Podcast appearances and mentions of tom dyson

Welcome to the Porter & Co. Black Label Podcast – a provocative, no-holds-barred space where Porter and Aaron talk about markets, politics, and life with a series of very special guests. In this episode, with Porter not feeling well, we listen in as Aaron has a thought-provoking one-on-one conversation with Tom Dyson, the Investment Director at Bonner Private Research. Show highlights include: Tom's travel philosophy for his family… Tom's pandemic experiences… Observations on Javier Milei and the economics of Argentina.. Why newsletters like Porter's exist… How Tom found the newsletter business… Why both Aaron and Tom admire Bill Bonner's work… What not to do with your life savings… The asset both Aaron and Tom are holding… Debating this central bank theory… And much more… To learn more about Tom's work, go to https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/ Click here to listen to the full podcast now. And grab your free reports at https://porterspodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/Porter_and_Co and https://twitter.com/porterstansb. To your success, Porter & Co.

My guest today is, Kim D. H. Butler, who is an influential author and thought leader in the financial space. Kim recently released a new book called, "Busting the College Planning Lies: How Unknown Opportunity Costs Kill the Goose and the Golden Egg." In this episode we'll be answering the question, "is college worth it?" This may be one of the most important questions we answer in the financial space for parents and for young adults considering which career path to choose. About the guestKim D. H. Butler is helping Americans build wealth... WITHOUT Wall Street risks! Kim is president of Prosperity Thinkers, a personal finance firm that serves clients in all 50 states. Along with her husband Todd Langford of Truth Concepts financial software, Kim is also the co-founder of Prosperity Economics Movement. A recognized expert on whole life insurance and financial strategies. Kim has authored paradigm-shifting books such as: Live Your Life Insurance, Busting the Life Insurance Lies, and Perpetual Wealth. Driven to find a better way, Kim studied the commonalities between wealth builders. She observed what worked and didn't work in the real world, and found synergy between certain strategies and principles. These common principles later became the "7 Principles of Prosperity" of the Prosperity Economics Movement. In 1999, Kim dedicated herself to the principles of Prosperity Economics. Her work as a Prosperity Economics Advisor has been recommended by financial thought leaders and authors such as Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad), Tom Dyson, publisher of the Palm Beach Letter investment newsletter, Tom Wheelright (Tax Free Wealth), and Garrett Gunderson (Killing Sacred Cows). She has been interviewed by Robert Kiyosaki, consulted with the Palm Beach Letter, and featured on many popular podcasts, including her own — The Prosperity Podcast on iTunes.Guest Links and ResourcesKim's new book - https://www.amazon.com/Busting-College-Planning-Lies-Opportunity-ebook/dp/B0BM535MQFEpisode Links and ResourcesFREE Tax Checklist - https://www.betterwealth.com/taxchecklist|Take our Free Wealth Quiz and get personalized results showing you what areas you can improve in your financial journey! - https://bttr.ly/quiz |Speak with one of our financial experts about the BetterWealth approach to money - https://bttr.ly/ytclarity|(The Vault) Learn more about our unique process with whole life insurance and how you can utilize it as a powerful asset for your life and wealth! - https://bttr.ly/vault|Speak with one of our life insurance experts and see if our unique strategy's fit your financial journey: https://bttr.ly/aaclarity #BetterWealth Free 15 Minute Clarity Call: https://bttr.ly/ytclarity The And Asset Book: https://bttr.ly/book BetterWealth Quiz: https://bttr.ly/quiz AndAsset.com: https://bttr.ly/andasset BetterWealth Youtube - https://bttr.ly/bwyoutube Financial Advisor, Agent or Coach:

Welcome to Episode #78 of the Fatal Conceits Podcast…They're sometimes called “California refugees.” But they hail from New York and Illinois, too… You'll find them in sleepy little towns in Florida… Texas… Arizona… Nevada… and across the sunbelt… basically anywhere that doesn't suffer oppressive taxation, creeping government, woke school curriculums, high crime, homelessness, drug epidemics…The pandemic didn't birth this trend, but it sure did accelerate it. Presently, California is losing about 370,000 people per year, a record rate. In today's program we're joined by MN Gordon, editor and publisher of the Economic Prism newsletter and former California native. Earlier this year, Mr Gordon packed up his family and headed east to find his own American Bolt Hole. We begin today's discussion with his fascinating story… then talk about Opendoor - as both an idea and a company - and what's next for real estate in the US. Please enjoy our discussion and leave your own comments and ideas regarding the best places in the US to live below…Cheers,Joel BowmanP.S. For those inclined to read rather than listen, please find a lightly edited (for clarity) transcript below…Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it.TRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:All right. Well, welcome back, dear listeners, to the Fatal Conceits Podcast. As you know, by now, it's a show about money, markets, mobs, and manias, not necessarily in that order. If you've not already done so, please head over to the Bonner Private Research substack page. You can find us at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com, where there are now hundreds of articles on everything from high finance to lowly politics and everything in between. There's plenty of research reports there, of course, by our macro analyst, Dan Denning and investment director, Tom Dyson, as well as plenty of Bill Bonner's daily musings. You won't find them anywhere else.And in addition, of course, there are many more conversations just like this on the Fatal Conceits Podcast. Grab that at the tab on the top of the page. And speaking of which, I'm delighted today to welcome a newcomer to the show. Mr. MN Gordon is the Editorial Director and Publisher of the Economic Prism Newsletter. I'll provide a link in the transcript to this, so you can head on over there. In particular, check out the library. You'll find plenty of usual suspects from Messrs. Hayek to Hazlitt to Mises, and all the rest of those free market oriented kind of gentleman. So, without further ado, Mr. MN Gordon, welcome to the program.MN Gordon:Hey, Joel. Morning. Thanks for having me on.Joel Bowman:Yeah, not a problem. Not a problem. Now, we've got so much to talk about, as is the case whenever we sit down these days. We had the remarks from Mr. Powell yesterday. There's real estate to discuss, credit markets, the dollar, on and on. But one thing I wanted to start with here is a story I read over on your Economic Prism website, and I think it's really instructive. I think a lot of people in America are thinking along these lines at the moment, and that is your exodus story from California. Why don't you just kick us off by telling us a little bit about how you got out of the Sunshine Tax State?MN Gordon:Yeah, you bet. Yeah, I'm a native of Southern California, born and raised there and worked for many years there in my career. And over the years, it just became more and more intolerable of a place to be. Certainly, the high taxes and wacky politics have always been a part of California, but it really turned ugly or just more and more intolerable during the COVID lockdown that had taken place.And my wife and my kids, we were just eager to get out and try something else and look for a place that maybe has a lighter touch from the government, more favorable tax policies, lower cost of living. So, we certainly found that in Knoxville, Tennessee. We moved out here in July, so we've been here for several months and we're really enjoying it so far. Really, really liking the green and wet conditions, not being in perpetual drought...Joel Bowman:Must be a nice change.MN Gordon:It is a nice change, for sure. And yeah, certainly more of a freedom feel here, no state tax, and lower cost of living, so it's turning out to be a really great move for us.Joel Bowman:Fantastic. Yeah, my wife and I were just in Austin, Texas a couple of months back and ran randomly into a group of people who referred to themselves as "California refugees." There are these pockets of similar people, it seems like, all around the country, in Austin, in other states. You guys looked at a few other places, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Florida, but none of them floated your boat for various reasons. What was your criteria?MN Gordon:Yeah. That's right. I think for us, it was really finding that lower cost of living, finding somewhere that had very good access to nature. I grew up at the beach and really connected with the beach in my youth and into my early adulthood. And the older I got, the more appealing the mountains became for me. California certainly has mountains that you can go to, but they're kind of tinder boxes. You don't really want to spend much time in them, and certainly wouldn't want to live there.And all the mountains in East Tennessee, we've got quick access to the Smoky Mountains here, and while they're certainly more subtle, the peaks are lower and what have you, they really are livable and very beautiful and enjoyable to spend time in. So, that was certainly something that attracted us to this area.Joel Bowman:And you mentioned your wife and kids, obviously it was a more appealing environment for a family in addition to just the great outdoors and having easy access to the lush Smoky Mountains. What about things like schooling? I'm interested in this, in particular as a father of a young daughter, what were the kinds of, I don't want to call them grievances, but complaints that you had pre-COVID, did you find those exacerbated with lockdowns and that kind of thing? Was that prevalent where you were in Southern California?MN Gordon:Yeah. Yeah, so that was also a big part of it. So, my son is 15, he'll be 16 next month or later this month actually. And so, he's in high school and the school he was going to, the local public school in Long Beach, has about 4,000 kids there, and they shut it down, of course during COVID. And when they reopened it, it really seemed like that the kids just went back and were really wild or what have you.Anyhow, it just turned into a rough situation. There was an incident where the school safety officer ended up shooting and killing a woman that was fighting one of the students right in the street, in front of the school.Joel Bowman:Wow. Oh my goodness.MN Gordon:Yeah. So, it was really crazy. And then, just during COVID and this prevalence of this woke ideology that had seemed to come into the school. Several years ago, the state of California created a third alternative when you apply for a driver's license. So, you can be male, female, or X, right?Joel Bowman:Oh, right, okay. Yep.MN Gordon:Yeah. And so, all of a sudden then my son's got a teacher that is clearly a mister, but he goes by Mx, because that's what's on his driver's license, and just a lot of that kind of nonsense.Joel Bowman:That teacher didn't happen to be the biology teacher, did they?MN Gordon:Right, yeah.Joel Bowman:Creates a little conflict.MN Gordon:Yeah. So, we were eager to get out of there for those reasons, and certainly don't want to be too negative on it here, but that was also certainly part of the factors in our decision to leave.Joel Bowman:So, how have you found it then in Tennessee? Because one of the things that you mentioned in the article, and actually one of the things that this group of "California refugees" impressed upon me when we met them in Texas, was exactly what you would said, which is, "Don't California our Tennessee." Or, "Don't California our Wyoming." Or whatever it is.We think of places like Tennessee and like Texas as brimming with Southern hospitality and very warm and welcoming, but I can see that there would be a little reticence when you see this brigade of California number plates just teeming over the hills. How have you found the welcome there in East Tennessee?MN Gordon:Right. Yeah, I mean, overall the welcome's been great. The people are very friendly and accommodating. We certainly have gotten some odd reactions from people when we say we're from Long Beach, California, and just moved here. And we have gotten some, very few, but some people that seem visibly outraged or what have you, that we moved here. We had one experience where we stopped by the lake marina and were talking to the lady at the boathouse, and she found out we were from Long Beach, and she really started questioning why we would move there and so on. And I think that's what it is, they're protective of the Tennessee that they have. Right?Joel Bowman:Right.MN Gordon:They don't want liberal policies coming in and taking over the schools or the government, whether that's limiting freedoms or increasing taxes, or creating these massive social programs that you have in California. So, I think that's what it comes down to. And they'll warm up to you pretty quickly once you start talking with them.Joel Bowman:Yeah. One of the things I liked that you mentioned in your article, is that a lot of times people think that those who are coming from California or maybe Illinois, or New York, or wherever else, and seeking refuge elsewhere, they think maybe they do want to bring their woke policies or what have you to the school boards there. But actually, it's people like yourself who know full well, have been on the front lines of this, who see it for what it is. It's really gotten to a fever pitch just in the past few years, and you see exactly what has happened upfront, whether it's at the school, or with taxes, or real estate prices, crime, homelessness, drug problems...MN Gordon:True.Joel Bowman:So, I find actually a lot of the people who have moved away from those places, they may have been very progressive to begin with. They moved to the Bay Area and then all of a sudden they see the end game of those policies and they think, "Oh, I've got to get out of here. Even if I'm centrist or if I vote a little left, this has just gotten out of hand here."MN Gordon:Right. Yeah. I think that's certainly accurate. I think people that are looking to leave California or other liberal dominated cities are looking to get to places that have greater freedom and are not wanting to recreate the situation that they're escaping from.Joel Bowman:Right. So, then let's talk about the nuts and bolts of your exodus with regards to selling your home. You mentioned that you had a story with regards to Opendoor. And for those readers listeners who are perhaps unfamiliar, I actually wrote something similar about Zillow a couple of weeks ago, one of these online real estate market makers. They wear various hats, I guess. But what was your experience with unloading California real estate and getting into the Tennessee market?MN Gordon:So, I used Opendoor. They refer to themselves as an iBuyer, I guess that's the buzz word, but essentially they use their digital pricing models to make offers on houses, cash offers, and then they make light touch-ups to the houses and then flip them back onto the market.And so, it was about June of this year when we were looking to sell our house, and I'd heard a bunch of commercials on the radio about how easy it is to sell your house with Opendoor. So, I reached out to them and got a price quote, and it was a price quote that I was certainly happy with and was ready to take. However, I wanted to just see what sort of price I could get, perhaps I could get a better price if I went with the traditional approach.And so, I got an agent and they staged the house and took a bunch of nice pictures and had open houses over a series of two weekends. And this was early June, so it's right when the mortgage rates had spiked up above 6% for the first time. And while we got a lot of traffic, we didn't get any offers. So, it was, "We really need to get out of California. We want to get into Tennessee before the next school year starts."And so, I went back to Opendoor, and this was maybe three weeks after my initial offer and spoke to the same person there who had given me the initial offer. And so, he came back with a new offer that was actually higher than the first one that they had given me. Clearly they weren't recognizing what was going on with the market. And so, certainly I jumped at that offer and took it.Joel Bowman:Yeah. Congratulations.MN Gordon:Their process was really simple. I got all my stuff moved out, took some pictures, uploaded it to the website, put the keys in a lockbox that they had mailed me on the door, and I left. Right? And then they wired the money to my account and it was really smooth and simple.But then after that, I've been following what's been going on with that house, my former house. And so, about two weeks after I had sold it to Opendoor, they had put it back on the market. They had gone through and really just done some interior painting on the walls, nothing major. We had some more colorful paints, and so perhaps they just wanted something more neutral, who knows? And so, they put it back on the market for 60,000 less than they bought it from us for. So it was-Joel Bowman:Wow. What was the timeframe there? That was just a few weeks?MN Gordon:Yeah. It was literally two weeks after they'd bought it from us. So, I don't know why they didn't recognize that before they bought it from us, but after they bought it, clearly they realized that they'd paid too much. They put it on for 60,000 less, and then it still hasn't sold. They've been dropping the price every several weeks. And so, we're going on 110 days and it's over $110,000 less than what they bought it from us for.Joel Bowman:My goodness.MN Gordon:Yeah. So, it was pretty wild. And so, that got me into really looking at Opendoor as a company and what's going on. And I wrote an article a couple weeks ago about it, and it seems like there's countless examples out there of my experience. In my article, I cited one in Colorado where Opendoor had paid close to $780,000 for a house in April, and then listed it for 870,000 and it didn't sell until October. So, about six months later. And when they sold it, it was for a $154,000 loss.Joel Bowman:Oh, wow.MN Gordon:Yeah. So, I'm not quite sure how the company expects them to make money that way...Joel Bowman:It's difficult to make up losses on volume.MN Gordon:Right. Right. So, from what I can gather, they have these digital pricing models or these algorithms that they use, and somehow they just missed it. That when interest rates rise, that it's ultimately going to cause the prices to drop, right? And interest rates or the price of credit really is fundamental to the markets, and especially those that rely on large quantities of debt.So, the housing market's a prime example of a market that's really sensitive to interest rates. And so, as the rates rise, the house prices eventually must adjust downward to balance out the monthly mortgage payments that people have. And so from what I can gather, Opendoor was projecting this trend outward that they had seen over the last several years. And when the inflection hit, they just missed that, missed what was happening with the rising rates, and continued to load up on houses that they would eventually have to sell for a loss. So, a wild ride going on there at Opendoor.Joel Bowman:Yeah. It's amazing too, that this happened, as you say, in the summer months of this year, because Opendoor had a forward example in Zillow. I may have to double check the years here, but I think it was in 2019, 2020, Zillow did something similar, where it used one of these AI algorithms to extrapolate straight lines into the future, which is never a good undertaking when you're dealing with human behavior and all of the complexities of something like a real estate market, which can be hit by things like pandemics, or economic downturns, or rapid interest rate hikes, all of which we've seen in the past couple of years.And Zillow really got caught out as well, where they had just onboarded, almost automatically, this huge inventory of houses and properties that the algorithms had weighed and decided were worth X amount and hadn't factored in or adjusted for reality, let's say. And all of a sudden, they were left with this enormous inventory, which of course, has a carrying cost. And then, if they can't rent out, they have to sell into a falling market, which can exacerbate the problem that in some ways they kind of caused in the first place. But it's interesting that Opendoor wouldn't have seen that as an example and maybe tweaked their own machine learning a little bit in anticipation of exactly this.MN Gordon:Yeah. Right. Who knows? That seems like a good example that they could have learned from. Perhaps they thought they were smarter. I don't know.Joel Bowman:So, what's happened with the price of Opendoor, the share price of Opendoor you mentioned had cratered. What's going on there?MN Gordon:Yeah. So, the share price is really circling the toilet bowl here. I think it peaked at around $35 per share in early 2021, and now it's down to somewhere around $1.80 or so.Joel Bowman:Wow.MN Gordon:That's a loss of over 95%. And meanwhile, the company recently laid off 20% of their staff. So, a ugly situation for the company. Perhaps that's an opportunity for, I wouldn't call it investing, maybe speculating, but when I was doing research for that article on Opendoor, I came across some writing from an analyst named Luke Lango, who writes for InvestorPlace. And so, he made the statement that, "Opendoor today could be like buying Amazon in 1997." And that seemed like a bold claim to me, but who wouldn't want to have bought Amazon in 1997?Joel Bowman:Right. Another company that, of course, was cut in half any number of times on its way to what it would eventually become and has, along with the rest of the tech sector, come off considerably since its highs, at whatever it was a year ago or something like that. But yeah, you do see these ... I mean, 95%, it would be maybe generous to call it a dip. That's pretty much a hatchet job.MN Gordon:Right.Joel Bowman:But at some point, somewhere, assuming there's not bankruptcy and insolvency, there's going to be an attractive discount, 95%. What was your experience like with Opendoor? It seemed like it was pretty open and shut, right?MN Gordon:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as far as the company, their user interface was really simple and entering my info into the website and then contacting the actual staff person there, who we did a walkthrough on Zoom and what have you. As far as going through the close and getting the money credited to my account. I mean, they certainly operated like a professional business, so they weren't winging it, I guess, as they were going. So, in that sense, they seem to operate like a good business. Who knows if they can survive these losses that they're taking? And their share prices is reflecting that.Joel Bowman:Yeah. I wonder what these big, mass buyers, whether they be the BlackRocks or the big funds of the world, but also outfits like Redfin, like Opendoor, like Zillow, that are just automatically vacuuming up these thousands or tens of thousands of residences. I wonder what that does for that old adage that real estate's about "location, location, location."If the buying and selling is going to be done by artificial "intelligence" that just algorithmically determines what entire regions are worth and then comes in with enough capital, enough muscle to move markets, if we're not going to have severe aberrations like this more in the future. It's interesting to think about.MN Gordon:Yeah, that is an interesting idea. And I don't know if they ultimately end up owning a lot of these houses that they can't sell, without taking a major loss, if they end up just becoming these large scale renters or what have you, until the market bounces back. I don't know. That's certainly a interesting idea to think about.Joel Bowman:All right. So, mate, what's on the future for you guys now that you've made the exodus, now that you're out in Tennessee, what have you and the family got programmed for the next couple of years? You've got a bit more schooling for the kiddos and then?MN Gordon:Yeah. My son's wrapping up high school here over the next few years. I've got a daughter who's 10, she's in fourth grade, and we homeschool her through a co-op, where she goes to school two days a week. And that was something that we started back in California. She was in first grade when the pandemic hit and we just couldn't have her on Zoom calls seven hours a day, trying to learn that way. So, that's when we switched to homeschooling. And it's turned out to be a really good thing for her.But yeah, as far as long-term plans, I mean, we're trying to settle in and make this our home and become connected to the community here, and getting out and exploring the city and the surrounding areas. And so yeah, I guess that's our short-term and long-term plans are to get connected here.Joel Bowman:That's fantastic. We've got our macro analyst, Mr. Dan Denning up there freezing on the high plains of Laramie at the moment. A couple of years ago, he did a bolthole project, where he drove thousands of miles around the country looking for the best spots with his particular checklist of what he wanted in various places.But it does seem like there are a lot of people who are peering over their own fence and thinking, "Hey, maybe there's not a better life for me somewhere else." So congratulations, mate. Best of luck with you and the family out there in East Tennessee. It's a place I haven't visited, so I'll maybe put that on the to-visit list in the future.MN Gordon, thank you so much for your time today, mate. And I'll include a link to Economic Prism and please, readers, listeners, viewers, what have you, head over there and check out Mr. Gordon's work. And of course, check out our own substack page. Again, that's bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com. And we'll catch you again next week.MN Gordon:Great. Thanks, Joel.Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it with Californians and refugees alike.... This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

