse than the headline ban. The legislation hands the Treasury Secretary broad authority to redefine the law’s key terms — “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” “excepted purchase” — and to issue new rules as he sees fit.

Penalties for violating the investor ban run up to $1 million per transaction or three times the purchase price — whichever is greater.

Weren’t Republicans supposed to be dismantling the administrative state — the one where unelected bureaucrats rewrite laws instead of Congress?

And Section 205 is the same playbook the federal government has used to drive up costs in healthcare and education — just applied to housing.

First the government hooks communities on federal block grant funding.

Then it uses that funding as a lever: communities that don’t hit Washington’s housing production targets get a 10% cut, and that money gets redistributed to communities that do. The bill even exempts communities that lack the legal authority to change their zoning — which tells you exactly what the penalty is designed to do to everyone else.

The places in America where housing actually works — cheap, available, no 15-month permitting disasters — work precisely because the federal government has left them alone.

This bill starts stretching Washington’s tentacles into local housing rules.

No wonder Elizabeth Warren loves it.

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At the same time, a 34-year-old man named DeCarlos Brown Jr. boarded the train behind her. Within minutes, he pulled a pocketknife from his hoodie and stabbed her three times, including once in the neck.

The video is gut-wrenching. You can see the moment she realized what was happening— her confusion turning to terror. And then she slid down into the seat and bled out in front of an entire train car full of people.

Surveillance footage then captured Brown pacing the train car afterward saying, “I got that white girl.”

Brown was a serial criminal with at least 14 prior arrests including armed robbery and felony larceny. He’d been arrested and released over and over and over again. This man was clearly a danger.

And yet he’d been released onto the streets to commit brutal murder.

It was an absolutely disgusting turn of events… and good-natured Americans were outraged.

Fortunately their outrage was heeded, because Brown was swiftly administered justice for his crime; he was quickly charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced, and he’s already serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Just kidding! Brown has yet to face any justice.

Brown was detained, and the wheels of justice began turning at approximately the speed of tectonic drift. Even in a case like this— caught on camera with multiple witnesses, i.e. a textbook open-and-shut— the system managed to produce a parade of procedural delays, continuances, and jurisdictional tangles between state and federal courts that dragged out for months.

But, hey, at least after all the delays, the trial is finally going to move forward.

Just kidding!

This week Brown was declared unfit to stand trial. So a man with 14 arrests and a brazen murder on his hands is apparently not competent enough to answer for his own crimes.

But if Brown isn’t fit to stand trial, then at least the magistrate who released him onto the streets to commit murder has been arrested and charged for her complicity.

Just kidding! That didn’t happen either.

Teresa Stokes, the local magistrate who declined to incarcerate Brown after 14 arrests, never graduated from law school, nor passed the bar in any state. She wasn’t qualified to adjudicate a traffic ticket, let alone violent crime.

And yet she had broad discretion over whether people like Brown stayed locked up or were released into mental health and addiction treatment programs.

Oh, and by the way— Stokes was simultaneously Director of Operations at Second Chance Services, a mental health and addiction clinic right there in Charlotte.

So the person deciding whether people like Brown walk the streets had a direct financial interest in the very same types of facilities those people get funneled into.

But at least she’s being thoroughly investigated for this conflict of interest.

Just kidding! That’s not happening either.

But at least voters went to the ballot box and tossed out the politicians who appointed her and allowed these systems to rot.

Just kidding!

Well at least the media made a big stink about it, demanding accountability and calling for heads to roll.

Just kidding… the establishment closed ranks, the story faded from the news cycle, and everyone moved on.

And this is precisely why nothing ever really changes in America. There are virtually zero consequences for even the most egregious levels of incompetence. And whenever someone does try to fix things, they get blocked by the system at every turn.

This is the same dynamic that explains why the national debt has barreled past $39 trillion. Why Social Security is racing toward insolvency. Why the Federal Reserve destroyed 25% of the dollar’s value in five years. And not a single person has answered for any of it.

It’s utterly exhausting.

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Hirohito went on what was a relatively new communications medium at the time—the radio— and gave one of the most bizarre speeches in all of human history, in which he told his subjects that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

Talk about an understatement.

It’s one of the more famous examples in a long list throughout history of speeches that have ended conflicts, where leaders paint whatever picture they want.

Perhaps even more famously, Richard Nixon promised “peace with honor” in Vietnam on the campaign trail in 1968.

It was one of the most brilliant political statements of its era, because everyone heard what they wanted to hear. Those who wanted an end to the war heard “peace.” The war hawks heard “honor.” Everyone got what they wanted out of it.

But ultimately there was neither peace nor honor. The war dragged on for seven more years, resulting in a humiliating withdrawal from Saigon in April 1975, complete with desperate helicopter evacuations from the US Embassy rooftop.

This is the sort of stuff that peace deals and conflict resolutions are made of— situations where you can talk out of both sides of your mouth, and both sides of the conflict can declare victory.

And if both sides can claim victory, that’s actually a good thing. Because the only other way to end a war is to have the other side so utterly demolished that they have no choice but to accept defeat.

The alternative is to give both sides an out.

That’s what’s happening with Iran.

It’s a strange situation from a military and strategic perspective given that Iran has been objectively obliterated; major infrastructure is demolished, key leadership was assassinated, the military is weakened, the government is vulnerable— and yet Iran actually thinks they are winning. Or at least they act like it.

It reminds me of when Charlie Sheen was on a three-day cocaine binge giving live interviews and talking about “winning.” That’s Iran right now.

The reason is because the American media is so deranged, so pro-Iran and anti-Trump, that they have managed to convince the Iranians that they are much stronger than they actually are.

But at this point the political realities have started surfacing in the US. The administration is worried about high gas prices and the midterms, and there’s a lot of pressure to end the conflict.

Now there’s an arrangement where both sides can declare victory. The US can say they accomplished their objectives — dismantled Iran’s military and defense capabilities, degraded their nuclear program, eliminated key leadership, and dismantled their ability to fund and spread terror.

And the Iranians can say they stood up to the ‘evil empire’ and forced the Americans to walk away.

That is essentially what both sides are saying right now. And while the full implications remain to be seen, this is where the proverbial rubber meets the road.

We’ve been saying since this war started that it could end up being a very big deal for the fate of the United States… so what happens during negotiations over the next few weeks is crucial.

On one hand, there is a possibility they could strike a deal to lift sanctions against Iran and allow Iranian oil to be sold on the global market— as long as it’s priced in US dollars.

Between Iran and Venezuela, that could create a massive financial incentive for the whole world to continue to hold US dollars, and thus to buy US government bonds.

But it could just as easily go the other way if the Iranians continue to think they are in a position of strength and that they have the advantage.

One thing we can be pretty sure about is that there probably won’t be a resolution in two weeks.

I couldn’t help but think of the infamous “two weeks to stop the spread” when COVID first emerged. That was an unrealistic timetable then, and two weeks is an unrealistic timetable now.

International negotiations are extremely difficult, and the tried and true tactic of rogue-nation geopolitics is to let negotiations drag on.

The Soviets perfected this approach. Their strategy was always to exhaust the negotiation partner. Westerners tend to like quick and speedy deals, but rogue nations in general tend to use that impatience to their advantage. So it’s hard to believe in the two-week time frame.

But the clock has certainly started, however long it takes. And by the end we should have a very good sense for what this means for America.

The consequences could be massive— for inflation, for the dollar, for bond markets, for the trajectory of the entire US economy.

This could still be a deal that helps prop up the dollar and US government bonds for years, if not decades, to come. But if that doesn’t happen, the best-case scenario is probably a stalemate where both sides walk away, flip the switch, turn off the war, almost pretend it never happened. And hopefully the world just ignores it and gives America a pass.

Time will tell. But probably not in the next two weeks.

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I’m not talking about watching it on a screen or catching a glimpse from some corporate hospitality tent. I mean standing close enough to feel the ground shake when eight horses come at full gallop, close enough to hear the mallet connect. It’s the closest thing to medieval combat that still exists – fast, physical, and genuinely impressive.

We had a private match organized just for our group, at one of the most exclusive polo clubs in Argentina.

And somehow, it was the least exciting thing we did all week.

I’m Viktorija, CEO of Schiff Sovereign. I’m based between Mexico City and Panama, but spend most of my time traveling – scouting investments, finding undervalued real estate, meeting the kind of people who actually know what’s happening inside a country before the headlines catch up. I know what momentum looks like. And Argentina has it right now.

Which is remarkable, if you know the backstory.

This was, not long ago, one of the world’s great cautionary tales. Decades of Peronist mismanagement, currency crises that wiped out savings overnight, a sovereign debt default of over $100 billion. By 2023, inflation had hit 211%. Not a typo. Two hundred and eleven percent. Ordinary people were watching their money lose value faster than they could spend it.

So they did something drastic. In late 2023, they elected Javier Milei – an “anarcho-capitalist” economist who campaigned with a literal chainsaw as a prop and promised to use it. And then, in office, he actually did.

The shock therapy was real and it was painful. Poverty spiked to 53% in early 2024. The protests were widespread and angry. Nobody was pretending this was painless.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Argentina’s GDP grew 4.4% in 2025 – the strongest expansion the country had seen in years. Inflation, starting from that 211% ceiling, has now fallen to its lowest level in eight years. Poverty has dropped back to 32% – the lowest since 2018. The turnaround is happening faster than almost anyone expected, and faster than most people outside Argentina realize.

When you’re on the ground, you feel it before you can explain it.

I recently brought a group of 16 people here as part of Total Access, our highest-tier membership. We spent time with real estate developers in Buenos Aires, walked through their projects, and saw firsthand what early-stage capital deployment looks like in a country that’s turning a corner. Construction is booming. Foreign capital is flooding in. The mood is genuinely different from even a year ago.

But the most interesting part of the trip wasn’t the real estate.

I invited a friend to join us for lunch – one of a very small number of people formally approved by the Argentine government to advise on the new citizenship by investment law.

Argentina has become the first South American country to offer citizenship by investment, under Decree 524/2025 signed in July 2025 – with no prior residency requirement and a target processing time of just 30 business days.

The minimum investment is expected to be around $500,000 into qualifying productive sectors. Full program launch is expected in the second half of 2026, and the details are still being finalized – which is exactly why having one of the short list of people worth talking to at our table matters.

This is the stage where having that kind of connection gives you a meaningful head start.

The Argentine passport offers visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to over 170 countries, including the EU Schengen Area, the UK, and Japan – and the US recently kickstarted the process for Argentina to rejoin the Visa Waiver Program.

For a $500,000 investment, that’s a serious passport at a competitive price point.

Later in the week, through one of our Total Access members, we were invited to an Ambassador’s private residence where he showed us how he lives, shared personal stories, and afterwards joined us for dinner.

We hiked and rode horses through the mountains around Bariloche, and had front-row seats at Swan Lake at the iconic Teatro Colón.

One of Argentina’s most celebrated chefs invited us to his home, cooked a traditional Argentine meal from scratch, and shared the recipe with us afterwards.

But the moments that stood out most were the conversations no travel agent can arrange – the kind that happen over long dinners with people who actually know what’s happening inside a country.

And of course, sharing those moments with other members.

The trip was so well-received that I’m heading back next week with a second Total Access group.

This is what we do at Schiff Sovereign.

On one hand, we’re clear-eyed about the problems – the fiscal trajectory of the US, the erosion of the dollar, the risks most people aren’t paying attention to yet. We don’t sugarcoat that.

On the other hand, we spend just as much energy finding the opportunities those same conditions create. Undervalued markets. Second residencies. Real assets.

Places like Argentina – not a perfect place, just a place where the gap between perception and reality is wide enough to be genuinely interesting, and where the story on the ground is more compelling than the one being told about it.

The world isn’t falling apart. It’s reshuffling – and that reshuffle creates real opportunity for people who are paying attention.

You can read about Argentina, study Milei’s policies, follow the data. That’s useful. But what you can’t get from reading is sitting across from the people who are actually building there, on the ground.

That kind of access comes from relationships built over years – and that’s exactly what Total Access is about. The right rooms, the right people, the right conversations at the right time, with a group who share the same values and curiosity about the world.

Information is everywhere. The network is rare.

And in a world reshuffling this fast, that network might be the most valuable asset you have.

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Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the week in case you missed them:

Even Her Own Allies Have Had Enough of Justice Jackson

Last year when the federal workforce layoff case reached the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a 15-page solo manifesto howling that the layoffs represented a “wrecking ball” against democracy.

The only problem— the case before the court had nothing to do with whether layoffs were good or bad. The justices were merely tasked with ruling on a narrow procedural question. But KBJ felt compelled to showcase her leftist credentials regardless.

Jackson’s soliloquy was so out of line that even fellow liberal Justice Sotomayor publicly corrected her, clarifying that “the [layoffs] themselves are not before this Court. . .”

Then, earlier this year, Jackson showed up at the Grammys and gave a standing ovation when Billie Eilish declared “no one is illegal on stolen land” and shouted “f*ck ICE” from the stage. Hardly appropriate for a sitting Supreme Court Justice, sworn to uphold the Constitution— including immigration law.

If you were hoping she was just settling into a new role on the bench, think again.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar— a controversial Colorado state law that effectively banned therapists from helping gender-confused kids.

Under the new law, if a boy who thinks he’s a girl goes to counseling, it’s against the law for the psychologist to help the boy see himself as a boy. According to the State of Colorado, the only acceptable answer is, “OF COURSE YOU’RE A GIRL!”

The Supreme Court ruled almost unanimously that this law violates the Constitution because it infringes upon the therapist’s free speech.

Even ultra-liberal justices Kagan and Sotomayor ruled that the Colorado law violated freedom of speech.

