Tag: Simon Black

Local government foils evil terrorist entrepreneurs once and for all

Guest Post by Simon Black

Tens of thousands of years ago, humankind was practically an endangered species.

Our early proto-ancestors had little means to protect against the harsh elements or defend against terrifying predators.

And finding enough food was a constant challenge.

Tribes of humans would roam from place to place, foraging for whatever they could eat until they had exhausted nature’s resources… and then be forced to move on to a new location.

And the idea that early humans were champion hunters is largely myth; we were scavengers for the most part, nibbling scraps off dead animal carcasses that had already been picked clean by predators higher up the food chain.

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Breaking down America’s worst long-term challenges: #1- Debt.

Guest Post by Simon Black

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On October 22, 1981, the national debt in the United States crossed the $1 trillion threshold for the first time in history.

It took nearly two centuries to reach that unfortunate milestone.

And over that time the country had been through a revolution, civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, the nuclear arms race… plus dozens of other wars, financial panics, and economic crises.

Today, the national debt stands at more than $21 trillion– a milestone hit roughly two months ago.

This means that the government added $20 trillion to the national debt in the 37 years between October 22, 1981 and March 15, 2018.

Continue reading “Breaking down America’s worst long-term challenges: #1- Debt.”

Why you might as well paint a giant bulls-eye on your bank account

Guest Post by Simon Black

Vegetarians be forewarned… you won’t like what follows.

We slaughtered a pig yesterday at the farm. I have two freezers full of pork now, and countless strips of bacon curing in the kitchen.

I’ve written about this before– out here at the farm I’m able to organically produce almost everything that I eat… meat, eggs, rice, nuts, and just about every kind of fruit and vegetable imaginable. A lot of it gets canned and stored.

We even grow wheat which we turn into organic flour, plus oats and all sorts of other grains.

As I’ve described in the past, this is a pretty powerful feeling. I know that, no matter what happens in the world, I’ll always have a source of food.

Continue reading “Why you might as well paint a giant bulls-eye on your bank account”

Mike Tyson Vs. The Grilled Cheese Truck

Authored by Simon Black and Tim Price via SovereignMan

It was just over two years ago that “The Grilled Cheese Truck, Inc.” began trading in the US stock market under ticker symbol GRLD.

GRLD was exactly what it sounds like– a truck that sells grilled cheese sandwiches.

Yet despite a history of heavy losses, the stock market valued the company at an extraordinary $107 million.

Skeptical investors would have been sharp to call that the peak of the market.

Yet the irrational exuberance continued.

Earlier this year, Snap Inc., a profitless mobile app which offers its shareholders ZERO voting rights, went public with a $28 billion valuation.

That too seemed like the peak of the market’s insanity. But that turned out to be a premature feeling as well.

Continue reading “Mike Tyson Vs. The Grilled Cheese Truck”

What do these CEOs know that we don’t?

Guest Post by Simon Black

Last night a good friend of mine came over for dinner.

He’s originally from Poland, and growing up there he heard a lot of bizarre stories about what it was like during the Nazi invasion and World War II.

In 1939, even as 1.5 million German soldiers prepared to invade, the general mood in Poland couldn’t have been more carefree.

My friend’s grandfather once told him that, just prior to the Nazi invasion, the schools in Poland announced they were suspending classes… but only for two weeks, because that’s how long they expected the war to last.

Incredible.

Continue reading “What do these CEOs know that we don’t?”

When America Was Still The Land Of Opportunity

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Last week during a long overdue vacation, a close friend of mine recommended reading the autobiography of Rich DeVos called Simply Rich.

DeVos is a billionaire entrepreneur who started countless ventures during his nine decades on this earth.

Back in the 1946, for example, DeVos started an airline… virtually overnight.

He just bought an airplane and started flying people around. No rules. No regulations.

They didn’t even have an airport. The local airfield north of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they were based, hadn’t been completed yet.

As DeVos recounts in his book, “We put pontoon floats on our plane and took off and landed on the Grand River, which ran along the airfield.”

His first office at the airfield was an old chicken coop that he found, washed in the river, and re-painted.