And now for some more Fatal Conceits…“I think those people at the Nobel Committee must have a sense of humor,” quipped Bill Bonner, in response to the questionable judgement that resulted in Ben Shalom Bernanke being awarded the Nobel Prize for economics earlier this week. “They're either very dumb or very cynical,” Bill continued. “And I'm not sure which it is because, if you remember that time, Ben Bernanke was wrong about everything. And no major issue came to him that he was not wrong about.”Alas, 14 years after Mr. Bernanke's preposterous “we may not have an economy on Monday morning” speech, in which he presented one of the most galling false dichotomies of the modern era (pass this unprecedented – and lately unread – stimulus bill… or the sky will fall), and we are now reaping the whirlwind of his profligacy.Over the course of a half hour or so, Bill shared with us his thoughts on the end of the Age of Abundance, the reason our current financial predicament differs greatly from what Volcker faced in the ‘70s (Hint: It begins with D and rhymes with “regret”) and why those born after 1980 cannot know, first hand, what a return to the “Old Normal” will entail…All that and plenty more on Ep #74 of the Fatal Conceits podcast. Please enjoy and, if you have a moment, share with a friend…Also, if you're interested in purchasing some of Bill's wine, which we talk about towards the end of the episode, their Tacana 2020 vintage is now available to select buyers. The first half of the allotment (reserved for the Bonner Wine Partnership's private Tacana buyer's list) sold out in a day. The rest probably won't be around for long, so if you want to grab a few bottles… for the cellar or the bunker… don't dilly-dally. More information here: And for those of you who are less audio-inclined, you'll also find a full transcript of today's interview, below. Until next time…Cheers,Joel BowmanThank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it.TRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:Welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits Podcast dear listener. It's the show, as you know, about money markets, mobs and manias. If you have not already done so, please head on over to our Substack page. You can find us at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com. On that page, you'll be able to find hundreds now of essays authored by today's guest, Bill Bonner, in the daily section. We've got plenty of research reports from Dan Denning and Tom Dyson. And of course, many more conversations like this under the Fatal Conceits Podcast tab at the top of the page. So without further ado, I think you can probably see in your screen there, framed by gilted cornices, remnants of a bygone era of abundance, Mr. Bill Bonner, welcome to the show. How do you do sir?Bill Bonner:Thank you Joel. It's a pleasure to be with you.Joel Bowman:You're up there in Baltimore at the moment, that's correct?Bill Bonner:In Baltimore. And you're right, it is the bygone remnants of an ancient civilization. Baltimore was by the way, the richest city in America in say the early 19th century because it had such a great harbor. And it was also connected, through the Cumberland Gap, it was connected to the whole Ohio Valley and all that area over there on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. So it was a big important port for people coming from Europe and a big important port for people making mostly food things that they exported it to Europe. And people got rich. And movies from say the 1920s or so, maybe a little bit later, they will frequently have a rich person as somebody from Baltimore. And that all seems so unlikely now. It's hard to even imagine.Joel Bowman:To be rich like a Baltimorean is like to be rich like an Argentine.Bill Bonner:Same thing.Joel Bowman:Exactly. And I'm racking my brain here, but how on earth were they able to get rich without ESG governance and diversity boards and equity programs…?Bill Bonner:That was before the foundation of the Federal Reserve. I mean, how did they know what interest rates to charge? They were building in the early 19th century here in Baltimore. They had huge factories. They made things, made things that they exported out of profit. How did they know how to do that without the feds showing them what interest rates to charge and so on, without the Fed printing money to stimulate them? Nobody stimulated them at all. They were stimulated by the desire to make money I guess. And they did quite well with it in that. But now we have, thank God, we have the Fed to stimulate the economy when it's needed to support the stock market when it seems to be falling and to provide us with the interest rates that we need. How they know what interest rates we need has never been clarified. But that's one of mysteries of the Fed.Joel Bowman:Yes, we certainly couldn't rely on the market for any, shall we say, “self stimulation”?Bill Bonner:NoJoel Bowman:Top down only. Speaking of which, that dovetails into news this week of, I don't know whether you would call him our colleague, but another economic luminary, Mr. Ben Bernanke, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics earlier this week. This of course is the man who had the “courage to act," at least according to himself, and who saved us from “not having an economy on Monday” as he warned us with such certainty...Bill Bonner:October the fifth, 2008. He went before Congress and he said, Look, if you guys don't pass this act, which I think was what was known as the TALF Act, it was a lot of spending to try to stimulate the economy, that if you don't pass this, we may not have an economy on Monday. He was talking on Friday. And thank God he rose to the challenge and showed that courage to act because otherwise we still wouldn't have an economy.Joel Bowman:Incredible. It does seem so "through the looking glass," the up is down back is forwards, when we see that not only did the man who failed to foresee the bubbles that had been created during the Greenspan era and that had led to these enormous imbalances and malinvestments, in particular the housing market. I remember yourself writing about huge irregularities in the mortgage back securities markets and Eric Fry writing about that. Our colleague Dan Denning was on the case of course. So it seemed like everybody except Federal Reserve economists were on the case. What does it say that 14 years later, having stimulated, it seems now, an even a larger bubble, that we not only look back and have not learned our lesson, we're gifting the guy the highest prize there is in the dismal science?Bill Bonner:Well, I think those people at the Nobel Committee must have a sense of humor. That's all I can think of.Joel Bowman:That's big sense of humor.Bill Bonner:They're either very dumb or very cynical. And I'm not sure which it is because Ben Bernanke, if you remember that time, he was wrong about everything. And no major issue came to him that he was not wrong about it. He was the one who said the subprime problem before the crisis of 2008, the subprime problem crisis was "contained." Of course it wasn't contained at all. He had all these things that were idiotic, like zero rates. He came up with that QE, he didn't invent it, it was the Japanese who developed it. But a lot of these things which now we see clearly are the cause, the proximate cause, not the only cause, but the proximate cause of our inflation and our economy, which is now melting down in order to try to contain inflation, those stemmed from policies put in place by Ben Bernanke. And not the only one because Janet Yellen kept doing the same thing and Powell came along and followed right in their footsteps.But for the Nobel Committee to award him a Nobel Prize is really quite remarkable. And it calls into question our whole elite process. Why do they think that he should get a prize for that? And then to have the hubris, the conceit, the unmitigated gall to write a book called The Courage to Act. I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it. I said, no sensible person would do that. Even if he believed that he had the courage to act, even if he believed that he had saved the economy, you still wouldn't put it out there. That makes you sound like an utter fool. What it does is it invites the wrath of the gods. There's someone way up there they must be after him. Now I don't know what they're going to do, but they're going to be after him.Joel Bowman:Pride before the fall. And for a man with a legacy unblemished by, as you said, a single success in the real world. So it does beg a lot of questions. But let's fast forward then 14 years after that fateful October Friday to where we are presently. And as you look across the landscape, I know you spent a lot of time down here in Argentina and then split between both sides of the Atlantic. When you look forward to what has happened in Argentina, they've been at the forefront of every boneheaded economic and financial policy known to man, real pioneers in the dismal art. When you look from here to where you are now in the United States, you look over to what's happening with the Bank of England or in the Japanese bond market. It does seem that there are enough signs that sort of point to this time maybe actually being different and this time maybe being the end of what you and Dan and our colleague Tom Dyson have called the Greatest Financial Experiment in History?Bill Bonner:Well, I think that's exactly right and I think people are having a very hard time coming to grips with it. Even people in the financial industry, they're so used to what they think as 'normal.' I was just speaking to some of my colleagues here in Baltimore about it and trying to explain it from my standpoint. And I realized that everybody I was talking to was born after 1980. I mean they were literally not born in any time other than the boom that we have known for the last 40 years. In 1980, of course then Paul Volker got control of inflation. Interest rates came down ever since. And there were a lot of things going on. Most important was the entry of like 500 million Chinese people into the market. And those people produced things at a low price.But for these people, I'm talking about people who were born after 1980, it's very hard to get to understand that the whole circumstance of your life, the whole circumstance of your life has been phony. Faith been synced up by the Federal Reserve to give the impression that everything is always up. The stocks and financial advisors will tell you this to these young financial advisors say, Well yeah, stocks go down, but they always go back up. And so what you have to do is buy the dip. Now they're all out there looking for the bottom. The bottom is the point in which they don't go down anymore. Now they're going to go up, so you got to buy. And they have these charts and graphs that show that you buy it every dip, it always goes up.But it's not that simple at all. If you had bought stocks in 1966, which was a good year for a stock market, you would've held them for the next 16 years until 1982 really. And the prices would've been about the same. But because inflation was happening, you would've lost 75% of your money. That was a long time to lose 75% of your money. And to talk to somebody and say, Well, you just hold on, they'll go back up. Well maybe they'll go back up, but it could be after you're dead. You're not going to have an infinite amount of time here.And so there are times in history, and I think this is the key point, that if you look at anybody who is telling you they have a good track record, and of course that's everybody. And in the financial industry, they boast about what they've done and so on. All of that happened during a very special time which no longer exists. Now that's a hard thing to under for anybody to understand. And it's not that I'm saying, by the way, I'm not saying this is a new era. I'm saying this is the old era. What we've been through in mostly the last 10 years. But you could stretch it and explain that whole 40 year period was a grotesque and unusual series of things that came together, mostly including federal money printing by the Fed and QE and all the other things that they were doing. And that era is over and it ended in 2021. It ended when the bond market turned around, when actually it was 2020, it's the end of 2020. The bond market turned. When that happened, that was the end.And since then nothing has worked very well because the fundamental aspect of our financial lives is altered. And it no longer is a market with falling interest rates. It's no longer a market that the Fed can support by driving interest rates lower. It's a different world in which now the Fed is battling inflation. And once it decides not to battle inflation anymore, which I think it will, then you're going to see worse inflation. So that won't be like the period from 1980 to 2020. Not at all. It's going to be a whole different world with a different battle going on that'll be very hard to understand. And people say, Well, your stocks are going to go up. Well, they probably are going to go up, but they're going to go up like they did in Zimbabwe. They're going to go up like they did in Venezuela and like they did in Argentina. All of those markets were once the world's top performers. But when you adjust for the inflation, they were going down, it gets more complicated.And by the way, you have the advantage of being in the most complicated place in the world financially. And the Argentines learned to do these calculations. They have the blue dollar and they have the black dollar and they have the white dollar and they have the soy dollar. I'm not sure what that is. But now they have a new dollar. Did you know this as of yesterday, the Qatar dollar?Joel Bowman:Oh, I haven't heard about the Qatar dollar...Bill Bonner:The World Cup is taking place in Qatar and for Argentines who want to go, they have a special exchange rate.Joel Bowman:That's very interesting because I know I was aware, of course having lived here over the last dozen or so years, that we do have a dollar for every color of the rainbow and every gender you can imagine and pesos down here, they self-identify as all kinds of things. But I was made sort of brutally aware when I was on vacation just a couple of weeks ago to Brazil, I had forgotten that there is a clawback tax. This is part of the capital controls that happen here when you use an Argentine credit card abroad. I made the mistake of just handing it over for a hotel payment and then getting home to see my receipt and realizing that I'd had it sort of an extra 40 or 50% clawed back out of my account by the state. But this is the kind of shenanigans that happens when inflation gets out of hand.Bill Bonner:People, they find ways to try to obscure it, try to disguise it, try to eliminate it, but in doing everything but the one thing that really will work, right? They want to control prices. Now they're talking about controlling gas prices and states are providing people with extra money. There are all kinds of things and people find to try to overcome the fundamental reality of rising prices. And as in Argentina, they don't work, they never work.Joel Bowman:But it doesn't stop them from trying.So let's go back a little further then, because I was speaking to somebody just yesterday about this, it's a common kind of rejoinder to this narrative that we present in at Bonnet Rrivate Research, and that is where people say, Well, we've seen this before. It was the 1970s. Look, we had an oil embargo where a major oil producing block took supply off the global markets. We had the Nixon shocks, we had double digit inflation, it was runaway. And then we got Volker, and he marched in and whipped everyone into shape. And then as you said, then we're off to the races for the next 20, 40 odd years, rather. So what about today is different fundamentally than that seventies landscape that people think will just kind of, well, we'll muddle through and then we'll be off for another to a moonshot again?Bill Bonner:Well, the fundamental difference is 30 trillion dollars. The federal debt in 1980 was one trillion. Actually, it was below, it was actually 900 billion, below a trillion. Now it's 31 trillion, 30 times as much. That's the fundamental difference. And it's added to, it's not just the federal debt, it's also private debt, household debt, corporate debt, all at record levels. So they take them together and the whole sum of debt in America now is about 90 trillion. And what happens is, in this process of rates going up to bring things back to normal, the cost of all that debt goes up. And you soon realize that you can't pay it. That is not going to work.And that's what happened just two weeks ago in England when the traders saw what was happening and they were bidding up the yields, which is to say they're bidding down the prices on UK government bonds. And pretty soon all those big institutions, the pension funds, they rely on the price of those bonds to make their numbers work. And then suddenly it became clear they weren't going to work. And so the bank had to intervene. The Bank of England intervened with support stimulation, whatever you call it. They were buying bonds in order to save them from bankruptcy.And so what I suspect, I expect, this is what you call a high probability hunch, that the US is in the same situation, really even a worse situation in some ways. And as the Fed stays the course raises rates to try to get ahead of inflation, as they do so, we're going to see some things like what we just saw in England that certain institutions, could be Goldman Sachs, it could be JP Morgan, it could be a state pension fund like CalPERS in California. They've got billions of dollars. And they have done the same thing because this theory was pitched to them by Goldman Sachs of what they call LDI, which was matching your liabilities to some long-term goal. But what it really meant was they were ratcheting up the risk in order to try to improve the results. You can do that if you're a young speculator. But if you're managing the pension funds for a lot of retirees, that is practically criminal.So what's going to happen is somebody's going to get in big trouble and suddenly there's going to be that meltdown crisis on Wall Street in which the Powell and his fellow bankers, they really are part of a banking cartel in order to save themselves and their clients and their members Wall Street itself, they're going to say, Well, okay, that was a good idea. We need to get control of inflation, but not right now. Now we have to save the system because otherwise it'll go totally bad. I would say again, a high probability hunch is that that's going to happen and we're going to see a pivot from the central bank because they just owe too much.So your question was what's the difference now than from 1980? Well, the difference is all of that debt that they didn't have. Volker could raise rates to 20%. He could do that. He was condemned. He practically had to have an armed guard. People were threatening his life. But he could do that because America could afford it. Also, by the way, in 1980, it might have been 1979, stocks had already been squeezed so hard by inflation that they were already very, very cheap. They're not yet very, very cheap here. So we have a lot to lose. Trillions of dollars still to lose till we get there.By the way, we like to measure things in terms of gold, and in terms of gold, for a brief time you could buy the entire 30 Dow Jones industrial stocks for one single ounce of gold. And today, what is it? 18. What we're looking at is a totally different situation in which we have high deficit. The deficit was announced just yesterday for the current year of 1.4 trillion dollars. And this is at a year without really a crisis. A crisis hasn't appeared yet. They're running huge deficits. The debt is multiplying even without them. And we're in a situation where we can no longer continue on this course of action.And so what will happen, I believe is we'll see something will come up, some Lehman Brothers moment as they say on Wall Street will happen. And then the Federal Reserve will be forced to change towards inflation. And once that happens, it'll be the next stage. The stage we're in now is deflation. We're deflating all of those, a lot of those promises, obligations, debts and so on from the bubble era. That will go on until it becomes really painful and then they'll start inflating it again.Joel Bowman:And so this is what sets the backdrop for something that Richard Russell wrote about maybe 10 or 12 years ago. But it's the idea, and Tom Dyson of course has written about it over on our Substack page as well, and that is the idea of "cash now gold later." So gold after the pivot when hyperinflation, is off to the races...Bill Bonner:And we see so far that advice has been very, very good. Nobody really took it totally because it just felt awkward. We saw inflation running at 8%. So who wants to hold cash when inflation is running at 8%? But in fact dollars have ended up being the best investment so far this year. As long as we're in the deflation stage, you want cash and after the deflation stage you want something else. Probably gold, maybe stocks, stocks go up too. But you have to adjust that price by inflation, which is then out of control for the foreseeable future. That is going to be a different world. And that's a world that you probably know better than anyone because the inflation of Argentina is about 90%.Joel Bowman:Officially 90%. I tell my friends down here that Americans and Brits and Australians are worrying about 9% inflation. And they asked me to repeat myself, Sorry, did you say nine? We would kill for a 9% inflation. That would be a day in the sun for them.And so from then, from the past and the setup to where we think we are right now, I was speaking with our colleague last week, Mr. Byron King, and he and I spoke a little bit about the end of these three cheap abundant stimulants of this modern world that we've all come to just take for granted. Certainly in the last 40 years, and you've alluded to a couple of them already. But we've coming to the end, through various geopolitical kerfuffles and conflicts, of cheap energy. And we've outlined this over at Bonner Private Research. This feeds into our trade of the decade, which is long conventional energy. But that whole era of cheap, reliable local gas from various places seems to be coming to an end. This era of mass produced manufactured goods and tight supply chains unruffled by policies or global lockdowns, that seems now to be coming to an end. And of course as you've spoken about, we have potentially the end, at least for the foreseeable future, of cheap and available funny money, cheap and available discounted credit.Where do we go exactly from here? And I mean is it time to just build a bunker and buy gold and do nothing? I mean, how does the average person live through this if they're in that state of mind?Bill Bonner:One thing that we learned from the Argentine example is that you can live with inflation at a fairly high level. And this is not the first time they've done it in Argentina. You can live, but you can't live very well. The economy falls apart and you need to have protection from the local currency, which of course is what you do and what foreigners in Buenos Ares do because they operate on dollars rather than pesos, not prisoners of the local peso economy. And in a larger scale, when the economy turns around with the pivot on the Fed and more inflation in the US, that will be a similar reality in America, which you will not want to be dependent on the dollar completely, which is why you'll probably want to move assets into things which are not dollar dependent like gold, minerals, real things, timber. I'd like to be in the timber business. It looks good to me. Farming, a lot of things which are real and don't depend entirely on the value of the dollar. So I think that's where you're going to end up.It's not the end of the world by the way, no, it is not the end of the world if things go on, but they get more confusing. And they get a lot more confusing and people don't know what to do or what to make of them. And that's where you get the real problems because they feel cheated, and they are cheated. The whole idea of inflation is to cheat people. And so the guy who's worked all of his life, he's expecting his pension and his pension comes in and he realizes it's only worth half what he thought it was going to be worth. That guy gets pretty mad and he justifiably he gets angry and next thing you know he's out on the street or voting for somebody that he probably shouldn't vote for or whatever. People look for solutions. They want solutions. That's when they turn to the guy who has the easy solution. And that guy is almost always a fraudster.So it's a problem. And you get a big breakdown in society. Argentina, they had that inflation of, I'm not sure if it was the eighties, which ended up in the generals taking charge and military dictatorship was very common. In Venezuela you have that puppet government. I don't know what the world they are doing, but the guy Madura said that he had a crow or something on his shoulder who was whispering in his ear channeling the Chavez who was dead.Joel Bowman:Sounds as reasonable. Maybe we should get the Nobel Committee to give that guy a prize for telepathy from the great beyond or something.So speaking of the end of world and real assets, I promised our friend and our colleague Diego Samper that we would mention the solution to all of life's problems, all of the above. And that is your latest harvest of Tacana wine from your ranch down here up in the northern reaches of Argentina. I don't know how many people have looked at this on a map, but it's way up there in the north, right up close to the Bolivian border and it's really extreme country. We've been up there, we've been up there a few times.Bill Bonner:As you say, the solution begins with that popping of the cork.Joel Bowman:Around 6:00 PMBill Bonner:That's the most pleasant sound of the day. You pour yourself a drink and here in the autumn, here in Maryland, in the autumn, recently it's been chilly enough. So I just had a little fire in the fireplace, and at six o'clock I sit in front of the fire with a glass of Malbec and for a while it doesn't seem too bad.Joel Bowman:Yeah, it's palliative. So tell readers who haven't maybe experienced it yet the difference between, and I've spoken to Will, your son Will Bonner about this, the difference between what you can expect from a high altitude Malbec grown in really unique and extreme conditions and the watery diluted over sugared dyed stuff you might pick up at the supermarket.Bill Bonner:You stole my thunder there. But that is the difference that the high altitude, what it's doing is it the extremes between day and night. And the extremes between day and night require a thick skin to survive. And so the grapes grown at that elevation, they tend to have these very thick skins, and in the skins is all the flavor. So when you get that, the high altitude, not just our place, but any place in the valley, because we're in the valley which is the highest in the world for wine. You get wine that is very strong. And some people don't like it because it's too strong, but you get used to it soon enough and then everything else seems weak. When I drink my own Malbec, I feel like, well, there's real wine and everything else seems to be an imitation.Joel Bowman:Well I think “having a thick skin to last one through” is probably a good point to end our powwow today, Bill. I'm not sure where we're going to catch up next, but I hope there's a glass of high altitude Malbec involved in it and we can get a front row seat to whatever it is about to happen next in this passing parade.Bill Bonner:Well thank you Joel. It's been a pleasure.Joel Bowman:Yeah, thank you Bill. Cheers.P.S. Readers and or listeners wishing to grab a few bottles of high altitude Malbec will want to be nimble. Bill doesn't sell his Tacana bottles to supermarkets or restaurants, but instead directly to his dear readers… like you! But they typically sell out pretty quickly. If there's any left by the time you read this, you be able to secure your supplies here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to another Fatal Conceits Podcast. In today's episode, we're joined by our good friend and regular favorite on the show, Christopher Mayer. Long time listeners will know Chris as the portfolio manager and co-founder of the Woodlock House Family Capital Fund, which he began with Bill Bonner back in 2018. Chris is also a published author who just released his latest book, Dear Fellow Time-Binder: Letters on General Semantics, which you can find here. His blog, in which he ruminates about life, markets and “this thing we call investing” is considered essential reading around the Bonner Private Research office. Check that out, here.In today's conversation, we take an unhurried stroll through Chris's library and get his take on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Robert Bruner's Deals From Hell, the latest Buckminster Fuller biography and plenty more besides. Please enjoy and feel free to share our work with fellow readers, thinkers and solitary ramblers…Cheers,Joel BowmanThank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it.TRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman: All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast, dear listener, a show about money, markets, mobs, and manias, not necessarily in that order. If you haven't already done so, please check out our sub stack. You can find us at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com. And on the site there you'll find hundreds of articles on everything from high finance to lowly politics and everything in between including, of course, many more conversations just like this one under the Fatal Conceits podcast tab at the top of the page. Today, we're delighted to welcome back to the show long time friend of Bonner Private Research and the portfolio manager of Woodlock House Family Capital Fund, which he co-founded with Bill Bonner back in 2018. A good friend of mine, Mr. Christopher Mayer. Welcome to the show, mate. How do you do?Christopher Mayer: I am well. Thank you for having me on, always good to talk to you.Joel Bowman: Yeah, absolutely. You're in a new place up in Maryland?Christopher Mayer: Yeah. I live in Mount Airy now. It's a nice little town, very green, lots of golf courses around. It's open, it's nice. I like it here.Joel Bowman: Good stuff, mate. We were speaking just before we hit the record button here and I told you that I would be remiss if I didn't at least throw out one financial question at the very top of the segment here. I guess what everybody wants to know is, after our June lows, we've had a 20 odd percent bounce in the S&P, what many would consider to be the classical definition of a bear market rally. Is this something that, first of all, you agree with? And secondly, does it concern you, as somebody who's in it for the long term and more focused on individual stock selection?Christopher Mayer: Yeah. Well, everybody wants to know the unknowable, right? Is this the bottom or we have more to fall or are we off and running? I don't look at it that way. I'm focused more on the individual companies I own. And I have to say, this is probably one of the easiest bear markets I've been in yet because I have now second quarter reports in hand for all my companies except one, and they're all firing on all cylinders. I mean, if you just looked at the financial statements, you wouldn't see any cause for concern. You'd be surprised that the stocks were down at all. So I think times like this are an opportunity. What's remarkable, I suppose, is the swiftness of this decline. So we're through August, this is the fifth worst start for the S&P 500, going back to 1928. So that's historically interesting and that ...Joel Bowman: Anything interesting happened around 1928-29 or there abouts?Christopher Mayer: Yeah. People like to make different comparisons, and it doesn't have to be catastrophe. I saw somebody on Twitter had put out charts where they said one for the bulls, one for the bears. And they had set up the decline that we see now and matched it up perfectly with '07, '08. But then someone else, they had matched up perfectly with another market where it went straight up. So, when do that kind of data mining you can find the pattern to make whatever argument you want to make, but they're all different in different ways.And this one feels different in that way, in that the underlying performance of companies so far is strong and there are pockets of the market that are weak. Of course, if some of the retailers have disappointed and banks earlier, didn't do so well, but by and large things seem to be holding up pretty good. So I'm not concerned. I think this is an opportunity for sure. And if you have any kind of time horizon, five years at least, I think you're going to do pretty good while picking up some things today.Joel Bowman: When we spoke for your segment on Bill's round table, which we recorded, I guess, maybe a month or so ago, you mentioned of course that with the benefit of hindsight, which we would all love to luxuriate in 24/7, you look back at those other market drops that you saw in 2008 and before and now they look like little blips. So who knows what the future will hold, but if you had the steel to hold and even pick up some bargains during that time with some stock selection, you could do very well.Christopher Mayer: Yeah. And the stock that I mentioned, I think on that call has put in a new 52 week load today, so... It's even better now, right? Yes, yes, yes, yes.Joel Bowman: There you go. All right. Well, looking at your bookshelf behind you there, one of the things that I love about our conversations, and for listeners and viewers now who are just joining us, I know we've got a lot of new readers on the Bonner Private Research sub stack, so welcome if that's you. Chris and I have had a few conversations here now, maybe three or four where we thumb through Chris's bookshelf and just do a little bit of a deep dive into what makes Chris tick as both an investor and a thinker and a writer. So I'll link to a couple of our previous conversations there so readers can get a little flavor of what we're about here. As we were emailing a little back and forth in preparation for this call, Chris, you nominated a typically, characteristically eclectic clutch of books, as you tend to do. Do you want to take us from the top, maybe beginning with the classics? Where do you want to start?Christopher Mayer: Yeah, we can begin with the classics. So a lot of these books behind me are old philosophy books. This is my main study here, but then across the hall, I have another library where my investment books and other books are. And then downstairs, there's another little section where some fiction is. And since we moved this library is about half the size it was, but it's the way it goes. But the classics I had recently read and thought I would share is Rousseau, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker.He wrote this as his last book and it's a series of 10 walks. So he goes off and he writes what he was thinking about on these different walks. If I were to describe it, I would say it's a rumination on happiness. What makes people happy? What makes them unhappy? And so this is old Rousseau looking back, and he's an interesting guy. He's a really good writer, but I have to say he's also a hard guy to like sometimes. I don't know. You mentioned in the email that you had read his Confessions, which I have not read yet, but I've heard about them. Yeah.Joel Bowman: Yeah, I read that recently, actually just in the past, I want to say six months or so, and maybe a spoiler for some listeners who haven't gone through much of their Rousseau yet, but yeah, he had a long running feud with Voltaire after a friendship earlier in their life. Voltaire was pretty savage in his attacks on Rousseau later in his life, especially for perceived hypocrisy around raising kids and education and that kind of stuff. It's pretty hard to like him after you discover some of those warts, those and skeletons in the closet.Christopher Mayer: Yeah. Yeah, it was unbelievable, but there are a lot of things like that. But then I think also he's very thin skinned. He seems to take offense pretty easily. But having said all that, he's also a good writer and deep thinker. And in this book, he talks about things that make him almost sound a bit like an Eastern philosopher. He starts talking about, what makes people happy comes from the inside and not being too bound up with externals and being able to be more unaffected by the vicissitudes of life. And he really comes to appreciate nature. There's one letter where he talks about how he gets in a boat and goes into the middle of a lake and just lays at the bottom of the boat, looking up at the sky and loses himself for hours in a peaceful meditation. So I don't know, it's a fun read. And it's not heavy reading either, it's pretty easy to read.Joel Bowman: Yeah. I think some of these other works, Emile in particular, is notoriously difficult.Christopher Mayer: And he's known for his political stuff, so I know that that can be difficult too.Joel Bowman: Yeah, The Social Contract and whatnot. Do you make anything of the rambling philosopher at all? There were others, differing vastly in their world views, such as Nietzsche who wrote in a very aphoristic style. He would go on these long walks and just meditate on what he thought was important. Obviously more recently, Taleb wrote his book of aphorisms and it seems to be one type of medium through which to distill your thoughts and get some clarity for anything like that.Christopher Mayer: Yes. I think of Henry David Thoreau also. He'd do these walks and he'd write in his journal.Joel Bowman: Yeah.Christopher Mayer: Emerson was a great keeper of a daily journal. Kierkegaard was also someone who wrote avidly in a journal. I have his journals right there. But yeah, I think there's something to that. And then even in some of the great Eastern philosophers too, they wrote in little snippets, like Lao Tzu or Laozi's Tao Te Ching and those guys. And that compares to these heavy, weighty treaties that Hegel and Kant would write, they're impenetrable. So I think there's something to say for that.Joel Bowman: The critique on the top of my finger, yeah.Christopher Mayer: That's critique of pure reason?Joel Bowman: Right there, yeah.Christopher Mayer: I have that there. That's over right here. Yeah.Joel Bowman: These big, weighty tomes. Those system builders, the Hegels and the Wittgensteins and whatnot, they can get so dense. It's almost sometimes a little impenetrable, but going back to ... you and I have spoken about Thoreau before, and of course Walden. He was social distancing a long time before it became cool on the outskirts up there in New England. I often wonder that, just by occupational hazard, we have our noses so close to the screens, we might be watching ticker symbols or analyzing charts or looking at company reports and that kind of things, if we wouldn't benefit a little from just stepping back, getting some perspective, going to play a game of golf, going for a walk in the woods and decluttering from time to time.Christopher Mayer: Yeah, definitely. I think that's a good point. And there's the science about that too, about what happens if you press yourself too much. Your brain needs some time to recharge. Concentration is almost like a resource, and if you constantly are at it, you got to give yourself a chance to regenerate. It's also interesting, some of these philosophers, like Nietzsche, some people think that it's because he had such intense migraines and a lot of other ailments that he preferred to write short because he couldn't sit there for that long and write long pieces. I don't know if that's true or not, interesting theory. But it does also seem like some of the philosophers who write shorter do have some love of nature too. They do tend to get outside and they're walking and then they write down these observations. So yeah, I think there's some value in detaching. Even Bill has told me that before. He says we should have some other outlet other than markets. For him, he likes his masonry and he's always working with his hands, but it's good to have something else.Joel Bowman: Yeah. Over the summer, my wife Anya and I and our daughter were touring around a little bit of Europe. We went to visit the Bonners in their country estate out in very rural Ireland ...Christopher Mayer: Yeah. I was in early June as well.Joel Bowman: Oh, yeah. That's right.Christopher Mayer: We were close in there. We just missed timing.Joel Bowman: That's right. Yeah. But it is funny to see. Bill will do his daily work and then he'll throw on the dungarees and march down the country lane and spend a few hours doing some masonry work and come back all dusted up for lunch or whatnot. But yeah, I think it's almost akin to when you teach your children, for example, when they've forgotten a word, they get stuck on something. They want to say something and for the life of them, it won't come to them while they're thinking about it. And you have to distract them and get them thinking about something else, talk about what they did that day or whatever and then, all of a sudden, there it is.Christopher Mayer: I think in the investing world, I mean, there are freaks like Warren Buffet who seems to have no interests other than investing.Joel Bowman: Big banks. Yeah.Christopher Mayer: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you've ever read The Snowball, which is the biography on him.Joel Bowman: No.Christopher Mayer: He's really a strange guy. He has a diet of a six year old, lives in the same house all that time, not particularly well-read at all. I don't know if he'd even know who Rousseau was. I mean, he just doesn't have that kind of background and no real hobbies or interests. I mean, he does play Bridge, so maybe that counts, maybe that's something.Joel Bowman: Yeah.Christopher Mayer: But it's very strange.Joel Bowman: He's almost like an idiot savant. You have all these arrested developments in other aspects of one's life. But then when it comes to analyzing markets, his the brain just goes into overdrive.Christopher Mayer: A lot of the better investors I know do like to read and they are curious. So I think that's a good trait to have, because when you think about businesses, you're learning about people and people have different philosophies and styles. You often think you can tell this history of the world through any different lens. You could tell it through investing. You could tell it through music. You could tell it through food.Joel Bowman: Yeah.Christopher Mayer: If you go deep enough, they all come together and these same philosophical topics eventually crop up.Joel Bowman: It's interesting, isn't it? That was one of Anthony Bourdain's observations that he would use. You mentioned food and we've talked obviously about travel and music and things like that before. He was a great believer that the same conversations are essential to human nature no matter where you go around the world. And you can use something like food, something as common and as communal as that ceremony, as a way of getting into all of the things that were happening in wherever he was, Phnom Penh or Nairobi or what have you. He would talk to people and then get into the rest of it. You could learn about supply lines. You learn about living standards. You learn about history. You learn about the politics of the place, the economics. All of the kinds of things that you see reflected in a stock market, for example, you might see if you really pay attention reflected in just breaking bread with someone in some far flung place around the world.Christopher Mayer: Yes. I agree with that, and I'm definitely a big Bourdain fan, so maybe that seed was planted. He's a guy I miss. I'd like to have him around, see what he thinks of some of this crazy stuff going on. Of course there's a number of people we could say that about, but he was a good one.Joel Bowman: We were mentioning as well recently reading the biography of Bucky, or Buckminster Fuller.Christopher Mayer: Yeah, Buckminster Fuller. Yeah, it was a big, fat book. It came out just recently. It's called Inventor of the Future by Alec Nevala-Lee. And when I first saw it I was very excited because I thought, "Wow, Bucky, as he would like to be called, getting the Royal presidential treatment, this big, fat biography. It's hard to describe what he did. I mean, he was an inventor and he was a poet and he did all kinds of things in his life. He was a philosopher as well. He wrote books and he was a coveted speaker. So he did a lot of different things.I read this biography and I think it is the definitive biography of his life, the when and the how he did this then and here and there. It sorts through different events and separates some of the myth from what probably happened. So in that sense, it was interesting to read it. But in the other sense, it focused a lot on his personal failings. He had a number of affairs and he had some other problems, so took away some of the magic. If you didn't know who Buckminster Fuller was and you picked up this biography and read it, you'd walk away thinking, what's all the fuss about?Joel Bowman: Right.Christopher Mayer: But he was something. I mean, Steve Jobs loved Buckminster Fuller. You know that famous Apple ad "think different" and it goes through 16 or 17 different icons? Buckminster Fuller is in that ad and that was at the request of Steve Jobs. He received 30 honorary degrees. He had something like 25 patents. This book, I didn't feel like it really brought home any of that. He was again, a very coveted speaker all over the world, he had fans all over the place. So anyway ...Joel Bowman: That's interesting, isn't it? When we talk about historical figures, even as recently as someone like Buckminster Fuller, one wonders if they would even be given a start today or whether they'd be canceled before they got going. I wonder if people would focus so much on their shortcomings? I mean, you're not reading a Buckminster Fuller book for marital advice, presumably. You're reading him for his philosophy on this or his inventions or his thoughts on this and that. I wonder in our haste to dig up the worst dirt on everybody, how much of the good we miss out on.Christopher Mayer: Of course there's a lot of people like that in history, right? If you were going to go through all the shortcomings, you'd hardly read anybody. I mean, shoot, Heidegger's one of the best examples of that for the 20th century. He's a Nazi, he's out.Joel Bowman: Ciao.Christopher Mayer: I mean, look at some of the stuff Hemingway wrote, homophobic stuff and misogynistic stuff. Forget it. So yeah, I don't know. It's a good point.Joel Bowman: All right, mate, let's move on to your second book here. Is it Deals from Hell, I think we've got up next. That's a great title by the way.Christopher Mayer: Yeah. It's called Deals from Hell, M&A lessons that rise above the ashes by Robert Bruner. This book was sent to me by a fellow money manager. And well, most of the book is case studies of M&A deals. But if you were to get this book, I would recommend at least just reading the first three or four chapters, because what it really does is that it kills this myth that M&A is a bad thing, mergers and acquisitions. There's a prevalent negative view among people, even professional investors, they don't like acquisitions. And their view is, when you do an acquisition, most of the time it destroys value for shareholders. And in this book, he goes through a lot of research and studies that have been done in M&A and he comes to the opposite conclusion, that M&A does pay.Joel Bowman: Oh wow.Christopher Mayer: And it's interesting why that is the case. So he says, an objective reading of more than 130 studies supports the conclusion that M&A pays. And one of the reasons why the conventional wisdom fails, as he says here, people generalized too readily from the findings of a single study. So there are some very high profile disasters, right, in mergers. And that's what gets all the attention versus all the little deals that get done along the way that worked out perfectly well. So the tendency is to exaggerate the failures and the key line here that I double starred, he says: "All M&A is local," which I really like. You really have to look at it on a case by case, deal by deal basis. And it took me a while to get over that hurdle, but now I've found some companies that are really great acquirers of other businesses, just systematically are able to add and plug in businesses to their growing little empire and do very, very, very well.Joel Bowman: So is this something that's affected the way that you think about the universe of potential investments that you come across on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?Christopher Mayer: I would say I had discovered this earlier. I wouldn't say this book turned my opinion on what I think, because I'd discovered that on my own, that M&A is really nuanced. And I've discovered a number of these companies. People now call them "serial acquirers" and they have done very, very well. There's a number of them in Sweden. There's a couple in the UK. In the U.S., there are several as well that just continued to acquire companies as their main avenue of growth. And they've been wonderful investments. So what makes those successful versus the failures? This book helps highlight that too. You've got greater propensity of failing if it's a very large deal, if it's very complicated, versus smaller deals, or if you're doing something that's in a business unrelated to yours. There are a number of things he goes through. But I think the value in this book is really busting that general myth and forcing you to think more nuanced about the topic of mergers and acquisitions.Joel Bowman: That's interesting. I like those myth busting books, those that turned things that you might have thought previously on their head. I'm wondering if the general consensus is such that mergers and acquisitions are bad might not offer a little pocket of hidden opportunity, an overlooked opportunity for people who could get past that stigma.Christopher Mayer: Yeah, I think it did for a while. And then I think a lot of these serial acquirers are now priced pretty well. So I don't know that that's necessarily true anymore, but it might be. Part of the reason I think is that it can be difficult to model these things because you don't necessarily know when the deals are going to strike or what they're going to look like. And if they deploy a lot more capital than you model, then there's going to be some big surprises. So it's a tough thing to predict and project.And so if you're willing to go with the uncertainty and you trust the capital allocation, trust the team and the process that they have, and they have a track record of successful deals. And you can do that. You can look back and see whether deals were successful or not. You can see whether there are impairments. You can see what happens to the overall companies' returns on capital, whether they go down over time as they do acquisitions, watering it down, or whether they're able to preserve it or even grow it.And it depends on the amount of disclosures companies give you. Sometimes you can really dig down and you can see how certain subsidiaries they acquired, how they've done sales and profit wise. And you can back in and say, wow, that was a really good deal. So I think that's the key. It's like most things in investing, in life. You can't go through it too generally, everything has nuance. And our culture forces everything to be squished and reduced to a headline or reduced to a soundbite or reduced to a one single powerful message that you can deliver, but on most things, there's a lot of nuance and complexity.Joel Bowman: Yeah. And oftentimes I think that looking beyond that the black and white or the binary conception of the world can flesh out a lot of useful information. I was going to ask, because you touched on a few different investing jurisdictions there, Scandinavia, Europe. I know that you invest, around the world, that you have an international portfolio...Christopher Mayer: Yes.Joel Bowman: Are there things that you'd look at in particular when you go into foreign markets, say for example, the transparency of their reporting, the maturity of the market in general, or does that all depend on price?Christopher Mayer: Yeah, there's definitely interesting jurisdictional differences. So even on this topic of M&A for example, there's a solid pocket in Stockholm where there's a dozen of these serial acquirers and they're all good at it. For some reason, it's like a Silicon Valley of serial acquirers there. Culturally, there's something there. There's about it and you don't see anything like that in Germany or France. It's just different. And in the UK, there are a few. And then in the states, there are several. But it's interesting to me sometimes how you can have such big differences in regional markets, even if you compare Sweden to the other Nordics. I mean, there's a lot of differences there in how business will run. For example, a lot of the Swedish serial acquirers will report on return on capital employed. I mean, they'll be right there, a number that they're tracking and targeting. And as an investor, I'm like, that's fantastic! Here's what you want to think about. Right? And not this BS about sales growth or earnings. These guys are focusing on the real things that matter. They get capital allocation. So yeah, I mean, those kind of things are pretty neat when you find that.Joel Bowman: Yeah. You toss a line over the side of your boat and you find a lot of what you like, you start to bait up again. Good stuff. Just going from the title there, I haven't read the book, but I expected there to be some horror stories in there. Some actual "deals from hell"?Christopher Mayer: Yeah. I mean, well the classic is the AOL, Time Warner deal. Time Warner bought AOL at the top. And yeah, I mean, then you've got some horrific charts here where they announced the merger and then the company becomes worth less than the deal value was. I mean, it's just a remarkable amount of destruction of wealth on some of these things. So yeah, there are definitely horror stories in there.Joel Bowman: Right. They're the headline grabbers that you were mentioning before that shaped public opinion.Christopher Mayer: Well, that's it. That's exactly right. Those are the ones. When people think of disasters, most people can think of these ones.Joel Bowman: All right then. Let's move on, Chris, to your own latest release. How many is this for you now, mate? You've got to be working on half a dozen?Christopher Mayer: This is number five.Joel Bowman: Number five. Okay. All right. Congratulations. Let's get into it.Christopher Mayer: It's called Dear Fellow Time-binder: Letters on General Semantics.Joel Bowman: All right. You're going to have to back up a little bit here for our listeners. We're going to go back into some previous conversations. Maybe you could do as your man Korzybski might do and help "map the terrain" for us.Christopher Mayer: Right, well, if you read, [my book] How Do You Know?, this book is a second crack at those ideas, except that I drop the investing focus. So, How Do You Know is really applying these ideas to investing. And then this is just a more general exploration. I call it letters. I was actually, as I say in the preface, I was inspired by Seneca's letters. He wrote these letters where he explained stoicism, and there's some debate about whether they were really letters or not, whether he would really mail them, but they were written in the letter format as if he was teaching somebody. And I thought that's a good way to do it, so I did this. I thought, if I were teaching someone of these ideas, how would I do it? What are these ideas?You mentioned Korzybski. Yes, Alfred Korzybski was a guy in the 1930s who created this discipline called general semantics. As you can think of it more as an aid to critical thinking. It focuses on the assumptions that we make with different symbols and language and how they interplay with how we behave. And there's a lot to it actually. There's a lot of different things to it. So it can get deep and get into all kinds of things about causation and things we take for granted. So what makes this book different, too, is it's published by the Institute of General Semantics and they gave me access to the archives for Et Cetera, which is their journal they've been publishing since the 1940s. And another publication they have, The General Semantics Bulletin. So I had these two archives.I was able to go back and I mined them because there were some interesting characters that taught these ideas over time. You won't know them now, but they're in the book, people like Wendell Johnson, Irving Lee and S.I.I Caldwell, these different people. They're interesting characters on their own. And so I was able to pull out different things from those archives. So it was really interesting to read in the 1940s, what people were thinking about, worried about. War of course hangs over the whole thing and so it was very appropriate then because they were looking at things like propaganda and taking apart the meaning of all these different terms and phrases and the ideas behind them. So, that's one thing that was really fun about doing this book. And I just did it on the side. Some of the letters were already published in their journal, Et Cetera, over the last couple years. And then finally the book came out this year, so I wrote most of it actually in 2020.Joel Bowman: As you're speaking now, I'm thinking about the messaging, let's call it, what used to be called propaganda before it underwent a public relations campaign itself, and is now called public relations. I think it would've been in the early 1900s when Eddie Bernays was just getting his start in the United States. He was the fellow that brought the world the phrase, "Making the world safe for democracy." And that was the banner under which he convinced Woodrow Wilson to commit American troops to World War I. America was a largely war weary continent as it had only just emerged from its own civil war a generation or so previously. And all of a sudden, with the right "messaging," we have troops marching off to war. And it does make you think, if that was happening then, and if it was happening in the forties, if this was on people's minds, it would be perhaps naive to think that this wasn't happening at some level today.Christopher Mayer: Yes. I mean, it's interesting to think about why that stuff works. Why does that phrase have power, "making the world safe for democracy?" What does that even mean when you think about it? And so that's what general semantics looks at. I think the biggest thing I've taken from Korzybski really is just that, to be conscious of what he would call "abstracting." So there are all these words and phrases that we use that really don't mean anything when you think about it. They mean whatever people want them to mean. They have dozens and dozens of different meanings, "democracy "for example. "Recession" would be one. Capitalism would be one. You hear people talk, especially politicians, about our "capitalist" system. And then you talk about other people and they're like, What are you talking about? We don't have a capitalist system. We've got something else entirely.Joel Bowman: It's a corporatocracy.Christopher Mayer: Yeah, exactly. Right. So all the kinds of labels we throw around. Even political parties. Saying someone is Republican or Democrat doesn't really say much.Joel Bowman: Right.Christopher Mayer: It's freighted with assumptions. And then sometimes words as we know them have become so freighted with connotations that we have to invent new words or we have to drop them. We can't even say the old words anymore. You look like you may have some examples to throw in there.Joel Bowman: I know. I'm not going to a risk cancellation by listing off a shopping list of unmentionables. But yeah, it's certainly the way. And I think also with regards to the way semantics is treated in our modern public discourse. We have a narrowing of definitions that we're permitted to use or that we're almost shoehorned into.Christopher Mayer: Yes.Joel Bowman: I'm wondering if while you were mining these archives, doing research for your own work, if you came across any time when the range of concepts, the range of language that we had available to us was so narrowed that it impacted the way we're even able to conceptualize and think about things in the first instance.Christopher Mayer: Yes. There's a hypothesis I talk about in the book is called the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis. And the idea is that the language we use actually actively shapes what we think, just like what you're saying. I can think of Whorf's examples because he used to work in insurance and he would say things like ... let's say there was a fire started in some factory and he would have to investigate the fire. And he would find out there were these drums that were labeled "empty gasoline drums." People would be very careless with them. They assume they're empty. But they're not empty. They'll have vapors in them that are very flammable and so on and so forth and that led to their mishandling which started the fire. Another one, I remember there was a time where he talked about how there was this pool of water where they would sometimes dump flammable liquids and things. And they would be a vapor there and someone was there smoking a cigarette and then they threw the match in the water, think it would put it out. Instead, it lit the whole thing on fire and ...Joel Bowman: The exact opposite, unintended consequences.Christopher Mayer: Yeah. So his point was you, if you label these things differently, we would actually think differently about them. If you didn't say they were empty gasoline drums, you called them something else, people would behave differently. That's a slightly different point than what you're making, but I mean, it's so endlessly fascinating, because you can go on about this forever. But part of this book too, is there's a lot of little helpers and things. I know just from studying general semantics, to give you one example, there's this whole thing about being mindful of absolutes. So when people say things like "always" and "never." Anytime I hear people use those, it's like a little light goes on in my mind. You have to be careful of that. So you get suspicious of certain words and it can help you ask questions, follow up questions. Like somebody will say, "Well, these immigrants are all thieves. And you'll be like, really? "All" of them?Joel Bowman: Mergers and acquisitions are "always" a bad idea.Christopher Mayer: Exactly. They're "all" terrible. "All" of them? Every single one? So there are little clues like that, words that will perk up. And as an investor, that's important because I spend a lot of time talking to people and asking questions and trying to parse their answers.Joel Bowman: We've never lost shareholders' investments. Never? Interesting. Yeah. All right, Chris, tell us where we can get your book here, it's Dear Fellow Time Bender. I'm assuming it's on Amazon. Anywhere else in particular?Christopher Mayer: Yes. It's not very expensive. It's 12 bucks. It's 150 pages. I think it'll be a fun read for people who like to think about these kinds of ideas. Yeah, Amazon and fine bookstores everywhere as people like to say, right?Joel Bowman: Fine bookstores.Christopher Mayer: And the Institute of General Semantics, they sell it as well, so you can Google that. You won't have any problem finding it. And I don't get any proceeds, by the way. I don't get any royalties or anything. It's done for the Institute, so all proceeds goes toward them.Joel Bowman: Okay. I'll include a link to Chris's book (SEE HERE) and the others that we've spoken about here, Deals from Hell and Rousseau's Reveries, the very last book of his life. We didn't even get into talking more about his other particular ideas about some very interesting things. I think mostly people tend to focus on, as you said, his political persuasions, the Social Contract and that kind of stuff, but his works reward a whole summer of study at the very least.Christopher Mayer: I think so. I think if I had to sum up the big idea from that book, I'd say it was his idea that people were naturally happy, but they become unhappy by comparing themselves to other people and focusing too much on external things.Joel Bowman: Hell is other people, as Sartre said, if you let yourself only exist in other people's opinions. Okay, Chris, I feel like we could go on for quite a bit longer, going through your bookshelves and mine, but let's leave it there and we'll pick it up again next time.Christopher Mayer: Yep. Thanks, JoelJoel Bowman: Thanks a lot, Chris. I really appreciate it. And for listeners, again, please head over to the Substack page. You can get plenty of research reports, columns from Bill Bonner, Dan Danning, Tom Dyson and myself, and many more conversations like this, including the ones I referred to, our past conversations with Chris Mayer, where we noodle through more of his extended archives. And with that, we'll be back next week. Thanks a lot. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to the Fatal Conceits podcast, a show about money, markets, mobs and manias… not necessarily in that order. In today's episode, we're joined by Bonner Private Research's macro analyst, Mr. Dan Denning, who's been monitoring the markets from his “fortress of solitude” up on the high plains of Laramie, Wyoming. After the worst first six months for stocks in half a century… the worst market for bonds in over two centuries… and the worst for a standard, 60-40 portfolio in… ever, we wanted to get Dan's take on where he thinks we're headed from here.We talk fed hikes, inflation, jobs, housing, energy, BPR's “trade of the decade” and the looming threat of China's imploding housing market… and all in (just) under half an hour!For the less audio-inclined, there's a full transcript of the show (lightly edited for clarity) below. Otherwise, happy listening…Cheers,Joel BowmanThank you for reading Bonner Private Research. And welcome to our new listeners! Just so you know, this post is public, so feel free to share it with friend and foe alike...Joel Bowman: All right. Well, welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast, dear listener, dear viewer, as it were, if you're joining us on the YouTube channel. If you haven't already done so, please head over to our Substack page. That's bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com. By now, you'll be able to catch hundreds of articles from myself, Dan Denning, Bill Bonner, and Tom Dyson, about everything from high finance to lowly politics, and plenty more in between.There's plenty of research reports up there as well and also many more conversations just like this, which you'll find under the Fatal Conceits podcast tab at the top of the page. I'm delighted to welcome back our in-house macro analyst Mr. Dan Denning, who joins us today from the high plains of Laramie. Dan, how are you doing?Dan Denning: Yeah, good. It's been a busy couple of weeks, but still blazing hot summer here, so no complaints.Joel Bowman: As I sit here shivering in my sweater at four degrees Celsius. Mate, you and I were just speaking before we jumped on the recording here, we should make a special mention to a lot of new readers who have just joined us over the past few weeks or the past month. Welcome if you're joining us for the first time. I thought we might start with just getting up to speed with where we've been both with the project and with the markets for the first half of this year.I think most of our readers probably know the basic setup. Worst first six months for stocks in half a century, inflation at a 40-year high, worst first six months for the bond market maybe ever, and likewise for a balanced portfolio. Do you want to just catch us up to where we are now, eight months-ish into the new year? I know we've had a bit of a bounce of the June lows. There's talk about whether or not that's a bear market bounce or the road to recovery. Where do you map us at this juncture?Dan Denning: Yeah. I think that's the right question because there's the price action in the market and then there's the big picture. Taking our lead from Bill, we always start with the big picture, which is taking over decades, not just months or weeks or even years. From that point of view, not much has changed since the first half of the year or really since we started in January.That forecast or that prediction, if you will, is that the markets were extremely overvalued, mostly as a result of interest rates that had been left way too low for way too long. Then we expected lots of inflation because of both the fiscal policy, which is to say the stimulus spending from commerce. Then the support that the Fed gave to markets, which translated into higher consumer prices.There were a few other complicating factors like the result of the pandemic lockdowns and their impact on the supply chain. That is a really important story for investors ,that the de-globalization that the pandemic has kicked off is probably going to push inflation higher or keep it higher for longer than we think the stock market expects. But it was almost inevitable that after such a terrible first half of the year, you would get some sort of recovery or bounce in markets.Really the important question is, is that the end of the bear market, or is it a bear market bounce or a rally? I think our view, and I speak for Tom as the investment director and Bill as well, is that it falls pretty squarely within the definition of a bear market rally, which is easy to say academically, because you can look at it and say, "Well, the S&P is up by almost 20% from the June lows." Some of the more aggressive growth-oriented indices and stocks like Apple, the NASDAQ, they're up more than that.These are really challenging moves for investors looking at the long term, because in the short term you feel like I'm missing out and maybe I'm wrong, but from our point of view, nothing has changed technically or fundamentally to suggest that the primary trend in the markets is still down. So that's what our investment strategy is set up to address is, how do you preserve your capital? How do you avoid the big loss and how do you prepare for this stagflationary environment where you have high prices that are sticky and lower stock prices?There's a lot involved. There's interest rates involved and real interest rates and things like that. I'd say we got initial confirmation in the first half of the year that our macro thesis was spot on and since then we've seen sort of a counter cyclical reaction in stock markets. You never want to say the stock market is wrong. You never want to say that the price action is wrong, just because it disagrees with your thesis.But I'd say based on the levels in the stock market right now, we're not going to change our call about where we think things are headed.Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public, so feel free to share it friend and foe alike...Joel Bowman: You mentioned stagflation there and prices. We've obviously got financial asset prices on the one hand but then prices of everyday goods and services that people consume on the other hand, that's obviously a big part of the picture. What do you say to people who make the case that inflation has peaked?I heard somebody use the metaphor the other day that the pig had moved through the python, this massive $6 trillion cash giveaway is moving through the system and now we're on the other side of that. What do you say to that argument?Dan Denning: Yeah. I mean, I'd say it's wrong. I think there's certainly an element that inflation was exacerbated by one-off factors, but that to me seems like the conventional explanation that it came easily and it will go away easily. History suggests that's not the case, that there's a lot of inertia once inflation gets hold. Part of that is just monetary and then part of it's psychological. If you look at real interest rates, so you look at the Fed funds rate adjusted for the inflation rate, it's still negative.It's around 6%, maybe almost 7%. Markets seem to have gotten ahead of themselves in saying that inflation will come down and the rate of interest rate increases has probably already peaked as well so they might continue to go up by 50 basis points or 25 basis points. But 3% is probably where the Fed will stop and therefore it's okay to go buy growth assets again at really high premiums, at high price to sales ratios, high price to earnings ratios.Those ratios are down a little bit from last November, but they're still elevated based on their historic high, so things aren't cheap right now. They're not cheap either especially if you think that we're headed toward either a recession or we've been in a recession, or that we'll have stagflation. You're pricing stocks as if interest rates were going to be lower or inflation was going to be lower and earnings were going to be higher.To me, that's a very rosy scenario and the risk if you're wrong is that there's still another 30 to 50% drawdown out there for equity prices based on where they normally revert in a mean reverting crash. Again, what I've been looking at lately, Joel, is I've been looking at the credit markets, especially if you look at some of the junk bond exchange traded funds, those have started to roll over a little bit.I say that because sometimes the credit markets are a little bit better indicator of financial conditions than the stock market. I'd say people who think that the Fed is done raising rates and that inflation's going to come down quickly, are hoping that's the case but the historical evidence is that it's not the case.Joel Bowman: You mentioned real rates, i.e. adjusted for inflation, and we're probably maybe something like 600 basis points behind the curve, as they say, where historically I think it was Volcker who jacked up rates to 600 basis points beyond the curve to get inflation under control when it was at roughly this level 40 years ago.Just sticking with real-world adjusted prices for a little bit, I know you've talked a lot about real wages, for example, and just to get back to your observation then that a rosy outlook necessarily entails increased earnings for corporations, I'm wondering how people who make the peak inflation argument are factoring in higher earnings when people's real, that is to say adjusted-for-inflation earnings, are lower and even going backwards.Dan Denning: No, I don't know. I mean, we both read the same people and we try to keep up. I mean, it's an important thing to keep up with data, evidence and arguments that could indicate that you've missed something or that you're wrong about something. But when you look at credit card debt exploding to its highest levels ever, a number of people taking out new credit cards and then the employment figures they vary from month to month, they're volatile. Are they leading? Are they lagging? Are they even correct?These are surveys. They're not necessarily hyper-accurate accounts of what's going on in the labor market, but if you look at the trends for real wages adjusted for inflation over time, those are easier to understand and they're easier to extrapolate.That compared to what's going on with energy prices, with healthcare costs, with food prices, with the cost of rent, with the cost of existing homes and new homes, those suggest that it's just harder than ever for normal people on a median wage and a middle class salary, even the rarest of things, a home with two wage earners, a mother and father who are both earning income, it's just the cap is getting bigger and bigger.I don't find it credible to think that there's going to be a huge rebound from the consumer in the second half of this year that justifies paying higher prices for stocks right now. Now, you talk about the stock market, we still look at individual companies where the setup is more favorable.I think that's an important point to make is as an asset class, our view on stocks is mostly bearish, but part of our strategy is to own some of them anyway, as part of a diversification approach and to focus on companies that have pricing power, companies that don't have debt, companies who for various reasons that are particular to their industry or to their management seem to be bucking the trend.That doesn't hedge your risk that when you own stocks in the bear market, most stocks go down, but Tom's actually been really... I say, actually. He's been doing it his whole career. He's been pretty good at finding these little pockets of opportunity. For new readers, or I think who would like to be more aggressive, we're simply not going to do that. We're not going to be aggressive on the short side because we're bearish and we're not going to try and surf these rallies and time the market perfectly in and out.I think Tom's going to continue his bottom up balance sheet analysis of companies that have a favorable setup and then trade them. I say trade, I mean, these are not long-term holds. We have one long-term hold, which is our trade of the decade, but the other stuff is not meant to be held for years. It's months or longer, but he'll be clear about all that when he sets them up.Yeah, it's difficult because we all have to do something with our money and it's hard to sit there and watch the market go up and wonder if you've missed something. I think we're on top of the macro trends and nothing has changed in the first half of the year that would cause us to think we're missing the boat on this.Joel Bowman: Right. Well, let's make that transition then for readers who are following along from what you've outlined then as Tom's tactical trades. They're these little pockets of the market where he sees perhaps an asymmetrical risk or favorable winds blowing, given a particular set of circumstances, but over the longer timeframe, which is to say the remainder of the decade, we've set up the /trade of the decade' as Bill has called it.This is essentially long conventional energy sources and there's a particular play on that for our readers. Do you want to set the backdrop there and maybe just talk about the slight correction in oil prices that has manifested over the past couple of months. Where we are with that?Dan Denning: Yeah, sure. I mean, that's an important one because if you want to do something, that's the simplest one to do. I would encourage people to read that report, which we'll probably update before the end of the year, because when we put it out at the beginning of the year, it was really based on two or three important ideas, none of which have changed. In fact that they've all gotten stronger and to extent that data has come out since then, I think it's confirmed what we said.The first one was just purely driven by the price action in the energy sector over the last 10 years. Anyone who's familiar with the idea of the Dogs of the Dow, that if you buy the worst performing Dow stocks from the last year and they tend to be not always the best performing, but they rally, or you can buy the best performing stocks from the previous year.The momentum investors would tell you to buy the best performing stocks from last year because they're probably going to be the best performing stocks this year. Contrarian Dogs of the Dow approach is to look for stuff that's done so poorly that it can't get much worse. When it gets worse in the Dow, they just kick you out of the Dow anyway. That's actually what happened with ExxonMobil.When we were looking, we looked at both the size of the S&P energy sector as a percentage of the entire S&P 500 and the performance of that sector relative to things like financial stocks and tech stocks, especially, and it couldn't have gotten any worse. Well, I mean, I suppose it could have gotten worse, but worse would've been the death of the coal industry and the death of the oil industry, which funnily enough, some people were calling for at the end of last year.They were saying, "That's it. Oil's never going to reach a hundred bucks again and it's uninvestable." I think Jim Cramer at one point said oil stocks are uninvestable.Joel Bowman: That's a great contrarian indicator for you right there.Dan Denning: Yeah. The magazine covers as well. The Economist had a lump of coal in a bell jar saying... I don't remember what it said, something like the end of coal. But those are cultural indicators of what's going on with liquidity and asset allocation and investor sentiment. It was underinvested in from that point of view, but that was the first point that it was bound for a rebound over the next 10 years, compared to the previous 10 years.The second point was because of regulatory action, which was mostly hostile to fossil fuels that the oil and gas company majors especially had dramatically reduced their capital investment in exploration and in production so that if demand recovered from the pandemic drawdown, which you would expect it would recover at some point, then the industry was not in a position to rapidly increase oil and gas supply to keep up with recovery demand.Our idea there was that demand would grow. It would resume, and it did quickly. You had the added complicating factor of the war in Ukraine with Russia and how disruptive that has been to energy supplies. That's a big story, which we probably can't get into here, but the idea that energy is being de-globalized or it's being politicized in a way that it hadn't before.The basic argument was just supply and demand, that the case that fossil fuels were dead was overmade, and that even if you believed that we were moving to renewables in this energy transition, it would be probably decades, not years and certainly not months and it wouldn't be seamless. That was a favorable setup.The third, which is probably a little more controversial is the very idea that we're moving seamlessly to an energy transition where the internal combustion engine will be replaced by electric cars and wind, solar and renewables, hydro, will all eventually replace coal and gas and we won't need nuclear is a pipe dream. It's a thermodynamic pipe dream and we're already seeing that.We didn't expect this at the time, but I saw this morning that Germany has two months of natural gas reserves, thanks to its dispute with Russia. That's a country and an economy that set themselves up as if they would always be able to get cheap fossil fuels, but switch miraculously to renewables. You and Byron King have had a lot of really productive discussions on why that's not true and what will happen if you make policy based on those assumptions.On the investment side, our conclusion was that for those three reasons, the underperformance in the previous 10 years, the underinvestment in the capital required to increase supply and the overemphasis on the energy transition and the idea that everything would be green and electrified, that over the next 10 years it would be hard to find a sector that's going to do better than oil and gas. That you can probably ignore the short-term price fluctuations.We get that a lot from new readers saying, "I didn't get into the trade when you made it. Is it too late?" What we say is we'll revisit it from time to time to look at when is an attractive time to enter the trade, and that means there's going to be drawdown. We were up by over 130% at one point, and then it came down, then it goes back up. The whole idea... Bill's idea of a trade of a decade was you just didn't have to pay attention to any of that over 10 years.Find yourself an attractive entry point to the trade, put as much money in as you're comfortable losing, and then forget about it. Don't agonize. If you can't sleep because you've made an investment that's supposed to work over 10 years, then probably it might not be the right investment for you. We'll update that report. I think those three points are still in our favor, and if anything, I think the decline in the oil price has been overdone.That's an interesting issue, which I'll get into in a weekly update in the next couple of weeks, but I wouldn't worry too much about the price action in the oil market.Joel Bowman: I should mention there that we recently unlocked a transcript that we recorded back in late December of 2021 with Bill's longtime friends, Rick Rule and Byron King. We had a really great discussion. This was when we were just getting going with Bonner Private Research and they were generous enough to give us their insights on what was happening in the energy markets.Of course, nobody could have foreseen the events in Eastern Europe unfolding as they did, but that served really just to exacerbate the situation that they had seen there. You can go onto bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com and check out that unlocked transcript. I'll put a link in the notes below this show, but Dan, we're almost out of time here, mate. I've just got one little black swan type question.A few of our readers have written in asking possibly off the back of one of Tom's observation, he's been writing a little bit lately about the slowdown in China and the bursting property market there. I think he noted that the Wall Street Journal had called the Chinese property market the single biggest asset class by value on the planet and that's something in the order of $53 trillion or some absolutely mind-boggling number there.Given what's happening over there in China, are you at all worried about being dragged into a global recession? What that knock-on might look like with regards to oil prices? How does that impact the thesis? I know it's kind of a big question to end on, but...Dan Denning: No. It's a great question. I mean, those are the things we're paid to think about and try to figure out ahead of time. I think it sort of graduates in scope. If you want to start with the oil markets, if China's in a recession or if they're locking down cities or if the property market collapses, or if there's disruption in their property market that causes slower economic growth, then that's going to impact their demand on oil.They've also shut down a bunch of factories in different places, so I think it has impacted oil demand, which has shown up in the oil price, which was something frankly I had neglected to pay attention to because you just talk about the global oil market and you forget that there are some components of it that drive the price more than others. That I think is something worth keeping an eye on.I think the two other... To be concise, there are probably two other things we'd look at. One is the financial stability in China and how that plays into whether China has an alternative to the dollar or the truth is China's capital market is still mostly closed to the rest of the world so they could have a property collapse and their banks could collapse, but the government would absorb those losses or they'd transfer them to someone else in the system.That doesn't mean it wouldn't have a domestic impact. When people have money that they think is in a bank account and it turns out that it's in an investment product and they can't get that money, then that makes people upset. We see some of those stories, probably not as much as we should, but I think that's also a cautionary tale for investors in the West and the United States is that money in the bank. Yeah, I mean, it's FDIC insured so I don't want to suggest that it could be seized like that, but that's what can happen.China's capital markets aren't ready for prime time. It's not going to replace the dollar or the U.S. bond market anytime soon, but I think the highest level about instability in China economically is how it plays into their strategy with regard to Taiwan and challenging the United States militarily.We didn't talk about those things because basically from when China entered the World Trade Organization in 2000, until the beginning of the pandemic, there was what we called the symbiotic relationship between China and the United States where China exported goods to the U.S., generated huge trade surpluses, which it reinvested in its own economy to build its infrastructure to re-migrate about 500 million people from the countryside to the cities. That's done. It's not entirely done.In fact, it may have been overdone in terms of the amount of investment they made in real estate to resettle those people. But if you have an economy where voters... Well, they don't really vote, but if you've got people that are unhappy because they're not sure their money is safe anymore, and you've got a conflict with Taiwan, and you're trying to decide whether the Russian war and Ukraine gives you an opportunity to conduct a military operation that the U.S. might not be able to resist, those are all things that... They're not black swans, because we can talk about them.A black swan would be something we just didn't even think about and weren't prepared for. We know that there's a possibility for military conflict in East Asia. We don't know if it'll be the North Koreans. We don't know if it would be the Chinese. We have no idea if China would suddenly say, "You know what? We're not worried about our economic situation anymore. We're going for territorial acquisition maybe as a way to distract our people from our crashing economy."As you said, China's property market is something like 300% of GDP. It's a massive sector which has suffered from massive inflation. It's one of those you have to keep your eye on because when you take your eye off it, that's when it's most likely to blindside you literally because we're all paying attention to semantic debates over what a recession is or over where interest rates will top out.In the meantime, you've got this giant lumbering economy that may be in crisis mode, and they're making noises about a conflict. Yeah, it's an excellent question and we'll be covering it more for the rest of the year, for sure.Joel Bowman: Excellent. All right. Well, just on the subject of recession, obviously, Dan, the correct definition is a recession is that it's only a recession if it comes from the recession province in France, otherwise it's just a sparkling economic gut punch. Mate, your readers, our readers, Bonner Private Research readers are going to be able to catch all of your weekly updates every Friday.Tom writes to our readers every Wednesday, so please be on the lookout, members, for those twice weekly updates. Again, as I said, it's bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com. Check out the dollar report, the strategy report, trade of the decade report and all the transcripts that we post from our special private summits, the latest of which Bill convened a round table to ask our panel, nine guests, two very simple questions, that is to say, what is going on in the markets and what are you doing with your personal money?We had a bunch of newsletter veterans, many of whom our readers would recognize. Alex Green, Porter Stansberry, Doug Casey, Byron, yourself, Tom, Rick Rule, and others besides. I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Jim Rickards.Anyway, it was a really all-star lineup. Obviously not everyone agreed because we had nine different people looking at different sectors of the market and trying to keep their eyes on this huge, complex global setup. Anyway, lots and lots of really interesting thoughts there. Again, head over to the Substack page where readers will be able to check that out. In the meantime, Dan, keep safe up there in Laramie, mate, and we'll catch up again very shortly. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