Justice Jackson was the lone dissent. And she wrote a 35-page opinion— longer than the majority opinion and Kagan’s concurrence combined— arguing in favor of the Colorado law.

Jackson’s opinion was so bonkers that Justice Kagan, her own ideological ally, took the unusual step of publicly rebuking her, writing “Her view . . . rests on reimagining—and in that way collapsing—the well-settled distinction” of free speech.

Pretty embarrassing.

But then on Tuesday, during oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case, Jackson waded into the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

The amendment grants citizenship to anyone “born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The case hinges on those last five words. The Trump administration argued that illegal migrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because they don’t have “allegiance” to the US— and hence birthright citizenship does not apply to them.

Jackson tried to gut that argument with a curious example: ““If I steal a wallet in Japan, I am subject to Japanese laws….. in a sense, it’s allegiance.”

In short, a sitting Supreme Court Justice thinks that breaking the law = allegiance = entitled to citizenship.

Canadian Socialists Spent Their Convention Arguing Over Who’s Most Oppressed

Canada’s New Democratic Party— the country’s far-left political party— held its federal leadership convention last week in Winnipeg.

The party distributed color-coded “equity cards” to convention delegates at registration. The NDP recognize five “equity-seeking groups” in its constitution— women and non-cis men, racialized members, Indigenous members, 2SLGBTQ+ members, and persons with disabilities.

If you belonged to one of those groups, you got a card. Green for gender, pink for race, etc.

The cards gave holders priority access to the microphone during floor debates, allowing them to cut the speaking line.

If you’re doing the math, you’ve probably noticed: the only person at this convention without any cards would be a straight, white, able-bodied man.

Hilariously, at what amounts to a victimhood convention, that’s roughly nobody. So in practice, almost everyone had cards.

The system had no rules for what happens when two card-holders both want to speak. Whose card wins? They built an entire hierarchy of oppressed people and forgot to rank it. So naturally, this led to a kind of victimhood Olympics.

One woman stood at the microphone waving her green gender equity card, complaining that the chair had called on someone else first.

A black woman responded by playing her actual race card: “I want everyone to be mindful that these cards, for individuals like myself who identify as a Black woman, have no value outside of this space.” Her point: but my oppression is more real than yours— so my card should outrank yours.

What trumps black woman? Trans. And as one trans delegate complained,

“It’s hard as a racialized and transgender delegate to sometimes use this card… it’s frustrating when these are my rights being directly under attack right now in Alberta and a cisgender woman had spoken over me.”

Meanwhile, the convention chair— who identifies as nonbinary— halted proceedings at one point because a delegate, mid-speech about the Iran conflict, addressed the chair as “madame.” The substance of what was being said didn’t matter. The pronoun did.

And on the final day, the party’s solution to the chaos was not to scrap the system. They expanded it.

This party used to be about healthcare and workers’ rights. Now they spend their time building a color-coded hierarchy of victimhood, then arguing over whose suffering entitles them to speak first into a microphone, even though no one is listening to the substance of their ideas, but rather privilege-checking their use of pronouns.

Oregon’s Animal Cruelty Measure Would Criminalize Farming, Hunting, and Pest Control

In Oregon, animal rights activists are closing in on enough signatures to put a ballot measure before voters in November called Initiative Petition 28, or the “PEACE Act” (People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions).

Like every state, Oregon exempts certain activities from animal cruelty charges: hunting, fishing, farming, medical research, pest control, etc.

This law would eliminate all of those exemptions. The only remaining exceptions would be self-defense and good veterinary practices.

Hunting and fishing— which currently produce $1.9 billion in economic activity— would become crimes.

Raising cattle for beef or dairy— Oregon’s largest livestock commodity— would be illegal. 37,000 farms and ranches and 80,000 agricultural workers would be affected.

Artificial insemination of livestock would be classified as “animal sexual assault.” Pest control would become a crime.

Don’t worry, though. The campaign’s own website helpfully explains that exterminators could “easily continue their profession in the broader field of rodent management” by humanely catching mice alive and releasing them outside… no doubt after a good mouse-massage.

Funded by PETA and other national organizations paying signature gatherers $25 an hour, they’ve collected over 100,000 and only need a few thousand more by July to get it on the ballot.

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It was an act of desperation. Portugal’s economy was in shambles— bailed out by the EU two years earlier, unemployment above 16%, property values cratering. The government needed foreign capital, and it was willing to trade residency permits to get it.

And since Portugal is part of the European Union, that residency card wasn’t just a ticket to Lisbon— it gave new property owners the legal right to travel, live, and work across all EU member countries.

The pitch worked. Over the next decade, Portugal’s Golden Visa brought in more than €7 billion in foreign investment.

Other cash-strapped European countries took note, and Greece, Spain, Cyprus, and Malta soon launched their own versions.

For years this was one of the easiest ways to establish a legal foothold in Europe— buy a home in a romantic getaway you enjoy, and get the right to live there.

Maintaining residency often comes with time commitments of living at least six months in the country each year. But Golden Visas are especially appealing as a “backup” residency because they require very little time on the ground.

That era is ending.

Portugal eliminated real estate as a qualifying investment in late 2023, restricting its program to cultural/ scientific contributions and business/ venture capital avenues.

Spain shut its Golden Visa program entirely in April 2025 after property prices began to skyrocket.

Two of the most popular programs in Europe, gone within two years of each other.

And the countries that still allow property-based residency have raised their minimums dramatically.

Greece is the clearest example. A few years ago, you could buy property almost anywhere in the country for €250,000 and qualify for residency.

Today, if you want that bargain price, you have to buy a commercial property that has already been converted to residential use, or purchase a listed heritage building and restore it.

Standard turn-key residential property that does not require renovation now starts at €400,000 in lower-demand areas and runs up to €800,000 in Athens, Thessaloniki, and the most popular islands like Mykonos, Santorini, and Crete.

It’s still a great option if you like the idea of buying a vacation home on a Greek island, and can afford it. But it is a much bigger commitment than it used to be.

Malta has gotten significantly more expensive. When it launched its residency program in 2015, you could buy property for as little as €270,000 in Gozo or southern Malta, with €30,000 in government fees.

Today, the minimum purchase is €375,000 plus a whopping €99,000 in government fees. The fees alone have more than tripled. Crazy.

Cyprus used to offer one of the most powerful programs in Europe— full citizenship by investment, with a total cost north of €2.5 million when you added the mandatory residential property purchase and government donations.

That was killed in 2020 after an Al Jazeera investigation caught the Speaker of Parliament and a sitting MP on camera offering to help a supposed criminal obtain a passport. Then the European Commission piled on with formal infringement proceedings, declaring that “European values are not for sale.”

Today it’s been reduced to a residency-only program requiring €300,000 plus VAT in new residential property.

Latvia offers the cheapest remaining turn-key real estate option in Europe, though even it has tightened significantly. When the program launched in 2010, you could buy rural property for as little as €71,000 and qualify. Today, the minimum is €250,000 and there’s a 5% state fee on top.

But that’s not a bad deal for a safe, affordable EU country whose capital has one of the best-preserved medieval old towns in Europe.

And outside Europe, there are still some attractive programs.

In Panama, you can obtain legal residency by purchasing property for roughly $300,000. And that money goes a long way — property prices run between $100 and $200 per square foot, meaning $300,000 buys genuinely nice real estate.

Mexico doesn’t even require a property purchase. You just need to prove your income or savings meets a modest threshold — roughly $4,500 per month in recurring income, or about $75,000 in savings for temporary residency. Retirees can often qualify for permanent residency directly.

And then there’s Turkey, which offers something none of the European programs do: actual citizenship, not just residency. Purchase $400,000 in real estate, and you become a Turkish citizen— though this price has also risen from $250,000.

The great thing about these programs is that you’re not just acquiring residency — you’re acquiring a real asset in a foreign country. A property that gives you both a personal and financial foothold outside your home country.

While things are good, it could simply be a vacation home you visit once a year that generates rental income while you’re away.

But if things in your home country ever deteriorate to the point that you want to get out of Dodge, whether temporarily or permanently, it makes sense to have already established a place to go where you have the legal right to enter, live, and work in that country.

The world is clearly going through a phase of more conflict and less cooperation… so having a another place to go is a sensible part of a Plan B.

These residency by investment programs change constantly; thresholds rise, rules tighten, and some get eliminated entirely. That’s why it doesn’t pay to procrastinate when you’ve decided to pursue second residency.

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That’s about $1,000 per employee, which might not sound so crazy, until you realize that this was during a period when only 9% of DOT employees were actually showing up to the office.

But the furniture budget of the Department of Justice was even worse— $408 million on furniture in four years, with an average attendance rate of just 35%.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) dropped $250,000 on a single “refresh” of Herman Miller chairs. My only hope is this was part of developing some new revolutionary bulletproof chair cushion.

All told, federal agencies have spent $4.6 billion on furniture since 2021 — much of it for offices that have sat empty while employees work from home on Zoom.

If this were an isolated case of waste, you might write it off as bad management at a couple of agencies.

But it is not.

In February, the Government Accountability Office calculated the final cost of the Employee Retention Credit— a COVID-era program that ended in 2021. Total payout: $283 billion.

But 83% of that money ($235 billion) was paid out YEARS after the pandemic ended; the fraud mills kept filing bogus claims, and the IRS just kept writing checks.

Also in February, the FCC’s inspector general discovered that Lifeline phone providers in California had been billing the government to provide phone and internet service to 94,000 dead people— $3.8 million worth of calls that were never made, to phones that were never used, for people who were no longer alive.

The examples never stop.

Senator Joni Ernst recently uncovered Pentagon-funded research projects that included studies on octopus hypnosis, monkey mind-reading, snail mucus, and elephant seal sleeping habits, all funded through a contracting loophole called “Other Transaction Agreements”.

These OTAs allow agencies to spend money without competitive bidding, standard oversight, or public disclosure of costs.

How much did each project cost? That’s the beauty of the system — the government doesn’t have to tell you. But the GAO found that $77.5 billion flowed through these agreements between 2021 and 2025 without proper public accounting.

The National Science Foundation spent $14.6 million teaching monkeys to play a video game inspired by The Price Is Right. USAID spent $20 million producing Sesame Street in Iraq and $69,000 on dance classes in Wuhan, China.

And every single year, the federal government makes hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments— money sent to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.

Last year’s total: $186 billion. That includes payments to deceased individuals, ineligible recipients, and programs that can’t even verify whether the money should have gone out at all.

Since 2003, the cumulative total has reached $2.8 trillion, i.e. a full 7% of the national debt that simply would not exist if the government was minimally competent.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has failed its own audit for eight consecutive years. Auditors could not verify more than 60% of the department’s $4.65 trillion in assets.

Congress’s response? Hand the Pentagon its first-ever trillion-dollar budget. They cannot account for the money they already receive, so why not give them even more?!?

Then there’s the end-of-year ritual. Under “use it or lose it” rules, agencies that don’t exhaust their budgets risk getting less money next year.

So in the final five days of fiscal year 2025, the War Department spent $50.1 billion in grants and contracts, including $6.9 million on lobster tail, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $15 million on ribeye steak, $225 million on furniture, including a $98,329 Steinway grand piano for a general’s home.

Makes sense. Perhaps a stirring rendition of “Great Balls of Fire” is just what we need to defeat Iran.

For context, only nine countries on Earth spend more $50 billion on their entire annual defense budget. The Pentagon spent that in five days.

None of this is secret. DOGE found it. Inspectors General found it. The GAO found it. Senators publish it in annual reports that make headlines for about a day.

And then nothing changes.  Congress doesn’t cut a dime.

They act like it is simply impossible, that children would be starving in the streets, national security would be at risk, and farms would lay fallow, that we would all burst into flames if they cut the budget.

This might be one of the most effective lies ever perpetrated on a population— that we simply cannot, must not cut a dime in spending, for the consequences would be catastrophic.

The federal government spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025. $2 trillion of that was borrowed. $1.2 trillion was spent on interest to service the $39 trillion national debt.

And over the next decade, the CBO expects Congress to add another $23.1 trillion to the debt. It will almost certainly be much more.

This is arguably the single greatest threat to America. Not China, not hysteria over AI, not any of the foreign adversaries that dominate the headlines— but the slow, compounding, mathematically inevitable consequences of a government that cannot stop spending money it doesn’t have.

And the most infuriating part is that it should be so easy to cut the most obvious, most indefensible waste. The $600 billion in outright fraud Secretary of Treasury Bessent estimates in the budget every single year. The $200+ billion in improper payments. The $100+ billion in legal graft that flows to political allies.

That alone would cut nearly half the deficit, without even touching the furniture for empty offices or octopus hypnosis experiments.

But if Congress is unwilling to even lift a finger for such obvious absurdity, what are the odds they’ll tackle Social Security’s impending insolvency, just six years away? Or give foreign countries the confidence to keep investing in US government bonds? Or behave in a way to keep inflation in check?

Seems pretty low to us. Which is why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

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America owed about $75 million in debt from the Revolutionary War. Individual states had already defaulted. Foreign creditors considered the new country a total joke. And domestic bondholders at home were selling their worthless government IOUs for pennies on the dollar.

So, Hamilton came up with a solution. It was highly controversial, but he managed to convince Congress to approve it.

In short, Hamilton issued brand new bonds to investors that effectively rolled up all existing state and federal debts. These new bonds were backed by dedicated tax revenue– including, most controversially, a tax on whiskey. Today that would be the equivalent of taxing Instagram use.

But in fairness his plan worked. Within a decade, US bonds traded for full value. Foreign capital flooded in. The country’s creditworthiness went from laughingstock to gold standard (quite literally after they passed the Mint and Coinage Act of 1792).

