Wilder: Some Straight Talk About Investments and 401k's

Wilder's latest piece is "If You Can’t Spot The Sucker At The Table . . . ." And when it comes to investing in the stock market, equities markets, etc., we--the common people--are the suckers. Wilder discusses several of the markets and investments that are legal scams, so be sure to reach the whole thing. One example is his discussion of investments in AI companies:

    Nobody actually requires pension funds to buy speculative A.I. bets. But when the benchmark rate that the fund is trying to replicate is the S&P 500©, over half of that index is now A.I. Private credit and datacenter infrastructure funds are sold as “diversifiers.” The Aptly Named Larry Fink has been open about it and I’ve written about him before: a big chunk of the A.I. build-out is coming from “your savings accounts and pension accounts.”

    If, or more likely when, the power plants never get built or the market discovers that no one really wants to pay a lot for A.I., the little guys eat it. We’ve seen this movie with mortgage-backed securities in 2008, but after 20 years, who isn’t up for a sequel? 

And he concludes:

    I guess I can stop pretending the game is neutral, because I could go on and on and on with more examples. To the big players, the Elons, Altmans, the Finks, we’re just liquidity and our retirement account is being used as their stack of chips.

    The cards are the same.

    The edge is not.

    Don’t be the sucker.   

Some More Iranian War News

• "US beefs up military might in Middle East after unleashing powerful B-1 bombers to attack Iran"--New York Post. The headline is misleading as the article indicates that only a single B-1 was deployed. It also reports that "[m]ore than 150 medics have also been sent to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany — the military’s primary hospital for wounded troops from the Middle East," and that additional special forces are being sent to the region.
• "House adopts Iran war powers resolution as four Republicans join Dems to rebuke Trump "--New York Post.  Four Republicans joined all 210 Democrats to pass a resolution calling on Pres. Trump to “to remove the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, including potential ground forces in a combat role or used for occupation.”
• "Brent crude oil surges to $100 a barrel for first time since May after reports of Red Sea attacks"--The New York Post.  "Reports of fresh strikes in the Red Sea raised new fears that a second critical shipping route through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which carries about 7% of global oil supplies, could also be compromised – multiplying what is already the world’s worst-ever supply disruption," the article states. 

Some Companies Facing AI Woes

Some interesting changes to the AI landscape. You may have noticed reports last week that Ford Motor Corporation was forced to rehire 300 engineers when it learned that they actually couldn't be replaced by AI. 

    "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, said in a press briefing, according to The Verge. 

    Additionally, Bloomberg reported Poon saying on a press call that artificial intelligence is a "fantastic tool," but only as good as the information you use to train it. 

    "Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles," Bloomberg reported him saying. "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high quality product."      

Ford isn't the only company having second thoughts about AI. CNBC reports that "[o]ther companies that have walked back their hiring plans to focus more on human capital include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and software giant IBM."

    These examples echo views presented by analysts that making employees redundant while using more AI may not necessarily offer the best route to business growth.

    “Budgeting on ‘tech to replace humans’ without investing in training or upskilling left teams unprepared to leverage AI,” according to a report by Intuition Labs. “Notably, among companies pushing automation, many later ‘regretted’ layoffs, having cut the very people needed to oversee AI,” it added.

    According to a report by Orgvue, 39% of business leaders made employees redundant due to AI deployment. However, among that number, 55% admit wrong decisions about those redundancies were made.  

    And then there are the unforeseen costs for heavy use of AI. Forbes reports that "AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced." That article relates:

    Something odd is happening in the tech world right now: the technology that was supposed to make human labour obsolete is, at this moment, more expensive than the humans it was meant to replace. Companies are laying off workers to fund the very AI tools that cost more than the workers they just let go. The circular logic of it would be darkly comic if tens of thousands of livelihoods weren't caught in the middle.

    Uber’s CTO, recently disclosed that the company burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. By March, 84 percent of Uber's engineers had adopted Claude Code, and roughly 70 percent of committed code now originates with AI. The usage was enormous. The corresponding value was murkier. Uber's COO and President, Andrew Macdonald, conceded publicly that token usage didn't seem to correlate directly with useful features shipped to users.

