You spend more than you can afford for too long and pretty soon it’s out of your control. Then, lenders — sensing a train wreck — want more interest to protect themselves. And you can’t go on.
First of all, Bill SEEMS to have misunderstood the Unemployment CLAIMS number and thinks they are bad. WRONG. LOWER CLAIMS MEAN MORE PEOPLE ARE FINDING JOBS AND ARE GAINFULLY EMPLOYED LOWER UNEMPLOYMENT RATE AND HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WORKING AND PAYING TAXES. So that is a big boner Bill.
Second, IRAN WILL RESOLVE and it may collapse before we even need to bomb and still we will get control of Hormuz and the IRGC will be run off....one way or another and all will be well.
PUTIN WAS TOLD BY HIS FINANCE MINISTER YESTERDAY THEY ARE OUT OF MONEY AND CANT PAY THE TROOPS AND CANT GO ON. PUTIN SHRUGGED.. IN HIS BUNKER AFRAID OF BEING ASSASSINATED. BUT THE UKRAINE WAR WILL STOP. LIKE MOST WARS WHEN THE BELLIGERENTS GET TIRED WORN OUT AND BROKE. IN WW1, THE TROOPS WENT HOME IN RUSSIA AND LEFT THE FRONT AND HEADED FOR MOSCOW AND A CIVIL WAR BROKE OUT....KILLING THE CZAR AND FAMILY AND THEN THE WHITES GAINED GROUND BUT CONGRESS CUT OFF OUR FUNDING OF THEM AND THE COMMUNIST BOLSHEVIKS WON THE CIVIL WAR AND LENIN CAME TO POWER....>THEN STALIN WHEN LENIN DIED AND TROTSKY WAS ASSASSINATED IN MEXICO. PUTIN BEWARE.
Bill Pulte head of FANNIE MAE was appointed successor DNI to Tulsi Gabbard. Pulte rewarded for being a LOYALIST to TRUMP and strongly favored firing Powell at the FED. NOT SURE WHAT THAT MEANS and Pulte will ALSO retain his job at Fannie Mae. ODD.
Berkshire Hathaway is now NOT A BUFFETT RUN PLACE (he still owns stock) and they are investing BILLIONS MORE in GOOGLE as an AI bet and also going to ask to float 80 BILLION in MORE STOCK because there is DEMAND FOR IT, they say......we shall see.
They dont need money, they have HUNDreDS Of billions in cash.
Trump is gaining weight and his health report was NOT good....and they are hiding it. We shall see.
Xi has problems too with DEBT and EMPTY BUILDINGS IN CITIES THEY BUILT AND NOBODY MOVED THERE. Middle class stretched in China and they are still 99% export dependent economy.
Taiwan Semi will move to USA to protect it from Xi's clutches. TRUST ME. SOON.
Then what for Taiwan? I dunno.
Trillions being spent on AI but we DONT HAVE THE ELECTRIC GRID TO POWER IT. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
7.62mm OPEN JOBS. HIGH. Thats good news. STRONG ECONOMY.
Kevin Hatsett is right.
Stormy seas ahead because of Middle East.....but it will calm, gold will DIP but RISE AGAIN because of debt.
Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory...wheels spinning all directions and out of control and nobody knows who is in charge and what is going to happen. stay tuned.
But I like Chocolate which is good for the brain and the heart btw.
I call balls and strikes and stick to facts as best I can and so in a MACRO sense, I concur with Bill and Casey and Dyson and Rickards and Rule and many others.....the DEBT CRISIS is going to explode and the printing press is the only way out for awhile....in the end that will fail too...and why REAL MONEY, aka GOLD, is the ONLY lifeboat off titanic.
Doom and Gloom Bill would have surrendered on December 8th.
Scardy-cat Tom is like the servant who buried the Talents for fear of what might happen.
I very much enjoy reading Dan's analysis and charts, but there's nothing actionable there.
I much prefer reading Rob Marstrand's work. He recognizes the risks of currency debasement like Bill, Tom, and Dan do, but he's not paralyzed by it and is still able to find profitable investments. And he is non-political and doesn't have TDS. Think I'll continue with him and cancel Bonner. Farewell.
I look forward to Bill’s thoughts of what we can expect when (1) no one will buy our debt except the US Treasury and (2) how long that gambit can run before sellers everywhere refuse to accept the USD
Germany’s Weimar Republic recovered from runaway inflation but I’m not sure how; only that it was a turbulent time that produced Adolph Hitler.
And reverting to the Gold Standard won’t help. If the dollar can be exchanged for gold, then all the gold in Ft Knox will disappear in hours.
Gentlemen, I must say Bill loves k- shaped economies. He loves the have and have not scenarios. He loves supply chains and viewing store shelves and wood piles. But for me today's missive is just a bit abstract leading the dear reader to wonder.