Gold, Bitcoin and The Fed Featuring Precious Metals Authority Rich Checkan Unlock Your Wealth Starring Heather Wagenhals On today's episode, Rich Checkan of Asset Strategies International returns for Season 17 to discuss the state of the the Fed, how Bitcoin is rebounding -- and what steps to take to inflation-proof our portfolios. You'll Learn: The FED's inflation challenge The Fed's rate increases and their anticipated pivot How gold IS actually doing its job in this environment The price of gold compared to all other assets despite the strong dollar Why it is the best performing asset this millennium (since 1/1/2000) Rich's upcoming webinar: Co-host is Adrian Day of Adrian Day Asset Management Guest is Tom Dyson of Bonner Private Research Dedicated UYW Link to Register… UnlockYourWealth.com/Q322webinar And so much more! ---   If you are experiencing financial challenges this year, DM Heather in IG or FB @unlockyourwealth for a complimentary discovery session to explore a new path for you financially. ---   Remember to bookmark this show and share it in your stories, feed, or timeline on social media. The late Jim Rohn said you are an average of the top 5 people you hang around with so help them achieve financial freedom along with you! DM Heather on IG/FB @UnlockYourWealth to claim your free Affordability checklist to assess your finances and create your plan for homeownership/real estate investment.     --- Pay off your mortgage, become debt free and have cash to invest with this simple strategy. Click here for the complimentary eBook. UnlockMyWealth.com --- Grab Heather's 9-page Financial Fire Escape Plan Checklist© for free by visiting CrackingYourMoneyCode.com   Learn More with Resource Links: Rich Checkan's Webiste: AssetStrategies.com Check out our resources and past shows at our Facebook fan page at https://www.facebook.com/UnlockYourWealthTV/   You can DM the show and directly ask questions!   Also Check Out:   MoneyCreditAndYou.com UnlockYourWealth.com FreedomFest.com Jim Woods Links: JimWoodsInvesting.com Bullseye Stock Trader Eagle Eye Opener Fast Money Alert WayOfTheRenaissanceMan.com

