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Laramie, Wyoming

We have a special treat for you as Holy Week begins today with Palm Sunday. Edward Bonner sent in a letter following a quick trip to Zurich. It’s a deep dive into the energy and precious metals markets. You’ll find that below—along with the rest of the research published this week at BPR.

Enjoy!

Dan

P.S. A few weeks ago I picked up a two volume history of the West, beginning with the ancient world and Christendom (volume one) and followed up with the modern and contemporary world (volume two). It’s a great set called The Golden Thread. It turns out the authors have started a newsletter as well. It’s not financial but well worth your while. You can find it here.

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Sunday, March 15th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

Rome didn’t immediately, or at least formally, become an Empire on this day in 44 BC. But the assassination of Julius Caesar did unleash quite a bit of chaos and civil war. The Lex Titia was passed in 43 BC and created the Second Triumvirate (Octavian, who would later become Augustus, Marc Antony, and Marcus Lepidus). Octavian defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the beginning of the Empire proper is officially dated at 27 BC.

Where does America stand today in the year of its 250th birthday? The end of Empire? The beginning? Or somewhere in the middle of a long decline, salted and peppered with inflation, financial insecurity, and the military in a constant state of war?

History aside, there’s a full slate of macro data scheduled for release in the coming week; the NY Empire State Manufacturing Index, retail sales, and pending home sales. But the big one is Wednesday is the Fed rate cut decision.

Here’s a question: If the oil price is at $150/barrel, could the Fed actually raise rates this week?

We’ll find out soon. In the meantime, please enjoy the summary of all the research we published at BPR this week.

Until tomorrow,

Dan

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Sunday, March 08th, 2026

Denver, Colorado

by Dan Denning

Bull markets become bear markets when liquidity matters more than valuations. It starts to matter more because there is less of it. First a little less. Then suddenly nowhere to be found.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $14 trillion in assets under management. Blocking $1.2 billion in redemptions from one of its private credit funds isn’t a catastrophe. Not yet at least. But we’ve got our eyes on it.

BlackRock, Blue Owl, Blackstone…these are the names in private credit we’re starting to hear more about. These investments promise higher returns to high net worth investors. But the money is illiquid. So what comes next?

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Credit events are like infectious diseases. They are bad enough for those that have them. But when they jump from one carrier to the next, from private markets to public markets, that’s when you get bigger problems.

If the liquidity disease moves from private credit to publicly listed asset managers…and then to banks…and then to insurance companies…well then valuations suddenly matter a lot…and mean reversion (a stock market crash) becomes a real risk in 2026.

But I’m sure it’s ‘contained.’ That’s what Ben Bernanke told us about subprime mortgages in 2007. And it’s not like panic is contagious in financial markets, is it?

Meanwhile, the US war machine is hitting up the private sector to ramp up production of critical minerals and build out the domestic supply chain as quickly as possible. Uncle Sam’s Defense Industrial Base Consortium identified thirteen critical minerals and metals it wants US industry to…secure.

By ‘secure’ I mean, build out quickly a domestic supply chain for mining and processing these elements for the Pentagon. The critical minerals in question are: arsenic, bismuth, gadolinium, germanium, graphite, hafnium, nickel, samarium, tungsten, vanadium, ⁠ytterbium, yttrium and zirconium.

This is all part of ‘Project Vault’, the $12 billion plan to stockpile elements and metals the US depends on the rest of the world for (mostly China and Russia). The Department of War announced a $27 million investment in US Antimony Corporation [UAMY]. Among other things, antimony is alloyed with lead to make bullets harder. I first wrote about UAMY in PM Dawn, just before Christmas last year.

We’ll continue to track this trend at BPR. I may even ask Bill about having the government as an investment partner when I speak with him next week. We’ll be sitting down for our latest quarterly State of the World interview. If you have a question you’d like me to ask Bill, leave in the comments below or send it to bpr@bonnerprivateresearch.com

Until tomorrow,

Dan

P.S. The tariff news got buried by the Iran war last week. But the Congressional Budget Office quietly put out a note this weekend that the Supreme Court ruling would add $2 trillion in deficits over the next ten years ($1.6 trillion in ‘primary’ deficits and $400 billion in interest expense). The US dollar could not be reached for comment. Gold, being an inert metal, also had nothing to say but currently trades $5,181/oz.

