The 30-year Treasury yield languishing above 5% got us to thinkin’ over the Memorial Day holiday weekend in front of the bonfire we’d set in the back 40. With your permission, the following meanders a bit. Let’s begin…
A funny thing happens when people stop trusting the future.
First, they stop trusting the money. Then they stop trusting the people managing the money. Eventually, they begin questioning the machinery itself.
That mood is spreading quietly across America now, although “quietly” may not be the right word anymore. You can hear it in state legislatures from Austin to Nashville to Topeka, where lawmakers who spent the better part of 30 years complaining about federal debt and central bank policy have started reaching for something much larger than another spending fight in Congress.
As of early 2026, 20 states have formally passed resolutions calling for an Article V Convention of the States, the constitutional mechanism that allows states to bypass Congress entirely and propose amendments directly to the Constitution.
That number matters because Article V requires 34 states to trigger a convention.
Suddenly, 20 no longer feels symbolic.
The stated goals sound straightforward enough on paper: force fiscal restraints on Washington, impose term limits on federal officials and reduce the scope of federal power itself. But beneath the legal language lies something much deeper — a growing belief that the post-war American system no longer functions as ordinary citizens were promised it would.
That feeling stretches far beyond politics now.
People see it every time grocery bills rise faster than paychecks, every time insurance renewals jump another 20 percent, every time young families stare at 7% mortgage rates while homes remain priced for the 3% world that disappeared after the pandemic.
The old financial order increasingly resembles an aging casino whose chandeliers still sparkle beautifully while the plumbing underneath leaks through the carpet.
And that brings us to gold.
🥇 Sound Money Comes Home
At the same time, as states push toward a constitutional convention, another movement has quietly spread across the country: the effort to restore gold and silver as legal tender within state economies. Eleven states now formally recognize gold and silver coins as legal tender under state law, including Texas, Utah, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Our friends at Glintpay.com have been at the forefront of this movement, working hand in hand with Utah legislators to get the ball rolling. Utah was the first state to formally enact the measure into state law.
The movement might sound eccentric at first glance, like something cooked up at a roadside diner between black coffee refills and conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve.
But the movement has evolved far beyond people stuffing Krugerrands inside basement safes.
Texas spent the past year building infrastructure around its state bullion depository system, allowing residents to link precious metal holdings directly to digital-payment systems and debit cards.
Texas isn’t building out a bullion depository ecosystem for decoration. When states start investing in gold infrastructure like it’s a critical public utility, it’s a pretty good sign the metal is becoming a lot more relevant to the broader economy. (Source: American Hartford Gold)
In practice, a Texan can now hold gold in a regulated vault, swipe a debit card at the grocery store and have the transaction settled automatically at the current gold price, while the merchant still receives ordinary dollars.
Which means something extraordinary is beginning to happen beneath the surface of the financial system.
Gold is slowly migrating from “investment asset” back toward “parallel money.”
Not everywhere.
Not all at once.
But enough to matter.
That shift tells us something important about the country’s psychology.
When citizens begin experimenting with alternative stores of value within the domestic economy, they are usually responding to a deeper fear that official monetary systems no longer preserve purchasing power as they once did.
History is full of these moments.
Argentina.
Turkey.
Weimar Germany.
Late-stage Soviet Russia.
America is obviously nowhere near those extremes. But people do not need hyperinflation to begin seeking alternatives. They simply need the growing suspicion that the dollar buys less stability each year while the debt required to sustain the system grows larger and larger.
That is why gold keeps reappearing in the conversation now, particularly among conservatives already pushing for constitutional restraints on federal borrowing and monetary power. Marco Rubio, among the many hats he wears in the Trump administration, is a champion of the Convention of the States and of reevaluating the U.S. gold stores.
Which leads naturally to the next question.
What happens if Washington attempts to outmaneuver the entire movement?
🏛️ The Gold Revaluation Option
Buried deep inside the Treasury’s legal architecture sits one of the strangest loopholes in modern finance.
Officially, the United States still values its gold reserves at the old statutory price established in 1973: $42.22 per ounce.
Meanwhile, real-world gold trades above $4,500 an ounce.
That gap creates an enormous accounting oddity because the United States government owns roughly 261 million ounces of gold, mostly stored at Fort Knox and other reserve facilities. On paper, those reserves remain valued at barely more than $11 billion. At market prices, however, they represent closer to a trillion dollars.
And that opens the door to what amounts to financial alchemy.
Under existing law, Congress — or potentially the executive branch under emergency powers — could authorize a formal gold revaluation. The Treasury would update the official price of America’s gold reserves, issue new gold certificates to the Federal Reserve and instantly create hundreds of billions of dollars in fresh Treasury liquidity without issuing new debt.
The mechanics sound complicated until you strip away the jargon.
Imagine discovering your grandfather’s farmland was still listed on county tax rolls at its 1973 value while nearby subdivisions now sell for millions. Revaluation simply updates the books to reflect reality. The difference is that Washington could then spend against the new value.