In this week's Fatal Conceits Podcast we are joined by Bonner Private Research's own macro man, Dan Denning... When we last touched base with Dan, back in late March, markets were enjoying (what hindsight now reveals was) something of a bear market bounce off their mid-month lows. But Dan was not convinced. He warned that “The Generals” (mega-cap S&P 500 stocks) were poised to beat a disorderly retreat… dragging the broader markets lower as investors “re-evaluated and repriced the future.”Fast-forward to this week and we see the Dow down 9%… the S&P off 13%… and the Nasdaq lower by almost 20%… just since that powwow. No surprise then that we were keen to get Dan's insights on the state of play today… from Mr. Powell's reappointment at the Fed to the greenback's relative strength against foreign fiat currencies over the past month… to his outlook on gold and the Bonner Private Research asset allocation strategy in general. We've got all that and more to get to today, in Episode #65 of your Fatal Conceits Podcast. Please enjoy…Cheers,Joel BowmanP.S. If you're not already receiving all of Dan's premium research - including his weekly Friday market notes, plus research reports like the BPR Asset Allocation Strategy and the upcoming Dollar Report - make sure you get access to it all here. Good for what ails ya.Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fatal Conceits Podcast - A show about money, markets mobs and manias. This one is public, so please feel free to share it, with market leaders and followers alike…TRANSCRIPT: Joel Bowman:Welcome to the Fatal Conceits Podcast, dear listeners, a show about money markets, mobs, and manias... not necessarily in that order. My name is Joel Bowman. I'm coming to you from the literal and geographical end of the world down here in Argentina. If this is your first time listening, please head over to our Substack page. That's at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com where you can check out 100s of articles on everything from high finance to lowly politics, and also plenty of research reports and market notes many of which are penned by my guest today, Mr. Dan Denning. Dan, welcome from the high plains of Laramie. How are you doing?Dan Denning:Good. Thank you. It's nice to see you again.Joel Bowman:Well, I don't know if you know this, Dan, but just in preparation for our discussion today, the last time that you and I recorded a conversation for this show was at the very end of March, which now in retrospect looks a bit like a bear market trap for those of us who are following the money off the March lows. And I just went back and did the math since our last recorded discussion. The Dow is down 9%. The S&P is down 13%. The Nasdaq, almost 20%. And during that conversation, you were warning that "the generals" may be beating a disorderly retreat. That turns out to have been a very prescient call. What did you know then that others were not predicting... And where do we lay now?Dan Denning:Yeah. I remember that conversation. And I guess to be fair-minded, I probably didn't say anything different then than I haven't been saying for the last three to five years. So, I don't want to be one of those guys that say, See, I told you so, and people say, Yeah, but it's the whole stop clock thing. But I would say that the overall thesis for Bill and I, and Tom Dyson had bought in Bonner Private Research and it has been now for well for a while, is that if you looked at all the traditional metrics for valuation in the stock market, not at the company level, but at the market level, they all were historically massively overvalued.So, the price of sales ratio on the S&P500 was over three. The market cap to GDP ratio for US stocks was over, it may have been over 200 at one point on the Nasdaq, but it was certainly well over the historic average of 80 and was closer to 150. And on an earning basis, too, if you looked at Robert Schiller's specifically adjusted price, earnings ratio, stocks were expensive.And then, there were other indicators that we used and have used over the years like margin debt, that show that when liquidity is available and interest rates are low, stock prices are very high and risk or growth assets become, as they say on Wall Street, elevated. So, we've been saying that for a long time and they just kept going up. So, that didn't make them less risky though.So, I think what happened and what's happened since you and I last talked is, one, there's been a discussion of higher interest rates, which definitely affects the pricing of growth assets, but more broadly, people have been thinking about the future and saying, "Well, maybe the next 10 years are not going to be as great as the last 10." And that shift in sentiment has been coupled with changes in liquidity.And that's probably the big thing for investors to realize is that when liquidity starts to thin out or dry up in financial markets, then it generally means lower prices for everything. And that means not just growth stocks, but most stocks and also government bonds, and also, to some degree, gold. Oil seems to be the exception, which we can talk about later if you want. But yeah, I think at the top end, the generals were the best performing highest flying growth stocks of the last 10 years.Especially since, you could go all the way back to 2009, but really since March of 2020 when the S&P doubled and the fed got extremely accommodative. We said, those stocks, and by those generals, I mean Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook had already fallen, Meta. Netflix had already fallen. Peloton. These other outlier stocks. They weren't very large, but they were the most overvalued.So, we think there's still more to go, but it doesn't go in a straight line, and our central bankers aren't powerless, so it's going to be an interesting summer for sure.Joel Bowman:Well, let's talk about our dear leaders in the central bank, Dan. Mr. Powell has been recently reappointed as fed head in chief. Is this just exercise in that old definition of insanity, just repeating the same thing and expecting a different result, or is there something more sinister at work here? It's a little bit of a toss-up it seems between some manufactured breakdown in the old monetary system if you want to get conspiratorial.Or is these just people who really down to their core belief that what they're doing is competent handling of the economy and that they can turn dials and pull levers and get it going in the way that they think that they can?Dan Denning:Yeah. It's funny you ask that question because I was just reviewing Tom Dyson's weekly update, which he publishes on Wednesdays. And he sends his draft to me and I just give him my reaction and some thoughts and observations. And it reminds me of an old, when I used to go to the barbershop in Estes Park, Colorado, it was run by an old friend, family friend. And I got to know him over many years, because I first went there when I was like five, and I kept going all the way through my adult life until he passed away. But he was a member of the John Birch Society. He carried a copy of the constitution in his front pocket, and we always talked about politics.And the one point I always made with him, which wasn't original to me was, it's hard to imagine a conspiracy of 3000 people being effective and efficient when it comes from the same organization that can't deliver the mail. How's the government capable of masterminding or faking a moon landing or doing this or that, or killing Kennedy, and at the same time, they're just ruthlessly incompetent at other stuff?But with respect to monetary policy, I think there's three different constituencies that Federal Reserve works for. One is political. One is financial, and one is institutional. So, if you look at all three, the institutional constituency are the 400 PhDs or economists that have only ever worked for the fed and whose livelihoods depend on providing research that justifies the government's policies or the central bank's policies.So, in this case, I think there's a group of people that actually believe they know what they're doing and that it's their job to provide the intellectual justification for zero interest rate policy for quantitative easing or for the latest moniker, which is the reverse wealth effect that if we engineer stock prices lower in a controlled, organized demolition, then people will feel less wealthy and that will moderate inflation. Sounds absurd.And I haven't read a lot of the research that purportedly justifies that policy. But I think in that case, they probably genuinely believe that lower stock prices will in some indirect way lower inflation in the United States, which is course, one of the mandates of the Federal Reserve is price stability. They're wrong. And probably, they're not stupid people but they just have existed in a bubble for a long time.They're completely divorced from the real world and they have no idea as Jim Cramer famously said in 2009 in his meltdown on CNBC, "They have no idea. These people have no idea." So, that's the one constituency.Joel Bowman:Quotable moment.Dan Denning:It was one of the great moments of all time.Joel Bowman:Teachable moment.Dan Denning:Actually, that's the second constituency, is the Fed's second constituency is the financial markets. It's bankers. Remember, it's a private institution that was given the license by Congress or the authority by Congress to manage the nation's money, and it's run and owned by banks. So, to that extent, their job is to run, manage the dollar, and manage financial markets so that banks don't blow up. And we could talk all day about what's been going on in the last 10 years.But that's part of what Powell's doing is saying, Look, unless there's a huge problem in the credit markets where a hedge fund blows up or a systemically important bank is in trouble because of assets that it holds, then we don't mind lower stock prices and high inflation because we don't work for the American people. We don't care about inflation. We work for the bankers. So, that's the second constituency. So, the second is Wall Street.The third is Washington DC. It's the elected officials. And I think that was interesting this week that President Biden in one of his press conferences mentioned that it was the fed's job to control inflation, and inflation makes all of the people running for reelection in Washington very nervous right now. Because in the real world where people are paying $4. 50 a gallon for gas, and that's just the national average. It's higher in California and other places.And where their food costs are going up, and where rent is expensive, and where the 30-year mortgage rate is now back over 5%, and house prices look like they've peaked. And a pocketbook issue is traditionally a much more motivating force for voter turnout than a social issue or even a foreign conflict.So, I think the political constituency that the fed serves endorsed J Powell overwhelmingly and said, "Please stay in charge because what we want you to do is we want you to hold interest rates below the rate of inflation so that we can continue to run these massive deficits without a real penalty on the dollar or without a sell-off in the US bond market."So, Powell answers to those people in the sense that the Fed is the central bank of the United States government, and the United States government has $30 trillion in debt, is supporting a war overseas, and everything but a declaration. And now realizes that from a demographic point of view, they're going to have to spend trillions more in the coming years on an older population that hasn't gotten back to work and that has learned to expect money from the federal government.So, that's a long-winded answer of saying, he serves three masters. He serves Wall Street, he serves Washington, and to a lesser extent, serves the people who have drunk the Kool-Aid at the fed and believe that you can turn the dials and pump the levers and manage the economy like a machine. And it's a giant mess for all of us, unfortunately.Joel Bowman:Well, just on that giant mess, anecdotally, and I know this is not a hard science measurement here, but I've been reading a lot of old essays from back in the '70s, Joan Didion, and just re-steeping myself in the zeitgeist of the '70s, which seems to be enjoying some dubious recrudescence right now, much to the chagrin of voters around America, many of whom don't want to relive those days, which we can get to in a little bit…But I'm wondering, just what appetite, maximum appetite, your average voter, who is suffering at the pump, at the grocery store, how much more can those people can be squeezed. How much more do you think the American people can take before they vote the bums out as they're constantly promising to do, but there never seems to be a shortage of bums in Washington on either side of the aisle, but before we see this massive revolt to the other side?Dan Denning:Yeah. I think it's a good question. If you look back, and also, I don't think it's so much that people are wondering if they can stand an era that's a lot like the 1970s because a lot of people just don't remember that. There's a whole generation of investors for sure that haven't lived in a period where interest rates rose, the dollar fell, golden oil rose at the same time, and there was persistent inflation in consumer prices. So, for a lot of Americans, this is an entirely new experience.And it connects in a visceral way that it's not inflation as an economic concept. It's a quality of life and a cost of living concept that my buck doesn't go as far as it used to. And therefore, my kids aren't eating as well, or we're not eating as often, or we're having to change our behavior because of things we don't entirely understand. So, that will translate into some political dissatisfaction, which I'll go through this really quick because I think it's interesting and it's also my job to think these things through.And ultimately, I don't think it'll matter, but what will happen is unless abortion becomes a massive issue in the midterm elections because of the Supreme Court ruling. And unless there's an escalation in the war in Ukraine, and unless China suddenly relaxes its lockdowns in these vaunted supply chain issues resolve themselves and you see lower inflation, then you should see a change in the control of both houses of Congress in November.So, the Republicans will take the Senate and they'll take the house, but you'll have a democratic president. So, you'll have two more years of Biden. So, typically that would immediately mean a lame duck presidency that you wouldn't expect to see any major legislative initiatives in that time. But then, you also see historically this brinksmanship between both parties about who's willing to do the least before the next presidential election so they can blame the other party for not doing anything?So, do they want to run the economy into a ditch and say, "Look what happened, the Republicans took over Congress and we had a recession, which it looks like we will have this year." So, those are all interesting speculations. And you can go back and look at the presidential cycles and the history of the stock market. And there's some interesting data which doesn't really yield any conclusive results.But I would say that's the main point for individual investors is going to the voting booth in November is not going to solve the problem with the dollar because whoever's in control, whether there's an R at the end of their name or a D at the end of their name, there's almost no willingness by anyone in Washington to be realistic about the fiscal mismanagement of the country and the long-term problem they've created with the value of the dollar.I'm working on a report right now for paid subscribers that we're just calling the dollar report, which says, "Well, where do we go from here?" The dollar's been actually quite strong against other paper currencies this year. Gold has held its own more or less. Okay, the Russian roubles done very well, which is in a whole another story. But we're trying to focus on the long-term, big picture of where we're at historically, and historically to bring it back to the '70s.This is the end of what we think monetary regime that began in the 1970s, which is a global dollar standard backed by nothing. People expected the United States government to be a good custodian of the value of the dollar. And therefore, people were willing to hold it as a central bank asset, or as a reserve, as an emergency safe-haven money for a crisis. Now we have a crisis and we learn that the US government is happy to tell people that money is no good.And they've told that to foreigners and especially the Russians. And we think that, that money is no good for anyone. But the trouble is, this is just a classic asset allocation problem. You'd rather own cash in a liquidity crisis, but when there's 8.5 % inflation and the central bank is willing to actively destabilize or devalue the currency, then cash is a difficult position to hold long term. So, that's a big problem that we're working on right now.But I think like you said, it's a once in a generation problem. And what we want people to realize is that problem is now. You need to be thinking about that stuff now.Joel Bowman:And it really is. This is a once in a half century problem. We're talking about the beginning of the '70s, and there are obviously so many transpositions that you could make, whether a change or at least a shock to the global monetary system as we saw with Bretton Woods and arguably are seeing some potential bifurcation of the international monetary system at present with banning the Russians from SWIFT, and there being all geopolitical murmurings between China, India, Russia. There's a whole lot on the table there that might go beyond the purview of this particular discussion.But what do you make of, and you alluded to this in your remarks, what do you make of the fact that the dollar, the greenback has over, probably since we've last spoken, certainly over the last month, has performed extremely well against not only paper currencies, foreign paper currencies, but in particular foreign paper, commodity backed currencies?I'm just planning a trip at the moment with my family where we're going to be in the eurozone. So, I'm looking at the exchange rates of Norwegian kroners, and euros, and British pounds, which have all, historically, performed pretty well against the US dollar. And I'm happy to report that my holiday is getting cheaper every week as the US dollar seems to hold up very well against those currencies.So, how do we make sense of that seeming disconnect? How do you purposefully inflate a currency away or devalue it, let's say by 8.5% a year, and still have it stack up strongly against these other fiat promissory notes?Dan Denning:Yeah, that's a great question. And because it seems counterintuitive when people look at it and say, "How could the dollar be getting stronger when all these horrible things are going at the ground level?" So, I think there are two answers. The first and obvious answer is interest rates or expectations for interest rates differential in those expectations. And that's a little bit, curious as well because the market, the future's market thinks that based on what the fed has said from its meeting notes and its public statements, that it will raise its benchmark interest rate to 2.5%, 3% by the end of the year.It hasn't done anything yet. It hasn't reduced the balance sheet. It hasn't begun running it off. It's just said that it's intending to combat inflation, and therefore monetary policy will be tighter and interest rates will be higher. So, that's part of the move in the currency markets is anticipating that there's going to be a yield on the dollar again and on a relative basis, it's more attractive.I guess there's three elements, but the second is less interesting to me because I don't think it's true, but it's a safe-haven bid that when people don't quite know what's going on. They run home to mama and the dollar is still mama for now. So, there's that element of behavior. I think the other, which probably is the most interesting and to me the most explanatory and predictive is it's a liquidity issue.So, one of the things people can look at if they haven't had a chance to is go back and look at this theory by a former federal bank, a Federal Reserve governor named John Exter called Exter's Pyramid. I like it because I'm a visual learner, and it reduces financial markets and asset class decisions to a triangle. It's an inverted triangle. And the idea is just liquidity pyramid is it's at the top end of the liquidity pyramid and financial markets.You have very large asset classes in terms of their nominal size but they're far removed from real value. So, their value is based on lots of variables. So, for example, in today's markets at the top of his pyramid would be the derivatives markets, interest rate, derivatives, currency, derivatives, those things. So, there's a huge liquid market in financial transactions, but the underlying value of those securities or instruments is related to something else that's far away.So, we saw that, for example, back in 2007 and '08 with the residential mortgage-backed securities, and that whole bundling of mortgages was an example of a derivative.Joel Bowman:It seems to be a good shape when talking about this.Dan Denning:It's a pyramid scheme. So, as you move down the pyramid, the type of asset becomes harder, maybe a little bit more liquid but it's smaller in size. So, you would get corporate, the corporate bond market, the government bond market, the equity market. And at the narrow end of the pyramid, you get cash, which actually in terms of the amount of cash that physically exists and circulates a small relative to the size of bank accounts and savings. And then, at the bottom of his pyramid, which is the whole point I'm going through all this is gold.So, it's the least liquid. It has the least utility in terms of its economic use, but it's the most stable and it's the hardest asset. Now, other people might claim that today, if you were redoing that pyramid, you'd have to add digital assets in there somewhere. But in terms of size, they're very small. They were 1.5 trillion or maybe 3 trillion at the peak. Maybe they're half that now. So, they're interesting but I wouldn't say material to this discussion unless we were going to just talk about money.So, the whole point is that in a liquidity crisis. So, we started with valuation crisis where valuations got reset from very high to somewhat more realistic. But the whole context of the thing is that as interest rates go up, the availability of credit and cash goes down, liquidity drains from the entire pyramid and money moves from the top to the bottom, and it gets destroyed at the top and it finds safety at the bottom. It doesn't mean it goes up.Like for example, gold and dollar terms is not going up right now, but my view is that gold isn't going anywhere. It's the dollar that's moving relative to gold. So, I think that the dollars apparent strength is only apparent if you understand it in that context, that there's a liquidity preference for US dollars for lots of reasons. And compared to other currencies on an interest rate basis, it looks like it might be more attractive, but we're not focused on any of that in the long term.We're trying to focus on how people can de-hedge or hedge their dollar risk, because I think ultimately anyway, that what you said is what's going on is that our financial authorities realize that one of two things has to happen. They can either allow inflation to go out of control to deflate the value of all this government debt and they have to pay a political price with high consumer price inflation, or they can allow the bond market to collapse. So, it's either the currency or the bond market.And our view is that it's probably going to be the currency. And so, for people who save in that currency, who invest in that currency, who are going to retire in that currency, then that becomes the number one issue to try and solve. So, that's why we're working right now on the dollar report, which is a big job, but that's our understanding.Joel Bowman:A big undertaking. Yeah. So, you mentioned gold there. And of course, in addition to the dollar report, which you're working on, Tom has his Dow-Gold report up on our Substack, which again, if you haven't visited is bonnnerprivateresearch.substack.com. So, head on over there for all the research that Dan's underscoring here. A lot of people have thought that in times of great uncertainty, and it would be difficult to imagine, I guess, a time of more uncertainty coming out of a global pandemic and in particular, various governmental responses to that pandemic.And now we have the threat, maybe again, a once in a generation threat where people are talking about nukes and something that may have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. It's hard to imagine more uncertainty. Most people think that when that happens, okay, there may be a flight to mama dollar as you've described, or many people think daddy gold is the other parental safety instrument.Obviously, as we speak here, gold has underperformed relative to the dollar in the past month or two. Are you looking for there to be some point at which dollars start cycling into gold as the safe-haven asset?Dan Denning:Yeah, I think so. I think that discussion is whether investors, a lot of investors, including retail investors will again see gold as an investment rather than as a method of saving or a vehicle of saving or capital preservation. Obviously, that has and does happen in precious metals bull markets is that the price action in the underlying commodity, gold or silver in this case, attracts retail investors who then bid up prices of mining stocks and you see the cash for gold phenomena on TV, where people are encouraged to bring in their grandmother's jewelry and trade it in for cash. Excuse me.I think there's an interesting analog with this, with what's happened in the crypto space, which I am not an expert on and I should qualify my statement, but I have noticed that there are two types of people that I've noticed. There's the people who expect to get rich in crypto by buying low and selling high. So, they were never really enthusiasts or even understood or cared about the idea that this was different money or a different saving or a different asset.They just wanted to get rich in dollar terms so they could buy Lamborghini or a new house or leverage a house, any of that stuff. So, this was just a speculative vehicle for them.Joel Bowman:When it was going out, they wanted to get on board. As simple as that. That's the whole funny thing.Dan Denning:Yeah. And I think that is the case typically in bubbles, which we may get again in mining stocks related to gold and silvers. You'll get a huge attraction of people who are not interested in the monetary discussion. They just want to get rich, or they need to get rich because they're retiring soon or they lost a bunch of money in the stock market. So, that'll be really interesting, and it's a good thing that we have a lot of friends who focus on mining stocks, companies that are currently generating great cash flow. They're returning it to shareholders.And if the price goes higher for gold or silver, they'll do really well. But that's really not our focus at Bonner Private Research right now. So, Tom and I probably have slightly different view on this, but I would say I don't know when I would sell my gold, but I wouldn't really care about the dollar price on a short-term basis. In fact, I don't care about the dollar price. I view it as a form of saving, as a way of getting money out of one type of financial asset and into anotherTom's view is slightly different in the sense that he thinks, and I think history shows that there are these major rotations out of asset classes. So, out of gold and into stocks, into stocks, out of gold. So, that's the whole point of the Dow gold ratio is to save in gold until stocks are cheap. And then, when stocks are cheap, to move out of gold and back into stocks. And I think as an investment strategy, that'll work because it has in the past. So, that's one of the major research reports that we publish.But for me, I think at some level, I don't think the retail investors, I think they disappear in bear markets because they're by definition the marginal investor. They end up getting wiped out because they buy high and they sell low. They didn't have a lot of money, to begin with. The transaction costs eat them up, and the lack of quality information tends to blow them up really quickly as well. And that's what's happening right now.So, that money's not going to be left. It's not going to be around to drive precious metals prices higher. So, that's not the reason for owning gold bullion. The reason is on a long-term basis, the dollar is being systematically devalued by the central bank. And we think gold, whether coins are bullion is the best store of value during a transition like that. So, there's a couple of different angles on it, but I think that's where we're at right now with it.Joel Bowman:Right. You mentioned energy before, just to flip between the commodity sectors and just by way of segueing into your trade of the decade, which you, Bill, and Tom have concocted, essentially long energy without giving too much away. And I guess the de facto, even though it's not strictly a pair-trade, it would necessarily in some way, I guess be short the dollar just because of the fact that you got out of the dollar and into energy.But do you want to give us a quick update on how that's going and speaking about these cycles you mentioned a chart depicting energy, having recently overtaken tech as a sector in the market, has now just started to outperform as oil has risen and the big tech generals have beat a disorderly retreat.Where are we in that cycle? I know we're only a couple of years into it, but it seems like it's been a roaring trade even at this early read?Dan Denning:Yeah. And I guess I'm obeying the rule of three today or some Trinitarian principle because everything has three aspects to it. But when we first researched that and published it in January of last year, it was really a cyclical argument that said that the energy sector, especially on the S&P500 had underperformed for 10 years, and the technology sector was the best performing sector for 10 years. So, just mean reversion and market cycles would show that was unlikely to be the case for the next 10 years.So, if you drilled down to it into a little bit deeper, you saw there was other evidence of that. One example was that I think in the early '80s, when the oil price peaked or when the oil price was high, energy sector companies, percentage of the S&P market cap were much larger. I don't think they were 30%, but they were somewhere between 13 and 23 if I recall correctly. But the point was, they were a bigger part of the real economy and they were a bigger part of the stock market because oil was a bigger part of the world.A lot changed over the next 30 years. So, by the end of 2020, tech companies, I think there were just five of them that made up 25% of the market cap of the S&P500. And, of course, at the peak in March, or it was really earlier in January, Apple became a $3 trillion company briefly. You had the race to 2 trillion with Amazon and Microsoft, and then you had, before it fell, you had Meta or Facebook knocking on the door.Just on that basis, we just said, "Wow, energy is way under invested in and technology is way over invested in." And that actually translated into capital investment. And by that, I mean the energy companies after the oil price peaked in 2014 and then crashed for 2011 in that whole period, they were just starved of capital. They didn't invest in new projects. They didn't invest in new supply. And there was a lot of reasons for that.One was, there was a lot of oil. The oil price was going down. The amount of regulation to explore for and bring new oil and gas into production was going up. So, it was discouraged from a political point of view, a regulatory point of view. And then, you had clowns like Larry Fink and Michael Bloomberg who were saying, and even Jim Cramer in 2020 saying, "These things are uninvestable, for moral reasons, for climate reasons, and for economic reasons that we should just stop investing in oil and gas companies."And some public pensions have done that too. They said, "Well, they're not carbon-friendly, so we're not going to give these industries capital." So, all that meant is that these industries, the supply of oil is not growing and the demand for it reached pre-pandemic levels and then went past it. So, look at the oil price right now, despite the prospect of a recession in the United States, and despite a lockdown in China's biggest cities and despite a war from one of the world's largest oil exporters, I say despite, I mean, that contributes to it. Its price action has stood out.So, that confirmed our thesis that this whole idea that the world was going to suddenly run on electric cars and that we weren't going to use oil, gas, and coal anymore was a marketing slogan. It was a political idea. There were other objectives going on. So, there was a lot of reasons that we thought that trade was going to be a good one. The question right now is, as you pointed out, we think that easy money has been made that they were really, really undervalued or mispriced last yearThey're less mispriced than they are now, but we think that because it's a long-term trend, in other words, it's going to take years to reallocate capital to the sector, to go out and find more oil and gas, to build pipelines, to build refineries. We think there's more money to be made. It just means you have to do more research and find out where. So, is it upstream? Is it downstream? Is it pipeline companies? Is it refineries? That's something Tom's been looking at quite closely.And so, we're going to continue to look at it, but the trade itself is really simple and just based on that basis that… and maybe that's probably the broader point is that we think something changed in the last year to where this idea of soft power or growth being the most valuable thing in the market has changed that real assets like coal, oil, gas, and gold. Those are more valuable now. And they're the source of both political power and real earnings for companies. So, that's a change in leadership in the market from the companies that produce real assets are in the ascendant and the companies that produce future revenue growth like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft are in the decline.Joel Bowman:Yeah. And it seems that, that delineation between the real world delivering real assets to real customers with real companies that produce real profits, as opposed to companies with just unimaginable, and as it turns out, very unprofitable growth projections, yield the opportunities that Tom's looking for with his tactical trades, special niche situations in the market, in particular pockets of the market, where people haven't been looking for a little while.And he sent around just an update on the performance of the stocks that are on the watch list. And they're doing handsomely, especially given the fact that the broader market has been more or less bleeding red for the year. So, that's all good stuff.Dan, I'm going to be up in the US in June. We've definitely got to get together, or rather July, actually, I'll be in Europe in June, spending my very powerful green backs while they've still got some staying power. And then, in July in the US. So, we'll have to get together up your way to record another one of these in person if we can.Dan Denning:Yeah, that would be great. And I would just close by saying, I think for us right now, Tom's getting ready to publish his next monthly issue. He does one a month, which is a fuller investigation of where we're at. And we discussed those things. And we think two things, these recent evaluations has further to go. So, things will get cheaper on evaluation basis. But now based on the recent earnings reports of companies like Walmart and Amazon, what people have to factor in is the prospect that companies are just going to be earning less money in a recession. They have higher energy costs. They have higher transportation costs, and they have a consumer who's facing these higher costs at the retail level, who has some disposable income but is spending more money through their credit card. And so, we think there's that factor of has the market priced in a recession. And in that case, when you have deflation in financial assets and a recession at the same time, it does change a little bit your tactical strategy of where the money's going to be made.So, it's a month-to-month thing. We have a long-term focus, but in some ways, it's a really fascinating environment to be trying to connect the dots, which is what we do, and then try to avoid the big loss, which we think we're in the middle of, and then try to get to the other side of the crisis, which we think is a long-term crisis. So, very busy times, but we'll have time for lunch and a bottle of wine, for sure.Joel Bowman:All right, Dan. As you say, we're early on, potentially in this cycle. There's a lot more work to do. So, finally do head over to our Substack. This is my third repetition of this, sticking with your rule of three today, Dan. It's bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com. Check out all of Dan and Tom's excellent research, and of course, Bill Bonner's daily missives. And we hope to see you there, Dan. We'll catch up again soon. Thanks for taking the time, I really appreciate it.Dan Denning:Thanks, Joel.Joel Bowman:Cheers.Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public, so feel free to share it with generals and foot soldiers alike... This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

