Month: November 2024

By Wilson Beaver of Heritage.org

Earlier this year, Hanwha Ocean Company bought Philly Shipyard for $100 million. Though it was met with little fanfare from the public at the time, the investment was a big deal in the Navy.

It came after requests from American defense experts and government officials for shipbuilders from allied countries to invest into the worn down, depleted, and inefficient mess that is the US shipbuilding industry. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro even called the deal, “a game-changing milestone” for America’s “Maritime Statecraft.”

Now, the new partnership is paying dividends, for Hanwha, Philadelphia, and the United States. In late August, Hanwha secured an annual Navy maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) contract. That contract and the new work at Philly Shipyard will go a long ways towards fixing the Navy’s current maintenance backlog, which is currently contributing to both shipbuilding delays and cost overruns.

According to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report, the Navy’s current maintenance backlog amounted to $1.8 billion. This inefficiency has a major impact on America’s combat readiness has contributed to the Navy’s decision to decommission 9 ships before their expected service life.

Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse under the Biden-Harris administration. Misguided spending priorities and a lack of urgency have set back America’s ability to keep up with and deter China, which is the world’s largest Navy numerically and whose fleet is still growing fast.

Hanwha could help turn the tide in that fight, though. With the purchase of the Philly Shipyard, it is now positioned to compete for contracts for building new ships, which could be an enormous windfall not only for Philadelphia workers, but also our naval power.

Specifically, the Philly Shipyard is well positioned to compete for contracts to construct Constellation-class frigates. Currently, these ships are only being built at Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, with the first ship set to set sail in 2029 following production delay. But Navy leadership has already called for an increase in the construction of new missile-guided frigates, and the Philly Shipyard is now well-positioned to compete for building these additional frigates.

The new investment in the Philly Shipyard is a refreshing step in the right direction. It is also a reminder that our efforts to reshore industry and rebuild our defense industrial base will benefit American workers first and foremost, like the new workers who will need to be hired as Philly Shipyards expands.

If we want to win, however, we need to build on this positive momentum. Policymakers should work to create maritime prosperity zones, implement programs to solve labor shortages, and cut down on overregulation in order continue to promote further investments in and expansion of our naval infrastructure, especially at Philly Shipyards.

As our Navy works to meet the challenges of tomorrow, Hanwha’s new investment means Philadelphia will be playing a leading role in the fight. By fixing the maintenance glut and building new ships, Philly Shipyard will be vital to preserving the security of the American people.

Why? Because the first battle of the next great power competition will not take place in the far-off seas of the Pacific; it will be fought in places like Philly Shipyard on the Delaware as we set out to defeat our own deficiencies. And this is a battle we can’t afford to lose.

According to RealClearPolitics, the current US Presidential polling averages have Trump at 48.5% and Harris at 48.5%, literally a tie.

On this measure the two candidates have been within two percentage points of each other since mid-August. So in terms of the popular vote, this is officially the closest election on record.

Today’s Chart of the Day from DB’s Henry Allen (available to pro subscribers in the usual place), looks at the gap between the candidate declared President and the runner up in percentage terms in every election since 1868 after the US Civil War.

Those in red mark the times where the eventual President didn’t win the popular vote. Allen has also annotated all those with less than a 3 percentage point differential.

There have been six elections with less than a percentage point between the candidates.

1. 1880 Garfield beat Hancock by 0.1pp
2. 1884 Cleveland beat Blaine by 0.5pp
3. 1888 Harrison was elected although he lost the popular vote to Cleveland by -0.8pp
4. 1960 Kennedy beat Nixon by 0.2pp
5. 1968 Nixon beat Humphrey by 0.7pp
6. 2000 Bush won even though he lost the popular vote to Gore by -0.5pp. See Henry Allen’s piece here this morning that looked at the market reaction after each election since and including this contested one.

So if current polls are correct then this could be the closest of any US election in popular vote terms. Of course in reality, polls are subject to a margin of error, so you’d expect some variation, but one thing is certain: in just a few days, the avalanche of lawsuits will begin.

Literally the worst case scenario for the country. Why? The 2020 census was wrong, as the Census Bureau has admitted…and it gave extra electoral college votes to blue states. If they’d done it right, Trump would win WITHOUT any of the blue wall states. Get ready for lawsuits. https://t.co/hJR1tiwUGB

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 4, 2024

Shortly we will publish a comprehensive Election Day guide, providing a comprehensive overview of the “swing states” that will decide the election, a list of bellwether counties to pay attention to within those states, as well as a precise recap of the time line for vote reporting and media projections of the winner in 2020.

It will also cover the rules for challenging the voting results in the swing states as well as rule changes at the federal level adopted in the wake of the last election.

Finally, we caution that while a winner is likely to be declared in MI, AZ, WI and NV within the first 24 hours of the polls closing on Tuesday, PA and GA are likely to take longer to assess – potentially 3-4 days or longer if there are recounts.

So if it is close, stand by for a long few days/weeks/months.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

Who actually are the “garbage” people?