    Uber is not an outlier. Microsoft, which has invested approximately $13 billion in OpenAI and writes up to 30 percent of its own code with generative AI, instructed engineers in a major division to stop using an AI coding assistant because the bills became untenable. One unnamed company, per Axios, ran up a $500 million Claude bill in a single month after management forgot to set a usage cap. These are structural miscalculations about what intelligence costs when you purchase it by the syllable.

Illegals Caused Massive Spike In Housing Costs

From the New York Post: "Biden’s illegal immigration surge triggered 30% rise in home prices, $ [sic] 20% in rents, Fed paper finds." I guess immigration is a strength for the wealthy. 

The Summer Job Is Drying Up

This seems to be a growing problem: "Desperate teens say it is now almost impossible to find a summer job, as experts reveal the three factors that are to blame"--Daily Mail. 

    'A lot of the entry-level roles that once existed simply do not any longer,' Jaune Little, director of recruiting services at the human resources company Insperity, told The Associated Press.

    She added: 'Those that do exist are on leaner teams that have less ability and desire to develop and train someone.'

    As a result, teens are now competing with experienced adults for the same jobs, who are prioritizing 'more skilled workers even if they are overqualified.'

In other words, they are competing against immigrants and other adults that lack the skills and training to get other types of jobs. I guess if you are an employer that is forced to pay $15 or $20/hour, you don't want to waste time training a teenager that might only stick around for a few weeks or months. 

This Is What The Wealth Pump Looks Like In Action

 

The wealth pump is that difference between real median earnings and real GDP per capita. You will see that the real wages tracked the growth of real GDP--meaning that workers and employees shared in that increased GDP--until about 1970. Part of the reason that employers were able to break earnings loose from GDP was because of what is shown in the chart below:

 You will notice that the inflection point in this graph was also about 1970. This is why a man could support his family on a single income in the 1950s and '60s, but two income households struggle today. 

Wilder: Space X and the AI Bubble

John Wilder's latest piece, "SpaceX®: The Final Frontier?", discusses the SpaceX initial public offering, profitability, and financial bubbles. 

    Under normal economic theory, money is more or less efficiently used because it chases after business opportunities and investments that will make those businesses a profit, meaning that it is flowing to companies producing goods and services which people actually want and need. This is why socialism and communism always fail--instead of going into things people need and want, it goes where some soulless bureaucrat thinks it should go, which is often for social engineering programs. 

    But bubbles are driven by speculation (a financial term meaning gambling) which chases hype and the fast buck. Unfortunately, it draws in a lot of money that would otherwise have gone to stable, useful investments into a gambling frenzy until it the bubble pops and the money is gone into the pockets of the best gamblers leaving the late comers high and dry.  And if the bubble was big enough, and drew in enough money, it will result in a recession or, even, a depression. 

    The concern that John has is that this IPO was not to support SpaceX or even Starlink, but is intended to fund Musk's venture into AI. And investment in AI (by everyone, not just Musk) may well be a bubble.  

Wilder: Why We Are Getting Poorer

Why are we getting poorer as a nation? If your first thought was "inflation," that is only part of the story. John Wilder's latest piece, "Singapore Got Rich on a Tiny Rock. We’re Getting Poor on a Vast Continent. Here’s Why" explores the factors that allow a country to become rich and explains how the U.S. has taken the wrong course. The factors are:

• Raw materials (whether your country has them or easy access to them from another country)
• Cheap energy.
• Capital investment (e.g., factories and infrastructure)
• Drive and ingenuity
• Skilled labor and physical craftmanship
• The right kind of legal environment
• A scoring system that rewards the productive

And as John points out, the U.S. has squandered its advantages in every category. For example:

    Capital investment?  We offshored it to China and called it “globalization.” Factories, machine tools, entire supply chains are all gone.  Sure, some capital flowed back in the form of stock buybacks and McMansions, but the productive kind?  That’s building Chang’s future now. 

    Drive and ingenuity?  Our schools turned into indoctrination camps.  Merit is racist, excellence is oppressive, and every kid gets a participation trophy.  The spark of genius gets smothered under layers of “equity.”  Steve Jobs couldn’t get hired at Apple™ today and with the regulations, couldn’t even start Apple© today.