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Sunday, March 1st, 2026

Scottsdale, Arizona

By Dan Denning

The oil price quadrupled during the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC oil embargo in 1973-1974. Gold more than doubled in the same time. It got a ‘safe haven’ bid AND an inflation bid during the same time frame (from $64/oz in early 1973 to $195/oz by the end of 1974).

In the second oil crisis of the 1970s, during the Iranian revolution, oil prices doubled again. Gold was already in the end stages of a multi-year bull market. But the last stage was spectacular. It started 1979 at around $216/oz. It finished the year at $512/oz. And then it peaked at $850/oz in January of 1980.

Bad times and good times.

We’ll know later today whether the financial markets think 2026 is more like 1973 or more like 1979. It may be like neither. If the Iranian regime is replaced by something more Persian and less Islamic/theocratic, the oil price could end the year much lower.

And gold? We’ll be watching it all this week, monitoring the situation. Paid subscribers can look for the March Monthly Strategy Report on Wednesday. Until tomorrow!

Dan

P.S. Here’s an interesting question: Are potential IPOs from Anthropic and OpenAI more or less valuable now that the US government seems to have deemed AI ‘critical’ to national security and the war effort? If AI models are now part of America’s ‘Arsenal of Democracy,’ the commercial upside of the technology (whatever it ends up being) may be limited.

Bull market peaks are often accompanied by highly anticipated IPOs. I thought that might be the case with OpenAI and Anthropic both rushing toward public listings this year. But if the US government restricts the development and proliferation of AI models based on national security concerns, the value (and size) of future AI cash flows from these companies is suddenly up in the air.

That’s not good for a stock market that’s been riding the wave of AI hype for four years. And with bond issuance from AI firms on track to hit another record high in 2026, you have all the classic signs of an investment bubble with billions in mis-allocated capital.

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Sunday, February 15th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Do you have a fever for more copper? A few years ago, sitting in the crowd at Rick Rule’s Natural Resource Investment Symposium in Boca Raton, Florida, I had to restrain myself from loading up massively on Freeport-McMoran, an obvious global copper play.

But there are less obvious plays, which several of the speakers at the show mentioned. I’m curious to hear what they’re saying this year. And I’m wondering, given the AI boom and the government pivot to ‘critical minerals,’ if copper might not be this year’s silver. If so, how do we play it?

First up, S&P reckons copper demand will grow by 50% by 2040 to 42 million tonnes a year. Current global supply is around 23 million tonnes. It can take almost two decades to bring a new mine into production (regulations/permitting…and that’s IF you find a good location). And now ‘demand’ is surging with AI, EVs, and the ‘net zero’ move to electrification of everything.

For what it’s worth, I’d expect the demand side to be revised this year. EVs are too expensive in North America and Europe for the market to get much bigger than it already is (where socialist policy makers don’t want people to have cars anyway…and people who buy cars don’t seem to want EVs anymore).

And the ‘net zero’ political and social death cult is running face first into the brick wall of physical reality. Renewables can’t generate reliable base load power (in Spain, they’ve gone so far as to make their entire electric grid unreliable and prone to blackouts). And Germany’s Chancellor Friederich Merz admitted publicly that the Marxist-Green phase out of German nuclear power as ‘a serious strategic mistake.’

But there’s no doubt demand is surging and supply is not. It takes capital to make things happen. And it will take much higher prices (even if demand from EVs and ‘net zero’ is currently overstated). This academic paper suggests that copper prices will have to double from here in order to justify the capital investment needed to bring new mines into production.

You wouldn’t guess any of that from the chart above. That’s Freeport-McMorRan [FCX]. It’s one of the names that came up at Rick’s show a few years ago. It wasn’t doing much of anything in September of last year.

And then there was a tragic accident at the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, where 800,00 tonnes of mud flooded underground operations. The accident, in which seven men lost their life, highlighted how vulnerable global copper supply is on a few big mines and countries (Grasberg accounts for 3% of global copper production each year).

Turns out that was the dip to buy. And that has me wondering if we’ll have a similar opportunity in FCX (or copper in general) later this year. As you may know, investors reverse to copper as ‘Dr Copper’ because its a proxy for the health and strength of the global economy.

If we get a deflationary dip this spring—falling asset prices because of concern that AI is going to devastate wages…or that AI capex has been overdone—that may be our window of opportunity in copper. We’ll stay on the story. In the meantime, there’s one other, megapolitical aspect to address.

The US government doesn’t seem overly concerned about a disruption of copper supply threatening GDP growth in 2026 or any time soon. But that doesn’t mean they won’t start stockpiling it anyway. And what do you think US Secretary of State Marco Rubio meant when he said this at the Munich Security Conference this week (emphasis added is mine):

Deindustrialization was not inevitable. It was a conscious policy choice, a decades-long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity, and of their independence. And the loss of our supply chain sovereignty was not a function of a prosperous and healthy system of global trade. It was foolish. It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis…the work of this new alliance…should be focused on…creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers...

This idea of ‘supply chain sovereignty’ is not new. But in the old, post World War II ‘rules based’ order there was no need for every nation to stockpile critical minerals and commodities (beyond, perhaps, oil and metals needed by the military). The world was a marketplace. And trade provided plenty for all.

That was the old world. What will this new world end up looking like? Is ‘supply chain sovereignty’ even a realistic and achievable ambition? Is it already too late?

For investors, the most important question is what should you do about it right now? More on that in the common week from BPR. In the meantime, please enjoy the brief summary below of all the research we published this week.

Until tomorrow,

Dan

P.S. There’s a megapoltical aspect to AI we’re just coming to grips with. Take this recent quotation from Palantir CEO Alex Karp: ‘There are dangers in AI. The reality is, there are only two cultures that are going to win in the next year— us, or China. If we are not the ones controlling the violence, we will not be dictating the rule of law.’

He who controls the ‘logic of violence’ controls the world, according to Jim Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg’s theory of megapolitics. The ‘logic of violence’ is an equation that includes the cost, returns, scale, and effectiveness of violence to amass power and control people.

In the Age of Agriculture, it meant controlling land. Then, gunpowder and the printing press decentralized both power and knowledge (lowering the cost of violence). In the Industrial era, States rolled out conscription to build massive standing armies, armored by powerful private companies. It resulted in ruinous state on state violence and the massive mis-allocation of natural and human resources for the purposes of destruction. Tens of millions people died.

JDD and LRM thought technology in the 21st century would change ‘the logic of violence’ in favor of the individual (hence the name of the book, The Sovereign Individual). They argued that the digital revolution would lead to smaller government, the collapse of the Welfare State, and a new era of empowered, encrypted sovereign individuals.

Well…the State fought back. It’s used new technological tools to reassert its control of violence. But what IS the new ‘logic of violence?’ What IS violence in the algorithm world (drone swarms, robot soldiers, predictive policing/targeting, digital censorship/de-platforming)? And who’s going to control and wield that violence?

More on this in the coming months. And more from Karp’s dangerous view. Feel free to share your thoughts below. Were JDD and LRM about technology leading to a freedom revolution? Or were they just early? And does the phrase ‘rule of law’ have any real meaning when an all-powerful State is wielding an all-knowing AI with violence?

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Sunday, February 1st, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

It was little noted in the Western press, after Friday’s bloodbath in precious metals, that the price for physical metal in Asia hardly budged. If you’re taking delivery of silver in Shanghai—for your factory, your safety deposit box, or to hoard—it’s going to cost you. Not so in London and New York. What will this week bring?

The data don’t support the idea that higher margins on Comex are, at least by themselves, responsible for squeezing out ‘speculative longs.’ That’s the story they’d like to tell, that silver was overbought by manic FOMO trading. If it’s not true, though, I’d expect to see the price rising again later this week (once Asia opens, the paper markets in London and New York lose control of the narrative).