Are they one and the same with Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “chumps,” and “dregs of society?”

Or Barack Obama’s “clingers?”

Do they include Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables?”

Are they FBI grandee Peter Strzok’s Walmart shoppers who “smell?”

Over the last decade-and-a-half, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Harris-Walz, and a host of other self-described elites have variously invented a wide range of smears and slurs—but about whom exactly?

Who are these people that leftwing politicians have so vehemently derided—and why?

They include Trump supporters, of course, or what Biden also dubbed “ultra-MAGAs” and Tim Walz called “fascists,” now without the prior qualifying prefix “semi.”

In general, these adjectives of disdain denote about half the country according to the results of what will soon be the last three presidential elections.

This half is more rural than urban, characterized by larger than smaller families, more high-schooled diplomaed than college degreed, and more conventional and traditional than vanguard and trend-setting.

Statisticians tell us that the new non-clinging Democratic Party finds its greatest support from those who earn less than $50,000 and those who make considerably more than $100,000. These are the rich/poor bookends that surround the reformed Republican party in between.

So, in terms of generalized income and earnings, the left is now the party of the well-to-do professional and credential class and the rich, along with the subsidized poor. The Republicans, by contrast, are increasingly represented by the middle classes.

The Democratic top dogs are most likely to embrace agendas that never garner 51 percent of public support—vast reductions in gas and oil to lessen “climate change,” open borders to welcome in the world’s needy, the government promotion of a third, transgendered sex, abortion on demand without restrictions, the reifications of various critical (race/legal/penal/modern monetary) “theories,” and radical changes in the current system (ending the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, the 50-state union, etc.).

Two truisms stand out about the elite boutique agenda: one, when these theories are implemented – often by the courts, and the permanent and unelected administrative and bureaucratic state – the architects of such experimentation do not really feel the inevitable deleterious consequences.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Silicon Valley masters of the universe, the professors of law, the corporate CEOs, and the Bill Gates of the world really don’t care much whether gas is at $3 a gallon or $6, or Romex wire is $39 a spool or $150.

Illegal aliens do not go to their children’s schools or crowd the offices of their concierge cardiologists and oncologists, much less dump trash on their streets and curbs.

They are strong supporters of teachers’ unions, despising the very idea of charter schools and homeschooling. And yet they send their children more often to private schools where students are not the lab rats of the public school system.

Their ideology is the fruit of their privilege and so is often more utopian and abstract. Given that if it results in economic, social, and cultural damage to millions, they will certainly avoid the ensuing flotsam and jetsam.

The fallout from defunding the police falls upon the inner city, not the privately patrolled Presidio Heights or the secluded sorts in Martha’s Vineyard.

Given their income and status, the new Democratic credentialed and moneyed classes do not care about the struggle of others to live one more day, clinging to the middle-class vestiges of their parents’ era. Instead, for the anointed who have transcended the fear of not filling up their tank or coming up short on monthly rent and power bills, it is not hard to mandate job-killing EVs or to chuckle over biological boys in girls’ locker rooms and pride flags flying from the abandoned American embassy in Kabul.

By the same token, the poor count on the left’s largesse to cushion themselves from the damage of their own party’s dreams turned into nightmares. Various food, housing, medical, legal, and educational subsidies to the poor are testaments that the left’s own agendas stagnant upward mobility and confine the poor to permanent poverty.

In a cynical sense, left-wing elites square the circle of the guilt over their privilege through government subsidies for those whom they’d rather not necessarily live next to or have their children attend school with. In other words, they find them useful rather than empathetic. They welcome in millions of illegal aliens—as long as they don’t camp out at Yale, the Hamptons, or Malibu Beach.

Not so the struggling middle classes. Modern theories can result in hyperinflation that can ruin them or easily send them into the ranks of the government-subsidized poor. They are conservative in wanting a secure border, legal-only immigration, affordable food and energy, safe streets, and equality of opportunity rather than of result, because they have no margin of error, lacking the wherewithal of secure home zip codes, or the perks of gargantuan grocery bills at Whole Foods, or a new foreign car every two years.

Such conservatism is reflected in the worldview of the clingers and irredeemables. They accept not cosmopolitism but 2,500 years of nationhood that remind them there can be no nation without borders.

There can be no modern comforts and security without access to affordable food and energy. There can be no public society without safe streets—and indeed, not even public places without sanitation and common decency.

So, the great middle class is wary about falling at the hands of others into government dependency and even more fearful of destroying what has worked over the ages. They resist experimenting with the unknown, especially when thought up and designed by those who will easily ride out the ensuing disasters when such harebrained schemes inevitably fail.

These chumps, fascists, and garbage people know that their advantages in numbers are outweighed by the Eloi’s absorption of institutional and government power. So, in depression, they often shrug and drop out. They assume wisely that the network news, the New York Times and Washington Post, Hollywood, and the corporate boardroom are mere extensions of the utopian and cultural left, who despise them for ignoring their supposed betters.