Hamilton’s success wasn’t some clever financial trickery. The whole idea was to establish credibility: demonstrate that America was serious about paying its debt. He paired every dollar of borrowing with a specific tax to repay it all. Bondholders could look at the tax revenue, look at the debt, and do the math.

And the math worked.

But that was 237 years ago. Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell admitted that the math no longer works.

“[Today’s] level of the debt is not unsustainable,” Powell said, “but the path is not sustainable. It will not end well if we don’t do something fairly soon.”

Look at that again to understand what he said: the amount of debt ($39 trillion) is not the problem. The problem is the trajectory.

America, he noted, is the world’s reserve currency issuer with the deepest capital markets on earth. It can carry a larger debt load than smaller countries. And that’s true.

But Powell also acknowledged the obvious part: “Our debt is growing substantially faster than our economy. And in the long run, that’s kind of the definition of unsustainable.”

He’s right.

The Congressional Budget Office projects net interest payments on the national debt will hit $1 trillion this fiscal year— nearly triple from 2020. Through the first three months of FY2026, the Treasury has spent $270 billion just on interest. And that doesn’t include the principal amount of debt that has to be repaid to foreign creditors who simply want their money back.

The CBO also projects that, by 2031, the average interest rate on government debt will exceed the rate of economic growth. If interest on the debt is 6%, and the economy is only growing at 4%, then the problem becomes self-reinforcing: debt will grow faster than the economy no matter what Congress does.

This would be a fiscal death spiral, and CBO’s own numbers say it’s just five years away.

After WWII, America faced a similar burden; the public debt was 106% of GDP in 1946. But within three decades the ratio had plummeted to 23%.

How? Simple. The government consistently ran budget surpluses, while an industrial boom powered significant economic growth. Plus (and this is the part nobody likes to mention) the Federal Reserve pegged interest rates below inflation for years– quietly taxing bondholders through financial repression, which slowly melted the debt away.

Not one of those conditions exists today. The US government hasn’t run a budget surplus in decades. Q4 2025 GDP growth was just revised down to a pathetic 0.7%. And inflation is running hot enough that the Fed can’t cut rates without making it worse.

There’s a certain dark humor in the Fed Chairman delivering this warning.

After all, this is the same man who presided over the most aggressive monetary expansion in history: trillions of newly created dollars, years of near-zero interest rates, ‘Quantitative Easing’ that made the government’s borrowing habit completely painless.

The Fed didn’t invent politicians’ spending addiction. But they did hand Congress an unlimited credit card with a 0% introductory rate. Now that the teaser rate has expired, the new interest bill is $1 trillion per year.

The Chairman’s proposed fix? “We don’t have to pay the debt down,” he said. “We just need to have the economy actually growing more quickly than the debt.” Then he added, with a self-aware shrug, “I pretty much limit myself to those high-level points, which essentially everyone ignores.”

So, is Congress going to suddenly find its inner fiscal discipline? Will the Bernie Sanders, AOCs, and Elizabeth Warrens of the world make critical regulatory reforms to unleash economic growth?

I’m not holding my breath.

The most likely course of action– as we have argued for years– is that Congress will continue to do nothing… which will ultimately cause the dollar to lose value and purchasing power. Your savings, your income, your retirement account will all buy less.

History is unambiguous about this. Governments invariably choose inflation. Every single time.

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His story was one of dozens featured in a recent Wall Street Journal article about Americans are leaving the country in record numbers.

Americans residing in Portugal have increased 500% since COVID. More Americans moved to Germany last year than Germans moved to America. Requests to renounce US citizenship jumped 48%.

And these days, it’s not all that hard to understand the allure.

The United States is a country where kindergarteners routinely practice active shooter drills— where a father’s breaking point isn’t the first armed threat at his kid’s school, but the second.

It’s a country where a 23-year-old woman named Iryna Zarutska was sitting on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a man with 14 prior arrests including armed robbery who had been released without bail pulled out a knife and killed her.

And yet when federal agents try to arrest and deport violent criminals, mobs show up to block them. Cities pass sanctuary policies. Removing illegal immigrants with violent criminal records is treated as an act of fascism.

Then there’s the slow suffocation of common sense.

People are fired and blacklisted for expressing opinions that were obvious truths ten years ago. Universities have turned into ideological minefields where medical professors self-censor biological facts to keep their jobs.

Children are being taught radical race and gender ideology in public schools— and parents who object are treated like domestic terrorists.

Business owners are drowning in regulations, tariffs, and compliance costs that change with every election cycle.

Congress is full of unqualified people who can barely contain their contempt for one another, let alone govern.

Is there anyone, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, who thinks this is going well?

The left thinks America is sliding into fascism. The right thinks it’s sliding into communism. There are factions within factions, divisions are growing, and there always seems to be a new reason to rage.

In the past, there have always been citizens who threatened to leave if/when a certain political candidate won. When George W. Bush became President, liberals said they were moving to Canada. When Obama got elected, conservatives said they’d had enough.

For the first time in modern memory, the discomfort isn’t partisan— it’s universal. Everyone feels it.

On top of the social chaos, the cost of living is crushing people. Housing in most major cities is absurd. Grocery bills keep climbing. Healthcare is a financial catastrophe for anyone without employer coverage— and increasingly for those with it. Retirees on fixed incomes are watching their purchasing power evaporate.

Which is why a woman the WSJ spoke to from Buffalo making $80,000 a year couldn’t make ends meet. She moved to Albania, where she lives comfortably on $1,000 a month. She now helps other Americans on Social Security and disability do the same.

It’s only going to get worse. The US national debt surpassed $39 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office projects $24.4 trillion in additional deficits over the next decade. That means more inflation. Higher taxes. Less purchasing power.

If you want a preview of what’s coming, look at the Netherlands. The Dutch government, strapped for cash, is trying to pass a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains— meaning they’ll tax you on investment gains you haven’t even sold yet.

Similar proposals have already been floated in the US— and with people like Mamdani being elected in New York City and Gavin Newsom gearing up for a White House run, how long before they become a reality?

That’s the playbook when governments run out of money. And the US government is running out of money faster than almost anyone.

We’ve been writing about all of this for over sixteen years.

We were among the very first voices talking about international diversification, second residencies, Plan B strategies, and the importance of not having all your eggs in one country’s basket.

Back then, people thought we were nutty. ‘Why would anyone leave the greatest country in the world,’ they asked.

Now it’s front-page news in the Wall Street Journal— right alongside a lot of other things we’ve been talking about for years: the debt crisis, gold, the erosion of the dollar’s reserve currency status.

We said: buy gold. Diversify internationally. Consider a second residency. Build a sensible Plan B.

These aren’t fringe ideas anymore. Everyone intuitively understands why these are important steps.

That said, it’s often hard to understand where to even begin doing something about it.

Which is exactly what our Plan B Confidential service is for.

We provide actionable intelligence on second citizenships, foreign residency programs, international banking, tax strategies, and real asset investments— drawn from boots-on-the-ground research and a professional network across the globe.

Again, we’ve been doing this for 16 years, so our Rolodex of trusted service providers runs deep.

Right now, given how important it is to have a Plan B for what’s happening, and what’s to come, we’re offering a 40% discount on membership (for the first time in years).

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

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“Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong,” she said. “Get out of town. Because you do not represent our values. You are not New Yorkers.”

Well, a lot of people took her advice.

Over the past several years, more than 125,000 New Yorkers relocated to Florida. And they weren’t the illegals suckling the teet of free government money; most of the 125,000 who left were very wealthy taxpayers. And they didn’t just bring their suitcases— they brought their money.

And the thing about New York’s tax system is that those ultra-wealthy matter A LOT. Just over 3,000 wealthy taxpayers in New York— the top 0.03%— generate roughly 19% of the state’s income tax revenue.

So without those same taxpayers that Hochul chased away, the state’s tax revenue plummeted.

And naturally Governor Hochul is now singing a very different tune. She recently spoke at a political conference saying,

“I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state. Now, there are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up— cut me the checks if you want to be supportive. But maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who we can bring back home, because our tax base has been eroded.”

Read that again. In 2022, she told anyone who disagreed politically to get out of town. In 2026, she’s practically begging millionaires to come back… almost like it’s some sort of membership drive.

Moreover, just a few days after her desperate plea for millionaires, Hochul published an op-ed announcing that she wants to postpone implementation of New York’s cap-and-invest climate program— the centerpiece of the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

Why? Because her own state agency’s official analysis projected the regulations could increase utility bills by over $4,100 a year and increase gas prices by an additional $2.23 per gallon.

Of course, that is the entire point for climate fanatics. They WANT the costs of carbon based fuels to rise to discourage use.

Which is probably why Hochul doesn’t want to REPEAL the law. She wants to DELAY it.

Hochul wants to push full implementation out until the end her second full term as governor… so that it won’t be her problem politically.

Although the climate law was passed before her tenure, Hochul embraced it as her own— issuing a 2022 executive order to accelerate its implementation, personally announcing the cap-and-invest program in her 2023 State of the State address, and calling herself “the staunchest environmentalist and fighter of climate change in New York’s history.”

Kathcy Hochul, like so many other politicians of her ilk, is an inspired idiot.

She thinks it’s great to demonize the other side and tell them to get the hell out while she’s on the campaign trail.

Then reality hits, and she realizes those are her tax cows she needs to milk if she has any hope of paying for her “generous social programs” that convince welfare queens and illegal immigrants to vote for her.

She thinks it’s great to play climate crusader when there’s a camera rolling. Until rising utility costs infuriate voters and threaten her own political career.

This is why having a Plan B matters so much. When your state views you primarily as a source of revenue to fund programs you didn’t ask for and don’t benefit from, the rational move is to go somewhere you are wanted.

The same thing can happen at the national level. And it’s not that hard to give yourself the option (but not the obligation), through foreign residency or citizenship, to move somewhere that welcomes you, with a lower cost of living, with better tax rates, or a more friendly atmosphere.

And that’s really what a Plan B is all about— making sure you always have options.

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It’s crazy. Every single senator on that committee acknowledged that Social Security will run out of money in roughly six years.

The Senate Budget Committee— one of the most powerful committees in Congress— convened what could almost be described as an emergency hearing to figure out how to fix it.

And nobody cares.

No media coverage. No headlines. No cable news panels. Nothing.

This is a program that roughly 50 to 60 million Americans depend on. It’s one of the largest programs in the entire federal budget— on par with national defense spending.

Just imagine if the Pentagon were about to run out of money. That would be front-page news around the world. There would be Congressional hearings, press conferences, emergency sessions.

But Social Security running out of money in just six years? Apparently that five-alarm fire doesn’t even warrant a mention.

If there’s one positive takeaway, it’s that everyone on the Senate committee agreed they need to do something. There was genuine, bipartisan consensus that the problem is real, it’s urgent, and it requires action.

Then they went and debated solutions… and that’s when the session became utterly hilarious.

For example, one senator proposed that the federal government create a brand new investment fund— “pre-funded” with $1.5 TRILLION. He believes that the government will invest this money so brilliantly, so skillfully, that it will save Social Security forever.

This is just classic Washington thinking. The solution to every problem is always more government control. More committees. More agencies. More trillions.

But the most hilarious part— and you can actually see this on the video— is that while the Senator was laying out his new plan, a camera operator in the background, who probably works for C-SPAN, started visibly shaking his head in disgust.

The average working guy understands what apparently United States Senators do not: handing politicians a $1.5 trillion permanent investment fund is not a solution. It’s a problem.

And not just a problem— it’s a fraud magnet.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already estimated that roughly 10% of the federal budget, around $600 billion per year, is lost to outright fraud. That’s the existing level of fraud, with existing programs. Now imagine layering a $1.5 trillion investment fund on top of that— managed by the same people, overseen by the same bureaucrats, with the same lack of accountability.

Social Security is hurtling toward insolvency, and the big idea from a senior United States Senator is to let politicians manage a $1.5 trillion investment fund.

Because that worked out so well the last time they tried it.

Remember when Pete Buttigieg, as Secretary of Transportation, was handed $1.2 trillion to spend on American infrastructure? His stated goal was to “deliver $1.2 trillion worth of value.” In other words, his best-case scenario was a 0% return on investment.

And he couldn’t even manage that. The $7.5 billion electric vehicle charging program, which promised 500,000 stations by 2030, has built fewer than 100 after nearly four years.

In Baltimore, where the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March 2024, the city initially said reconstruction would cost $1.7 billion and be complete by 2028. Nine months later they revised the cost estimate to $5.2 billion, and completion to 2030.

And where, exactly, would this $1.5 trillion in “pre-funding” come from? The government is already running a deficit of $2 trillion a year. The national debt is approaching $40 trillion. They don’t have $1.5 trillion lying around.

So they’d borrow it. Which means more debt. More pressure on interest rates. More inflation. More printing. And ultimately, more waste, more corruption, and more scandals.

Everyone knows this. Even the guy in the background operating the camera.

The good news is that there does appear to be at least some political will to address the problem.

And there are relatively straightforward fixes available, and the committee at least recognizes that the longer they wait, the more painful the fixes become.

We’ll see what happens. But this hearing perfectly illustrates what always seems to happen in Washington: in trying to “solve” a crisis, their good idea factory creates even more problems, more waste, and more fraud than what they started with.

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It is, arguably, the most important financial document published in the country each year— the government’s own accounting of what it owns versus what it owes.

And the numbers are devastating.

The bottom line is that the government is reporting assets of $6 trillion, versus liabilities of nearly $48 trillion.

That gives it a “net worth” of NEGATIVE $42 trillion, which is the worst financial position on record.

Now, in fairness— and I’ve pointed this out before— governmental accounting is not always grounded in the real world.

