A great take from one of the most honest gold investors out there. Ronnie is a great follow for anyone interested in gold, mining, and macro.

1/ Some loose thoughts on the current macro setup and what it means for #gold 🧵 Gold is under real pressure. Silver and the miners are underperforming and show no signs of strength yet. My take: we’ll see a capitulation low over the next few days.

My one friend told me that at the investment fund he works at, they read The Economist for research and macro🤣🤣🤣

Which way, modern nation-state? The evidence is clear: reduce production costs and risk, and people produce more. Cause and effect work as reliably as gravity, not ideology. From 1960 to 1997, Hong Kong ran a flat tax below 15 percent, minimal licensing, and near-zero tariffs. A fishing village became one of the wealthiest places per capita on earth. John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary who refused to even collect GDP statistics because he feared politicians would use the data to justify intervention, drove that transformation through deliberate restraint. The government stepped back. Wealth flooded in. Compare that to Argentina. In 1930, Argentina ranked among the ten wealthiest nations globally. Over the following decades, its government imposed price controls, nationalized industries, taxed exports, and printed currency to cover deficits. By 2001 the country defaulted on $132 billion in debt. Real wages collapsed. The government did not run out of bad ideas; it ran out of other people's money. Ireland cut its corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent in 2003. Foreign direct investment poured in. GDP per capita grew faster than any other EU member through the mid-2000s. Critics called it a race to the bottom. The Irish called it employment. Between 1984 and 1991, New Zealand slashed tariffs, privatized state enterprises, deregulated financial markets, and abolished agricultural subsidies that had consumed 40 percent of farm income. The short-term pain was real. The long-term result was a competitive, diversified economy that no longer required permanent government life support. France ran the opposite experiment. Its 75 percent top income tax rate, introduced in 2013, lasted two years before even the socialist government that passed it admitted the revenue projections were fiction. Capital left. Gerard Depardieu took Russian citizenship. The tax raised less than 200 million euros against projections of 500 million, then disappeared quietly in 2015. Capital moves toward places that respect contracts, maintain sound money, and leave producers enough margin to reinvest. Every country that built sustained prosperity did so by making production cheaper and safer. Every country that destroyed prosperity did so by making production more expensive and more uncertain. The pattern repeats across centuries and continents because it reflects how humans actually respond to incentives, not how politicians wish they would.

FYI to anyone who hasn't realized this yet: AI plus data centers means all storage and data processing happen off-site. Five years from now, your phone, laptop, and PC will be a screen with a battery attached. Don't overinvest in something that will soon be obsolete.

Whenever a ceiling is placed on government spending, bureaucrats treat that number as a target rather than an arbitrary maximum, and the effect is usually the opposite of the intended one. Intervention attempting to stop further intervention causes more intervention.

Why does everything a government touches turn to shit? Every tax, regulation, and price control produces an economic consequence its architects either ignore or actively conceal from you. Murray Rothbard's Power and Market, published in 1970, tears apart the intellectual cover governments use to justify intervention. Rothbard builds the case like this: no form of state interference improves on the voluntary exchange economy. Every intervention distorts prices, misallocates capital, and ultimately harms the very people the policy claimed to protect. Take price ceilings. New York City imposed rent control in 1943 as a wartime emergency. Eight decades later, landlords still face legal caps on rents, and the city faces a perpetual housing shortage. Capping prices below market rates destroys the incentive to supply. Investors channel capital elsewhere, housing stock deteriorates, and you pay more for less under the table through bribes, key fees, and "finder's fees" to brokers. Rothbard also categorizes interventions. Autistic intervention forces you to act or refrain without directly involving your property in exchange. Binary intervention forces an exchange between the state and a private party. Triangular intervention forces exchange between two private parties on state-dictated terms. The specificity matters because each category produces distinct distortions, and grouping them all as "regulation" lets politicians dodge accountability for the specific damage each one causes. Then there is the calculation issue. Governments do not possess the price signals needed to allocate resources correctly. Mises already proved this in 1920, and Rothbard extends the argument: intervention actively destroys the information system that makes optimization possible in the first place. Free market thinkers after Rothbard have added data, case studies, and formalized models. None have overturned the logic. Governments intervene, prices lie, and you bear the cost.