They pass on watching the Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, and Grammys. They are deaf to the top-down sermons from an Al Gore, John Kerry, the Clintons, the Obamas, or Joe Biden, which assume the grubby majority is either too ignorant or amoral or both to know what is good for them and so must be shamed, smeared, and slurred rather than won over by argumentations and persuasion. Is not the 2024 election about just that—the haughty who sermonize and those weary of being lectured?

The dregs could care less who is president of Harvard or how many letters and titles follow a professional’s name—except to confirm to themselves when watching or hearing such people that our elites increasingly have neither common sense nor integrity. A high school history teacher could have answered congressional questioning on race, anti-Semitism, and bias far more effectively and adroitly than a deer-in-the-headlights, clueless Harvard president Claudine Gay.

Yes, the semi-fascists are lectured that they are racist, sexist, and xenophobic. They are damned by the credentialed as “white privileged” who “rage,” as they dutifully go off to Iraq and Afghanistan to die in combat at double their numbers in our demographics.

They are advised of their toxic illiberality and bigotry, even as their children lack the race, gender, and ethnicity advantage accorded to the so-called Other and the inside edge that money, influence, and status provide for the elite.

What has recently brought this great divide to a head and exposed the fury of the elite is resurgent anger at the newfound impudence of the deplorable class, or the notion that they would dare call the dishonest media the “fake news” or suggest that “fit-as-fiddle,” “smart-as-a-tack,” cognitively challenged Joe Biden is the proverbial emperor with no clothes.

Who are these arrogant who pack the 20,000 seats of Madison Square Garden even after the good people have warned that they were mindlessly reenacting Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will?

The left believes that either racial victimization or money should guarantee privilege and so despises those qualifying for neither. In the elite’s view, the working class so often lacks the romance of the poor and non-white, but worse still, the culture and pretensions of the progressive Übermenschen.

Finally, the unspoken irony of this divide is that the self-professed elite know that they are not the elite by any definable standard or meritocracy. Yale gives a higher percentage of A’s on spec to its students than do trade schools and junior colleges.

Today’s supposedly brilliant Columbia student would likely struggle to earn an objectively graded C on a state college’s standardized, multi-choice history exam.

Those who run the Washington Post or NPR are less competent, worldly, and knowledgeable than the chumpy and dregsy sexagenarian who publishes a small town’s weekly newspaper.

The average salesman and electrician can far better spot fraud and deceit than an Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak. And the tractor driver is more likely not to lie under oath than a John Brennan, James Clapper, or Andrew McCabe. The lineman working with high voltage is far more likely to err on the side of safety with the lives of others than the executives of Pfizer or Moderna.

In a wider sense, the deplorable class believes it can still build reliable pipelines, frack, truck our nation’s goods, and clean up after a hurricane. But it has utterly lost confidence that the best and the brightest at the Pentagon can win a war, at Boeing can craft a safe jet, or at NASA can send astronauts safely into space and back in the fashion of their grandfathers more than half a century ago.

This election is about many things—left/right issues, of course, and the peculiar personalities of Trump and Harris perhaps.

But it will likely be defined by those who are not just tired of being smeared as the underbelly of America but, far more unforgivably, are beginning to enjoy and mock the disparagement from those who have never earned the right to smear anyone but themselves.

As if there weren’t enough problems in academia right now, an assistant professor at the University of Miami’s medical school has just been charged with trafficking a date rape drug, according to the NY Post.

On Friday, Dr. Dairon Garcia was charged with trafficking the drug. Authorities say they connected him to a package intercepted at Miami International Airport containing 15 pounds of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.

Miami-Dade Judge Mindy Glazer said at the arraignment: “He should be so embarrassed being here. He’s a medical doctor, going through all those years of education and committing his life to helping people and to get arrested for this.

She added: “That’s between you, your lawyer and the criminal justice system. Good luck to you, sir.”

The NY Post article says that Garcia, an assistant professor of clinical radiology at the UM Miller School of Medicine, is facing charges linked to a package from Paris addressed to his rental property, intercepted by customs at Miami Airport on Aug. 29.

Miami police, alerted by Homeland Security, monitored the address as the package was delivered on Sept. 12 and collected by a woman. After a search, her daughter reported Garcia had informed them of the delivery, asking them to accept it.

Another tenant reported receiving a separate package for Garcia on Sept. 7, and customs intercepted yet another on Sept. 25, addressed to his registered company, DG Diagnostics MD LLC, the report says. 

He pleaded not guilty at Friday’s arraignment, was held on $15,000 bail, and posted it that evening.

The DEA says gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), often called “grievous bodily harm” or “coma in a bottle,” is colorless and can be slipped into drinks, causing sedation without the victim’s knowledge.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“Most people do not get a clear opportunity to vote against Communism and prevent a historical evil from taking hold. We have that opportunity. Vote Trump.”

– James Lindsay

You thought Halloween was over, but somehow the horror show won’t stop, and it’s not so much fun anymore.