    Labor and craftsmanship?  We imported millions of low-skill workers who consume more in services than they produce in output, while our own kids rack up six-figure debts for gender studies degrees.  The skilled trades?  Stigmatized as “dirty jobs” for decades.  Now we wonder why nothing gets built on time or on budget.  Welding productivity is half what it was in 1960.

John also discusses why the it was allowed to happen (it has enriched those in charge) and warns that our opportunity to turn it around will be painful.

    John doesn't discuss what it will take to turn things around, however, but I suspect that it will take something akin to a revolution or the rise of a Caesar. 

    For instance, as to the legal environment, John observes that we need "[e]nough government to stop anarchy, not so much that you end up with Pol Pot’s people party. ... Too little law and warlords loot your factory.  Too much and the bureaucrats loot it for you." But what we have is "more government than ever [with] regulations thicker than a Manhattan phone book ..., agencies with SWAT teams, and a bureaucracy that treats citizens like the enemy." 

    John is underestimating the amount of regulations. Just the federal regulations--the Code of Federal Regulations ("CFR") was 190,260 pages spanning 245 volumes at the end of 2023, and more is added every year." And these figures don’t even account for the unknown number of guidance documents issued by agencies that, although not legally binding, direct the interpretation of their rules," the cited article adds.

    It’s safe to say that the regulatory burden on everyday Americans is not alleviated in any meaningful sense as long as the code keeps increasing. This breadth and complexity makes it nearly impossible for any normal citizen to know what the law requires.

    The Framers understood the threat posed by an ever-changing, ever-increasing mass of laws. Such legal metastasizing “poisons the blessing of liberty itself,” as James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 62. And the purpose of representative government is defeated, according to Madison, “if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they…undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

    Are we truly free if we have no reasonable way of knowing the laws to which we’re subject, when the overwhelming majority of them come from unelected bureaucrats instead of our elected representatives in Congress? With a six-figure code, the ominous maxim “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” becomes a reality for too many Americans.

How will this change? Congress isn't going to engage in mass repeals of law; nor will the bureaucracy willingly eliminate their regulations. And even if they did, the individual states similarly have their administrative codes and regulations. 

    We've never seen governments as complex as today's which complexity is only possible because of the immense wealth of the country to afford it. There is no historical precedent. Nevertheless, Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies argues that societies collapse when the costs of maintaining their complexity outweighs the benefits. So one resolution is that our society collapses. This could be mass uprisings where the elites are simply killed (e.g., the Mayans) or disintegration from wars or revolution (e.g., the Bronze Age Collapse).

    Or the government could be forcibly reformed such as through Caesarism: the rise of someone with the military and political power to simply cut through the Gordian knot of the bureaucracy and regulations. Oswald Spengler noted that every great civilization goes through a period of rule by a Caesar type figure who wields the necessary force to change the laws and control competing factions, and predicted it would be the end stage of democracy. 

    Obama's comment in the face of Congressional deadlock--"I've got a pen, and I've got a phone"--is an example of an attitude of Caesarism. Even Trump's aborted attempt to use DOGE to uncover and stop government waste and corruption is an example, even if it stalled in the face of opposition from the judiciary, Congress, and the bureaucracy. 

    But perhaps there will come a President that will have sufficient support that he or she can simply ignore Congress, the courts, and/or the bureaucracy.  We saw this recently in El Salvador where President Nayib Bukele and the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly removed corrupt judges that prevented any meaningful reform and control of criminal gangs. Bukele tweeted, for instance: 

If you don’t impeach the corrupt judges, you CANNOT fix the country.

They will form a cartel (a judicial dictatorship) and block all reforms, protecting the systemic corruption that put them in their seats.    

We may live to see "interesting times".      

Trump's Secret Weapon Against China

 An interesting piece from Rod Martin (h/t Instapundit) which asks "Is Scott Bessent Working to Crash the Yuan?" Bessent is the current Treasury Secretary. But back in the day, Martin relates, Bessent was part of the team at Soros Fund Management that “broke the Bank of England.” So he knows how to crash a country's currency. Martin hypothesizes that Trump wanted Bessent to head up the Treasury Department because of his experience in exploiting weaknesses in currencies, and wanted to apply that against China. 