The report, for example, places no value on the potential trillions (if not tens of trillions) of dollars’ worth of natural resources in the ground. And it assigns relatively little value to other hard assets like real estate.

But there’s no sugar-coating it. The fiscal situation is absolutely atrocious, and it gets worse every year.

The good news may be that the people in charge at least seem to understand this; Treasury Secretary Bessent acknowledges in his introduction that the situation is bad and that it needs to be improved quickly.

He writes, “Getting our fiscal house in order is not only an economic imperative, it is also essential to preserving the strength and credibility of the United States at home and abroad.”

And he discusses how they’d like to do it — through “reining in government spending and growing the economy,” through deregulation, as well as “energy abundance.”

Hallelujah. That is the exact formula to fix this looming fiscal crisis.

For the Treasury Secretary to even admit this is borderline unprecedented.

I’ve read through the Treasury Secretary’s introduction to these annual financial reports going back a couple of decades.

In 2002, for example, Secretary John Snow (who clearly knows nothing) wrote a very bland intro letter about accounting rules, with no acknowledgment of mounting military spending or the recession.

By 2007, Secretary Hank Paulson was beaming about how great the economy was, with no mention unsustainable discretionary spending— and this was only months before the entire financial system nearly collapsed.

In 2014, Secretary Jack Lew bragged about a slight decline in the budget deficit, even as the national debt was spiraling out of control.

And by 2023, Janet Yellen took a victory lap about how white-hot her economy was, completely ignoring the skyrocketing national debt and inflation fueled by COVID-era deficit spending.

This current report is the first time I’ve seen a Treasury Secretary seriously acknowledge the problem.

The obvious question then, is, having correctly identified both the problem and the solution, are they actually going to be able to execute?

I certainly hope so. Unfortunately many of the things he mentions, like tax reform, regulatory reform, and spending discipline, fall exclusively under the authority of Congress. And the majority of those 435 people are unserious about spending cuts.

There are a few things that the administration can execute on its own. Energy policy is one of them, and as we’ve said before, they have done quite a bit to boost nuclear energy.

Obviously a lot is riding on what happens with Iran when it comes to oil. A peace deal could potentially drive more foreign investment into US Treasuries, which would result in lower interest rates and lower inflation— and buy America time to restore its fiscal responsibility.

But it could also go the other way and drastically erode confidence in the United States.

So we’re really at a tipping point right now.

If Iran ends poorly, we could likely see foreign countries avoiding US Treasuries— putting more pressure on the Federal Reserve to ‘print’ money to finance the deficit. That would end up generating a lot more inflation.

The bigger problem is that Social Security is set to run out of money in six years. So, if Iran ends poorly and there’s no serious fiscal reform, I think that 6-year window is when the US would see major economic consequences.

One canary in the coalmine is rising interest rates. Right in front of our eyes, the 10-year and 30-year Treasury yields have been rising to near their highest levels in twenty years.

This is the opposite of what’s supposed to happen.

In the past, during times of crisis (including war), the world rushed into US Treasury bonds as the “risk free” asset. And yields plummeted due to the surge in demand.

Now it’s the opposite. Since the war began a few weeks ago, the 10-year yield has gone from 3.97% to 4.39%. Yields are up, not down. That’s the opposite of what normally happens in a crisis.

The jury is still out, and I sincerely hope they’re able to conclude a great deal.

But if confidence continues to erode and yields keep rising, the Federal Reserve will be under enormous pressure to step in with a new Quantitative Easing program. In other words, they’ll ‘print’ money to buy US government bonds and finance the deficit.

And as we saw during the pandemic, when the Fed created roughly $5 trillion out of thin air, that led to 9% inflation.

Bottom line, it’s definitely time to be thinking about a Plan B.

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Obviously, there are the usual suspects like the New York Times and Washington Post who have called it “folly” and “rotten”. But plenty of voices on the right have joined in the criticism as well.

Tucker Carlson calls it “absolutely disgusting and evil”. Thomas Massie says it is “not America First”. Joe Rogan says it’s “insane”. Joe Kent, formerly the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned his post because Iran was not “an imminent threat” and there was no “clear path to a swift victory”.

In short, there are plenty of respectable and informed views that Iran is (1) not going well, and (2) not in America’s interests. And I can certainly understand their points of view.

Personally, I see this from a lot of different angles– some positive, some negative. But at the same time I also think there’s a possibility that what’s happening right now might actually BE the plan.

Just consider: the US national debt is $39 trillion. Deficits are piling on an additional $2 trillion per year. Social Security is only six years away from running out of money. And the vast majority of United States Congressmen couldn’t possibly care less.

It doesn’t make you unpatriotic or unAmerican to understand this simple truth: US government bonds are simply not as attractive as they used to be for foreign investors.

The leadership of every foreign country on this planet recognizes that they could wake up tomorrow morning and find out that their Treasury holdings have been frozen. Or they could be sanctioned. Or there could be another tariff escalation. Or their alliance terminated. Or another military strike.

They also believe that Congress will continue to do nothing about America’s spiraling debt and budget deficit. Interest on the debt already exceeds 22% of federal tax revenue, and the problem is rapidly becoming much worse.

They also know there’s a good chance the Federal Reserve will fail to achieve price stability, and that inflation could easily go much higher from here.

All of that spells plenty of risk, especially for foreign governments and central banks. Given that US Treasury securities pay a measly 4%, it hardly seems worth their investment.

That’s why so many foreign governments and central banks around the world started moving a portion of their strategic financial reserves away from the US dollar… and into gold. This has been a trend for a few years now– central bank gold purchases surged in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

That’s a huge problem for the US government, which critically needs foreign investors to continue buying Treasury bonds. Treasury demand from foreigners helps keep interest rates down and inflation in check.

Conversely, if foreigners ditched the dollar entirely, inflation and interest rates would both skyrocket.

So, what better way to prevent this than to give foreigners an extremely compelling reason to buy US Treasurys and hold US dollars?

Oil is the most widely traded commodity in the world. Every country needs it, and despite the cries of deranged teenagers who superglue themselves to the pavement, demand for oil keeps growing.

Oil has traditionally been bought and sold in US dollars… even when neither buyer nor seller are American. So, when Australia sells oil to India, that transaction takes place in US dollars.

The sheer volume of the oil trade means that every country stockpiles US dollars in order to participate in global energy markets. And they typically hold US dollars by buying Treasury bonds.

This war might possibly have been a ploy to gain control over Iran’s oil: punch them in the face, decimate their leadership, destroy much of their military capabilities… and then offer a peace deal:

“We will lift sanctions and allow you to sell oil on the global market, and even line up investment to expand your production, as long as everything is denominated in US dollars. No oil will be sold in any other currency. Better yet, we’ll push you to peg your currency to the US dollar, just like other countries in the region.”

Obviously, they would never communicate such a strategy in public; they’d never stand on stage and tell CNN what they’re really trying to accomplish.

But in the end, maybe they don’t really care if there’s true regime change in Iran. Maybe they don’t really care about Israel’s objectives either. Perhaps the singular American goal is to boost foreign demand for the US dollar.

And it’s possible they might just pull that off.

Again, I’m just speculating. The only thing we can say for sure is that there’s a lot riding on this outcome.

If they succeed, the resurgence of the dollar could buy the US enough time to fix its problems. If they fail, it could be the proverbial nail.

That’s why this war in Iran could end up right alongside 9/11, the GFC, and Covid as one of the most consequential events of our time.

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Here are a few of this week’s stories in case you missed them.

20 million Americans just found out what “affordable” healthcare actually costs

The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010 with a promise that healthcare would finally be affordable. It wasn’t. Since the ACA became law, the average family health insurance premium has nearly doubled— from $13,770 to almost $27,000 a year.

So by 2021, the government had to introduce enhanced subsidies just to keep Obamacare’s own premiums from crushing the very same people that it was supposed to help. At the peak, 24 million people were enrolled and 92% of them were receiving taxpayer-funded premium subsidies.

The “Affordable” Care Act could only be sustained by massive government handouts on top of the massive government program.

When those subsidies were set to expire at the end of 2025, the same Democrats who created this mess triggered a 43-day government shutdown, fighting to keep the money flowing rather than fix the program. They lost. The subsidies expired on December 31, 2025.

Now the results are in.

Average annual premium payments more than doubled— from $888 to $1,904. Of the 24 million people enrolled in ACA plans last year, roughly 2.4 million have dropped health insurance entirely. Another 5 million switched to other coverage. And 17% of those still hanging on aren’t sure they can afford premiums for the rest of the year— meaning the exodus is far from over.

More than half of those who kept their plans say they’re cutting back on food and basic household items just to cover healthcare.

This is simple economics. When the government shows up with a bottomless wallet, the entire industry restructures around the guaranteed revenue. Prices rise as a result.

This has happened literally every single time the government has stepped in to make something more affordable— education, child care, housing, and now medical insurance.

The “Affordable” Care Act was never affordable. It was subsidized. And now tens of millions of Americans are learning the difference.

Finally, the Teachers Unions Lose and Students Win

Stacy Davis Gates makes over $270,000 a year running the Chicago Teachers Union. This is the same school district where only 43% of students can read at grade level and 27% are proficient in math— and that’s AFTER the state lowered proficiency standards.

The district’s budget has nearly doubled since 2012, i.e. the more money they spend, the worse the results.

So naturally Ms. Gates got a promotion. Last October she was unanimously elected president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers (i.e. statewide union), giving her control over 103,000 members in Illinois.

She has wasted no time using that control to fight a federal new school choice program which would give parents the opportunity to move their kids from failing schools.

Rather than acknowledge that her schools are rampant failures and that parents should have the right to move their children to better performing schools, Gates has called school choice “the choice of racists” and formally urged Illinois not to participate.

I’m not even sure what that means; she seems to be asserting that the teachers are exclusively black, the fed-up parents are exclusively white… and that ethnicity is the reason parents are upset, i.e. NOT the fact that their kids can’t read. This is a clinical level of insanity.

Under Stacy Davis Gates, her CTU’s political action committee donated $72,500 to State Senator Graciela Guzman— who, literally on the same day as the donation, submitted a bill to ban Illinois from participating in the school choice program.

Nonetheless, voters in more than 30 counties weighed in on whether Illinois should opt in — and the measure passed in every jurisdiction that has reported results so far, with support ranging from 56% to 77%.

Inject a little free-market competition into a system that has failed students for decades. Let parents choose. Let schools compete. The only people opposed are the ones who benefit from a captive audience.

Oh, and Gates sends her own child to a $16,000-per-year private school.

So she clearly understands that school choice works. She just doesn’t want anyone else to have the right to choose.

The EU “simplifies” its AI regulations — by making them more complicated

Only the European Union could use the word “simplification” to describe what happened on Tuesday.

The European Parliament voted 101-9 to adopt changes to its Artificial Intelligence Act — a law that runs 458 pages, contains 180 recitals, 113 articles, and 13 annexes, totaling roughly 88,000 words.

The “simplification” modifies 30 articles, adds a brand-new banned category of AI, and creates three different compliance timelines instead of one — November 2026, December 2027, and August 2028.

Of course, the European Commission itself missed its own February 2026 deadline to publish guidance on how companies should comply. The standardization bodies tasked with developing technical standards also missed their deadline. At least 12 member states missed the deadline to appoint enforcement authorities. And 19 hadn’t even appointed a single point of contact.

In short, regulators who don’t adhere to their own deadlines have written rules based on standards that don’t yet exist, enforced by authorities who haven’t been appointed, in a law that hasn’t been fully implemented. And they just voted to “simplify” it all by adding more rules.

The damage is already real.

Apple delayed launching AI features in Europe, only rolling out a partial version months after American users had access. Meta delayed AI features and refused to sign the EU’s voluntary AI code of practice.

Google DeepMind’s head of public policy said the Act “was devised before ChatGPT had even come out.” Meta’s public policy director said “European citizens and consumers suffer” as a result of the regulations.

The specific rules are even more absurd than the process.

The EU classified healthcare, education, and employment as “high-risk” AI domains — the very sectors where AI could deliver the greatest benefits to ordinary people.

An AI system that helps a doctor diagnose a rare disease faster? Forget it. An AI tutor that detects when a student is struggling and adjusts its teaching? Banned outright (the EU prohibits emotion-recognition AI in schools). A recruitment tool that matches workers to better jobs? Subject to fines of up to 35 million euros or 7% of global revenue.

This is technology that could raise living standards, increase productivity, improve healthcare, and make personalized education accessible to millions.

Instead, Europe has ensured its 450 million citizens will be the last people on earth to benefit from it.

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It points out that the United States has never entered an economic downturn as indebted as it is today— meaning there is essentially zero fiscal space to respond to the next crisis.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, national debt stood at roughly 35% of GDP. By the time it was over, debt had ballooned to about 70%.

Then, when COVID hit in 2020, debt was already at 80% of GDP. By the time that was over, it had surged past 100%.

Today the official national debt is almost at 130% of GDP. That’s well beyond the World War II record.

Each economic crisis starts from a worse position, requires more borrowing, and leaves the country deeper in the hole.

None of this should be surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention. We’ve been writing about this for years.

We said it in 2019 when everything was going great— record stock market, record tax revenue, healthy economy— and the government still ran a trillion dollar deficit.

We wondered out loud— if the government still runs a $1 trillion deficit when everything is great, how bad will the deficit be when there’s an actual crisis?

We didn’t have to wait long to find out; Covid hit shortly thereafter, causing the government deficit to surge to $5+ trillion.

So what happens when the next recession hits? Where does the money come from?

The CRFB’s proposed emergency plan gives you the answer. First, freeze Social Security, Medicare, and all discretionary spending — no cost-of-living adjustments, no growth, nothing.