Meanwhile, Palantir [PLTR] reports this week. With a market capitalization of $350 billion, Palantir isn’t the biggest AI or tech stock. But it’s one of the most expensive. The trailing P/E is 350, the forward P/E is around 150 (depending on earnings estimates), and it trades at 89 times sales. Have a look at the chart.

It’s ‘oversold’ on an RSI basis (below 30). But the recent price action has dropped the share price below the 200-day moving average. It’s rolling over. But is the bull market sparked by AI in October of 2022 dying? Tune in for more this week…

Dan

P.S. Nerd Alert: Palantir is named after the lost ‘seeing stones’ of Middle Earth in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. In Tolkien’s world, the stones were a kind of super powered wireless device, allowing communication over long distances and even the ability to see different versions of the future.

But not THE future…because what the stones showed was influenced by the will of whoever ‘commanded’ them. To a weak-willed watcher, the stones might show you only what someone else wanted you to see. They could mislead, deceive, and manipulate.

Markets are always discounting different versions of the future. Narratives compete for investor buy-in. There will be a point when investors realize the huge investment in AI is the largest mis-allocation of capital in recent history…and re-price the ‘hyperscalers’ and Palantir accordingly. The valuations suggest it is inevitable. But is it imminent?

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Sunday, January 25th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

It’s a big week ahead to close out the first month of the year (already!). Investment Director Tom Dyson will publish the February Monthly Strategy Report on Wednesday for paid subscribers. We’ve got a new update on the Doom Index. And of course analysis of the key ratios in the markets, especially Dow/Gold (by which time gold may have hit $5,000/oz and the Dow 50,000).

More earnings kick off tomorrow that give us an insight into the see-saw battle between the energy sector and the tech sector. Apple [AAPL], Microsoft [MSFT], Meta [META], and Tesla [TSLA] all report tomorrow. But so do ExxonMobil [XOM] and Chevron [CVX]. And throw in Visa [V] and Mastercard [MA] for a look at consumer credit and health.

The chart above shows the cycles between the tech and energy sectors over the last 27 years. It includes the dot.com boom in 2000, then the great bull run in oil up to mid 2008 (oil peaked at around $147/barrel in July of that year). You’ll note that the current ratio is far below the tech peak in 2021, and hasn’t been able to hold the same level of the 2000 peak.

What next? Higher oil? Lower tech? AI or crude oil? Or some combination of both. Look for what Tom has to say when he reviews the new energy stocks we added to the Official List late last year (for free readers, the Official List is where keep tabs on all open investment recommendations at BPR…there are 14 positions on the List now, with eight listed as ‘BUY’ and six listed as ‘HOLD’).

And don’t forget Wednesday! We’ll find out whether America still has a nominally independent central bank. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee will announce its first interstate rate decision of 20265.

Higher? Lower? Will there be dissent? What would you do?

Will Fed Chairman Jerome Powell say anything about the recent grand jury investigation into his testimony in front of Congress last year? Did you know three Fed governors (Richard Clarida, Randal Quarles, and Adriana Kugler) have resigned while being investigated in ethics probes under Powell's tenure as chair? And will anyone ask Powell about what gold and silver are saying about the creditworthiness of the US government as another government shutdown looms?

All that and more coming up this week at BPR. In the meantime, enjoy your frigid Sunday and a review of all the research we published last week.

Until tomorrow,

Dan

Sunday, January 18th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

Markets are closed for a public holiday on Monday (Martin Luther King Jr. day). But it’s a big week for earnings on Wall Street. JP Morgan reports on Tuesday. And the government will release the Fed’s ‘preferred’ inflation measure too. But let’s talk ‘junk silver’ first…

A pre-1965 quarter was 90% silver, or about 0.18 of a troy ounce. In today’s term the ‘melt’ value of four quarters is about $65 (using the current spot price of around $90/ounce). Keep in mind that the 1965 Coinage Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson removed silver altogether from dimes and quarters (and reduced the silver content of the half dollar to 40%…and thanks to legislation passed in late 1970…silver was completely removed from the half dollar).

All these pre-1965 silver coins are now called ‘junk silver.’ You used to be able to easily buy them from banks of dealers. Not so easy now, or cheap. A bag of pre-1965 coins with a total face value of $100 will cost you over $6,700 today (be prepared to wait as orders are delayed due to soaring demand and high prices).