    Martin explains:

Speculators do not destroy sound currencies by magic. They attack when governments defend lies. They see the contradiction before politicians admit it, before central bankers explain it away, before the press corps discovers it three years too late and pretends it was obvious all along. Britain broke. The pound fell. The Bank of England lost.     

[snip]

    China is not Britain in 1992. The analogy is not exact, nor does it need to be. Britain was defending a currency arrangement markets no longer believed. China is defending something far bigger: the fiction that an overbuilt, overleveraged, export-addicted dictatorship with too little domestic consumption and evaporating foreign direct investment can keep growing forever while its own people are trapped behind financial walls and its customers are shutting their doors.

    That fiction is embodied, crystallized in the yuan.

    The yuan is not a normal currency. It is not the dollar. It’s not even the euro. It is a managed instrument of Communist Party control. A real reserve currency requires trust. It requires convertibility. It requires deep and open capital markets. It requires the rule of law. It requires confidence that the government will not trap your savings the moment they become politically inconvenient. 

As Martin continues, Trumps tariffs go the heart of the matter because it forces China to defend one of its lies at the expense of revealing the contradiction on other points. 

Trump isn’t just raising costs. He is forcing choices. He’s making China decide which lie it wants to defend first: the lie that its export machine can survive without unrestricted access to the American consumer, the lie that its domestic economy is healthy, the lie that the yuan is trusted, or the lie that Communist capital controls are compatible with global financial leadership. 

Guns America: Why You Are Getting Poorer Every Year

You might think you are getting poorer each year because of inflation, mostly driven by out of control government spending financed by debt. But there may be more about it than that according to this article from Guns America: "Why You’re Getting Poorer Every Year." The author begins:

    Every once in a while, someone explains what you’ve been feeling… but couldn’t quite put into words.

    This is one of those times.

    In a recent sit-down with Peter McCormack, macro analyst Lyn Alden didn’t sugarcoat it. She didn’t hedge it, she didn’t dress it up in economist jargon, she just said it.

    “Do you believe we’re living through a slow financial collapse that the majority of people don’t even recognize is happening?

    Her answer, “I do.”

Sip on that for a moment. Because if you’ve been wondering why everything feels tighter (even when you’re making money) you’re not crazy. You’re just living inside the system she’s describing.

    First, inflation plays a role: "It comes from debt, money creation, and whether people realize it or not, debasement." Because that is what is inflation over time: debasement of a currency. And the reduction of your purchasing power. 

    Second: "This is where things go from uncomfortable to outright brutal. Alden explains that the real winners in this system aren’t the savers. They’re the borrowers. The ones who can take on debt, buy assets, and effectively 'short the currency.'"

    Third: It is a form of theft. "Not theft in the traditional sense. No one’s kicking your door in and grabbing your wallet. It’s quieter than that. It’s your dollar buying less. Your savings shrinking in real terms. Your future is getting more expensive."

     Fourth: Some suggestions:

     If the system is slowly eating away at your money, doing nothing isn’t a strategy. You don’t need to go extreme, but you do need to be intentional.

    Start by getting out of pure cash. If your savings are just sitting there, they’re losing value every year. Think in terms of hard assets (real estate, commodities, long-term equities) that hold or grow value over time, not just dollars in an account.

    Understand how debt actually works in this system. Used wisely, fixed-rate debt can work in your favor as inflation rises. But there’s a big difference between leveraging assets (buying something that pays you) and drowning in liabilities (buying something that drains you).

Related:  

• "What Caused Rome to Collapse?" Inflation/debasement of the currency, predatory levels of taxation, unsustainable government spending, and a contracting economy. 

An Enemy Hath Done This: DEI Policies

 The American Spectator reports that "The DEI Business Case Is Falling Apart," noting studies that DEI hiring practices and policies, at best, do not provide any benefit to businesses, and generally harm businesses. 

    For instance, the article relates, influential reports published by McKinsey "claim[ed] that companies with more racially and ethnically diverse executive teams earn higher returns." Yet when researchers attempted to replicate these studies, "the alleged advantage of diverse executive teams largely disappeared." That is:

The replication study found no meaningful difference in profitability between firms with highly diverse executive teams and those with little diversity. Whether using earnings, returns on assets, revenue growth, or shareholder returns, the relationship was basically flat.  