Those oversized ghouls, werewolves, and dead souls you erected in the front yard, like shrines to wickedness, represent something truly roiling and moiling around the zeitgeist of this troubled land: the ruling Party of Chaos.

Look at what they have done to you and what they are still doing. Hoaxing you, sucking the life-blood out of you, and lying about everything. Wrecking the country.

Why does it seem that the Democratic Party is in it solely to remain in power?

I will tell you: because it controls the money-flows to the vast cadres of a vicious parasitical bureaucracy and its support system of outside orgs that commit crimes and make war on the rest of us.

It’s called “the blob” for a reason. It’s exactly like that monster out of the 1950s horror movies, a shape-shifting leviathan that devours everything in its path with only one purpose, to grow ever larger until it consumes. . . everything.

In my state of New York last week, the DEC authorities sent a swat team to seize a man and woman’s pet squirrel and raccoon and then killed the animals. Why? Because they could. How is that different from the DOJ swatting and seizing a grandmother for walking through the US capitol building and then stuffing her in prison for the rest of her natural life on misdemeanor charges? It’s not different. They are both demonstrations of deliberate cruelty — and that’s why the squirrel story resonated so widely around the country. You know exactly what it says: we can take whatever is dear to you. . . your pets. . . your livelihood. . . your freedom. . . your life.

Who failed to notice that candidate Kamala Harris was unable to articulate any coherent notion about how her government might manage its business beyond some empty nostrums about “joy,” and “turning the page?” Because the party’s actual purpose, which it hides and lies about, is just to push you around, tell you what to do and what to think, and to punish you if you don’t comply — in other words, to exercise despotic power. It can’t do anything else with that power.

It lacks the competence to manage an economy from the top down, and it certainly won’t allow the countless volitional transactions of people at liberty to produce and sell things of value on their own. It will go to war against anything to steal more money: some pitiful foreign kleptocracy of country. . . the liberty-minded people of our own country. . . against sound ideas, proven principles, standards of decency, and, not unusually, against reality itself.

And now you and I face the ordeal of an election that, by design, will be nearly impossible to audit, will remain inconclusive for weeks, and subject to endless dispute. Why, because it serves the purpose of the Party of Chaos, which is. . . chaos! The scheme was to introduce so many devices of uncertainty as to guarantee political paralysis. Why else would you use batteries of hugely expensive computerized vote-counting machines that can be easily hacked, untraceable mail-in ballots with no chains of custody, the automatic registration of non-citizens, and laws (as in California) to literally forbid the requirement of voter-ID?

This was the work of lawfare terrorist Marc Elias — with hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, some from the government itself, a bunch from the party, and some from rogue billionaires such as George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, and then disbursed surreptitiously through hundreds of NGOs — to elect officials such as Secretaries of State and district attorneys who will ignore or bend the law, to pay off state legislators around the country to change voting rules, to hire brigades of ballot “harvesters,” and to file ruinous lawsuits against anyone who objects to these pranks. It is an enormous, dastardly machine designed to deprive you of your consent to be governed. It is the work of political psychopaths.

You’ve no doubt heard about one of the blob’s instrumental players, Rep. Jamie Raskin’s audacious plan to un-do the election, should Donald Trump happen to generate a landslide vote that overwhelms Marc Elias’s ballot-box-stuffing operation. The Raskin scheme is to disqualify Mr. Trump as an “insurrectionist” by an act of Congress before the January 6 certification ceremony. Of course, that would suppose a Democratic majority in Congress, which is unlikely to be the case.

But Mr. Raskin put his foot in his mouth so deeply that he nearly choked to death last week when, discussing election matters with entertainer Bill Maher on TV, Mr. Raskin stated that he would accept the results only of a free and fair election – with himself left to determine whether it was free and fair.

This, you understand, is exactly what he accuses Donald Trump of doing in 2020: thinking-and-saying that the election might not have been free and fair.

The problem for Mr. Raskin is that this sort of “election denial” he exhibits is exactly the basis for accusing Mr. Trump of “insurrection” in the first place.

Thus: Mr. Raskin has just made a potential “insurrectionist” of himself. What’s more, as if the Jack Smith Case in Judge Chutkan’s DC court was not already compromised enough by the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can now call Jamie Raskin as a witness in the case, play the video of his remarks to Bill Maher, and ask him how expressing doubt about the freeness or fairness of an election amounts to “insurrection.”

One way or another, looks like we’re in for a hard, anxious winter.

Threats galore loom concerning possible blob / Party of Chaos mischief ahead, designed to disorder our national life: false flags prompting the imposition of martial law. . . aggressive censorship and cancellation of free-speaking regime opponents. . . deployment of Antifa mobs against civil order, with violence, looting, arson.

This symbiotic enemy of the people is desperate to evade accountability for the crimes they’ve already committed as officials running institutions: abuse of power, conspiracy to deprive many citizens of their civil rights, perhaps even treason. They’re capable of anything. They must be defeated.

