Money Flow Trading Method along with Risk Management

What Does Greg Weldon’s “Debt Black Hole” Mean for Gold & Silver?
September 11, 2025

https://silverseek.com/sites/default...?itok=IShGAqXu


Greg Weldon’s new 61-page report makes a stark claim: the United States has crossed the “Macro-Event Horizon” and entered a Debt Black Hole.
Decades of borrowing and money printing have pushed the system past the point of no return.

The only way forward is more debt, more monetization, and more currency debasement.

The Debt Trap
Public debt now exceeds $37 trillion. Americans themselves hold the bulk of it through Treasuries, banks, and the Fed’s balance sheet.
Weldon calls this “the largest Ponzi scheme in human history.”

Consumers are cracking under the strain: credit card balances grow more slowly than inflation, savings are depleted, and delinquencies are rising toward crisis levels.
For policymakers, the options are grim. Allowing a debt deflation would be catastrophic.
That leaves only one path—tolerate higher inflation to protect consumers, housing, and the bond market.
At the same time, America’s global position is weakening.

China now outpaces the U.S. in trade, OPEC and Russia are aligned with Beijing, and BRICS nations are openly building an alternative to the dollar. Weldon argues it is only a matter of time before the U.S. loses the privileges of seigniorage and the petro-dollar.

Gold and Silver on the Launchpad
In this environment, gold and silver are the obvious beneficiaries. Gold is pressing toward $3,700 per ounce, and Weldon notes that speculative participation remains unusually light—a bullish sign that institutional money has yet to arrive.

Silver, always more volatile, is “poised and positioned” for a breakout above $40 and beyond. The SIL silver miners ETF has already surged to a 13-year high, beating the S&P 500.

Mining stocks are confirming the trend. GDX and GDXJ have broken long-term downtrends and are outperforming both bullion and the stock market.

Majors like Newmont, Kinross, and Agnico Eagle are flashing technical breakouts that Weldon sees as the first wave of a much larger capital rotation into precious metals. He insists this is early-stage, not a blowoff top.

Beyond Metals
While his “Got Gold?” call is sincere, Weldon warns that this cycle won’t stop at bullion.

Food markets are volatile, uranium is crushing the S&P 500, and base metals, currencies, and bonds offer major opportunities.

He believes Commodity Trading Advisors are uniquely equipped to exploit the coming environment, with the ability to go long or short across asset classes.
The lesson for individuals is clear: passive stock market portfolios will not protect purchasing power.

For professionals, the challenge is to deploy the full macro toolkit to keep ahead of currency debasement.

The Call to Prepare
Weldon’s report is less a forecast than a roadmap. The U.S. must choose inflation over deflation. The dollar is breaking down. Gold, silver, and miners are only beginning to reflect the shift. Once inside a debt black hole, there is no escape—only acceleration.

So he flips the old slogan into a challenge: Got Gold?
If not, the time is now.

In a world of fading dollar supremacy and rising inflation, preparation beats surprise. Gold and silver may not be the endgame, but they are the first line of survival.
To read Greg Weldon's Report, CLICK HERE.
Greg Weldon's website: https://www.weldononline.com/

About the author
https://silverseek.com/sites/default...?itok=IShGAqXu

Money Metals Exchange is an online bullion dealer in business since 2010 and has been voted the Best Overall Precious Metals Dealer by Investopedia. Their website is MoneyMetals.com.

WWW.AVIELFOREXLEARNINGEDGE.COM

Gold-Silver Ratio Over 103 Indicates Silver Is Still on Sale!

April 23, 2025
https://silverseek.com/sites/default...?itok=6QSgw88c
Mike Maharrey

Market Analyst

18Shares

As gold marches ever higher, silver continues to lag, like a kid more interested in sniffing flowers than keeping up with his parents’ pace.
Don’t get me wrong. Silver hasn’t done horribly so far this year. It is up a little over 12 percent. However, it has failed to close the gap with gold, and that has many investors questioning what’s going on with the white metal.

As of this morning, the gold-silver ratio was just over 103:1. That means it takes about 103 ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold.
This is slightly above the 1991 peak and not too far below the all-time high of 123:1 during the pandemic chaos in 2020.

https://silverseek.com/sites/default...23184503-1.png

In other words, this is an extremely wide spread from a historical perspective and indicates that silver remains drastically underpriced compared to gold.
More significantly, these extremely wide gold-silver ratios don’t tend to last long. They eventually snap back to the mean. And when that happens, it’s generally a very fast move.

Historical Gold-Silver Ratio Perspective
Mining industry geologists estimate there are somewhere between 19 and 20 ounces of silver for every ounce of gold in the earth. This provides a natural starting point for a gold-silver ratio of 20:1.

From a mining perspective, annual silver production averages around 800 million ounces per year, and gold production is a little over 100 million ounces. (These are rounded numbers.) That would give a gold-silver ratio of around 8:1.

Analyst Lau Vegys included a chart in a recent article published on Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing website that provides some perspective on the gold-silver ratio. As he noted, “While I don't have precise data going back centuries, I recently stumbled upon a graphic circulating on X that really drives home just how unusual today’s silver (under)valuation is. Although I haven't verified every data point myself, it broadly aligns with historical accounts.”

https://silverseek.com/sites/default...23184527-2.png

We do know that governments have set gold-silver ratios to control the value of their coinage for centuries. The earliest recorded imposed gold-silver ratio was by King Menes of Ancient Egypt, when he set the ratio at 2.5:1.

The U.S. Congress fixed a gold-silver ratio of 15:1 in its 1792 Coinage Act. This compares to a 15.5:1 ratio set by France in 1803.
A bi-metallic monetary system proved to be unwieldy, and European countries began to demonetize silver in the mid-19th century. The U.S. followed the lead of England, Portugal, Germany, and other nations and established a gold standard in the Coinage Act of 1873.

The demonetization left the gold-silver ratio to float freely. By World War II, the gold-silver ratio had spread to as much as 40:1.

In the modern era, the gold-silver ratio has averaged around 60:1.

Returning to the Mean
As I already mentioned, when the gold-silver ratio gets way out of whack, it eventually snaps back to the average.
From a historical perspective, when you see gold-silver ratios well above that historical average, it tells you that silver is underpriced compared to gold, and there is a strong possibility that silver will go on a bull run to close that gap. Historically, this has often happened in the midst of a gold bull rally, with silver outperforming gold. (Of course, past performance does not guarantee future results.)
Vegys noted this as well.

“Historically, extreme ratio levels—like 103 right now—have often preceded significant reversals, with silver typically outperforming gold as the ratio reverts toward its average. A clear recent example was March 2020: after spiking above 120, silver more than doubled within just five months, substantially outperforming gold.”

When it was all said and done, the ratio was back to 60:1.
We’ve seen even more dramatic snapbacks in the past. The gold-silver ratio fell to 30:1 in 2011 after rising to over 80:1 during the money creation of the Great Recession in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Some people have suggested that the gold-silver ratio has broken down. It has been well above the 60:1 average for well over a year. However, nobody has been able to point to any structural change in the gold and silver markets to explain such a breakdown.
Vegys suggested three reasons why the gold-silver ratio tends to return to the mean.

1. The silver market is relatively small, roughly a tenth the size of gold's, which means even modest capital inflows can move the price dramatically.
2. Silver tends to be more volatile, often behaving like a leveraged version of gold. During bull markets, it usually outpaces gold significantly.
3. Unlike gold, about half of silver's demand is industrial. As economic activity rebounds after downturns, this industrial usage picks up, providing additional price support.

It’s worth noting that the supply and demand fundamentals are extremely strong for silver.

Industrial demand set a record in 2024, driving the fourth straight annual market deficit. Gold demand outstripped supply by 148.9 million ounces. That drove the four-year market shortfall to 678 million ounces, the equivalent of 10 months of mining supply in 2024.

And this was with tepid investment demand. When investors get in on the action, that supply-demand gap could explode.

Silver isn’t priced for these market dynamics.

Vegys sums up the situation this way:
“Here’s the bottom line. With the gold-silver ratio at such an extreme level, silver looks set for a potential catch-up rally. If the ratio just moves back to its long-term average of 60, silver would need to rise about 70 percent relative to gold. That’s an increase of nearly $23 per ounce from current levels. And if gold keeps climbing too, silver’s upside could go from big to explosive.”

He also makes an important point to those who speculate that the gold-silver ratio has somehow become irrelevant.
“Extremes can last longer than you'd expect, and history doesn’t guarantee what comes next. But at these levels, silver’s risk/reward looks pretty compelling.”

The bottom line is that silver appears to be on sale. Not to sound like a TV huckster, but these prices probably won't last. Now is the time to take advantage of this historically wide gold-silver ratio. Nobody knows when it will snap back to more normal levels, but if history is any indication, it will. And when it does, it will happen fast.

WWW.AVIELFOREXLEARNINGEDGE.COM

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/what-shape-economy

What Shape Is The Economy?


https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b.../picture-5.jpg
by Tyler Durden
Sunday, September 21, 2025 - 02:00 PM

Submitted by Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

What Shape Is The Economy?

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen or heard so many people talking about the “K” shaped economy as I did this week. Both leading into the FOMC meeting and after the meeting, it felt like people were tripping over themselves to talk about the “K” shaped economy.
You have our take post FOMC – where we still believe the market is:

1. Underpricing the number of cuts and the speed of cuts (inflation is slowing, and jobs are weaker than even the revised data shows).
2. Underpricing the efforts the administration will take to keep yields lower across the curve.

Speaking of underpricing the efforts of the administration, stocks that the admin may have an interest in (rare earths, critical minerals, some chip companies, nuclear power, and even crypto) did very well this past week. You may or may not like how this admin is handling investments in key areas, but you sure as heck should trade it. Scouring the universe for companies, like MP, that the admin might take a serious interest in, makes sense. We are on public record (in our T-Reports and on TV/Radio) talking about Intel as well, and that stock got a boost this week, and I’d be shocked if the boost wasn’t at the very least (and I mean, very least) encouraged by the admin. So, love it or hate it, you need to consider the admin’s goals in your investment thesis – and that includes wanting mortgage rates lower.

But that is not what triggered today’s “rant!” (Full disclosure, from a hotel room in Sacramento, rushing to make it to the airport in time).
K or k?

I believe my colleague, Peter Atwater, coined the “K-shaped recovery” post-COVID. It is a compelling and easy way to picture the economy.
Some segment of the economy is doing well (the upward-sloping part of the K). Some part of the economy is doing poorly (the downward sloping part of the K).
I think “K” made sense post-COVID, but it is not reflective of what is going on now.

Even with the “K,” I think there is a big difference between K and k. The downward sloping part of the economy is similar, whether it is a capital K or lower case k. The difference is that K has a lot more people doing well than K. Yes, that is probably a bit pedantic. My focus may be in part because I couldn’t stomach being the 1,000th person to re-analyze the Fed this week, but I also think it is important to be clear. Every time someone says “K” shaped, we should ask whether it is the capital K or lowercase k. It does make a difference, and might also help alleviate the use of this term, which wouldn’t bother me at all.

Just Normal?

All you have to do is go on Twitter (now X) and scroll through #FINTWIT briefly to see chart after chart showing how the “haves” are doing better than the “have nots” (you should follow @AcadSecurities and @TFMKTS – though we are making a bigger push on LinkedIn and other platforms – speaking of which, we will be producing our monthly Around the World Podcast this week). In any case, I saw a bunch of interesting charts showing how much wealth the top 1% has versus anyone else. How the top X% (and X is pretty small) spends more than the bottom Y% (and Y is pretty large). Definitely concerning.


https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=96lbDScP
Source: BBG


Having said that, is it really that different? Let’s just look at the Vanderbilts.
They started an entire college (yes, I attended school there).

There are Vanderbilt estates and mansions strewn across the country (some have become the clubhouse for famous golf courses).
There is a street just outside of Grand Central named after them.

I believe that the Yale Club (on said street) has some reciprocals with Vanderbilt, because there was a period of time when the lock business wasn’t doing as well as the railroad business and Vanderbilt helped Yale (I’m not sure if that is completely true, but if enough people search for “did Vanderbilt help Yale because railroads were doing better than locks,” AI might deem it true ).

I don’t mean to be flippant about income inequality, but it has been around for a long time. Maybe it is just easier to see in our digital age? Certainly, it is quite visible when one of the richest people in the world owns (and is active on) one of the biggest social media platforms that has ever existed. It is one thing to own a newspaper (I was too lazy to search whether or not the Vanderbilts owned any newspapers, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t). It is an entirely different thing to own a social media platform, and more importantly, control the algorithm (the conversations around TikTok are very focused on their algorithm; it is just the nature of social media).

The Little i – or i Shaped Economy?
Yes, I’m sick and tired of hearing about the K (or k) shaped economy. I don’t think it is as relevant as many seem to think it is. While we did play devil’s advocate with the prior section, I do think the “shape” of the economy is changing.

I was on a podcast this summer with Adam Taggart. He runs “Thoughtful Money,” and he mentioned the I-shaped economy.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

The premise is that “the dot” is doing extremely well and everyone else (“the stick”) is running in place.
Look at the stock market. A handful of companies are generating the bulk of the returns. If it weren’t for the AI story, the indices would be lower, but still up.
The “little i” captures the outperformance by a small group, while not saying/arguing that everyone else is doing worse.

That is one issue I see with the “K” or “k” shaped economy. It implies that a lot of people (50% or more) are doing worse. I just don’t see that right now.

I see an economy that is disproportionately benefiting a small subset, but others, as a whole, are doing okay. The definition of “OK” might vary, but the Atlanta Fed GDPNow Forecast is running at 3.3% - that doesn’t seem like the sort of number that implies a lot of people are doing poorly.

So, if I’m asked, “What shape is the economy?” or I decide to take a complex issue and summarize it with a “shape,” I’m going to go with “little i.”
If I thought that ProSec was difficult to get traction on, little I know it had its own set of issues.

It is difficult to type i. It is easy to type i, but the autocorrect keeps changing it to I. That alone, in an age driven by social media, might be enough to stop the “i-shaped” economy from getting traction.

Then, no one seems to care whether you mean capital K or lowercase k. It is all close enough (and autocorrect never tries to turn k into K). So, you can just say “k-shaped” and everyone is happy.

But you cannot say I-shaped economy, because capital I is dull (and looks a lot like lower case l). But I digress.
My working assumption is that we are living in an I-shaped economy. A fraction of the population (be it individuals, regions, corporations) is thriving at levels almost unheard of, while others do “just” okay.

I do believe if you think about the economy (and markets) this way, it helps with your process.
ProSec

We have tried National Production for National Security.

Production for Security.
And yes, ProSec (short for Production for Security).
We even tried “Refine Baby Refine.”

Somehow, none of these resonates like “Drill Baby Drill.”

Drill Baby Drill really understates what is necessary to ensure that a country produces a bare minimum of what it needs to be “secure” (but it is catchy).

As we had another round of negotiations with China (and a Trump/Xi call), it seems brutally obvious that:

1. China has a strong hand because of their control over the refining and processing of rare earths and critical minerals.
2. The U.S. has a strong hand because of AI and chips, but
   1. China is doing what it can to help its own chip industry, and all you have to do is think about BYD (EVs), and you should have some concern that they might be successful.
   2. With energy equating to electricity, there are concerns that U.S. policy is still overly geared to “fossil fuels” and being “fossil fuel independent” and not enough to grow electricity production at the pace necessary for the rising electricity demand.

IF we are going to do a deal with China that gives both sides a couple of years before going back to the table, we will have to accelerate our own production of anything required to be “secure.”

And it isn’t just us.

If the U.K., for example, wants to be big in AI, they better produce a lot more of its own energy.

Every country across the globe is going to have to embark on some version of ProSec.
That is where some of the biggest investment opportunities lie, even with recent pops in many of the stocks that could be instrumental in achieving that goal.

Bottom Line
The Fed is behind and will be forced/enabled to catch up. Weak jobs and less inflation.

We will see yields lower across the curve. 10s briefly went below 4% this week (before slumping), but will get back there.

Mortgage rates will go lower. If you want to help “the stick” in an I-shaped economy, lower mortgage rates help. Again, you don’t have to agree with what the admin wants, but you should be cautious about betting against them getting what they want (at this stage).

The dollar will get weaker over time. A weaker dollar is a feature (not a bug) of almost all the policies being discussed.
The admin can jawbone about a stronger dollar, but at the core, we all know the President wants more exports and lower imports and sees a weaker dollar helping accomplish that.

I agree that AI is in only the 2nd or 3rd inning. Maybe even the top of the 1st. The issue is whether valuations are in the 8th inning?
I don’t know, but I think ProSec offers better risk/reward here.

And as weird as it might sound, Chinese stocks can CONTINUE to outperform the U.S. ETFs like FXI and KWEB have outperformed our major indices by a lot over the past year and year-to-date (we’ve done charts in recent reports). A portion of that is attributable to moves in the currency, but that seems unlikely to change. While the admin keeps trying to make a deal with China, Chinese assets should continue to perform. There may be a time when we hear chatter about delisting, etc., but that seems off the table for now. Again, while I hate to say it, China is likely to use the “pause” in trade wars more effectively than we do. I hope not, but that is a real risk and definitely keeps me up at night.

In the meantime, aspire to be “the dot,” but even being part of “the stick” in an I-shaped economy is better than being part of the downward sloping leg of a K-shaped economy!

And as always, trade and plan for the world we have, not the world you or I may think we should have.
Ugh, I just realized summer is almost officially over.

WWW.AVIELFOREXLEARNINGEDGE.COM

Why I'm Positioning My Portfolio For The Fed's Most Dangerous Gamble Yet


Sep. 21, 2025 7:30 AM ETS&P 500 Index

(SP500), SPX, DJI, NDX, SPY, DIA, QQQ, IVV, VOO, IWMODFL, CSL, UNP, CNQ, BCC, URI, CNQ:CA, SP500, SPX, DJI, NDX, SPY, DIA, QQQ, IVV, VOO, IWM
https://seekingalpha.com/images/user...pic.png?io=w36

Leo Nelissen

Investing Group

Summary

1. I see a paradigm shift as the Fed and White House risk higher inflation to fuel growth, creating both huge risks and massive opportunities.
2. While Big Tech drives GDP, the real economy struggles. This makes rate cuts risky, but also sets the stage for a powerful market rotation.
3. My portfolio leans into cyclical value, energy, and AI-linked plays. It’s a tough ride now, but I’m convinced it will supercharge future returns.
4. Looking for more investing ideas like this one? Get them exclusively at iREIT+HOYA Capital. Learn More »

https://static.seekingalpha.com/cdn/...o=getty-c-w750

MarianVejcik/iStock via Getty Images

Introduction
I’m worried.

However, I’m not worried about market volatility or other things long-term investors have gotten long used to. What I am worried about are major economic and geopolitical forces that create one of the trickiest environments for investors in decades.

I have discussed this in countless articles, including in "Why I Believe We’re Entering The Biggest Market Rotation In Decades." This was one of the articles where I brought up the extreme likelihood of a situation where both the president and the Fed risk higher inflation to stimulate economic growth and ease the real burden of government debt and the deficit.

