GSI Banner
  • Free Access
  • Contributors
  • Membership Levels
  • Video
  • Origins
  • Sponsors
  • My Account
  • Sign In
  • Join Now

  • Free Access
  • Contributors
  • Membership Levels
  • Video
  • Origins
  • Sponsors
  • Contact

© 2025 Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

  • Cookie Policy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Whitelist Us
Beneath the Surface

Railing Against the Rising Tide

Loading ...Addison Wiggin

September 30, 2024 • 7 minute, 25 second read


Railing Against the Rising Tide

“The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization.”

–John Foster Dulles


Turn Your Images On

In the belly of the beast, a lone nation-state strikes out against the growing trend for a one-world government.

September 30, 2024 – The nation-state model seems to be a victim of its own success. Nations rise, then fall. Sometimes, however, a nation can change course and become resurgent.

That’s what happened in the United States in the 1980s. After a decade of high inflation and what then-President Jimmy Carter (who turns 100 tomorrow) called a “malaise,” the economy turned around.

It just took the optimism of Ronald Reagan, some marginal tax cuts, and a willingness to crush inflation with high interest rates.

Looking around the world today, something similar is going on in Argentina. But it’s on steroids. Self-described libertarian economist Javier Milei got into office on a promise to take a proverbial (and sometimes literal) chainsaw to rules and regulations.

In the first year of office, it’s working.

Inflation is falling quickly. Many government employees have been laid off. GDP is growing. And despite not having a political party to work with in the legislature, Milei has been able to create a coalition of lawmakers willing to cut the size of the state.

We’re talking real cuts, too. In the United States, our political leaders look at a government program expected to grow 10% over the past year as a “cut” when its future growth is only 5%.

Recently, Milei took his fiery brand of libertarian populism to the United Nations, where he used the forum to bash several UN-supported ideas such as net zero carbon emissions, Covid-era lockdown procedures, and more ideas that seem based not on economic reality, but on inching towards a one-world government.

As you know, from his home in Buenos Aires, longtime friend Joel Bowman has been following the Greatest Political Experiment of our Time on his substack page.

Today, Mr. Bowman gives us a review of Milei’s UN performance. Enjoy ~~ Addison

oes to the UN

Joel Bowman, Notes From the End of the World

What time is it, dear reader…

…when the 2020 global covid quarantines are considered a “crime against humanity”?

…when “net zero” carbon emissions targets are exposed as “ridiculous policies, promoted with Malthusian blinkers […] which harm, above all, poor countries”?

…and when the United Nations itself is labeled a “multi-tentacled Leviathan, which aims to decide not only what each Nation-State should do, but also how all citizens of the world should live”?

Yep, you guessed it! It’s time for another speech from Javier Milei, in which the Argentine presidente gives members vampires of the United Nations the unfiltered feedback they so richly deserve…good and hard.

Casual Hypocrisy

So it was that, after signaling to the world that Argentina is “open for business” by ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, Sr. Milei took his message of “life, liberty and economic prosperity” uptown to the UN’s headquarters coven in Midtown Manhattan.

There, in front of a disgruntled clutch of triggered bureaucrats and sniveling meddlers, Sr. Milei reeled off a dirty laundry list of grievances that have resulted in “the loss of credibility of the United Nations in the eyes of the citizens of the free world.”

We could almost hear the blood clot from all the way down here, at the other End of the World.

In front of the UN’s General Assembly, Sr. Milei underscored, for starters, the organization’s casual hypocrisy of tolerating dictators of convenience:

“In this same house that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed bloody dictatorships such as those of Cuba and Venezuela to enter the Human Rights Council, without the slightest reproach.”

Milei also called out the duplicity of an organization that is always and everywhere ready to signal its higher virtue, to bend the knee to popular collectivist causes, but which casts its own stones from the biggest glass castle of all:

“In this same house that claims to defend women’s rights, they allow countries that punish their women for showing their skin to enter the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.”

Likewise did the man with the motosierra denounce collectivist policies that have undermined economic growth around the world (especially in developing countries), the systematic violation of property rights, and in particular the UN’s insidious 2030 “Pact for the Future,” signed this past Sunday, which he described as:

“…nothing more than a supranational government program, of a socialist nature, that seeks to solve the problems of modernity with solutions that undermine the sovereignty of nation states and violate the right to life, liberty and property of people.”

So far, so good…

I hope you’re enjoying Notes from the End of the World. If you’d like to receive new posts and support my work, kindly consider becoming a member, here…

The Blazing Pyre

Milei even managed to sneak in a couple of quotes from Thomas Paine and Frédéric Bastiat, which must have had the dastardly diplomats scratching their shiny eggheads in uniform wonder. (“Aren’t they intersex, post-modern, installation artists of some kind? Yes, yes. I thought so.”)