Moreover, the replication study found that the McKinsey data could actually be interpreted not as more diverse boards do better, but that "more successful firms hire more diverse executives later on, not that diversity drives financial success." But even that is not the end of the story, because other studies have found that more diverse boards lead to more monitoring of executives. The result?

One major study of almost 2,000 American firms  finds that when boards increase gender diversity, they impose noticeably stronger monitoring of executives. While oversight is necessary, too much of it slows decision-making, restricts managerial autonomy, and makes firms less responsive to changing conditions. The study concludes that the average effect of gender diversity on firm performance is negative and can reduce value in well-managed firms because heightened monitoring becomes a burden rather than a benefit. 

     And this is for companies that voluntarily diversify their boards of directors. What about when corporations are forced to diversify their boards?

... When Norway introduced a law requiring corporate boards to be 40 percent female, firms had to rapidly appoint new directors from a limited pool of qualified candidates. Stock prices of affected companies fell immediately following the announcement and did not recover in subsequent years. The same pattern occurred when California implemented its board diversity law. Research shows that markets responded by marking down the value of companies forced to replace experienced board members with individuals selected primarily to satisfy demographic quotas. These findings suggest that rapid, mandatory diversification weakens board quality by reducing the emphasis on experience and expertise.

    The results are even more dire for a company that implements DEI practices to its general hiring. Studies show that "[c]ompanies with higher Diversity Scores experience dramatically more workplace accidents" and "face more consumer complaints, more controversies relating to customer health and safety, and lower overall customer satisfaction." Moreover, "[p]roduct recalls, quality controversies, and delays are also more common in these firms. Such problems point to a drop in average employee competence and operational discipline." 

    How to remedy the situation? The CEO of a company called Bolt had a solution:

    When Ryan Breslow’s fintech company Bolt lost $10.7 billion in value, he had a radical diagnosis: HR needed to go. “They were creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow, 31, said at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”

    Breslow, who stepped down as CEO in 2022 but returned in 2025, cut 30% of the workforce in April and replaced HR with a smaller “people operations” team focused on training.

Major Lithium Deposits Found In U.S.

From Science Alert: "Vast, Untapped Source of Lithium Found in The US Could Last 300 Years." China most disappointed:

    There could be nearly 330 years' worth of lithium hiding beneath the Appalachian Mountains, which stretch like a stony spine across the eastern United States.

    New research from the US Geological Survey suggests that the Appalachians may contain around 2.3 million metric tons (2.5 million US tons) of recoverable lithium oxide locked away in pegmatites, the grainy, granite-like rocks that form as water-rich magma cools and crystallizes deep within the Earth.

    "This research shows that the Appalachians contain enough lithium to help meet the nation's growing needs – a major contribution to US mineral security, at a time when global lithium demand is rising rapidly," says Ned Mamula, Director of the US Geological Survey (USGS).

    Therefore, mapping US mineral resources may help reverse the country's recent reliance on lithium imports. 

Wilder: The AI Bubble

The latest from John Wilder at Wilder, Wealthy & Wise is "What Does A Bubble Look Like?" John discusses why he thinks we are looking at another investment bubble, but one that goes far beyond prior bubbles such as the housing bubble or the dotcom bubble. An excerpt:

    I could go on for another three thousand words about how frothy we are at this moment in time, but this time really is different.  Most of this bubble is built on debt to build things that are impossible to build in promised timelines using resources that aren’t available.  At least when the dotcom bubble burst, we had lots of unused fiber optic cable in the ground and when the housing bubble burst, we had houses left over.

    What happens when a debt bubble bursts that hasn’t built the data centers it promised and evaporates a huge percentage of the venture capital that was sunk into it and all we have left are mountains of Nvidia© chips sitting in warehouses surrounded by confused pimps?

    Well, that’s just another way that A.I. will change the world, I guess.  

 Read the whole thing. 

Netanyahu Reveals Timeline for American Economic Decline

From "Netanyahu's shock plot to split with US as Trump's Iran peace proposal unravels sending oil prices soaring" at the Daily Mail. The article relates:

    Benjamin Netanyahu plans to 'wean' Israel off American financial support, just as Donald Trump's Iran peace proposal unravels and oil prices surge. 

    The Israeli prime minister was pressed on the financial support his country receives from the US during an interview with CBS News anchor Major Garrett on Sunday. 