Or at the bank account, after years of spending like tomorrow had been cancelled, until the first pension cheque fails to clear?
Bill Bonner got me looking at Canada’s version of Social Security: the Canada Pension Plan.
And here, for once, Canada did something almost alarmingly sensible.
Back in 1997, the federal government created the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, now called CPP Investments. It was set up at arm’s length from politicians, run by professional managers, overseen by an independent board, and paid in the real-world language of investment performance rather than campaign slogans.
The result?
Nearly thirty years later, the CPP Fund sits just shy of $800 billion.
Now imagine, only imagine, if all government departments worked like that: run by real-world managers, accountable to real-world results, treating public money as capital to be protected rather than fuel to be burned.
The only problem?
We know the account is full. We get the annual reports, the asset mix, the glossy summaries, and enough transparency to reassure us that adults are in the room.
But we still do not get the thing an ordinary person would ask for if it were their own retirement account:
Where, exactly, is the money?
Not in broad categories. Not in polished pie charts. Not in institutional language about diversified global portfolios.
Not so fast...as a Canadian, I would agree the our CPP is well run. However, our Prime Minister of Brookfield has plans to pilfer it and fund private ventures through Brookfield as well borrow billions of dollars to create a so called Sovereign Wealth Fund. Our country is now in a 'technical recession' ..the only G7 country to be in one. One day Mr Carney will leave office as very wealthy man and Canada, not so much.
Just to make my position plainly evident: I am not calling for Canadian government access to CPP funds. Quite the opposite.
The CPP works because politicians do not get to treat it as a chequing account.
What I want is transparency. Not day-trading disclosure. Not political interference. Not some minister deciding where pension money should go. Just enough clarity for Canadians to know whether the woodpile is truly diversified, or whether we are quietly neck deep in US Treasury bills on the assumption that asset class can never be tossed to the curb.
And yes, I would welcome other departments being run with the same seriousness. Not by letting industry buy influence through the back door, but by taxpayers paying competent people fair wages to manage enormous public responsibilities responsibly.
If someone is in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars, pay them like an adult, measure them like an adult, and hold them accountable like an adult.
That is the point.
Responsible management. Real transparency. No political raids. Period.
Canada did pretty well in 2008 when US housing hit the shitter. I hope the best for them, personally. But when this one goes I suspect everyone's money will be in question.
Canada did come through 2008 better than most, but that was not magic. It was because some parts of the system were still run with a degree of restraint. Better banking regulation. Less direct exposure to the worst US mortgage garbage. And, in the case of CPPIB, a much tighter grip on counterparty risk.
The issue with rehypothecation is that an asset can quietly become someone else’s collateral, then someone else’s collateral again, until nobody is entirely sure who owns what when the music stops.
Around that period, CPPIB appears to have pulled back the big securities lending and rehypothecation style exposures. In plain English, they brought the woodpile closer to the house.
That is the kind of management I want to see.
Not political access to the fund. Not government raids. Not some minister deciding what patriotic investment the CPP should make next.
Just competent people, paid properly, watching the actual risks. Counterparty risk. Liquidity risk. Custody risk. Collateral risk. The stuff that seems boring right up until it becomes the whole story.
Because I agree with you. When the next one goes, the question will not be “How much money did the statement say we had?”
The short answer is: not directly Carney, and not directly any Prime Minister.
The CPPIB directors are appointed by the federal government, through the Governor in Council, on the recommendation of the federal Minister of Finance. The Minister is supposed to consult the participating provinces and use a nominating process. The board then chooses and oversees the CEO.
So no, the Prime Minister does not personally sit there picking the CPPIB CEO.
But your larger concern is legitimate: the board is not born immaculate from the heavens. It ultimately enters through a political appointment process. That means independence depends on the quality of the law, the appointment process, the board culture, public scrutiny, and whether future governments respect the firewall.
That is why my point is transparency, not political control.
I do not want politicians getting access to CPP money. I want Canadians to know enough about the fund’s real exposures to be confident it is being managed for contributors and beneficiaries, not quietly bent toward political priorities.
First of all, Bill SEEMS to have misunderstood the Unemployment CLAIMS number and thinks they are bad. WRONG. LOWER CLAIMS MEAN MORE PEOPLE ARE FINDING JOBS AND ARE GAINFULLY EMPLOYED LOWER UNEMPLOYMENT RATE AND HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WORKING AND PAYING TAXES. So that is a big boner Bill.
Second, IRAN WILL RESOLVE and it may collapse before we even need to bomb and still we will get control of Hormuz and the IRGC will be run off....one way or another and all will be well.
