The Great Taking
Addison Wiggin / May 15, 2025
A $36 trillion dollar bombshell has just been dropped. You need to prepare now to protect your wealth and save your future.
BREAKING NEWS
Addison Wiggin / June 16, 2025
The silver breakout we’re seeing now was telegraphed months ago. Technical traders could have anticipated patterns signaling a major move, and the fundamentals back it up. Add in the geopolitical chaos—trade wars, sanctions, and debt crises—and it’s no surprise that safe-haven demand for precious metals is spiking. Silver’s volatility makes it a wild ride, but that’s exactly why the upside is so explosive.
The U.S. economy is a house of cards built on debt and delusion. The national debt is now $36 trillion, with interest payments alone eating up $1 trillion annually. The Fed can’t raise rates without crashing the system, and they can’t cut rates without igniting more inflation. It’s a trap, and silver is the escape hatch. Gold is an enduring store of value, but silver’s industrial demand gives it an extra kicker. As green energy and tech sectors grow, silver’s necessity only increases.
Addison Wiggin / June 16, 2025
Over the past few years, oil prices have spiked on every geopolitical tiff between Israel and Iran.
When the two countries lobbed missiles at each other in early 2024, oil prices spiked, and markets dropped.
But in all of those cases, tensions cooled, and oil prices came back down and markets kept on truckin’.
Addison Wiggin / June 16, 2025
The Fed meets this week. Powell will speak on Wednesday. We anticipate he’ll hold rates as they are, and Trump will once again mock him on Truth Social. The insinuation that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent should replace Powell… or at least succeed him early next year… will get bandied about on X.
Andrew Packer / June 13, 2025
Colorado has pumped oil out of the ground since 1901. And it’s the fifth-largest state in terms of oil production. This long period of production means that the area has been thoroughly surveyed, and that resources are well known.
Politically, however, the state of Colorado is run out of Denver and Boulder. The left-leaning political orientation of those cities tip the state governance towards environmentally sensitive rules and regulations for mining and drilling natural resources.
For instance, what happens if you hit a natural gas pocket as you’re drilling? Don’t think about burning it off – a process known as flaring. While flaring may light up the night sky in otherwise desolate parts of West Texas, there are only a few limited times flaring is allowed in Colorado.
That may sound like a good reason to invest your money in a good, old-fashioned Texas company instead.
Yet that’s one reason why the energy companies that operate out of the DJ Basin are bullish. These regulations create some of the cleanest fossil fuels you’ll find today. But the higher regulations, and uncertainty of future regulations, keep competitors out.
In fact, that leaves the DJ basin with four companies operating today.
Addison Wiggin / June 13, 2025
As the saying goes: “history doesn’t repeat itself – but it does rhyme.”
While the situation in the Middle East is fresh in the news, investors are feeling a dose of deja vu fear following Israel’s strike on Iran last night.
The U.S. officially stepped aside. And markets haven’t reacted too strongly. But it’s worth asking the question. What can we expect going forward? Prior similar events provide a clue.
Addison Wiggin / June 13, 2025
The S&P 500 is up more than 20% from its post-Liberation Day lows in April. Oracle delivered a blowout quarter thanks to a feeding frenzy for its AI cloud services, helping investors push the S&P higher yesterday.
Still something’s not right…
There is, of course, the LA riots, now spreading over 1,000 communities nationwide. And after the market close, Israel’s surprise attack of missiles and drones at nuclear facilities, top political leaders and scientists in Iran.
But that’s not it.
Institutional investors were already making for the exits, quietly. The pros sold $4.2 billion of stock into the rally just last week. The retail crowd, eyes wide and arms full of index funds, continues buying at a record pace.
John Robb / June 12, 2025
The disruption generated by Zero-day wars isn’t sufficient in and of itself to achieve a complete victory over an adversary. They are used to:
Incapacitate an enemy to make it vulnerable to a conventional invasion that will achieve a complete victory.
Decisively delay an enemy’s ability to mobilize in response to maneuvers, actions, or invasions taken against other foes (by the time they do, it’s over).
Force an enemy to overreact (see last month’s report: The Tactics of Mistake) in ways that will critically damage them.
Addison Wiggin / June 12, 2025
Notably, central bank gold holdings didn’t bottom around the year 2000 when gold prices did – they bottomed right around that pesky Great Financial Crisis.
And since then, central bankers have been taking the same steady buying approach to gold that retail investors take with their 401(k)s and steadily buying more.
Addison Wiggin / June 12, 2025
Global market valuations sit above 117% of GDP. Higher than 2000. Higher than 2007. Higher than any sane person should feel comfortable with.
Historically, market dislocations don’t resolve in tidy boxes. They end with sudden repricing — quietly at first, then all at once.
John Robb / June 11, 2025
Packetized media, the dynamic, granular media we consume and interact with on social networks, is transforming how we think and, by extension, how we organize society. As unsettling as this transformation has been so far, it’s far from over now that AI is being used to generate media packets. To understand what will happen, let’s break it down and put all of that AI innovation (LLMs to generative images, voices, and video) we’re seeing into context.
From the creators of The Daily Reckoning, I.O.U.S.A, Empire of Debt and The Daily Missive