    'Do you believe it's time for the state of Israel to reexamine and possibly reset its financial relationship to the United States?' Garrett asked, to which Netanyahu responded, 'Absolutely.' 

    'And I've said this to President Trump. I've said it in - to our own people. Their jaws drop,' the leader continued. 'I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.'

    Netanyahu went on to say he wants to begin the drawdown immediately rather than wait for the next Congress, phasing it in over the next decade, a push that comes as American support for Israel declines. 

In other words, within the next 10 years, he does not see the United States being wealthy enough to support Israel at the level it is accustomed to. 

Wilder: The Poor Get Hit First

In his latest piece, "The Poor Get Hit First," John Wilder points out signs that money is tightening and prices are starting surge all across the globe. This will be a problem in the third world and those living on the margins:

    Let’s talk basics.  Even if the price of rice tripled, I wouldn’t notice much.  Rice is still cheap for me.  If I have to give up steak, I can just eat some rice, right?  But that’s not a universal truth.  If all a person in some third-world hellhole can afford is rice, and the price doubles, welcome back, world hunger.

    What a lot of people missed is that world hunger was a solved problem.  People just didn’t starve anymore, except in Hollywood®, and that wasn’t real starvation, it was just skinny starlets mainlining Ozempic® and calling it a diet.

    Global food production had climbed so high that famine was basically extinct outside of war zones and socialist experiments.  Now the dominoes have started falling.

    I expect revolutions popping up like mushrooms in Africa.  Hungry people turn into angry people, and angry people with AK-47s equals a revolution. ...

But, he predicts, it won't stop there, but will hit India and poorer parts of Asia.  It will strike Europe as well: limiting grandma to just one small meatball a week isn't enough to save the system. The refugees that have flooded into Europe will get restive. And here in the U.S.? I've been seeing local news stories featuring farmers complaining of not having enough illegals to work the farms and the high price of diesel fuel--and, if you don't know, almost all the equipment on a farm relies on diesel. But Wilder continues:

    Inflation didn’t hit the hedge-fund guy first.  It hammered the guy stretching a paycheck from one tank of gas to the next.  Fast-food prices doubled, rent climbed, and the folks at the bottom discovered that “essential workers” are only essential until the margins get squeezed then they can be easily be replaced by illegals or H-1B Indians.

    The poor lose first because they have no cushion, no skills that the market values, and no margin for error.  When times get tight, luxury items like $272,000 non-profit jobs disappear, and even the mid-level grift starts to evaporate.

    This culling isn’t random.  Societies have always had layers.  The top layer produces, saves, and innovates.  The bottom layer consumes more than it creates.  When the pie stops growing, the bottom layer gets the smallest slice first.

    The credentialed political-grifter class is about to get the same lesson.

And, according to Peter Turchin, these are exactly the type of people that will resort to revolution or civil war.  

Meme of the Day

 

Source: Barnhardt Memes

Survival Lilly: Game Over For Germany

Survival Lilly has posted a follow up video to her one from last week describing how bleak things had become in Germany. In many ways, this video is even worse than the one from last week. She begins by sharing an article entitled "Germany's Economy At Point Of No Return". The basic thrust of the article is that German businesses are taking more in depreciation than they are spending on new equipment. In plain terms, it means that, overall, German businesses have stopped investing in new plants and equipment ... at least in Germany. The article goes on to note that NGOs (i.e., the freeloaders that live off government subsidies) are crowding out the real economy; and those businesses that can do so are moving out of Germany.  She also notes that since 2018, Germany's industrial sector has lost about1/5 (20%) of its production volume; and the government is reporting a 79% reduction in corporate tax revenue compared to last year, along with a 14% decline in income tax revenue. In short, as Lilly explains:

Once the continent's industrial engine, Germany has spent the last decade dismantling the foundations of its prosperity through energy and immigration policies driven more by ideology than evidence or good sense. The results have been rising costs, falling competitiveness, social disorder, and political backlash. 

In other words, Germany is undergoing "decolonization". 

    You might think that term simply means countries dispossessing themselves of colonies. But just as the term "anti-racism" actually means reverse racism, decolonization means a reverse colonization and destruction of the European peoples. That is, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger." And to accomplish this, quoting from the introduction to The Camp Of The Saints, "[t]he First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to humanity." 