“I'm not a gold bug. I'm not a gold guy. I don't buy gold out of some philosophical distrust of the system or anything like that. I'm actually an investment guy. I like stocks. I like investments. And I intend to have our savings in the stock market most of the time.” ~ Tom Dyson, Investment Director for Bonner Private Research TRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:Welcome back to the Fatal Conceits Podcast, a podcast about money, markets, manias, messiahs, masochists. We could probably come up with a bunch of other descriptive adjectives for the show, but in any case, we're thrilled today to welcome the Bonner Private Research Investment director, Mr. Tom Dyson, to the show. Tom joins us from the Dyson household in London. Welcome, Tom.Tom Dyson:Thanks, Joel.Joel Bowman:Good to see you again, mate.Tom Dyson:Good to see you, too.Joel Bowman:We've got a lot to talk about today, but I think for your long time readers, they're interested in just catching up on how the family's doing. I know you mentioned that you guys all got COVID recently. We're hoping you're all well and on the mend.Tom Dyson:Yeah, thanks. Yeah, we did. We caught COVID. All five of us tested positive at the same time and it wasn't a big deal, just mild cold symptoms.Joel Bowman:The highly mild variant.Tom Dyson:Yeah, exactly. Exactly.Joel Bowman:All right. Good, good. Well, glad to hear that everyone's on the mend. So mate, before we get into your story and in particular your role as the investment director here at Bonner Private Research and the whole new project that we're undertaking here, I thought maybe we could back up a little bit. And just for who or listeners rather who might be just joining us at the moment, maybe we could start with a little bit of an origin story, if you will. I know you got into investing as quite a young lad. Do you want to just pick up the beginning of your journey and how that all came to fruition at the very beginning?Tom Dyson:Yeah, my dad was a banker and I guess some of it must have rubbed off on me because I was interested in finance as long as I can remember. And one day he spread the Financial Times page of all the stock market quotes in front of me and asked me to choose some stocks. I was 11 years old at the time, and I chose Marks and Spencer and Euro Tunnel. At the time Euro Tunnel was just ... I don't even know if they'd finished construction of it yet. In fact, they hadn't. I have to go back and look, but I had no idea what I was doing.So what happened was within about a year, Euro Tunnel had tripled and I wanted to sell, but by the time I'd written a letter back to my dad asking him to sell, it had lost some of his gains, but I ended up more than doubling with my money. And Marks and Spencer, I held for many years, probably two decades after that and it didn't really do much. It wasn't a good investment and I sold it probably 15 years ago or something. So that really got me, got me started. That's where I started my addiction of checking stock prices all the time. I would grab the Financial Times any time I could and look up the prices of my stocks. And then the internet came along and that addiction just went into overdrive.Joel Bowman:Yeah. The internet's been an enabler for many of folks' addictions, I think. A good old brand would leave that to be desired. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty auspicious start if nothing else. So you went along. Were you working at ... I think it was Salomon Brothers, was it? Or one of the ...Tom Dyson:Yeah, Salomon Brothers had just merged and was called Smith Barney. And then while I was there, it turned into City Group.Joel Bowman:Okay.Tom Dyson:So that was my first job after college, my first serious job. And that was in March 2000, so literally at the peak of the technology bubble.Joel Bowman:Right.Tom Dyson:Actually, the bubble actually crashed the first day while I was on the plane in the air flying back to London to take my position.Joel Bowman:Wow.Tom Dyson:So it was...Joel Bowman:That was a warning sign.Tom Dyson:Yeah. The timing was incredible. Effectively, my entire professional investing career has been a series of bull markets and bear markets.Joel Bowman:Right. Right. All right. Well, mate, let's get into a little bit of that because as, I think you may not protest at the descriptor, something of a contrarian, you didn't take what would be for many the path most traveled. And you have quite a colorful history even from there on out. So when it comes to traveling, and for those who have followed your postcards and your writings over the years, it's not Club Med type traveling. Tom is a pretty extreme traveler going to weird and wonderful places and traveling on trains and all this kind of stuff. So how did your interest in traveling and travel writing and investing converge? And in particular, how did that bring you up to working with Bill, which would've been around, I guess, just a few years after that, maybe early 2000s?Tom Dyson:Yeah, 2003, I think, I wrote to Bill and asked him for a job. I told him I'd quit my job at City Group on the training floor and I'd go and work for him for free. And it didn't quite work out how I imagined, but it did work out in the end. So I was never a writer. In fact, I can admit to you that I failed my English GCSE, which should have been pretty easy. I mean, it's a nationwide exam that anyone with a pulse should really be able to pass. But I was always much more into mathematics, economics, physics. I guess my mind is more comfortable with numbers and equations than it is with words and that kind of thing.So the fact that I'm a writer is still a surprise to me. I never thought that that would've happened, but what happened was I was at Citi Group. I was there for four years and I went to night school to study accounting. And I'd go to professional accounting qualification as well, which I've always loved accounting, but I didn't like working at City Group. I found it stifling and I wasn't doing what I really wanted to do, which was research investments. Instead, I was working in a cubicle. I was working for a trading floor. I was managing spreadsheets and basically I was doing whatever my boss told me to do. And I was commuting every day and I just wasn't inspired by that at all. It wasn't how I had imagined it to be.And another thing I should add is in addition to studying investing, I loved reading books about investing when I was a teenager, I read Liar's Poker. I read Barbarians at the Gate. I read about Michael Milken. I read about the big takeover crazes. I read lots of that sort of literature. And so that really inspired me to go work in the city or on Wall Street, but as I said, it wasn't quite as I had imagined it to be. And so another passion that I've always had are railroads, freight trains specifically, not passenger trains. I'm not that interested in passenger trains, but for freight trains, I'm really interested in. And I have been ever since I was a kid.We used to have a model. I used to build model railways when I was a child. And then anytime we were in the car with my parents and I saw a train, I would always pester them to stop and see if we could see trains coming, et cetera. So I just had this fascination with trains. And I decided instead of working for Citi Group ... and Bill didn't get back to me right away, so I quit my job anyway. And I went to America and started backpacking around and trying to catch rides on freight trains, like a hobo, hobo style. And I'd been inspired by that because the internet and email was quite new at that point, and newsletters were quite new. And I'd been reading Bill's email newsletter, and I decided to write my own email newsletter back to my friends who all had cubicle jobs in London. And to describe to them the series of misfortunes and mishaps that I went through as a young investment banker trying be a hobo.And I had plenty of mishaps to write about, and I just really wanted to entertain my friends and make them laugh. It wasn't to show off or anything else like that. I just really wanted to entertain. And that is where I first started writing and getting interested in writing. And from there, I think, I think Bill and Addison and some of the other people at Agora saw that I was in a way a unique, because I enjoyed writing, but I also had experience with professional finance. And I think it's quite a rare combination. Finance guys are interested in numbers and spreadsheets, and writers, they're interested in poetry and art and literature. And there's a rare crossover there and I was that. So anyway.Joel Bowman:Well, a rare crossover, I guess, that it's not so often that you get a hobo investment banker, so yeah, there's a unique flavor to your approach. And as you were describing this chapter of your journey, then I'm thinking about something else that I know you and I are very interested in, and maybe we'll do a separate podcast about this. But as you're talking about the texts that you were reading and just consuming voraciously as a nature, it's that auto didactic nature that I think when some people, as you mentioned with, with the GSE, they may not gravitate toward traditional learning, but they may have a passion or a flare for something. And if they follow that dream, whether it's on a railway or into investment biker books or Liar's Poker or whatnot, yeah, that can really nurture a lifelong love of something in which you bring a passion and dedication that is often very rewarding.So mate, let's fast forward a little bit to when you were working in Agora for a while, writing some very successful newsletters, the 12% letter and doing a bunch to research with a lot of people whom I think ... probably a lot of our readers and listeners would be very familiar with, a lot of personalities in the investment newsletter industry. You had a bit of a break and then you picked up again ... What would it have been? 2015, 2016 or something when you got together again with Bill, spoke about a dow-gold trade? And this is chapter two, I guess, maybe of your involvement together.Tom Dyson:Much later, actually. More like 2019, actually.Joel Bowman:Okay.Tom Dyson:2019, so not very long ago with, what, 2022 now, so it's three years ago. Yeah. What happened was Kate and I, my wife, and our kids, we went off traveling. I'm sure most people are familiar with the story because I've beaten it to death, but we went off traveling and I had stopped writing. I wrote a newsletter for the best part of 10 years. And then I went more into the publishing world where I started a publishing company and I stopped writing. And I hired analysts to do the writing and I built a publishing business. So I really stopped writing at that point to try something different. And it was after we went traveling that I guess I got the call inside me to start sharing again. And that's when I started writing emails back to my friends, basically.Again, it's the same story. I wanted to entertain people with our stories. And as you alluded to before, we were not staying in five star hotels and going to theme parks. That to me is not interesting, and I wouldn't want to read that. I just don't want to read that. I want to read people who do things different or funny or shocking. I want to be entertained as a reader. I always think I really just write stuff that I would like to read if the roles were reversed. I think that's where it comes from. And there's nothing funny about someone going to a five star resort and showing how fortunate they are to be by an infinity pool, or eating a gourmet meal. There's just nothing funny about that at all, so I would never write about that.But the way we did it, we were backpackers staying in really terrible hotels and youth hostels for $4 a night. And that was quite funny, especially how the children reacted to that and how Kate reacted to that. And we were doing our laundry in sinks and hanging them up on anywhere we could find, a corner. And anyway, so I'm rambling, but that's how I got back into writing. And that's also at the time where I hooked up with Bill and Dan and I started doing something more serious.Joel Bowman:Yeah. So I guess that brings us from a personal background to a little bit of where the rubber begins to meet the road, because as I have been reading along with others, your journey along the way, you took what I think most people would consider a pretty big plunge, or at least something that's very entertaining to read. And that's with your dow-gold trade and going all in as it were. I think a lot of people were intrigued by that. It's not a usual orthodox way to go about one's investing life. So maybe catch us up on a little bit of that backstory, and then we'll get into what we're doing now and your role as investment director with Bonner Private Research and what we're looking at going forward.Tom Dyson:Yeah. There's a lot to that. I think people's reactions surprised me because I didn't feel like I was doing something risky or more crazy or wild. To me, gold is really the most boring, the most risk averse thing you could do. It's like doing anything else seems to me like adding risk. So at the time, we were traveling and I think we were in central Africa when I first started withdrawing all the money out of our bank and purchasing gold. I was doing it on the phone ordering in gold in boxes. And yeah, to me, that was ... I guess I looked at the situation. And if you go back to ... and this was in the fall of 2018 at the time, gold, it was much lower than it is today. And the start market, well, that was also lower than it is today.But at the time it was at an all time high and valuations were still really high. And we were in a bull market and I just wanted to be safe. And so part of the reason going to gold was for me like, I'm on sabbatical. I'm sitting on the sidelines.Joel Bowman:Yeah.Tom Dyson:I don't want to think about investing at the moment. I don't want to worry about my savings. I don't want to stress. I want to sleep well at night. I want to have fun with my family. So to me, that's why I went to gold. As I said, I was surprised that people thought it was risky or ill-advised. But to me, that was just the best way I could sleep well at night. It was nothing more than that. So, that's what I thought of it. And if you look back over history, there are times when the stock market does very well. I'm not a gold bug. I'm not a gold guy. I don't buy gold out of some philosophical distrust of the system or anything like that.I'm actually an investment. I like stocks. I like investments. And I intend to have our savings in the stock market most of the time. To me, there is no better way to grow wealth passively, outside of having your own business, as passive investments. There is no better investment than the stock market. I mean, that's just a fact, so that's where my interest lies. I like investing and I aspire to have my savings in the stock market as much as possible. And so…Joel Bowman:It has to do with timing really. What you're saying is that there's times that you want to be in secular bull markets and times where you want to ride it out on the sideline and surround yourself with safety. So for readers who aren't perhaps familiar with this trade, it's essentially you are looking for the ratio to hit five or something loosely around there, where that's a signal to you that it's time to get off the bench as it were and dive back into the opportunity. So gold is to maintain and preserve wealth, but when the time comes and when bargains abound, valuations drop back down from the stratosphere, and you see some opportunities there with the kind of research that you're doing, that's the time that you deploy some of your wealth and have it work for you. Where are we at along that right now, do you think?Tom Dyson:Where we were when I first made the trade, more or less, and we can talk specific numbers. The Dow-Gold Ratio back then was above 20. I think it was more like 21 when I made the trade. And you are right, yeah, I'm effectively betting that the stock market is a bad deal and I'm trying to time it so that the stock market falls and I'm able to get back in when it's a good deal. I'm effectively bargain hunting. So selling out at the top, waiting, hoping the stock market goes down in terms of gold. And then I'm going to buy back in, and then I'm going to wait for another cycle. So yeah, it's effectively bargain hunting. And at the time it took about 21… of gold to buy a unit of the dow. And today, it's a little bit below that. It's, I think off the top of my head, 19 something. And in the meantime, it's been about three years, the dow has fallen drastically against gold, reaching about 13 at the bottom of the Corona meltdown. So it was in March 2020.Joel Bowman:Yeah. Right.Tom Dyson:Yeah. So I was up 30 or 40% on that trade for a second, but then the authorities came in with a load of printed money and stimulus and inflation, and it bounced all the way back. So now we're basically back where we started and we're waiting.Joel Bowman:So this feeds into something that you were writing about in your January issue. And maybe I'll just take a moment to point out to listeners who aren't aware. As the investment director of Bonner Private Research, Tom's paid investment strategies are available in a monthly newsletter format. Tom also does weekly updates with Dan Denning, Dan on Fridays and Tom on Wednesdays. And this is along with a bunch of other private zoom calls with members of Bill's inner network of analysts and thinkers and strategists and real estate investors. We've got a bunch of people that we're going to bring into of these private zoom calls, webinars, anyway, a whole host of other things that are available to paid readers. And I think I'm not being too cheeky in admitting that I think we may have priced this thing wrong because at a couple of bucks a week, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a price hike in the future.I hope I'm not letting a cat out of the bag there, but if readers or listeners are interested in signing up for, I think, probably the best deal going right now when it comes to quality investment research, then the things that Tom, Dan and Bill are doing for our paid readers goes above and beyond. So I'll put a link to that in the transcript, and you'll be able to find it on the website. But Tom, to get back to your January issue, just picking up from where you left off there, you touched on inflation volatility. And this is something that we've obviously seen whip sawing in the past from the low of a Dow-Gold Ratio at 13. They pumped these trillions of dollars into the system and then we see things just going absolutely crazy. You described this in your January issue as inflation volatility, and it's going to be a bumpy road ahead. Do you want to maybe dig into that just a little bit more? And then we might get to what's on your or radar for coming issues.Tom Dyson:Yeah, of course. So again, these are quite complex ideas, but the gist of it is that there hasn't really been my much inflation for a long time. We've been living in a world with very moderate levels of inflation, basically, our entire lives. And to me, I started anticipating or expecting a sea change in 2018 when I finished my sabbatical and started rolling my sleeves up and getting back to work. The thesis that I basically hung my hat on was that inflation was going to make a comeback. And so I'm gratified that I was right. I mean, inflation is now 7% year over year, which is something we haven't seen, I've never seen in my adult life. And Bill's seen it before, but but it's been a long time. So…Joel Bowman:I think 40 years. It's about 40 years since prices were rising at this pace. Tom Dyson:Right, since the seventies.Joel Bowman:Yeah. A whole generation of people who haven't witnessed this before and are just now confronting it and maybe don't know quite what to do about it.Tom Dyson:So, that's very important. That's very important because if ... let's say the the fed and the central government have both found a way to stimulate the economy. And basically any time there has been the suggestion of a recession or any type of crisis, they throw money at it, and the results have always been good. They've always headed off that crisis and got things back up again. And so the question you ask yourself is why can't they always do that forever? And why can't every other country always do that? What's stopping that going on forever? And the answer is inflation. It's the only answer. It's the only thing that prevents them. And for many years there hasn't been inflation and there has been no check on that behavior of bailing out the economy or reinvigorating it with stimulus. So now we have inflation.To me, that changes the whole dynamic of the relationship between the central government and the free market, and between the central bank and the free market, and between the complicated ways that professional investors think about risk and reward. We've got inflation now. It completely changes the game. However, I always wondered if it would simply be a case of no inflation and then inflation and I don't think that's the case. I think inflation ... my gut sense is that it's going to be capricious. It's not just like a light switching on, and now we've got inflation which I imagine a lot of people imagine that's the way it is. Oh, now it's going to be inflation. It's going to be the end of the dollar. The whole world's going to melt down.I don't believe that's the case. I think it's going to be persistent, but capricious inflation, where it goes up and then it tricks you, and then it disappears again. And so that's what I mean by inflation volatility and it's going to keep everyone on their toes that's for sure. And what it does is it prevents you ... If you knew, for example, that it was going to be nonstop inflation of 7% a year, every year for the next 10 years, it'd be quite easy to invest.Joel Bowman:Right.Tom Dyson:You just… Yeah, but because it's not going to be like that, what it means is you can't just position your portfolio in one way and just leave it, and then not have to think about your investments again for 10 years. I don't think that's going to work. I think, unfortunately, we have to have a rotation going on in order to prosper, which is going to be very difficult for the average investor.Joel Bowman:Yeah, for sure. And I'll just piggyback on what you were saying there in that treating inflation as a limiting principle to just infinite monetary stimulus, one only needs to look to ... I'm coming to ... you hear from Bueno Aires, Argentina, which is obviously no stranger to economic catastrophe and rolling decennial crises, usually underpinned by money printing and inflation and all the kinds of usual suspects. So right now we have officially 50% inflation and you would've experienced this, of course, on your travels to various countries. But for readers and listeners who have spent a generation growing up with more or less stable prices, what you have just said about inflation and it being akin to a kind of emergent property where it's constantly in flux, it doesn't increase at the same rate all the time.It's a hugely volatile and unpredictable environment where storekeepers and people who are keeping inventory have to constantly readjust their strategy, even just retting prices on inventory, merchandise, et cetera, et cetera. And for investors, it's a really, really difficult environment to navigate. So let's go to looking a little bit forward. We've got probably some rough rides ahead, as you said, but we've been talking behind the scenes about some contrarian plays. Did you want to mention anything perhaps with regards to where you're looking next and the opportunities that are just popping up on your radar?Tom Dyson:Sure. So the reason I love gold is because by my estimation gold performs well in both, while inflation is high and also when inflation disappears. In fact, gold relatively, I think, will perform when there is deflation and the stock market is under pressure and risk assets are under pressure. I think that's when gold has its best relative out performance, but during times in inflation, gold will do okay also. It'll keep up. And a lot of people have asked, well, gold, hasn't done very well over the last year. And that's in spite of the fed monetizing four trillion dollars of government bonds. So why? And I mean, I think gold anticipated it and has risen quite a lot since 2018. And so I like gold because I think it's like an all weather. It's an all weather asset.That said, the stock market and the investment market, just as you say, this capricious inflation is a nightmare for investors. I think there's another meme out there that in times of inflation, you need to own stocks because stocks are real assets producing cash flow. I disagree with that. I think the evidence shows that that stocks do not like inflation. Stocks like 2% is the sweet spot. If it goes higher or lower, the stock market doesn't like it, it weathers. So I lost my train of thought, where I was going there, but ...Joel Bowman:No. Yeah, I think we were back onto some of the opportunities potentially that you are looking to help readers navigate what, I think probably I would agree, are going to be a pretty volatile…Tom Dyson:It's a nightmare. Yeah. I mean, I could be wrong, but my base case is that we're heading into a nightmare for most investments. And even the uncertainty, investors hate uncertainty. It alters the models, it alters the spreadsheets. So my base case is we're heading into a bear market and generally a nightmare for passive investing. And so the only investments that I'm really willing to write about or even look at are things that have not done well during the bull market years. Joel Bowman:I think you were calling them old economy investments, things that are …Tom Dyson:Right, old economy value stocks.Joel Bowman:Value stocks, that's it.Tom Dyson:And then there's a whole ‘nother thing here. The market at the moment, and since the 2008 crisis, has really put a high premium on future growth. And that's because interest rates have fallen, and because interest rates, especially corporate bond rates have gotten down to sort of 2%, 3%, even junk bonds got below 4% for a little bit last year, which was below the rate of inflation. So effectively real interest rates below zero, effectively debt finance is free for companies. And because of that, obviously, they borrowed tons of it. And then they bought back their shares, which was a completely rational thing to do.Joel Bowman:Yeah.Tom Dyson:But what it meant was their equity holders receive a big payday. A big source of cost for the average corporation was removed. And so equity holders got a bonanza over the last 10 years. In addition to that, the stock market looked into the future at all the future earnings and capitalized them at a much lower discount rate, which basically means that therefore the price must be marked up. And so you've got these two tailwinds that have effectively really caused a huge bull market in growth stocks, in companies that have a long runway of profitability into the future.And at the same time, investors completely shunned companies that do not have that long runway of profitability and growth into the future. And these are companies which basically tend to be old economy, utility type investments, where they don't have growth. They have cashflow. They're profitable, but they don't grow. And so the most simple example of that would be a bond, a corporate bond that pays a coupon of 6% a year. That does not get valued very highly in the market, the fashion for investing over the last 10 years.And so yeah, I'm a contrarian and I think that that inflation is going to reverse that dynamic, reverse those trends, reverse those fashions. It might take a while and so the only thing that I'm interested in investing in other than gold, which I don't really think of as an investment, but more of as ballast or cash, are investments that have been shunned over the last 10 years. And so if I'm wrong, we can't lose much anyway, because they've already been depressed for so long.Joel Bowman:Right.Tom Dyson:But if I'm right and we do get this new sea change, I think that the market may come to value a stable but consistent cashflow with much higher multiples than it has been. And so that's why I've been looking at old economy. Shipping is my favorite as a broad basket, but also raw material producers and steel companies or coal miners or oil tankers or whatever.Joel Bowman:Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Now it seems to make sense that in a world of uncertainty and unpredictability and volatility that steady as she goes, reliable, stable, cashflow producing companies that are at present at least relative to their growth cousins are deeply discounted. So, all right, well, it sounds like there's going to be a lot of opportunities for savvy investors going forward to look into your research. We're recording this at the beginning of the month, so I think we've got about three more weeks until your next monthly issue hits the digital stands. Is that about right?Tom Dyson:Yeah, that's about right, but I'm like ... this new sub stack model, to me, I had in mind that I was going to publish a monthly newsletter like I used to, but I now realize now, we've been doing this for a month now, that the medium, it doesn't necessarily lend itself to having a long eight page month newsletter and then nothing in between. I mean, to me, that's quite analog. That's like the old days where you'd write a long letter and once a month send it out to your subscribers, but now that the… Yeah, through the post. So I don't want to ramble, but I'm not going to lock myself into recommending stuff once a month in a long writeup. So actually every Wednesday now I'm just going to write an investment newsletter and they may or may not have a new idea in them, but yeah…Joel Bowman:Yeah, no, that's a very important point to bring up because for people who've been following along with Bill's new project exactly as you say, Tom, it's a new medium. And it is allowing us a lot more flexibility and to be a lot more nimble in the way that we deliver information and interact with readers. So just yesterday, for example, we tested out a thread on Sub stack, which is essentially we mail out a research note, what you would maybe consider a research note from an investment firm. They identify a particular point of interest, maybe a non-intuitive aberration in the market, or just something that captures the imagination. So Dan Denning shot something out yesterday to our paid readers about gold. And it's storied history in American monetary throughout the 20th century.So we had, yeah, just some huge involvement and engagement from our paid readers who jumped on, had a really great discussion. There were a couple of hundred comments. People were all very respectful and well behaved. So it's just a really, really good forum where people can get in and nut out some ideas, exchanged some information, and there was a lot of really valuable discussion there. So we're going to keep on discovering new tools and new ways that we can present our very best information, including, Tom, your best investment research, Dan's observations, and of course, daily speaking of reliable and stable and just somebody that you can always rely on. Bill is there every single day with all the wit and charm and panache that you've come to expect from his daily messages for the last, goodness, 30, 40 years on the case connecting the dots. So, Tom, I just want to say, mate, thank you very much for checking in, and hopefully we'll be able to do this on a much more regular basis in the future.Tom Dyson:Yeah, absolutely. Please, just let me know. I would love to keep doing these, and I agree with what you said about the Substack. It's quite new to me, but so far, I love the ... It's very comfortable, so a very good way to serve our audience in my opinion.Joel Bowman:Excellent. All right, Tom, mate, thanks very much. And we'll catch up again soon. Cheers.Tom Dyson:Yeah, please. Thanks, Joel. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