Then, freeze tax brackets too, so that inflation quietly pushes more Americans into higher brackets.

And on top of all that, phase in a brand new “deficit reduction surtax”: an additional tax on income above $100,000 that ratchets up every year until deficits fall to 3% of GDP.

Of course this would all be so politically toxic that the report concedes nothing will be done until… a crisis forces it.

But that doesn’t mean Americans aren’t already feeling the consequences of higher deficits.

Last year, a Yale Budget Lab report found that federal deficit spending since 2015 has pushed interest rates up by nearly a full percentage point.

The government borrows so much money that it crowds out private lending, forcing everyone else to pay more. You’re essentially competing with the government for a loan.

For a new homebuyer, that single percentage point adds $76,014 in extra costs over a 30-year mortgage — roughly $2,534 per year, or about $211 every single month. Auto loans cost an extra $670. Small business loans cost an extra $7,723.

So when a young couple can’t afford their first house, or a small business owner pays more to expand, part of that cost is a direct, measurable consequence of Washington’s borrowing binge.

The national debt isn’t an abstract number on a screen in Washington. It’s higher interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards.

And the government borrowing is only accelerating.

Over the past year, the debt grew by $2.7 trillion; that’s a sharp increase from the $1.8 trillion federal deficit in fiscal year 2025.

So not only is the national debt growing, but the rate at which the national debt is growing… is growing. (If you’re a math wonk, the second derivative is positive.)

At the current trajectory, the debt will cross $39 trillion by the end of this month. And $40 trillion by the summer… not long after America celebrates its 250th birthday.

What’s crazy is that the people in charge of tracking all of this spending can’t figure out where the money goes.

On March 5, a government auditor reported that the Office of Management and Budget cannot even produce a complete inventory of federal programs, despite being legally required to do so.

It’s not that the OMB is lazy or incompetent; it’s that there are simply too many federal programs… and the complex web of spending makes it virtually impossible to tally up all the various offices, agencies, sub-departments, committees, special advisory boards, emergency programs, etc. that exist in the federal government.

Congress makes things much worse when they appropriate annual funding for some program— sort of ‘fire and forget’. So decades go by since a program was originally created…yet it continues to receive money each year even though nobody knows what it’s for.

Bottom line, the government now spends $7 trillion each year. And they can’t figure out where it goes.

We’ve spent the last 16 years helping people build a Plan B— because even back in 2010, the trajectory of fiscal spending was obvious.

Look, the world’s not coming to an end. But it would be naive and foolish to think there won’t be consequences to such a dismal financial situation. There already are.

And it’s important to think about this, because the earlier you start preparing, the more options you’ll have to mitigate the consequences.

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The saunas were fed by nearby hot springs and often maintained by Buddhist monks; in this way they were viewed as almost sacred… and certainly healing. The heat was believed to promote circulation, detoxification, and overall health, plus the social gathering in the saunas reinforced relationships within the community.

But, again, medieval Koreans had modest values. And for that reason, they separated men and women in different saunas. That wasn’t a new idea either; many civilizations, going back to the Roman baths, or thermae, separated genders when nudity was involved.

This should hardly be a controversial topic even today. But leave it to angry Leftists to turn public nudity into a human rights case.

Olympus Spa in Washington state is a traditional Korean sauna; as such, it is for women only– and many patrons bring their minor-age daughters along.

Per the Korean tradition, the women are typically nude. And the owners– Koreans themselves who happen to be devout Christians– believe that grown men shouldn’t be naked in a public place in front of women and girls.

You can just smell the Left’s disdain for such basic social norms. And sure enough, a few years ago, a grown adult, nonbinary transgender queer “AMAB” (assigned male at birth) named Haven Wilvich sought entry to the spa.

The spa denied entry, and Wilvich then filed a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission.

Think about that again. We’re not talking about some form of modern slavery. Or warlords holding children at gunpoint. Or China’s internment of its Uyghur population. Or the Taliban’s brutal suppression of women’s rights.

Nor are we talking about Wilvich being denied a critical need, like admission to a hospital for emergency care.

This was quite simply a biological man demanding to access to nude female children. And the state HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION jumped all over it like they were saving the world from genocide.

After being forced to change their gender policy, the spa’s owners, Myoon and Sun Lee (joined with some anonymous ‘Jane Doe’ female customers) filed a lawsuit against the Human Rights Council.

The Lees alleged that their own rights, including their First Amendment religious freedom, had been violated by the heavy hand of the state.

But the Court found such allegations preposterous and dismissed the case. The judge made it very clear– the only rights being violated were the nonbinary transgender queer AMAB’s rights. Everyone else’s rights are irrelevant and should be trampled upon in the name of social justice.

The Lees then requested an appeal to the US Ninth Circuit, where a judicial panel refused to even hear the case. The Lees petitioned again for a re-hearing at the Ninth Circuit, and that request was rejected late last week.

I read the 105-page opinion over the weekend; it’s hard to not be disgusted given how the judges justified rejecting the Lees’ appeal… based on procedural technicalities

The majority claimed, for example, that the spa owners “did not challenge [the definitions] or the language” of Washington’s anti-discrimination law (known as WLAD), nor did they sufficiently “argue that the statute was vague” or that “the HRC’s [Human Rights Commission] related policies” were inappropriate.

Unbelievable. A grown adult wants to walk around naked in front of children, and the Ninth Circuit is busy debating legal definitions and policy memos.

One of the few dissenters was Lawrence VanDyke, a Trump-appointed federal judge who wrote bluntly in his opinion:

“This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa— a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa—understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit.”

Most of the other justices, along with the legacy media, pounced all over VanDyke for his foul language. Unsurprisingly they were far more offended by his potty mouth than by the men who want to parade their genitals in front of prepubescent girls.

It’s enraging that the ‘experts’ in power– who are charged with maintaining our civilization– are becoming more destructive by the day.

They justify their decisions with legal vagaries and high sounding talk of human rights… without realizing how ridiculous they sound. GOING TO A DAY SPA IS NOT A HUMAN RIGHT! Duh.

But that’s not even the point. I read Wilvich’s entire blog site, going back several years. And my conclusion is that Wilvich is an extremely angry and unstable person.

The March 5, 2023, entry, for example (entitled “Fuck America”) viciously laments that “even my own liberal bubble is threatening to pop” because the country was not woke enough.

Bear in mind that 2023 was the same year that a trans activist exposed they/their boobs on the White House lawn in a symbol of peak, Biden-era insanity. Yet even that was insufficient progress for Wilvich.

This person needs serious, professional help. And I don’t mean that in a derisive way. It’s just a fact. But rather than get major psychological support, Wilvich was given a pulpit… and the power to force hard-working business owners to betray their commonsense value system.

Wilvich even gloated about it, writing later on they/them’s website, “I did it! I got the main naked lady spa in the area to change their policies and allow all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals.”

In short, business and property owners have no rights. Their female patrons have no rights. Girls as young as 13 who are now forced to be nude in front of grown men… have no rights. Only they/them have rights.

This is an extremely unserious system of justice.

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On the other side of the world, German Chancellor Angela Merkel panicked.

Her government had extended the operating lives of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors just five months earlier. But, because of the earthquake in Japan, Merkel reversed course overnight and mothballed eight German reactors.

But Merkel’s decision wasn’t really about natural disasters. It was political.

Merkel was terrified of Germany’s Green Party— which was literally founded on anti-nuclear activism in 1980 and had been gaining ground. A critical regional election was just two weeks away, and Merkel was hoping that she might pull out a victory if she killed the reactors.

Her gambit didn’t work, and the Greens won anyway.

But at that point the fate of nuclear had already been set in motion. Within three months, the German government decided to phase out EVERY nuclear reactor in the country.

Bear in mind that Germany’s 17 reactors were generating over a third of the country’s electricity… with zero carbon emissions. That’s a pretty good thing for a country obsessed with climate change.

Yet Germany’s Green party had inexplicably spent decades campaigning to close them, i.e. to shutter the cleanest, most carbon-free source of baseload energy known to man.

Germany committed to replacing its nuclear plants with solar panels. Naturally this meant that, in a country where the sun barely shines, Germany became increasingly dependent on natural gas— most of which is piped in from Russia.

The true extent of this idiocy didn’t reveal itself until February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine: Germany joined Western sanctions against Russia. Russia retaliated by throttling gas supplies. And Germany had no fallback.

So Germany— the country that had lectured the entire world on carbon emissions— frantically restarted more than 20 coal-fired power plants. Then they imported 42 million metric tons of coal, including a surge from southern Africa. They even bulldozed the village of Lützerath to expand a lignite mine, dragging away protesters.

Germany also became a net electricity importer, buying power from France’s nuclear grid.

And gee what a surprise: German electricity prices are now the highest in the European Union. One obvious consequence is that Germany is no longer industrially competitive due to energy costs.

And that brings us to March 6, 2026.

Manuel Hagel, a 37-year-old political candidate from ex-Chancellor Merkel’s party, visited an elementary school. National television cameras were rolling as Hagel attempted to explain the greenhouse effect to the children:

“Between the earth and the sun is the atmosphere. And as this gets increasingly thin, the sun gets hotter and hotter. And the reason for this is CO2 emissions and and and. And that is the greenhouse effect.”

Unfortunately his explanation is completely wrong. The greenhouse effect works because CO2 and other gases trap heat within the atmosphere; it has nothing to do with the atmosphere thinning or the sun getting hotter.

This is a guy who takes away stoves and gasoline powered vehicles in the name of reducing carbon emissions. Yet he doesn’t even understand the basics of his own ‘science’.

Zee German leadership humiliated themselves even more when, on March 10, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stood at the Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris and declared that Europe’s retreat from nuclear power had been “a strategic mistake.”

“In 1990 one-third of Europe’s electricity came from nuclear, today it is only close to 15%. This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice, I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power.”

She’s right, of course. It was a mistake. An extraordinarily costly one.

This is hilariously ironic since Von der Leyen is German. She served in Merkel’s cabinet. She personally voted to phase out nuclear, and her own policies at the Commission have been to quietly phase out nuclear power.

Also this week, Germany’s current Chancellor (Friedrich Merz) weighed in on this nuclear blunder when he called the reactor phase-out “a mistake” and said, “I regret this.”

Great. Then fix it!

But they’re not going to do that. Unfortunately for Germany, said the Chancellor, “it is the way it is, and we are now concentrating on the energy policy we have.”

Unbelievable. So, in summary:

• Germany (initially by Angela Merkel, then later by subsequent governments) destroyed their clean, cheap nuclear plants
• They did this for idiotic political reasons
• This led to a major energy crisis, which triggered an economic crisis
• Nearly everyone in power now acknowledges this was a huge mistake
• But they aren’t going to even bother trying to fix it

As we’ve written before, abundant cheap energy is one of the few forces that can reliably keep inflation in check. It fuels stronger growth, lowers prices, and makes life better for everyone.

The US, at least, is heading in the right direction for now, thanks to recent executive orders to reform nuclear licensing, fast-track small modular reactor designs, and create the first real momentum the US nuclear industry has seen in decades.

But the risk is obvious: one election, one change in administration, and a new set of politicians could gut all of that progress overnight — just like Merkel did in 2011.

Germany is a fifteen-year case study in how terrible policies can weaken a country.

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

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And the Duke had his eye particularly fixed on the borough of Horsham in southern England because of its unique political characteristics.

Horsham was quite fanciful to a power-hungry aristocrat; not only did it send two members to Parliament, but in order to be a registered voter in the Borough, you had to own one of a handful of very specific properties.

This meant that, at most, only a few dozen people selected two MPs– giving whoever controlled the land in Horsham a LOT of power. And the Jockey Duke wanted that power. That’s why he spent the better part of 20 years (and a ton of money) buying those specific ‘voting’ properties.

By 1790 he had assembled enough land votes to assert control of the borough. But unfortunately for him, an elderly widow by the name of Lady Francis Irwin was standing in his way.

Lady Irwin had inherited some of the other vote-eligible properties from her late husband, and she wasn’t about to let the Jockey Duke take over her town.

So, prior to the election of 1790, she subdivided a portion of her land into dozens of tiny holdings– some as small as a few square feet. Then she claimed those tiny plots were owned by people who, for the most part, had never even set foot in Horsham. Some of them may have been made up entirely.

Regardless, dozens of new votes were cast on behalf of those ‘property owners’, and the votes were just enough to win. The Jockey Duke lost the election. And the election after that. And the election after that. In fact, he didn’t win until Lady Irwin died in 1807.

This wasn’t the first time in history that an election was rigged with fake votes… or voters who never should have been eligible. It’s an ancient practice, dating back to classical Greece when non-citizens infiltrated the eklesia to cast illegal votes. Naturally, some of those illegal voters were brought in by politicians themselves.

Voter fraud is so common in history that there have even been longstanding concerns over ballot tampering and forgery during papal conclaves, even as recently as 1958.

So, it seems pretty obvious that politicians should want to bolster confidence in elections… and take reasonable steps to modernize and improve upon their processes. That should be especially true in the world’s most advanced representative democracy.

Here’s an interesting personal anecdote– I have Italian citizenship through ancestry, and the country is currently having a national referendum on its constitution.

I’m registered as an overseas citizen at my local consulate… and, they actually sent a guy (literally just yesterday) to my HOUSE to hand deliver the ballot, check my ID, make sure I filled it out, and take it back to the consulate.

So not only did they want to ensure that I voted, but they also made sure that I am a citizen. That last part seems pretty basic.

The SAVE Act in the United States is designed to do just that. I actually read the legislation– and it’s pretty straightforward, not one of these crazy bills that goes on for thousands of pages.