PUTIN WAS TOLD BY HIS FINANCE MINISTER YESTERDAY THEY ARE OUT OF MONEY AND CANT PAY THE TROOPS AND CANT GO ON. PUTIN SHRUGGED.. IN HIS BUNKER AFRAID OF BEING ASSASSINATED. BUT THE UKRAINE WAR WILL STOP. LIKE MOST WARS WHEN THE BELLIGERENTS GET TIRED WORN OUT AND BROKE. IN WW1, THE TROOPS WENT HOME IN RUSSIA AND LEFT THE FRONT AND HEADED FOR MOSCOW AND A CIVIL WAR BROKE OUT....KILLING THE CZAR AND FAMILY AND THEN THE WHITES GAINED GROUND BUT CONGRESS CUT OFF OUR FUNDING OF THEM AND THE COMMUNIST BOLSHEVIKS WON THE CIVIL WAR AND LENIN CAME TO POWER....>THEN STALIN WHEN LENIN DIED AND TROTSKY WAS ASSASSINATED IN MEXICO. PUTIN BEWARE.
Bill Pulte head of FANNIE MAE was appointed successor DNI to Tulsi Gabbard. Pulte rewarded for being a LOYALIST to TRUMP and strongly favored firing Powell at the FED. NOT SURE WHAT THAT MEANS and Pulte will ALSO retain his job at Fannie Mae. ODD.
Berkshire Hathaway is now NOT A BUFFETT RUN PLACE (he still owns stock) and they are investing BILLIONS MORE in GOOGLE as an AI bet and also going to ask to float 80 BILLION in MORE STOCK because there is DEMAND FOR IT, they say......we shall see.
They dont need money, they have HUNDreDS Of billions in cash.
Trump is gaining weight and his health report was NOT good....and they are hiding it. We shall see.
Xi has problems too with DEBT and EMPTY BUILDINGS IN CITIES THEY BUILT AND NOBODY MOVED THERE. Middle class stretched in China and they are still 99% export dependent economy.
Taiwan Semi will move to USA to protect it from Xi's clutches. TRUST ME. SOON.
Then what for Taiwan? I dunno.
Trillions being spent on AI but we DONT HAVE THE ELECTRIC GRID TO POWER IT. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
7.62mm OPEN JOBS. HIGH. Thats good news. STRONG ECONOMY.
Kevin Hatsett is right.
Stormy seas ahead because of Middle East.....but it will calm, gold will DIP but RISE AGAIN because of debt.
Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory...wheels spinning all directions and out of control and nobody knows who is in charge and what is going to happen. stay tuned.
But I like Chocolate which is good for the brain and the heart btw.
Interesting, not sure of the validity of all of your thoughts as they are out of my wheelhouse but nevertheless, Interesting.
Maybe you shoukd start your own newsletter instead of ego-squatting on someone else's.
Your comments have the intellectual value of a Pot Noodle after someone's nicked the flavour sachet and pissed in the cup.
This guy is truly a fool. A month or so ago he threatened to hurt me with all his CIA connections. Delusional fool😂😂😂
He is entertainment
But Patrick your assessment doesn't seem much better than Bill's?
I call balls and strikes and stick to facts as best I can and so in a MACRO sense, I concur with Bill and Casey and Dyson and Rickards and Rule and many others.....the DEBT CRISIS is going to explode and the printing press is the only way out for awhile....in the end that will fail too...and why REAL MONEY, aka GOLD, is the ONLY lifeboat off titanic.
“The news just got worse?” “The lowest job numbers are so low, we haven’t seen anything like them since 1969.” What?
Why on earth are you quoting the lowest new claims for unemployment since 1969 (lowest in 57 years!) as a negative! How do you make this mistake?
The problem with gloom and doom is you miss the boom.
Doom and Gloom Bill would have surrendered on December 8th.
Scardy-cat Tom is like the servant who buried the Talents for fear of what might happen.
I very much enjoy reading Dan's analysis and charts, but there's nothing actionable there.
I much prefer reading Rob Marstrand's work. He recognizes the risks of currency debasement like Bill, Tom, and Dan do, but he's not paralyzed by it and is still able to find profitable investments. And he is non-political and doesn't have TDS. Think I'll continue with him and cancel Bonner. Farewell.
The best time to stock up is when nobody is stocking up. Let’s not forget who was in charge during the last stock up time.
I look forward to Bill’s thoughts of what we can expect when (1) no one will buy our debt except the US Treasury and (2) how long that gambit can run before sellers everywhere refuse to accept the USD
Germany’s Weimar Republic recovered from runaway inflation but I’m not sure how; only that it was a turbulent time that produced Adolph Hitler.
And reverting to the Gold Standard won’t help. If the dollar can be exchanged for gold, then all the gold in Ft Knox will disappear in hours.
Gentlemen, I must say Bill loves k- shaped economies. He loves the have and have not scenarios. He loves supply chains and viewing store shelves and wood piles. But for me today's missive is just a bit abstract leading the dear reader to wonder.