VIDEO: "Game over for Germany - Part 2"
Survival Lilly (14 min.)

Wilder: The Reset Is Happening

While a shift from the Middle-East to American oil producers is good for oil companies, it isn't good for the American consumer and most businesses who are going to pay higher energy costs. I just saw a headline for an article about airlines trying to charge fuel surcharges to people who had already booked flights. In his latest piece, "The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect," John Wilder discusses the downstream impact on prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And he ends with this cheerful thought:

    And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:  the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years.  Both of those props just got kicked.

    Hard.  The reset isn’t coming in some distant future.  It has already started.    

Read the whole thing.  

    But sometimes as some doors close, others open up. The special status the the dollar has enjoyed is the "petro-dollar"--that oil sales were denominated in dollars so, in order to buy oil, countries had to have U.S. dollars. One of the purposes of this war with Iran seems to be to perpetuate the petro-dollar.  But that is not the door that is opening. Rather, the opportunity that is here--if the U.S. is willing to seize it--is Helium-3. And there is only place we can get to that has it in abundance--the Earth's moon. 

    I know that some of you are probably sick of my bringing it up, but I'm not the only one talking about it: from the New York Post article, "Last man on moon, Apollo 17’s Jack Schmitt, reveals secret hidden in lunar dust that could spur space-travel boon." The article begins:

    The last man to walk on the moon says he can’t explain what it was like up there but that more and more people may learn soon enough — thanks to a trillion-dollar industry hidden in the lunar dust.

    Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, 90, an Apollo 17 astronaut who spent three days on the moon in 1972, told The Post this week that there is a superfuel locked within the lunar dust that could provide Earth with an abundance of clean and safe energy for generations.

    “I’ve been working on this for many decades — harvesting the light isotope of helium-3 from the moon,” said Schmitt, who is from New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque.

The article goes on to explain:

    Helium-3 is a key ingredient needed to run nuclear fusion reactors, which operate with extreme efficiency and without the dangerous radioactive waste today’s fission-based power plants create.

    But helium-3 is extremely rare on Earth — so rare that it’s rationed by the federal government — meaning fusion reactors have never been viable on a large scale.

    But the moon is believed to be ripe with it, since the sun has been bombarding its atmosphere-free surface with the isotope for billions of years and building it up in the grey lunar dust.

    Harvesting it could be a trillion-dollar industry providing humanity with clean and safe energy for generations, Schmitt said.

    As a result, he co-founded a business, Interlune, that’s developing the technologies to make it happen.

    “We think the business case has finally made it,” Schmitt said, explaining the process of extracting helium-3 from moondust is more akin to agricultural harvesting than mining.    

New fusion reactor designs, including from Helion, are premised on a  Deuterium-Helium-3 fusion reaction. Why? As Helion explains: "Among other benefits, D-He-3 maximizes our ability to directly capture electricity, a large advantage when building a fusion system for commercial deployment." The article goes on to explain:

    D-He-3 fusion requires the highest temperatures, about 200 M°C, which does pose an engineering challenge due to the need for stronger magnets and putting more energy into the system. However, both challenges can be addressed through designing better magnets or more efficient circuits. This reaction produces a 3.6 MeV alpha and a 14.7 MeV proton. However, with a D-He-3 mixture, D-D reactions can still occur, resulting in five possible outputs: 3.6 MeV alphas, 0.8 MeV helions, 14.7 MeV protons, 1 MeV tritons, and 2.45 MeV neutrons.
 
    Despite the higher temperature requirements, some key advantages of D-He-3 begin to emerge. The most significant is the type of particle it emits. Protons, unlike neutrons, can be contained using magnetic fields, reducing the material wear and shielding requirements compared to a D-T reaction. D-He-3’s reactions yield substantial energy – 18.3 MeV – more than tritium, and without the higher-energy neutrons. This is a significant benefit in Helion’s systems, as we directly recover electricity from this process. By not relying on a thermal conversion, we do not need to build large cooling towers and steam turbines; instead, we can pull energy directly from the reaction. For a commercial system, this helps to increase efficiency and reduce capital and operating costs.  