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

The insane neo-Keynesian policies implemented by the Biden-Harris administration have created persistent inflation and record levels of debt with two objectives: to bloat Gross Domestic Product and jobs with public spending and government jobs.

The United States’ insane inflation is solely due to out-of-control spending and currency printing. Corporations, wars, or supply chains cannot cause aggregate prices to rise, nor can they consolidate the increase even at a slower pace. Although this can have an impact on individual prices, the only factor that causes aggregate prices to rise year after year is the decline in the value of the US dollar that the government issues.

Over 20.5% accumulated inflation over the past four years, government deficit spending has reached nearly $2 trillion annually despite record tax receipts and a growing economy, public debt has reached almost $36 trillion, and the monthly job figure includes an astonishing 43,000 new government jobs each month. In 2023, nearly 25% of all job gains were government ones, and the entirety of the growth of the labor force in the past four years came from foreign workers. The latest jobs figure is so poor it seems disingenuous to blame it on hurricanes and strikes, as if economists and forecasters had not considered those two factors in their estimates. Furthermore, the only factor that continued to increase uncontrollably was the number of government jobs, adding 40,000 new positions to an overall total of just 12,000 jobs. No wonder the labor participation rate and employment-to-population ratios remain below 2019 levels. Furthermore, in the latest GDP figure, government spending accounted for 30% of the annualized growth, while investment was basically stagnant. In the past nine quarters, government spending has been one of the top drivers of GDP growth, and its contribution to GDP in the third quarter of 2024 was the largest in a year.

This is upside-down economics in full swing. Private sector investment weakness, higher taxes for the productive economy and government spending and debt driving the economy. Of course, this never ends well.

The Harris-Biden administration arrived in January 2021, when the economy was bouncing back strongly. Instead of allowing the private sector to thrive, it embarked on a strategy of out-of-control spending and tax increases with two objectives: increase the size of government in the economy so much that the next administration would be unable to reduce it enough in four years. The second objective was to bloat growth and job figures so aggressively that the next administration will see a recession if it reduces public sector growth. You may ask yourself why they would do it if Harris intended to win the elections. If Kamala Harris wins, she will continue to expand the size of government, inflate prices through spending and printing, and blame companies and stores for these actions.

The Biden-Harris administration has left a massive time bomb for Trump and Elon Musk’s government efficiency office if they win. It will be almost impossible to avoid a recession if they cut discretionary spending and eliminate duplicate jobs. It is the same strategy that the socialists followed in Greece, Spain, and France, by the way.

However, the socialist strategy may backfire. The evidence is that citizens do not value Biden’s policies and the state of the economy. The approval rate regarding the economy is atrociously low, 39.8%, according to RCP. United States citizens do not believe that they are better off than in January 2021. Inflation, immigration, and rising taxes have crippled small businesses and families. Furthermore, a strong pro-growth strategy and lower taxes will likely boost the dormant investment figure, create jobs in the private sector, and help small businesses achieve critical mass and grow. In Argentina, Milei recognized the necessary actions and cautioned the citizens about the inevitable reduction of the bloated state. The Kirchner socialists left a more significant time bomb legacy than what Trump might inherit. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Lower inflation led to lower taxation, an eight-month budget surplus, and rapidly improving public finances.

The biggest risk for the United States economy and the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is out-of-control public spending and constant currency printing added to tax hikes. Healing public finances and reducing government jobs may have a temporary negative impact on GDP, but higher exports, investment, and private sector jobs will likely compensate for it, and the result will be better for the US dollar and American citizens.

More government is always poorer citizens. The potential of the United States economy’s private sector is much greater than the short-term negative impact of efficiency and budget control on headline GDP.

Authored by Egon von Greyerz via VonGreyerz.gold,

There is a fine line between happiness and misery, as Dickens describes in David Copperfield. Copperfield’s landlord, Mr Micawber, was just on the wrong side of happiness by six pence. 

In a recent article called THE END OF THE US ECONOMIC AND MILITARY EMPIRE AND THE RISE OF GOLD, I stated: “Unsustainable deficits and galloping debt levels, combined with a crumbling military, are the perfect recipe for the end of an Empire.”

So, we are obviously not talking about a six-pence deficit in the case of the virtually bankrupt US empire but instead about a debt that is growing exponentially, now by several trillions of dollars annually.

History doesn’t just rhyme, but it repeats itself over and over and over again. 

Let’s just look at the final stages of a debt crisis. 

The table below shows the disastrous result of irresponsible governments during the last 54 years.

Governments never tell their people that they consistently destroy the value of the people’s money. 

In 1971, when Nixon took away the dollar’s gold backing, he said: “YOUR DOLLAR WILL BE WORTH AS MUCH TOMORROW”.

If Tricky Dick was still alive today, he can, of course, argue that he didn’t lie.

Because a dollar today is still worth a dollar, he would argue. But he wouldn’t tell anyone that the dollar 53 years later has lost 99% of its purchasing power.

Gold is up 78X since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. The next phase will be acceleration.

