To The Moon

To the surprise of absolutely no one today, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee chose to do nothing at the close of its two-day meeting. The White House is furious about the decision; the President believes that the Fed should be slashing rates, and that the current “high” rate of interest is costing the US government hundreds of billions of dollars each year in excess interest. Now, I am no fan of the Fed. Quite the opposite— the organization is a total failure. Just consider that section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act (passed in 1913) states that the Fed is supposed to maintain a stable currency. Yet the US dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing power under the Fed’s stewardship over the past 112 years. Personally I think it’s difficult to find another organization that has been so

Much has been written about Warren Buffett having sold a substantial amount of stocks. And his company, Berkshire Hathaway, is sitting on a record $325 billion cash pile as a result. Buffett has often said that his preferred holding period for an investment is "forever". So the fact that he has sold so much stock has many observers proclaiming that "Buffett is predicting an imminent stock market crash." Except that he's not. Buffett is a pretty transparent guy who has never been afraid to speak his mind. If he were predicting a crash, he'd probably say it. Besides, Buffett has sold plenty of stocks in the past; this is not an anomaly. In 2022 and 2023, for example, he dumped shares of Chevron, Activision Blizzard, Taiwan Semiconductor, and HP. This time around he sold off some shares in Ap

There’s a really dirty four-letter word that starts with a “C”. No, not that one. This is a word you simply cannot say around Greta Thunberg, otherwise her ears will melt off of her face. I’m talking about coal. And it’s about to have its moment. One reason is that global population grows each year, and every one of them needs energy in some way or another—to keep the lights on, to fuel the machines that harvest their food, to power virtually everything that keeps life going. Second, the world population generally becomes wealthier each year. Billions of people in China, India, and Southeast Asia are better off now than they were ten years ago. As economies develop, they consume more food, more goods, more electricity— and all of that requires more energy. More efficient technology offsets

It’s very hard to overstate just how obliterated the global economy was following World War II. Europe was in ruins, with many major cities having been bombed back into the Stone Age. Japan had literally been nuked. And just about every economy around the world that still had any manufacturing capacity was pumping out guns, bullets, and bombs; there was hardly any economic activity taking place that wasn’t somehow tied to the war. It was sort of like Covid— the regular economy was shut down... and governments discovered very quickly that they couldn’t simply turn the global economic machine back on with the flip of a switch. The transition from obliterated war economy to booming peacetime economy was an incredibly difficult one. So, in 1948, the United States (which was among the only deve

On the 26th of February in the year 1401, an English priest named William Sawtrey was hauled before his Archbishop to learn whether he would live or die. Sawtrey wasn’t a witch or satanist, or even a criminal. He was, however, an early leader in a breakaway religion known as Lollardism, which both the Church and the English government viewed as a major threat. The Lollards followed the basic plotline of Christianity. But they criticized the heavy taxes that people paid to the Church, and they questioned the ways in which the Church spent its riches. More importantly, the Lollards believed in the separation of church and state. They also strongly opposed war and preached that all Christians should live in peace. Those last points were enough for the English government to treat the Lollards

On the evening of March 5, 1770, a thirteen year old boy named Edward Garrick deliberately provoked a British soldier who was on guard duty outside the Boston Custom House. It was a dumb thing to do. Like a lot of teenagers, Garrick didn’t think before running his mouth. He even poked the soldier in the chest with his finger... until the soldier ultimately struck him in the head with a musket. Now, Boston at the time was a hotbed of revolutionary spirit. Whereas today, people in the northeast seem to be happy to pay outrageous tax rates to incompetent politicians, back in the late 1700s they were ready to go to war over unfair taxation. So when that British soldier struck Edward Garrick, an angry mob quickly formed at the scene. By nightfall the soldier had been reinforced by several armed

1866 was not an auspicious year to start a business in the United States. America had just been devastated from a five year long civil war-- one of the bloodiest conflicts in US history. Plus the country was in the midst of a severe economic recession. 1866 was also the year that a major investment firm in London went bankrupt, triggering a worldwide financial panic. Capital was scarce. Interest rates were high. And overall business conditions were pretty dismal. But despite such obvious challenges, 36-year old Hiram Bond Everest of Rochester, New York still saw tremendous opportunity in the burgeoning oil sector, and he started a business called Vacuum Oil Company. Oil was primarily used for lighting in kerosene lamps at the time. But Everest, a former science teacher, conducted extensive

On Friday morning July 23, 1982, news broke around the world that a consortium of Japanese companies was acquiring Rouge Steel… which until that point had been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor Corporation. It was unthinkable: the Japanese were buying up an American steel company??!? But it was just one of the first of many, many more acquisitions to come. Within a few years, Japanese companies and investors had bought up large chunks of prime US real estate, major companies, and just about any US asset they could get their hands on. Sony bought the iconic Columbia Pictures (which had recently released cinematic gems like Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid). Japan’s Bridgestone Corp. snapped up the legendary Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. Mitsubishi bought 51% of the world famous R

On August 4, 1964, two US Navy destroyers were conducting intelligence patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam, when the task force commander grabbed the radio and reported that they were under attack by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The news traveled very quickly all the way to the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara briefed President Lyndon Johnson on the situation. They demanded retaliation. And only a few days later, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution… which essentially authorized full blown military conflict in Vietnam. The only problem, of course, is that the supposed August 4th attack in the Gulf of Tonkin never actually happened. McNamara himself admitted decades later that the attack was made up, and a declassified report from the Nati

You see, the subsidies from the Defense Production Act are worth $10,000 or more per car. Manufacturers are desperate to get their hands on those subsidies. Because noncompliant manufacturers will have to charge $10,000 more for the same car. Whichever manufacturer is the first to produce a 100% Made-in-the-USA EV will dominate the entire market. And there’s simply no way that U.S. car manufacturers that don’t qualify for the credits can stay alive. So there’s nothing they won’t do to get their hands on U.S.-mined lithium. Now, that includes outright purchasing lithium mines to keep competitors from snatching them up first. For example, General Motors has invested $650 million to develop a mine in Nevada. It’s literal vertical integration—and it’s making lithium mines the hottest commodity