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The War On Cash Is Happening Faster Than We Could Have Imagined

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

It’s happening faster than we could have ever imagined.

Every time we turn around, it seems, there’s another major assault in the War on Cash.

India is the most notable recent example– the embarrassing debacle a few weeks ago in which the government, overnight, “demonetized” its two largest denominations of cash, leaving an entire nation in chaos.

But there have been so many smaller examples.

In the US city of New Orleans, the local government decided earlier this month to stop accepting cash payments from drivers at the Office of Motor Vehicles.

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Overheard In The Land Of The Free

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

When I was in Texas over the weekend taking a quick break from a whirlwind trip around the world, I went to one of the biggest shopping malls in Dallas to buy a birthday present for the CFO of our agriculture business.

The mall is called the Galleria, and it’s particularly interesting for shoppers because it has an ice-skating rink on the ground floor.

An ice rink might not sound like a big deal, but in a state like Texas that’s legendary for sweltering heat, it’s still quite a novelty.

Kids especially love the ice, and it’s common to hear them begging mom and dad for a 30 minute skate pass.

I was standing on a terrace overlooking the rink on Friday, busy firing off some emails to my staff, when I overheard one such conversation.

It didn’t even register until I heard the mother say, “Kaden – you can’t go ice skating… you might fall down!”

The words immediately passed through my mental filter as if someone had just shouted out my name across the food court.

You might fall down? Duh. It’s a ten-year old boy on ice skates. Of course he’s going to fall down.

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No, Protesters, You Are Not Entitled To Free Education

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Bleary-eyed from the 16+ hour flight from Asia, I checked my phone last night once the plane landed to find that riots have broken out across the Land of the Free.

It was enough to wake me from my jet lag.

All the televisions in the airport terminal were showing footage of the chaos along with occasional interviews with some of the protestors.

Naturally there was outcry against racism, sexism, violence, and all the usual anti-Trump arguments.

(Which I found ironic given this video of a Trump voter being viciously beaten in Chicago.)

But one of the recurring themes from these protestors being interviewed, primarily young people, was that Trump wasn’t going to do anything about student debt.

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While media obsesses over Pussygate, US debt soars to $19.7 trillion

Guest post by Simon Black

First of all, I want to say thanks for all the well-wishes.

I’ve been flat on my back for the past several days with a particularly nasty case of the flu that I likely contracted en route to Los Angeles last week.

Picking up the occasional bug is one of the hazards of spending a lot of time on planes… plus I have some special luck with airlines for always being seated next to a guy who sneezes with the explosiveness and ferocity of a biological terrorist.

But, now that I’m better and getting brought up to speed, one of the things that caught my attention this morning was that the US government’s debt level has soared to just a hair under $19.7 trillion.

To give it some context, that’s up over $120 billion in just six business days.

It’s almost as if Barack Obama is intentionally and desperately trying to breach the $20 trillion mark before he leaves office in January.

Continue reading “While media obsesses over Pussygate, US debt soars to $19.7 trillion”

Here’s some compelling data about the next recession

Guest Post by Simon Black

danger-ahead

In the modern history of the US economy over the past seven decades, the longest period of time the country has gone without a recession was 10 years.

Since the end of World War II there have been 11 recessions in the United States of America, so the average time in between recessions is 6 years and 5 months.

The average length of recession was 336 days; the longest recession in modern history was 18 months in 2008-2009, and the shortest was 6 months in 1980.

And whenever a recession hits, the all-knowing, all-powerful Federal Reserve attempts to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates, typically multiple times.

The smallest interest rate cut was 2.03% during the 1990-1991 recession.

The largest interest rate cut during a recession was 9.84% during the 1981-1982 recession.

The average interest rate cut during a recession is 4.03% based on sixty years of Federal Reserve data.

Continue reading “Here’s some compelling data about the next recession”

Secret Federal Reserve minutes leaked

Guest Post by Simon Black

Yesterday the Federal Reserve released the minutes from its July meeting a few weeks ago in which they decided to NOT raise interest rates.

These minutes are the official archive of the meeting, providing details about the presentations, debates, and discussions that took place.