Here’s a fact: You couldn’t actually buy a Big Mac in 1965. It didn’t come out until 1967, when a franchise in Uniontown, Pennsylvania (southeast of Pittsburgh) introduced it as a ‘premium’ burger on the McDonald’s menu. Nonetheless, the thought occurred to me earlier today of constructing a silver-to-Big Mac ratio just for fun.

It’s Sunday, however. So I didn’t do that. But I didn’t have to. The point is pretty simple to understand: Silver was demonetized because the government started debasing the currency in earnest when the cost of the Vietnam War and the Great Society skyrocketed.

Over time, a silver-to-Big Mac ratio would show you getting dozens of Big Macs per ounce when silver peaked in 1980…and only about 1.5 Big Macs in the fall of 2001, when silver was $4.03/oz and a Big Mac was around $2.50. Today, if you could pay with an ounce of silver, you could buy about 15 Big Macs with one ounce.

Will that be true next month? Next year? We’ll see.

Last month, rumors abounded on the Internet of a major Wall Street bank getting a back-door bailout from the Fed due to its massive short position in silver. Has that short position been closed? What’s next for silver? Does anybody still eat Big Macs?

Stay tuned for more this week.

Until then,

Dan

P.S. The Personal Consumption Expenditures index (PCE) will be released by the government this week. In a normal world, it’s not the the sort of data point a normal person has to pay attention to. But our world is not normal. Prices are distorted and the money is unsound. So pay attention we must.

You may have heard that the Federal Reserve ‘prefers’ this inflation calculation over the Consumer Price Index (CPI). But I never understood why until doing a bit more research this weekend. The answer was simple: PCE is constructed in such a way to report a lower inflation rate than CPI.

Of course the Fed wouldn’t come right out and say it prefers an inflation metric that under-reports inflation. This would remind people that the counterfeiters in charge of the value of our money are the most responsible for the decline in our quality of life (and the rise in our cost of living). Tar. Feathers. Rails.

Technically, PCE relies on a lot more ‘substitution’ that CPI. CPI measures the price of a fixed basket of goods. PCE assumes that if beef gets more expensive, shoppers buy spam instead. While strictly rational in a theoretical way, people do not always behave rationally (or even often). This makes PCE theoretically flawed.

The far bigger problem with PCE is that about 25% of the inputs into the calculation come from a ‘black box.’ The data is not derived from any actual market prices or transactions. It is not based on real prices and the choices actual people are making with their actual money in voluntary exchanges.

Instead, 25% of the PCE data is based on models, trends, and something called ‘imputed’ prices. The net result is a metric that, by design, consistently understates the real rate of inflation people face everyday in the real economy.

Is the government deliberately lying to you about inflation? Or is it just a bad model? We’ll let you decide. Or comment below! And enjoy the week in review.

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Sunday, January 11th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Did you know that the office of the President—indeed the entire Executive Branch—are completely absent from the Articles of Confederation? All the Executive and Judicial powers we associate with two separate and equal branches of government today were vested in the Congress in America’s original founding. Congress could select an officer to ‘preside’ over it. But he wasn’t a President.

The Articles only lasted about eight years, from 1781 to 1789. The weak central government couldn’t tax, couldn’t regulate commerce, couldn’t field a standing army, and couldn’t easily declare war.

The good old days!

Alas, the forces of collectivism and centralization are powerful and have deep pockets. The US Constitution as we know it was drafted and signed in 1787. It was ratified in 1788 and became the law of the land. Though specifically defining and limiting the powers of the Federal government, it amounted to vast expansion of Federal power and an assault on the States and individual liberty.

Still, try as you might, you can read all of Article II (dealing with the powers of the Executive branch and the President) and you’ll find no mention of capping interest rates on credit cards, limiting stock buy backs, or forbidding the corporate ownership of single family homes. Those were all things the current President proposed doing this week.