Below is one of the quotes I used back then:

[...] the Trump administration appears to be embracing that reality with a high-stakes gamble, as it is likely to target (or accept) 4% inflation and high single-digit nominal GDP growth.

While I may sound a bit dramatic, I believe this is a full-blown paradigm shift, one that could—and likely will—renew markets for years.
For investors, this means adapting to a world where cyclical stocks, hard assets, and value will likely outperform growth. - Albert Marko

The reason this worries me is that the margin of error is slim. See, while the economy, in general, is not in horrible shape, as the Atlanta Fed forecasts 3.3% real GDP growth, we need to be aware that growth is massively skewed by factors like the AI data center buildout, something that has attracted hundreds of billions so far, as I am sure most readers will know.


https://static.seekingalpha.com/uplo...in.png?io=w640
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta


While GDP growth may seem fine, as it comes with strong earnings growth from the Big Tech giants, the underlying economy is a hot mess. For example, the Chicago Business Barometer, which is one of the best leading indicators for manufacturing, has been below 50 (that’s the neutral line) for more than 20 consecutive months. Although it’s not a manufacturing recession, it’s one of the longest streaks without growth "ever."
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Institute For Supply Management


The housing market is similar, as the mix of limited supply, high prices, and elevated rates has caused an implosion in existing home sales, and the market seems locked down.


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Reventure


And then there’s the labour market, which seems to be suffering from post-pandemic recovery weakness and the rising impact of AI on labour demand, something the Fed will have a very hard time solving, as it cannot influence secular growth trends. At least not directly, as I will tell you in a second.



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X/@kurtsaltrichter

Now, this has forced the Fed to move, and I think it’s the start of something big.

The Fed May Be Forced To Play A Dangerous Game
By now, I am sure that everyone knows the Fed cut rates by 25 basis points a few days ago.
This is the comment I provided for Seeking Alpha on the same night:
"'As expected' would perfectly sum up today’s events, as the Fed initiated the first rate cut, while promising two more. It takes some pressure off short-term lending, while it also clearly communicates that economic growth is not as strong as desired.”

I also put emphasis on Powell’s comments, as the Fed Chairman noted that labour demand has softened, with a job creation growth rate that is not strong enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising. In other words, it’s a clear sign that the Fed may be "forced" to cut, as it may fail to protect the labor market, which is one of its two core mandates.

That also explains why the market has basically been "promised" two more cuts this year.


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CME Group


Having said that, my "higher for longer" thesis isn’t dead. On the contrary. The Fed is fully aware that inflation has not been beaten. After all, the Fed’s "favorite" inflation indicator, the Core PCE Deflator, has been rising again lately. It’s now 110 basis points above the Fed’s target despite support from lower oil and gas prices that are favourable for the U.S. economy.


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Wells Fargo

All else excluded, we are now dealing with a cutting cycle into rising inflation.
This also explains why Fed funds futures seem to be bottoming close to 3.0% in 2027, which means markets see no way to more than four more hikes down the road, something that would already be quite something, as it would lower interest rates to the level of current inflation, something that makes it even harder to get inflation to the 2.0% target.

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Bloomberg

The interesting thing is that outliers are starting to appear.
For example, the Fed’s dot plot, which shows where FOMC members expect rates to go, shows one major outlier that did not exist in June. That outlier is an FOMC member who expects rates to fall to less than 3.0% by the end of this year. While it doesn’t say who it is, Bloomberg’s John Authers makes the point that this is likely (almost certainly) Mr. Stephan Miran, President Trump’s pick to succeed Jerome Powell next year.


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Bloomberg

Needless to say, we can assume this is just a political gesture without an effect, as John Author explains as well. It basically signals to President Trump that Miran agrees with his dovishness.

As most people know by now, the president is extremely dovish and would like low rates. Even months ago, it was reported that President Trump wanted rates as low as 1.0%. Again, that’s not happening, but it clearly shows his goals, which align with my "higher for longer" inflation vision and the desperate need to kickstart broadening/cyclical economic growth.

This brings me to a Bloomberg article from September 16, which was titled "Fed ‘Third Mandate’ Forces Bond Traders to Rethink Age-Old Rules." As I just showed, the Fed has two mandates, which are price stability (read: maintaining 2% inflation) and protecting the labour market (maximum employment).

However, there’s a third one, which Trump’s pick, Miran, brought up in his testimony. That mandate is moderate long-term interest rates:
Effective monetary policy is critical to the well-functioning of the economy, the preservation of America’s robust capital markets, and the growing prosperity of our nation. Congress wisely tasked the Fed with pursuing price stability, maximum employment, and moderate long-term interest rates. If confirmed, I will transparently and honestly work toward that pursuit to preserve a stable and healthy economy that benefits all Americans.
The funny thing is that Miran didn’t make this up. It has been a part of the Fed’s statutes.

What mattered is that bringing it up confirms, once again, that the Trump Administration wants long-term rates to come down as well. That makes sense, as these have a much bigger impact on mortgage rates and general lending than short-term rates.

There are obviously ways the Fed can influence the long-term bond. One way to do it is by buying long-term bonds. That’s QE, as it creates liquidity, as the Fed buys bonds. While I am not making the case that it will happen, especially in light of sticky inflation, I fully understand why people make the case that any effort to control long–term rates could be inflationary:
Still, some investors say the hyperfocus on long-term rates is enough for them to include the possibility of some type of action in their bond-market calculus. Others warn that the extent to which unorthodox maneuvers to cap long-end rates become part of policy raises the risk of adverse effects, particularly inflation, that would make debt management - and the Fed’s job - even harder in the end. - Bloomberg

Between the Great Financial Crisis and 2021, the Fed and other central banks have done multiple QE programs. The only difference is that inflation was much lower and enjoyed secular tailwinds like the Shale Revolution, globalization, and more. As the Bloomberg article I just quoted explains, unorthodox measures may be applied if short-term rate cuts fail to lower long–term bond rates.


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Bloomberg


After all, the Trump Administration has been very clear about its goals since the start, which include bringing back manufacturing, unlocking the housing market, and supporting AI.

Big Portfolio & Market Implications
Going forward, I believe two things to be true:

1. This is a super-tricky market with zero margin of error for the Fed and the Trump Administration, as potentially sacrificing inflation to boost growth could result in stagflation. It could also result in asset inflation without cyclical growth, widening the wealth gap in an environment of already elevated social tensions. I’m not saying it will happen, but to me, that’s the downside.
2. I am convinced we can build tremendous wealth if we get this macro shift right. In fact, I’m not kidding when I say that I think the next few years can supercharge my financial plans.

While I am now recycling my plans from prior articles a bit, I have invested roughly 50% of my portfolio in companies that would do tremendously well if we get a rebound in cyclical growth, housing market support, and a continuation of the AI data center buildout, which I expect to happen anyway, as I wrote in articles like this one.

This includes energy through landowners and upstream producers, transportation through Class I railroads and less-than-truckload logistics, construction through suppliers, and data centers through equipment and service providers, just to name a few.

With some exceptions, this feels like a total pain trade right now, as most of these stocks are left behind due to the absence of any cyclical tailwinds and other issues I brought up in this article. For example, my investment in Old Dominion Freight Lines (ODFL) and Carlisle Companies (CSL) continues to take hits. Especially CSL has taken a beating lately due to analyst downgrades, as "nobody" seems to be willing to bet on a cyclical rebound just yet.

Although I would be lying if I said this didn’t bother me a bit, the worst thing is that I currently lack the cash to substantially boost these investments, as I have spent the past few months rebuilding my cash position to fund my Albania investment and any tax obligations I have.
Luckily, I’m getting close to servicing any major expenses over the next 12 months, which means I can go back to deploying capital in the fourth quarter of this year.


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Data by YCharts


In addition to buying more CSL and ODFL, I will also boost my positions in Union Pacific (UNP), Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ), and potentially add new cyclical value investments like Boise Cascade (BCC) and United Rentals (URI), among others.

So, while I expect the S&P 500 to do well, I think the real opportunities lie in diversifying into other areas, as the S&P 500 has become extremely tech-heavy, as I wrote in articles like "Oh Boy, The Entire Stock Market Hinges On Just 1% Of Stocks."


https://static.seekingalpha.com/uplo...in.png?io=w640
JPMorgan


While I think Big Tech will be sustained by AI demand for a while, any broadening economic growth could soon give the edge to left-behind value stocks, especially the ones capable of adopting AI in the future.

I also believe gold and silver will remain extremely attractive, which is great news for miners, streamers, and everyone holding these commodities in any physical form.

My point is that a big part of my thesis is built on the following points:

1. The Trump administration is almost forced to broaden economic growth. It will have to get the housing market unstuck and kickstart manufacturing. These are the areas I want to be (it’s where I already am).
2. It may be forced to take some unorthodox measures. So far, developments point to more rate cuts despite rebounding inflation and the potential use of (small) QE programs once the President gets more control of the Fed Board.
3. This requires investors to put a lot more emphasis on inflation protection.
4. On top of protecting one’s wealth, I believe having the right assets can generate tremendous investment returns, which is why I truly expect to see the biggest wealth gains since I started investing in the years ahead.
5. I also believe small–cap stocks have a good shot at outperforming the market if rates continue to come down.

Besides that, as the S&P 500 is trading at nearly 23x forward earnings (see below), I believe even the first signs of broadening economic growth could trigger a substantial rotation into more attractive investments. For that, I am closely watching the ISM Manufacturing Index, S&P 500 earnings revisions, as well as smaller leading indicators like the Philly Fed and Chicago manufacturing surveys.


https://static.seekingalpha.com/uplo...in.png?io=w640
FactSet

On top of monitoring these indicators, I will gradually deploy more capital and maintain my promise, which is that I will put a lot more emphasis on actionable ideas in the weeks ahead.

Takeaway
This has become a super challenging market environment, as we’re dealing with lofty valuations, massive secular growth from AI, political unpredictability, and other issues.

Despite this, I think we’re looking at some of the biggest investment opportunities on the market, as the government and Fed seem to be forced into protecting the economy, which could result (I’m convinced it’s already happening) in easing the fight against inflation to broaden economic growth and ease the real debt burden of the national debt.

Hence, while I think the S&P 500 will remain in an uptrend, the best opportunities may be beaten-down deep-value stocks, energy, AI beneficiaries, and companies with strong pricing power.

I sure am betting on them and quite excited about the future, despite the many challenges.

Risks To My Thesis
While I may be running a portfolio (a full portfolio update is coming soon) that is much more concentrated and cyclical than the average dividend growth portfolio, I am not turning it into a thematic investment vehicle. All companies I buy have the qualities to withstand recessions and generate long-term wealth.

However, as I may be wrong about cyclical growth, these companies could continue to underperform the market for a prolonged period and be prone to steeper downturns than your "average" conservative dividend stock.

So, please note that I can provide food for thought but not manage your portfolio for you.

More on my IG service
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This article was written by
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Leo Nelissen
44.91K Followers

Leo Nelissen is an analyst focusing on major economic developments related to supply chains, infrastructure, and commodities. He is a contributing author for iREIT+HOYA Capital.

As a member of the iREIT+HOYA Capital team, Leo aims to provide insightful analysis and actionable investment ideas, with a particular emphasis on dividend growth opportunities. Learn More.

Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of CSL, ODFL, UNP, CNQ, either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third-party authors who include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

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What You Aren’t Being Told About The World You Live In

How The “Conspiracy Theory” Label Was Conceived To Derail The Truth Movement

How Covert American Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive and Destroy Reputations


September 22, 2025

World Mourns Loss Of Last American Who Genuinely Believed You Could Change Someone’s Mind
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

A compelling new Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today first noting President Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to all of his NATO allies in Europe last week, ordering them stop buying Russian oil, seize frozen Russian assets and sanction China and India for buying Russian oil, says he also warned in his ultimatum: “This is not TRUMP’S WAR, it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s WAR...I am only here to help stop it and save thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives...If NATO does as I say, the WAR will end quickly, and all of those lives will be saved!... If not, you are just wasting my time, and the time, energy, and money of the United States”.

In response to the ultimatum issued by President Trump, this report notes, yesterday it saw European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen rejecting Trump’s order to place sanctions on China and India—French President Emmanuel Macron rejected Trump’s order to seize frozen Russian assets warning: “When some countries start to disrespect international laws this is the beginning of a total chaos”—and European Commissioner for Economy and Productivity Valdis Dombrovskis announced in defiance of Trump’s order: “The new package of EU anti-Russian sanctions will not include restrictions on the purchase of oil from Russia”.

While being openly defied by all of his NATO allies in Europe, this report continues, President Trump announced plans to designate what he described as a “vast domestic terror movement” threatening American safety as terrorist organizations—an announcement joined by FBI Director Kash Patel informing the American peoples yesterday: “As the Director of the FBI, I am committed to ensuring the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s assassination is thorough, pursuing every lead to its conclusion...The full weight of America’s law enforcement agencies is actively following the evidence that has emerged, but our efforts extend beyond initial findings...We are examining every facet of this assassination...We are meticulously investigating theories and questions, including the location from where the shot was taken, the possibility of accomplices, the text message confession and related conversations, Discord chats, the angle of the shot and bullet impact, how the weapon was transported, hand gestures observed as potential “signals” near Charlie at the time of his assassination, and visitors to the alleged shooter’s residence in the hours and days leading up to September 10, 2025”.

As over 100,000 people gathered in person and tens of millions from all around the world watched the memorial service for Christian martyr Charlie Kirk yesterday, this report details, it was also revealed: “A report from Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) released this week suggested that Gen Z appears to be charting a different political course than Millennials...The DDHQ analysis indicated Democrats had lost ground among young voters in voter registration, particularly young men, during the 2024 cycle...The same report showed that, while Democratic registration among young white women remained consistent with historical norms at 47 percent, Democratic registration among young white men, historically around 49 percent, had fallen to 29 percent...The report also found modest losses among young nonwhite women”.

In analyzing the effect the brutal assassination death of Christian martyr Charlie Kirk will have on young American voters, this report concludes, world-renowned American elder statesman William Bennett, in his just-released open letter “What Charlie Kirk’s Murder Tells Us About The American Mind”, warned:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".
William Butler Yeats wrote those words about Europe after the Great War, but they ring with terrible clarity this week as we bury Charlie Kirk, murdered at 31 for the crime of arguing in public.

The young man who built an empire of discourse from a suburban garage has been silenced by someone who apparently found bullets more persuasive than words.

But here is what strikes me as I reflect on this tragedy: Charlie Kirk may have been the last American who genuinely believed you could change someone's mind with a good argument.

Think about that. When was the last time you saw someone actually switch positions during a debate? When did you last witness someone say three of the most treasured words in the English language: "I was wrong?"

My younger son understood this belief. He called me after Kirk’s death and shared something that possibly captured our national descent. "Dad", he said, "I used to be like Charlie Kirk— I used to think people could be persuaded with reason".

My son learned otherwise during the 2016 election, while in graduate school. He started getting several calls a day from classmates wanting to understand how he could support someone they genuinely believed was the modern-day equivalent of Hitler. These graduate students—educated, intelligent people pursuing MBAs—literally thought Trump was on par with Hitler and were calling my son because they could not reconcile how someone like him could support such evil.
So, in good faith, he engaged everyone who contacted him. From his own account: "I came to business school to learn things like accounting, not to practice defending myself from being called a Nazi. I lost friends through this period, and it ended up being one of the hardest times of my life".

Let me advance an unconventional thesis: Charlie Kirk died because we have forgotten how to hate properly.
G.K. Chesterton observed that "the true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind [or next to] him". We fight not for hatred of our enemies but love of our fellow soldiers and the ideals of our country.

We have inverted this wisdom. We teach our young people to hate their opponents rather than love their own principles. We have made politics a blood sport precisely because we have drained it of transcendent meaning. When you believe in nothing greater than your own righteousness, the only thing left is to destroy those who challenge your certainty.

As my son lost friends, he did something quite understandable. Shortly after Trump's election, he stopped actively participating in politics—watching the news, talking about it with friends, and reading the articles he used to read daily. "I found myself getting physically uncomfortable when the news came on", he told me. "Defending yourself against being called a Nazi, racist, sexist, endlessly just for communicating relatively common-sense ideas like boys go to the boys' bathroom and girls go to the girls' bathroom, or that throwing Molotov cocktails into police cars is a bad idea (something a classmate of his actually did during the George Floyd protests) just gets really draining after a while".

My son learned a hard, unfortunate lesson during graduate school, one countless other students have learned in recent years. The modern university, where Kirk met his end, has become the opposite of what John Henry Newman envisioned when he wrote "The Idea of a University". Newman imagined institutions where "a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom".

Instead, we have created factories of fragility, where students pay $70,000 a year to have their prejudices confirmed and their triggers avoided.
The founders would have recognized Charlie immediately. Franklin with his junto, Hamilton with his newspapers, Jefferson with his correspondence, they all understood that democracy is an argument, not an answer. Madison wrote in Federalist 10 about the dangers of faction, but he never imagined we would solve the problem of faction with assassination.

Here is another unconventional thought: The problem is not that our universities are too political. They are not political in the classical sense of "political" that Aristotle meant when he called man a political animal. The university problem is that they are factory of indoctrination, especially in the liberal arts. Real politics requires engagement with difference, the ability to live alongside those you disagree with, and the skill of persuasion rather than coercion. Our campuses have replaced politics with theology, and a particularly intolerant theology at that.

My son concluded his reflection with words that haunt me: "In those moments, having made the wrong choice at that juncture many times before, I hope I have the conviction and bravery to live it like Charlie and live it like Bill". He meant Charlie Kirk, of course. The other Bill he referenced was his father — me. I am humbled by the comparison but troubled by his confession. While he admittedly tossed his hat out of the ring and entered the non-political world of finance, he has found his comfort and happiness. But at what cost to our society?

This is what we have done to our young people. We have made the cost of conviction so high that capable, principled people retreat from public engagement entirely. We have created a world where it is safer to be silent than to speak, safer to conform than to question, safer to hide than to stand. There is a certain relief in that. But it does not come without a cost.

The question before us is not whether we will have more Charlie Kirks—young people willing to brave hostility for their beliefs. We will. The question is whether we will have more like my son, capable people who retreat from public engagement because the cost has become too high. Few of the brightest people I know dream of entering politics—they dream of venture capital, private equity, the places where talent can still flourish without ideological inquisition. It makes brutal sense: Make enough money, and perhaps you can affect the change you want to see in society, safely insulated from the mob.

If we cannot make America safe for argument again—not just civil argument, but vigorous, passionate, even angry argument—then we should stop pretending we live in a democracy.

In its literal etymological sense, democracy means "power of the people"—today it feels more like the power of the perpetually aggrieved. If you are not consumed with rage, you are at home raising your family and going to work. So radical political movements naturally attract the angriest among us, not necessarily the wisest.
Charlie Kirk is dead at 31, but the idea he represented—that Americans can argue their way to truth rather than shoot their way to silence—must not die with him.

