Last week President Trump took steps to re-name the Department of Defense the "Department of War." The President explained his rationale for the name change: "It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound. We want defense, but we want offense too ... As Department of War we won everything...and I think we...have to go back to that."At first it sounds like a terrible idea....Read More

It appears that RFK Jr. has been in President Trump's ear about the mRNA COVID vaccines.Since Trump initiated Operation Warp Speed, he has often stated the vaccines are an achievement which saved millions of lives.But suddenly, his tune is changing. POTUS recently posted the following on Truth Social:It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Man...Read More

I hope you had a good Labor Day weekend. Now, it's back to work. Time to buckle down for the last part of the year, right?Along these lines, I recently visited a defense plant. It occupies an important place in the scheme of America's national security, and I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) just to drive up to the front gate and park in the parking lot, let alone go inside and have a t...Read More

When we use the phrase cracking up, we don't mean an immediate and catastrophic collapse. Instead, we refer to a breakdown in the political, economic and geopolitical spheres that imply a severe weakening in the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and perhaps even the fall of the CCP over the course of the next few years. That would be a momentous development by any measure.Of course, such...Read More

AI-driven trading is taking over the stock market.Jim Rickards estimates that 95% of volume on the NYSE is automated today, and an increasingly large part of that is driven by new AI algorithms.According to Jim, the NYSE trading floor is now "half museum, half TV set". Basically irrelevant.He revealed all this and more in a recent interview with South Korea's Global Money Talk. We'll link to the f...Read More

I'll never forget the first time I realized public health in America was about to change forever. It wasn't in D.C. or at some think tank it was live, on the airwaves, during a call with Dr. Marty Makary.This is a voice you might recognize from the dark days of COVID a Johns Hopkins cancer surgeon and best-selling author who stood up for truth when the whole country was being told to sit down...Read More

Picture this scenario for me.You’re watching the financial news, and every talking head is telling you the same thing: “Trump loves oil. Solar is dead. Buy energy stocks, but stick to the traditional ones.”Meanwhile, your electricity bill just jumped 10% this month.Your local utility is warning about rolling blackouts this summer because they can’t keep up with demand.And e...Read More

The only good part of being on LinkedIn is seeing the idiotic posts the alleged "intelligentsia" puts up.There are some people who you'd expect to have a brain, but really don't, especially when it comes to numbers!I've long said innumeracy is a greater danger than illiteracy. And boy, does it show sometimes. Take this meme, that's been floating around:It's supposed to be some snarky hot-take on o...Read More

In August of 2019, former NY Federal Reserve President Bill Dudley launched an attack on President Trump.The attack came in the form of an opinion piece in Bloomberg.In it, he argued that Trump's trade war with China threatened to crash the U.S. economy.So Dudley wrote that the Fed should consider punishing Trump for his bad policies.Here's an excerpt from that 2019 Bloomberg editorial by Dudley (...Read More

Here at the Daily Reckoning, we love contrarian investments.Back in February, we highlighted an idea that fits the bill nicely: buying Brazilian stocks.Specifically, we mentioned the iShares Brazil ETF (EWZ), which was yielding around 8% at the time, and Nubank (NU), a fast-growing digital bank.Brazil had been in a slump since its stock market peaked in 2008. The country's stock market is heavily...Read More

Recently, I was traveling but not on one of my typical visits to a mine, or to an exploration or development project, nor to an investment conference. Instead, I gathered first-hand information about how an iconic American company can drive itself into a ditch, figuratively speaking. And I'll address this in just a moment.But first, some backstory...Panorama of returning 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain...Read More

By now, you've all heard about the tragic incident in Florida last week, where illegal immigrant Harjinder Singh pulled an illegal u-turn in the 18-wheeler he was driving.A minivan with 3 people inside was forced to crash into Singh's trailer and everyone aboard was killed instantly.A dash camera recorded the entire crash, and Singh's cold reaction set the internet ablaze. The driver reacted as if...Read More

After four years of unnecessarily confrontational foreign policy under President Biden, Americans elected Donald Trump in part for his promise to put America first at home and overseas. He promised a war-weary America that he would start no new wars and would get us out of the existing ones. Eight months into his second Administration it appears his promise remains to be fulfilled, as his approval...Read More

Stocks are priced at valuations near the 2000 dot-com extremes.Hot tech IPOs like Circle are doubling and tripling on day 1.Home prices have soared to unaffordable levels.Meme coins and meme stocks are back in vogue.Sports-betting is red hot, with the latest trend being 10-leg parlays with a (tiny) chance to pay off 100x+.Trading on margin (leverage) has reached new records.Speculation is the new...Read More

Jerome Powell doesn't like to surprise the markets. That much we know. The man's a lawyer, not a cowboy. He's not Volcker puffing cigars and shoving rates into the stratosphere. He's not Greenspan mumbling gibberish while the markets hang on every syllable. He's not even Bernanke, that academic deer frozen in the headlights of the 2008 crisis.No, Powell is more like a risk-averse corporate counsel...Read More

The largest gold miner ETF (GDX) is up an impressive 63% so far in 2025.Yet strangely, investors in the fund have been selling aggressively. So far this year they've sold $3.5 billion worth of GDX shares on net.We can track this via ETF.com's fund flows tool:Source: ETF.comAs you can see by the red bars on the chart, investors have been steadily selling shares of GDX all year. There have only been...Read More

Let's discuss what happened in Alaska last week when President Donald Trump met with Russin President Vladimir Putin. The encounter was brief, productive and historic, although one might not realize it based on conventional, ill-informed Western media coverage. Unsurprisingly, most Western media botched their coverage, although for many outlets that is exactly their mission.It helps to know what t...Read More

Around the U.S., new data centers are sprouting up like weeds.These data centers feed fast-growing demand for AI products and services.We have plentiful access to the NVIDIA chips which power cutting-edge AI applications.The bottleneck is now power generation. There's not nearly enough juice to go around.For example, Elon Musk's xAI recently built their massive Colossus data center near Memphis, T...Read More

According to the July Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, prices rose by 2.7 percent over the past year, and by 3.1 percent when the "volatile" food and housing sectors are removed from the calculation.Markets rose following the release of the CPI since the increase in price inflation was not as high as expected. This led to an increase in expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rat...Read More

It's Assumption Day. And it's hot.Every group is entitled to its own fantasies…its vanities and its lunacies. They are condensed in slogan form, easy for the masses to remember.'Free the Holy Land' was popular for generations. 'Make the World Safe for Democracy' fizzled out fast. As did the 'Thousand Year Reich.'Europe has now settled on 'global climate change' as its cause celebre. Its numb...Read More