It would take an act of Congress to do any of those things. And even then, they might be un-Constitutional (violating the due process language in the 5th amendment). Individual states actually CAN cap credit card rates under ‘usury’ laws. This is why so many national credit card companies (Citibank, Chase, Capital One) are based in Delaware and South Dakota—because those states have no maximum interest rate limit on credit cards (general usury cap, in legal terms).

Of course I haven’t spoken to anyone who hates the President’s idea of lowering credit card interest rates to 10% for a year. Americans have about $1.3 trillion in credit card debt. The average APR on that debt is over 20%. That adds up to roughly $260 billion in interest payments each year. That does seem a bit usurious, but the again those companies are effectively taking the risk of lending money to debtors who might not pay it back. You take what you can get.

What does this Presidential over-reach/populism/outreach mean for investors?

The President wants to run the economy ‘hot’ headed into this year’s mid-term elections. You dole out some tariff money as a ‘stimulus,’ you eliminate taxes on tips, you buy $200 billion in mortgage backed securities to lower interest rates and stimulate the housing market, you replace your Fed chair with someone willing to do your bidding and lower interest rates, and you save debtors money on interest payments they can now spend.

It all adds up…but to what?

Keep an eye on GDP figures and the velocity of money. If the intention of the Executive branch is to do everything in its power—and some things clearly NOT in its power—to boost economic activity, it will show up in a higher velocity of money (higher inflation). That, plus the inability of the Congress to restrain, much less cut, spending, should be a tail wind for precious metals in 2026.

By the way, sometime in the early hours of January 11th, 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the actual Rubicon. ‘Alea iacta est,’ Caesar said. The die is cast. Caesar was governor of Cisapline Gaul, or what is now northern Italy. But under Roman law, he could not legally cross into the Roman homeland with his army, as a General. It was an offence punishable by death.

He did it anyway and the Roman civil war began. All the institutions of power were up for grabs. The sword was more important than the vote.

You could argue this was the real end of the Republic, although as I pointed out Friday, historians generally point the rule of Octavian (Augustus) as the point at which Rome ceased to be a Republic and became an Empire. It doesn’t really matter exactly when, especially since the process took place over more than century. For ordinary people, life went on.

And America today?

Well, who knows. This summer will mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It’s been a good run. Let’s hope we make it another 250 years!

Life goes on either way. And we must all do something with our money, to protect it, and our families. That work continues this week.

Until tomorrow,

Dan

P.S. Just a reminder that our friends at International Living are hosting a live event on Wednesday, January 14th. It’s about how to retire overseas. You can sign up for free here. If you’ve been thinking about a second home overseas, now is the time to make it happen.

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Sunday, January 4th, 2026

Making America great again apparently means ALL of the Americas. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro sits in a Federal jail in New York City after being ‘arrested’ over the weekend on narco-terrorism charges. US President Donald Trump has said the US will ‘run’ Venezuela in the meantime.

Attention now turns to the impact of these events on financial markets, especially oil. Who wins? Who loses? What happens next?

Below are some relevant facts. While Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, it’s unlikely there will be any immediate or significant boost to its daily production. That doesn’t mean oil prices won’t move lower anyway in the short-term. But it DOES mean sorting the winners from the losers over the long-term will take more research.

• About half of American’s total oil refining capacity is on the Gulf Coast. That’s according to the last Refining Capacity report from the US Energy Information Administration (data current through Jan. 1 2025). Major owners of the largest facilities include Marathon Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Valero and Citgo.

• There are ‘only’ 11-12 billion barrels of oil recoverable from the Stabroek Block off the coast of Guyana (just east of Venezuela). This region already produces around 900,000 barrels per day. The producing wells are deep-water and offshore and produce light sweet crude—fundamentally different in cost and quality from the 300 billion barrels of oil thought to be in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt. Exxon and Chevron are heavily invested in Guyana (which may have become more ‘de-risked’ based on the weekend’s events.)

• The largest Canadian producers of ‘heavy’ oil (mostly from the oil sands in Western Canada) are Canadian Natural Resources, Suncor, Cenovus Energy, and Imperial Oil. Smaller ‘pure’ Canadian oil sands plays are Athabasca Oil, MEG Energy, and Strathcona Resources. Increased exports of Venezuelan crude to the US may reduce Canadian exports to the US.