In short, the Act would require voters to provide “Documentary Proof of United States Citizenship” prior to voting or registering to vote. And there are plenty of ways to demonstrate this.

Yes, I know there may be millions of people who don’t have a passport, or they don’t have access to their birth certificates, or they don’t readily have their Social Security cards.

But it’s not that hard.

Sure, maybe some people will grumble about the cost of obtaining proof of citizenship. But there are plenty of easy ways around that, including one of the Left’s favorite siren songs: subsidies for the lowest income applicants.

But the critics of this bill (almost exclusively on the Left) don’t talk about ways to solve these minor problems. They don’t talk about how to reform the bureaucracy to make it easier and cheaper to obtain ID and proof of citizenship. Nor do they propose other ways to improve election integrity.

Instead, they just claim (without explanation or evidence) that the bill is racist. The implication, apparently, is that black people are incapable of obtaining ID… and that strikes me as an extremely racist assertion.

The only reason I can think of why someone would be so opposed to this bill is because they want non-citizens to [continue to] vote in US elections. Chuck Schumer claimed that “tens of millions” of voters would be de-registered as a result of the law– which is sort of the whole point.

Opposition is crazy. Plenty of other countries already check citizenship. But the American Left has no interest in restoring election integrity or voter confidence. So, they just denounce election reform as racist.

Perhaps with enough pressure from the President the SAVE Act might actually pass the Senate. But, while I hate throwing cold water on this, it’s clear there will still be plenty of room for fraud.

If the law passes, for example, I wouldn’t be surprised to see places like California create new state-issued ID cards certifying the bearer’s US citizenship. And these IDs would then either be ‘erroneously’ issued by a state agency, or flat-out falsified. Either way, illegals could still vote.

There’s also a part of the law requiring local officials to ask voters “Are you a US Citizen?” … well duh, if someone is willing to break the law to vote illegally, they probably have no problem lying about that question.

Bottom line, I don’t know what the right answer is. The SAVE Act will hopefully make a difference, but there’s still plenty of room for fraud. Criminals always find a way to cheat.

But at a minimum it would be nice to see the Senate do the right thing for once, and push through a piece of legislation that protects Americans’ interests.

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An aging, out-of-work game hunter and security guard, Monty had been unemployed for quite some time. Fortunately, he was getting by, but living off the generosity of a family in southern California who had taken him in. Without them Monty would have almost certainly been living on the street.

But things started to change for Monty on a fateful day when his host family received a letter in the mail from a local bank– addressed to Monty. They eagerly ripped open the letter to find that the bank had pre-approved old Monty for a substantial line of credit!

They all found this extraordinary… and not just because Monty had no job, no income, no assets (i.e. a classic “NINJA loan” from the early 2000s). What was particularly unique about this case is that Monty was a dog.

We’ve talked about this a lot over the years– but in case you’re too young to remember, the early 2000s was a decade in which anyone and everyone was able to borrow money.

The Federal Reserve had slashed interest rates to zero– which made borrowing look cheap… even free. And government policy was prompting banks to ignore all common sense and underwrite loans to anyone with a pulse… and occasionally some people without a pulse.

The stories covered in books like Michael Lewis’s The Big Short are hilarious– dead people, homeless people, unemployed people, prison inmates, canines and cats… they were wall approved for mortgages despite having no ability to make monthly payments.

There were so many loans being issued that the US mortgage market quickly ballooned to $11 trillion.  Investment banks packaged up these dubious loans and dressed them up as special investment-grade bonds… and then the big Wall Street ratings agencies (like S&P, Fitch, etc.) slapped the highest quality “AAA” rating on them as if they were risk-free.

The whole system blew up in 2008, causing multiple financial institutions to collapse– triggering the Global Financial Crisis.

The warning signs were there all along. But very few people paid attention.

My friend and partner Peter Schiff was one of the few voices of reason who accurately predicted this crisis years before it actually happened; Peter used to go on live television and get laughed at by CNBC’s panel of ‘experts’. But in the end, Peter was right… and the whole system blew up.

It turns out that lending money to broke, unemployed people who cannot pay is a pretty stupid lending policy.

Now, you may have heard about new trouble emerging in the financial sector. And gee what else is new. Finance guys almost invariably find ways to generate short-term profits while creating long-term risk.

And the latest brewing financial crisis of the day is the so-called ‘private credit market’.

Private credit is what it sounds like– funds and investors (i.e. NOT banks) underwrite private loans to companies. This isn’t particularly controversial; private lending is one of the cornerstones of capitalism.

And usually these loans are asset-backed– just like a real estate mortgage– so the lender has collateral.

Private lending was initially brought on by the ultra-low interest rates of the pandemic era (when companies could borrow for 3%); and it also ballooned– estimated at roughly $3 trillion. That’s a pretty chunky number, even in the $30+ trillion US economy.

But, just like the subprime market in the years before the GFC kicked off, there are starting to be warning signs that private credit is cracking.

One of those– most notably– is that a major private lending fund (run by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest asset managers) has capped redemptions, i.e. they have limited the amount of money that investors can withdraw.

This is a pretty clear sign of strain. Perhaps not the proverbial canary in the coal mine… but it’s a big deal that an investment firm with the size and reputation of Blackstone isn’t letting its investors out of their fund.

(In fairness, the fund documents do stipulate redemption limits. But it’s pretty unusual for an asset manager to have to exercise this clause.)

Another sign of strain is that default rates are up dramatically. Fitch (the same guys who slapped AAA ratings on NINJA loans 20 years ago) estimated that roughly 10% of US private loans are in default. That’s a big number, and it could go a lot higher.

A key reason is that interest rates are MUCH higher today than when many of these loans were originally underwritten. So, any borrower that needs to refinance (which is likely the vast majority) will see a massive spike in monthly payments.

That will be unaffordable for a lot of borrowers, resulting in even higher defaults. Plus, general economic malaise could contribute to higher default rates too.

A chief concern about private credit is that many loans were like subprime “NINJA loans”, i.e. private loans that were way too big, issued to borrowers who were not creditworthy.

I doubt anyone will shed any tears that Blackstone might lose money in a bad deal. But there could be knock-on effects– specifically to banks.

I know the whole point of ‘private’ credit is that the loans are NOT issued by banks. But in a rather peculiar twist, banks often loan money to private credit funds, who in turn loan that same bank money to the final borrower. Strange, right?

Bottom line, banks are exposed.

A few prominent voices lately have been warning that this private credit fiasco has all the hallmarks of the early 2000s subprime bubble… and that the next GFC is upon us.

And there are definitely similarities. But a LOT of major differences too– most notably size. The private credit market is MUCH smaller than subprime was, and it’s difficult to see how those losses would take down the US financial system again, let alone the entire global economy.

But there are also significant existing risks in the banking sector– like rising defaults in traditional office and commercial loans, and mark-to-market losses in banks’ bond portfolios.

We’ve talked about this before– US financial institutions are collectively sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized losses, and most of those losses ironically come from Treasury bonds. So, another ~$100+ billion hit from private credit could definitely hurt banks.

I’ve been looking at this pretty hard, but at the moment I don’t see some epic crisis emerging from private credit.

That said, one EASY Plan B option to safeguard your capital is to hold funds at Treasury Direct.

Through Treasury Direct, any US citizen is able to set up an account and hold virtually any amount of money through ultra-short-term T-bills; it’s like keeping your money in a 4-week certificate of deposit, but without any bank counterparty risk.

As we’ve discussed many times before, the US government is in pretty dire financial straits. But even I don’t think they’re going to default in the next four weeks.

So, this is a safer alternative to hold cash–and you can quickly link your Treasury Direct account to your bank for easy back & forth transfers.

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The Iranians were ruled by an extremely aggressive king named Shapur I who had little respect for the Roman Empire’s grandeur and authority.  And with limited Roman presence in the Middle East, Shapur saw an opportunity to pounce.

From their capital in southwestern Iran, the Sasanids invaded west into Roman lands (modern day Syria and Turkey). And Rome’s 13-year-old emperor, Gordian III, personally led an army to repel his new enemy. But the Romans were vanquished, and Gordian was killed.

His successor, Philip the Arab, sued for peace and offered Shapur a tremendous amount of money to stop fighting. Needless to say, Shapur took the money… but continued the war.

By the year 260, the war was going very badly for Rome; their forces were depleted, their treasury exhausted, their supplies running thin. And at the Battle of Edesssa that summer, the Roman Emperor himself was captured by Iranian forces… and marched back to Persia as a captive.

This wasn’t necessarily THE singular moment that shook up the ancient world. Rome was already in deep trouble at that point– and everyone knew it.

The Roman economy was weak. Inflation was kicking in to high gear. Political corruption was rampant. The once great empire that built extraordinary works of architecture and engineering couldn’t manage to get anything right anymore. It was embarrassing.

So, when news of the Roman Emperor’s humiliating defeat, capture, and forced march back to Iran spread across the ancient world, people probably just shrugged their shoulders and thought, “well that figures…”

Even just a century before, such news would have been met with disbelief. But by the third century, Rome’s extreme failures and incompetence had become normalized… almost expected.

One key impact was that foreign kingdoms– most of whom happily traded with the Roman Empire to access its vast and relatively prosperous consumer market– started to lose confidence in Rome… and Roman currency.

Rome’s primary silver coin, for example, had been debased from 98% silver purity during the reign of Augustus in the first century AD, down to just 15% by the middle of the third century.

Yet for more than two centuries, Rome’s foreign trading partners continued to use those heavily debased coins… simply because Rome had a large and terrifying army.

That’s easy to understand; when everyone believes you’re a military superpower, you can get away with some pretty outrageous currency dilution.

But that military defeat (plus the Roman Emperor being captured and marched back to Persia) shredded the perception of Roman invincibility. Suddenly the empire looked weak… and trading partners revolted.

Over time, merchants began rejecting Roman coinage and instead demanded payment in either premium goods (like spices or silk) or in hard assets– like gold.

More importantly, because foreign merchants no longer wanted to use them, those Roman coins rapidly made their way back home… and the flood of currency back into the Roman economy caused yet another severe bout of inflation.

This is not a particularly unique story. The cycle of power, the rise and fall of empire, the loss of reserve currency status, is all too familiar in history. And it’s worth wondering if we’re witnessing the same cycle now.

Perhaps. Despite its challenges, I am and always will be rooting for America. And I’ve argued many times before that the US has a [narrow] window to escape the gravitational field of its fiscal black hole… to reassert the dominance of the US dollar… and to reestablish its place atop the global order.

It helps that the US economy is ridiculously innovative, that Europe keeps shooting itself in the testicles in the most inconceivable ways, and that China has its own extreme demographic and economic challenges. So, it’s still a jump ball from here.

But there is a distinct possibility that, like Rome in the 3rd century, America’s trading partners could rapidly move away from the US dollar. Again, I’m in no way rooting for this to happen. But some evidence is already in front of us.

The gold price is an obvious example. Gold isn’t some sh!t-coin or meme stock that suddenly became popular in a Redditt chat room.

Gold’s rise, as we have been predicting and reporting for years, is because foreign governments and central banks have been losing confidence in the United States.

They saw an American president shake hands with thin air. They saw the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. They saw the Treasury Department routinely freeze US dollar assets that were held by foreign countries. They saw eye-popping US budget deficits and a Congress unwilling to stop it.

All of this prompted foreign governments and central banks to reallocate just a tiny portion of their US dollar assets into gold. And just that tiny (few hundred billion dollars) reallocation caused gold to hit $5,000.

Frankly I think very few people really appreciate how much higher gold can go from here.

Foreigners are sitting on $40+ trillion in US “cash-adjacent” assets, like Treasury bonds, bank deposits, money market funds, etc. And if just a few hundred billion dollars pushed the gold price up to $5,000, what will happen if they invest, say, $4 trillion in gold? Even that would only be 10%.

After modeling with a few AI simulations, and a little help from JP Morgan’s analysts, a $10,000 gold price would entail foreign governments and central banks scooping up about 10,000 metric tons over the next few years.

Now, to be fair, this would be unprecedented. The highest annual central bank purchases reached 1,000 tons in 2024, so it’s literally never happened. Such a shift into gold would only occur if there were a key geopolitical shift signaling that other countries have truly lost all confidence.

That’s unlikely as long as the US is able to maintain military dominance. But it’s also why so much is riding on the outcome of Iran.

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That’s a higher percentage than people who think America’s biggest problem is the economy. Or immigration. Or inflation.

Think about that for a moment. The institution whose entire job is to solve problems has become, in the eyes of the public, the single biggest problem of all.

Joseph Tainter described exactly this phenomenon in his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter studied empires from Rome to the Maya and found the same pattern every time: as societies grow, they create layers of bureaucracy and complexity to solve problems.

Eventually the bureaucracy becomes so bloated and expensive that it stops solving anything — and starts generating new problems instead.

And you can see it playing out in real time. Rather than address why it is failing to solve problems with the $5 trillion plus it already collects, a growing number of politicians simply want to extract more wealth from the people who create it.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna just introduced the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act” — a 5% annual wealth tax on America’s roughly 938 billionaires, which they optimistically estimate would raise $4.4 trillion over ten years. That’s about $440 billion a year.

Sounds like a lot. Until you remember the federal government is running $2 trillion deficits every single year. Sanders’ grand plan wouldn’t cover a quarter of the annual shortfall.

And that’s the best case — which assumes no billionaire leaves the country, no assets decline in value, no capital flees to friendlier jurisdictions.

Britain tried something similar when the Labour government abolished its 110-year-old “non-dom” tax regime. The result? Over 10,000 millionaires left the country, and tax revenue actually fell.

But even setting aside the question of whether it would “work,” a 5% annual tax on existing wealth — compounding every year — is an extraordinarily destructive idea.