My son's generation deserves better than the choice between silence and death.
They deserve what Charlie Kirk tried to give them: a place at the table, a voice in the conversation, and the right to speak without being murdered for it. Our children and grandchildren deserve it.

[Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]

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September 22, 2025, EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked to its source at WhatDoesItMean.com. Freebase content licensed under CC-BY and GFDL.

[Note: Many governments and their intelligence services actively campaign against the information found in these reports so as not to alarm their citizens about the many catastrophic Earth changes and events to come, a stance that the Sisters of Sorcha Faal strongly disagree with in believing that it is every human being’s right to know the truth. Due to our mission’s conflicts with that of those governments, the responses of their ‘agents’ have been a longstanding misinformation/misdirection campaign designed to discredit us, and others like us, that is exemplified in numerous places, including HERE.]

[Note: The WhatDoesItMean.com website was created for and donated to the Sisters of Sorcha Faal in 2003 by a small group of American computer experts led by the late global technology guru Wayne Green (1922-2013) to counter the propaganda being used by the West to promote their illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.]

[Note: The word Kremlin (fortress inside a city) as used in this report refers to Russian citadels, including in Moscow, having cathedrals wherein female Schema monks (Orthodox nuns) reside, many of whom are devoted to the mission of the Sisters of Sorcha Faal.]

Trump Vows Use Of “Harsh Measures” To Free Innocent Patriot Tortured In “Feral City” State

Trump Launches Historic “Feral City” Blitzkrieg To Decide Fate Of America

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Precarity and the Point of No Return September 11, 2025

Or maybe it's just me, and all is well. Time will tell. I often wonder if others feel the precarity of this era, or is it just me? It's hard to tell, as economic statistics don't measure precarity; they mostly measure averages and aggregates, all glowing: GDP and profits up, unemployment low, and so on. If precarity makes the news, it's the financial precarity experienced by many American households as costs rise and wages don't keep up, regardless of what the aggregate statistics indicate.

This precarity is real, but it's not what's being featured. It's reflected in mirrors, not in headlines. In this mirror, millions of people are pursuing side hustles and crowding into speculative casinos. If this isn't a reflection of desperation, it's something close to it. But this isn't news. The precarity extends into the realms of public trust. Expertise backed by credentials--presented as evidence the public could trust the credentialed experts to serve the public interest with disinterested competence--has been eroded by self-interest. Public trust is as precarious as household budgets. Faith in our prospects is equally precarious.

We're presented with an endless series of science-fiction fantasies brought to life--flying motorcycles, driverless taxis, household robots, energy so cheap we won't even bother metering it--but the mirror is reflecting a much different future, one of precarity, uncertainty and decay of what can't be measured like GDP or profits.

We all sense when we've reached a Point of No Return, a river like the Rubicon that, should we cross it, there's no going back. There's another type of Point of No Return: the point in the journey where we realize we no longer have the resources to retrace our steps and return to the safety of what we left behind. At this point, we can only go forward into an uncertain future, one without guarantees and one in which trust is diminishing as steadily as the water in our canteen.

This is when the temptation to grasp at straws and seek scapegoats looms large, and the potential of losing our grip is a greater threat than the unknowns ahead.

There's a bad moon rising, and this makes our journey forward more precarious. We like to believe we're in control of our destiny, but the world around us has its own destiny, and we're making choices on a stage with its own gearing. The gearing of precarity is guiding the machine, whether we're aware of it or not.

I fear for the nation, as the journey ahead is faintly illuminated by a bad moon rising. I fear the dwindling sandbar between the raging currents of partisanship will disappear beneath my feet. Or maybe it's just me, and all is well. Time will tell.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gold-...235705197.html

(Bloomberg) -- Gold climbed to a fresh record, with traders weighing China’s plan to become a custodian of foreign sovereign gold reserves in a bid to strengthen its standing in the global bullion market.

The People’s Bank of China is using the Shanghai Gold Exchange to court central banks in friendly countries to buy bullion and store it within the country’s borders, according to people familiar with the matter. The Asian nation is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of the precious metal, and the country taking a bigger role in the global bullion market could mean looser import restrictions, or a broader role for gold in the financial services sector.

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Good morning

Frank is a good friend of mine and an expert trader of Commodity futures.

Mark, please call me after the Jewish Holidays or we can meet in Montreal, Friday or Saturday as I will be in Montreal for a few days.

Adarsh, please call me today so we can discuss our mutual interests on U Tube setups and design of my enhanced website.

From: "Frank Petricca" <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>

Sent: Tuesday, 23 September 2025 at 8:57

Subject: PETRICCA'S LONG-TERM PROFIT STRATEGIES

https://ecp.yusercontent.com/mail?ur...54r7wfZOWQ--~D

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FRANK PETRICCA'S
LONG-TERM PROFIT STRATEGIES
FOR COMMODITY TRADERS

 

1. Commodity trader/broker since 1974
2. Former Member: Chicago Mercantile Exchange
3. Fox Business Network (FBN) contributor

CELL: 312-286-9320 EMAIL: [email protected]


September 23rd, 2025

METALS ROAR!
GOLD PUNCHES OUT NEW HISTORICAL HIGHS!

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LTPS (Long Term Profit Strategies) clients should also know that silver futures are close to all time highs trading $43.30.
Platinum and Palladium are also sharply higher from recent lows and should be bought on any sharp correction.

IT'S ALL ABOUT INFLATION!
Consumer prices rose 2.9% last month from a year earlier, the Labour Department said last week, up from 2.7% the previous month and the biggest increase since January.

Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 3.1%.
Both figures are above the Federal Reserve's 2% target.

Make No Mistake -
U.S. inflation ticked higher last month as the Trump administration's import taxes have absolutely lifted the price of goods, potentially affecting the price of gas, groceries, hotel rooms, airfares, along with the cost of clothes and automobiles.

My focus, longer-term is going to what could happen to the cost of groceries and hard commodities across the board.
Let us not forget -
During the runaway inflation in the late 1970s, commodities experienced an incredible boom cycle driven by geopolitical turmoil and speculative trading.

I remember it vividly...
Gold and silver saw a massive, speculative-driven spike. Gold hit a record high of $850.00 an ounce in January of 1980. Silver prices surged higher traded $49.00 an ounce the same day.

The energy sector continued its climb from the 1979 energy crisis following the Iranian Revolution. In 1980, crude oil recorded a record high of $39.50 a barrel.

Please hear me out on this...

Soybeans traded $9.56 in 1980.
ACCOUNTING FOR THE CURRENT RATE OF INFLATION, 9.50 SOYBEANS IN 1980 WOULD HAVE THE SAME PURCHASING POWER AS APPROXIMATELY $37.50 PER BUSHEL HERE IN 2025.

This calculation is based on the Consumer Price Index, which tracks the price of goods and services over time.
Corn traded $3.80 in 1980...

BASED ON INFLATION ALONE, CORN THAT TRADED AT $3.80 IN 1980 WOULD BE WORTH APPROXIMATELY $14.90 HERE IN 2025.
Using the Consumer Price Index, a cumulative price increase of 292.05% occurred between 1980 and 2025, which means $1 in 1980 has the same buying power as $3.92 here in 2025.
Wheat traded $5.44 in 1980...

BASED ON INFLATION, WHEAT THAT TRADED $5.44 IN 1980 WOULD BE WORTH APPROXIMATELY $21.34 HERE IN 2025.

While there are certainly NO GUARANTEES =
It is my opinion that grain accumulation at these incredibly low levels, relative to constant dollars, could be one of the best investments you will make this decade.

While this year's harvest will be plentiful, global and domestic stocks to usage levels continue to deteriorate.
Let me be specific -
I will be using all harvest pressure corrections to add to my already long position.
Using correct Money Management Strategies LTPS clients should contact me personally for maximum portfolio risk/reward ratio and help you navigate through any challenges.

Call me today to start planning for tomorrow.
312-286-9320

________________________________________________________________



For potential clients -
My name is Frank Patrica, President and CEO of LETUPS Trading Inc.
I literally lost millions trading the day-to-day gyrations.

In 1997, I decided to change my short-term mindset, and my company, LETUPS Trading was born.
LETUPS Trading offers a Long Term approach for commodity traders that will supercharge your investment portfolio, that will insure you will be "In The Market" when a major commodity market move occurs.
Speaking of Major Commodity Movement -

1. Gold/Metals are trading close to historical highs.
2. Coffee, Cocoa, and Orange Juice are at multi-year highs.
3. Livestock futures are trading at all-time highs.

THERE IS NO QUESTION WE ARE MIDST A MAJOR COMMODITY SUPER CYCLE!
My company, LETUPS trading, offers personal consultation in terms of expert guidance and assistance in navigating the exciting world of commodities.

Before you subscribe to my Newsletter, "The Producer," please call me personally so we can set up a Long-Term market strategy that coincides with your portfolio needs.

I'm in the office Monday through Friday, 7:00 AM until 10:00 AM CT.
Cell: 312-286-9320
_________________________________________________________

AN EXAMPLE OF A LETUPS LONG POSITION.

WE BOUGHT CORN FUTURES UNDER $2.52, IN THE LOWER 25% OF THE LONG-TERM TRADING RANGE AND TOOK PROFIT WHEN CORN FUTURES MOVED INTO THE UPPER 25% OF THE LONG-TERM TRADING RANGE. ($7.65)
(statement documentation provided upon request)
AVERAGE PROFITS TOTALED: $25,650.00 PER 1 CO

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AN EXAMPLE OF A LETUPS SHORT Position
WE SOLD CRUDE OIL FUTURES AT $$120.40 IN JANUARY OF 2008, THE UPPER 25% OF THE LONG-TERM TRADING RANGE AND TOOK PROFIT IN JANUARY OF 2009 ($43.40), THE LOWER 25% OF THE LONG-TERM TRADING RANGE.
Average Profits totalled: $78,120.00 per 1 contract.
(statement documentation provided upon request)


https://ecp.yusercontent.com/mail?ur...J1EBMhdrRg--~D

FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS...

THERE ARE FOUR IMPORTANT COMPONENTS REGARDING MY STRATEGIES FOR FUTURES POSITIONS.
1. POSITIONS ARE ESTABLISHED ONLY IN THE UPPER OR LOWER 25% OF THE LONG-TERM
TRADING RANGE.
2. POSITIONS ARE ESTABLISHED ONLY WHEN MY LONG-TERM FORMULA IS UP OR DOWN WITHIN THAT 25% PARAMETER.
3. POSITIONS ARE HELD UNTIL POSITIONS REACH THE OPPOSITE EXTREME HIGH OR LOW.
(THE UPPER OR LOWER 25% OF THE LONG TERM TRADING RANGE) OR UNTIL MY LONG-TERM FORMULA CHANGES DIRECTION.
4. CORRECT MONEY MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES MUST BE IMPLEMENTED.

THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE LOOKING FOR A "GET RICH QUICK" STRATEGY SHOULD LOOK ELSEWHERE FOR A COMMODITY INVESTMENT BROKER.
THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT MORE THAN 95% OF COMMODITY INVESTORS LOSE MONEY...
AND IT'S TRUE THAT MY STRATEGIES ALSO INCUR DRAW DOWNS.
BUT WHAT I OFFER IS A WAY TO BE "IN THE MARKET" WHEN MAJOR COMMODITY MOVES OCCUR.
MY STRATEGIES REQUIRE ONE TO MAINTAIN:
* PATIENCE
* COMMITMENT
* VISION
* DISCIPLINE

THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE AN INTEREST IN ADDITIONAL DETAILS SHOULD CALL ME PERSONALLY.
312-286-932
_________________________________________________________

Please call me personally if you have any questions or comments regarding my Long-Term strategies...Would love to hear from you.
In the meantime -

Have a great year trading and keep accumulating with the Long-Term Trend,
Best,
Frank.
312-286-9320
Email: [email protected]

Please click the PayPal button below to subscribe to my Long-Term Profit Strategies Newsletter.

My $25.00 fee per month or $199.00 per year includes...
* Daily commentary regarding LETUPS signals and fundamental analysis.
* Timely information regarding "Episodic Volatility."
* Personal consultation regarding Money Management Strategies.
* Long-term charts provided upon request.
* Analysis of major industry and governmental reports


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This report includes information from sources believed to be reliable, but no independent verification has been made, and we do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. Opinions expressed are subject to change without notice. This report should not be construed as a request to engage in any transaction involving the purchase or sale of a futures contract and/or commodity options thereon. The risk of loss in trading futures contracts or commodity options can be substantial, and investors should carefully consider the inherent risks of such an investment in light of their financial condition.


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Update Profile
This message was sent to [email protected] from [email protected]

Frank Petricca
LTPS Trading
2006 Waverly Circle
Chicagio, IL 60606

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


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Bonner Private Research
From:[email protected]
To:[email protected]

Tuesday, September 23 at 10:10 a.m.

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Long Haul Gold

Gold is not an investment; it’s a place to put your money while you wait for a good investment to come along. It’s not a wealth creator; it’s a wealth preserver.
Bill Bonner and Tom Dyson

September 23, 2025, 10:33 A.M. EDITED BY BWM USING GRAMMARLY SOFTWARE.

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A freight train in Eastern Washington, Source: Getty Images

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025
Bill Bonner, from Normandy, France

More and more investors are jumping on the Gold Express. MarketWatch:

Last week, something interesting happened on CNBC. Host Scott Wapner was interviewing Jeffrey Gundlach — they call him the Bond King. Wapner lobbed him a softball about portfolio allocation.
“Really? One quarter of one’s portfolio in gold?”
“Yeah,” Gundlach said. Then he called it insurance and predicted $4,000 by year-end. 
When the dealer starts betting against his own game, smart players head for the exit.

But where does this ‘exit’ lead? Today, we return to a key question: If we buy gold at today’s prices, aren’t we risking another Death Valley… a 45-year period in which we gain nothing? 
‘Yes’ is the answer. The risk is there. And if you will need your money in the next couple of years, you might want to think twice. 

But we count our wealth in gold. And even if it took a generation-long dip, we wouldn’t rend our garments or tear our hair out. Because our real wealth would remain intact, undiminished. We would have exactly as much gold as we started with.
And we feel confident that we can depend on our public officials to make sure gold doesn’t stay down for too long. They will eventually inflate away America’s debt; what other choice do they have?

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The Dow/Gold ratio went under 5 in 1974. In January 1980, it was 1.29. If we’d had our Dow/Gold Trading Strategy (DGTS) back then, it would have directed us to sell our gold in 1974 and buy stocks. The next eight years would have been rough; stock prices were steady, but inflation greatly reduced real values.

Even so, we should have taken it with good grace. We owned good companies making good money — that was the real value, not the prices quoted in the new, fake dollars. And so it was that we would have gone into the bull market beginning in 1982 with stocks, not gold. And our DGTS model would have kept us in stocks for at least the next 14 years, depending on where we set our stop loss, and multiplied our gold (our real wealth) by at least three times.
But let’s look at what is likely to happen now. The Dow/Gold ratio can change, either by inflation, taking the price of gold in dollars way up. Or by way of deflation, taking the price of stocks way down.

Either way, we will watch the news and cross ourselves.

Yesterday, we saw what might happen in a deflationary scenario. Stocks could go down without much movement in the gold market. Gold at $4,000, for example, would need a Dow of 20,000 to hit our “5” target. This is very plausible.

We seem to be in a period of stagflation. There’s no way to know whether the ‘stag’ or the ‘flation’ part will dominate. But since we looked at the ‘stag’ hypothesis yesterday, we’ll take the other side of the trade today. That is, we’ll look at what might happen if the gold promoters turn out to be right.

A few quarters with rising inflation numbers could propel the price of gold much higher. Most people still don’t own any gold. When Mom and Pop climb aboard, the train is going to become crowded. But not with ‘gold bugs’ and fuddy-duddy investors. Instead, the bar car will be packed with amateur speculators. That is the source of our caution: these latecomers can jump off the gold rush train as quickly as they got on.

Just to remind ourselves, our DGTS calls for us to buy stocks when we can get the 30 Dow stocks for five or fewer ounces of gold. Then, we sell our stocks for gold when the price of the Dow rises to over 15, using a stop loss to keep us in them as long as they are rising, but making sure we get out above 15.

This is not ‘technical,’ ‘smart,’ or ‘sophisticated.’ Nor does it pretend to know anything about which direction prices are going. Or what the Fed will do. Or how tariffs will affect the economy. Or who will win the White House? Or anything else. It’s just a simple model that protects against the risk of the Big Loss and allows us to buy wealth-producing stocks when the risk is low.

At today’s stock prices, gold would have to go to around $9,000 to bring us to our target, where we trade our gold for stocks. Is it realistic to think that gold could go to $9,000? 

In the ‘70s, the price of an ounce went from $35 to over $800 — almost a 25x gain. To get to $9,000 today, gold would only have to go up less than three times. Or, taking it from the beginning of the decade, when gold was trading around $1,700, it would still only have to go up five times to hit the $9,000 mark. Even if you were to go back 25 years, when gold was trading around $300, you’d only need a 30x increase to get to $9,000.

These are easy goals. Not unimaginable ones. And a big run-up in gold already seems to be underway. The press is promoting it. Ordinary people are beginning to think about it. And Wall Street hopes to sell a lot of ‘paper gold’ to investors who are desperate to join the gold rush. 
But in all the hoopla, it’s easy to forget what we are really doing. Gold is not an investment; it’s a place to put your money while you wait for a good investment to come along. It’s not a wealth creator; it’s a wealth preserver.
 
Is it the best place for your money now? We don’t know. We’re on the train already…and we’ll stay on until we reach our destination. 
But if we were still standing on the platform, we’d feel better about hopping on if there were more vacant seats aboard.
Regards,
Bill Bonner


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Market Note, by Tom Dyson




This chart shows the Dow/Gold ratio going back a hundred years. When stocks are expensive, we hold gold. When stocks are cheap, we hold a major stock market average, like the Dow or S&P. Simple. Functional. The most practical stock market trading system that ever existed — and a much better alternative to “buy-and-hold” index investing.

Even though we’re now in the third decade of the “holding gold stage” of the strategy, stocks are still expensive. They need to fall by at least another 60% in terms of gold before we’ll arrive at the system’s next “hold stocks” signal.

It’s been a long wait… but perhaps this last leg will go by faster? We’ll see. And of course, we’ll be monitoring the indicator closely in our paid newsletter.
You’re a free subscriber to Bonner Private Research. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber.

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Investments should be made only after consulting with your financial advisor and only after reviewing the prospectus or financial statements of the company or companies in question. You shouldn’t make any decision based solely on what you read here. Neither Bonner Private Research nor its employees and writers receive any compensation for securities or investments covered herein.