    And while helium-3 isn’t abundant on Earth, it can be created through a process of breeding within the D-D reactions. Additionally, the tritium created through the process decays into helium-3, which we can use in our fusion process.  

Pulsar Fusion, which recently achieved "first plasma" in a fusion rocket test, also plans on using a D-He-3 reaction for its fusion rocket. 

American Blockade of Iran

Trump's latest Middle-Eastern ploy is a take on the classic saying: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." As you probably already know, talks between the U.S. and Iran broke down over the weekend with Iran insisting on keeping its nuclear weapons program. Up to this point, Iran's biggest point of leverage was to blockade the Strait of Hormuz to any ships that did not pay "protection" money to Iran. Trump has responded by imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz on any ship leaving an Iranian port facility or which has paid Iran for safe passage. The U.S. Navy has also begun mine removal operations. Meanwhile, supertankers headed for the Gulf of Arabia have changed course for the United States--some even making literal U-turns. From the preceding post on X:

    American oil exports are approaching record levels. Gulf Coast refineries are running at 95% capacity. Supertankers that were mid-ocean on their way to the Persian Gulf literally turned around and headed to Texas. That's not a metaphor. Ship tracking data shows them doing U-turns in the Indian Ocean.

    Meanwhile China, which was getting 45% of its oil imports through Hormuz and paying basement prices for sanctioned Iranian crude, is now competing with Japan and Europe for the same expensive American barrels. Chinese manufacturers are already raising prices 20% on goods headed to the US.

    So to summarize: Iran played its biggest card and the main result is that the United States became the world's emergency gas station and China's cheap energy subsidy evaporated.     

France Removes Gold From NY Federal Reserve

The French Central Bank believes it has seen the writing on the wall. From the Daily Caller: "French Bank Yanks Gold Bars From US, Makes $15,000,000,000." From the article:

France’s national bank removed and sold all of its remaining gold held by the U.S. Federal Reserve, netting a profit worth nearly $15 billion, multiple outlets reported.

The Bank of France announced it netted 12.8 billion euros — equivalent to $14.8 billion — after it finished pulling 129 tons of gold from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and replacing it with higher-quality gold stored in Paris, Radio France Internationale (RFI) reported Saturday. The massive amount of the precious metal represented 5% of the bank’s total reserves. 

The article notes that this represents "the first time in about 100 years that France did not keep any of its gold at New York City’s Fed branch, mining.com reported." The article indicates that other central banks began considering this option after the U.S. froze Russian assets, fearful that they might be caught up in similar asset seizures. It was just that France was the first to act. The article continues (bold added):

    “France is the only one that’s formally moved. Germany and Italy have talked about it,” Hanke, who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the DCNF. “The discussion, the anxiousness and the risk of having their assets somehow frozen if they were in the United States came up when in February 2022 the central bank assets of Russia were frozen — because the standard before that had been these were untouchable central bank assets.”

    “And so that was the start of things,” Hanke said. He noted that then-U.S. President Joe Biden “led the charge” in breaking from the precedent in which the “reserves of central banks were off limits” and “had sovereign immunity.”

    “They had sovereign immunity, but we froze them,” the applied economics professor said. “Biden led that charge. That came from the United States. Everybody else piled on, but the lead was the United States.”  

The article further adds:

    Former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget J.D. Foster told the DCNF that, “symbolically,” France moving the gold means it is “further cutting ties with the United States, making it easier in the end for the United States to cut ties with Europe.” He said France’s ties with the U.S. are disappearing “one by one.” 

    “Substantively, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. These gold reserves are relics of a bygone era. We have fiat currencies now,” he said. “And think about it: $15 billion in gold reserves when trillions flow through New York markets hourly, some days every minute.”

    “France, and most especially President [Emmanuel] ‘lame-duck’ Macron, remains a clown show. They are only doing this out of petty spite, like a three-year-old’s temper tantrum,” Foster added, referring to the French leader, who is term-limited in 2027. “Make no mistake — if somebody wants to give me $15 billion in gold bullion, I won’t complain, but relative to national output, the money supply, the vast flows of capital internationally, it’s a flea’s fart in a hurricane.” 

 Related?  "Trump mulls punishing NATO countries that didn’t assist Iran war effort: report"--The New York Post.