As I explain in this article, gold will rise by multiples in the coming years (obviously with corrections).

The Roman emperors who ruled the Roman Empire from 190 to 290 AD could argue the same, although the Denarius silver coin went from almost 100% silver content to zero. 

The same was true for Friedrich Ebert, the president of the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s. He would have argued that a Mark is always a Mark, even when it has lost 100% of its purchasing power. 

But gold doesn’t lie. Measured in real money, an ounce of gold in 1923, was worth 87 trillion Marks.

Until a currency totally dies in a hyperinflationary collapse, the deceit of the leaders is never revealed to public.

But we must never forget what Voltaire said in 1729 – “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – ZERO.”

When have we ever heard of a leader telling us that we must protect ourselves against the fraudulent destruction of our wealth by constantly debasing the value of money?

As Alan Greenspan said in 1967:

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value…The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

Have a look at the tables above again.

These are but a few examples of thousands of currencies having been destroyed throughout history.

Governments create inflation by printing money and by allowing the financial system to create unlimited amounts of credit in the fractional reserve banking system. 

In short, it means that banks and other financial institutions receive a deposit of, say, $100 and can lend 10 to 50X or $1,000 to $5,000 against that. Add derivatives, which allows the system to create trillions of dollars out of thin air. 

This immoral and totally undisciplined financial model doesn’t just create unlimited leverage for financial players, whether they do it in banks, hedge funds, private equity, or any part of the shadow banking system. 

This is how the total global debt of $350 trillion probably is in the quadrillions of dollars if we include all these creative “financial weapons of mass destruction”, as Warren Buffett called them. See the debt pyramid below.

Until now, conventional investment assets like stocks and property have been excellent \protection as they have gone up substantially as a result of the constant growth of credit and money supply.

So, this massive liquidity injection has created colossal paper fortunes for most investors.

WHEN WILL IT END

That party is now coming to an end. Valuations of these bubble assets are now at perilous levels. History tells us that manias always end badly. 

But history doesn’t tell us when they will end. Will it be tomorrow, in six months or several years? 

So, can we forecast the end?

Well, the most exact of all sciences is hindsight. With the benefit of this very accurate method, many people will tell us afterwards that the crash was bound to happen. 

Sadly, no one realises that this time, dip buying will fail. Still, investors will buy dip after dip until they are exhausted. So when the market has fallen further than anyone expects most investors will sit tight based on greed and FOMO (fear of missing out). And just at that point, the biggest wealth destruction in history will take place. 

Very few will think of alternative investments like gold to preserve wealth until it is too late.

And at that point, gold will have gone up so much in value with very few participating. Everyone will find gold too expensive. Very few will realise that gold isn’t going up, but paper money is down.

A FASCINATING JOURNEY LEADING TO A POT OF GOLD

I was born in Sweden and have dual Swedish / Swiss citizenship. I started my career in banking in Switzerland and then in corporate life in the UK. 

In 1972, I was offered a job by a bank client, a small listed retail company called Dixons. I became Finance Director in 1974 at the age of 29. I was thereafter appointed Vice-Chairman. 

We made the company to be the biggest electric and consumer electronic retailer in the UK and a FTSE 100 company. 

It was an incredibly stimulating time building a dynamic business both organically and by acquisition. As business leaders we experienced adversity as a positive challenge. We sold electrical goods including televisions by candle light in 1974 when there was only electricity for 3 days per week due to a major coal miners’ strike. And we grew by contested takeovers of companies much bigger than ourselves.

Corporate life in a dynamic business is extremely exciting. But since I started that career in my late 20s, I felt it was time to do my own thing in my early 40s. 

So, in the 1990s, I started investing my own funds as well as the capital of some wealthy friends. 

I have always been interested in understanding risk and protecting the downside, both in banking and in corporate life. 

In the 90s I started to be concerned about the growth of debt and derivatives. So I was looking at the best ways of preserving wealth. 

Having experienced Nixon closing the gold window and the subsequent 24X growth of the gold price from $35 in 1971 to $850 in 1980, I had always been fascinated by gold. 

Seeing debt and especially derivatives growing with no shackles and especially tech stocks becoming a massive bubble in the late 1990s, I was convinced that gold par excellence was the best asset to preserve wealth.

Having experienced gold go from $35 in 1971 and then correct from $850 in 1980 to $250 in 1999, I was closely watching the gold price for confirmation of a bottom. So in early 2002 we invested heavily into physical gold at $300 for ourselves and a group of co-investors that we were advising. 

We haven’t looked back since and only increased our investment in gold over the years. Since we had created a superb system for buying and storing physical gold based on our stringent wealth preservation principles, people around the world started to ask for help.  That led to the creation of Matterhorn Asset Management / GoldSwitzerland. The name was changed at the beginning of this year to VON GREYERZ AG. 

Today we have clients in over 90 countries and are probably the biggest company in the world outside the banking system for HNWIs acquiring and storing gold. 

