The latest CPI report came out showing that the annual CPI now stands at 2.4%.  This was a little lower than expected.  It is still not at the Fed’s supposed 2% target.

Even though we will hear that inflation is going down, prices are still going up.  The rate at which prices are going up is going down.

In other words, things are still 2.4% more expensive than they were a year ago.  This is an added 2.4% to the already-higher prices from last year.

Compounding interest is magical for investors.  Unfortunately, it is a nightmare when it comes to price inflation for savers.  It is a compounding reduction in the value of your money.

Celebrating Dow 50,000

Pam Bondi was on Capitol Hill this past week to testify about the Epstein files.  She pointed out that the markets are hitting all-time highs, including the Dow hitting 50,000.  She asked why we aren’t talking about this instead.

Bondi seemed to be reading from a script at times.  Maybe she didn’t know the stock market numbers.  If somebody wrote that script for her, they should be fired.  Pam Bondi should also be fired.  She should probably be in jail.

We should be happy that Bondi wanted to talk about the Dow hitting 50,000 instead of the Epstein files.  Her message was a political loser to say the least.

To answer Pam Bondi’s question about why they weren’t talking about Dow 50,000 that day:

1. Pam Bondi, you are the attorney general, not the Treasury secretary or the chair of the Federal Reserve.
2. Pam Bondi, you were in front of Congress to testify on the Epstein files, not on the state of the stock market.
3. Pam Bondi, covering up a massive blackmail and pedophile ring is important to some people.  For some people, it means more to them than the returns in their 401k account.

There also seems to be a bit of irony that the Dow 50,000 benefits many of the rich and powerful people whom we might refer to as the ruling elite.  There is an overlap with the ruling elite who are highly exposed in the Epstein files.

This could be one of the biggest political miscalculations in a long time.  This should be enough to force Pam Bondi out, but you never know with this administration.  Meanwhile, Trump is posting messages saying that Thomas Massie is a loser and that Pam Bondi did a great job.  If this was a great job, you really have a lot of problems.

The memes are already coming out on this one.  Whenever someone brings up an uncomfortable topic, the response is: “Why are we even talking about this?  The Dow just hit 50,000.”

Stocks and the Economy

Bondi was trying to suck up to Trump by touting his economy.  Of course, the stock market is not the economy.  Biden was trying the same trick when he was in office.  The sentiment was: “Forget about the rising prices of your groceries and your car insurance.  The markets are doing great.”

There is probably a slight majority of Americans who actually own stocks Most of the people who do own stocks have a modest brokerage account or 401k/ retirement account.

If someone has $100,000 in a 401k and it goes up 15% in one year, sure they are probably happy with the return.  But that doesn’t really help offset the higher credit card bills every month from groceries.  It doesn’t do much to make you feel better about your rising insurance costs.  If you need a new roof that costs $25,000, that $15,000 gain in your retirement account doesn’t seem to carry a lot of weight.

Also, we are far from guaranteed that these abnormal returns will continue.  The day after Bondi touted Dow 50,000, it lost over 1% the following day.  What if the Dow proceeds to fall to 30,000 over the next year?  Will Pam Bondi then be willing to talk about a giant pedophile ring run by our ruling elites?

You can be almost guaranteed that overall prices will continue to go up, even if they go up at a slower pace.  With the stock market, this is far from guaranteed.  Stocks tend to always go up over time because of inflation itself.  But you can easily have a bear market that lasts for years.

That is one of the notable things of recent times, particularly over the last 5 years.  There is a major disconnect between the stock market and living standards.  Even though we hear about good times on CNBC in terms of stocks, this is not how the average American is feeling.

Even if the stock indexes continue to hit new highs, this is a major political miscalculation by the Trump administration.  If stocks go into a bear market, you might see the lowest approval ratings ever for a president.

With the releases of millions of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, it is revealing a lot of lies and hypocrisy.  Of course, it is also revealing more evidence that Epstein was running a giant blackmail operation.

First, it is important to verify things on your own to the extent possible.  This is always important whenever you are going to speak publicly about events.  The internet is great for getting information out there.  Unfortunately, it is also great for spreading false information.

You can look at and search the files here.

With the Epstein files, there are a lot of things that are being made up or not presented in a truthful manner.  It is also important to understand that there are a lot of names in the files, and just because someone’s name is in the files doesn’t alone implicate them.

I am not one to defend Bill Gates, and I believe he is guilty of a lot of evil things.  But one of the juicier files talks about Bill Gates contracting an STD and secretly trying to give antibiotics to his then wife.  But Gates didn’t write this email.  Epstein supposedly drafted it and didn’t send it.  This alone does not prove Gates did anything wrong.  If anything, the bizarre language just shows that Epstein likely was blackmailing him.

I also want to point out that there probably are some innocent people who may be seemingly implicated in these files.  Epstein was running a blackmail operation, so he purposely tried to associate with rich and powerful people.  Someone’s association with a bad person doesn’t necessarily make that person bad.  It is an indicator of someone’s character when it seems to happen frequently, like the Clintons.  The Clintons have been associated with many bad people over the years, including Epstein.

I am a lot less forgiving for people who were associated with Epstein after he was indicted the first time and given a lenient sentence, to say the least.

The Hypocrisy of the Left

Most of the leftists who are talking about this issue at all are hypocrites.  They have all of a sudden been given permission to throw Bill Clinton under the bus.  But where have they been for the last 30 years?  For anyone who care to knew, there have been credible rape allegations against Clinton since he was president.

Regarding his association with Epstein, which was apparently quite bizarre at times, it’s funny how the left is just now willing to criticize Clinton just to give them permission to criticize Trump.

I wrote a post about the Democratic nomination leading up to the election in 2016.  In that post, I wrote:

“I think the next step will be to link Bill Clinton with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.  Clinton has taken repeated trips on his private jet.  Personally, I would be surprised if Bill Clinton isn’t a pedophile.”

That was in 2016.  Unfortunately, the link to the story in that post is dead.  But the point is that it was already known that there were flight logs of Bill Clinton flying to Epstein’s island.

So, to all the Democrats who are now willing to throw Slick Willy under the bus, where were you 10 years ago?

In fact, where were you on any of this for the last 5 years?  I see all these leftists saying that Trump and MAGA just want to ignore the Epstein files and cover them up.  To some degree, they are correct now.  But none of this would even be an issue if it weren’t for the rightwing in this country, including some of MAGA.

The left, generally speaking, never made this an issue.  They only made it an issue when Trump seemed to have something to hide.  I don’t remember loud calls from the left for the Biden administration to release the Epstein files from 2021 to 2024.  If anything, they would just call people conspiracy theorists if they pushed the issue too hard.

PizzaGate

With the release of the Epstein files, we get to circle back to 2016 and Pizzagate.

From Wikipedia:

“Pizzagate is a conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential cycle, falsely claim that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had discovered a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party while searching through Anthony Weiner’s emails.  It has been extensively discredited by a wide range of organizations, including the Washington D.C. police.”

There you have it.  Wikipedia has declared it to be false, so it must be so.

I didn’t get much into Pizzagate back in 2016, although I was aware of it.  The establishment had to assure us that it was a wild conspiracy theory dreamt up by Qanon and Trump supporters.

The pizza references came from emails of John Podesta, who was a close associate of Hillary Clinton.  We were supposed to believe that Podesta really just was referencing pizza.

Well, here we are in 2026, and there are many bizarre references to pizza in the Epstein files.

It might be normal if adults were eating together in person and one of them mentioned how delicious the pizza is.  But it is not all that normal for adult men to talk about delicious pizza in emails to each other and to talk about when they can get together again for pizza and grape soda.  Given that Epstein was running a sex ring with minors, it calls into question the use of the term pizza.

I’m sure we’ll be getting an apology any day now from all of the people who slandered anyone who talked about pizzagate in 2016.

The Hypocrisy of the Right

This is more obvious because the hypocrisy has happened over such a short time span.  Still, there are many MAGA faithful out there who will just go along with Trump and his administration no matter what they do or say.

Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Trump himself have all shown themselves to be absolute liars.  Of course, it is worse than this.  They are lying to cover for pedophiles.

Maybe some of them have been threatened and don’t want to get involved in this mess.  If that’s the case, then resign.  Bongino left, but he is still defending what he did during his short time with the FBI.

All of these people talked about the Epstein files.  Then, sometime in 2025, word came down that there would be a coverup.  They said the files didn’t really exist.  Trump said it was a Democratic hoax, thinking his supporters are a bunch of fools.  He wasn’t completely wrong.

Trump goes after Massie and MTG for trying to get the Epstein files released.  Trump then is forced (politically speaking) to sign legislation to release the files, which supposedly didn’t exist.

Now we have these files that implicate a lot of people and strongly suggest this whole thing was a blackmail operation.  But Kash Patel and the FBI can’t be bothered to do an actual investigation.  Instead, we are left to sift through the files and piece together the puzzle.  Kash is satisfied that pizza is just pizza.

I don’t necessarily believe that Trump is guilty of raping children, but he is covering for people who rape children.  So are Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino.  They are liars, and they are despicable people.

Conclusion

Some of the things in these files are so sick that is it is hard for many people to grasp.  They largely ignore them because it is so sick.  It is hard for people to comprehend that there are individuals in this world who are this sick.  It is even more disturbing when you think that these sick people are the ones who are ruling over us.

With millions of files, more is going to get uncovered, and we are going to start to fit more pieces together.  Of course, this uncovering is not going to come from the FBI or any federal government agency.  It also isn’t going to come from CNN or any other establishment news outlet.  It will come from the alternative media and regular people who are curious and willing to do some work.

We shouldn’t expect to see anyone else go to jail for this stuff, but it doesn’t mean it is pointless.  It is another wakeup call for people.  More people are losing faith in the system and realizing that the ruling elite are not on their side.  In many cases, the ruling elite are just really sick and criminal people.

It is funny how the Trump apologists are already trying to blame people who are criticizing Trump for what is going to happen in the mid-term elections in November 2026.

To be sure, some of the Trump apologists actually hate Trump and are just using him to execute their interventionist foreign policy.  Do you really think that Marco Rubio, Ben Shapiro, or Lindsey Graham like Trump?  They hated Trump, and they weren’t all that shy about it 10 years ago.  But now they realize that they can just suck up to Trump and stroke his ego, and then they can get him to do their bidding by bombing, invading, and funding foreign countries.

You also have the Trump apologists who probably really do like Trump, or at least they don’t hate him.  They like the prestige that comes with being a Trump apologist.  For example, Tim Pool went on a rant against Candace Owens with some colorful language, blaming her for why the Republicans would lose in November.

There are many people on the political right who are getting blamed already.  It isn’t just Candace Owens as mentioned above.  It is Tucker Carlson, Dave Smith, Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and many others.  Sometimes it is even less political people like Joe Rogan, who supported Trump in the last election but has been critical of things coming from his administration.

While the Democrats reign in the White House from 2021 to 2025 was horrific, it would also be scary if the Republicans didn’t lose in November.  It’s hard to imagine that anywhere near a majority of people endorse the madness that has been happening for the last year.

Both parties abuse and expand power so much while in power, it is almost necessary to have them alternating.  At least the abuses shift.  We’ve gone from vaccine mandates to invading Greenland.  Unfortunately, the weaponization of the “Justice Department” hasn’t changed.  Only the victims have changed. The funding of Israel and Ukraine also hasn’t changed.

Whose Fault is This?

It is hilarious, if not irritating, when the Trump apologists blame the Trump critics, especially people who actually supported or voted for Trump.  This includes Trump himself.

Trump attacked Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who actually helped Trump when he didn’t have many friends.  Thomas Massie was trying to identify undercover federal agents who were at the Capitol on January 6^th before Trump even understood that this was a setup against him.

MTG is now out of Congress, and Trump is attacking Massie relentlessly, including attacks against his wife.  Trump doesn’t like Massie because Massie wanted the Epstein files released, and he doesn’t want foreign wars.  The lobbyists for Israel want Massie out, therefore Trump obeys his masters.

The Trump apologists will blame people like Massie for the Republicans getting wiped out this November.  The Democrats will likely take majorities in both houses of Congress.

Is it Massie’s fault that Trump bombed 7 countries in his first year back as president?  Is it Massie’s fault that Trump and his administration lied about the Epstein files, claiming it was all a Democrat hoax?  Is it Massie’s fault that the administration was arresting legal immigrants because they didn’t like what they were saying about Israel?  Is it Massie’s fault that Trump has created unnecessary chaos on the streets of major cities?  Is it Massie’s fault that Trump keeps growing the budget and the debt and continually changing tariffs on other countries on a whim?

It is hard to see how someone could have supported Trump in November 2024 and still supports him today. Virtually everything he’s done since March 2025 has been a total disaster.  He has been anti liberty in almost every way, plus we get all of the chaos and division that comes with it.

Trump has completely betrayed America First.  He has done the opposite of adopting peace towards other nations.  He has grown government in almost every way.  When the Democrats get in power and use ICE and tariffs and whatever else Trump used to enact their agenda, the Trump apologists will be crying over it.

The Power to Abuse

This is one thing that the loyalists to both major parties don’t get.  Or if they do get it, they are just evil.

They complain when the other party is in power.  But they never want to reduce that power.  They want the power for their side.

Harry Browne liked to say that the problem isn’t the abuse of power.  It is the power to abuse.

In other words, whenever there is power available, it is inevitably going to get abused.  It is going to get used against your side at some point.  The solution isn’t to try to get power for “your side” (whatever that means).  The solution is to reduce the amount of power so that nobody can have the power over others.

Kevin Warsh has been nominated as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.  After the announcement, gold and silver took their biggest price dive ever in terms of dollars in one day.

The announcement was perhaps a little bit of a surprise.  Warsh is more establishment than some others who Trump could have nominated.

Being establishment isn’t always bad, or at least it isn’t necessarily the worst thing.  When Trump is bombing 7 countries in one year, kidnapping foreign leaders, and seizing oil tankers in international waters, establishment sounds good in comparison.  Someone who is more establishment might be a little bit more cautious with the interventionism.

And so it goes with the economy and the Fed.  Trump is on the verge of recklessness right now.  He is as much of a socialist or more as the next politician.  He changes tariffs or the threat of tariffs almost daily and on a whim.  His administration is threatening criminal charges against Jerome Powell, and it seems obvious that it is because Powell has not been aggressive enough in lowering interest rates.

The Fed may be an evil institution, but I think we would rather a group of Fed members setting interest rates and monetary policy over Trump.  At least the Fed gives the financial establishment what it wants.  It will give inflation and lower rates, but only to a point.  Trump wants lower interest rates because he woke up in a bad mood and thinks it will grow the economy.  It might grow the bubble, but not the economy.

Kevin Warsh – A Yes Man?

Warsh was on the Fed Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011.  This was during the financial crisis of 2008.  So, he was part of the massive bailouts and quantitative easing (monetary inflation).

Still, he is somebody that seemed to go along with the consensus.  If anything, he is seen as being on the more hawkish side, meaning he doesn’t want to inflate as much as other people.

The U.S. dollar had been tanking recently, and gold and silver had been on an almost parabolic run up in price.  The announcement of Warsh temporarily reversed that.

Given Trump’s behavior in his first year in office in his second term, many people expected, and rightly so, for Trump just to appoint a total “yes man” who would do exactly what Trump wanted.  There is more of a question with Warsh on whether he will just do whatever Trump says.  He will probably throw him a bone and lower the Fed’s target rate right when he gets into office (if it hasn’t been lowered more already), but we can’t be certain after that.

Remember, Trump appointed Powell in his first term, and Powell doesn’t necessarily listen to Trump any longer.  Powell generally just goes along with the consensus.  (It isn’t that Powell is forming the consensus.)

Warsh is a fairly establishment pick.  The financial media like it because it supposedly helps restore “Fed independence”, which sometimes just means Fed secrecy and doing the bidding of the establishment.  The Warsh pick helps the U.S. dollar in the short run, as we aren’t getting someone flashy who will just try to drop rates to zero as soon as he enters office.

Warsh will be something of a “yes man” to Trump initially, but in the longer run he will be more of a “yes man” to the financial elite than to Trump, which doesn’t always mean a weaker dollar.

Betting on a Stable Dollar

The reaction to Warsh’s nomination by investors indicates that they think he will be relatively hawkish.  It is probably safe to bet the opposite.

Even if Warsh is in the establishment and slightly hawkish camp, he won’t really be the one determining monetary policy.

The government keeps spending more and more money.  There is almost no desire to cut anything back.  Trump is proposing a $1.5 trillion military budget, and he has a lot of countries in his sight for bombing or regime change.  Meanwhile, the so-called entitlement programs continue to grow.

We will likely hit a national debt of $40 trillion in 2026.  And that is if we don’t have a recession.  On top of it, price inflation is still above the 2% mark, even according to the government’s statistics.

The economy is not in good shape.  The Fed’s only solution is to manipulate interest rates lower and create more money out of thin air.  Unless someone like Ron Paul had been nominated as the next Fed chair, there is no sign that this out-of-control train is going to come to a stop without major wreckage.

Kevin Warsh will have no other answer than to create money to bail out the economy and the reckless Congress.

This is why any strengthening of the U.S. dollar is likely to be temporary.  A major pullback in gold and silver was inevitable anyway.  They had run too far, too fast.

It is a safe bet that the next Fed chair cannot stop this train wreck.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released its latest monetary policy statement.  The Federal Reserve is maintaining its federal funds rate target in the range of 3.5% to 3.75%.  There were two dissenting votes by members who wanted to lower the rate by .25%.

Apparently, the Trump administration’s threat of indicting Jerome Powell wasn’t enough to make him do what they want.

It was already surprising in past meetings that the Fed was lowering interest rates and even returning to monetary inflation (although they refuse to call it QE) when the CPI numbers are still coming in near 3% annually.  The Fed’s target is supposed to be 2%, and it hasn’t been at 2% or lower in almost 5 years.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the Fed took a break from lowering its target interest rate.  Even though the inverted yield curve of 2023 and 2024 is a warning sign for a recession, the stubbornly high CPI numbers are the more immediate threat to the Fed.

It will put the Fed in a really bad position if interest rates are already really low, price inflation is still elevated, and we hit a recession.  Do they save the economy and risk losing the dollar?  They are already letting the dollar slip more than was probably planned.

For anyone who follows this stuff, you have to wonder if the Fed is just looking at its typical benchmarks, which are government statistics (unemployment, GDP, price inflation, etc.).

The Gold and Silver Signal

The dramatic rise in the price of gold and silver (in terms of dollars) is telling us something.  We just can’t exactly be sure of what, other than it being a warning sign for holders of U.S. dollars.

Maybe gold and silver are just joining the Everything Bubble.  They had to play catchup with stocks and Bitcoin.  Maybe everything will tank when the bubble pops.

But what if the bubble doesn’t pop much?  Or what if the bubble pops but gold and silver don’t go down with the ship?

Powell was asked about the rapid rise in gold and silver in his press conference.  While Powell admitted that they do monitor asset prices, he claims that the Fed isn’t losing any credibility because of asset price changes.  On the other hand, Powell is warning that the increasing national debt is unsustainable.

These things really go hand-in-hand though.  The Fed and Congress and many presidents are to blame for the weakening dollar.  The government runs up debt, and the Fed keeps monetizing much of it.  And when it isn’t monetizing debt, it stands ready to do so.

Gold and silver are sending a warning signal about this runaway spending and debt.  The prices, as determined by the market, are telling us to be careful of the U.S. dollar.

It doesn’t matter if it is foreign central banks buying gold or a lot of little investors.  (It is likely both driving prices higher.)  The major rise in prices is telling us not to trust the U.S. dollar.  It might no longer be a safe haven, given the path we are on.

You have to wonder if Powell and company are factoring the prices for gold and silver into their decision making.  It would be hard to believe that this isn’t a factor.

Nobody Seems to Care

The problem is that nobody seems to care.  For investors in gold, silver, and mining stocks, it is nice to get gains.  But I don’t want major gains at the expense of a civilized society.  I don’t want us to end up like some third-world country with massive inflation or hyperinflation.

Powell is correct that the rising debt is unsustainable, but he is one of the people helping to feed it.  If the Fed announced that it would no longer monetize any future debt, that would cause a major recession or depression.  However, it would also force Congress to drastically cut its spending.  Or maybe Trump would just indict all of the Fed members and announce that he is now overseeing monetary policy.

For the most part, a few people are celebrating the rise in gold and silver because they are profiting from it.  Most people are just ignoring it and pretending like it doesn’t matter.

Sure, it’s nice for those of us who have exposure to gold and silver and mining stocks.  Sure, it’s a bit of vindication for our past warnings.  But it is also a bit scary because it is a warning sign that things could go very wrong in the near future.

There is simply no will to cut federal spending.  DOGE ended up being a joke.  If it couldn’t be done this year, then it won’t be done until the laws of economics force it on us.  Public opinion is against the rising debt, but public opinion is also generally against cutting any major spending.

The price of one ounce of silver has hit $100 for the first time ever.  Gold is close to hitting $5,000 per ounce.

This puts the metals at an approximate ratio of 50 to 1.  It is an interesting statistic to note, regardless of how relevant you think the ratio is.  I wrote about the gold-to-silver ratio on June 1, 2025 when it was about 100.

I wrote a post about gold and silver on October 17, 2025.  It was just over three months ago.  Gold had just passed the $4,000 mark, and silver had passed the $50 mark.

So, in just over three months, the price of silver has doubled, and this came after it had already hit a new all-time nominal high.

It is crazy to see silver go up by 5 or 6 dollars in a day.  I can remember when silver traded at about $5 per ounce.

This is a parabolic move.  Perhaps it is just the last part of the Everything Bubble.  But something has to give.  Either the price of silver is going to come down from here (more than temporarily), or the U.S. dollar will continue its major descent.

The Financial Media

Perhaps I have been listening to too much Peter Schiff, but I was watching CNBC today as gold and silver hit new all-time highs.  I didn’t have the volume on, but I could see the headlines, and I could see the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

The price of Bitcoin kept flashing up on the screen, probably every 10 seconds.  It took me several minutes of watching before I saw the prices for gold and silver.  I must have seen the price of Bitcoin flash about 20 times before I saw the metal prices.

In other words, CNBC is still obsessed with Bitcoin while mostly ignoring the huge run-up in gold and silver, which is something that Peter Schiff has pointed out.  Maybe they are just giving their customers what they want to see.

I expect that this is common in most of the financial establishment media.  Of course, there is alternative media out there that is talking about the historic runs for gold and silver.

This is why the huge run for gold and silver doesn’t seem as much like a bubble.  It isn’t getting that much attention by the establishment media.  Then again, perhaps they ignore it as much as they can because they have never really been bullish on the metals.  It may seem like something of an admission that the dollar isn’t exactly sound these days.

And to be sure, this is a reflection of the U.S. dollar.  It is a reflection of the horrible economic situation we face in the United States.  The national debt will probably hit $40 trillion this year, and there is no sign of slowing down.  If anything, it is just speeding up.

If the national debt is going parabolic, then it would make sense for gold and silver to follow.

Mining Stocks

Mining stocks have finally taken off in the last year or so.

GDXJ (gold miner juniors) has a 52-week low of 45.69.  Today, it hit 145.41.  That is more than three times its low from about a year ago.  This is an ETF; not a stock.

GDX has a 52-week low of 36.84.  Today it closed at 107.02.  That is almost triple.  Again, this is an exchange-traded fund.  It isn’t one stock.

These mining stocks are making the Nasdaq look stable by comparison.  They could run a lot higher than this too, depending on where this whole thing goes.  If we hit a recession, we could also see some huge losses for these mining stocks.

Recession

A recession is probably the only thing that can break this bull market in metals.  This doesn’t mean there won’t be significant pullbacks along the way.

But even with a recession, it is hard to bet against gold and silver right now.  If the Everything Bubble pops, it will probably hurt most asset classes, which should include gold and silver.

Here’s the issue though.  The federal government is already spending money like crazy, and the Fed has already returned to a minor version of quantitative easing (digital money printing).  Imagine what will happen if we hit a deep recession.

The Fed, especially with the current administration making appointments to the committee, will go ballistic creating money out of thin air.  Congress will increase the debt at an ever-greater rate, and the Fed will monetize this debt.

When investors realize that there is no end in sight for the destruction of the dollar, along with foreigners dumping the dollar, where do you think they will turn?  Foreign central banks are already trying to protect themselves against the U.S. government by buying gold.  They are tired of the threat of sanctions and tariffs. They are turning away from the dollar in international trade.

A recession is typically bad for gold and silver if there is somewhat of a price deflationary aspect to it.  But if you get a recession with a majorly declining dollar, that will be different.

A Strategy

The most important thing is to be diversified.  If you have made a lot of dollar profits from owning gold, silver, and/or mining stocks, then it doesn’t hurt to take a little off the table as things run higher.

At the same time, you want to keep significant enough exposure in order to hedge against a falling dollar.  As consumer prices continue to increase, it doesn’t make sense to have significant assets piled in the bank or dollar-denominated assets like bonds without also having an inflation hedge.

The days of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency are quickly coming to an end.  This is what happens when the government engages in endless empire building and continually increasing the debt.  Gold and silver prices are finally reflecting this reality.

Donald Trump has been president now for one year in his second term.  I very hesitatingly voted for Trump in November 2024, even though I vehemently disagreed with Trump on several issues.

I thought Trump had a chance of being the lesser of two evils.  The Biden regime needed to be repudiated after 4 years of more war and COVID tyranny, among other things.  I was also cautiously optimistic that Trump was being surrounded by some good people near the end of his campaign.  He was surrounded by seemingly decent people like Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy.  He also chose J.D. Vance as his VP, who is less hawkish than a lot of the alternatives.

For this reason, I reluctantly voted for Trump in the hopes that things might improve a little, and also as a repudiation of the Democrats.  I fully expected some bad things like tariffs and possible hawkishness on certain countries like Iran.

The Good

Trump started out in January 2025 on a high note.  He enacted a lot of executive orders.  There was so much flying at us in the first few days, it is still hard to grasp.  Some of the executive orders were simply repealing previous executive orders, which is completely legitimate.

Trump corrected a massive injustice by pardoning most of the January 6^th protesters.  Most of these people were non-violent, and we still don’t know the extent of federal agents helping to create the situation that day.  Most of the protesters could have been charged with trespassing and given a fine.  It was a ridiculous notion to send people to jail for years and years for taking a walk through the Capitol building.  They didn’t have weapons, and they certainly had no means of orchestrating a coup.

Trump also satisfied his promise to the Libertarian Party by freeing Ross Ulbricht.  This was another correction to a massive injustice.  Unfortunately, it would turn out to be one of the few things he did that the Libertarian Party or libertarians in general would really like.

We also have to remember that we had Elon Musk taking residence by Trump’s side and initiating DOGE.  You can criticize Elon Musk, but he seemed to be genuine in his attempts to cut government spending, and especially corrupt and fraudulent spending.  This is why Musk and Trump eventually had a falling out.  It is because Musk was really irritated that his work with DOGE wasn’t producing any results.  Instead, we got stuck with the One Big Beautiful Bill.

DOGE was far more chaotic than it needed to be.  It probably actually increased some spending by forcing government workers back into the office and offering generous severance packages to government employees to leave their job without first researching whether those jobs actually served a function.  (It’s not as if we would no longer need passports if all of the workers at the passport office decided to quit and take a severance package.)

Still, on the whole, DOGE seemed encouraging to those who cared about government spending.  They were actually uncovering a lot of crazy stuff where our tax money was going.  Unfortunately, the DOGE mania didn’t last long, and it is now dead.  We were never going to get any DOGE rebate checks because nothing of any significance ever got cut from the budget.

Turning Ugly

Things went downhill quickly about 2 months in.  In March 2025, the Trump administration started arresting immigrants, particularly students, who were critical of Israel.  These were legal immigrants.

While Trump campaigned on stopping illegal immigration, he certainly never talked about arresting people and deporting people for the words they use or for the things they write.  It is still surprising that this got such little coverage.  The Trump administration may have linked this to immigration, but it was just a pure violation of free speech.  It was also interesting that legal immigrants were more likely to be arrested and deported for criticizing the state of Israel than criticizing the U.S. government.

This sent up major red flags for me in March 2025, and I could already see the drastic turn towards authoritarianism.

Of course, things got much worse from there.  Trump bombed Yemen on behalf of Israel.  He bombed Iran on behalf of Israel, even when he said he was negotiating with them.  Trump has been murdering boaters off the coast of Venezuela in the name of drugs.  He then proceeded to kidnap the president and his wife there.

The Trump administration has also bombed Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and Somalia.  This is a total of 7 countries being bombed in one year.  And let’s not forget that Trump continues to fund Israel to slaughter innocent people in Gaza, and he continues to fund Ukraine to keep the war going there.

If all that weren’t enough, Trump has also been a trainwreck on the domestic front.  He has raised and lowered tariffs so many times, I don’t think anybody has been able to keep count.  He has hiked tariffs on countries because of their political situation or because they are trading with the wrong countries (according to Trump).  While his excuse originally was to bring back manufacturing, he has used tariffs as one of his main weapons (aside from dropping bombs) to bully other countries.  Of course, it just serves to hurt American businesses and American consumers by making things more expensive.

The Absurd

There are so many absurd things in one year that it is hard not to leave things out.  There is all of the lying about the Epstein files.  There is Trump going on a political war against Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene.  There is Trump weaponizing his “Justice” Department just the same as what was done to him.  But instead of going after the people who tried to jail Trump, Trump is going after other people, such as Jerome Powell, probably for not lowering interest rates enough.

Trump has been seizing oil tankers in international waters.  Now we are going through a major spat about Greenland just because Trump all of a sudden thinks he can be emperor of the world.  The fact that Trump was even thinking about invading Greenland shows how unhinged the man has become.

He wrote a letter to the president of Norway saying that because he didn’t receive the Nobel Peace Prize that he no longer felt the need to be peaceful.  So that’s why you talked about peace on the campaign trail? Because you wanted a prize to enhance your ego?

Trump might have dementia like Joe Biden before him.  But Biden was so far gone, and he was fully controlled by his puppet masters.  Trump is controlled by Netanyahu, but he still calls the shots on other areas.  The problem is that the war hawks, who previously hated Trump, just suck up to him and stroke his ego.  They tell him how great he is, and then they convince him to bomb the next country.  Trump is both evil and stupid.

Trump has the worst combination of narcissism and some kind of early dementia.  He has become almost everything that the left has accused him of being.  The left no longer needs to make up stories about him in order to accuse him of being a tyrant.  Still, I will see leftists make up stories about Trump or exaggerate things, even though they don’t need to do it at this point.

When Things Change

The Republicans mostly live in fear of Trump.  If you step out of line one little bit, look at what happened to MTG.  She was a major defender of Trump for many years, and look at how she was treated.

When things turn bad for Trump, they will turn bad quickly.  Imagine when there is enough public opinion against him on the right that Republicans in positions of power start opposing Trump.  Things could spiral against Trump very quickly, especially if we hit a hard recession.

Also, Trump has made most major officials in other countries mad, to say the least.  Do you really think Putin or Xi like Trump at this point?  Do you think all of these other prime ministers and presidents who have been bullied, made to look weak, and had tariffs slapped on them have an ounce of sympathy for Trump?

Trump is hated almost everywhere now except for a MAGA faction in the United States.  But even here, you have to imagine that there are several million people who voted for Trump who now despise him.  Trump is making war and not peace.  He is not helping the average American.  He is making things worse.

Let’s hope the second year goes better than the first.  If most everyone turns on Trump, it is hard to say how things will go.  He is already a very unpredictable man.  Unfortunately, this unpredictable man has a lot of power at his disposal.

And ultimately, that is the problem.  The problem isn’t the abuse of power.  It is the power to abuse (as Harry Browne liked to say).  We don’t just need to get rid of Trump.  We need to drastically reduce the power of the president and the federal government.  We shouldn’t have to worry about any particular unhinged person getting into office.

Sometimes it is effective to attack the right from the right and the left from the left.  If you criticize Trump’s foreign policy or violation of civil liberties, a lot of Trump defenders will just blow you off as a left winger.  It is much more difficult for them to do when you attack Trump from the political right.

One area Trump is very vulnerable is on economics.  It is becoming less hyperbolic by the day to refer to Trump as a socialist.  Trump defenders don’t know how to handle this accusation, especially if you start listing out all of the examples.  It seems to actually cause their brain to malfunction.

Trump is not an outright socialist, but neither is Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani.  If you asked Sanders or Mamdani if people should be allowed to own a toothbrush, they would probably agree.  They don’t advocate for the government literally owning everything.  It is all a mix of socialism (government ownership), economic fascism (government control), and some market activity.  They mostly want government to control things, but they still don’t advocate for a total abandonment of all market activity.  They still want the existence of money as a way of making exchanges.

At this point, Trump is more of a socialist than an advocate for free markets.  All you have to do is look at all of his rhetoric and actions from the first year of his second presidential term.

It’s All Government Central Planning

Trump has vastly increased government spending, which was already beyond control.  DOGE was a complete joke and did nothing to cut the federal budget.  Trump is now advocating for a $1.5 trillion military budget.  There are about 130 million American households.  That would be $11,500 per household every single year, just for the military.  Do you want to pay $11,500 per year for a world empire?

The U.S. debt keeps rising dramatically.  It is over $38 trillion.  It will probably hit $40 trillion in less than a year.  Trump just keeps spending and spending.  It couldn’t get any worse with a Sanders presidency.

Trump is overseeing some of the largest tax hikes in history too.  He is unconstitutionally enacting tariffs on a whim.  If he doesn’t like who another country is doing business with, here’s a 50% tariff.  No wait, make it a 100% tariff.  Ok, just kidding, we’ll call it 75%.  There is another country that elected the wrong person.  Give them a 50% tariff too.

Of course, this is mostly a tax on the American people who will pay higher prices.  Or it will just destroy trade with other countries and there will be fewer choices and worse quality with just American-made products.  We haven’t given all of these tariffs enough time to show just how bad they are for business and for our overall living standards.

Other Trump Socialist Policies

The list could go on and on.  But here are a few more from recent times.

• Trump is telling credit card companies to charge a maximum of 10% interest.  This will just prevent a lot of people from being able to obtain a credit card.  It will also destroy a lot of the benefits for people who hold credit cards, including those who pay it off each month.
• Trump is ordering the purchase of mortgage-backed securities in an attempt to lower mortgage rates.  What’s next?  Will Trump just outright hand out free money to buy houses?
• Trump is threatening criminal charges against Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.  It isn’t because Powell is counterfeiting money.  It is because he hasn’t obeyed Trump’s wishes and counterfeited enough.
• Trump is ordering that investment companies will no longer be allowed to buy single-family houses.  He turns to socialist dictates instead of trying to ease regulations and taxes.
• Trump is continually advocating for more money printing and artificially lower interest rates.  His solution to everything is more inflation and more debt.

What’s to Come?

Trump is already unhinged, and we haven’t even hit a recession or financial crisis yet.  Imagine what this guy is capable of saying and doing when a real crisis hits.  It will be one order and dictate after another, trying to force his ways on the economy.

We are in the realm of possibility where we see $5 trillion annual deficits soon.  It looks like Trump is trying to oversee the demise of the U.S. dollar and an implosion of our economy.

Would you really put it past Trump to say that he is going to nationalize the grocery stores?  Would you be surprised if he declared that he is now in charge of the central bank and will set all policies?

The guy is a total socialist.  Trump himself said that he is only constrained by his own morality at this point, which isn’t very good news for the American people.

Why should we be scared of Bernie Sanders at this point?  Trump is a socialist.  He is the president now.  He thinks he is the dictator, which is consistent with socialists.

1. I hate the framing of the debate when people argue about whether it was in “our” interest to capture Maduro and generally intervene in Venezuela.  Perhaps we can speculate on how bad it will work out, but it completely ignores the immorality of the whole thing.  Imagine I hit a grandmother over the head and take her purse.  Then a debate ensues about whether it will really benefit me over the longer run.  There is a large ethical problem that lingers here.  I don’t care if “we” can get rich by taking over Venezuela’s oil.  It is highly immoral and evil.
2. I am beginning to think that Trump is more of a socialist dictator than Maduro.  At least Maduro confined his socialism to just the people of Venezuela.
3. The new mayor of New York City is also a socialist.  Can he possibly be any worse than kidnapping a president, and declaring that he will now be “running” the country and controlling the oil?  At least his socialism is confined to New York City where the people actually elected him.
4. The excuses keep changing and expanding for going into Venezuela.  It is quite similar to the story of Iraq in 2003.  The narrative quickly shifted from weapons of mass destruction to “liberating the Iraqi people”.
5. Even if Maduro was not legitimately elected, Trump wasn’t elected anything in Venezuela.  How many MAGA people justify Trump’s invasion because Maduro wasn’t legitimately elected, yet they also believe that Trump won the 2020 election?  By their standard, I guess Putin, Xi, or any other world leader could have bombed Washington DC in 2021, kidnapped Biden, and declared they would be running the United States until the proper transition had taken place.
6. Maduro is being indicted on drug and weapons charges.  Apparently, U.S. gun laws apply to the entire world, including foreign presidents and militaries in their own countries.  Isn’t almost every world leader in violation of U.S. gun laws?
7. It would be hilarious if Maduro – the socialist – were to defend himself in court by arguing that U.S. gun laws are contrary to the 2^nd Amendment.  Maybe he should up the ante and argue that U.S. drug laws violate the 10^th Amendment.  I can just picture the attorney for Maduro: “Where in Article 1, Section 8 is any authority granted to the federal government of the United States to make laws prohibiting drugs?”
8. Trump has already fallen hard.  The only true allies he has left are some hardcore MAGA people and the Republican war hawks.  The war hawks are just simply using and abusing Trump.  They will turn on him when it is convenient.  Trump is a total disgrace.  He is completely unhinged at this point.  We can only hope that his power will get cut off one way or another before he gets us into a major war.
9. J.D. Vance is just a weak piece of garbage.  He is trying his best to justify all of this violence from Trump and company.  He has almost no chance of becoming president unless Trump doesn’t make it to January 2029.
10. The left is still useless (and worse), but I am not going to stop them right now from going after Trump, even though they still get so much wrong.  Yes, Trump is just extending power that has grown over the last 100 plus years.  Still, we need as much criticism as possible of Trump at this point because he is a total maniac who sees no limits to his use of violence.

2025 was a crazy year in a lot of ways.  With a few exceptions, it wasn’t a good year for liberty.  The Trump administration seemed to start off well with pardons, a few good cabinet appointments, and the idea of DOGE.

It all quickly faded.  DOGE may have exposed some things, but it went nowhere, as Trump simply had no desire to cut anything significant out of the budget.  Government spending has increased.

Things really went downhill in March and April of 2025.  The Trump administration started arresting legal immigrants simply for peacefully protesting or speaking out against the crimes of the Israeli state.

While Trump’s rhetoric is all over the place, he has continued to fund Ukraine and Israel.  His so-called peace deals or ceasefires haven’t really panned out.  Trump has bombed Yemen, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria, and Venezuela.  It has all been unnecessary and evil.  He has provided weapons and funding for all of the killing and bombing done by the Israeli state.  He has given Netanyahu just about everything he wants.

The Epstein files have been a total disaster for Trump.  Kash Patel has been shown to be a liar.  The same goes for Pam Bondi.  Trump did a terrible job of lying about the whole thing.  It is obvious he has been trying to protect people by not releasing information.

Trump has declared war against the good people who have defended him against the establishment in the past.  It isn’t just Elon Musk.  Trump drove Marjorie Taylor Greene from office, and he is running the biggest campaign against Thomas Massie.  Trump and his establishment cronies are spending more money trying to get rid of Massie than any Democratic person in Congress.

Overall, the first year of the second term of the Trump presidency has been a disaster.  It has been a bigger disaster than his first term, and we still have over three years to go.

The Economy

Trump’s disastrous tariffs will only make our lives more expensive.  They will also make for lower quality products, as they serve to eliminate foreign competition.

At the risk of calling the last 10 out of 2 recessions, I do predict that we will be in a recession in 2026 unless the Fed goes crazy with quantitative easing.  I thought we would get a recession last year because we had had an inverted yield curve for most of 2023 and 2024.

The yield curve has taken a while to normalize, but it is finally mostly normalized now.  If history is any guide, we should be seeing a recession in the next 12 months.

I was going to predict that the Fed would return to QE (digital money printing), but that already happened with its December 2025 meeting.

It is absurd that consumer price inflation is still running above 2% and yet the Fed feels the need to lower its target rate and to start expanding its balance sheet.  It only had about 12 days of its transition from balance sheet contraction to balance sheet expansion.

Perhaps we will finally see the Everything Bubble pop.  Housing has already cooled down.  It was somewhat stagnant in 2025 in general.  Bitcoin fell below the $90,000 mark.  I expect it will keep falling, but it is going to be a wild ride with a lot of ups and downs.  The fall of Bitcoin may be the face of the end of the speculative bubble.

Bitcoin has been somewhat correlated to the Nasdaq, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.  It only makes sense when you realize that they are both speculative bubbles.  But at least the Nasdaq companies make products that consumers buy.  The fall for Bitcoin will be greater than the fall in the Nasdaq or stocks in general.  Still, stocks could fall by 50% or more.

Gold and Silver and the Dollar

The precious metals will also continue to see high volatility.  If there is a deep recession, we could see some temporary drops.  But expect gold and silver to keep running higher in the longer term because the Fed’s only solution will be to print more money.

It is extraordinary what gold and silver have done in 2025.  Gold was up over 60% for the year.  Silver was up over 140%.

GDX – a gold miners ETF – was up about 142% in 2025.  GDXJ – a junior gold miners ETF – was up about 153%.

These are extraordinary returns to say the least.  It isn’t likely that 2026 will see these gains, but it is still possible.  One reason for the high returns is the weak U.S. dollar.

In a recession, Americans typically find a safe haven in the U.S. dollar.  This may not happen this time around.  The national debt is quite staggering, and the Fed is already going back to monetary inflation before the recession has officially begun.  With the sanctions and bullying of other countries from Trump, there is good reason for China, Russia, and several other countries to turn away from the dollar.  They certainly won’t be buying any significant amounts of U.S. Treasury debt.

Foreign Policy

Your guess is as good as mine here.  Trump’s foreign policy in 2025 was absolutely atrocious.  He has proven himself to be a war criminal.  How many more countries can Trump find to bomb?  Apparently all 195 countries or so on the planet are a possibility.  It is the biggest joke that people even talk about the possibility of Trump getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

The only way to predict what will happen in 2026 is to predict what Trump will think and do.  This is impossible.  Not even Trump knows what he is going to do tomorrow.  It usually depends on the last person he talked to.

The best hope at this point is that Trump does not get us into any major wars.  He already has essentially declared war on Iran and Venezuela.  Iran was incredibly diplomatic in settling things down quickly the last time.  Venezuela is just not capable of fighting back unless it plans to go all out and face a devastating bombing campaign from the U.S. government.

Trump is just flat-out murdering people in Venezuela.  They are coming up with ten different excuses for doing it.

What was the point of Trump beating out lil’ Marco Rubio in 2016?  Trump has basically handed over his foreign policy to Rubio now.

There needs to be a severe backlash against Trump from his base.  There is already backlash from some conservatives and libertarians who may have supported Trump or voted for him as the lesser of two evils.  That is why his approval ratings are way down, but they aren’t down low enough.

Politics

Trump will get even more unpopular as the economy tanks.  He is already acting like Biden, trying to convince the populace that the economy really is good, in spite of how you may feel.

When the recession hits and the asset bubble implodes, Trump’s approval rating will sink to its lowest ever. He will still be above 25% because he has a base of people who will support him no matter what.  He will also get support from the war hawks who actually hate Trump but accept the more up-to-date version of Trump who does their bidding in funding and starting wars.

The prediction I feel most confident of is that the Democrats are going to take back Congress in 2027.  Even though the Democrats remain unpopular (and rightly so), many independents and libertarians, along with some Republicans, are going to sit out the November 2026 election.  The Republicans fully deserve to lose.  It will probably be a landslide against the Republicans.  They are already deeply unpopular, and we aren’t even in a recession yet.

My prediction for 2028 is that J.D. Vance is going to have a very difficult time running for president on Trump’s record of failures.

One positive for liberty that has happened and will continue to happen is the turn to alternative media.  The establishment news on television is dying.  It is mostly old people watching CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News.  The main networks like NBC, ABC, and CBS are also not as influential as they were even 10 years ago.  They still have some influence, but it is waning quickly, and rightly so.

The hope for 2026 is that Trump won’t start any new wars and that the American people will continue to not trust the ruling elite.  If public opinion keeps shifting away from the establishment, there is hope for greater decentralization and liberty in the future.  It probably won’t come in 2026 though.

Happy New Year!