Keeping Starlink out of rural people's hands is vital to the ANC's survival. They need their voters/victims as poor and dumb as possible. If Elon backs down from this proposal, it would actually help the process of getting Starlink into South Africa. Feel free to contact me for more advice, @Starlink

It is not virtuous to give away money if that money is not yours.

Things your economy can get away with: ✅ An imbecile as a president. ✅ Government shutdowns. ✅ Cutting government spending by 80%. Things that will kill your economy within a decade: ❌ Open borders + Welfare ❌ Overtaxing productive citizens while subsidizing the unproductive. ❌ Price controls ❌ Bureaucratic overreach.

Capital flows where it is treated best. California is driving away rich, productive people and attracting poor, unproductive people. Don't act surprised when it is a wasteland 15 years from now. Change happens surprisingly quickly.

Every mainstream economist, NGO bureaucrat, and State Department analyst predicted Nayib Bukele would detonate El Salvador's economy. He did the opposite. When Bukele declared Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021, the IMF warned of "macroeconomic instability." Bloomberg ran pieces about imminent fiscal collapse. Moody's downgraded Salvadoran debt. The consensus was uniform: this was a reckless stunt by a millennial authoritarian who had watched too many crypto YouTube videos. What actually happened? By early 2024, El Salvador struck a $1.4 billion deal with the IMF, negotiated from a position of genuine fiscal improvement rather than desperation. The country's GDP grew 3.5% in 2023. Tourism revenue hit record numbers, with arrivals up roughly 95% from pre-Bukele baseline figures. Bond prices, which markets had priced for default, recovered sharply. The security transformation is where the predictions aged worst. El Salvador held the highest homicide rate on earth for years, running above 100 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015. Bukele's crackdown brought that figure below 2 per 100,000 by 2023, a number that competes favorably with most Western European cities. The same analysts who called his economic policies reckless called his security policies fascist. Salvadorans who previously couldn't walk to a corner store without facing gang extortion now experience ordinary life. Property rights and personal security are not soft political preferences. They are the foundation that makes voluntary exchange possible. Capital flows toward you when you can enforce a contract without paying a gang for permission first. Bukele is no libertarian. His consolidation of institutional power deserves criticism from anyone serious about checks on state authority. But the mainstream's specific, quantified predictions failed categorically. Stability didn't collapse. Investors didn't flee permanently. Citizens didn't starve. The lesson is simple: crack down on criminals and enforce property rights, but, incredibly, the mainstream still refuses to learn it.