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September 23, 2025

Putin Activates Russian Area 51 And Grants Citizenship To Biden's Sexual Assault Victim
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

A foreboding new Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today first noting President Putin revealed that Russia is prepared to follow the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty for one year after its expiration next February, provided the United States reciprocates and refrains from actions that could break the nuclear status quo, says following his revelation about the last existing nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the United States set to end in five months, he gravely warned: “I want to stress that Russia is capable of responding to any existing or emerging threats, and no one should have any doubts about this...We will respond not with words, but with military and technical measures”.

In response to the grave warning issued by President Putin, this report notes, American Ambassador Mike Waltz declared at the United Nations: “I want to take this first opportunity to repeat and to emphasize the United States and our allies will defend every inch of NATO territory...Russia must urgently stop dangerous behavior”—a declaration swiftly followed by the news: “Russia is closing the airspace over the Kapustin Yar range from September 22 (00:00) to September 27 (00:00)”—the Kapustin Yar range is also known as the “Russian Area 51”, about which is reported: “Somewhere deep in the steppes of southern Russia, hidden behind barbed wire fences and decades of Soviet secrecy, lies a facility that has never been officially acknowledged for what many suspect it really is: Russia’s answer to Area 51...Known publicly as Kapustin Yar, and officially as Military Unit 15644, this installation has served as a missile testing ground, a cosmodrome, and—if you believe the rumours—a warehouse of recovered alien spacecraft,”—and world-renowned senior British diplomat Alastair Crooke just warned in terror: “We’re moving towards war and it’ll be a big war”.

As to why President Putin activated the mysterious and feared Russian Area 51 complex, this report continues, top Foreign Ministry official Rodion Miroshnik grimly revealed yesterday: “Over the past week, Ukrainian Nazi attacks wounded 145 Russian civilians, including three minors, and left 24 people dead...The affected children include a 12-year-old girl, a 12-month-old baby, and a teenage girl, 13...In the period, Kiev fired 3,100 munitions of different types on Russian regions”—a grim revelation followed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announcing today: “Russian troops carried out a coordinated strike against Ukrainian forces in retaliation for a terrorist attack on civilian targets in Crimea...Russia's Battlegroup Tsentr has eliminated over 580 Ukrainian military personnel over the past day...Russia's Battlegroup Vostok has eliminated up to 330 Ukrainian soldiers, and Kiev has lost up to 250 soldiers in battles with Russia's Battlegroup Yug...At the same time, Russia's Battlegroup Zapad has eliminated over 230 Ukrainian soldiers in the past day”.

While Russian military forces were sending 1,390 Ukrainian Nazi soldiers to the hereafter before they could demonically kill more Russian children and babies, this report details, Executive Producer Andrew Kolvet of The Charlie Kirk Show made the historic announcement: “Our production and streaming partners tracked over 100 million overall streams for today’s tribute to Charlie...This is JUST what they know about...It’s likely much larger...Over 100 million people just heard the Gospel proclaimed again and again by speaker after speaker...Truly remarkable”—a historic announcement followed by President Donald Trump signing into force the executive order “DESIGNATING ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION”.

With Antifa being a radical leftist political philosophy instead of an organized group, this report concludes, as to whom President Trump is exactly targeting for destruction was revealed by top White House official Stephen Miller: “The Democrat Party does not fight for, care about or represent American citizens...It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defence of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists...The Democrat Party is not a political party...It is a domestic, extremist organization”—a revelation about the godless socialist Democrat Party well known to President Putin, who yesterday granted Russian citizenship to Tara Reade, the young American woman who fled to Russia in fear of her life after being brutally sexually assaulted by former President Joe Biden.

[Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]


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[Note: The WhatDoesItMean.com website was created for and donated to the Sisters of Sorcha Faal in 2003 by a small group of American computer experts led by the late global technology guru Wayne Green (1922-2013) to counter the propaganda being used by the West to promote their illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.]

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Welcome, Bruce W

Carmichael: Tiff Macklem is trying to wake Canada up
The Bank of Canada governor knows talk won’t be enough to shake the country out of its economic stupor
By Kevin Carmichael


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Tiff Macklem, governor of the Bank of Canada, at the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal in February 2024. Photo: Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The Logic


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Kevin Carmichael

Economics Columnist & Editor-at-Large

September 24, 2025 | 11:00 AM ET

The C.D. Howe Institute keeps a team of recession watchers ready to spot economic downturns. That group assembled this week and determined that the second-quarter drop in economic growth was “significant,” but not enough to justify the word's use. The Business Cycle Council “stands ready to meet if conditions deteriorate,” the Toronto-based think tank said in a press release.

Conditions might not deteriorate. Canada’s policymakers have become pretty good at forestalling the worst. The problem is, conditions might not improve much either. We’re facing a different kind of crisis that will require changes we’ve been unwilling to make for a long time.

I’ve typed the word “crisis” pretty much weekly since 2008. Yet in Canada, the Great Recession was just a recession, lasting the equivalent of a couple of quarters thanks to a powerful combination of monetary and fiscal stimulus. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an epic economic collapse, but one that lasted only a few months. Compare that to the early 1980s, when the recession that central banks incited to crush inflation went on for more than a year.

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Carmichael: Canada’s prospects are grim, and the Bank of Canada can only dull the pain

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Bank of Canada cuts key interest rate to 2.5 per cent amid slow growth worries

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Carmichael: Doug Ford’s rah-rah routine masks an inconvenient truth

As dangerous as the Great Recession and the pandemic were, the battle plans were relatively straightforward. You reverse a crisis of confidence in the banking system by flooding the system with money and promising to keep banks from collapsing. You offset a collapse in demand by making money so cheap that borrowing becomes irresistible, and by replacing private spending with public stimulus. The Great Depression informed the response to the Great Recession, although it took some time for policymakers to read up on those lessons. The COVID-19 recession was short because the Great Recession playbook was still fresh.

It helped that those crises were the sort for which central banks were created. Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem uses almost every public appearance these days to stress that he can’t do much about what Canada is facing now.

Inflation is contained, but too hot to cut interest rates to zero even if the central bank thought that was wise. The bigger issue is that a massive structural shock from tariffs, and the costs associated with adjusting to tariffs, is beyond the power of monetary policy to fix. CERB-style checks, tax holidays and arena-and-gazebo infrastructure programs won’t help either. Stoking demand would only exacerbate the inflation risk.

The only way out of the hole the Trump shock has created is to climb. In a speech on Monday, Macklem re-upped a version of the chart I wrote about earlier this month. Two lines are headed in roughly the same direction. Then, in early 2025, one plunges. That line shows Canada’s new economic trajectory, and it stays permanently below the other one, showing Canada’s path pre-Trump.


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“Canada has a choice,” Macklem told an audience in Saskatoon. “We can live with the structural impact of a more protectionist United States—the lower path.” Or, he said, “we can improve our productivity and competitiveness” and bend our trajectory “back up to, or even above” what it was pre-Trump.

According to C.D. Howe’s Business Cycle Council, the worst recession Canada has suffered since the Great Depression was a 26-month downturn between the springs of 1990 and 1992. The early 1990s are analogous to what we’re going through now in that it was another period of extreme disruption—the beginning of what is now ending. Manufacturing employment declined by 340,000 positions, or 16 per cent, between December 1988 and December 1993. Canada was adjusting to its new free-trade agreement with the U.S., and China had just begun its ascent as a manufacturing powerhouse. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991. The tailwinds from globalization would eventually send Canada on a pretty good run, but it was rough at first.

Macklem’s ability to cut interest rates might be constrained, but he still has a bully pulpit. His Saskatoon speech was a lecture from the country’s unofficial chief economist on how a handful of “megatrends” have changed the world. Some of them have their roots in the 1990s.

As tariffs fell in the era of globalization, trade grew faster than the global economy. Real life mirrored the world described in economics textbooks. Import competition replaced competition between great powers. Stuff got cheaper, incomes rose, and global poverty fell. But it was too much change, too fast. For the last decade, trade growth has stagnated under the growing weight of duties, sanctions and other politically motivated friction. “Workers who lost their jobs lost more than they gained,” Macklem said. “This has eroded public and political support for globalization, resulting in a pullback from open trade.”

That’s hindsight analysis. Democratic capitalism was triumphant in the early 1990s, and no one was talking about autocracy making a comeback. Maybe that euphoria made those of us who were there a little stupid. We got excited about growth rates, trade surpluses and balanced budgets without paying enough attention to what was going on underneath. There was always talk of being more deliberate about helping communities adjust, but I don’t know that anyone took it especially seriously. There was a deep conviction that free trade would make everyone richer. Canada did a better job of distributing that wealth than many. The mistake was assuming we could rely on others to underwrite our quality of life indefinitely.

If lessons from the Great Depression and the 1980s helped fight some of our more recent crises, what do the early 1990s tell us about what we should do now? One thing: recognize that adjusting to shocks of this magnitude can take a long time. Another might be to avoid ideological blindness and prosecute every assumption about how things are supposed to work. A third, surely, is to avoid letting ourselves again be so exposed to events beyond our control.

Macklem reminded his audience this week that it’s easy to talk about doing hard things in the aftermath of a crisis. “The recession in 2009 highlighted how vulnerable we are to a drop in U.S. demand, and everyone talked about diversification then, too,” he said. “But not much happened. This time we need to follow through.”
On trade diversification, and on so much more. We know what to do. The faster we do it, the easier this will be. But make no mistake—nothing about it will be easy. Adjustment is always at varying degrees of difficulty.

Kevin Carmichael is The Logic’s economics columnist and editor-at-large. He has spent more than two decades covering economics, business and finance for outlets including Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post, where he also served as editor-in-chief.


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Reality Of Charlie Kirk Murder Available For Purchase At The Pick Your Truth Bazaar
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“When you deliberately distort and selectively present the truth, you lie.”
The above-cited quote is by the late publicly executed Charlie Kirk (14 October 1993 – 10 September 2025), who was martyred for his Christian beliefs by still unknown evil forces.

Special Report from Sister Ciara

My Dearest Friends:
President Donald Trump shocked the world when he proclaimed yesterday: “Ukraine, with the support of the EU, is in a position to fight and win all of Ukraine back...Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years...This does not distinguish Russia; in fact, it very much makes them look like a paper tiger”—after which Russian lawmaker Oleg Matveychev quickly dismissed Trump’s words as meaningless and observed: “It’s a random number generator, a random phrase generator...And there’s been a saying that Trump says exactly what the last person in his office told him to say”.

In response to President Trump’s provably false proclamation, top Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov factually declared: “Russia is not a tiger...Russia is more often associated with a bear...There are no such things as paper bears, and Russia is a real bear”—a declaration supported by the facts that Russia is ranked as having the strongest military in world and is the world’s largest owner of natural resources—unlike the West, military experts know that Russia fights “wars of attrition” to grind an enemy down before taking large amounts territory—and are facts well known to NATO military leader Supreme Commander of the German Army Lieutenant-General Alfons Mais, who warned his allies: “Russian resources, like the resources of the Russian army, are practically inexhaustible...Many underestimate the Russian Armed Forces...This cannot be done”.

Also becoming a “random phrase generator” is Executive Producer Andrew Kolvet of The Charlie Kirk Show, who posted the message this week: “I want to address some of the discussion about the lack of an exit wound with Charlie...I’m usually not interested in delving into most of this kind of online chatter, and I apologize that this is somewhat graphic, but in this case, the fact that there wasn’t an exit wound is probably another miracle, and I want people to know...I just spoke with the surgeon who worked on Charlie in the hospital...He said the bullet “absolutely should have gone through, which is very, very normal for a high-powered, high velocity round...I’ve seen wounds from this calibre many times, and they always just go through everything...This would have taken a moose or two down, an elk, etc.”...But it didn’t go through...Charlie’s body stopped it”.

In stark contrast to “random phrase generator” outright lies, elite American snipers flocked by the thousands to the RangeDayBro military equipment site to expertly examine the assassination of Charlie Kirk—an expert examination that led the RangeDayBro channel to release its beyond shocking video yesterday “Kirk Assassination: New Video Evidence Changes Everything”—a shocking video that’s been viewed by nearly 5 million Americans in the past 24 hours, wherein you can clearly see that Charlie Kirk was shot from the side with the bullet entering below his right ear and exiting from the lower left of his neck, and which captured a blurry image of the assassin that is not the patsy named by the FBI.

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Seven months ago on 20 March, it saw Charlie Kirk exclaiming to his radio show audience: “Stop what you are doing this is the best episode we've ever done”—the episode “Who Really Killed JFK?” saw Kirk interviewing President Trump ally Roger Stone about the public assassination President John Kennedy—an episode joined yesterday by Stone documenting how the assassination of Kirk exactly mirrors that of President Kennedy’s.

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At the Charlie Kirk Memorial Service viewed by over 100 million from all around the world on Sunday, it saw President Trump ally Tucker Carlson being one of the main speakers—then yesterday, Carlson released his 5-part series “The Official Story On 9/11 Is A Complete Lie” and proclaimed: “Of all the lies the government has told us, this may be the worst...Our series cuts through the official narrative with firsthand accounts and primary sources to uncover the truth about what really happened”.

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The heir to Charlie Kirk, should anything happen to him, was Candace Owens, who was the communications director for Turning Point USA Owens and Kirk were the main speakers at Turning Point USA rallies on college campuses, including when they spoke to students at Utah Valley University in 2019, which was where Kirk was gunned down on 10 September.

On 3 November 2023, it saw Candace Owens posting the simple message: “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever...There is no justification for a genocide...I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state,”—a simple message that caused Turning Point USA to force her out and articles to appear like “Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire Severs Ties With Candace Owens After Embrace Of Antisemitic Rhetoric”.

As to whom was powerful enough to sever the bond between Charlie Kirk and his heir Candace Owens, a clue can be glimpsed in the video just released by Maddie Block, the daughter of New Mexico State Representative John Block—but whose power is unable to stop Owens, who is now aided by her millions of devoted followers in investigating the murder of Kirk, and whose searing investigative videos include “Erika Kirk Forgives. The Feds Forget” and “Bearing False
Witness: Who Made The Charlie Kirk Videos Go Viral?”.

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As outright lies abound in America involving the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the assassination of President Kennedy, what really happened on 9/11, and too many other subjects to mention, I found it interesting that New York Times columnist Frank Bruni observed last week: “Reality is whatever we’ve decided to purchase at the pick-your-truth bazaar”—an observation just joined with the news “The New York Times accidentally published a headline, "Man Found Not Guilty of Trying to Assassinate Trump in Florida"...The lede of the now-scrubbed article added, "In a surprise verdict, a federal jury acquitted Ryan Routh of attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate last year"...The screenshot also indicated that the article would be published in the print edition on September 24, 2025”.

As you go to the pick-your-truth bazaar to purchase reality today, I strongly urge you to buy the truth my Dear Sisters provide to you daily, which you can do by going below and giving what you can to keep our mission going.

For those of you knowing these true things, I urgently plead for your support in our desperate hour of need, and is why I’ve always strongly reminded my Dearest Friends, if you prefer being lied to and deceived then, by all means, turn away from us, but, for those of you still wanting the truth, never forget that in aiding us, or others like us, our Dear Lord gave you this solemn promise: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

With God,
Sister Ciara
Dublin, Ireland
24 September 2025

Our needs today are dire indeed, but if every one of you reading this gave just $20.00 today, our budget for the entire year would be met! So, before you click away, ask yourself this simple question….if you knew the truth about what is happening now, and what will be happening in the future, isn’t worth 5 US pennies a day, what is?

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(Please note that those who respond to this appeal, in any amount, will receive, at no charge, Sorcha Faal’s September 2025/October 2025 lecture series to the Sisters of the Order titled “Total War: the Collapse of the United States and the Rise of Chaos: Part 162”. This is another one of the Sorcha Faal’s most important lectures dealing with the coming timelines of war, famine, catastrophic Earth changes and disease as predicted by ancient prophecies.)

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Singularity and the Buzzard
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John P. Hussman, Ph.D.
President, Hussman Investment Trust
September 2025


Nearly 50 years ago, I was an admittedly geeky 14-year-old high-school junior. Cool songs like Brick House by the Commodores were in the top 40, but I was undoubtedly listening to She Did It by Eric Carmen and On and On by Stephen Bishop (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I discovered Earth, Wind & Fire a year later, and my whole world opened up.

My favourite teacher was Father Arnold Perham. We all called him Arnie. He had a stuffed plush-toy buzzard that looked remarkably like his doppelganger. He would drop it on your desk when you made a mistake – “You get the buzzard!” adding with a smile, “and he will stay there, until you’ve redeemed yourself.”

One morning, I wrote this diagonally in all-caps in my math notebook:
AT 10:25 AM ON OCTOBER 26, 1977, MY FUTURE IN CALCULUS BECAME MATHEMATICALLY INDETERMINATE
Arnie had just covered something called L’Hôpital’s Rule, which allows one to deal with problems that, in the limit, result in division by zero – illegal in math. Arnie was showing that as you approach the singularity, you can compute the limit of a ratio of functions by taking the limit of the ratio of their first derivatives.
Yeah, my reaction too. System overloads. The hamster falls off the wheel. Singularity.

Singularity

Division by zero is known as a “singularity.” It’s the point where equations break down, values become “indeterminate,” things stop working normally, and variables shoot toward infinity and suddenly collapse on the other side.

Black holes are called singularities because the normal equations of physics become meaningless – things like density and curvature go to infinity.
I’ve never liked division by zero. In college, it was a bane of my existence, particularly in computer programming class. Aspiring geeks like me would be huddled in Northwestern’s Vogelback Computing Center, which could easily be mistaken for a bomb shelter, and you’d wait half an hour for some bored work-study student to push your stack of punch cards, wrapped in a printout, into your slot amid a beehive of mail cubbies, only to find a crash log of cascading “Fatal error!!” messages because you forgot to assign a variable and the computer tried to divide by zero.

I started my own investment company in 1985, and over the next 25 years, the relentless pursuit of geekiness was wonderfully rewarding across market cycles that included both bubbles and crashes. Those admirable outcomes hit an excruciating roadblock (which we’ve since resolved) when another singularity emerged in 2010.

That’s when Ben Bernanke introduced a full-throttle, hair-on-fire, “divide-by-zero” singularity, recklessly driving the quantity of zero-interest Federal Reserve liabilities from just 6% of GDP in 2008 (a level historically associated with T-bill rates of roughly 4-6%), past 10% of GDP (a level associated with T-bill rates between 0-2%), past 14% of GDP (at which point T-bill yields hit zero), all the way to 25% of GDP by the time his term as Fed Chair ended. The expansion continued – abetted by Janet Yellen and initially by Jerome Powell – until the quantity of zero-interest base money created by the Fed peaked at a deranged and unprecedented 36% of GDP in early 2022.

Somebody had to hold these Fed liabilities, in the form of cash, at every moment in time. Cash doesn’t “turn into” something else when you use it. It just goes into someone else’s hands, someone else’s account. Nobody wanted it. As the Wiggles song goes, “Hot potato, hot potato.”

Several years of “quantitative tightening” have gradually brought Fed liabilities down to about 22% of GDP. These Fed liabilities primarily take the form of bank reserves, currency in circulation, and “reverse-repurchase” agreements with money-market funds. The Fed would have to cut its balance sheet by another two-thirds, to roughly 7% of GDP, to achieve T-bill rates of 2-4% by market forces alone.