“This is now the greatest financial crisis in American history. We don't know how long it'll last, whether it'll be something like the 1930s or whether it will be something more volatile and violent, but let's not be afraid to call it what it is.”~ Dan Denning, Bonner Private ResearchTRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:Welcome back to the Bonner Private Research Podcast. I'm Joel Bowman coming to you from my home office down here in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Now, it is a capital city in the middle of South America, so if you do hear some impatient Argentines honking horns and some construction across the street, you'll just have to chalk that up to a little ambient sound. A special thanks, too, to our new readers and listeners, many of whom are joining us for the first time this Christmas season. By way of a little backstory, I've known Bill Bonner personally for almost 20 years now. And as his long-term readers will know, nothing Bill ever does is uninteresting. I expect this latest adventure to be no exception to that general rule. For those of you who perhaps don't know, it's been a decade or more since Bill, Dan, Tom, and I wrote together for the same publisher back in Baltimore, in and around the mid-2000s.So, in that way, this does feel a little like getting the old band back together. I'd like to say thanks therefore to my once and future colleagues for joining us along the ride. On that note, we'll have some other personalities dropping in along the way, some of whom you may be already familiar with. Folks like Chris Mayer, Rick Rule, Byron King, Verne Gowdie in Australia, Tim Price and Charlie Morris in the UK, Ronan McMahon, wherever we can track him down, and plenty of others besides.As you well know, the world has changed plenty over these past couple of years, not least in the way that we communicate with one another, from Zoom conferences to webinars and podcasts just like this one, we now have more tools than ever to stay connected with you, which is exactly what we're hoping to do with this new venture. It's a small core team to be sure, just the four of us, Bill, Dan, Tom, and myself. So, we'll be freewheeling a bit and ask your patience for any bumps that we may encounter along the ride. "Ready, fire, aim," is our general motto here. To help us explain a bit more of what you can expect from the Bonner Private Research project, I caught up with my co-pilot Dan Denning a little earlier this week. I invite you to stick around for our quick powwow up right after the break.All right. We're talking today to Dan Denning, all the way up in Wyoming in the northern end of the Americas. I'm Joel Bowman. I'm coming to you from down in Buenos Aires in the southern tip down here in Bill's sometimes home of Argentina. Dan, how are you doing today?Dan Denning:I'm all right, Joel. Thanks. Yeah. Laramie's really high plains. It's where the, as you know, where the Great Plains meet the Rockies. And it is super windy here today. That's one of the quality of life issues I ran into when I picked it. So, if I blow away or the roof rips off, that's why.Joel Bowman:We'll just-Dan Denning:But hopefully we'll be okay.Joel Bowman:We'll just continue recording. It'll make for good footage. Mate, so, we've got a little bit of housekeeping to get through today because we've got some new readers and new listeners along for the journey, along with our long-suffering, faithful and unfaithful readers, I guess. So, we'll get to all that in a little bit, but first, I guess, an update on something that you and I have been discussing for a long time, both professionally and just by way of email, and something that you and Bill and Tom have been writing about for the better part of a couple of decades, perhaps even longer, and that is the question on everyone's lips and one which becomes more urgent with every passing month and every passing week, it seems like now, and that is whether or not we are in the greatest financial crisis in American history.Dan Denning:Yeah, that's a good question. And-Joel Bowman:Just to start with a small question.Dan Denning:No, it's a serious one. And it's one that I've already received from new readers who've signed up for Bonner Private Research. And I should say that that's not my phrase, actually. Tom Dyson and I went and visited Bill in Baltimore in late October, and we were trying to be very precise about what we thought was at stake for investors right now. And Bill, who is not prone to hyperbole and is usually fairly reserved about what he claims to know had said, "Well, what we're really talking about is the greatest financial crisis in American history." And one of the reasons he had mentioned that is we had been discussing what happened during the Civil War, which was obviously more than a financial crisis, but there was an aspect to it that was purely financial.And the monetary aspect was Lincoln printing greenbacks in order to pay for the war. So, that was a huge crisis for the country. Then there was another crisis in World War II where the government's debt inflated massively against the size of GDP. And again, there was an existential crisis for the country and it came after the Depression. So, we coupled the Depression and World War II as a second great crisis. And both of those were also historical and demographic. But since our beat here is money, we're always focused on following the money. And typically when the money goes, everything else goes. So, when we were talking about it in Baltimore, Bill said, "Look, the trends are pretty unequivocal." We look at government debt to GDP. We looked at the inflation figures, which have just gotten worse since then.And we look at the length of the current monetary regime, which started in 1971 when the Fed, Richard Nixon, decoupled gold from the dollar. This is now the greatest financial crisis in American history. We don't know how long it'll last, whether it'll be something like the 1930s or whether it will be something more volatile and violent, but let's not be afraid to call it what it is. So, that really focused our minds and energies on, "Well, what can we do now to prepare for that and to help readers get through it unscathed?"Joel Bowman:Right. So, we're now, this year, actually, you mentioned 1971, where exactly half a century into this monetary experiment. And I think people are getting a sense that things are starting to unravel. The kind of things that you and Bill and Tom have been writing about for the past couple of decades are really now coming to the fore. And we're seeing what previously would've been headlines in fringy, alternative news outlets starting to hit the mainstream papers. So, I think people are really starting to wake up to what's going on around them. So, this brings us to, why this new project? Why have we chosen this particular outlet affording us the independence to speak directly to readers? Do you want to speak a little bit to that about Bonner's new project and how we're all involved in that?Dan Denning:Sure. I think when we had our discussion we just thought, "It's a really serious moment for anyone who's retired or at or near retirement age." If you already have a lot of money invested in both the housing market and the stock market, typically we don't like to lose that money. So, for a long time, since Bill and I have been collaborating, especially since the Bonner-Denning Letter started almost five years ago, the main investment goal was not to lose money. And the main investor that we were speaking to was someone who may be doing other things with their money, but also wanted someone who looking at for what the big risks were. And so we wanted to be able to just focus on that message without any interference, not interference, really, but without any distractions, because it's not only a full-time job to try to understand this stuff and then make the right moves with your money, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.We think that this is something that may play out over the next decade or so. So, what we really wanted was a way to talk to and write to readers who are interested in help in that problem, where we could write to them as often as we'd like, where we could sometimes talk to them this way, or they could engage with us on message boards. And also, they could do it in an ad-free environment. This is the only thing we're doing now, and so we can focus on it 100% and they're not going to receive any other ads for anything else, which to some readers that helps them focus on what's going on as well.So, we looked around for a platform. There's a lot of interesting digital platforms where you can express yourself without getting canceled, hopefully, and we thought this was a really good self-publishing platform. A little bit different than what we've worked with in the past. But as Bill mentioned, the world is changing and we thought, "Well, let's change with it and try something to see if it's a better service for the readers that are interested in our message."Joel Bowman:Right. So, you and I have been having conversations much like this for the past, going on maybe a year or so now. And we've touched on a bunch of different topics that seemed to us, at the time, very relevant. We couldn't have known, of course, how relevant they would become. And I'm talking, of course, about all of the trends that have been accelerated during this past year, whether it be with regards to government indebtedness or surveillance, or our ability or rather inability to travel freely, to protect our money against the inflationary whims of central bankers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This medium, us being able to speak directly to our readers, is something that's going to change our relationship with our readers. Do you want to take a look under the hood and maybe explain to readers and listeners now how this is going to be different and maybe a little bit of what exactly they can expect going forward with regards to specifics of subscriptions and such?Dan Denning:Sure. Yeah. That's a good question. And I'll just tell a quick backstory. I first started working with Bill in 1997, but I was in France before I'd moved to France permanently in 2002. I was there in the August and September of 2001. I was there with some other colleagues and we had retreated to Bill's house to try to figure out what was going on in the world. And of course we were all in the Paris office on September 11th, and we didn't see what had happened until later. We heard it on the radio, but the media world was different back then. So, the fortunate thing, which was very small in the context of what was going on, is that we were in the same place and we had a chance to spend some time thinking about what it might mean for a lot of things, not just financial markets, but for the universe of issues that we concern ourselves with: money, history, markets.So, a similar thing happened in late 2019 when Bill and I were in Baltimore and we started hearing about this virus from China and what was going on. And then of course, I ended up shortly thereafter... Tom was with us at that time as well. And then we all spread to the four corners of the earth. Bill got trapped in Argentina. I got trapped in Australia. And I don't know where Tom was at the time. He was somewhere in America on the road or something.Joel Bowman:Might been up in Canada or something. Yeah.Dan Denning:Yeah, yeah. But we started doing things like this. We knew we needed to talk about what was going on. And we were having private conversations about what this meant for investors. So, as you remember, in March of 2020, the S&P 500 fell 35% in 23 days. And since then the rally has been considerable. So, everything that was happening in the world started happening a lot faster. We needed a way to talk about it amongst each other so we could better advise the readers what was going on. So, we started having a lot more private conversations, not only amongst ourselves, but with you and with people we'd known for a long time, like Verne Gowdie down in Australia, Tim Price and Charlie Morris in the UK, and then Rick Rule, Byron King, Chris Mayer, Ronan McMahon. Just people Bill has known and relied on for a long time to help him figure stuff out.And so we thought, we've been doing that really since 2020, and in the last six or eight months we thought, "Well, maybe that's what we should be doing for everyone. Maybe that should be available to all of our colleagues and readers that we've met all over the world all these years past." So, we decided to do it. Now, what it means is it's really not going to change much if you were already an existing reader of the Bonner-Denning Letter or Tom Dyson's Portfolio or Bill's Diary, except you're going to get all that work in one place now, instead of having to subscribe to multiple things that come out at different times. What you'll end up getting is you'll end up getting an email from Bill every day, which is his Diary. It used to be the Daily Reckoning. You'll end up getting, if you're a free reader, you'll get a summary of everything at the end of the week which, Joel, you're going to prepare so people can see what's going on behind the scenes if they're busy and they don't always have time to read every day. And then for-Joel Bowman:Yeah. It's a kind of digest.Dan Denning:Yeah, that's right. It's a little more convenient for people to keep up with everything that we've published. And then for readers who are paying subscribers, I'll continue to provide what I've been providing to readers of the Bonner-Denning Letter, which is just a review of any important events that happened that week that might affect either our long-term strategy or, and and this will be a bit different, our shorter term strategy. And that's because Tom, the work that he used to be doing for his Portfolio readers, will now be doing in this place with Bill and I. So, Tom's work is a little bit more tactical. There are a few more trades involved. And by trades, I don't mean day trading. I mean, things that he has spotted in his research, like the tanker trade that he made and obviously the Dow gold ratio. That's going to be what he's focusing on. So, in the weekly updates you'll get anything related to Tom's individual trades.And then you'll get a monthly research report, which is a collaboration amongst all of us, which focuses on our best ideas. And it tends to be a weightier, more thoughtful piece that you can print out, sit down and read. And that's a lot like the Bonner-Denning Letter, except now it's going to be called Bonner Private Research. Tom has accepted the role of being our investment director. I'm going to be the managing editor. And my job is to continue my work on the macro themes, but to also bring in the work of people that I mentioned before, like Chris Mayer and maybe Byron King from time to time, and anybody else who we know, like Rick, who has interesting things to say and wants to share them with you. So, you'll be getting daily, weekly, and monthly research. And then from time to time, hopefully even before Christmas, we'll be doing something like this, where you get to engage and talk back and ask questions. And it's more of a conversation or a dialogue rather than a monologue.Joel Bowman:Right. All right. So, lots of new stuff to look forward to. I feel like this might be just the right time for this. I mean, were we to have this exact conversation a couple of years ago in the pre z-Zoom era or the pre-work-at-home era, some of this might have seemed a little different. But as you say, the world's changing. Platforms are adapting. The way that we best reach our readers and our listeners is changing. So, there's a whole host of new ways that we're going to be able to engage and people will be able to choose a level of engagement that best suits their needs. So, on that point, I wonder if there might be people asking, "Hey, is this for me? Do I need to be a pro investor? Maybe I'm just somebody concerned about what I see on the headlines." Who in particular is this for? Do you want to speak a little bit to that perhaps?Dan Denning:Yeah, I can try. And in fact, this is the interesting thing. If you've ever owned a small business or started a business, or I guess really worked in any enterprise whatsoever, small group dynamics are funny. People all have their own idea of how things should be. And so I think one of the things new subscribers should expect is that we kind of have an idea of what we're trying to do in terms of... Well, we definitely know the problem we're trying to solve, but the division of labor and how we work together, those things are evolving. And one of the issues we'll have is, who are we writing for? So, for example, I know that Bill and Tom write to currently hundreds of thousands of people who don't consider themselves investors, but they enjoy reading about the world. They enjoy Bill's perspective on financial markets. I know a lot of people are completely fascinated with Tom's journey with his family, with his personal story, with his getting back together with Kate, and of course, with the homeschooling of their kids.So, we don't want to lose that because we're real people too, and we all have real lives. And some of the things that we're doing in our own lives are interesting to our readers. But I would say that the focus will probably shift more work towards investors. So, if you are a saver, if you are a retiree, if you're on a fixed income, if you're interested in buying a house or selling a house, these are huge financial decisions. And if you're at that point in your investment journey where you're trying to preserve the value of the assets you've accumulated, that's mostly our audience. So, those are mostly the things we're going to be writing about. And so a lot of the work that we're going to be doing now is for investors, and therefore you're going to have to pay for that work. But Bill's also made a career out of not being too adamantine about how he wants to do things. He likes to let things evolve. So, he wants to continue to write for free every day.People who want to read that, even if they don't necessarily invest, will want to subscribe to what we're doing. So, we're going to try to create a subscription option where you can read all of the research at a reasonable price, but also make it possible to continue to read, if you're just interested in Bill's analysis of what's going on in America. Because it's funny, it's lighthearted, it's not as serious. It doesn't mean it's not sophisticated, but Bill has this incredible talent of making complex things sound interesting and finding the humor in them. And I think that's important as well for people, that we don't want to just write about problems that are not solvable. We want to try and solve them. And occasionally we want people to remember, "You're not in this alone and sometimes there's even funny things that happen." So, that's how we're going to try it going forward.Joel Bowman:Yeah. Something tells me we're going to need, as much as anything, a sense of humor over the months and years that are waiting ahead of us. So, definitely stay on board for that. And I wanted to just ask very quickly if people are just joining us now for the first time and maybe they want to get other people, their friends or family, their loved ones involved, they want to sign them up, they can share links to our free resources and there'll be no problem with sharing our stuff around and inviting other people on board. That's correct?Dan Denning:Yeah, that's right. And this will be strange for people who've been with us for a long time because we're used to being part of larger organizations that we've built or joined and they have substantial resources to create large archives and libraries of introductory material. And there's lots of resources available, including customer service and phone numbers. This is very much a startup. And I know it sounds strange to hear that coming from people who've been in the publishing industry for, in Bill's case, 40 years, and in Tom and I's case, 25 years almost, but it's really a four man band right now. It's you, me, Tom and Bill. We're doing everything ourselves. And so the reason we picked the platform we picked is that they could do the payment processing and all we're going to do is write to you.So please, when you go to those construction sites and it says, "Please excuse our dust. We're trying to improve things," we're building everything from scratch here. And if we had waited to have everything built out so that it was a brand new, shiny, gleaming, perfectly functioning thing, we would've waited too long. We thought it was more important to start now and just focus on the important stuff, which is the ideas, the investment research and getting those to readers on a regular basis. But if you think it's interesting to you and you want to share it, the only social media we have right now is Twitter. So, if you want to follow us on Twitter, it's @bonnerprivate. Otherwise, if you want to keep hearing what we have to say, then you can either sign up for the free email, which doesn't cost anything, and that gives you what Bill says every day and that weekly update from you, Joel.And then if you want to pay 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks a year, that gives you a subscription with all the research. That's it so far. And it really is paired back. There's no fancy website. There's no username or password to log in. Substack handles all of your login for you. So, I know there'll be a few bumps in the road and I know people will have some questions on how things are going to work. We'll try to get to them as quickly as we can, but be as patient as possible with us, since it's just the four of us. Which really, because Bill's in Ireland and Tom is on the road, means it's just you and me. And you have a daughter and a wife, so it means it's just me. So, I will do my best as quickly as I can, I promise.Joel Bowman:Right on. Well, having worked with you on and off over the years, Dan, I know our readers and listeners are in good hands. And really, this is all part of the adventure too. Because as the old motto, "Ready, fire, aim," goes, we're going to be learning by the seat of our pants. But one thing that it does mean is that we're going to be able to be nimble and dynamic and responsive, which I think is very key in the kind of world that we live in today, where things are changing week by week, month by month.For anybody who had travel plans interrupted over the last year or budgets that they had to recalibrate because of price differences or market action or what have you, we'll be able to hopefully stay on top of all that with conversations like this and plenty more. But I think, mate, that probably does it for a bit of an introduction to our new readers. Please spread the word. Get other people involved and on board. And we look forward to talking to you again soon. Dan, thanks for chiming in from Wyoming today, mate. Good to talk to you.Dan Denning:Yeah. Thanks, Joel. One last thing real quick just so people, whenever they're listening to this... Our first monthly issue will be in January. Tom is headed back to London. He's made the decision to hunker down there for a while with the kids who got their passport from the home office. So, the first monthly report will be in January. We're going to start publishing Bill's daily emails in late December, and I'll start putting out weekly updates this weekend. So, if you're just joining us, that's what you can expect in the coming days. There's always a little bit of a lull in the holidays, which should help us work out any of our technical issues. But on a personal note, I just want to thank everyone who's decided to join us. It's really exciting to be involved with it again. It's always a little intimidating when you're not quite sure what it looks like, but off we go.Joel Bowman:All right, mate. Tally ho. For readers who are just joining, there's a whole bunch of archives on the website of old podcasts and things that we've had over the last couple of years or the last couple of months. You'll get a little bit of a look in to some of the other personalities that will be joining us along the way. Dan mentioned a few of them at the top of the episode. So, have a look through there, and look out in your inbox for future communications. Thanks a lot, and talk to you again soon.Thanks for listening to this episode of the Bonner Private Research Podcast. You can find more conversations like this in the members only section of our website. We look forward to hearing from you either way. Until next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