"𝘐𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘱𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘸𝘰𝘰𝘥...𝘢 𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭-𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴...𝘰𝘪𝘭 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘴...𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘩 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘬.
𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘰𝘥𝘱𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘴?"
Or at the bank account, after years of spending like tomorrow had been cancelled, until the first pension cheque fails to clear?
Bill Bonner got me looking at Canada’s version of Social Security: the Canada Pension Plan.
And here, for once, Canada did something almost alarmingly sensible.
Back in 1997, the federal government created the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, now called CPP Investments. It was set up at arm’s length from politicians, run by professional managers, overseen by an independent board, and paid in the real-world language of investment performance rather than campaign slogans.
The result?
Nearly thirty years later, the CPP Fund sits just shy of $800 billion.
Now imagine, only imagine, if all government departments worked like that: run by real-world managers, accountable to real-world results, treating public money as capital to be protected rather than fuel to be burned.
The only problem?
We know the account is full. We get the annual reports, the asset mix, the glossy summaries, and enough transparency to reassure us that adults are in the room.
But we still do not get the thing an ordinary person would ask for if it were their own retirement account:
Where, exactly, is the money?
Not in broad categories. Not in polished pie charts. Not in institutional language about diversified global portfolios.
Where is the woodpile?
I wrote about it here:
https://lucaskandia.substack.com/p/canada-pension-plan-a-success-story
Not so fast...as a Canadian, I would agree the our CPP is well run. However, our Prime Minister of Brookfield has plans to pilfer it and fund private ventures through Brookfield as well borrow billions of dollars to create a so called Sovereign Wealth Fund. Our country is now in a 'technical recession' ..the only G7 country to be in one. One day Mr Carney will leave office as very wealthy man and Canada, not so much.
Just to make my position plainly evident: I am not calling for Canadian government access to CPP funds. Quite the opposite.
The CPP works because politicians do not get to treat it as a chequing account.
What I want is transparency. Not day-trading disclosure. Not political interference. Not some minister deciding where pension money should go. Just enough clarity for Canadians to know whether the woodpile is truly diversified, or whether we are quietly neck deep in US Treasury bills on the assumption that asset class can never be tossed to the curb.
And yes, I would welcome other departments being run with the same seriousness. Not by letting industry buy influence through the back door, but by taxpayers paying competent people fair wages to manage enormous public responsibilities responsibly.
If someone is in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars, pay them like an adult, measure them like an adult, and hold them accountable like an adult.
That is the point.
Responsible management. Real transparency. No political raids. Period.
Canada did pretty well in 2008 when US housing hit the shitter. I hope the best for them, personally. But when this one goes I suspect everyone's money will be in question.
That is exactly the concern.
Canada did come through 2008 better than most, but that was not magic. It was because some parts of the system were still run with a degree of restraint. Better banking regulation. Less direct exposure to the worst US mortgage garbage. And, in the case of CPPIB, a much tighter grip on counterparty risk.
I wrote about this in my rehypothecation (https://lucaskandia.substack.com/p/rehypothecation) and CPPIB (mentioned above) pieces.
The issue with rehypothecation is that an asset can quietly become someone else’s collateral, then someone else’s collateral again, until nobody is entirely sure who owns what when the music stops.
Around that period, CPPIB appears to have pulled back the big securities lending and rehypothecation style exposures. In plain English, they brought the woodpile closer to the house.
That is the kind of management I want to see.
Not political access to the fund. Not government raids. Not some minister deciding what patriotic investment the CPP should make next.
Just competent people, paid properly, watching the actual risks. Counterparty risk. Liquidity risk. Custody risk. Collateral risk. The stuff that seems boring right up until it becomes the whole story.
Because I agree with you. When the next one goes, the question will not be “How much money did the statement say we had?”
The question will be:
Can you actually get it?
Sounds nice but who determines who those people are? Carney?
Fair question.
The short answer is: not directly Carney, and not directly any Prime Minister.
The CPPIB directors are appointed by the federal government, through the Governor in Council, on the recommendation of the federal Minister of Finance. The Minister is supposed to consult the participating provinces and use a nominating process. The board then chooses and oversees the CEO.
So no, the Prime Minister does not personally sit there picking the CPPIB CEO.
But your larger concern is legitimate: the board is not born immaculate from the heavens. It ultimately enters through a political appointment process. That means independence depends on the quality of the law, the appointment process, the board culture, public scrutiny, and whether future governments respect the firewall.
That is why my point is transparency, not political control.
I do not want politicians getting access to CPP money. I want Canadians to know enough about the fund’s real exposures to be confident it is being managed for contributors and beneficiaries, not quietly bent toward political priorities.
Have enough, fir and larch in the wood shed for 2 years ahead