Given that Fed liabilities remain vastly above that level, the only way the Fed can hold short-term interest rates above zero at present is by explicitly paying interest to banks on the trillions of dollars of reserves it has created. Currently, the Fed pays banks interest on reserve balances (IORB) at a rate of 4.15% annually.
The chart below shows how all this works. It’s our version of what economists know as the “liquidity preference curve.”


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924a.png

Why the zero-interest rate policy was a “singularity”
Since we’ve already broached the topic of 70’s music (I may be a geek, but I’m also a 70’s pop-head), recall a line in Someone Saved My Life Tonight by Elton John: “I would have walked head-on into the deep end of a river. Clinging to your stocks and bonds, paying your H-P demands forever.”

An H-P demand is a “hire-purchase” obligation – an agreement that involves ongoing installment payments. Let’s define an “H-P demand – forever” – as an IOU that pays $1 a year from now until eternity (I know, Elton is British. It would pay in pounds. Get over yourself).

If the interest rate on the IOU is, say, 10%, we have $1 payment = 10% of the obligation, so the present value of that perpetual $1 payment is $10. Now drop the interest rate to 5%. For $1 to be 5% of the present value, the present value must be $20. Now drop the interest rate to 1%, and that same $1 as a 1% annual payment means that the present value of the obligation is $100.

0.5%: $200. 0.25%: $400 (assuming the buyer is willing to accept that given long-term rate of return forever). That’s how bonds are priced. Holding cash flows constant, the lower the interest rate (yield-to-maturity), the higher the price of the bond.
Extremely high prices may seem like a beautiful thing, but they’re a corrupt bargain. Unless you actually sell, the cost of “enjoying” record high valuations is that you are locking in record low future rates of return.

Now drop the interest rate to zero. Infinite price. Singularity.
Division by zero is known as a ‘singularity.’ It’s the point where equations break down, values become ‘indeterminate,’ things stop working normally, and variables shoot toward infinity and suddenly collapse on the other side. The current speculative bubble was driven by a singularity. Avoiding the crash on the other side relies on the willingness of investors to accept the lowest long-term return prospects in U.S. history, forever. Extremely high prices may seem like a beautiful thing, but they’re a corrupt bargain. Unless you actually sell, the cost of “enjoying” record high valuations is that you are locking in record low future rates of return.

Of course, in practice, stocks don’t work quite as simply as an IOU with an infinite interest rate and a fixed, infinite payment obligation. In practice, real growth rates, profit margins, inflation, dividend payouts, free cash-flow, return on invested capital and other factors matter. And there’s a difference between transitory movements in interest rates over the course of a few years and changes in the rate of return that investors agree to accept over an infinite horizon.
Still, the core idea is simple: zero interest rates made investors lose their minds and encouraged them to chase stocks regardless of the level of valuation. It was reckless and misguided, and the bubble hasn’t deflated yet.

When does the bubble burst?
Bubbles are generated when investors drive valuations higher without simultaneously adjusting expectations for future returns lower. In other words, the defining feature of a bubble is inconsistency between expected returns based on price behaviour and expected returns based on valuations. The “Bubble Term” measures the gap between the two.

Unless the Bubble Term can become exponentially larger forever, it shows up as a growing gap between the long-term return that investors expect in their heads and the long-term return that investors can actually expect based on the future cash flows that will ultimately be delivered into their hands.

Now suppose there’s a sort of compromise, where investors eventually become willing to lower their return expectations – so that valuations don’t need to keep setting fresh highs forever, but without the need for valuations to collapse. Here’s the problem: to permanently maintain the valuation extremes that are already in place, investors would have to reduce the long-term return expectations in their heads all the way down to the long-term expectations that would equate price with discounted cash flows.


Currently, that means that investors would need to be comfortable holding stocks indefinitely, at the highest valuation levels in U.S. history, while fully understanding that they imply long-term returns in the ballpark of only 5.7%. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, and that’s why bubbles crash.
– John P. Hussman, Ph.D., The Bubble Term, August 14, 2025

I added a “Geeks Note” to the end of last month’s comment (The Bubble Term) that walks through this argument for readers and former students who want to trace the math explicitly.

What will burst this bubble? (and based on the gap between surveys of investor expectations and cash flow growth rates and yields, I emphatically believe we’re in
one). My view is simple, and it’s reflected in last month’s comment:

The bubble hasn’t burst yet because investors haven’t quite yet recognized that the highest valuations in history imply the lowest expected future returns in history. A market crash is nothing but risk-aversion meeting a market that’s not priced to tolerate risk. Every fresh record high in valuations amplifies the likely downside when that occurs, but examining the collapse of past bubbles, the “catalyst” typically becomes evident only after the market is in free fall.

In a typical timely fashion, my friend Danielle DiMartino Booth published a piece this morning called “Surviving a Free Fall.” If you’re in an elevator that’s dropping like a rock, you want to lie flat on the floor, spread out, so you distribute the impact. Physics shows that jumping up a second before impact won’t work. The analogy, I think, to a market collapse is to diversify your assets, though it’s probably preferable not to get into a hinky elevator in the first place when it’s on the highest floor of the highest building, with cables (internals) already ragged.

In any event, nothing in our investment discipline relies on the bubble bursting or the market crashing. Indeed, we’ve done just fine with market fluctuation alone, given the hedging implementation I introduced nearly a year ago.

We do prefer market fluctuation to a diagonal, hypervalued advance, and I’ll have more comments below about the diagonal, non-fluctuating advance in the market over the past few months. For now, suffice it to say that while I very much expect this bubble to collapse, our discipline doesn’t need it to do so, so no forecasts or scenarios are required.

Valuations and “passive flows”
The chart below shows our most reliable gauge of market valuations in data since 1928: the ratio of nonfinancial market capitalization to gross value-added (MarketCap/GVA). Gross value-added is the sum of corporate revenues generated incrementally at each stage of production, so MarketCap/GVA might be reasonably be viewed as an economy-wide, apples-to-apples price/revenue multiple for U.S. nonfinancial corporations.
The current level of valuations is the highest in U.S. history, easily exceeding both the 1929 and 2000 extremes. While the S&P 500 has advanced just over 9% since February 19, when the previous record was set, we’ve been pleased with our own knitting.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924b.png


The chart below shows the same valuation measure on a log scale, versus actual subsequent S&P 500 nominal total returns over the following 12-year period, in data since 1928.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont...mc250924b2.png


It’s tempting to believe that because the bubble has not burst, it must not be a bubble, and if it is, it must be immune to bursting.
Nowhere is this notion more prevalent than the current meme circulating under the moniker of “The Inelastic Market Hypothesis.” In a nutshell, this is the idea that as investors passively pour money “into” the stock market (sigh), if existing holders are reluctant to sell, prices can advance and retain that advance permanently. The argument seems to trace to an NBER working paper a few years ago, containing assertions like “the price impact is perfectly long-lasting. This is not necessarily because flows release information, but instead simply because the permanent shift in the demand for stocks must create a permanent shift in their equilibrium price.”

The problem is that such an assertion implies that “flows” effectively divorce price movements from their underlying cash flows, and investors permanently accumulate stocks regardless of the long-term returns implied by their cash flows. This is our very definition of a bubble.
One would expect economists to recognize that every “flow in” is a “flow out.” As it happens, the authors do, but in my view, in the sketchiest way possible.

Essentially, because of the way they define “flows”, the price increase is itself the source of the “flow.” As the paper puts it, “the net total flow is 0, as one bond removed from one fund goes to another fund, and the net amount of equities purchased is 0, as the net amount of shares is constant. Hence, there is a well-defined notion of “the aggregate flow into equities,” which is generically non-zero, even though “for every buyer there is a seller.”

Sketch.
For what it’s worth, it’s also useful to point out that even if every dollar of personal saving could somehow violate the laws of equilibrium by going “into” stocks without coming “out,” and without requiring new issuance (which would satisfy the new demand with new supply without impacting prices), the fact is that total U.S. personal savings amount to scarcely 1% of outstanding U.S. equity market capitalization.

So if you could somehow simply add that “flow” onto existing market cap, it would amount to a bump of about 1%, which is among the smallest ratios of personal saving/U.S. equity market cap in history, though matching levels of 2000, 2007 and 2022.

Hey, why do those dates ring a bell?


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Look. I don’t want to criticize the well-intentioned work of others, so I’ll leave it there, but it’s important to remember that there’s a mathematical relationship between prices, cash flows and subsequent returns. It’s not surprising that theories promising “the price impact is perfectly long-lasting” will become popular at the same moment valuations have pushed to record highs. As Galbraith wrote about crowd psychology preceding the 1929-1932 collapse, “It was still necessary to reassure those who required some tie, however tenuous, to reality.”

So here we are, at the most extreme point to date in what I continue to view as the third great speculative bubble in U.S. history. In my view, the appeal to an “inelastic market hypothesis” is an attempt to inject some sort of theoretical formalism around the idea that no price, no valuation, is too high.
As long as they are in, they have a strong pecuniary commitment to the belief in the unique personal intelligence that tells them there will be yet more.
John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria

Interest rates and “cash on the sidelines”
I probably don’t need to repeat this, but I will because every hour watching CNBC is an hour being reminded that many Wall Street professionals (and virtually no financial TV anchors) have been taught how equilibrium works. The trillions of dollars that people call “cash on the sidelines” are there because the Fed put them there. Someone has to hold every dollar of those Fed liabilities, at every moment in time, until the Fed retires them by contracting its balance sheet.

It’s fascinating to hear people on CNBC repeating, “At some point, this cash is going to come into the market.” No. No, it’s not. If interest rates come down, people may become more uncomfortable holding cash, and they even trade their cash for stocks if they’re willing to pay the most extreme valuations in history. But the cash doesn’t morph into stocks.

If you use your “cash” to buy stocks, the seller of the stocks gets that cash. It can’t turn “into” something else. It will remain “cash on the sidelines” because there
are no sidelines. It is what it is. It will go away when the Fed contracts its balance sheet, or not. Go ahead and add all the T-bills the U.S. Treasury has issued with less than about 14 days to maturity, because someone has to hold those, too, and they’re probably held by money-market funds.

In any event, make no mistake. Given the current size of the Fed’s balance sheet, short-term interest rates will go up or down, not because the Fed has made “money” scarcer or more plentiful. Short-term interest rates will go up or down because the Fed changes the rate of interest it pays banks to hold those reserves. That will only change once Fed liabilities drop below about 10% of GDP.

Meanwhile, the very notion that the “cash” itself matters – rather than market valuations, or the long-term returns implied by those valuations – is precisely why we’re in a bubble. That’s fine. We’ve adapted, particularly given last September’s hedging implementation (see Asking a Better Question, Subsets and Sensibility, and the section titled “The Martian” in The Turtle and the Pendulum).

We don’t need the bubble to end. Ever. We do prefer some amount of market fluctuation to diagonal ramps (more below), but that’s it. If our discipline can be defensive yet still do well year-over-year at unprecedented valuation extremes, the “permabear” label has no thorns.
Still, for the record, yes, I expect this bubble to collapse.

The U.S. economy continues to hover near the threshold that has normally distinguished expansions from recessions. Given the weak relationship between changes in short-term interest rates and changes in economic variables like inflation and unemployment, I wince every time people on TV talk about Fed policy as if a 100 basis point change in Fed Funds would have anything but a minor impact on those variables. Still, given that these voices are nearly impossible to escape, it’s worth noting the Fed funds rate remains below, not above, the level that would historically be associated with “systematic” policy benchmarks, based on prevailing levels of inflation, GDP growth, unemployment, the real GDP output gap, real retail sales growth, and other variables.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924d.png


Two final notes on interest rates. First, it’s worth noting that even if we’re on the verge of a recession, it doesn’t follow that investors should be chasing bonds here. While investors seem to imagine that recessions are associated with hard declines in 10-year Treasury yields, most of that belief is an artifact of the 1979-1982 period of recession and disinflation. Apart from that episode, bond yields rarely change by much during the first year of a recession.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924e.png


That point is important, given that 10-year Treasury yields have retreated to levels that we presently view as slightly inadequate. They’re fine, and probably about right given the prospect of further economic weakness and gradual cuts in short-term interest rates, but they’re just borderline fine.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924f.png


The chart below shows the cumulative total return of 10-year Treasury bonds, over and above the returns on T-bills, based on whether bond yields were “adequate” or “inadequate” relative to the benchmarks shown above. The same profile holds in data going back to the 1950s. Given that 10-year Treasury yields have now dropped to slightly inadequate levels, we don’t really expect much difference between bond returns and T-bills at present. That will change.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924g.png
Finite-Time Singularity

There are certain instances across history when the central feature of investor behaviour is an “increasingly urgent impulse to buy the dip.” This semi-frantic investor behaviour is typically associated with fluctuations that have progressively smaller ranges and progressively steeper slopes.

In the book “Why Markets Crash,” Didier Sornette described these dynamics in terms of what he called a “log-periodic bubble.” I’ve referenced Sornette’s work a few times in recent years: within days of the February 2018 peak (which was followed by a quick market loss of 10% and a secondary decline later in the year that brought the overall loss to nearly 20%), late-2021 a few weeks before the January 2022 market peak, and again in February of this year, within a few days before the interim peak that preceded current extremes.

Sornette offered this description of the market dynamics of bubbles in their final phase. What I’ve described as an “increasingly urgent impulse to buy the dip” is what Sornette describes as a “finite time singularity.”

Since the crash is not a certain deterministic outcome of the bubble, it remains rational for investors to remain in the market provided they are compensated by a higher rate of growth of the bubble for taking the risk of a crash, because there is a finite probability of ‘landing smoothly,’ that is, of attaining the end of the bubble without a crash.

The market return from today to tomorrow is proportional to the crash hazard rate. In essence, investors must be compensated by a higher return to be induced to hold an asset that might crash. As the price variation speeds up, the no-arbitrage conditions, together with rational expectations, then imply that there must be an underlying risk, not yet revealed in the price dynamics, which justifies this apparent free ride and free lunch. The fundamental logic here is that the no-arbitrage condition, together with rational expectations, automatically implies a dramatic increase in the risk looming ahead each time the price appreciates significantly, such as in a speculative frenzy or in a bubble. This is the conclusion that rational traders will reach.”

– Didier Sornette, Why Markets Crash
The chart below shows our current parameterization of Sornette’s log-periodic structure, applied to the S&P 500 Index. Needless to say, the April tariff panic wasn’t something that this kind of smooth structure could capture well. Still, unless we allow for the slope of the current market advance to become quite literally infinite, it’s difficult to closely fit the broad overall advance since 2020, coupled with the recent diagonal ramp, without setting the “finite-time singularity” – the point at which instability typically emerges – within a few days of the present date.

Notably, the singularity is not the date of a “crash.” Rather, it’s the point where the pitch of the advance reaches its extreme. This can simply be an inflection point (as was the case for a few singularities between 2013 and 2017), it can precede a material correction, or it can mark a pre-crash peak.
In either case, we’ve essentially reached the singularity, which you can see in that 30-day crash-hazard rate.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924h.png


I’ll say this again (and again): nothing in our investment discipline relies on a market collapse, and no forecasts or scenarios are required. But my preference is to share my work, and interesting things I’m looking at, for free, despite having bottles thrown at me by drunk speculators like it’s a scene out of the Blues Brothers.

On a related observation, we’ve now gone 100 days with the S&P 500 above its 50-day moving average. That’s not our ideal situation, since even the hedging implementation we introduced a year ago prefers some amount of fluctuation to a diagonal, hypervalued advance with an increasingly narrow daily range.

For better or worse, these instances tend to be impermanent, and once you get beyond about 90 days without breaching that 50-day average (assuming investors are at least somewhat bullish), the market typically hits an air pocket of at least 4-6% within the next few weeks. It can be deeper of course, and it’s also possible we get nothing. My guess is 4-6% straight down, which is the standard outcome. That might be a starter, or it might be all we get for a while. Fortunately, no forecasts or scenarios are required.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924j.png


Technological singularity
Finally, on the subject of “singularity,” it’s worth briefly discussing the use of that term as it applies to technology and artificial intelligence. In the 1950s, John von Neumann wrote: “The ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race, beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

There are numerous versions of that sentiment, ranging from human extinction to the moment that AI becomes self-aware, or both. These scenarios typically evoke the Terminator movies, but my own favourite is the Matthew Broderick movie War Games. If you’ve never seen it, you’re missing out.
Whenever one mentions AI, the central focus of investors seems to be on visions of enormous future corporate profits and ever-accelerating economic growth. I think that exuberance will prove to be off the mark. Consider the profound impact of the internet, smartphones, social media, the sequencing of the human genome, and all of the life-changing technologies of the past 25 years. One might imagine that economic growth over the past 25 years must have been higher than over any 25 years in history. In fact, it is the lowest.


https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-cont.../mc250924k.png


I’ve said this before, and I realize you’re not going to believe me, but most of the impact of new technologies is dispersed over time as “consumer surplus,” not as corporate profit. Yes, the complete abdication of anti-trust considerations in recent decades has produced a sort of winner-take-all economic dynamic among individual companies. But the advancement of technology itself makes even these monopolies vulnerable, which is why some of the largest cap stocks in 2000 have languished with total returns well below the overall return of the S&P 500 in the decades since.

Moreover, it’s taken a multi-year bubble and an advance to the highest valuations in U.S. history simply to bring the overall total return of the S&P 500 since the 2000 market peak to 7.9% annually.

Don’t get me wrong. I think artificial intelligence is mind-boggling in its capacity to generate content and accelerate almost any kind of research and development. I’m also convinced of two things: the less you’re willing to think, the more vulnerable you are to having AI think for you, and the more you’re willing to think, the greater the opportunity you have for AI to leverage your insight. As individuals, and as a society, we can go either way with that choice. Our most urgent focus should be on that choice.

As we’ve seen with social media, the potential for compartmentalized information feeds and information tuned to maximize engagement for the sake of profit, with zero “model weight” placed on enrichment or even basic elements like civility, compassion, or kindness, is a real danger as we get attached to these machines.

Unfortunately, Wall Street will be complicit, at every step, in nudging toward the profit focus. As Art Cashin once observed over dinner – “If there was a report tomorrow that heroin addiction was skyrocketing among teens, the first question you’d hear on Wall Street is ‘Who makes the needles?’”

These devices in front of us, and in our hands, have so much capacity to bring us together, and so much capacity to tear us apart. The problem is that they’re absolutely indifferent, and we owe it to ourselves to look carefully at how we use them. They can be incredibly useful, or incredibly destructive, and they don’t care. Nobody is going to be responsible for us, nobody is going to be kind to us, nobody is going to be compassionate to us, nobody is going to take care of others for us. The devices aren’t going to do it for us, particularly when they amplify voices that thrive on division. It’s up to us to model and nurture what we want to see in the world, and maybe even encourage others to come along.

