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 / May 14, 2025
Jamieson Greer, known for his surgically precise legal approach to trade policy, is not interested in grand statements or theatrical gestures.
His aim, according to those familiar with the talks, is simple: to build mechanisms that lock in behavioral change, not just extract promises. The biggest change? Removing non-tariff barriers, or NTBs.
If anything, it’s more important than tariffs themselves. In Greer’s own words, offered at a recent Santiago Capital roundtable, “tariffs are the noise; NTBs are the system.”
That sentiment echoed through Geneva, where the discussions were anything but conventional. Instead of haggling over tariff percentages, Greer’s team laid out a menu of reforms to China’s approval processes, customs procedures, and product standards — policies long used to quietly exclude U.S. goods and services without triggering WTO complaints.
Addison Wiggin / May 13, 2025
Non-tariff barriers aren’t tariffs. They’re stealthier. Trickier. More… Chinese.
They include arbitrary food safety rules, tech transfer demands, opaque licensing procedures, outright bans on foreign firms for “national security” reasons — and, yes, currency manipulation.
That last one is the dragon in the room.
Imagine, for a moment, that all the talk of trade deficits and factory closures in Ohio were downstream effects not of wage arbitrage or environmental shortcuts, but a central bank in Beijing intentionally weakening its currency to juice exports and hoard dollar-denominated assets. A grand illusion. A monetary matador’s cape.
Bill Bonner / May 12, 2025
The outcome of the ‘Trade War’ should have been obvious. It had been rehearsed, in public, back in Donald Trump’s first term. In 2017, he went to war with Canada and Mexico. He ranted and raved about the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, as if it were the devil’s own work, and declared a ‘trade war.’
Critics complained that he was an economic ignoramus…stupid…or even crazy. MAGA supporters defended him, saying it was just a negotiating tactic…or that he was ‘playing 3D chess,’ whatever that was.
Joel Bowman / May 9, 2025
To the undisguised chagrin of the hyperventilating blowhards peopling the mainstream media, who prophesied a collapsing economy, widespread misery and a Mad Max-style, statewide collapse, the long-suffering citizens of Argentina were spared their ghoulish fantasies.
Take the national carrier, Aerolíneas Argentinas, as a simple case study. In a major legislative victory late last year, the Milei administration was able to pave the road (or is it, clear the skies?) for privatizing the nose-diving, cash-hemorrhaging airline.
Naturally, the popular presses sided with the powerful and notoriously corrupt unions, who weren’t exactly keen on seeing their gravy plane grounded.
Andrew Packer / May 8, 2025
One of Buffett’s best investment principles is the “circle of competence.”
Simply put, it means only invest in what you can understand. And it’s both a blessing and a curse, because Buffett’s circle of competence has led to investment allocations that lag where future global growth will lie.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about Berkshire’s lack of technology stocks or the like. I’m talking about Berkshire’s underrepresentation in global markets. After all, the benefits of global diversification — and not just in equities — form the core of what The Sovereign Society stands for.
Andrew Packer / May 7, 2025
Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting was about one thing above all else: the celebration of compounding wealth. And that’s something we should all take the time out to recognize sometime, rather than simply try and move on to the next trade.
It’s a wondrous thing, and rarely done right. As investors, we’ve all been known to sell at the wrong moment or buy into something we don’t understand and see it fail.
While most companies that engage in mergers and acquisitions tend to destroy rather than create value, Buffett does the opposite.
Rather than run an “imperious headquarters,” it’s kept as lean as possible, and Buffett will only step in on a rare occasion where a subsidy manager can’t do the job.
It flies in the face of modern corporate America, and it works.
John Robb / May 6, 2025
The US has been on the road to conflict with China since 2001, when Clinton and Gore pushed for China’s entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization) by claiming that capitalism would inevitably democratize China.
It didn’t, but it did put on a course toward conflict.
Now that the conflict is finally reaching a breaking point (embargoes, tariffs, cyber disruption, potential invasions, etc.), let’s spend some time framing it in a way that will help us make sense of it.
Addison Wiggin / May 5, 2025
Gold has made massive price moves in 2025, touching $3500 just days ago and finally making headlines in a politicized world, media and financial system that has otherwise deliberately attempted to ignore and downplay gold for decades.
But can we really blame those silly little “experts” with political incapacities for honesty?
After all, rising gold is proof positive that a debt-soaked nation is in deep trouble, as its currency is no longer trusted, loved, used or wanted.
When the USA abandoned its golden chaperone in 1971 and began spending like a drunken sailor, its Treasury Secretary, John Connally, didn’t seem to care at all that the U.S. had just welched on the rest of the world—a world that once trusted the gold-backed dollar promised to them in the Bretton Woods moment of 1944.
Lau Vegys / May 2, 2025
In 2008, renewables made up just 20% of Spain’s electricity generation. By 2013, that figure had doubled to 40%. And by the end of 2024, renewables accounted for 64% of Spain’s total installed capacity — with over half of that coming from just two sources: solar (26%) and wind (25%). These far outweighed more stable sources like gas, hydro, or coal.
Meanwhile, the government moved to shut down dozens of coal and nuclear plants — long before replacements were ready. Coal was demonized. Nuclear was branded unsafe.
At the same time, the public was sold on the idea that all electricity is created equal. And in Spain — a country where the word “equality” carries almost sacred weight — that idea was easy to embrace.
Bill Bonner / May 1, 2025
America faces the kind of ‘imperial overstretch’ that the gods punish. Along with big increases to the military budget…trade wars…chaos, incompetence…and deficits headed towards $2 trillion annually — it begins to look as though the real purpose of Team Trump were to destroy the empire, not to make it great again.
From the creators of The Daily Reckoning, I.O.U.S.A, Empire of Debt and The Daily Missive