And yet, despite his laissez-faire swagger, Milei remains decidedly human. Which is to say, like the rest of us, he is prone to err… to interfere… and to leave bad enough not alone. From our pequeño lugar, Milei appears too willing to be drawn into needless posturing regarding the escalating situations in both the Levant and the Eurasian Steppe. In his speech this week, he reiterated support for the US military industrial complex’s pet causes once again. (We’ll keep a close eye on this “Milei-tary” blindspot in future Notes…)

Likewise, one must be mindful of the company one keeps. Your editor is not so naïve as to think politicking on the world stage does not involve a little horse-trading from time to time… which may partially explain Milei’s willingness to oblige photo ops with champing Euronags like President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. Certainly, cavorting with the who’s-who of globalist elites will do little to assuage concerns that Milei is merely “managed opposition.”

By almost any measure, Milei has produced astounding economic results here in his native Argentina… and he is right to push back on supranational organizations bent on lecturing the poor of the world as to their own sovereign concerns. Ditto the woke agenda and climate nonsense. As for swashbuckling foreign military misadventures, the world already suffers an abundance of deep state war hawks, who never saw a brushfire they didn’t wish to fan into a global conflagration. No need to add fuel, even if only rhetorically, to that blazing pyre. Better to abide by M. Bastiat’s sage words, quoted above.

The Agenda of Freedom

That being said, it is a fool who makes the perfect the enemy of the good. For now, Argentina’s posturing vis-à-vis Raytheon’s favorite conflicts in far-flung lands is, in a practical sense, of secondary concern. (Even if he were to go “Full Militard,” and declare war on all foreign governments he doesn’t like, the fact remains, as Milei himself boldly declared in his historic inauguration speech back in December: “¡No hay plata!” (Argentina has “no money.”)

Milei was best, as usual, when he was squarely on the side of free markets, free minds and free people. Fitting, then, that he should conclude his speech by extending an invitation to form a new agenda, founded in liberty and open to all:

Argentina will not support any policy that implies the restriction of individual freedoms, of trade, or the violation of the natural rights of individuals, no matter who promotes it or how much consensus that institution has. For this reason, we want to express – officially – our dissent on the Pact of the Future, signed on Sunday, and we invite all the nations of the free world to join us, not only in the dissent of this pact, but in the creation of a new agenda for this noble institution: the agenda of freedom. ~~Joel Bowman, Notes From the End of the World

So it goes,


Addison Wiggin,
Grey Swan

P.S. Tomorrow, we’ll have some choice words about the UN’s Pact for the Future – an undemocratic, collectivist money grab if there ever was one.  Stay tuned.

How did we get here? Bill Bonner and I penned a few alternate takes on the financial, economic, and political history of the United States from Demise of the Dollar through Financial Reckoning Day and on to Empire of Debt — all three books are now available in their third post-pandemic editions. You might enjoy one, or all three.

 


“No Kings” or Just Bad At Math

October 20, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

The “No Kings” crowd might one day discover that the tyranny they fear doesn’t wear a crown. It wears a smile, signs checks, and calls itself “the common good.”

And like all monarchs in the end, it will demand obedience — long after the cheering stops.

If history rhymes, as it seems to, we’re somewhere between the late 1930s and the late Roman Republic. The crowds are restless, the debt insatiable, the elites insulated, and the reformers convinced they can vote their way to virtue. The yachts are still in the harbor; the customers are still swimming.

“No Kings”? Fine. But remember: every time the crowd dethrones a monarch, it tends to crown a bureaucracy. And bureaucracies, unlike kings, never die.

“No Kings” or Just Bad At Math
A Look Ahead to 1940

October 20, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

Wall Street will always sell tickets to the parade—radio in 1929, dot-coms in 1999, GPUs in 2025. Some parades end in confetti; others in subpoenas. Schwed’s wisdom still stands: you don’t need to time the last note, just keep your seat close to the exit.

If the boom continues, your portfolio participates. If it falters, your ballast buys you time—and maybe your own modest “yacht,” which Schwed would remind you is simply a sturdy rowboat, with good oars and a sound hull.

A Look Ahead to 1940
Wall of Worry, Indeed

October 20, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

Wall Street traders have a term for this phase: the wall of worry. As long as investors get fearful enough, the market top isn’t in.

At the top, investors will go all-in – in what’s known as the “blow of top”,  like they did with dotcom stocks in 1999, or as many did with SPAC companies in 2021.

We haven’t quite gotten to the “this time is different” mentality that causes investors to throw on the blinders – yet.

Wall of Worry, Indeed
Adam O’Dell: Gold’s $5,000 Moment?

October 17, 2025 • Adam O'Dell

Regardless of anyone’s personal opinion on Trump, it’s clear that the international community is translating his “Putting America First” agenda as something more like “Every Man for Himself.” That could have a profound impact down the line, not just for our future trade prospects, but for the health of the economy and the U.S. dollar at large (which is still the world’s dominant reserve currency, for now).

At the same time, this is all very bullish for gold, as central banks are likely to continue buying for years to come. In this kind of situation, gold hitting $4,300 and continuing to rise higher was a foregone conclusion, and it’s clear that Trump’s agenda is locked in and unlikely to change.

Adam O’Dell: Gold’s $5,000 Moment?