used to have this girlfriend known as Elsie With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea She wasn’t what you’d call a blushing flower As a matter of fact, she rented by the hour The day she died the neighbors came to snicker: “Well, that’s what comes from too much pills and liquor” But when I saw her laid out like a queen She was the happiest corpse I’d ever seen —Cabaret Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome...to Weimar, America. For two weeks, we’ve been wrestling — like St. Ge

What Could Shock the Markets Before Election Day We’ve entered October, a month that has a history of producing surprise events that can change the course of an election. With the country already facing economic, political, and geopolitical turmoil, what are you expecting? You'll recall what Mark Twain said many years ago. Something along the lines of "the most dangerous month in the stock market is October. The other dangerous months are November, December, January, Februa

America Can Print Money—But It Can't Print the Missiles It Needs THAAD is one of the military-industrial complex’s most expensive boondoggles—and most Americans have never heard of it. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system ranks among America’s most advanced ballistic-missile defenses. It aims to intercept ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, as their warheads reenter the atmosphere from space and descend toward their targets. According to the GAO,

Trouble Behind, Trouble Ahead Diesel is what delivers the stuff. The highways are full of trucks. And the trucks burn diesel fuel. Raise the cost of diesel and the price of the stuff the trucks deliver also goes up. ‘America lost its way after 9/11,’ says Gerald Baker in the London Times. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than 7,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of civilian ones and trillions of dollars, turning that surplus into a debt now above $40trn. Seei

The Builders and the Parasites Capitalism doesn’t build surveillance states — it builds infrastructure. What gets done with that infrastructure afterwards is somebody else’s problem, and it’s a problem the folks building it never seem to ask themselves. The largest infrastructure buildout in human history is currently underway, financed almost entirely by private capital, justified almost entirely by a commercial promise the underlying numbers clearly do not support. What I d

Investors tend to chase whatever is most fashionable at the moment. Where do you see important investment opportunities developing today that most people are overlooking because they aren’t exciting or widely discussed yet? I've specialized in resource stocks for most of my investing life. They’ve treated me very well, although they’re highly cyclical and ultra-volatile. In the roughly five great resource bull markets starting in 1971, the average gold stock went up 10-1. So

All Bubbles End in Deflation When the feds are going to print money, the dollar becomes a hot potato. They aim to get rid of it as soon as possible. Sales go up in the short run. In the longer run, the economy is destroyed. The Case Shiller Home Price Index, in gold terms, has fallen around 80% in the last 25 years. We begin this week’s perambulations with a stroll into the future. So far...the Bubble in the US is broader than any in history. It has been inflating everything

The Old Barkers’ Con Prices — including the price of credit — are primarily information. They signal the relationship between money available for lending and the demand for loans Last week, we were ambling along through BubbleLand, a giant amusement park where everything was fake or fraudulent... Ultimately, all designed to separate the plain people from their money. Come the weekend, the circus cycle didn’t let up. A village ‘fete’ took place nearby — drawing in hundreds of

Some people call you unrealistic when you talk about the life you want. They say it with a calm face like they are doing you a favor. What they are really doing is pulling you back into the range where they feel safe. They want your desires to match the size of their courage. They want your goals to fit inside the limits they accepted years ago. A person who has surrendered always panics [music] around someone who still believes. Their world only makes sense if your hunger be

One preposterous flim-flam after another Everything, every asset class...every shopping decision...and every dollar has been distorted, stretched...twisted, puffed up and corrupted. There goes the neighborhood. Up the river from us in Ireland...comes another rich guy. The Irish Times: With a rumoured pricetag of between €20 to €30 million, Strancally Castle has been bought by Meta giant, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. This morning, The Irish Times reports that

Why Comfortable People Don't Revolt: Propaganda, Debt, and Control The question serious analysts must ask is not "why do governments expand?" That is self-evident, a structural feature of any bureaucracy. The appropriate question is "why do populations permit it?" The answer requires understanding the propaganda apparatus that Western states have built, refined, and now operate at industrial scale. The modern architecture of consent management dates to the First World War. Wo

Let's Not Make a Deal Interest rates are probably on their way to all-time highs. And if that is so, it is the single most important financial news you’re likely to get today, this week, or this year. Yesterday, we noted that the celebrity dealmaker who runs the USA seemed unable to make a deal. The deals either never come together...or come apart immediately thereafter. And now that we have the makings of another ‘deal’ with Iran, comes the Wall Street Journal with cruel moc

You fell maybe you stayed down longer than you should have maybe you curled up in your defeat and called it a phase maybe you convinced yourself that this was just how life is now quiet empty directionless you watched others pass you by carving lives from ambition while you sank further into silence you kept telling yourself you'd return When the time was right when you were ready when the pain dulled but the truth is you didn't want to come back you wanted the world to apolo

Yield Curve Control: How the Fed Will Quietly Confiscate Your Wealth Yield curve control, or YCC, may sound like an obscure technical policy. It is not. It is one of the most important tools of financial repression. In plain English, yield curve control means the central bank decides what interest rate the government should pay on its debt—and then uses its money-printing power to enforce that rate. If the free market demands 6% to lend to the government, but the central bank

Knock the Temple Down Trump has accumulated 35% of America’s national debt SINCE 1776... Let that sink in... —The Rest is Politics: US The drama over the weekend came when thousands of Moroccans surged into a Spanish enclave on the African coast. But what sense did it make? They still couldn’t get to Europe. And Ceuta is a tiny Spanish city. There was nothing for them to eat...and nowhere for them to sleep. So, they surged back home. Forbes: Most Migrants Who Crossed Into Ce

The Kingdom Of Gene Silencing This is Verum Liquid Biotechnology – where Nikos presents a revamped portfolio to capitalize on the next biotech bull market. The details of the recommendations – and the specific names of the companies and buy prices – are for paid-up subscribers only. Why RNAi Is The Next Monoclonal Antibody – And How To Own It Silence one gene and you can silence almost any gene. That is the whole investment case for gene silencing – part of what we call bi

The Moves (And Money) Made Between A Deal Announced And A Deal Done Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The deal was recently halted by a federal judge, leading to another round of share-price fluctuations for both companies. Marty views the merger from the perspective of the traders who work the deal along its long path to success or failure. If anything moves markets, it's the tortuous path of a big-time merger – as most recently seen with the ongoing attemp

This might not apply to all sheep-types, but many of the ones I have encountered simply do not care. This could be the reason we can’t seem to get through to them with the facts we are constantly shoving down their throats. Of course, the ones I’ve talked to may just be saying they don’t care to shut me up, but I really don’t think so. They seem pretty sincere. How could they not care? Now, that is the $64,000 question. People, in general, do not care about things they do not

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it,,,

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood – Otto von Bismark Since I wrote the first part of this theme in late April, things have largely advanced like I expected including the current locations of important US warships designated for what’s coming. And as expected, the noise has been deafening even as little has changed. The “noise” has been a brilliant “cat-and-mouse” game with the media and the ma