It’s not a tax on income. It’s a tax on assets — on the factories, businesses, and investments that employ people and produce things.

If you tax at 5% annually, within 15 years you’ve confiscated more than half the wealth. You haven’t funded the government. You’ve just driven capital, talent, and entire companies to friendlier places.

Then what? America is poorer. There are fewer businesses, fewer jobs, fewer wealthy people left to tax. Growth slows. Tax revenue declines. The deficit gets worse, not better.

The federal government already collects $5.2 trillion a year in tax revenue. The problem was never insufficient taxation. It’s a spending addiction that no amount of taxation can feed.

And we know that’s true because the entire federal budget in 2019 was $4.4 trillion.

If Congress had simply held spending at that level, the government would have posted an $800 billion surplus last year. Even adjusted for inflation, they would have roughly broken even — without making a single spending cut.

Instead, spending surged 59% to over $7 trillion.

And what did Americans get for it? Roads and bridges are still crumbling. Social Security is still barreling toward insolvency. Is America safer? Is inflation down? Do we receive more government services?

No.

The only people it’s working out for are the Somali immigrant fraudsters who are part of the network that steals $600 billion from taxpayers every year.

And the bureaucrats in California, where the legal graft funnels $100 billion in government grants to DEI initiatives, intersectionality programs, and non-binary construction apprenticeships.

Of course this dysfunction is not just at the federal level.

In Los Angeles, fire victims who lost their homes in the devastating Palisades fires have been receiving citations from the city’s fire department — for failing to clear brush on properties that already burned to the ground.

In Baltimore, where the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed in March 2024, the city initially said that reconstruction would cost $1.7 billion and be complete in 2028. Nine months later they revised their cost estimate to $5.2 billion, and completion to 2030.

These people just cannot execute.

This is what late-stage institutional decay looks like. Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow, grinding loss of competence and legitimacy — where the government’s primary function shifts from solving problems to perpetuating itself.

But here’s the thing — history shows that this kind of decay is less “end of the world” and more forest fire. Painful, yes. Destructive, absolutely.

But forest fires clear out the deadwood, return nutrients to the soil, and make way for new growth. It’s happened to every overgrown empire in history, and what comes after is almost always better than what came before.

The sensible course of action is to make sure, one, you have fire insurance, and two, you’re positioned for the new growth.

That’s what a good Plan B is all about.

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You’ll be asked to fill out compliance forms explaining the purpose of the transfer. Your bank’s compliance department will review the transaction. A Currency Transaction Report will be filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. And depending on the bank, you may receive a follow-up phone call asking you to further justify why you’re moving your own money.

Try to open a bank account overseas and it gets even more fun. Under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, every foreign bank on Earth is required to report American account holders to the Internal Revenue Service. The paperwork burden is so heavy that thousands of foreign banks have simply stopped accepting American clients altogether.

Deposit $10,000 in cash and the government automatically files a report. Split it into two deposits of $5,000 to avoid that report and you’ve committed a federal crime called “structuring” — punishable by up to five years in prison.

This is the financial surveillance infrastructure that every American lives under. It was built over decades, starting with the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970 and expanded massively by the Patriot Act after 9/11. We are told it exists to catch money laundering, drug trafficking, terrorism financing, and financial crimes.

Yet over twelve years, Jeffrey Epstein moved $378 million across 270 wire transfers without a single flag.

Bank of New York Mellon — one of the oldest and largest financial institutions in America — processed every one of them. At least 18 were round-dollar $1 million wires in 2007 alone — textbook structuring.

The bank’s own compliance review could not identify a legitimate business purpose for any of the 270 transactions. And no Suspicious Activity Report was filed until 2019 — only after Epstein had been arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

More than a decade passed between when the transactions occurred and when regulators were notified.

This wasn’t an isolated case, either. Both JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank settled lawsuits related to their Epstein banking relationships. The pattern was identical: process the money, ignore the red flags, settle quietly later.

But while the banks were asleep, another arm of the government was not.

The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center — which pulls together financial intelligence from the Treasury Department and other federal law enforcement agencies — compiled a trove of data on Epstein and his associates: suspicious financial transactions, border crossings, and other records from across multiple agencies.

Based on that intelligence, the Drug Enforcement Administration opened a formal investigation codenamed “Operation Chain Reaction,” targeting Epstein and 14 co-conspirators for illegitimate wire transfers tied to narcotics and prostitution in the US Virgin Islands and New York City.

And once again, nothing came of it.

The investigation ran for at least five years. No charges were ever filed. And the names of all 14 co-conspirators remain redacted to this day.

So what exactly is the point of all the surveillance and regulation?

All this infrastructure — the reports, the compliance departments, the cross-agency intelligence sharing, the billions spent building a surveillance apparatus that monitors every dollar the average American moves — and it couldn’t produce a single charge against the most prolific child sex trafficking operation in modern history.

But split a $10,000 deposit into two transactions at your local bank, and you’re facing five years in federal prison.

The entire Know Your Customer regime, the Currency Transaction Reports, the Suspicious Activity Reports, FATCA, the anti-structuring laws — all of it functions perfectly. Against you.

The financial surveillance state is enormous, expensive, and genuinely burdensome to ordinary people.

But the cost isn’t just personal inconvenience — it’s economic.

The Code of Federal Regulations is nearly 200,000 pages. Every one of those pages represents time and money that businesses and individuals spend on compliance instead of productive activity. And it shows. Real GDP growth in the United States has averaged just 2% since 2000, down from 3.3% in the 1980s and 1990s.

That 1.3% gap might sound small, but it isn’t. Higher growth means higher incomes, higher corporate earnings, and dramatically higher tax revenue — without raising rates.

If real growth had stayed at 3.3% over the past two decades, the federal government would have collected so much more in revenue that budget deficits would have been non-existent. America’s debt-to-GDP ratio today would be under 50% and falling, instead of above 120% and rising. Social Security would be fully funded. The dollar’s dominance would be unquestioned.

Instead, the national debt is north of $38 trillion and climbing by roughly $2 trillion a year. The simplest path out is growth — grow the economy faster than the debt, and the ratio shrinks on its own. But that requires a government willing to get out of the way.

Look at who we’re counting on to make that happen: Congress full of Epstein’s friends, or people covering for Epstein’s friends. And even if you’re generous and set that aside, this is the same body that can’t pass a budget without threatening a government shutdown every few months, that hasn’t meaningfully cut spending in decades, and that just projected $24 trillion in cumulative deficits over the next ten years as if that’s an acceptable baseline.

These are not serious people solving serious problems.

And that’s what a Plan B is all about — making sure your family’s future isn’t dependent on their competence.

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Google Trends shows that searches for “WW3” and “nuclear war” spiked over the weekend.  Similar hashtags on social media (#WW3, etc.) also surged.

It doesn’t help that much of the legacy media has been stoking these fears, as they almost always do.

Now, I suspect most people already have very strong opinions on the conflict. I certainly do. So there’s no sense in spending time today trying to litigate whether the military action was a good idea; we’ll all find out soon enough.

Instead, I want to focus on two key points:

The first is that—regardless of how someone feels about this conflict— World War III is LESS LIKELY today than it was on Friday. And it’s not hard to understand why.

US military capabilities have been on full display this year— first in Venezuela, where special operations forces managed to extract one of the world’s most tightly protected dictators… and it was over in a matter of hours.

Only weeks later we see total dominance of Iran’s air defense systems— most of which are Russian or Chinese technology.

In other words, China and Russia saw their military technology completely embarrassed by the United States.  And this unmitigated defeat makes them both less interested in taking on America’s military.

More importantly, Russia is completely depleted after four years of war in Ukraine. China’s military has almost no combat experience and has never had to project power beyond the South China Sea.

So while they’ll certainly phone in their condemnations and strongly worded tweets, these countries have neither the capacity nor the inclination for war.

It’s also noteworthy that the US rolled out a new weapon against Iran— a ‘kamikaze drone’ which was first pioneered by the Iranians themselves.

Over the past several years the Iranian military developed its low-cost Shahed-136 drone— and sold vast quantities of them to Russia for use in Ukraine.

Well, an Arizona-based defense startup reverse engineered the Shahed-136… and made major improvements with respect to range, firepower, networking, cybersecurity, and more.

It’s also dramatically more cost effective and can be manufactured in America at less than half the price as the Iranian variant.

This shows how valuable the US private economy can be in war— managing to best the Iranians at their own game in less than a year. Foreign adversaries cannot ignore this.

Look, nothing is impossible. But in terms of probabilities— at this moment, the specter of world war, nuclear war, etc. is actually lower… and adversary nations’ appetite for direct military conflict is diminishing by the day.

The second point is what’s really at stake.

Military action of this scale brings almost infinite permutations. And, yes, there are many possibilities which result in the US subduing Iran’s military and a new, America-friendly regime takes control of the country.

China has already lost access to Venezuelan oil. Now they stand to lose access to Iranian oil. This is bad news for China’s domestic economy.

More importantly, by exerting de-facto control (or at least significant influence) over most of the largest oil supplies on the planet—Iran, Venezuela, the US, most of the Gulf states— America would be able to re-establish the US dollar’s dominance.

Every country that wants to buy oil— which is pretty much everyone— would need to own and hold US dollars to pay for it. This means that foreign countries must continue buying vast quantities of Treasury bonds—helping to finance America’s deficit and keep interest rates down.

But there are other outcomes as well.

If the remaining military campaign does not go well— if the Iranian regime manages to suppress the protestors, survive the bombings, and maintain their grip on power— then the US could be in trouble.

US casualties at that point will be mounting. Munitions will be depleting rapidly. And most media attention and political opposition will pounce on the President.

Frankly I’d expect to see more well-funded protests and professional agitators making a stink across American cities, i.e. the Left will fall back on its Minneapolis/ICE playbook to force a military withdrawal.

China and Russia would likely take advantage, capitalizing on US weakness and the fact that America’s relations with Europe are heavily strained.

Between the tariff chaos, domestic social divisions, Congressional intransigence, constant government shutdown threats, etc., adding in a humiliating military defeat in Iran might just be the final straw.

Led by China, other nations could come together and say, ‘enough is enough’, then force a new Bretton Woods style convention to formally establish a new order that strips the US of its power.

Again, there are nearly infinite ways in which this could play out. But regardless of where someone stands on this weekend’s airstrikes, it’s important to acknowledge the stakes.

A successful outcome could provide major benefit to the dollar for decades to come. Defeat could trigger the end of US geopolitical dominance.

America might just be on a precipice. And we’ll find out which way it goes over the coming weeks.

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Here are a few of this week’s most absurd stories in case you missed them.

In New York City: Voter  Fraud is OK. But snow shovel fraud must be stopped.

As a major snowstorm hit New York City last week, Comrade Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked his fellow New Yorkers to pitch in and help shovel snow.

But… there was a catch. Those who turned up to do the work were asked to provide valid paperwork, including two forms of ID and a Social Security card.

Bear in mind, no one in New York had to present ID in order to vote for Mamdani. But they had to present ID in order to shovel snow for him.

The mayor’s office cited federal labor regulations requiring proper ID in order to employ people.

But wait a minute— if requiring ID to vote is “racist”, then isn’t it also racist to require ID to work?

The Left claims that voter ID requirements are burdensome barriers which will disenfranchise  minority communities; the implication, of course, is that only white people are competent enough to obtain valid ID… which strikes me as an incredibly racist assertion.

But even if true, that same woke logic suggests that labor ID requirements also prevent minority communities from being able to work.

So why don’t we see the Left championing the right to work without ID? For some reason, they just want people to be able to vote without ID.

$750,000 for having the wrong opinion on Facebook

Canada can’t seem to find the resources to provide wheelchair ramps for its mangled and disabled veterans. But they’ve found plenty of resources to spend years prosecuting a school board trustee for his Facebook posts.

Over a five-year period, an elected school board trustee in British Columbia named Barry Neufeld made social media posts and public statements criticizing the province’s sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum.

In his posts, he called gender ideology an “absurd theory” and a “weapon of propaganda,” and he argued that pushing these ideas in school was tantamount to “child abuse.”

Obviously such wrongthink must be stopped. So, the same government that debanked the freedom convoy protesters set its sights on prosecuting Mr. Neufeld.

And last week the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled that Neufeld’s statements constituted hate speech and workplace discrimination against LGBTQ teachers.

His punishment will be a $750,000 fine… all for expressing “opinions” that were, for 99.999% of human history, biological facts.

The Netherlands wants to tax unrealized gains

I recently ran into a Dutch guy who’s shopping around for a new country to live in. Not for the weather. Not for a job opportunity

He’s leaving because the Netherlands is on the verge of taxing money he hasn’t even made yet.

Earlier this month, the lower chamber of the Dutch parliament passed a new tax that would levy a 36% rate on unrealized capital gains — meaning the annual change in value of your stocks, bonds, crypto, and mutual funds— even if you never sold a single share. It passed with 93 out of 150 votes.

Under the new system, the Dutch government would assess the value of your investments on January 1, then again on December 31, and send you a tax bill based on the difference. They’ll generously let you keep the first €1,800 in gains tax-free each year. After that, the government takes 36% — on money you haven’t even received.

And if you don’t have the cash to pay a 36% tax bill on gains that only exist on paper? You’d have to sell — liquidating assets to cover a tax on wealth you never chose to realize.

Real estate and qualifying startup shares were exempt, taxed only upon actual sale. How generous.

The bill still needs Senate approval to become law. And on February 25, the Finance Minister conceded it would need amendments because it likely can’t survive the Senate in its current form.

But even if they water it down, the fact that it sailed through the lower chamber of parliament is extraordinary. And there’s a good chance the final version is still some form of unrealized capital gains tax, just less severe.

It’s a classic anchoring tactic: propose something outrageous, then “compromise” to something merely bad, and everyone feels relieved.

There is truly no end to the creativity of politicians when it comes to inventing ways to take your money.

And raising taxes is always their only approach; they never spend responsibly, never manage resources effectively. They waste and squander everything they’re given, and rather than reflect on their own poor decisions, they simply demand more.

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Hollywood was paying him handsomely again. But there was a problem. The top marginal income tax rate was 92%, and Sinatra was about to watch most of his comeback earnings disappear before a single penny ever hit his bank account.

So Ol’ Blue Eyes did what every major Hollywood star at the time was doing: he set up what was known as a “collapsible corporation.”

The tactic was simple. Instead of collecting his fee personally — where it would be taxed at 92% — Sinatra had the studio pay his corporation, which was taxed at roughly 50%. He’d take a modest salary out of the company. Then, when the picture wrapped, he’d sell the corporation’s stock and pay the 25% capital gains rate on the proceeds.

The 92% rate was the law. But in practice, it was a fiction.

Back in the 1950s, fewer than 10,000 households in the entire country — out of 57 million tax returns — earned enough to even reach the top bracket. And those who did had so many deductions and shelters available that the top 1% paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 16.9%.

I think this is important to point out because, just last week, TIME Magazine published an article titled “Tax the Rich. They’re Not Going Anywhere”. They argued that wealthy Americans are too “sticky” to flee, so cities and states should feel free to squeeze them.

New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani wants an additional 2% tax on incomes over $1 million. California voters are expected to vote on a “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires. TIME cheers them all on.

In Britain, the Labour government already abolished the “non-dom” regime — a 110-year-old policy that let wealthy foreigners shield overseas income from UK taxes. As a result of changing this program, Britain drove over 10,000 millionaires out of the country.

But rather than eat their humble pie and admit a policy failure, the left wing of their party is pushing for a new wealth tax. On top of that, they continue gaslight people and insisting, just like TIME magazine, that wealthy people don’t leave when tax rates rise.

Across the pond in America, Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren have been beating this drum for years— demanding that the wealthy pay their “fair share.”

What IS the fair share? They never say. They never commit to a number.

So let’s look at the numbers they keep ignoring.

In 2022, the top 1% of American taxpayers paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes, according to the Tax Foundation. The top 10% paid 72%. The bottom 50% paid 3%.

And the top 1% doesn’t just pay a large share — they pay a share wildly disproportionate to their income. They earned 22.4% of all adjusted gross income but shouldered 40.4% of the tax bill. That’s nearly double their proportional share.

This isn’t new. It’s been the trend for decades — and it runs in exactly the opposite direction from what the “fair share” crowd implies.

In 1980 (when the top marginal tax rate was 70%), the wealthiest taxpayers (the top 1%) paid 19% of all federal income taxes. Today, again, the top 1% pay 40.4% of the taxes, even though the highest marginal tax rate is much lower.

How? Because the Tax Reform Act of 1986 — a bipartisan deal signed by Ronald Reagan — made a simple trade: dramatically lower rates in exchange for closing the loopholes. No more passive loss write-offs zeroing out taxable income. No more converting salary into capital gains through shell corporations. No more Frank Sinatra deals.

The rates were lower, but there were fewer places to hide. And these changes to the tax code resulted in the wealthy paying MORE tax, not less.

Even if you go back to the days of 92% rates (which the Left loves to bring up), the effective rate for the top 0.1% was only 21%.

But even setting all of that aside — even if you could squeeze a few more percentage points out of the top 1% — it wouldn’t fix anything. The federal government is running $2 trillion annual deficits. Higher taxes are not the solution.

Cutting the deficit requires spending restraint. And economic growth.

Given Congress’s intransigence in cutting spending, growth is the easier option. But it a stable, predictable business environment with minimal bureaucracy.

Instead, we get an environment that changes every four years — sometimes every four weeks. One administration’s regulations get undone by the next. Businesses get sued over rules that didn’t exist two years ago.

Take the infamous Corporate Transparency Act.

Congress passed this law in 2021 requiring roughly 32 million small businesses to file “beneficial ownership” reports with FinCEN. The penalties for failure to do so were $500 per day in fines and up to two years in prison.

Never mind that the government already collects this information through K-1s, 1099-DIVs, and existing bank regulations. Never mind that large banks and publicly traded corporations were conveniently exempted.

The onus fell on small, family-owned businesses: the restaurant owner figuring out how to keep waitstaff from quitting, the small shop already buried in paperwork. Well, Congress gave them yet another form to fill out under threats of penalties and imprisonment.

But then the regulations changed— SEVEN TIMES in four months. A federal judge blocked the law. Three days later, an appeals court reversed him. Three days after that, a different panel reversed the reversal. Then the Supreme Court weighed in.

The Treasury Department kept issuing new deadlines to comply, and no business owner had any idea from one week to the next whether they were in compliance.

In the end, the White House simply canceled it— which was the right thing to do. But the next President might very well put it back in place.

The whole ethos was that every small business owner is a potential money launderer. Never mind the money laundering rules already on the books — rather than fix what wasn’t working, Congress just piled on more. That’s how you end up with a Code of Federal Regulations over 188,000 pages long.

That’s the real problem. Not that the wealthy aren’t paying enough. That the business environment in America is so needlessly complex, so maddeningly unstable, that it chokes the growth that would actually generate the revenue politicians claim to want.

If they spent as much energy making it easier to build a business as they do dreaming up new ways to “soak the rich,” the tax base would take care of itself.

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So Ned grabbed a hammer and smashed the machine to pieces.

The story spread across England’s textile country. Over the next thirty years, Ned Ludd became a folk hero for every worker who felt threatened by the new machines that were pouring into their factories.

Now, the story is probably a myth — there’s no hard evidence Ned Ludd ever actually existed. But it didn’t matter. The movement that took his name was very real.

In March 1811, textile workers across England’s industrial heartland began breaking into factories at night, smashing power looms with sledgehammers. They called themselves Luddites. Over 200 machines were destroyed in the first month alone.

It was all motivated by fear; workers were terrified that machines would take their jobs and steal their livelihoods.

But think about the world back then: in the early 1800s when the Luddites were smashing looms, roughly 90% of the world’s population lived in what today would be considered extreme poverty.

Life expectancy in England was only about 35. One in three children didn’t make it to their fifth birthday. Houses were tiny. Food was scarce. Clean drinking water was a luxury. Heating your home meant an open fire, and most of the warmth went up the chimney. Indoor plumbing didn’t exist. Neither did antibiotics, electricity, or refrigeration.

That was normal life in 1811. But fast forward just over two hundred years.

Extreme global poverty has fallen from 90% to under 10%. Life expectancy has more than doubled. The poorest American today — not the wealthy, the average person — has access to more information, nutrition, comfort, and opportunity than the richest king on earth could have imagined in 1811.

Our homes are bigger. Our food is more plentiful. Our energy supplies are more abundant… and far more efficient.

And the reason is technology.

Every major leap in human prosperity has followed the same basic mechanism: new technology makes people more productive. More productivity increases supply of goods and services. More supply means lower prices. Lower prices mean more prosperity for everyone.

At the same time, there is always some short-term pain. Entire vocations and industries disappear… and that sudden change can be both difficult and scary.

But think about it— in literally EVERY major technological advancement throughout history, overall employment went UP. Economies prospered. Workers prospered.

That’s the great fear sweeping the world right now regarding artificial intelligence, and a lot of people are worried.

Earlier this month, for example, a viral essay by an AI startup CEO tore across the Internet and was viewed more than 80 million times.

His thesis: AI will have a COVID-level impact on the world, and the industry right now is the equivalent of being back in January 2020. Everything feels normal at the moment. But he believes that life will be unrecognizable (just like during Covid) in just a few months.

But while Covid was temporary, he believes the AI impact will be permanent.

Amazingly enough, due to this one viral essay, investors began dumping their stocks, triggering a major selloff.

Cybersecurity stock CrowdStrike, for example, dropped roughly 16% in days. Travel companies like TripAdvisor are down nearly 30%.

Financial firms like Charles Schwab and Raymond James fell 7% to 9% in a single session. Software giants like Salesforce and ServiceNow have shed a quarter to a third of their value.

All told, roughly $2 trillion in market value has been wiped off software stocks alone.

The logic behind the selloff is: if AI can scan code for security vulnerabilities, why do you need CrowdStrike? If an AI agent can plan your entire trip, book flights, and find the best hotel, why do you need TripAdvisor? If a chatbot can manage a portfolio or draft a financial plan, why are you paying Raymond James?

Investors looked at these industries and decided that AI wasn’t just going to help these companies — it was going to replace them. And they sold.

It’s amazing how overblown this is.

People said the same things about the Industrial Revolution — that machines would make human labor obsolete and destroy the working class.

They said it about personal computers in the 1980s — that automation would wipe out office jobs.

They said it about the Internet in the late 1990s — that e-commerce would obliterate entire sectors of the economy.

Every single time, the prophets of technological doom were wrong.

The reality is that, of course, some industries and vocations go away. But advances in technology have never led to sustained, long-term, widespread unemployment.

New industries emerge. New skills become valuable. The economy adapts. And the overall standard of living goes up.

But all along the way, there are always the self-interested evangelists insisting that THIS time is different. THIS technology is uniquely disruptive.

Yes, AI is obviously a massive advancement. It’s going to reshape industries. And plenty of businesses that exist today won’t survive the transition. That’s the nature of progress.

But the idea that we’re all going to be starving in the streets because a chatbot can draft a legal brief or scan code for security bugs is ludicrous.

Technology always makes people more prosperous and better off. It might not be crystal clear right now exactly how that plays out with AI. Early stages of a technology boom are never clear.

But the notion that one person’s viral essay could wipe trillions from global financial markets is peak paranoia.

The Luddites were wrong in 1811. The AI doomsayers will be wrong today.

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You could wake up in the morning to the pleasant sound of celebratory gunfire… then artfully dodge landmines left behind by not one, but two different superpower invasions on your way to witness the day’s beheading.

You could cap off the afternoon spelunking through mountain caves where you might bump into actual jihadists, then end the day with with a stroll through a war-torn city’s desperate poverty.

If this sounds ideal to you, then you’re in luck! The Taliban now offers an investment visa for foreigners to obtain residency in Afghanistan.

This is a real thing; earlier this month, Afghanistan’s Economic Commission approved a proposal to offer foreign investors residency permits of up to ten years. Put your money into Afghan mining, construction, or energy, and you too can call Kabul home.

Sure, the banking system is cut off from the international financial network, US sanctions make it effectively illegal for Western companies to operate there, and girls aren’t allowed to attend school past sixth grade. The roads, power grid, and water systems are barely functional. And the country has been at war, in some form, for over forty years.

Any takers?

Fortunately the world is a big place, and there are plenty of other options besides Afghanistan.

And while we poke fun at the Taliban, the core concept of obtaining residency in another country is one of the smartest things you can do to give yourself a Plan B.

The logic is simple. If your home country feels like an increasingly unfamiliar place— as a lot of people in the West feel right now— then it makes sense to have a backup… a place you can go, legally, on your own terms, even if borders close or things get weird.

We saw this play out during COVID. When governments around the world slammed their borders shut in 2020. Tourists were locked out— flights canceled, entry denied.

But people who had established legal residency in a foreign country still had the right to enter and stay, just like citizens.

Families who had taken that step years earlier found that they had options— another place to leave the chaos, work remotely from their second home, and wait out the insanity on their own terms.

Those who hadn’t were stuck wherever they happened to be, subject to whatever restrictions their local governments decided to impose.

That distinction— tourist versus legal resident— became the difference between freedom and lockdown. Overnight. And this might matter again.

But a second residency isn’t about crises and pandemics..

A lot of people start by simply finding a place they enjoy. They visit somewhere on vacation — Costa Rica, Portugal, Malaysia, wherever— and they love it. They go back a few times. Eventually they start looking at property. Maybe they buy a place and rent it out when they’re not using it.

Over time, they realize they’ve built something more than a vacation spot. They’ve got a home in a country where life is slower, the food is better, and their money goes a lot further.

And that last part matters more than most people think.

The cost of living in much of the world is a fraction of what it is in the West. A couple living on Social Security and a modest level of savings— money that barely covers the basics in most American cities — can live extremely well in dozens of countries.

We’re talking beachfront property, hired help, great healthcare, and money left over at the end of the month.

There are plenty of ways to obtain residency abroad. In some countries, you can become a legal resident by purchasing property— something that you might want to do anyhow.

In Panama, you can become a legal resident by purchasing property for roughly $300,000 — and that buys you genuinely nice real estate in a country where property prices can be $100 to $200 per square foot.

In Europe, countries like Portugal and Greece have set up formal programs specifically designed to attract foreign capital in exchange for residency rights.

There are also plenty of countries that don’t even require an investment— where simply demonstrating you have a pension (like Social Security) is enough to qualify.

Other places (like Australia or New Zealand) are looking strictly at skill needs, so younger people with valuable work experience can obtain residency.

Everyone’s situation is different. For some people it’s a beachfront villa in Central America. For others it’s a flat in Lisbon. For others it’s a farm in New Zealand. The world is full of options.

The point is that none of this is radical. It’s not about fleeing. It’s about having the option to go somewhere you actually enjoy — somewhere you might already vacation — and having the legal right to stay there indefinitely if you ever need to.

It’s the same logic as any insurance policy. You don’t buy fire insurance because you want your house to burn down. You buy it because you’d rather not find out the hard way that you needed it.

That’s what a Plan B is about.

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