Sunday, December 21st, 2025

Laramie, Wyoming

The US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, has boarded a third oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, according to news reports this morning. The tanker was on the way to load oil and flew a Panamanian flag. The title to the oil was reportedly held by a Chinese company.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says US forces will ‘continue to pursue the illicit movement of sanctioned oil that is used to fund narco terrorism in the region.’ We’ll keep an eye on the oil markets in the meantime in what should be a quiet week in markets.

It’s been anything but quiet for precious metals this year. Gold is up 66% year-to-date and has made 51 new all-time highs. Silver is 131% and has made 14 new all-time highs. The chart above (from earlier this week) tells the tale for 2025.

But what about 2026? Tom was on the case earlier this week, which you’ll find in our summary of posts below.

Until tomorrow,

Dan Denning

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Sunday, December 14th, 2025

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

After a circuitous 14-hour journey—beset by a 72-hour flu—we resume our post here on the High Plains of Laramie. I wish the high ground gave us some advantage in seeing what’s ahead in 2025. But for today, I’ll enjoy the balmy weather as we look forward to the week ahead.

Mind you, last week was…what the management geeks call…productive. Bill and Tom and I had an important conversation about our course for 2026. You probably share our main concern—the damage inflation does to our cash position. More on that as the year closes.

In the meantime, look forward to a new Private Briefing and Research Report as 2025 comes to a close. I also ran into some old friends in Baltimore who agreed to be guests early in 2025 (you might be surprised who they are). But for now, it’s back to bed.

Until tomorrow,

Dan

P.S. If you’re game for some in-depth reading on geopolitics on a Sunday afternoon, try this essay from Peter Turchin. Turchin’s theory of ‘cliodnyamics’ is based on the idea of applying mathematical models and statistical analysis to the rise and fall of great powers (geography plays a big role). Clio, by the way, is the muse of history in Greek mythology.

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Sunday, November 23rd, 2025

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Imagine a world governed by a small group of technocratic elites, men and women who believe the world and its economy are a giant machine. This machine can only be managed only be experts with the technical knowledge to make it work efficiently, to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number of people (individual choice has to be sacrificed to achieve the collective good).

It would inevitably lead to a totalitarian state. AI would make the rules and enforce them. Travel, healthcare, eating…all would require a good social credit score and permission from the machine. What you say in private or post on social media would be subject to restrictions and punishment. Not a pretty picture.

But this was actually a popular idea in the 1930s. Mired in the Great Depression and increasingly convinced that capitalism had failed and couldn’t be fixed, Americans were open to the idea of some other form or organizing society (not democracy, not monarchy, not communism, not fascism). A man named Howard Scott popularized the idea of a ‘Technate of America’ (that’s the map you see at the top of today’s letter).

The Technate had many controversial ideas about how the economy ought to work. But what they all had in common is that the experts would decide and you would obey. And, interestingly, that the currency of the Technate—the unit of exchange for all public and private transactions—should be based not on gold or paper money, but on energy.

Interesting idea. But here’s the important point. The technocrats are back and stronger than ever today. Billionaire tech CEOs promise a vision of society with infinite abundance. But also total surveillance and unlimited government control over your money and freedom.

Next week I’ll be talking about how you can escape the coming technocracy. It’s a Private Briefing scheduled with my friend Gabriel Custodiet from Watchman Privacy. We’ll be talking about technocracy, privacy, cyber security, cryptocurrency and a lot more. If you’re paid reader and you have a question you’d like me to ask Gabriel, leave it in the comments below or send it to bpr@bonnerprivateresearch.com

Until tomorrow!

Dan

P.S. As Bill pointed out several times this week, the ‘fatal conceit’ behind technocratic government is that men are capable of rationally designing and running a social order based on scientific expertise and central planning. They are not. Why?

Because you can’t measure individual preferences, wants, and desires. Those are subjective and change all the time. No machine—not even an all seeing and all knowing AI—can guess the secrets of the human heart.

Gabriel Custodiet published a book in late September called Privacy and Utopia. You can read it on Kindle before our Private Briefing later this week. I highly recommend it.

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