There’s so much being modelled right now that encourages us to isolate and divide ourselves. But amidst it all, every one of us is made of one shared substance, our common humanity. If we’re deeply, and not just superficially aware of the suffering or relief that we can create for others, aware that we might be them but for circumstances of birth and opportunity, we may get an insight into what to do, what not to do.

Silicon Valley seems to think that we’re somehow going to compensate for humanity’s faults with digital technologies. I don’t think humans are obsolete. I don’t think humans are the problem; I think humans are the solution. I believe that there are essential values and qualities of people that are not making translation into the digital realm. Maybe they can’t quite be quantified, and maybe that’s the part of humanity that we should be exploring. Instead, we seem to be forgetting about them, and that concerns me. So, Team Human is an argument that being human is a team sport and anything that connects us is good and pro-human.

Anything that isolates us from each other is anti-human.
– Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human, 2019

Geek’s Note
Here’s a fun way to see how singularity messes things up.
Start with x = 1
Multiply both sides by x. Then x^2 = x
Subtract 1 from both sides. Then x^2 – 1 = x – 1
Factor the left-hand side: Then (x – 1)(x + 1) = x – 1
Cancel (x – 1) from both sides: Then x + 1 = 1
Substitute x = 1, which was the first statement: Then 2 = 1

The singularity here is the cancel step. It’s a subtle divide-by-zero.

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"A Black Swan Event": Copper Prices Soar After FCX Declares Force Majeure At World's 2nd Largest Mine
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by Tyler Durden
Wednesday, September 24, 2025 - 02:05 PM

In what Goldman's commodity team dubbed a "black swan event", copper mining giant Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) declared force majeure on contracted supplies from its giant Grasberg mine in Indonesia, the second-largest source of the metal, sending prices of the metal soaring.

The US company also cut its copper and gold sales guidance for the quarter, now seeing 4% lower copper sales and 6% lower gold than July 2025 estimates, as it continues to search for five missing workers following an accident at the site two weeks ago. Two employees are confirmed to have died following a flow of about 800,000 metric tons of mud into Grasberg’s underground levels.

https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=bZPmvaKi
The Grasberg mine open-pit

Production in the Grasberg minerals district had been halted following the incident. A prolonged disruption at the copper mine may further lift benchmark prices, while posing an additional challenge for the smelting industry as processors deal with a severe shortage of feedstock. Force majeure gives producers the right to miss supply obligations due to unforeseen events.

Teams are working around the clock at Grasberg in the province of Central Papua to clear mud and debris, and are making steady progress to reach areas where the workers were located at the time of the Sept. 8 incident, Freeport said in a statement.

While the company tried to minimize the impact as much as possible, Goldman's commodity specialist James McGeoch was far less sanguine, calling the shocking development a "black swan event". This is what he wrote this morning:
Force Majeure at Grasberg: Q3 loses 4% Copper and 6% Gold (incident was Sept 8 at Grasberg), Q4 will only see unaffected areas back operating by mid Nov (2 out of 5 areas), with sales "insignificant" (does that mean zero?), prev estimates 201kt Cu, and 345koz gold... Wow, that's material.... phased restart in 2026, 2/5 blocks and third in 2H and last 2 in 2027... Guide to 2026 being 35% of the previous guide, which is 270kt of copper lost and 1.04m oz Gold. GIR model we model 700kt in 2025 and 730kt in 2026....

Summary: you are losing 500kt Copper over the next 12-15 months, with a ramp in 2027, could argue another 100-200kt lost..... This is Cobre + Komao + Los Bronces all at once.

FCX: looking at 2026 cons, this is c.39% of their Copper and 60% of the Gold. Grasberg to those in the weeds is a Gold mine (the largest in the world). REMEMBER FCX owns 48.76%...so this is not as painful as it looks.

Copper has to rally on this. Remember what I say. Demand moves are linear, supply moves are exponential.
Below is a chart looking at these periods. Obviously, there are many factors at play in each of these moves. I have been arguing for several days/weeks that

Copper is poised; interest has been low (despite CTA creeping to record long on GS strat data and Managed money back at a reasonable level). Commodity franchise has been almost exclusively looking at precious metals for discretionary/macro accounts. This will light the fuse.

https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=3Ngtm5Ai
Here is a separate fact sheet, also from Goldman, only this time from trader Adam Gillard:

1. Summary: We think the realized production loss will be smaller than the headline given lower YTD reported disruptions, but ~150k MT this year should have a disproportionate impact on SHFE + LME given the surplus is trapped in the US (from tariff-related stock build). Expect SHFE / LME arb to perform, Asian LME inventory to draw, and LME spreads to stay tight. Vol bid; 6M 25% delta calls +2v (from a 5y low), and skew also rallied to +1.5v, highest level since May 24 when CMX “broke”. We’re trading from the long side via skew and flat price.
2. What happened? Freeport downgraded bal-25 production by 250-260k MT, and cal-26 production by ~270k MT, causing price to rally 3.5%
3. Balance pre Grasberg disruptions: 2025: 105k surplus / 2026: 55k deficit / 2027: 134k deficit
4. Are there any mitigants: YTD disruptions are ~90k MT below our allowance; think the salient point is whether Q4 disruptions are in line with YTD average, or our pro-rata allowance. Think we likely lose ~150k MT this year, although we acknowledge the potential for concentrate inventory at mine, port or Tank House, to be exported if Freeport can get a permit from the Indonesian Gvt. 2026 impact harder to model; we had 5% / 1.1mn MT disruption allowance vs 2.2% supply growth, probably lose another 100-150k MT. It’s a lot. Price should rally, we think.
5. Where do Indonesian exports go: Refined exports are low-ish at 25k MT pm as Gresik ramps, 25% goes to China, the rest Asia ex-China. Concentrate exports are ~160k DMT per month, of which 65% goes to China (which explains the onshore bid during their night session, see below).
6. Does the CMX stock build exacerbate the LME + SHFE tightness? Yes. A combination of a) tariff-related onshore (US) stock-build and b) still positive CMX / LME ARB (explanation here), incentivizing the marginal unit to the US, is keeping the surplus trapped (in the US), meaning lost Grasberg metal will have a disproportionate impact on Shanghai and London.
7. What did China do: Bought a lot, the largest open interest change in 5 years. But total positioning is ~23% off the local high
8. LME volume is also strong at ~49k lots

Copper for delivery in three months rose as much as 3.7% to $10,341 a ton on the London Metal Exchange, the biggest intraday jump since April 10, while FCX shares tumbled as much as 11% and rivals including Glencore and Teck Resources climbed.

https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=MyQWMiss

As Bloomberg notes, the accident highlights the copper market’s vulnerability to global supply shocks and is just the latest disruption to the industry. It follows Hudbay Minerals' disclosure late Tuesday that it was shutting operations at a mill at its Constancia mine site in Peru due to ongoing political protests.

The development at Freeport shows “how little it takes to tighten up this market,” especially when two of the world’s top copper mines have problems at the same time, said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank. “Traders buy first before asking questions.”

The Grasberg mine accounted for about 3.2% of the mined copper supply for this year before the disruptions, according to Grant Sporre, global head of metals and mining at Bloomberg Intelligence. It contributes nearly 30% of Freeport’s total copper production and 70% of gold output, underscoring the scale of the disruption.

"An accident of such scale is unheard of in Freeport’s history," said Bernard Dahdah, an analyst at Natixis.
Glencore shares rose as much as 3.6% in London, while Antofagasta Plc added 9.6%. Teck Resources gained as much as 6% and Southern Copper Corp. climbed 10% in New York.

WWW.AVIELFOREXLEARNINGEDGE.COM

https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

Money, Credit, Growth and Depression: It's Complicated
September 23, 2025
If "growth" is all that matters, that leads to depending on credit and asset bubbles, which are self-liquidating in ways few see because, well, it's complicated.


Many people anticipate the demise of fiat currencies for good reasons. This is the motivation for calls to return to the gold standard--currency backed by the tangible value of gold--or the equivalent use of bitcoin.

What few seem to ask is: why did authorities embrace fiat currencies in the first place? What prompted them to replace a gold-backed monetary system with a fiat currency system?

Were they misled by monetary theories, or delusional, or merely desperate?

Let's consider the complications of money in a system that demands "growth." As I noted in my recent post for subscribers, Not What We Expected: Why Our Fixes Will Fail, if banks are allowed to originate loans based on reserves--fractional reserve banking--then most of the "money in circulation" is created not by adding gold or bitcoin to the system but by originating mortgages, commercial credit, etc.

If credit is limited to loaning out a percentage of cash deposits, credit becomes scarce, and everything that depends on abundant, affordable credit--vehicle sales, real estate purchases, college diplomas, consumer credit--all dry up and blow away. This collapse of "growth" is called a depression. Without credit, assets collapse in value, savings are depleted to pay bills as employment shrinks, and so on.

This is why the early American economy was starved for credit: everybody wanted to do something great but they had no access to the money needed to do something great. Banks arose and failed, wiping out savers and borrowers alike, as loans were called and assets were liquidated for pennies on the dollar.

So how do you expand credit without expanding money in circulation? You can't, as credit-money is money, period. So $1 billion in gold or bitcoin backs the money supply, but what happens when banks issue $10 billion in mortgages and loans, money that is created out of thin air and enters circulation? Every dollar that was backed by X quantity of gold or BTC is now backed by 1/10th of X.

Then there's foreign trade. If imports and exports don't zero out--$1 billion in imports is balanced by $1 billion in exports--then the balance is paid in gold. Nations running trade deficits eventually run out of gold.

This was the case for the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the US ran sustained trade deficits with its allies for geopolitical reasons: it was deemed essential to prop up our allies to ward off the threat of the USSR and the appeal of Communism. Let your economy slide into Depression, and the promises of Communism start looking very attractive to people immiserated by impoverishment.

Once a nation runs out of gold, trade deficits are no longer possible. The problem is that sometimes trade deficits make economic or geopolitical sense, and so ending trade deficits is catastrophic for both importer and exporter.

OK, it's complicated. But it gets more complicated.

There's an interesting phenomenon we call The Network Effect: the more people that start using a network--for example, an online platform--the more useful and valuable the network becomes to both the users and the owners.

For example, Meta/Facebook. When FB was limited to university students, it was of limited value to users. Once it expanded to a global user base of 3 billion people, it became more valuable to users and its owners, as the data collected from users and sold to advertisers became much more valuable. Meta is now worth $1.9 trillion, larger than the GDP of Spain or South Korea. That's The Network Effect.

Currencies also manifest The Network Effect: the greater the sum in global circulation, the more valuable the currency becomes. (Note that issuing $1 trillion in a currency isn't the same as $1 trillion in global circulation: the currency must have some value and utility to be circulating in the global economy.)

The utility of a currency isn't based solely on the quantity in circulation, of course; a currency's value is based on trust in the currency as a reliable store of value over the duration of the trade, its status as a commodity of known value that everyone will accept in payment, its liquidity, i.e. the ease of converting it into some other currency or commodity, and the "backing" of the currency: the central bank and national economy that issues it.

The nation that issues the currency with the greatest Network Effect has an exorbitant privilege: it can issue bonds and emit fresh currency in size that enter circulation, in effect trading fiat currency backed by The Network Effect for real-world commodities.

As many have pointed out, this is both a blessing and a curse. But it's hard to part with the power generated by The Network Effect--not just for the #1 currency, but the #2 and #3 and #4 currencies as well.

The real problem here isn't just the complications of money: it's the insanity of needing "growth" by any means available, including borrowing more money than can ever be paid back and debauching the currency to maintain the illusion of "growth" even as the resulting inflation slowly impoverishes the majority of the population who have been reduced to debt-serfs or speculators counting on credit-driven bubbles in stocks and real estate to maintain their lifestyle and financial security.

If "growth" is the Prime Directive, then credit and fiat currency become the means to achieve it. That's the story of the 20th century. That was the "blessing" phase. The story of the 21st century is the "curse" phase, and there is no exit if "growth" is all that matters, because that leads to depending on credit and asset bubbles, which are self-liquidating in ways few see because, well, it's complicated.

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Debt, Trump, Political risk, Politics, UK, Economy, Democracy, Sovereign Debt, USA

Worry Less about Gilts and More about Treasuries

Published On: September 24, 2025

Tags: UK, USA, Trump, Gilts, US Treasuries
Comments on Worry Less about Gilts and More about Treasuries

Blain’s Morning Porridge 24th Sept 2025 – Worry Less about Gilts and More about Treasuries
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.”
If there is one thing we Brits are really, really good at its making things difficult for ourselves. We talk ourselves down and fall into doom and gloom, despite knowing for certain is the sun will come up tomorrow… “Things are never as bad as we fear, but seldom as good as we hope!”
At the moment, it sure feels bad in Blighty.

I will spend part of the weekend scribbling comments for next week’s UK Mortgage Finance Conference in London. I will try not to be the most miserable person in the room, but the UK is in danger of squandering a whole generation lacking basic accommodation security, unable to build their careers, or start family formation because of the lack of social and affordable housing. It’s utterly fundamental to the success of the nation, but politicians just talk, and talk. I’ll rant about the economic implications and how it will ultimately cripple growth and sink the economy, unless solutions are found immediately.

If you are interested you can join 200+ mortgage originators and investors at the UK Mortgage Finance Conference on 29 September at The Landmark London — tackling housing affordability and innovative funding solutions. Use discount code BLAIN10 for 10% off registration.
Meanwhile, the UK’s last significant car maker, Jaguar Land Rover, is in meltdown. The factory gates closed because someone didn’t decide to spend enough on cybersecurity. Now, the firm is effectively shuttered because of its compromised IT systems. As a result, smaller automotive suppliers around the country are in crisis as orders are cancelled and delayed. The knock-on effects on the automotive supply chain across the economy could unravel the OECD’s recently improved outlook for UK growth (although it predicts inflation will remain high).

No doubt the right-wing commentariat sniping every government decision will blame Land Rover’s crisis on Sir Keir Starmer, but the reality is it’s the result of a bad business decision. The reality is that Land Rover, an Indian owned firm, could well trigger a government bailout of the automotive sector – one of the UK’s few global-scale manufacturing sectors!

The good news is London is not under Sharia Law, as US President Donald Trump told the United Nations last night. London has Sir Sadiq Khan. America has Donald Trump. You choose. It was a truly extraordinary speech. And we were worried about Joe Biden? I guess the US will chuck the UN out of NY – after all, one of these horrible foreigners pulled the plug on the escalator!

Ah, America! Such confidence. Such strength. And next week, Donald Trump has cancelled a meeting with the Top Congressional Democratic leaders to discuss Government funding – ahead of a potential government shutdown! He doesn’t think it could be “productive”. I guess his strategy is to force the Dems to block the 60% congressional approval to raise the ceiling or step down. If they don’t, he can blame the Blue Team when it all goes to rack and ruin. Or maybe he’ll declare them economic terrorists and just deport them all?

Deep down, in the depths of my soul, I know the UK must be in trouble because yesterday I found myself agreeing with the Liberal Democrats. (That is so sad…) I think they might be right – given the dire state of the Tories, and Labour dither, they might be the only alternative to Farage and Reform importing MAGA populism to the UK…. But it’s not much of a choice.
Meanwhile, the populist Reform destabilizing noise machine is telling us the nation is about to plunge into despair, despond and an inescapable debt trap because Chancellor Reeves has so misjudged the national accounts. They claim the budget black hole has deepened to unplumbed depths – witnessed by the Office for Budget Responsibility scaling back its productivity estimates for the UK economy, making the problem even worse. And it’s all the fault of the Labour government. November’s budget will sink the ship!

Steady…. The crisis in the UK has been a long time coming. On a relative basis, the productivity of the UK has plummeted largely due to Brexit, which I believe was Mr Farage’s pet project?

Its consequences are still impacting the economy 9 years later in terms of trade and investment in the UK, and the fact that most of our largest businesses are now foreign-owned. These are no longer the gateway to 900mm European consumers they once were. And the rest of the economy is the Government, which is largely bust.
However, I suspect there is another, more fundamental reason for the UK’s appalling worker productivity. It’s that UK businesses and government services have lost sight of their basic purpose.

Ask yourself how much time you spend each week on the internet or on terminal death-hold to your bank, your energy co-op, or the council. These are all truly awful experiences and eat up precious time. These are all the result of bad business decisions – cutting costs and losing sight of purpose. If you really want to understand the real productivity crisis at the heart of the UK… try calling your local energy firm.

I’ve gone Japanese on a new car, and ordered a Plug-in Hybrid (basically to peeve Donald Trump), which means getting a fast charger fitted at home. Which means calling Hive, the electric firm. I tried to order online – didn’t work. I had to call. Three times I held for 30 minutes, being told how important my call was to them, before they cut me off bang on 30 minutes. (Apparently, that is to show the regulator all calls are answered within 30 mins…! If they are cut off, they don’t count.) 4th time, I got lucky and was picked up by an utterly disinterested young lady who suggested I should order online. Which doesn’t work.

The new car is on its way to us from Tokyo. It will likely arrive before we get the charger fitted from the stock in the warehouse down the road.
But being miserable is a British trait. It is one of these things that makes us British! The reality is never as bad as it looks. And that is probably as true today as it’s always been. There is hope.

The headline story in the FT this morning is Bond Giant, Pimco, buying Gilts. They reckon UK inflation expectations are overblown, and the Bank of England will soon be able to ease, flattening the yield curve, bringing down the Long Gilt yield, which the right wing have been telling us means the end of everything. The bet is essentially simple – that the UK is being priced by the market as a basket-case, but in fact is pretty much in line with other heavily indebted, struggling nations. There have been factors that have caused UK inflation to spike higher, like rising employer contributions and minimum wages, that will now fade.

In many ways, the UK is better off than we think. We have genuine economic and monetary sovereignty – and control over our own currency. The Gilt Market remains much more resilient than the headlines have tried to paint – demonstrated by the ongoing success of recent Gilt auctions. That resilience is based on the strength of the gilt market’s structure – a relatively low Debt to GDP level, the longest outstanding duration of debt among the G7 nations, and the professionalism of the UK’s Debt Management Office.

If the government had a coherent plan to address the budget hole with a well-considered, thought-out, and fully-costed spending plan, then the Gilts market would be happy enough to buy more. Call it the Negative Liz Truss Scenario. What the bond market cares about is the likelihood of getting paid interest and repaid principal – the more competent a government looks and sounds, the more likely that is to happen.

And speaking of government competency, that’s why I’m far less worried about Gilts than I am about Treasuries….

Out of time, back to the day job…
Bill Blain
CEO – Windshift Capital
Author – The Morning Porridge
Partner – Shard Capital

NOTE: EDITED BY BWM USING GRAMMARLY SOFTWARE.

COPY AND PASTE BELOW WITHOUT EDITING.

