State of the World Private Briefing with Bill Bonner
Normal people do awful things. They're not evil people, particularly. They're just ready to do whatever they need to do when they need to do it. When the money goes false, everything gets screwy.
Thursday, June 19th, 2025
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning
Dear Reader,
My latest Private Briefing with Bill Bonner is below. In it, we talk about Bitcoin, AI, Michael Saylor and Jim Chanos, and whether information has any value at all to investors.
Enjoy!
Dan
P.S. I used AI to generate an image in response to a comment Bill made in our discussion about the value of information. The image is tongue-in-cheek. But stay as safe—and prepared—as you can out there.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS BELOW
Dan Denning: All right. Welcome back to the show. This is Dan Denning. It is Tuesday, June 17th, 2025. I'm here in Laramie, and today for the State of the World quarterly podcast, I'm joined by our founder and namesake, Bill Bonner in Ireland. Bill, how are you?
Bill Bonner: I'm fine. Thank you very much, Dan.
Dan Denning: Well, you're welcome. And for new readers and listeners, just as a reminder, we do this once every three months with Bill to kind of step back from the day-to-day price action in the markets and look at some of the bigger issues that we're following at Bonner Private Research. And I did solicit questions from readers and I got a lot of them. So thank you to people who wrote in and had specific questions for Bill.
What I did, to make sure we covered as many of them as possible, is I consolidated them into a series of subjects which cover the main topics. So we're going to go through them today and before we do, I want to start with an Argentina question for you, Bill, because last time we spoke with you, you were on your way.
Since then I saw a report that said the International Monetary Fund has said that Argentina's economy will grow by five and a half percent this year and four and a half percent next year. The deficit is down. Is he going to pull it off? Is Milei turning that place around? What was your impression while you were there?
Bill Bonner: Well, my impression is that it's more complicated than the media typically suggests because that's what you'd expect. I mean, there's a huge establishment of government and private enterprise and private citizens who depend on a very big state government, big government in general, and they're not going to stop depending on it overnight. I mean, they have organizations too. They have ideas, they have theories, they have ways of influencing policies. They have representatives in the Congress down there, and they're not going out without a fight.
So it's not as simple as you might think. I mean, I think that Milei is totally on the right track. He's doing it the right way. He's not hesitating, he's not fooling around, he's not changing the subject. He's going right to the heart of the matter, which is that they spend too much money. And he's cutting that down, and he got a budget surplus in his first year. It was the first surplus they've had in like 50 years, and it was an amazing thing that he did.
And I think he's on the road to success. He's a bit nutty as a person. He has his own ideas and flaws, but his ideas about how to run an economy I think are correct. And if they're allowed to play out, Argentina will be coming into the world financial market, the world system, the world economic system as a powerful new competitor.
Dan Denning: Well, that's promising. And I think we'll come back to that later with respect to where I am right now, the United States and whether it can follow a similar path or whether things have to get worse before they get better.
Bill Bonner: Dan, I'll give you one little example while it's on my mind because I just got a note yesterday, which was that Argentina has a law they instituted not too long ago, which says that foreigners can't own large tracts of land.
Well, a large tract of land is what you need if you're going to be farming at scale in Argentina. And this law has caused a lot of trouble because there are a lot of people, including me, who own large tracts of land and then we can't sell them. We can't give them to our children, for example, because that would be passing them to a non-Argentine.
But anyway, so Milei, bless his heart, got that law changed so that now foreigners can own large tracts of land in Argentina, but the courts decided that this move was illegal, unconstitutional, and that now it's in the courts. And we won't know for a while whether which part of that sticks, will it be that you can't or that you can. Well, we'll find out, but that's where we are generally in the Argentine situation, somewhere in between figuring out which laws can be changed and how and so forth.
Dan Denning: That's interesting because I've been following a little subcategory here in the US where in Congress, not from the executive branch, but in Congress there are senators and congressmen who are trying to prohibit Chinese nationals or Chinese companies from owning farmland that's on or near US military bases because they see it as a risk like what happened in Ukraine, that you've got this truck that has a bunch of drones and so who knows? It's all very Tom Clancy, but in that case it's being driven by the Congress and not the executive. So I'm not sure what the judicial branch will say, but nobody knows these days what's going on.
Bill Bonner: By the way, there are military bases everywhere in America, so it will be hard to find agricultural land that's not near our military base.
Dan Denning: Yeah, that's a good point. There's a lot of them in Wyoming as well. Well, let's move to markets because for readers that have been with us since the beginning or readers that are brand new, they'll know that the Dow Gold Theory is kind of our North Star for what things are worth, whether it's gold or whether it's stocks or other assets.
So just to bring you up to speed and other readers who are watching today, we're about at the halfway point of the year. Platinum, which Tom added to our strategy recently is up 40% this year, gold is up 29%. Silver, which has been sluggish and a laggard for years, is up 27% and it's moving again today.
In the meantime, stocks aren't really doing much. The Nasdaq is up 4%, the S&P's up two and a half percent, and as of today, the Dow Jones is down about half a percentage point. The important ratio is the Dow Gold ratio started the year around 16, and now it's at 12.5. So that primary trend toward five or below five, which we think will happen is happening.
My question for you is so far this year, most of that move has been with gold going higher, not with stocks going lower. What do you see happening for the second half of the year? Is it stocks are overvalued and going lower, or gold is being repriced as a reserve asset and is going much higher?