Monkey Business
Bill Bonner / February 18, 2025
“One useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three is a Congress.”
—John Adams
February 18, 2025— There’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). And there’s also Trump-o-philia (ToP). One man hates him. Another loves him. Which one sees most clearly?
“It feels like Christmas, every day. He’s really getting the economy going. And getting rid of all those freeloaders.”
A local real estate agent — a strong Trump supporter — came to visit. She watches the news… and is delighted. Trump attacks the pretensions, waste and balderdash of the Democratic elites. He and his sidekicks, Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, are on the rampage, she believes.
They gut agencies…uncover billions in fraud…and talk tough to foreigners. Europe has lost its way, Vance tells the Old World. You’ll have to spend more to protect yourselves, Trump adds.
“You’re fired,” says Elon…and we’ll “get rich” from tariffs, Trump promises.
What fun!
“I’m heavily invested in [a crypto currency]. I’ve been following them for years. If they keep going up, I’ll have enough to buy a family compound.”
Alas, the young woman might be a little short on cynicalism.
Good luck to her. But we have our doubts.
“Do you know that that foreign aid group was sending millions of dollars to Chelsea Clinton?” said our realtor friend. “They fund the Clinton Foundation… and other groups that she is part of… on the board… a director… something… they have contracts for $84 million. The whole thing was such a scam. It’s a pleasure to see Trump and Musk doing something about it.”
The fact-checkers claim it is not true. Also on the internet, Chelsea’s net worth is reportedly $70 million — which is a lot of scratch for someone who works for non-profits.
What to believe? We don’t know. But compared to the MIC budget, whatever Chelsea gets is peanuts. In order to avoid a financial catastrophe — chaos… inflation… default — the US needs to cut deeper.
Not by a few billion… but by trillions [more on Social Security and Medicare fraud later this week]. And to do that, it needs to trim its ‘transfer’ payments and put its firepower industry back on the leash. That’s the real challenge. And neither TDS nor ToP has anything to do with it. But Bloomberg reports:
GOP Defense Leaders Pushing Trillion-Dollar Pentagon Budget
Rogers, Wicker want defense spending to be close to 5% of GDP. Congress has been wrestling with how the US should prepare for possible future conflict with China and address weaknesses in the defense industrial base supply chain exposed by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
That’s right; they’re planning to spend more, not less. Is China readying an attack on California? No? Then why would US policymakers want to spend more money to prepare for it?
Typically, as an empire degenerates, its civilian authorities become less competent and more corrupt, with too many groups competing for power and money. Elected assemblies become like the monkey cage in the zoo, each member dancing a jig for whomever hands out the bananas.
Then, democracy — grown too big, with a growing hodge-podge of fraud and contradictions — awaits its ‘strong man.’ He says something such as “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” recently posted on Truth Social by Donald J. Trump. Claiming to ‘save his country’ he thinks he can do almost anything.
And he’s right. The institutions that might have stopped him have been twisted or strangled — the Constitution, the Courts, Congress…along with the public’s sense of right and wrong. In the 9/11 panic, people learned to get in line to be patted down at airports. Then, the Covid hysteria had them going along with lockdowns…whether they were at any real risk or not. The universities and the press do their parts too — ‘schooling’ or exiling anyone with alternative points of view. They were paid to do it. Asia Times:
How much of USAID’s US$40 billion annual spending and the budgets of the National Endowment for Democracy and other government agencies bought the cooperation of journalists worldwide?
The nearly $270 million in payoffs to “independent media” in the 2025 federal budget – a staggering sum compared to the editorial budgets of the world’s news organizations – may be a small fraction of the total subsidy once payments to so-called charitable foundations are tallied up.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations and other private entities subsidized the same media, bringing the grand total into the billions.
The big man comes like a breath of fresh air to the many ToP sufferers.
Those afflicted most severely with TDS will resist. But that is where the MIC — including muscled-up local police and dumbed down civilians — will come in handy.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Grey Swan Honorary Member, via Substack
P.S. from Addison: News from the gold front. A “gold squeeze” is on the way… let me explain.
As you already know, we’re already hot on the trail of the trend of central banks amassing higher-than-normal quantities of gold. That’s a good thing if you’ve been following our advice to acquire more physical gold.
We’re also keenly aware that the financial media gives “some” lip service to gold hitting new price highs, but retail investors are still largely absent from gold buying. However, when the herd does get moving, that can also drive the gold price higher.
Now, a third item that we have been aware of and watching since a 2015 report we published called “Zero Hour” is starting to make its way around the gold bug community.
As the price rises, more people buy what’s called “paper gold.” It’s kind of an oxymoron. But from the financial market’s perspective, it makes sense.
Since its groundbreaking launch in 2004 as the first commodities-based ETF, The SPDR Gold Shares ETF, ticker GLD, has transformed how investors access this precious metal.
It manages billions of dollars in physical gold while “eliminating the traditional hurdles of storage, transport, and authentication.”
The GLD ETF allowed passive investors to build a position in gold without the historical costs and ongoing storage headache of receiving the bullion itself.
We remember the excitement during the launch. It contributed to the enthusiasm for gold that we’d already been detailing for five years prior to the launch.
Since its launch, GLD has gone up 503%:
The gold ETF tracks the price of gold closely. You can see that spike we called “Trade of the Decade” between 1999 and the gold price peak in 2011.
You can also see the historic rise gold has enjoyed since autocratic knuckleheads, globally, broke the economy in 2020, on purpose.
Today, the gold price is trading at $2943… heading toward our short-term target of $3200.
The ETF, following suit, is pushing $270.
All good. So…
Here’s what’s concerning to members of the gold community:
The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) is the standard bearer for gold trading in financial markets around the world.
They’re currently tracking 279 million oz of gold, of which 30 million are available for withdrawal.
Demand for gold, including the quantity spoken for by GLD, exceeds 300 million ounces.
The ETF is called “paper gold” for a reason. It’s a piece of paper, without the gold available to back it up.
Combined with the central bank buying physical gold, governments globally are being thrown into disarray by the Javier Mileis and Donald Trumps of the world, pushing investors to the metal for safety. We’re tracking what we expect to be a “gold squeeze” at some point.
That squeeze could result in a rapid spike upward in the price. While good for you if you’re a speculator, the financial system today requires something sane like a “gold standard” to keep the bubble in AI stocks from wreaking havoc across global pension funds, insurance caches and individual retirement accounts.
We’re working on explaining, clearly, how the “gold squeeze” can potentially happen and what you should do today. We’ll publish more later this week after we’ve had a chance to check our facts and assumptions.
In the meantime, I urge you to take a second look at the gold research we published early in trading this year. You can do so, right here.
Send your comments to addison@greyswanfraternity.com