We have been actively involved in gold for soon a quarter of a century and experienced almost 10X growth in the gold price since we started the business. 

Still, we believe that the gold journey is only starting now.

Why, you may ask. 

Well, gold is the best-performing asset class in this century, better than the S&P including reinvested dividends and still NOBODY OWNS GOLD.

Only 0.5% of global financial assets are invested in gold. 

It is totally incomprehensible that gold has gone up 9.5X. This century, investors are not even looking at it. 

So why is gold still so unloved?

Gold held in the investor’s name in safe vaults and jurisdictions outside the financial system is the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

But asset managers and banks dislike gold since they can’t churn commission with an asset that can’t be turned over at regular intervals. So no commission and no performance fees. Also, very few people understand gold. 

In my view, gold is now ready to explode, measured in paper money. 

I have explained the reason for gold’s coming explosion in many articles, including this recent one.

But remember that gold never goes up. All it does is to reflect governments’ and central banks’ destruction of fiat money.

Gold is just stable purchasing power in a world where goods and services go up exponentially in price because the money you buy it with always goes to ZERO. 

Having said that, I do expect gold to do better than just keeping pace with purchasing power in the next few years.

Again let me make it clear – no paper money has ever, ever, ever survived in history (in its original form). 

With such a perfect record of destroying money, why should we believe that the FED, ECB, BoE (Bank of England) or BoJ (Bank of Japan) or any other central bank will stand a chance to save the global financial system with $2-3 quadrillion of toxic exposure?

Well, I can personally guarantee that they won’t. 

Remember that destroying the value of money by printing quadrillions is a technical default, although no central bank will call it that. 

And creating digital money for the central bank is just a technical diversion. 

Debt can never be written off without totally destroying the value of the assets it supports. That is how a balance sheet or double-entry accounting works. 

So, this global financial system will collapse, as they all have. But this is the first time it has been global. 

BRICS countries will also suffer, but not as much as the West. 

The coming era will be commodity-based. Take Russia, for example, with $85 trillion of natural reserves. They will be one of the major winners in the coming commodity era. They also have low debts. 

So, let’s look at the risks.

WAR RISK 

There are today two major wars that could lead to global conflicts and potentially nuclear war. 

The US is directly involved in both conflicts with weapons and money, although US territory is not threatened. The best chance for the world to avoid a global conflict is for Trump to be elected. He has both proven and stated that he will stop the war, especially in Ukraine. Harris will not change the direction of Biden and the neocons, which means a much higher risk of global conflict.

COLLAPSE OF GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM

As outlined above, this collapse is inevitable. The only question is when and to what extent. I strongly believe that most of the BRICS countries will suffer less from the collapse and emerge from it much faster. 

The West, with its massive debt bubble and moral decadence, has already started a major secular decline that could last for centuries.

WEALTH PRESERVATION 

Gold is not the panacea for the problems outlined above. However, history proves that in any period of crisis, gold has always stood as a protector, both financially and for personal safety.

But what is more important than anything else is protecting and helping family and friends. 

Strong family ties and a group of close friends are more important than all gold in the world. 

As Dickens said:

Throughout most of the Ukraine-Russia war, Western officials have suspected Moscow is waging an expanding sabotage campaign targeting arms and defense tech manufacturing facilities in Europe. This has included mysterious alleged arson attacks, for example including the charge that Russia was behind a huge blaze which destroyed a metal factory belonging to defense manufacturer Diehl in Berlin last summer.

But on Monday, curiously one day before the US presidential election, Western security officials have made new bombshell allegations of a Russian plot aimed at bringing down cargo and passenger planes leaving Europe.

Few details have been given on precisely how European security officials were able to quickly link it to “Russian intelligence” – but arrests have been made.

“Western security officials say they believe that two incendiary devices, shipped via DHL, were part of a covert Russian operation that ultimately aimed to start fires aboard cargo or passenger aircraft flying to the U.S. and Canada, as Moscow steps up a sabotage campaign against Washington and its allies,” The Wall Street Journal writes.

The Monday report says that during two incidents in July, electronic devices inside packages actually ignited. This occurred at two separate DHL logistics hubs—in Leipzig, Germany in Birmingham, England.

Poland has arrested four suspects and charged them with terrorism-related crimes, and its National Prosecutor’s Office has alleged the individuals were working on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency.

“The group’s goal was also to test the transfer channel for such parcels, which were ultimately to be sent to the United States of America and Canada,” the Polish prosecutor’s office said.

But the head of Poland’s foreign-intelligence agency, Pawel Szota, went further and strongly insinuated Russia is involved in the plot, and specifically the military-intelligence agency GRU. “I’m not sure the political leaders of Russia are aware of the consequences if one of these packages exploded, causing a mass casualty event,” the provocative statement by Szota said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has countered by saying, “We have never heard any official accusations” of Russian involvement. He followed with: “These are traditional unsubstantiated insinuations from the media.” WSJ further details the following of the alleged plot:

Now investigators and spy agencies in Europe have figured out how the devices—electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance—were made and concluded that they were part of a wider Russian plot, according to security officials and people familiar with the probe.