(00:50) - Intro (03:10) - [START] (03:50) - The Greatest Financial Crisis in American History... (06:20) - Half a century into the modern monetary experiment and where it's headed (07:50) - What does Bonner Private Research mean for YOU? (08:50) - Bill Bonner, Dan Denning, Tom Dyson and Joel Bowman, direct to you (10:50) - Daily musings, weekly podcasts, deep dive investment insights (13:20) - Welcome to Bill's personal network of investors, analysts and thinkers (14:20) - What you'll get with your new BPR subscription... (16:50) - The world is changing... this is how we're changing to keep you informed (20:50) - Sharing is caring! Please invite your friends and family along for the ride... (23:50) - Nimble, dynamic and responsive... a new way forward for a new year. (25:50) - A look at the days to come... and a big thankyou to everyone (26:00) - END

In today's episode of Passion for Real Estate Investments, Founder of Partners for Prosperity, Kim Butler, talks about death benefits in regard to real estate. After leaving the firm she worked for in 1999, Kim Butler founded Partners for Prosperity, LLC. Through her work and dedication, she has helped countless people build sustainable, generational wealth with her Prosperity Economics Philosophy and The 7 Principles of Prosperity™. Kim has featured in the Investopedia Top 100 List four times, she is the author of 8 highly recommended books, host of the Prosperity Podcast, mentor, and co-host of the annual Summit for Industry Professionals. Her work has been recommended by distinguished industry leaders such as Robert Kiyosaki, Garrett Gunderson, Tom Dyson, Tom Wheelwright, Michael Isom, and Patrick Donohoe, to name a few. What can the presence of death benefit of life insurance do for your real estate? Hear about moving real estate from generation to generation, the differences between term insurance and whole life insurance, how to use charitable remainder trusts and reverse mortgages, and the importance of education in creating a legacy. If you're looking into life insurance policies and want to know more about your options, or you want to learn about how it affects your real estate, or you want to create a lasting legacy, this episode is for you.   Highlights from the interview “Unless you know something I don't, death is a guaranteed event.” Life insurance companies think the life expectancy age is 120. “It's so critical that the life insurance that you use for a charitable remainder trust is permanent.” “If you use term insurance, it's not likely going to survive as long as you do.” “We recommend full life so that their family is guaranteed to get the replaced wealth.” “Reverse mortgages are done much better if you are in your 80s.”

In today's episode of Passion for Real Estate Investments, Founder of Partners for Prosperity, Kim Butler, talks about death benefits in regard to real estate. After leaving the firm she worked for in 1999, Kim Butler founded Partners for Prosperity, LLC. Through her work and dedication, she has helped countless people build sustainable, generational wealth with her Prosperity Economics Philosophy and The 7 Principles of Prosperity™. Kim has featured in the Investopedia Top 100 List four times, she is the author of 8 highly recommended books, host of the Prosperity Podcast, mentor, and co-host of the annual Summit for Industry Professionals. Her work has been recommended by distinguished industry leaders such as Robert Kiyosaki, Garrett Gunderson, Tom Dyson, Tom Wheelwright, Michael Isom, and Patrick Donohoe, to name a few. What can the presence of death benefit of life insurance do for your real estate? Hear about moving real estate from generation to generation, the differences between term insurance and whole life insurance, how to use charitable remainder trusts and reverse mortgages, and the importance of education in creating a legacy. If you're looking into life insurance policies and want to know more about your options, or you want to learn about how it affects your real estate, or you want to create a lasting legacy, this episode is for you. Highlights from the interview * “Unless you know something I don't, death is a guaranteed event.” * Life insurance companies think the life expectancy age is 120. * “It's so critical that the life insurance that you use for a charitable remainder trust is permanent.” * “If you use term insurance, it's not likely going to survive as long as you do.” * “We recommend full life so that their family is guaranteed to get the replaced wealth.” * “Reverse mortgages are done much better if you are in your 80s.”

Echuca's favourite son, the Big Clock.

Tony discusses the priorities and choices we make as parents with Tom Dyson, an undeniably radical parent, who recovered from divorce, depression, and a mid-life crisis by taking his family on a multi-year, round-the-globe trip that culminated in couchsurfing across over 30 homes in the US during the peak of COVID. Tom reminds us that the time we have with our kids is limited and precious and provides an inspiring example of a family that has prioritized that time together above all else. links and resources referenced in the podcast:Invisibilia Podcast: https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-batmanPeter Gray on Fear-Based Parenting: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201903/the-many-shades-fear-based-parentinghttps://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-vi-hunter-gatherers-playful-parentingThe Culture of Childhood (We've Almost Destroyed It) Peter Gray: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201610/the-culture-childhood-we-ve-almost-destroyed-itHow to Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success (Julie Lythcott-Haims) https://www.julielythcotthaims.com/how-to-raise-an-adultJanet Lansbury Podcast & Blog: https://www.janetlansbury.com/tag/podcasts/Susan Stiffelman : https://susanstiffelman.com/3 Ways to Stop Parenting out of Fear: https://medium.com/be-unique/3-ways-to-stop-parenting-out-of-fear-eebb785e9513Aware Parenting Institute: http://awareparenting.com/Simplicity Parenting with Kim John Payne: https://www.simplicityparenting.com/about-simplicity-parenting/about-kim-john-payne/Free Range Kids: https://www.freerangekids.com/

A man goes to see an epidemiologst to ask, “When will this pandemic be over?” “How should I know?” the epidemiologist replies, “I'm not a politician.” Ah yes, dad jokes. More truth than humor, no doubt. this week I caught up with the co-author of the Bonner-Denning Letter and one member of the so-called Aussie diaspora, Mr. Dan Denning, who currently resides in Colorado but who proudly called Melbourne home for a happy decade... We spoke about the situation Down Under, vis-a-vis immigration and border closures, the lockdown and lock out, plus the importance of standing up for your hard won rights and liberties. Dan also mused on the inflationary creep going on in the US, where prices for raw materials - lumbar, iron ore, base metals and such - are beginning to seep into the broader economy in a very real way. For those of us who, say, consume food and energy, that means higher prices at the store and at the pump. And for those who live on or near the margin, which as we saw over the past year is many more than you might think, that means some tough decisions ahead. All that and more we cover in my conversation with Dan Denning, up next... Time stamps - A rough guide... (00:50) - Intro (07:45) - An Open Letter to Australia (09:30) - An Aussie news play-by-play: Fear and trembling Down Under (11:00) - “When you control the message, and the message is fear, it's not surprising that's what you get.” Dan Denning (13:05) - What happened to asking questions? To standing up for our rights? (16:30) - The age old false dilemma: Liberty or Security (17:25) - Turning to the US and the maybe, possible, probably return to normalcy... (18:55) - Consumer Price Inflation - To the moon? (19:50) - Inflation is becoming a psychological phenomenon now (20:40) - US Jobs Outlook: When you pay people not to work, people to a good job at it (22:00) - Tom Dyson's take on shipping stocks and raw materials (24:00) - Money printing: The point at which inflation goes from theoretically possible to practically catastrophic (28:00) - When it comes to free money, credulity is the limit (29:30) - Interest rates are the ones to watch... (30:45) - What ever happened to the bond vigilantes? (32:20) - The corrosive effects of unsound money on the broader economy (33:30) - The Japanese Story... and why it's fundamentally different to the US (35:45) - Two transportation metaphors: The Titanic and Aeroplane Take-off Speed (39:00) - When incentives change from patience and prudence to borrow, borrow, borrow!

Tom Dyson was the co-founder of the Palm Beach Research Group with Mark Ford - which became one of the most successful financial publications.   You can follow Tom on Instagram HoboFamily and his new newsletter 'Postcards from the Fringe.'   https://www.bonnerandpartners.com/products/postcards-from-the-fringe/   In this episode, you're going to listen to Tom's story of divorce and business failure to traveling the world with his three young children and ex-wife. Before leaving, Tom sold all of his assets and possessions and bought physical gold.   Tom's transformational story re-invigorated his passion for writing about finance, investing, and economics. His refined perspective is almost prophetic, given the current state of the world.

Today you’re going to sit down with me and eavesdrop as I catch up with an old friend that I haven’t seen in years... His name is Tom Dyson. Tom was the co-founder alongside Mark Ford, of the wildly successful investing and financial education company, the Palm Beach Research Group. Together, they turned the business into a $100 Million company. And then a few years ago Tom went through a divorce, depression overtook him, and he simply walked away from everything. Well today you’re going to hear the fascinating story of what happened, and why it ended up being a massive blessing in disguise. I’m thrilled to say that this story has an incredibly happy ending, but it certainly contains some very, very valuable lessons for all of us. Now given the fact that both of us are still in love with global economics and investing, we couldn’t help but dive into that topic towards the end of today’s interview. What’s going on with the markets? Is there a crash looming ahead, and what are Tom and I doing with our money? I think you’ll be shocked to hear the answers to those incredibly important questions… Resources: Postcards From the Fringe Follow HoboFamily on Instagram Music: Track: ROY KNOX x Tim Beeren - Save Me (Feat. Svniivan) [NCS Release] Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds. Watch: youtu.be/_wgDPGBbfjU Free Download / Stream: ncs.io/SaveMe

Wagtail CMS Wagtail Slack Channel Torchbox Drupal Royal College of Arts Wagtail Core Team PEP 405: Python Virtual Environments CodeRed CMS Wagtail Features wagtail-alt-generator DjangoConUS 2018 - Django and Machine Learning awesome-wagtail awesome-django wagtail-experiments A/B testing SHAMELESS PLUGS William's books on Django Carlton's website Noumenal

If you are operating a website that needs to publish and manage content on a regular basis, a CMS (Content Management System) becomes the obvious choice for reducing your workload. There are a plethora of options available, but if you are looking for a solution that leverages the power of Python and exposes its flexibility then you should take a serious look at Wagtail. In this episode Tom Dyson explains how Wagtail came to be created, what sets it apart from other options, and when you should implement it for your projects.

Today, on the Wealth Standard Radio, Patrick Donohoe is joined by Tom Dyson to discuss a current currency trend. Together, they analyze the state of the US dollar and compare it against the history of the value of the dollar. Tom explains his contrarian views on currency markets. Patrick looks into the ripple effect of...

Tom Dyson is the Publisher of Common Sense Publishing, which owns The Palm Beach Letter. Common Sense is one of the fastest growing investment newsletters in the world.   Dyson joins the show to discuss what he looks at when picking stocks, including what every good company needs to have over the long term.    Dyson then shares his thoughts on why he thinks whole life insurance with paid up additions policies are great investments.   The topics then turn to lifestyle, as Dyson discusses ways to cut down stress and lose weight.   Dyson has prepared a SPECIAL video for all listeners. He shares where bankers and the rich keep their money and why they do it.    Visit www.palmbeachletter3.com to find out for more . 

This week, Tom Dyson, editor of the Palm Beach Letter, and publisher of Common Sense Publishing joins Stansberry Radio.   You'll hear Tom to talk about their latest newsletter that was launched just two weeks ago. Here is your chance to get the inside scoop...

This week we sit down with Tom Dyson, “The man who has the best job in the industry”. Porter and Tom talk about how important it is to safeguard your investments.

Special guest Tom Dyson of Common Sense Publishing and The Palm Beach Letter discusses with host Patrick Donohoe the current economic environment, the financial newsletter and publishing industry and what's next for the financial markets. Bio: Tom Dyson, Publisher of Common Sense Publishing Tom bought his first stock when he was 11 years old. He has been...

Rich Suttmeier, chief market strategist at ValuEngine.com - and notable bear, says 90% of stocks are undervalued. Tom Dyson, editor of the Palm Beach letter, gives us his favorite income generating ideas.

Tom Dyson, former editor of the 12% Letter at S&A, talks about his new income generating project. Frank breaks down the economy and inflated earnings estimates for S&P 500 companies.

Former S&A editor Tom Dyson talks about his new Common Sense newsletter.  S&A Short Report editor Jeff Clark talks about buying the dollar and shorting copper.

Mike Williams, editor of S&A's True Income newsletter and 30-year bond veteran talks individual bonds. Tom Dyson, editor of the  12% letter for S&A gives us his top high yield plays.

Frank talks to Rich Suttmeier from Valuengine.com and Tom Dyson. Both are very bearish on the markets although Rich sees a short-term rally. Then oil guru Chuck Marvin explains why refining is a great business for the majors.