Welcome to the Golden Age

Monday, June 08th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from Youghal, Ireland

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AOC. Mamdani. Talarico. Platner. Communist, socialist, progressive...and who knows what.

A third of Generation Z has a favorable opinion of communism. Two-thirds look upon socialism as a kind of unsweetened muesli; they are sure it will be good for us.

These young people are warming up...ready to make the same dumb errors of previous generations.

So today, we take our eyes off of the proven failures...Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump...in order to look, however briefly and cautiously, at how succeeding generations are likely to make an even bigger mess of things.

But to understand how the ball bounces, we need to look at the stoneheads it bounces off of. Yes, we are talking about the very numbskulls we just pledged to ignore.

The White House’s news release tells us we are “Welcome to the Golden Age.” And the hacks in the administration are going to make it shinier than ever, by declaring another war!

Yes, dear reader, blow the horns...fly the flags...beat the drums...line up at the recruiting office. This is a ‘War on Fraud’ — soon to be as glorious a victory as the War on Waste by the DOGE...or the War on Iran...or the war on drug runners:

President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance are unleashing an unrelenting, full-scale assault on the fraudsters, scammers, and corrupt operators who have looted billions from American taxpayers. The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is moving at unprecedented speed and ferocity to root out the waste, abuse, and criminal exploitation of government programs that have drained billions from hardworking taxpayers.

This is a direct offensive against every fraudulent scheme preying on hardworking Americans — and the results are already staggering.

Our funny bone is so tickled that we can hardly sit upright. ‘Golden Age?’ Where is it? Employment...GDP growth...real wages...life expectancy...personal liberty...purchasing power...consumer confidence — by every measurement of quality, today’s numbers are either in a dead heat with yesterday’s, or falling far behind.

This leaves the impresarios of the Golden Age but a single exhibit: the stock market. And that, too, is a fraud. A stock is not “golden” because its price is high, nor base metal because it is low. The only sound price is the one that is neither — the price that whispers the plain truth about what the underlying business is actually worth. Everything else is a blunder or a swindle. Today’s quotations, we suspect, are a generous helping of both.

This is no Golden Age. And in terms of real gold, stocks have been going down for the last 25 years...and in the last 18 months they’ve dropped sharply, losing almost another third of their value.

The Nasdaq 100 tech index divided by the price of gold since 2000, performance calculated in percentage terms.

At the press conference heralding the new crusade, it was further alleged that scammers were preying on lonely, elderly men and separating them from their money.

We have some personal experience in this regard. A dear and ancient friend seems to have suffered a stroke. Largely immobile, he goes on the internet where he believed he found the woman of his dreams. As the relationship developed, she put aside her customary shyness to ask him for help with this or that...while maintaining that she is actually the granddaughter of J.P. Morgan...and holds advanced degrees from Harvard and MIT.

After a while, they planned to wed...though they had never actually met, ‘in the flesh,’ as they say. She claimed to have reserved Winchester Cathedral for a grand ceremony, she said. All she needed from him was to pay his share of the unspecified costs — totaling some $50,000.

Your editor was drawn into the drama when he was invited to be the best man. ‘The Wet Blanket’ is a role practically written for your editor. So, he immediately began to dribble over the upcoming nuptials. He asked for details, examined the correspondence — which was absurd in almost every respect — and informed his friend that there was absolutely no chance that Winchester Cathedral would be the site of his wedding; he might just as well get married on the moon. The whole thing is a scam, we explained, and counseled that he should in no circumstances send his beloved internet fiancée a single farthing, let alone 50,000 smackers.

The deluge was thus dammed and prevented. But the trickle of funds to the ‘fiancée’ — whom we imagined as a 250-lb. Nigerian man — continued. And to this day, our old friend half-believes that we derailed what might otherwise have been his last chance for connubial bliss.

Whatever the Trump Administration intends to do about situations like this, we don’t know. But US politics has been stroked out, by our reckoning, for many years. Every big policy move is either fraud or fantasy. But where is the wet blanket? Instead, there are more frauds...more waste...and more wars. (If either party wishes to know why the youngsters are turning to communism, socialism, and fascism, they have only to look in the mirror.)

And now, a ‘war on fraud?’ It is as if the Hershey company had made war on chocolate...or the National Football League announced a campaign against team sports. Were it not for fraud, neither party would have anything to offer the voters.

Republicans accuse Democrats of fraud. Democrats catch the charge in mid-air and throw it right back. And in this, as in so little else — both parties are essentially, emphatically, correct.

Regards,

Bill Bonner