And that possibility matters enormously because it collides directly with the Convention of States movement itself.
A gold revaluation would force the Fed into territory it hasn’t seriously dealt with in decades — where balance sheet accounting stops being just an academic exercise and starts carrying real monetary implications. A change in gold’s official value would ripple through reserves and capital ratios in ways the central bank can’t finesse with language alone. (Source: Federal Reserve)
The entire constitutional push rests on the idea that Washington eventually runs out of borrowing capacity and therefore must be restrained through structural reform. But a gold revaluation could temporarily relieve enormous fiscal pressure overnight by creating what amounts to debt-free liquidity.
Naturally, critics on both sides recoil at the idea.
Supporters view gold revaluation as a partial return to sound money because it reconnects sovereign balance sheets to a tangible reserve asset. Opponents view it as another form of monetary manipulation dressed up in constitutional clothing.
Both sides may be right.
The deeper issue is that America increasingly appears trapped between two competing realities: one side demanding hard limits on debt and federal power, the other seeking ways to preserve the existing financial order long enough to survive the transition already underway.
⚙️ The Great Race Arrives at Home
Most Americans still think the global monetary transition is happening “out there” somewhere — in BRICS summits, Chinese trade deals or Middle Eastern energy negotiations.
But the pressure is increasingly showing up domestically.
The Convention of States movement.
Gold legal-tender laws.
State bullion depositories.
Dollar 2.0 stablecoin legislation.
Federal gold revaluation discussions.
The return of industrial policy.
The AI infrastructure race.
The bond market’s refusal to cooperate with the Federal Reserve’s easing.
These are not disconnected stories anymore.
In fact, they increasingly resemble pieces of the same larger transition.
For most of the last 40 years, the global economy rewarded financial engineering, globalization and falling interest rates. Capital floated effortlessly toward software, services and debt-fueled asset inflation because cheap money and stable supply chains made the physical economy feel almost secondary.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to reverse that relationship.
The more computing power the world demands, the more nations suddenly care about electricity generation, semiconductor fabrication plants, cooling systems, uranium supplies, natural gas pipelines and who controls the copper running beneath the ground.
AI was initially sold as weightless, software-only progress — until it showed up on the power bill. Now, data centers are soaking up electricity at a pace utilities didn’t exactly plan for, and grid operators are scrambling to keep up. (Source: Morgan Stanley)
That is why the Trump Administration spent the past year weaving together deals involving Saudi Arabia, semiconductor restrictions, energy diplomacy and critical minerals while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent simultaneously pushes what increasingly looks like a Dollar 2.0 system built around stablecoins and digital settlement infrastructure.
The old system ran on globalization and Treasury recycling.
The next one may run on energy dominance, AI infrastructure and whoever controls the rails carrying both money and electricity.
Which helps explain why the bond market suddenly feels so uneasy.
Long-term Treasury yields continue to press higher even after six Federal Reserve rate cuts between September 2024 and December 2025, because lenders increasingly appear less worried about a recession than about the enormous industrial, military and technological spending now unfolding across the world.
That is not normal late-cycle inflation. It is regime change.
📜 History Rhymes Loudly
History has a wicked sense of humor.
On May 26, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act into law, creating the most restrictive immigration framework America had yet imposed on itself. The law emerged from a country exhausted after World War I, fearful of radical political movements and increasingly convinced that globalization had brought too much instability home.
The legislation sharply limited immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, favored Northern European countries and established rigid national quotas that would shape immigration policy for decades.
Japan reacted furiously at the time, declaring May 26 a national day of humiliation after years of diplomatic agreements with the United States suddenly collapsed beneath domestic political pressure.
The details differ, of course.
But the mood feels strangely familiar.
Periods of geopolitical transition often produce the same emotional cocktail: rising debt, anxiety about borders, distrust of financial elites, pressure for industrial rebuilding and growing suspicion that the old global order no longer benefits ordinary citizens the way it once did.
The question now is whether America manages this transition gradually — through industrial rebuilding, monetary restructuring and constitutional pressure — or whether the stresses eventually force something far more disruptive.
Either way, the world emerging on the other side will probably look very different from the one investors grew accustomed to during the eight long decades of Pax Americana.
~ Addison
P.S. The remarkable thing about large historical transitions is that most people only recognize them clearly in hindsight. Living through one usually feels far messier — less like a dramatic movie scene and more like noticing that the assumptions which guided your entire adult life suddenly stop working one by one.
Meanwhile, over at the Grey Swan Trading Fraternity, our own Andrew Packer just issued an alert to close a trade in a space-related stock that’s been soaring in recent weeks. Total gains as of Friday’s close were over 130% – with a final return of over 200% following this morning’s market surge.
The SpaceX IPO, valued at nearly $2 trillion, will be a lot for the market to digest – and could lead to a vacuum sucking up capital from other stocks. This may be yet another case of the old adage of buying the rumor – in this case, all the details of the SpaceX IPO – and selling the news when it does happen.
