Donald Trump is a hard person to read at times.  I am not one who typically says that Trump is playing 4-D chess.  When he does something moronic, he is usually just being a moron.  We don’t have to go looking for a deeper explanation.

A post on Truth Social about Ukraine really brings up a question of whether Trump is insane or playing 4-D chess.  Maybe it is both.  Maybe it is that Trump is insane and thinks that he is playing 4-D chess.

Trump says in his post that Ukraine “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”  He goes on to say that Russia has been fighting aimlessly and that it makes them look like a paper tiger.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115255130298104593

Trump concludes that, “We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them.”  When Trump uses the word “we” like so many other politicians, he means the taxpayers.

The comments made by Trump are so incredibly out of touch with reality, it makes it seem as if he is trolling.

The Only Way to Oppose the War Hawks?

Perhaps Trump is in over his head.  He has surrounded himself with war hawks.  He hasn’t made any significant progress on ending the war in Ukraine because he keeps funding Ukraine.  It is the same way that the mass murder in Gaza continues because Trump and Congress keep funding the Israeli state.

Maybe Trump is tired of fighting the war hawks and figures he sees no way to beat them.  Therefore, he just makes outrageous comments by essentially doubling down what the war hawks say.

This would be like Ron Paul saying, “After studying the issue more, I believe the Federal Reserve can do a great job of centrally planning the economy.  The Fed should drop interest rates to zero and start up the digital printing presses again.  More monetary inflation won’t lead to higher prices or misallocations.  The Fed is in a great position to give us a booming economy.”

Of course, Ron Paul tells the truth, so he wouldn’t say this.  But this is the vibe you get from reading Trump’s post about Ukraine.  He is being so ridiculous by saying that Ukraine can gain back all of its territory when the Ukrainian government is losing the war to Russia.  It is as if Trump is saying, “Yeah, go ahead with your plan of keeping the war going.  We’ll see how that turns out.”

Why Doesn’t Trump Just Tell the Truth?

Trump’s social media platform is called Truth Social, but he doesn’t seem to be very truthful these days.  Either Trump is delusional and lying or he is purposely lying.

If this is a trolling post, why doesn’t Trump just come right out and say that Ukraine has no hope of winning the war?  Why doesn’t he cut off funding?  Why doesn’t he say, as he has kind of said in the past, that Ukraine isn’t in a position to negotiate right now?

If Trump isn’t completely delusional and this is a sarcastic post, then it means that Trump is really scared of the neocons.

This has seemed evident when it comes to Israel.  Trump is Netanyahu’s little b**ch.  He does whatever Netanyahu orders him to do.  Trump is completely controlled in this sense.

But apparently Trump is just controlled on foreign policy overall.  If he can’t stand up to the war hawks and call out this charade in Ukraine, then he is useless at best.

Trump has said some good things in the past on Ukraine, but he continues to fund the conflict.  He also fails to ever mention the U.S. government’s role in sparking the conflict.

We seem to always get back to the question of whether Trump is just stupid or evil.  Maybe the deep state is making threats against him and his family.  Trump is allowed to speak in opposing climate change and some cultural issues, but he dares not speak against the U.S. empire.

If Trump isn’t stupid, he is a total coward because he won’t stand up to the deep state.  If he is being threatened, then maybe he should just resign.

If Trump thinks he is playing 4-D chess on the Ukraine issue, he is losing badly at it.  Maybe he should try just telling the truth on Truth Social.  He is either a coward or a fool.  He’s probably both in this case.

It is almost never good to judge a situation or institute a policy based on the actions of one person, unless the actions are representative of a larger group.

When violence is committed by one individual, we should certainly never portray that on an entire group of people.  For example, when a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to kill members of Congress at a baseball game, it wasn’t appropriate to label all Bernie Sanders supporters as murderers or nutcases.

The fact that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, seemingly by a lone person, does not tell us anything by itself.  It is a tragic event where one person took the life of another.

The loss of Charlie Kirk is significant in many ways, but perhaps the biggest story is the reaction to it.  I experienced it in my own world.  I saw more than one of my Facebook “friends” saying things that I found disturbing.

I try to put myself in the position of others.  What if Joe Biden had died while he was president at the height of the evil vaccine mandates?  I certainly wouldn’t have shed a tear over it, but I also don’t think I would have taken to Facebook and celebrated the moment.

It is almost never a good idea to celebrate and act gleeful over the death of another human being.  Even if the person is evil, you should be careful about celebrating too much.  You may turn into what you claim to hate.

Of course, Charlie Kirk wasn’t even a politician.  So even if he had views that someone found repugnant, it’s not like he had the power to force them on anyone.

Conspiracy Theories

There are certainly bizarre things about this story, but I can’t claim to know that it was anything more than the single person who has been accused.

There are theories out there that it could have been the Israeli government or U.S. intelligence behind the assassination.  Netanyahu had a somewhat bizarre response when asked about the allegations, but this doesn’t mean he had anything to do with it.

If we ever get any kind of solid evidence that the Israeli state was behind the killing of Charlie Kirk, it might open the eyes of a lot conservatives out there.  Personally, it would do nothing to change my views because I already believe that the Israeli state (with U.S. government weapons and funding) has intentionally killed tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza over the last 2 years, so it would be no surprise if they killed one person in America.

Several people have stated that Charlie Kirk had been offered a large amount of money for his organization to tow the pro-Israel narrative.  He was also supposedly threatened by the pro-Israel lobby at a meeting in the Hamptons.

We can’t be certain that all of this is true and accurate, but at the very least it seems that Kirk’s views on Israel had evolved.  At a summer event hosted by his organization (TPUSA), he had Tucker Carlson there, who has become less shy in criticizing the Israeli state.  Kirk also had Dave Smith there to debate the topic of Israel, who has been a harsh critic of the actions of the Israeli state over the last 2 years.

Just the fact that Charlie Kirk had Dave Smith speaking at his event is a big sign of Kirk’s change in attitude, or at least his open-mindedness on the topic.

In a recent episode of his show, Dave actually read some text messages from Charlie Kirk.  One interesting thing is that Charlie Kirk saw the debate on Joe Rogan’s show between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith.  Kirk said that even though he comes more from the pro-Israel side, he didn’t really disagree with much of what Dave had to say.

In other words, Charlie Kirk was no Ben Shapiro.

And speaking of Ben Shapiro, it is creepy the way he tries to use Kirk’s death and pretend that Kirk would have wanted us all to unconditionally support Israel.

Cancel Culture

I have never been completely comfortable with the term cancel culture, and it has become clearer why.  I have never thought that a person should never be fired from a job for saying something.

There is certainly nuance here.  We have seen some ridiculous stories about people getting fired from their job over a dumb and harmless comment.  Sometimes the comments are even accurate but they are seen as politically incorrect.

On the other hand, it would be crazy to take a position that someone should never be fired for what they say or write in public.  If you are celebrating violence, you can see where a company might not want to associate with that.  That is especially true if the person is doing it while representing the company in some way.

Jimmy Kimmel

When Jimmy Kimmel said that MAGA people are distraught over one of their own murdering Charlie Kirk, Kimmel said it on his show on ABC.  It is not surprising that ABC did not want to defend this inaccurate and obnoxious comment, especially when Kimmel already had low ratings.

I actually thought it was far worse what Kimmel said a few years back when he said that the non-vaccinated people should be denied entry into hospitals and left to die.  This wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t funny.  Kimmel was a salesman for the evil establishment.  Kimmel and Colbert were both shills for the vaccine regime.

ABC has suspended Kimmel.  Maybe he has been fired, but we don’t know for sure if it is permanent.

Of course, the idiotic Trump administration has to ruin this great victory by making threats of investigation against ABC.  This just provided cover for ABC to get rid of Kimmel, and it gave the left an excuse to holler about Trump.

To be clear, it is absolutely wrong for the government to threaten a company with investigation or to threaten pulling their license if the company doesn’t fire someone because of something they said.  It was just as wrong when the Biden people were threatening social media companies if they didn’t censor people who were critical (giving accurate information) about COVID lockdowns and vaccines.

Kimmel’s ratings were already in the toilet.  ABC could easily let him go after the Trump team made threats.  It would have been a harder decision if the Trump team had kept their mouths shut and let it play out from public pressure.

Other Lessons

It seems that this has brought out the true colors in many people.

Pam Bondi has now fully exposed herself as an opponent of liberty and free speech.

Parts of the hardcore left have shown themselves as supporting violence.

There are good parts too.  I have seen some on the left who have been respectful and have even had some genuine praise for some of the things Charlie Kirk stood for.

Another positive thing is that we, so far, have seen little violence in response to what happened.  Unlike 2020, there haven’t been riots in the streets.

There are certainly cultural issues where I had disagreements with Charlie Kirk.  There are some things he said that I wouldn’t have said or I would have said differently.  But he also had some really good things to say.  His biggest thing was that he stood for free speech and open debate.

Even though almost everyone knows of him now, most people who don’t pay attention to politics didn’t know much about Charlie Kirk, if anything at all.  Some have now heard the more controversial things he had to say, but some have also seen him from when he was engaging in open dialogue with those who disagree with him.

Charlie Kirk was working through some issues in his own mind on foreign policy, but he was generally on the better side of MAGA (the less interventionist side).

If there is one thing we should take away from Charlie Kirk, it is that we should strive to have an open dialogue with those who disagree with us, as long as they are willing to do so civilly.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released its latest monetary policy statement.  The decision was to lower the federal funds rate by 25 basis points, which is the same as 0.25%.  There was one dissenting vote by Stephen Miran, who wanted to lower the target range by 50 basis points.  Miran was just put on the Fed Board by Trump, so it is no surprise that he is trying to give Trump what he wants.

This cut was widely expected by the market.  The Fed is now signaling that we should expect two more rate cuts by the end of the year.  Since there are only two meetings left in 2025, this likely means 25 basis points will be cut at each meeting (late October and December).

If this holds, the Fed will have a target range of 3.5% to 3.75% by the end of the year.  Meanwhile, the CPI numbers are still near 3%.  Why is the Fed in a stage of lowering rates if price inflation is still running higher than the Fed’s stated target?

Monetary Deflation

While the rate cut gets all of the news, the Fed will continue its policy of reducing its balance sheet holdings.  The Implementation Note states that the Fed will continue to allow $40 billion of debt to expire each month without rolling it over.  That is $5 billion in Treasury securities and $35 billion in mortgage-backed securities.

There is no way that Donald Trump understands this at all.  He watches Fox News and perhaps a little CNBC, and we can be rather certain that his advisors aren’t explaining to him that the Fed is deflating its balance sheet.  He might not even know what this means.  Trump just sees the headline news that interest rates are going lower.

To be sure, the Fed’s balance sheet reflects the base money supply.  It still matters what commercial banks do with the money that is out there (whether they loan it out or keep it on reserve).

So, while one hand of the Fed shows lower rates (a looser monetary policy), the other hand shows monetary deflation (a tighter monetary policy).

As a side note, the banks are getting paid to keep money on reserve.  That is how the Fed is controlling the federal funds rate.  We see headlines that the Fed cut 25 basis points.  Maybe someone should run a headline saying that commercial banks will be paid 0.25% less than before for parking money at the Fed.

Will This Stop a Recession?

The Fed isn’t just lowering rates to please Trump.  The Fed members probably see trouble in the economy.  Otherwise, why would they be lowering rates while price inflation is still above their target?

If you think the Fed’s easing of interest rates is going to stop a recession from coming, you should look at the past.  It has been very common for the Federal Reserve to already be in easing mode when a recession becomes evident.

The yield curve was mostly inverted in 2023 and 2024.  It has somewhat normalized.  With this rate cut, the 3-month yield is finally below the 10-year yield.

While an inverted yield curve is a good recession predictor, there is typically a delay.  The recession doesn’t actually show up until the yields have normalized – meaning that longer-term yields are higher than the shorter-term yields.  This normalization often comes because shorter-term yields are being controlled by the Fed (i.e., being lowered by the Fed).

The process right now is actually typical of what precedes a recession.  Perhaps one difference is that price inflation is still rather high.  I would also argue that the asset bubble is far bigger than what we have seen in the past.

The Fed has control of the short-term interest rates right now.  It is not likely to stop a recession from happening just by cutting 25 basis points at each meeting.  Unless the Fed starts massively inflating like it did in 2020, it isn’t going to prevent a recession.

We haven’t even seen the Fed stop its policy of monetary deflation.  Trump may not know this or understand this, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.  The continued monetary deflation and the small rate cuts from the Fed are indicating a recession ahead.  Investors in general don’t see this.  The bond market tends to be wiser on these matters.

The latest CPI numbers were released for August 2025.  The CPI was up 0.4% for the month.  The year-over-year now stands at 2.9%.

The median CPI, which tends to be less volatile, was up 0.3% on the month and stayed at 3.6% annually.

Forecasts had predicted a monthly rise of 0.3% and an annual rise of 2.9% for the CPI.  This means that it was a rounding difference, but the actual numbers came in slightly higher than expected.

To offset this little bit of bad news was more bad news.  The number of unemployment filings came in higher than expected.

Therefore, the bad news of slightly higher price inflation was offset by the bad news of higher unemployment.  The first piece of bad news indicates that the Fed can’t be as loose with its monetary policy.  The second piece of bad news says, “Don’t worry about the first piece.  The higher unemployment gives us a green light to lower rates at the next Fed meeting.”

In other words, the bad news that favors lower rates typically wins out.

Investors Love Everything in Bubble Mania

Higher price inflation?  Who cares?  Buy more stocks and mutual funds.

Higher unemployment?  Who cares?  If anything, this just gives the Fed more incentive to lower rates.  Buy more stocks and mutual funds.

It doesn’t matter what the news is these days.  Even tariffs don’t seem to bother investors any longer. No matter what it is, the market just keeps marching higher.

The Dow closed above 46,000 for the first time ever.  The Nasdaq closed above 22,000 for the first time ever.

This is bubble mania.  No matter what the news is, it is twisted into a good reason to buy more equities.

When the markets hit new highs, it means that the economy is strong.  And since the economy is strong, you should buy more stocks.

Does this all make sense?  It only makes sense in the context of bubble mania.

We don’t know when the bubble mania will end, but we know that manias always come to an end.  They end when the irrationality can’t get any more irrational.  They also end when people don’t have any more money to speculate because they are using it for necessities.

The bubble mania will end slowly and then all of a sudden.  Then there will be a mania in the rush for the exit door.  You don’t want to sell when everyone else is trying to sell.

The U.S. medical care system is really messed up, but the Health Savings Account (HSA) is a great vehicle to use if it is available to you.  In order to have an HSA, you have to have a high-deductible health insurance plan.

The Health Savings Account allows you to contribute pre-tax money into an account and use that money for eligible medical expenses.  It is somewhat similar to a 401k except it is supposed to be for medical expenses instead of general retirement.

In addition, some employers will make a contribution to your HSA, somewhat similar to a 401k plan.  Unlike a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), an HSA plan carries forward.  If you don’t use any of the money in a particular year, it stays in your account.

You can technically spend your HSA money on anything, but it will negate any tax benefits.  You will owe income taxes on non-qualified expenditures.

A Strategy for Growing Your HSA

There is a small segment of people out there, including a few financial advisors, who will suggest that you not use any of your HSA money while you are working and earning money.  Instead, you should keep all of your medical receipts and keep growing and investing the money that is in your HSA account, which will grow tax-free.

When it comes time to retire or when you really need the money, you can then redeem your money with all of the receipts you have saved.  If you have $30,000 in medical receipts over the course of 20 years, you can then withdraw $30,000 tax free as long as you have the receipts to show for it.

This is a strategy that is commonly employed in the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) community.

Personally, I am not a fan of this strategy for multiple reasons.  I’m not saying it is a disaster if you are currently doing it, but I do want to warn about a few things.

Are You Maxing Out Your HSA and 401k?

If you are not maxing out your pre-tax accounts, there is no point in doing this strategy.  Actually, there is only downside to doing it.

If you can legally contribute more to your pre-tax accounts each year – particularly your HSA – then it doesn’t make sense to not claim your medical expenses now.  Why would you not claim $1,000 in medical expenses while still being able to contribute another $1,000 per year to your HSA?

You are better off getting reimbursed now through your HSA and maxing out your contributions.  If you are not maxing out your HSA contributions, then there is no tax advantage to saving your medical receipts to get reimbursed in the future.  It is just complicating things.

A 401k is not as accessible as an HSA, but you really should be maxing out your contributions to a 401k too before you consider deferring HSA reimbursement.

A Bird in the Hand

If I find an old receipt, the print is often faded.  After 10 years or so, how do you know you’ll be able to read what is on the receipt?  If you can’t read it, then you can’t document it to the IRS.  You could end up in a situation where you can’t get reimbursed for some of the qualified medical expenses that you did have.

Maybe you are really organized and have scanned all of your medical receipts.  Even here, it is possible that you could lose a file or a file gets corrupted.  If they are stored on a home computer and not in the cloud, you are always at risk of a fire or some other damage.  The same holds true for paper receipts.

Plus, just the organization of it all sounds like a nightmare.  You have to have really great organization skills to track receipts for many years and not lose them.

Other Factors

There are other problems that come to mind with this whole strategy.  Do you really want to wait for 20 or 30 years and then claim, say, $50,000 or more in medical expenses?  This sends up smoke signals to the IRS to be audited.  You are almost begging to be audited, and then you will have to prove out $50,000 in receipts for one year.

Meanwhile, if you were spending something like $1,500 per year on average in medical expenses using your HSA card, it would not be nearly as burdensome if you were audited the following year.  It wouldn’t be as big of a deal if you couldn’t prove some of the expenses.  Also, it would be much easier to possibly retrieve a receipt for something that just happened in the last two years or so.

Another factor is that it is just easier when you go to the doctor’s office to pay with your HSA card and to save the receipt.  Again, if you are going to save receipts for many years or decades to be reimbursed later, you need exceptional organizational skills.

If you aren’t maxing out your pre-tax accounts, there is no point to this strategy, as discussed above.  If you are maxing everything out, you are probably in a position where you don’t need this headache anyway.  Just take the money now.  If you still want to invest it, put it in a regular brokerage account.  You won’t get the tax benefit with your investment returns, but you will have easy access to your money, which isn’t always the case with a 401k plan.  And you don’t have to use it for medical expenses.

In order to employ this strategy of saving your receipts to get reimbursed in the distant future, you should have a strong cash flow outside of pre-tax accounts while also maxing out contributions to your pre-tax accounts.  Most people aren’t in this position.

If you are in this position, you are already doing extraordinarily well.  Why give yourself these possible headaches for the possibility of a few extra tax-free bucks?

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a ruling saying that Trump lacks the authority to implement most of his tariffs.  The ruling does not take effect until October 14.

Trump has now indicated that he will request an expedited ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump absurdly declared, “If you take away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country.”  Actually, if Trump keeps dictating unconstitutional acts (such as tariffs), we could end being a third-world country.

Tariffs are a tax, plain and simple.  They are a tax on imported goods.  You can argue about who ultimately pays the tax, but it is still a tax.

The reason America grew so wealthy in the 1800s and early 1900s wasn’t because of tariffs.  It was in spite of tariffs.  Up until 1913, there was no Federal Reserve.  There was no 16^th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax.  Government spending was a tiny fraction of what it is today.  And most things were not regulated by the federal government as they are today.

Trump is a complete fool when it comes to economics.  You can be sure though that Trump will find anyone else to blame when we hit a recession.  He will blame “Too Late” Powell.  He will blame the courts for striking down his tariffs.

A Test for the Supreme Justices

This will be a great test for the justices on the Supreme Court.  The so-called liberal justices will probably vote in favor of striking down the tariffs just because it goes against Trump.

The interesting thing will be the so-called conservative justices.  Will they actually follow the Constitution, or will they play politics by giving Trump and some of his supporters what they want?

To be sure, these tariffs are absolutely unconstitutional.  Trump is just dictating them from his throne.  They seem to change from day to day on a whim.

The Constitution is clear.  The very beginning of Article 1, Section 8 states, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises…”.  It is the first thing there assigned to Congress.

Section 10 states, “No state shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection Laws.”

There is certainly no authority for the executive branch to institute taxes on imports.  It would have to be done by Congress to be constitutional.

The Trump administration has used the International Economic Powers Act as justification for Trump’s tariffs.  This act in itself is probably unconstitutional.  But even here, is Trump really going to claim that all of his tariffs constitute an emergency?

He has cited so many different reasons for putting tariffs on various countries.  Will they argue that India buying oil from Russia is an emergency?  Politics in Brazil is an emergency?  The trade deficit is an emergency?  A foreign leader not doing what Trump wants is an emergency?  They will have to argue that anything qualifies as an emergency.

Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas

It will be interesting how the more conservative justices will rule on the tariffs.  There are no libertarians on the Supreme Court.  There are no true constitutionalists.  But the closest ones are probably Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch.

These are the unpredictable ones.  Even though there is nothing “conservative” about tariffs, will they side with Trump on this?  Or will they do a proper reading of the Constitution and rule against these taxes?

This will be a good litmus test for them to see if they are on the side of politics or the Constitution.  For the rest of them, it doesn’t matter how they vote because we already know they are charlatans.  Again, the leftists will just go against Trump.  It just so happens that that is the correct and constitutional decision in this case.

We can only hope that these tariffs will get struck down.  It is possible the Supreme Court just doesn’t hear the case, which means that the previous ruling against the tariffs will stand.

Even though Trump will blame the courts, it is the best thing for Americans.  We are getting a recession either way.  We don’t need added taxes to the things we buy on top of the recession.

There is a book by Annie Duke called Thinking in Bets.  One of the terms she coined is “resulting”.  Resulting is when someone judges a decision based on its outcome.  The problem is that the result itself isn’t always indicative of whether the decision itself was proper at the time it was made.

Annie Duke was a professional poker player.  If you get a hand with pocket aces, it makes sense to play the hand and probably to raise the stakes.  This doesn’t always mean that it will result in you winning the hand.  You may get unlucky.  Someone else might have had a 2 and a 7, which is typically a terrible hand.  But if two more 7s come up on the flop, it is all of a sudden a great hand.

The reason this is so important is because you don’t want resulting to dictate future decisions.  If you lost a hand with pocket aces, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bet with them in the future.

For another example, think about an insurance policy.  You pay $3,000 for an annual insurance policy for your house.  During the year, your house doesn’t burn down.  You don’t have any severe damage to your house from anything, so you don’t file any claims with your insurance.  Should you conclude that it was a waste of money to get the insurance?

If you could have predicted the future and known that there would be no damage to your house in the next year, then it would make sense to go without insurance.  But you don’t know what the outcome will be.  You have to make the decision with the knowledge you have at the time.

Investment Performance

Even though the above makes sense to most people, they tend not to apply this thinking to their investments.  Let’s say someone has half their investments in stocks and the other half in a money market fund.  The stocks go up 20% in one year, while the money market fund returns 3%.  It would be easy to say, “I should have put it all in stocks.”  In fact, that’s what many would say.

But like your poker hand, you didn’t know what the outcome would be.  It would make sense to say, “If I had known, I would have put everything in stocks.”

But you didn’t know.  Nobody knows what the stock market will return in the next year.  The whole point of diversification is that you don’t know what the future holds.  That is the point.

This is why it also doesn’t make much sense to judge a portfolio based on its results, especially in the short run.  Tell someone that you invest in the permanent portfolio or something else with diversification.  In most cases, they won’t analyze the holdings and how the assets perform in different environments.  Instead, they’ll want to know the returns.  They’ll want to compare it to the S&P 500 or maybe their own portfolio.

This isn’t a way to judge a portfolio.  This is especially true when you are in a major bull market in stocks.  At the very least, you need to look back at how it performed during different economic environments.

The Everything Bubble

Just because we have been in a bull market, it doesn’t mean that the same things will keep going up.  In fact, it is a good reason to go the other way and be more protective of your investments.

Going just based on results, it would have been better to invest in stocks in the last 10 years than in bonds or in the permanent portfolio.  Actually, it would have been even better to put your money in Bitcoin.  But this doesn’t mean that would have been the right decision based on what was known at the time.

And it certainly doesn’t mean that is the path forward.  Based on the results of the last 10 years, you should put your money in Bitcoin if you think the next 10 years will be similar.  But that isn’t typically what happens, and it would be extremely risky (and probably irresponsible) to put all of your money in Bitcoin.

We are probably in an Everything Bubble where all major assets are in a bubble.  Some are worse than others.  Stocks and crypto currencies may be the biggest of the bubble.  Even here, I can only make decisions now knowing what I know now.  I won’t focus on the results of previous decisions except as far as it helps my decision-making process going forward.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has a disclaimer that “past performance is no guarantee of future results”.  As Harry Browne said, this is one statement by a government agency that is truthful.

Judge your portfolio based on whether it is doing what it is supposed to do.  Don’t judge it by comparing it to a particular asset class.  Ask yourself whether your portfolio will hold up in any economic environment, perhaps with the exception of a complete collapse of the division of labor.

If your portfolio isn’t well diversified, are you accepting of the fact that you are vulnerable to losing a large percentage of it?  If you aren’t ok with that, then it probably makes sense to change your portfolio.

On Friday (August 22, 2025), Jerome Powell delivered a speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  He said, “With policy in restrictive territory, the baseline outlook and the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance.”

With that one sentence, U.S. stock indexes soared higher to new record highs.  You know there is something wrong with our system when one bland statement from one person can dramatically impact the economy.

Mr. “Too Late” Powell (Trump’s nickname) was essentially saying that there is a good chance the Fed will lower its target rate at the September meeting.  The chances for a 25-basis point reduction went up to near certainty after these comments.

So, it looks like Trump is going to get what he wants this time out of “Too Late”, although maybe Trump would favor a much bigger cut.

The nickname isn’t a bad one, but it isn’t because he is too late lowering rates.  It is because he was too late in hiking rates and stopping the monetary inflation when price inflation was already spiking in 2022.

It wasn’t until March 2022 that the Fed finally hiked its target rate to a mere range of .25% to 0.50%.

And prior to that meeting in March 2022, the Fed was still increasing its balance sheet via monetary inflation, even when it was quite evident to most Americans that consumer prices were rising far faster than the Fed’s 2% target.

Now that Powell has indicated that the Fed will go back to lowering rates, perhaps he can answer some of these questions.

Questions for a Central Planner

If stocks continue to soar higher with new all-time highs, why is the Fed lowering interest rates?

There is a seemingly contradictory policy of lowering rates while continuing to deflate the balance sheet.  If the Fed is lowering rates, why is it also continuing to sell off debt from its balance sheet at the same time?

What will the Fed do if price inflation goes higher from here?  Will it start hiking rates again?  The PPI numbers recently came in showing a 0.9% rise in just one month.

What happened to the Fed’s policy of looking for an average of 2% price inflation over time?  We haven’t even been able to hit the 2% mark once in the last several years, so why is the Fed going to lower rates again?

What will the Fed do if we get some kind of stagflation where we have high price inflation and low (or negative) economic growth?  Which one will take priority?

Happy 90^th birthday to the great Ron Paul.  He was born on August 20, 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression.  While he is best known for his promotion of liberty, Ron Paul is the ultimate family man.

He has been married to Carol Paul since 1957.  They had 5 children together and now enjoy a large family with many grandchildren.

Ron Paul became a doctor and delivered thousands of babies.  One interesting factoid is that Dr. Paul delivered Selena, the late and famous singer.

He was elected to Congress in a special election in 1976.  He had become interested in economics prior to that.  He has cited Nixon’s closing of the gold window in 1971 as an event that got him more interested in the subject.  He became familiar with the Austrian school of economics (free market economics).

While Ron Paul was in and out of Congress several times, he is probably most well-known for his presidential runs.  He ran on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, but it just wasn’t his time to shine yet, as this was before the internet era and also coming off of the Reagan presidency.

Ron Paul gained huge notoriety in 2007 when he ran for president on the Republican Party ticket.  In the debates, Paul emphasized his positions on a non-interventionist foreign policy and fixing the monetary system.  It surprised many people, especially libertarians, when he would go around the country giving speeches and there would be crowds chanting “End the Fed”.  There was also a large percentage of young people who were attracted to his campaigns.

Paul ran again in 2011/ 2012, but again fell short of getting the nomination.  There was still a strong establishment presence in the Republican Party that made it difficult for an outsider to gain traction on a national scale.  Still, Ron Paul allowed the world to see that you could be in favor of low taxes and low spending and also be firmly against war.  In fact, he stressed that you have to be against war and running an empire if you actually favor low taxes.

For better or for worse, Ron Paul paved the way for Donald Trump to enter the scene in 2015.  Trump was actually able to get the Republican nomination while being somewhat critical of war.

Ron Paul as an Example

Ron Paul is a great example of someone to emulate.  Ron Paul has demonstrated what it means to be a Christian and a family man.  But unlike many in politics, he did not wear his Christianity on his sleeve.  He practiced his Christianity more than he preached it.

This is not to say that you should follow Ron Paul and be a politician.  But he was never really a politician in how we think of that term in today’s world.  He used his platform, not to exert power over others, but to spread the message of liberty.

Paul himself will say that different people should do different things to promote liberty.  For some, it might mean through entertainment such as comedy or music.  For others, it might mean writing or speaking or hosting a podcast.  You can effect positive political change without running for political office.  And if you do run for political office, be sure that you are well grounded with a firm set of libertarian principles.

Ron Paul was able to do something that very few people are able to do.  He was elected and continued to stick by his principles.

There was a great celebration for Ron Paul in advance of his 90^th birthday where many big figures in the liberty movement came out to honor him.  For most libertarians today, Ron Paul has played some kind of an influential role.

It is hard to state just how important Ron Paul has been for the advancement of liberty.  Before 2007, the hardcore libertarians probably made up less than half a percent of the population.  That number has multiplied several times since then.

Finally, it is impressive that Dr. Paul is still “working”.  As he hits the age of 90, he is still writing and doing a show 5 days per week where we can still learn from him.  Whether it is on the latest foreign policy debacle or monetary policy, he is still giving us the same message of liberty.  Even at the beginning of the Covid madness in 2020, Dr. Paul was firmly against lockdowns and never bought into the hysteria.

Here is a big thank you to Ron Paul for your many decades of spreading the message of liberty.

Happy Birthday!

There is really only one way that Trump can end the war in Ukraine.

First, we have to understand the causes.  Trump likes to call this Biden’s war.  While the actual Russian invasion of Ukraine started under Biden, the whole conflict started long before this.  It goes back to at least Obama, if not before then.

Of course, Biden was vice president under Obama and had his hands in Ukraine then, so Biden really does share a large responsibility.  Plus, Biden could have prevented this in 2021/ 2022 when Putin sent a letter to the Biden administration looking for security assurances.  The Biden people just blew him off.

This really goes back to the end of the Cold War when Russia was given assurances that NATO would not expand to the east towards Russia’s border.  This was broken before Obama was ever on the scene.

But the whole Ukraine fiasco really got underway in 2014 when the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup against the democratically-elected president in Ukraine.  The president that was overthrown was trying to seek peaceful relations with Russia.

How would Americans feel if the Russian government overthrew the prime minister in Canada and installed their own handpicked leader, with intentions of forming an alliance and placing missiles on the border of New York?

On top of it all, the Ukrainian government then persecuted the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and allowed many thousands of people to be killed from 2014 and on.

It should also be noted that after the 2014 coup, the people in Crimea overwhelmingly voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia.  The establishment refers to it as Russia annexing Crimea, but it could just as easily be said that Crimea seceded from Ukraine.

Russia is “Winning”

There are rarely actual winners in war other than the military-industrial complex and the “leaders” of the countries involved who often enjoy support and increased power.

But if you had to say that one side is winning in this war, it is Russia.  This is why it is ridiculous for Zelenskyy or anyone else to make these demands of Russia giving back Crimea and just withdrawing and going home.  Why would Putin do this?  Why would Russians support this, especially when they are winning the war?

For Zelenskyy to say this, it basically means he doesn’t want peace negotiations.  He doesn’t want a ceasefire unless it is temporary so that his side can have some time to recover and rearm.

This is why it is basically useless to have Zelenskyy involved in any kind of negotiations or attempt at a ceasefire.  It is also useless (or worse) to have the main European leaders involved.  They don’t want to see this thing end in a way that is actually possible.

Trump should just deal with Putin.  He can meet with Zelenskyy just to let him know what they decided.

When Trump met Putin in Alaska, we should all hope that Putin gave a clear explanation of what was going on.  It needed to be in Fox News talking points where it doesn’t get too complicated, but not with the Fox News bias towards war.

Let’s hope that Putin explained to Trump that his buddies Obama and Biden started this whole thing with a coup in 2014.  Trump has probably never heard that from Fox News or anywhere else.  (Robert Kennedy Jr. is aware of this fact.)

Putin has the upper hand to the degree that anyone does here.  He is not going to give back Crimea.  He wants assurances that the U.S. will not admit Ukraine in NATO.  Those two things are non-negotiable.

What may be somewhat negotiable is who controls the territory in eastern Ukraine.  Putin does not want a return of the slaughtering of ethnically Russian people.  Perhaps he would be willing to negotiate these areas as being neutral or independent states.

The Only Thing Trump Has

There is only one possible way that Trump can get this thing negotiated and bring an end the fighting.  It all comes down to one thing:  Funding.

Trump has to be willing to take on the deep state and those around him.  He has to be willing to stop funding Ukraine with money and weapons.  He has to credibly tell Zelenskyy and everyone else to pound sand.  He has to make it clear that the funding is about to stop.

This is what will bring an end to the conflict.  Maybe the Europeans will attempt to fund it themselves.  Trump has to make it clear that there will be no funding from NATO or else the U.S. stops sending any money to NATO.  The Europeans will not be able to prop up Ukraine for very long, and Zelenskyy probably knows this.

Trump can talk to Putin and Zelenskyy all day long, but he ultimately has to be willing to cut the funding to Ukraine.  This is why Trump is in charge of negotiating with Putin and not Zelenskyy.  It really is a proxy war that the U.S. is fighting with Russia because the U.S. is funding it.

Trump can negotiate everything with Putin.  The agreement can be that Russia keeps Crimea.  The U.S. agrees to not admit Ukraine into NATO and not use Ukraine as a place to put missiles.  The eastern parts of Ukraine can be deemed independent states.  Maybe there will be some kind of buffer zone.  In return, Putin will withdraw all troops out of Ukraine.

If they can negotiate a deal like this, Zelenskyy won’t like it.  The war hawks in the U.S. won’t like it.  The only way Trump can enforce this agreement is by pledging to withdraw all funding and weapons going to Ukraine.

At that point, if Zelenskyy still wants to fight on, then it is his fight.  It will be up to the Ukrainian people to get him out of power.  Russia may just take all of Ukraine at that point.

The key is the funding.  It’s not clear if Trump understands this.  Any threats or talks are meaningless unless he is willing to stop the funding.  Trump and Putin can end this conflict very quickly if Trump is willing to defy the western establishment and stop the funding.