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Bill Bonner, reckoning today from San Martin, Argentina...
Why do fools fall in love?
Why do birds sing so gay
And lovers await the break of day
Why do they fall in love~ Frankie Lymon
Our guiding premise here at Bonner Private Research is that we are all fools. We do things that we can’t explain, governed by forces we didn’t create.
So too are there basic ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ in our financial lives. We didn’t invent them; we can’t change them…and we ignore them at our peril. You can’t borrow your way to wealth, for example. Neither can you ‘print’ money and expect to get rich. To the contrary, the more you print…the more you distort and corrupt the real economy. You can ‘break the rules.’ But there’s a price.
And someone will pay. What follows is another way to think about it…and discover who.
Some people succeed in life by doing extraordinary things. They strike oil. They build a home computer. They conquer England.
But most of us ‘win’ by not losing. That is, we follow the rules. We fall in love. We get married. And then, in our 50s, we don’t run off with the fetching cocktail waitress! We stick to the program. We don’t steal from the church collection plate. We don’t invest all our savings in a kooky crypto. We don’t set the neighbor’s cat on fire. And if we’re lucky, things turn out all right.
The feds, meanwhile, think they can get away with anything. And in important matters – war and finance – they are largely right. It’s not their money…and other people die in their wars.
Who Pays?
And now, after more than 10 years of phony negative-rate lending…and more than $8 trillion new dollars ‘printed’ since 1999…creating trillions in fake prosperity and $90 trillion of real debt…
….somebody is going to pay for this nonsense. But who? How?
The feds? The deciders? People with Ph.Ds or accounts with Goldman Sachs?
The following news item gives us a hint:
WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - U.S. Republican Senator Rand Paul on Wednesday blocked a bid to fast-track a ban of popular Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, which more than 150 million Americans use, citing concerns about free speech and uneven treatment of social media companies.
"I think we should beware of those who use fear to coax Americans to relinquish our liberties," Paul said on the Senate floor. "Every accusation of data gathering that has been attributed to TikTok could also be attributed to domestic big tech companies."
When you’re among the ruling elites…and you’ve lost every war for the last 70 years…you’ve cut the nation’s GDP growth rate in half… made the common people’s lives more difficult by approximately doubling the amount of time they have to work to afford an average house…and added $50 trillion in excess debt…including $31 trillion in government debt (no one is very sure what the money bought)….
…every new thing is a threat. Every mob has a rope in its hand. Every market trend threatens to turn you into a pauper. And every entrepreneur may put you out of business.
The Blame Game
So what do you do? You treat every challenge as an opportunity to grab more power and money from the public. Ban TikTok. Stop the Russians in the Ukraine…the Chinese in the Taiwan Strait…the White Supremacists in Tennessee. And don’t forget to save the banks.
Neither Russia nor China has done anything that the US hasn’t done. The US invaded Iraq. Russia invaded the Ukraine. TikTok gathers info from its customers. So does Apple, Google, Meta…etc. etc. And banks? Zombie companies? Reckless investors? All should be allowed to go broke.
But the mind of a hegemon is not driven by need. It is driven by the desire to keep things as they are. Its rules are those it makes for itself. And somebody pays.
No surprise, the deciders will decide that it shouldn’t be them.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Joel’s Note: The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced a surprise production cut over the weekend. It was a million barrels–enough to move crude oil prices up over $80 (up 6%.) Stocks of big oil companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Occidental Petroleum were up in early trading.
Energy scarcity is a huge part of the investment strategy we’ve built for our clients. On Friday, Dan Denning reaffirmed our Trade of the Decade – long oil, short the dollar – in his weekly column.
Investment Director Tom Dyson just released his latest Monthly Strategy Report with a new LNG recommendation, to complement the uranium, oil, gas and shipping stocks we already track. It is the largest natural gas producer in the United States, preparing to extract hundreds of billions of cubic feet of natural gas from under Pennsylvania and West Virginia and send it to Asia.
Tom and Dan will have more this week on what the OPEC production cut means to oil prices, inflation, and stocks. Keep in mind, OPEC cut production by 2 million barrels in November. These latest cuts aren’t supposed to hit markets until May.
But the announcement is ALREADY moving prices at a time when the Strategic Petroleum Reserve–America’s emergency oil stockpile–is at its lowest level in 41 years. The Biden Administration has drained millions of barrels from the SPR. And now OPEC has cut production…again. Sign up for Bonner Private Research at the special rate of $149 per year, here.