They contain very formal sounding language, referring to their near-zero interest rates as “accommodation” in the same way that my high school health teacher preferred to use the more clinical term “copulation” instead of “sex”.

As an example, the most recent Fed minutes state:

“members agreed to indicate that they would continue to closely monitor global economic and financial developments.”

What in the world does that even mean?

I really get so tired of their forked-tongue garbage.

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This trend tells you everything you need to know about America’s future

Guest Post by Simon Black

Long ago in the Land of the Free, if you wanted to start a saloon, you rented a space and started serving booze.

You didn’t have to go through years of petitioning a bunch of bureaucrats for permits and licenses.

If you weren’t qualified or good enough at your job, your reputation would suffer and you’d go out of business.

This is the way it used to be for just about every industry and profession.

It wasn’t until 1889 that the US Supreme Court ruled in Dent v. West Virginia that states had the right to impose “reasonable” certifications or licenses for various professions.

At first, most states only licensed physicians, dentists, and lawyers.

In fact, by 1920, only about 30 occupations in the US required any sort of licensing.

By the 1950s, about 5% of US workers required a license to perform his/her job.

Today that number has risen to 30%, and climbing.

Continue reading “This trend tells you everything you need to know about America’s future”

The Financial System Is Breaking Down At An Unimaginable Pace

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Now it’s $13 trillion.

That’s the total amount of government bonds in the world that have negative yields, according to calculations published last week by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Given that there were almost zero negative-yielding bonds just two years ago, the rise to $13 trillion is incredible.

In February 2015, the total amount of negative-yielding debt in the world was ‘only’ $3.6 trillion.

A year later in February 2016 it had nearly doubled to $7 trillion.

Now, just five months later, it has nearly doubled again to $13 trillion, up from $11.7 trillion just over two weeks ago.

Think about that: the total sum of negative-yielding debt in the world has increased in the last sixteen days alone by an amount that’s larger than the entire GDP of Russia.

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How safe are top US banks?

Guest post by Simon Black

Recently I was having drinks with a friend of mine who is an ultra-successful US real estate developer and investor.

He told me that his team had just closed a large real estate transaction worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they got a sweetheart deal from the bank.

The bank is loaning them almost all of the money at an interest rate of around 2%.

But it gets better.

If the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, he has the option of locking in the rate that he has now… so his interest rate will basically never go up.

But if the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, the rate that he pays on the loan will go down.

In other words, he got an amazing deal from the bank… and it might even get better. But it will never get worse.

Now, this is obviously fantastic for the borrower.

But for the bank, this is an absolute sucker’s bet. There’s almost zero upside.

The bank is putting up the vast majority of the money, their return on investment is next to nothing, and the tiny return they are getting might even go down.

More importantly, if interest rates go up, or if inflation increases, the bank is going to lose a LOT of money.

Of course, the bank isn’t going to lose its own money. Banks never use their own money when they make these crazy loans.

No. Instead, they use their depositors’ money. YOUR money.

Continue reading “How safe are top US banks?”

German Banks Told To Start Hoarding Cash

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Just stunning.

German newspaper Der Spiegel reported yesterday that the Bavarian Banking Association has recommended that its member banks start stockpiling PHYSICAL CASH.

Europe, of course, has been battling with negative interest rates for quite some time.

What this means is that commercial banks are being charged interest for holding wholesale deposits at the European Central Bank.

In order to generate artificial economic growth, the ECB wants banks to make as many loans as possible, no matter how stupid or idiotic.

They believe that economic growth is simply a function of loans. The more money that’s loaned out, the more the economy will grow.

This is the sort of theory that works really well in an economic textbook. But it doesn’t work so well in a history textbook.

Cheap money encourages risky behavior. It gives banks an incentive to give ‘no money down’ loans to homeless people with no employment history.

It creates bubbles (like the housing bubble from 10 years ago), and ultimately, financial panics (like the banking crisis from 8 years ago).

Banks are supposed to be conservative, responsible managers of other people’s money.

When central bank policies penalize that practice, bad things tend to happen.

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