WWW.AVIELFOREXLEARNINGEDGE.COM

Debt, Trump, Political risk, Politics, UK, Economy, Democracy, Sovereign Debt, USA
Worry Less about Gilts and More about Treasuries
Published On: September 24, 2025Tags: UK, USA, Trump, Gilts, US Treasuries0 Commentson Worry Less about Gilts and More about Treasuries
Blain’s Morning Porridge 24th Sept 2025 – Worry Less about Gilts and More about Treasuries
“For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of horse the kingdom was lost.”
If there is one thing we Brits are really, really good at its making things difficult for ourselves. We talk ourselves down and fall into doom and gloom, despite knowing for certain is the sun will come up tomorrow… “Things are never as bad as we fear, but seldom as good as we hope!”
At the moment it sure feels bad in Blighty.
I will spend part of the weekend scribbling comments for next week’s UK Mortgage Finance Conference in London. I will try not to be the most miserable person in the room, but the UK is in danger of squandering a whole generation lacking basic accommodation security, unable to build their careers, or start family formation because of the lack of social and affordable housing. It’s utterly fundamental to the success of the nation, but politicians just talk, and talk. I’ll rant about the economic implications and how it will ultimately cripple growth and sink the economy, unless solution are found immediately.
If you are interested you can join 200+ mortgage originators and investors at the UK Mortgage Finance Conference on 29 September at The Landmark London — tackling housing affordability and innovative funding solutions. Use discount code BLAIN10 for 10% off registration.
Meanwhile, the UK’s last significant car maker, Jaguar Land Rover is in meltdown, the factory gates closed because someone didn’t take the decision to spend enough on Cyber-Security. Now the firm is effectively shuttered because of its compromised IT systems. As a result, smaller automotive suppliers around the country are in crisis as orders are cancelled and delayed. The knock-on effects on the automotive supply chain across the economy could unravel the OECD’s recently improved outlook for UK growth (although it predicts inflation will remain high.)
No doubt the right-wing commentariat sniping every single govt decision will blame Land Rover’s crisis on Sir Keir Starmer, but the reality is it’s the result of a bad business decision. The reality is Land Rover, an Indian owned firm, could well trigger a Govt bail out of the automotive sector – one of the UK’s few global scale manufacturing sectors!
The good news is London is not under Sharia Law – as US President Donald Trump told the United Nations last night. London has Sir Sadiq Khan. America has Donald Trump. You choose. It was a truly extraordinary speech. And we were worried about Joe Biden? I guess the US will chuck the UN out of NY – after all, one of these horrible foreigners pulled the plug on the escalator!
Ah, America! Such confidence. Such strength. And next week Donald Trump has cancelled a meeting with the Top Congressional Democrat leaders to discuss Government funding – ahead of a potential government shutdown! He doesn’t think it could possibly be “productive”. I guess his strategy is to force the Dems to block the 60% congressional approval to raise the ceiling or step down. If they don’t he can blame the Blue Team when it all goes to wrack-sh*t. Or maybe he’ll declare them economic terrorists and just deport them all?
Deep down, in the depths of my soul, I know the UK must be in trouble because yesterday I found myself agreeing with the Liberal Democrats. (That is so sad…) I think they might be right – given the dire state of the Tories, and Labour dither, they might be the only alternative to Farage and Reform importing MAGA populism to the UK…. But it’s not much of choice.
Meanwhile, the populist Reform destabilising noise machine is telling us the nation is about to plunge into despair, despond and an inescapable debt trap because Chancellor Reeves has so misjudged the national accounts. They claim the budget black hole has deepened to unplumbed depths – witnessed by the Office for Budget Responsibility scaling back its productivity estimates for the UK economy making the problem even worse. And it’s all the fault of the Labour government. November’s budget will sink the ship!
Steady…. The crisis in the UK has been a long-time coming. On a relative basis the productivity of the UK has plummeted largely due to Brexit – which I believe was Mr Farage’s pet project?
Its consequences still impacting the economy 9 years later in terms of trade and investment in the UK, and the fact most of our largest businesses are now foreign owned. These are no longer the gateway to 900mm European consumers they once were. And the rest of the economy is the Government – which is largely bust.
However, I suspect there is another more fundamental reason for the UK’s appalling worker productivity. It’s that UK businesses and government services have lost sight of their basic purpose.
Ask yourself how much time you spend each week on the internet or on terminal death-hold to your bank, your energy co, or the council. These are all truly awful experiences and eat up precious time. These are all the result of bad business decisions – cutting costs and losing sight of purpose. If you really want to understand the real productivity crisis at the heart of the UK… try calling your local energy firm.
I’ve gone Japanese on a new car, and ordered a Plug-in Hybrid (basically to peeve Donald Trump) which means getting a fast charger fitted at home. Which means calling Hive, the electric firm. I tried to order on-line – didn’t work. I had to call. Three times I held for 30 minutes, being told how important my call was to them, before they cut me off bang on 30 mins. (Apparently that is to show the regulator all calls are answered within 30 mins…! If they are cut off they don’t count.) 4th time I got lucky and was picked up by an utterly disinterested young lady who suggested I should order on-line. Which doesn’t work.
The new car is on its way to us from Tokyo. It will likely arrive before we get the charger fitted from the stock in the warehouse down the road.
But being miserable is a British trait. It is one of these things that makes us British! The reality is never as bad as it looks. And that is probably as true today as it’s always been. There is hope.
The headline story in the FT this morning is Bond Giant, Pimco, buying Gilts. They reckon UK inflation expectations are overblown, and the Bank of England will soon be able to ease – flattening the yield curve, bringing down the Long Gilt yield the right wing have been telling us means the end of everything. The bet is essentially simple – that the UK is being priced by the market as a basket-case, but in fact is pretty much in-line with other heavily indebted, struggling nations. There have been factors that have caused UK inflation to spike higher, like rising employer contributions and minimum wages, that will now fade.
In many ways the UK is better off than we think. We have genuine economic and monetary sovereignty – and control over our own currency. The Gilt Market remains much more resilient than the headlines have tried to paint – demonstrated by the ongoing success of recent Gilt auctions. That resilience is based on the strength of the gilt market’s structure – a relatively low Debt to GDP level, the longest outstanding duration of debt among the G7 nations, and the professionalism of the UK’s Debt Management Office.
If the government had a coherent plan to address the budget hole with a well-considered, thought-out, and fully-costed spending plans, then the Gilts market would be happy enough to buy more. Call it the Negative Liz Truss Scenario. What the bond market cares about is the likelihood of getting paid interest and repaid principal – the more competent a government looks and sounds, the more likely that is to happen.
And speaking of government competency, that’s why I’m far less worried about Gilts than I am about Treasuries….
Out of time, back to the day job…
Bill Blain
CEO – Windshift Capital
Author – The Morning Porridge
Partner – Shard Capital

Billy Bambrough Senior Contributor
Follow me on X and Forbes.com
Good Thursday morning. Billy Bambrough here with the bitcoin and crypto news you need to know.

Get ahead: Bitcoin Is Suddenly On The Brink

In today's issue:
- Reverse charge
- Bargaining chips

QuizCodex: Four questions each week, linked by a theme, with answers revealed on Friday. Send theme guesses to [email protected].
Thursday's question: Assassinations, terrorist attacks and mass shootings marred the launch of which crypto project in 2018?

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24-hour crypto market snapshot
CoinPricePercent Change
Bitcoin $112,095
0.5%
Ethereum $4,047
3%
XRP $2.84
1%
IP $9.45
25%
Source: Forbes Digital Assets. Prices as of 5:30am ET
Going rate
The power struggle between the White House and the Federal Reserve isn't over, even after Fed chair Jerome Powell announced it had restarted its interest rate-cutting cycle last week. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has slammed Powell for failing to champion further rate cuts while top Fed official Austan Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Fed and Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) member, told the Financial Times he could be less willing to support further cuts at forthcoming policy votes due to inflation fears, though the market continues to heavily bet on another 25 basis point cut next month.

The crypto market jubilation that came with the Fed's well-telegraphed interest rate cut last week has faded fast as traders reassume risk-off positions, exacerbated by fears a U.S. government shutdown could sap confidence. The bitcoin price has resumed its downward trend while ethereum has dropped 3%, leading the crypto major market lower. Ripple's XRP has fallen just 1% as hopes for an exchange-traded fund (ETF) boom add support. Further down the charts, the artificial intelligence-linked blockchain story has seen its IP cryptocurrency drop 25% following a huge run since its February launch.

Now read this: Bitcoin could soon have a big global buyer that has shunned it up to this point
Stay ahead of the market!
Don't miss these essential updates:

Bitcoin Is Braced For A $9.5 Trillion Fed Earthquake

Bitcoin Is Digital Exit Gold: The Four-Year Doubling Cycle

The Rise Of Bitcoin As Money Continues
Read now!
Reverse charge
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Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire brought the company to market this year in a wildly successful initial public offering (IPO). 2025 Bloomberg Finance LP
Circle back: Circle, the issuer of the world's second-largest stablecoin USDC, has said it's exploring the development of reversible transactions, moving the company further away from its decentralized, free-wheeling roots and closer to the traditional financial industry that crypto technology was conceived in opposition to.
- "We are thinking through ... whether or not there’s the possibility of reversibility of transactions, right, but at the same time, we want settlement finality," Circle president Heath Tarbert told the Financial Times, outlining a mechanism that would allow money to be refunded in cases of fraud or disputes.

Zoom out: The New York-based Circle is challenging the dominant USDT stablecoin following the passage of the Genius Act stablecoin bill this year, with the company presenting itself to Wall Street and lawmakers as the regulated, compliant version of the technology, compared to the El Salvador-based Tether.
- In June, Circle completed a highly successful initial public offering (IPO) that saw it valued at $30 billion, just as Goldman Sachs analysts said they see a stablecoin gold rush coming that could double the number of USDC stablecoins in circulation by 2027. Tether is meanwhile reportedly eyeing a funding round that could value it at up to $500 billion.

Slippery slope: In July, Tether revealed it had assisted U.S. authorities in freezing and reissuing approximately $1.6 million worth of USDT that was connected to wallets linked to Buy Cash Money and Money Transfer Company (BuyCash), a Gaza-based financial network "tied to terrorist financing operations."

Privacy settings: In a further split from crypto's cypherpunk roots, Circle is also looking into privacy settings that would allow users to shield sensitive financial information and encrypt the value of transfers.
- “If you’re a financial institution or working with clients and you’re sending money around you don’t necessarily want ... for the world to see every transaction so we created a confidentiality layer to shield the amount,” Tarbert said, adding such controls would be available on Circle's new arc blockchain, designed for use by financial institutions.

No fear: Tarbert also played down financial establishment fears that stablecoin adoption will leech deposits from bank accounts after banking associations warned almost $7 trillion was at risk of being yanked from current accounts and moved into stablecoins.
- While it is “possible” that people could take money out of their current accounts and put it into a stablecoin, “it’s [also] entirely possible people could move out of other asset classes into stablecoins and it’s entirely possible that new wealth could be created,” Tarbert said.

Call for calm: Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has warned people that no stablecoins pegged to the offshore yuan had been approved for issuance in the city amid what the South China Morning Post called a stablecoin "frenzy."

Now read this: Down and out on the crypto frontier
Bargaining chips
Two Democratic Party senators have called for an ethics probe into president Donald Trump, his family, and top administration officials, including the administration's crypto czar David Sacks, over the connection between the World Liberty Financial crypto venture and a deal for thousands of artificial intelligence computer chips to be sold to the United Arab Emirates.
- The New York Times reported on the Trump administration's involvement in the deals last week, suggesting there was a connection between World Liberty Financial and the chips deal.

“The pattern of these transactions is deeply troubling,” senators Elizabeth Warren and Elissa Slotkin, wrote in the letter to the acting inspectors general at State and Commerce, as well as the Office of Government Ethics.
- Representatives from World Liberty and the White House denied any connection between the deals which saw the UAE-founded investment company MGX invest $2 billion into the crypto exchange Binance using World Liberty's newly launched USD1 stablecoin.

U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was also named in the letter. Witkoff's son Zach is the chief executive of World Liberty Financial.
- Last week, president Trump's son Eric defended the company on CNBC, saying his family has "always been serial capitalists; we've always had companies" and "crypto came out of a necessity that we were debanked by everybody and needed to find a new way."

Good to know: HSBC says new quantum computing trial beat Wall Street rivals
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How We Got Here: A Brief History of America's Banking System

by David Stockman


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President Reagan famously said that the closest thing to eternal life on this earth is a government agency. Surely that aphorism applies to the Federal RESERVE. And most especially when you put a Trumpian ALL CAPS focus on the “reserve” part of its title.


That is to say, the purpose of the 1913 act had nothing to do with the Fed’s present-day “goals” with respect to inflation, unemployment, economic growth, housing starts, business capex, or any other aspect of the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. Instead, the Federal Reserve Act’s far more modest remit was to fix the badly flawed “reserve” arrangements of the National Banking Act that good old Abe Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had put into place to finance the civil war.

What the latter actually did was to nearly tax out of existence the honest free enterprise state banks that had prevailed during America’s growth explosion prior to the Civil War in favor of a system of federally regulated “national banks”. But the latter were just thinly disguised servants of the US Treasury. In that capacity, they were required to hold US Treasury bonds as collateral to back the issuance of their own bank notes—the latter being the essence of the 19th-century banking business.
As it happened, during the 50 years after the Civil War, fiscal prudence prevailed in Washington—even as the proceeds from Uncle Sam’s “revenue tariffs” soared owing to America’s booming commerce with the world. The result was that nearly 80% of the Civil War Debt was paid down by 1913, and the remaining debt, at less than 3% of GDP, amounted to barely $10 per US citizen.

So at that point Abe Lincoln’s war debt monetization machine was no longer needed, and the Civil War inflation had also been long-extinguished after the US officially went on the gold standard in 1879. Still, the awkward cantilevered reserve-holding structure of the Civil War banking system had lingered on.

The latter required local or so-called “country” banks to retain roughly 15% of their demand deposits as cash reserves, of which 60% could be placed at a dozen or so regional “reserve city” banks. In turn, these regional reserve city banks were required to maintain an even higher reserve ratio (around 25%)—of which 50% could be deposited with a third tier of “central reserve city” banks located in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York City.

Needless to say, during ordinary times, the central reserve city banks, and most especially the New York money center banks, were awash in the cash that would flow in from the “country” banks of the hinterlands and build up through the pyramid of regional reserve city banks. That sea of cash cascading to Wall Street, Chicago, and St. Louis would then frequently be put to work as overnight margin loans to the nation’s original stock market speculators and “hedge funds”.

Of course, the problem was that at certain times of the year, like the fall harvest, or when business conditions changed due to droughts, trouble in export markets, over-investment in new technologies like railroads or mechanized farm equipment, etc., the cash flows in the cantilevered reserve structure would be thrown into reverse. To wit, country banks would draw down deposits at the regional reserve city banks to meet the withdrawal demands of their customers. In turn, the regional reserve city banks would drain deposits from the central reserve city banks, which would be forced to liquidate their margin loans, sending the stock markets into a periodic crash and tizzy of liquidation.

While these periodic “panics” were claimed to cause severe hardships down the line to Main Street and to subtract from national prosperity, present-day scholars like Professor Wicker of Ohio State have shown otherwise namely, that these 19th-century panics were very short-lived and did not much interfere with the relentless rise of industrial production, economic wealth and living standards after the Civil War.

Most especially, these “panics” did not establish in any way, shape, or form a case for a modern-day “central bank” in the business of macro-management of the GDP and unemployment rates; and most certainly did not remotely suggest the need for a central bank-administered 2% inflation target, which would have been pointless under the gold standard, anyway. The latter actually generated a net zero rise in the general price level in the US between 1879 and 1913.

Thus, the Congressional authors of the 1913 act merely sought to remove the reserve structure rigidities of Lincoln’s banking system and most especially its tendency to drain the nation’s banking reserves into the big central city reserve banks. That was, in fact, the first and foremost objective of the act’s intellectual architect and draftsman, Congressman Carter Glass, who was a financially literate small-town newspaper editor from Virginia.

In brief, Congressman Glass’ scheme centered on the creation of 12 equal regional “reserve banks” that would operate “discount windows” empowered to advance cash loans to member banks. Such discount loans were to be based on solid commercial loan collateral and would bear interest at market rates plus a penalty spread.

The implicit point of the scheme was to make the national bank system more liquid and “elastic” by providing “borrowed reserves” to meet customer withdrawal demands in lieu of liquidating cash balances within the tiered national banking system. This discount window-based mechanism was, in essence, a “money printing” scheme, but its purpose was merely to eliminate the cause of banking “panics” on the presumption that the gold standard and free market capitalism would handle growth, investment, inflation, and prosperity without any help from a monetary Sherpa in Washington.

Indeed, the heart of the system was the decentralized reserve banks spread from Boston to Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. The Board of Governors in Washington, in fact, was more an honorific and largely powerless afterthought to give a “Federal” veneer to the scheme. But Carter Glass wanted the core discount loan-making function of the reserve banks to be domiciled as far from the big Wall Street banks as possible.

In short, the Glassian discount window-based money-printing system did not sever the dollar’s link to gold. Nor did it provide any kind of mandate whatsoever for macroeconomic management of the US economy.

And more crucially still, it did not even recognize US Treasury debt as a valid form of collateral to be used by member banks to obtain discount loans or what amounted to “borrowed reserves” at the 12 regionalized Reserve Banks.

Instead, it tethered the Reserve Bank printing presses to the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. That is, the reserve banks could print new central bank credit only after goods had been produced and then pledged as collateral for commercial bank credits, which in turn had been rehypothecated for cash advances at the Federal Reserve discount windows.

In short, there was a double barrier against the modern 20th-century form of peacetime “inflation”. To wit, the gold standard remained intact because dollars created
by the banking system and the new Federal Reserve could be redeemed for gold without limit—even at the small denomination level of gold coins.

Secondly, under the Glassian monetary regime known as the “real bills doctrine,” supply always preceded demand per Say’s Law. Production of goods in the real economy came first, followed by spendable commercial bank credit and central bank money.

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Doug Casey and Chris MacIntosh issue a stark warning.
We’re not facing a recession. We’re entering a complete system reset—a collapse of the bond, equity, and currency markets all at once.
Doug Casey calls it "The Greater Depression."

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If we fast forward for a moment to March 2020, however, we get a scintillating glimpse of what the Gipper meant by the eternal life of Federal bureaucracies. To wit, in its capacity as the leading bank regulator in the US, the Fed actually abolished any “reserve” requirements in the US banking system, and therefore the entirety of its original reason for existence. The replacement regime based on capital and liquidity ratios has no need for central bank credit at all.

But, alas, the Fed did not put itself out of business in March 2020. To the contrary, in less than 26 months, it generated $4.8 trillion of new central bank credit–or more than it had issued during its first 106 years of operation. That’s because the original narrow liquidity purpose of the Federal Reserve banks had long been surpassed by sweeping mission creep that had finally resulted in today’s form of monetary central planning.

And this “mission creep” started almost from the day the Fed went into operation in November 1914. To wit, 30 months after the Fed opened its doors, Woodrow Wilson took America into a pointless war in Europe and needed massive amounts of cash to fund a two-million-man army that was being mobilized, trained, and deployed to France from scratch.