Top 5 Socialist sociopaths: Socialism destroys wealth systematically, and the leaders who implement it deserve to be judged not merely by their body counts but by the full scope of their economic vandalism and the machinery they build to sustain it. 1. Mao Zedong earns the top position without argument. His Great Leap Forward collectivized 500 million farmers, abolished private farming by 1958, and replaced price signals with production quotas set by party cadres who had never grown a crop. Steel output targets sent peasants melting their own tools in backyard furnaces while grain rotted unharvested. The economy contracted by 30 percent between 1959 and 1961. Mao knew the numbers and continued the policy anyway. 2. Fidel Castro ran Cuba for 49 years and handed his brother a country that still rations cooking oil. Before 1959, Cuba had a higher per capita income than much of Southern Europe. Castro nationalized 166 American businesses in 1960, then dismantled the domestic private sector entirely by 1968 during his "Revolutionary Offensive." Sugar, the one export Cuba could sell, averaged production below 1950 levels through the 1990s. Central planners cannot replicate what price signals do for free. 3. Hugo Chavez inherited a functional oil-exporting economy in Venezuela in 1999 and used oil revenue to paper over nationalization after nationalization, seizing more than 1,200 companies between 2002 and 2012. When oil prices fell after 2014, Venezuelan grocery store shelves were empty because Chavez and then Maduro had already killed domestic food production with price controls and land seizures. The people started eating zoo animals. Inflation hit 1,000,000 percent by 2018. Three million Venezuelans fled by 2019. 4. Nicolae Ceaușescu ran Romania with a particular brand of cruelty that deserves more attention than it gets. He repaid foreign debt by exporting virtually all Romanian food production through the 1980s, leaving Romanians with 1,500 calories per day while the Securitate secret police maintained one informant for every 43 citizens. The Danube-Black Sea Canal, built on political prisoner labor and costing billions, moved almost no commercially significant cargo. 4. Kim Il-sung built the definitive socialist laboratory in North Korea after 1948, and the results are legible from space. The Korean peninsula is one country split by an ideology, and the satellite image of darkness above the 38th parallel is the most damning economic graphic socialism has ever produced. Agricultural collectivization through the 1950s and 1960s created famine conditions that recur because the system has no mechanism to respond to scarcity except political denial. Each of these leaders shared one commitment: they all destroyed the price system. Prices tell you what people actually value, and that information was politically inconvenient.

This comes to show that even in South Africa, the man on the street still sometimes has influence. Well done to everyone who made themselves heard about this insane and draconian proposal. Hat tip to @PRDG_ZA for doing excellent work on this topic. We live to fight them another day.

The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world. Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever: Let's start with the best: 1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, on the grounds that the Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right. 2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside. 3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument. These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool. Now the worst. 3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered. 2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms. 1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945. Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.

In September 2008, the Federal Reserve and Treasury ran a rescue operation. AIG, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Société Générale were the beneficiaries. You were the source of funds. Here is how the mechanism worked. AIG had written credit default swaps guaranteeing hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed securities. When those securities collapsed, AIG owed its counterparties full par value. The government injected $182 billion across multiple tranches, and AIG's counterparties collected 100 cents on the dollar. Goldman alone received $12.9 billion. No haircuts. No negotiations. Full payment, funded by you. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former Goldman CEO, made this call. The conflict of interest practically announces itself. Free market economists recognize that bankruptcy exists precisely for this moment. AIG's assets, subsidiaries, and insurance policies would have survived Chapter 11 reorganization. Policyholders carry legal protections under state insurance law regardless of the parent company's solvency. The "systemic collapse" narrative was a performance, staged to justify socializing losses that sophisticated institutional investors should have absorbed themselves. When counterparties realize the government will guarantee their riskiest bets at full value, they price that guarantee into every future transaction. Risk calculation collapses. Banks take larger positions than the underlying economics justify because the downside belongs to you. You did not write those credit default swap contracts, you did not collect the premiums, you did not sit on AIG's board approving the exposure. You simply received the invoice, laundered through Treasury debt and Federal Reserve money creation, inflating away purchasing power you will never recover.

Central planning doesn't fail because planners are stupid, but because planners are blind. Soviet factory managers faced a simple incentive structure: hit your quota, keep your job, possibly keep your life. The State Planning Committee (Gosplan) measured shoe production in units. One shoe equals one unit. So managers at factories across the USSR produced left shoes, warehoused them, reported their numbers, and collected their bonuses. Right shoes were, technically, someone else's problem. This actually happened. Soviet citizens lined up for goods that existed in abundance on paper and in warehouses, completely unwearable without their missing counterpart. The absurdity is funny until you realize millions of people walked around in poorly fitted footwear because no price signal existed to tell any producer what consumers actually needed. The Soviet shoe problem repeats itself wherever governments replace price signals with targets: hospital bed counts, agricultural tonnage, student graduation rates, housing units permitted. The metric gets optimized, but the underlying human need gets ignored. Bureaucrats optimize for what gets measured. Markets optimize for what gets bought. Only one of those methods requires the person selling to actually satisfy you.