Blog Archives

The Sound of Shoes Dropping in the Night

10/26/2019

It was interesting to watch the Cable News divas go incandescent under the glare of their own gaslight late yesterday when they received the unpleasant news that the Barr & Durham “review” of RussiaGate had been officially upgraded to a “criminal investigation.” Rachel Maddow’s trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine “…what the thing is that Durham might be looking into.” Yes, that’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, all right… with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it. Welcome to the Wile E. Coyote Lookalike Club, Rache. You’ll have a lot of competition when the Sunday morning news-chat shows rev up.

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The Stereogram

10/26/2019

"The free world has been dunking on LeBron James for more than a week now and it has not gotten old.
Still, something about it has made me uneasy.

Am I uneasy because King James requires some special grace, because I’m worried that we aren’t being full-hearted enough in our criticisms of him? No. Good God, no. Knock yourselves out, y’all. I’m uneasy because once you see clearly the influence the Chinese Communist Party can wield arbitrarily over you and me as citizens of the free world, you see that same power in a million other places. It is like a stereogram, one of those pictures for which our eyes must conquer their natural tendency to coordinate focus and vergence functions to see anything but a series of repetitive dots.

And once you see it, you cannot unsee it."

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"Gold Shining Throught the Darkening Recession Clouds" - In Gold We Trust Chartbook 2019

10/24/2019

Dear clients, friends and colleagues,

We sincerely hope that you are well!

We are proud to announce that our 13th annual "In Gold we Trust" report was very well received and distributed to more than 2 million people. For the first time we also published the report in China, which was obviously an incredible milestone for our report!

Since many of our readers did not have time to read the entire 340+ pages, we decided to put together a compendium of some of the most compelling charts and important conclusions of the report.

Some of the key takeaways of our new chartbook:

Recession risks are significantly higher than discounted by the market. In the event of a downturn, negative nominal interest rates, a new round of QE, and the implementation of even more extreme monetary policy ideas (e.g. MMT) are to be expected.
The breakdown of trust in the international monetary order is manifesting itself in the highest gold purchases by central banks since 1971.
Gold reaffirmed its portfolio position as a good diversifier as trust in the “Everything Bubble” was tested in Q4/2018. While equity markets suffered double-digit percentage losses, gold gained 8.1% in USD and gold mining stocks 13.7% in USD.
De-dollarization is picking up momentum: more and more countries are looking for alternatives to the US dollar, be it trading in other currencies, accumulating reserves of non-US-dollar currencies, or buying gold.
After several years of creative destruction in the sector, most gold miners are now on a much healthier footing. Historically, the sector is extremely undervalued at the moment.

The chartbook can be read and downloaded here:
In Gold We Trust Chartbook 2019 - "Gold Shining Through the Darkening Recession Clouds"

Have a great day and please do not hesitate to contact us if you should have any questions!

Yours truly,
Mark J. Valek & Ronald-Peter Stoeferle

Impeachment Will Fail

10/24/2019

"The Democrats are being led by a coalition of constitutional renegades, political tricksters, and would-be Maduros. They are speeding over a political cliff. The force of gravity will assert itself.

Two elements of the turbulent current American political scene became clearer over the past week. One is the determination, attested to by almost all Washington insiders whatever side they are on, of the Democratic leadership to force an impeachment trial of the president. Also developing, as a further bleat from the vanishing NeverTrumpers, is the theory that large chunks of Republican loyalty in Congress are starting to peel off and desert the president.

Since all polls show Republican opinion in the country is rock solid behind the president and by any normal criteria—the economy, declining illegal immigration, and his delivery on election promises—he will be reelected easily. This, as the egregious U.S. Representative Al Green (D-Texas) says, is the problem: if Trump isn’t impeached, he will be reelected. But impeachment will be a complete failure, and he will be reelected anyway.

The game has escalated. Donald Trump said he would drain the swamp and he has made a greater effort than any president since Andrew Jackson in 1829 to sweep out the governing elites. It was not on a whim that he had that president’s painting hung behind his desk in the Oval Office and visited Jackson’s home, The Hermitage, in Nashville.”

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Elizabeth Warren’s Financial Berlin Wall

10/23/2019

"She proposes to lock in high-earning, highly taxed Americans, penning them in order that they may be shorn and milked as though they were livestock.

Italy calls it la dolce visa.

If you are interested in moving to Italy and you would be bringing a ton of money with you, then the Italian government has an offer that might be appealing to some very high-income expatriates: a maximum flat tax of 100,000 euros per year, irrespective of income, so long as that income is not earned by working a job in Italy. Earn 1 million euros? Pay 100,000. Earn 100 million euros? Pay 100,000. Italy here is making a bid for the sort of affluent taxpayer who might be interested in Switzerland’s “forfait” system, in which noncitizens residing in Switzerland have the option of using their annual housing expenditures rather than their income as their basis of taxation — an attractive option for thrifty billionaires."

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Kyle Bass: "China: The Most Reckless Financial Experiment In History" (Hedgeye Investing Summit)

10/23/2019

This is an exclusive "Hedgeye Investing Summit" interview between Kyle Bass, chief investment officer at Hayman Capital and Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough.

Click here for free access...

Politics Drops Its Pretenses

10/22/2019

Can the increasing politicization of life in America be stopped, or even slowed?

"To be sure, average Americans do not want this. Most people prefer not to lead overly political lives, beyond perhaps voting once in a while and grumbling about taxes or potholes. Most people prefer to focus on work, family, hobbies, sports, or a million other pursuits instead of politics. We watch the game instead of attending the Tuesday night city council meeting. But increasingly we all feel the pressure, drawing us inexorably into a highly-politicized world which demands we take binary "sides" on Trump, impeachment, abortion, guns, climate change, and far more. This politicization seeps into our jobs, family lives, neighborhoods places of worship, social interactions, and even our sports and entertainment."

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Why Do They Hate Him So?

10/21/2019

"Democrats, NeverTrump Republicans, left-liberal celebrities, journalists, and academics all revile Donald Trump because he is trying and often succeeding to restore a conservative America at a time when his opponents thought that the mere idea was not just impossible but unhinged.

But what drives this unprecedented furor, given the economy has reached near-record low peacetime unemployment at 3.5 percent, resulting in millions of inner-city youth and poor being sought after by labor-needy employers? What is so evil about attracting the lower-middle classes to the Republican Party, and shedding its stereotype as a party of the golf links and corporate retreats?”

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When Does It Count as a Coup?

10/21/2019

“Freedom is not our norm. In the history of mankind, and even today, oppression and political corruption are the standard, with the people of more than 90 nations living without the freedom we take for granted in America. Thomas Hobbes was right. Unless we decide, together, to live in peace under a mutually agreed upon and respected social contract, life is invariably nasty, brutish, and short. But the question for us who live in the freest nation today, is at what point would we say—with justification—that we have lost too much of our liberties and that our nation is being stolen from us right now? Would we even realize if there were a concerted attack on our freedoms? Or, like the proverbial frog in hot water, would we only work out what was going on once it was too late?”

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The Dangerous Mix: Big Tech & Social Justice Ideology—Michael Rectenwald | American Thought Leaders

10/15/2019

"Just how did a self-professed communist become one of the most vocal critics of social justice, identity politics, and postmodernism?

This is American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Today we sit down with Dr. Michael Rectenwald, a former professor at New York University and author of “The Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom.”

This book actually shook me to my core.

We discuss Dr. Rectenwald’s vision of how Big Tech, influenced by marxist and postmodernist thought, increasingly enables a toxic mix of censorship, surveillance, social engineering and “social justice” policies that in effect create a digital equivalent of the Soviet Gulag."

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