So he committed the greatest possible monetary sin. Namely, he untethered the Fed’s printing press from the ebb and flow of Main Street commerce, allowing US Treasury debt to become eligible collateral for Discount Window loans.

Needless to say, it was off to the races from there. Self-evidently, politicians have an infinite capacity to spend and borrow on the state’s credit when the discipline of rising yields and “crowding out” in the bond pits is short-circuited by central bank absorption of the government’s debt as “collateral” for printing press credits.

As it happened, financing America’s lurch into the Great War provided the playbook for funding the permanent Warfare State and Welfare State that emerged in the century to follow. But at the time it seemed simple and harmless enough: To wit, the US Treasury sold massive amounts of Liberty Bonds to everyday people in a kind of grand Red Cross blood drive, while the folks who bought the bonds were able to borrow most of the payment from their local national banks.

In turn, they could pledge these Liberty Loans as collateral to obtain discount window advances from the Federal Reserve banks to fund their balance sheets, and, conveniently, at interest rates slightly below the yields on the Liberty Bonds, which were the underlying collateral.

Needless to say, this scheme worked for the short duration of the war because the excess demand created by monetizing the war loans was being dissipated in the bloody trenches of northern France. At length, in fact, the household debts to fund the Liberty Bonds were paid off after the war’s end, and the bloated level of Federal Reserve credit, which had enabled them, was paid down, as well.

But before long, the commercial banks had what amounted to a hissy fit over dividends from the Federal Reserve. The member banks technically owned the Federal Reserve system and had become accustomed to the dividend flow from the surge in discount window loans that had funded the Liberty Bonds.

When the latter had been liquidated after the war, of course, the dividends dried up. So immense pressure developed within the system to rebuild Federal Reserve balance sheets so that system profits and dividend-paying capacity might be restored. And, as post-war prosperity surged by 1923, a solution was found.
To wit, under the guidance of the newly formed FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee), the reserve banks began to buy bonds in the open market based on newly minted Federal Reserve credit, which in turn generated system profits and dividends.

Nevertheless, what started as a money-making side gig was progressively transformed into an instrument of “national policy”. This famously started at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under the leadership of ex-JP Morgan Banker Benjamin Strong.

During the Benjamin Strong era, the national policy objective was mainly to help France and England recover from the fiscal calamity of the Great War, but the die had now been cast. Rather than operating the printing presses to service a passive discount window by issuing commerce-based advances to member banks, the printing presses were now taken over by an FOMC that was in the national policy business and able to operate with virtually unlimited discretionary power over the entire financial system and the US economy.

It was only a short leap from there to Greenspanian monetary central planning, but two interim steps by Oval Office miscreants Franklin Roosevelt and Tricky Dick Nixon opened the door to today’s inflationary disaster.

In 1933, FDR decreed that citizens could not own or trade in gold to protect themselves from inflationary central bankers. And then in August 1971, Tricky Dick supplied the coup de grâce by closing the gold window to foreign central banks as well.

Now America’s money was all fiat, all the time. And, not surprisingly, since August 1971, the consumer’s dollar has also lost 87% of its purchasing power.
Editor’s Note: The history of America’s banking system is not just an academic curiosity—it is the foundation of the crisis we now face.

What began as a reserve mechanism to stabilize local banks has mutated into full-scale monetary central planning, fueling bubbles, eroding the dollar, and pushing the entire system toward a breaking point.

The next chapter will not be written in the past tense—it will unfold in real time, and it will determine whether ordinary Americans preserve their savings or watch them vanish.

That’s why we urge you to see what comes next.

Legendary investor Doug Casey and David Stockman, the “Father of Reaganomics,” have pulled back the curtain on the financial reset already in motion. They reveal the #1 secret to protecting your wealth and positioning yourself to profit like the insiders do—so you can avoid crippling losses and even capture windfall gains during the turmoil ahead.

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Off the Rails

The gold standard came into being in the 18th century. It got gassed in WWI. Then, after WWII, it was re-established, sort of. The dollar was made the key financial reserve. It was linked to gold.
Bill Bonner

September 26, 2025
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Source: Getty Images

Friday, September 26th, 2025
Bill Bonner, from Paris, France

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There are some things we humans cannot do. We cannot fly without artificial wings. And we can’t manage a currency system without artificial guardrails.
As to flying, here in Paris, a tailor thought he had made himself a ‘flying suit’ that would permit him at least to glide through the air. He put it to the test on February 4, 1912, by jumping off the Eiffel Tower. Alas, he fell like a sack of turnips and died on impact.

Yesterday, we walked over to the site. The city was sad. It rained. Gray. Cold. The buildings were gray and cold. The people seemed gray and cold too.
We thought of the dot.com investors...and how they had come crashing down. And of today’s AI investors, putting on their flying suits...hoping to soar.

Then, we met an old friend for a drink. She had bright cheeks and a warm manner. That’s the nice thing about Paris. There’s always a place to have a drink and
always someone to have it with.

The temperature in Paris has fallen sharply. Just a week ago, we might have sat outside at a table on the sidewalk and enjoyed watching the chic Parisiennes walking by. But it is now too cold to sit out. And France, fighting its ‘climate emergency’ with all the reckless enthusiasm with which America shoots at ‘terrorists,’ has outlawed the gas heaters that used to make sitting outside, even in cold weather, so agreeable.

So, we went indoors...and managed to find a small table, vacant, sandwiched in ‘twixt two others.

“The Germans have a word for it.” The young, blond woman published our last book in French. She knew what we were thinking.
“A word for what?”
“For the sad feeling you have when you realize that the world is going to hell in a handcart. It’s ‘weltschmerz.’
“At least, our part of it,” she continued...after a pause. “The west.”
“Did you hear Trump’s speech to the UN? He thinks immigration and energy policies are the big problems. If so, those are relatively easy to fix. You could seal the borders and take away all the windmills and solar panels. But the major problem would still be there.”

Our friend is also a Greek and Latin scholar. “The real problem is popular democracy. As the ancient Greeks explained, it works for a while...but not for long. People always want more free stuff. And then, you can’t take it away...even when you’re going broke.”

America’s founders read the classics, too. They tried to dodge the problem in two ways. First, they put some distance between the feds and the ‘vox populi’ of the voting masses. Our friend, John Henry, founder of the Committee for the Republic, explains:

‘For more than a century, the United States has undergone a transition from a constitutional republic to an unconstitutional democracy with overpowering global ambitions. In fits and starts, we went from voting for Democratic and Republican candidates who jealously guarded our liberty-centred republic to politicians who systematically dismantled our Constitution in pursuit of making the world safe for so-called “democracy”. No one asked how we could make the world safe from something we weren’t ourselves. Under our Constitution, we are a republic – not a democracy.’

The founders also tried to limit military expenses by requiring an act of Congress before going to war...and to limit spending generally by insisting that there should be no other coinage but ’gold and silver.’ Both of these guardrails were taken down, the latter finally junked in 1971 by Richard Nixon.

The ‘golden guardrail’ was particularly important. John Dienner recalls this passage from Friedrich Hayek, written in 1975, that explains why:
‘The pressure for more and cheaper money is an ever-present political force which monetary authorities have never been able to resist. ... Except these 200 years of the gold standard [in the 18th- 20th centuries], practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.’

The gold standard came into being in the 18th century. It got gassed in WWI. Then, after WWII, it was re-established, sort of. The dollar was made the key financial reserve. And the dollar was linked to gold.

Then, in 1971, the last link with gold was cut. Since then, several efforts were made to re-install some sort of guardrails. In the ‘70s, we were personally part of the drive for a Constitutional Amendment that would make deficits illegal. In the ‘80s, our friend Grover Norquist succeeded in getting prospective members of Congress to sign The Pledge, crossing their hearts and hoping to die if they increased taxes.

And then there were debates over raising the debt ceiling...which ended up as political theatre. The debt ceiling has been raised more than 80 times since the 1960s.
So, the guardrails are down. All of them. We are back to the ‘bad old days’ when we can count on the elites to rip off the public with funny, ‘paper’ money.
“In that UN speech,” our friend continued, “Trump boasted that ‘inflation has been defeated in America.’ But I don’t see how that is possible.”

Yesterday, we made a mistake. (Yes, we are all-too-human, too.) We grossly understated the debt build-up in the US. Deficits are running at $2 trillion per year. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to tackle spending and, and even at the current rate, the US dollar will lose about 80% of its value as the two parties add $55 trillion in debt over the next thirty years.

The guardrails are down; what’s to stop them?
Regards,
Bill Bonner

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About The Book

In the fall of 1949, I went to the Library of Congress to get material for a newspaper article about the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. What I expected to be a week's labour turned into a lengthy research job of nineteen months, for I discovered, in my initial inquiry, that there existed not one narrative account of the origins and activities of this powerful organization. The standard works on the Federal Reserve System, almost entirely abstruse and technical works on economics, I found of little practical value. Even in the matter of acceptances, the usual textbooks contained no information upon such an important item in America's economic history as the changeover from the open-book system of credit to the acceptance system, which has wrought such vast changes in our practice of commerce, and for this information I found only one source, a few pamphlets published by the American Acceptance Council from 1915 to 1928.

It is, then, little wonder that the student with a Master's Degree in Economics from one of the better universities will see here for the first time material which should have been before him in his elementary courses." Eustace Clarence Mullins, Jr, was a populist American political writer and biographer. His most famous and influential work is The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, described by Congressman Wright Patman as 'a very fine book [which] has been very useful to me'. He is generally regarded as one of the most influential authors in the genre of conspiracism.

Eustace Clarence Mullins Jr. (March 9, 1923 – February 2, 2010)[1] was an American writer, white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, propagandist, and [2] Holocaust denier. A disciple of the poet Ezra Pound,[3] his best-known work is The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he alleged that several high-profile bankers had conspired to write the Federal Reserve Act for their own nefarious purposes, and then induced Congress to enact it into law. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as "a one-man organization of hate".[4]

Life
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Letter from Eustace Mullins to J. Edgar Hoover, June 5, 1966

Eustace Clarence Mullins, Jr. was born in Roanoke, Virginia, the third child of Eustace Clarence Mullins (1899–1961) and his wife Jane Katherine Muse (1897–1971). His father was a salesman in a retail clothing store. He said he was educated at Ohio State University, New York University, and the University of North Dakota, although the FBI was unable to verify his attendance at any of them, except for one summer session at NYU in 1947.[5]

In December 1942, he enlisted in the military as a Warrant Officer at Charlottesville, Virginia. He was a veteran of the United States Army Air Forces, serving thirty-eight months during World War II.

In 1949, Mullins worked at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Washington, D.C., where he met Ezra Pound's wife Dorothy, who introduced him to her husband. Pound was at the time incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Mentally Ill. Mullins visited the poet frequently and, for a time, acted as his secretary. Later, he wrote a biography, This Difficult Individual Ezra Pound (1961), which literary critic Ira Nadel describes as "prejudiced and often melodramatic".[6] According to Mullins, it was Pound who set him on the course of research that led to his writing The Secrets of the Federal Reserve.[7]

Mullins became a researcher at the Library of Congress in 1950 and helped Senator Joseph McCarthy in making claims about Communist Party funding sources.[8] He later stated that he believed McCarthy had "started to turn the tide against world communism".[9] Shortly after his first book, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, came out in 1952, he was discharged by the Library of Congress.[10]

From April 1953 until April 1954, Mullins was employed by the American Petroleum Institute Committee (APIC). He was cited in 1954 as a "neo-Fascist" by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which noted in particular his article "Adolph Hitler: An Appreciation", written in 1952, in which he compared Hitler to Jesus and described both as victims of Jews.[2] In 1956, he sued the APIC for breach of contract, charging that the group had hired him as a sub rosa propagandist to undermine Zionism, but failed to live up to a verbal agreement to pay him $25,000 for his covert services.[11] The APIC responded that Mullins had been hired “as one of several economist-writers in a subordinate capacity", and denied that he had been employed “in any capacity at any time for the purpose he [alleged].″[2] The lawsuit, like many others filed by Mullins over the years, was eventually dismissed.[4]


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Eustace Mullins's home at 126 Madison Place in Staunton, Virginia

In the 1950s, Mullins began his career as an author writing for Conde McGinley’s antisemitic newspaper Common Sense,[12] which promoted the second edition of his book on the Federal Reserve, entitled The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (1954). Around this time, he also wrote for Lyrl Clark Van Hyning's Chicago-based newsletter, Women's Voice. He was a member of the National Renaissance Party[13] and wrote for its journal, The National Renaissance.[14] In the 1990s and 2000s, he wrote for Criminal Politics.[15][16] Mullins was on the editorial staff of the American Free Press and became a contributing editor to the Barnes Review, both published by Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby.[17]

Mullins lived in Staunton, Virginia, in the house at 126 Madison Place[18] where he grew up, from the mid-1970s through the end of his life.[19]

Writings
The Secrets of the Federal Reserve
In the late 1940s, when the poet Ezra Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital on treason charges against the US, he corresponded with Mullins. In their correspondence, Mullins exclaimed "THE JEWS ARE BETRAYING US", in a letter written on Aryan League of America stationery. The two became friends, and Mullins often visited the poet while he was detained.[20] In his "Foreword" to The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Mullins explains the circumstances by which he came to write his investigation into the origins of the Federal Reserve System: "In 1949, while I was visiting Ezra Pound… [he] asked me if I had ever heard of the Federal Reserve System. I replied that I had not, as of the age of 25. He then showed me a ten-dollar bill marked "Federal Reserve Note" and asked me if I would do some research at the Library of Congress on the Federal Reserve System, which had issued this bill."[20]

Mullins told Pound that he had little interest in such a research project because he was working on a novel. "My initial research," wrote Mullins, "revealed evidence of an international banking group which had secretly planned the writing of the Federal Reserve Act and Congress’s enactment of the plan into law. These findings confirmed what Pound had long suspected. He said, 'You must work on it as a detective story.'"[20]

Mullins completed the manuscript during the course of 1950 when he began to seek a publisher. Eighteen publishers turned the book down without comment before the President of the Devin-Adair Publishing Company, Devin Garrity, told him, "I like your book, but we can't print it ... Neither can anybody else in New York. You may as well forget about getting [it] published."[20]

In 1952, the book was finally published by two of Pound's other disciples, John Kasper and David Horton, under the title Mullins on the Federal Reserve. In it, Mullins postulated a conspiracy among Paul Warburg, Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson, J.P. Morgan, Benjamin Strong, Otto Kahn, the Rockefeller family, the Rothschild family, and other European and American bankers that led to the founding of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. He argued that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 defies Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 of the United States Constitution by creating a "central bank of issue" for the United States. Mullins went on to claim that World War I, the Agricultural Depression of 1920, and the Great Depression of 1929 were brought about by international banking interests to profit from conflict and economic instability. Mullins also cited Thomas Jefferson's staunch opposition to the establishment of a central bank in the United States.

In an updated edition published in 1983 and retitled Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Mullins argued that Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and the House of Morgan were fronts for the Rothschilds. He asserted that financial interests connected to the J. Henry Schroder Company and the Dulles brothers financed Adolf Hitler (in contrast to Pound's declaration that Hitler was a sovereign who disdained international finance. [21] He called the Rothschilds "world monopolists" and claimed that City of London bankers owned the Federal Reserve, since they owned much of the stock of its member banks. He attempted to trace stock ownership, as it changed hands via mergers and acquisitions, from the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913 to the early 1980s.[22]

In the last chapter of the book, he noted various Congressional investigations and criticized the immense degree of power possessed by these few banks that owned majority shares in the Federal Reserve. He also criticized the Bilderberg Group, attacking it as an international consortium produced by the Rockefeller-Rothschild alliance. In an appendix to the book, he delved further into the City of London and criticized the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which he claimed helps to conduct psychological warfare on the citizens of Britain and the United States.

Mullins dedicated Secrets of the Federal Reserve to George Stimpson and Ezra Pound. It became his best-known book,[23] and remains broadly influential in American far-right movements.[24] A copy was reportedly found in Osama bin Laden's library at his compound in Abbottabad, along with Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier, another right-wing conspiracy theorist.[25]

Hitler and the Holocaust
Mullins' October 1952 article entitled "Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation" was mentioned in a report by the House Un-American Activities Committee.[26] In it, he espoused antisemitic views and expressed the belief that America owed a debt to Hitler.[27] The article first appeared in The National Renaissance, the journal of the National Renaissance Party.[14]

In a tract from 1984 called The Secret Holocaust, Mullins stated that the accepted account of the Holocaust is implausible, calling it a cover story for Jewish-led Soviet massacres of Christians and anti-communists.[28] In particular, Mullins argues that by the mid-1960s, to divert the world's attention away from this putative mass slaughter, "the Jews" had cooked up the story of the Holocaust, using "photographs of the bodies of their German victims, which are exhibited today in gruesome 'museums' in Germany as exhibits of dead Jews"[29] as evidence for their claims.[28]

The Biological Jew
In 1968, Mullins authored the tract The Biological Jew, which he claimed was an objective analysis of the forces behind the "decline" of Western culture. He claimed that the main influence that people were overlooking in their analysis of world affairs was "parasitism".[30]

The World Order
Michael Barkun describes Mullins' 1992 work The World Order: Our Secret Rulers as "a more openly anti-Semitic version of the Illuminati theory". He writes:
Like his mentor [Ezra Pound], Mullins sees the world's evil as a product of financial manipulation, in which Jews play a central role. But as an explanation of the world, as opposed to modern history, his conspiracist vision makes the Illuminati merely a link in a much longer chain that extends back to the ancient Near East and forward to the nascent communist movement of the early Marx. Weishaupt himself is portrayed as a mere figurehead… Mullins sees the Illuminati as really run by Jews…".[31]

Political activities
Mullins was involved with several extremist right-wing and neofascist groups from the early 1950s through the 1990s.[32] These included the National Association for the Advancement of White People and James H. Madole's[14] organization, the National Renaissance Party (NRP).[33] In the early 1950s, Mullins regularly[33] spoke in public at NRP demonstrations.[14] His then-roommate was Matt Koehl, later the leader of the American Nazi Party, but at that time head of the NRP's "Security Echelon Guard."[14]

In the late 1950s, Mullins also collaborated with "scientific racist" Robert Kuttner, an associate editor of Charles Lee Smith's magazine, The Truth Seeker, in theorizing Kuttner's ideas on white supremacy. They cofounded the Institute for Biopolitics in 1958 to popularize Kuttner's theories and their precursors in the work of Morley Roberts.[33]

By the mid-1990s, Mullins was "considered a national leader" in the constitutional militia movement.[34] He spoke regularly to militia groups across the United States during this time.[24] The Secrets of the Federal Reserve provided, in part, the theoretical underpinning of the movement's conspiracy theories about a secretive cabal of wealthy families controlling the international monetary system.[35]

Death
While on a speaking tour in Columbus, Ohio, in January 2010, Mullins suffered a stroke. He died on February 2, 2010, aged 86, in Hockley, Texas.[36]
Works

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