Security officials say the electric massagers, sent to the U.K. from Lithuania, appear to have been a test run to figure out how to get such incendiary devices aboard planes bound for North America.

But without much in the way of further details released to the public, some serious questions remain…

Given that sometimes electronic devices have been known to malfunction, possibly causing fires—especially devices made with lithium-ion batteries—are investigators certain this wasn’t the result of an accident?

Below: the Executive Director of the hawkish think tank McCain Institute, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia – has said this warrants deeper NATO involvement in supporting Ukraine.

Are authorities assuming the suspects are being run by Russian intelligence due merely to the geopolitical context of the Ukraine war, or have they been able to establish definitive links between the suspects the GRU (or other Russian agencies)? Past cases related to sabotage allegations involving Russian intelligence have proven flimsy at times.

And then there’s the question of motive: never has Russia before been shown to conduct terror tactics focused on bombing and bringing down large civilian airplanes… why would Moscow want to do this now?

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge ruled on Sunday that Iowa election officials may continue to follow Secretary of State Paul Pate’s directive to challenge the ballots of 2,176 registered voters who have been identified as possible noncitizens.

The ruling came as a recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll forecast Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa by three points over former President Donald Trump, while other polling organizations estimate that Trump is still ahead in what has been a safely Republican state in recent years.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa filed a lawsuit on behalf of four naturalized citizens on Oct. 30, alleging that Pate’s directive to check registered voters’ citizenship status violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

On Oct. 22, Pate directed Iowa county auditors to challenge the ballots of voters who had previously identified themselves as noncitizens to the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT).

In its lawsuit, the ACLU argued that Pate’s list of voters whose ballots would be challenged was based on outdated DOT records, and that many of those listed have already been proven to be citizens.

It alleged that the secretary’s directive places “severe burdens” on the voting rights of the affected voters by keeping the list secret, which it said could undermine their ability to resolve their eligibility.

Pate responded that voters will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot instead, which will be counted if they can prove their citizenship.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher declined to grant a preliminary injunction, citing the finding that “some portion” of the registered voter names on Pate’s list have indeed been confirmed to be non-citizens.

“This portion appears to be relatively small—no more than 12 percent—but, still, the injunctive relief requested by Plaintiffs effectively would force local election officials to permit those individuals to vote,” Locher stated in a Nov. 3 ruling.

The plaintiffs had argued that Pate’s directive violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires that states complete any program for removing ineligible voters within 90 days before an election.

However, Locher ruled that the NVRA was not implicated in this case because the state had not removed any voters from the voter rolls, and was only requiring them to cast provisional ballots.

“Secretary Pate’s letter is likely to impose a modest additional burden on at least some voters who should not have to bear that burden. All the same, those voters are still permitted to vote and have their ballots counted. The harm is therefore not irreparable,” the judge stated.

Pate last week had blamed the federal government for blocking his office from meeting the 90-day rule, saying that the audit was delayed to October by a lack of cooperation by the Department of Transport, which did not grant access to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database for confirming citizenship.

In a statement, Pate hailed the court’s ruling as a “win for Iowa’s election integrity,” emphasizing the importance of ensuring that only eligible voters can participate in Iowa’s election process.

He said that his office would continue to seek clarity on the citizenship status of voters who had previously self-reported to be noncitizens, while urging the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office to allow the Iowa field office to release information about those voters.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird stated on X that the ruling ensured that Iowans’ votes will not be canceled out by illegal votes.

“I was glad to lead the fight in court to defend Iowa’s long-standing election integrity laws. Only American citizens can vote in Iowa elections,” she said in a statement.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the ACLU for comment but did not hear back by publication time.

This week’s refunding auctions were surely not on anyone’s list of the most important events over the next five days, and that’s good because moments ago we just concluded the week’s first coupon auction when the Treasury sold $58BN in 3 Year paper in a relatively boring affair.

The auction stopped at a high yield of 4.152%, a 27bps jump from last month’s 3.878%, and the highest since July; the auction tailed the When Issued of 4.143 by 0.9bps, following last month’s 0.7bps tail and the highest since June.

The bid to cover was a modest improvement from last month, rising to 2.60 from 2.45, and above the six-auction average of 2.57.

The internals were also stronger, with Indirects surging to 70.6% from 56.9%, above the six-auction average and one of the highest on record. And with Directs dropping to just 9.6%, the lowest since the covid crisis days of March/April 2020, Dealers were left holding 19.8%, the highest since June.

While the secondary market saw a big drop in yields after Friday’s blowout, the mixed auction was spooky enough – largely due to the tail – to send yields to session highs, rising to 4.325% at last check, up from 4.27% at session lows.

It is possible that the market, always clutching for soundbites, merely noted the auction’s tail and ignored the rest of the otherwise solid auction; if so watch as yields sink lower in the next few minutes as humans override their dumb algo traders.