What was the motive for the abysmal security?

Losing our minds.

This is my full interview with Demetri Kofinas in December 2023.

I just re-listened to it. Demetri is a very well-prepared and fairly tough interviewer, and I think I held up pretty well. I’m proud of it. If you’re following me here you might as well listen to it on a walk or drive and get a little broader perspective. It’s all un-paywalled.

You can find all my podcasts here.

If these outliers below are correct - and I hope they are not - it would be the absolute worst possible outcome for 95% of Americans.

This was friend of the show’s Mike Green’s comment:

Let’s hope so.

Just fyi, this bizarre historical M2 aberration has been fixed.

Link

Greg Weldon

“The problem with academics and politicians - you write all these theories that are based on 30 years of history, and all of a sudden things change, and there's no reason these theories should hold true, and yet this is how policy is run, based on these theories. It's the one of the dumbest things ever, and this is why I'm so glad that I dropped out after going to a single economics class at Colgate University. I immediately was like, this is gobbledygook, and - no offense to the academics out there - but unless you have skin in the game, unless you're in the markets, trying to determine the economy in the bigger picture - you don't have a clue, man, you just don't. You think you know about the markets.

If you like Weldon, here he is on the McAlvany Podcast. He’s one of my favorite traders to listen to, but he gets too apocalyptic at the very end for my taste.

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Michael Pento

“From the year 2008 all the way to 2022, 85% of that time real interest rates were negative, and when I think about negative real interest rates it's basically saying I can go out and borrow money - for example at 3%, and invest it in stocks and commodities and real estate, factories, mines, utilities, and get that inflation rate which is 6%, say, for example. So I'm virtually guaranteed to make money. Money is virtually negative in nominal terms. It's the same function as money being negative in nominal terms without inflation, so when money is free, and I get paid to borrow, what happens? You borrow a heck of a lot of it…we had negative real interest rates and that caused an asset bubble in stocks, an asset bubble in bonds, an asset bubble in real estate, and a massive credit bubble, okay?”

I guess we’ll never know who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines…