In the year 1157, the Republic of Venice was engaged in a bitter trade war with its arch rival the Byzantine Empire. While the rest of Europe was barely surviving thanks to the stupidity of their centrally planned feudal economies, Venice was a place where anyone, even the most illiterate peasant, could work hard, take some risks, and become fabulously wealthy. In short, it was the medieval America. And unsurprisingly its economy was booming. Trade was the bread and butter of the Venetian economy. Venice had the fastest ships, the boldest captains, the shrewdest merchants, and by far the best legal and economic system. In the other corner was the Byzantine Empire, a superpower in decline. Even the emperor at that point was more of a figurehead as nearly everything in the economy was contro

Much has been written about Warren Buffett having sold a substantial amount of stocks. And his company, Berkshire Hathaway, is sitting on a record $325 billion cash pile as a result. Buffett has often said that his preferred holding period for an investment is "forever". So the fact that he has sold so much stock has many observers proclaiming that "Buffett is predicting an imminent stock market crash." Except that he's not. Buffett is a pretty transparent guy who has never been afraid to speak his mind. If he were predicting a crash, he'd probably say it. Besides, Buffett has sold plenty of stocks in the past; this is not an anomaly. In 2022 and 2023, for example, he dumped shares of Chevron, Activision Blizzard, Taiwan Semiconductor, and HP. This time around he sold off some shares in Ap

There’s a really dirty four-letter word that starts with a “C”. No, not that one. This is a word you simply cannot say around Greta Thunberg, otherwise her ears will melt off of her face. I’m talking about coal. And it’s about to have its moment. One reason is that global population grows each year, and every one of them needs energy in some way or another—to keep the lights on, to fuel the machines that harvest their food, to power virtually everything that keeps life going. Second, the world population generally becomes wealthier each year. Billions of people in China, India, and Southeast Asia are better off now than they were ten years ago. As economies develop, they consume more food, more goods, more electricity— and all of that requires more energy. More efficient technology offsets

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It’s very hard to overstate just how obliterated the global economy was following World War II. Europe was in ruins, with many major cities having been bombed back into the Stone Age. Japan had literally been nuked. And just about every economy around the world that still had any manufacturing capacity was pumping out guns, bullets, and bombs; there was hardly any economic activity taking place that wasn’t somehow tied to the war. It was sort of like Covid— the regular economy was shut down... and governments discovered very quickly that they couldn’t simply turn the global economic machine back on with the flip of a switch. The transition from obliterated war economy to booming peacetime economy was an incredibly difficult one. So, in 1948, the United States (which was among the only deve

At a campaign rally earlier this month, President Trump promised that if he is elected, “We will keep the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It is currently under major siege. Many countries are leaving the dollar.” What he’s referring to is the extreme privilege that the US has, i.e. that central banks around the world hold the US dollar in reserve as form of savings. The entire world also conducts trade in US dollars. Since World War II, the vast majority of cross-border transactions among international businesses have been settled using US dollars. Today, US dollars account for 54.8% of central bank holdings around the world. That’s still a lot, but it’s down from around 70% in the late 1990s, according to the latest IMF data. And the US dollar is currently used for 42% of inter

On the 26th of February in the year 1401, an English priest named William Sawtrey was hauled before his Archbishop to learn whether he would live or die. Sawtrey wasn’t a witch or satanist, or even a criminal. He was, however, an early leader in a breakaway religion known as Lollardism, which both the Church and the English government viewed as a major threat. The Lollards followed the basic plotline of Christianity. But they criticized the heavy taxes that people paid to the Church, and they questioned the ways in which the Church spent its riches. More importantly, the Lollards believed in the separation of church and state. They also strongly opposed war and preached that all Christians should live in peace. Those last points were enough for the English government to treat the Lollards

On the evening of March 5, 1770, a thirteen year old boy named Edward Garrick deliberately provoked a British soldier who was on guard duty outside the Boston Custom House. It was a dumb thing to do. Like a lot of teenagers, Garrick didn’t think before running his mouth. He even poked the soldier in the chest with his finger... until the soldier ultimately struck him in the head with a musket. Now, Boston at the time was a hotbed of revolutionary spirit. Whereas today, people in the northeast seem to be happy to pay outrageous tax rates to incompetent politicians, back in the late 1700s they were ready to go to war over unfair taxation. So when that British soldier struck Edward Garrick, an angry mob quickly formed at the scene. By nightfall the soldier had been reinforced by several armed

1866 was not an auspicious year to start a business in the United States. America had just been devastated from a five year long civil war-- one of the bloodiest conflicts in US history. Plus the country was in the midst of a severe economic recession. 1866 was also the year that a major investment firm in London went bankrupt, triggering a worldwide financial panic. Capital was scarce. Interest rates were high. And overall business conditions were pretty dismal. But despite such obvious challenges, 36-year old Hiram Bond Everest of Rochester, New York still saw tremendous opportunity in the burgeoning oil sector, and he started a business called Vacuum Oil Company. Oil was primarily used for lighting in kerosene lamps at the time. But Everest, a former science teacher, conducted extensive

On Friday morning July 23, 1982, news broke around the world that a consortium of Japanese companies was acquiring Rouge Steel… which until that point had been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor Corporation. It was unthinkable: the Japanese were buying up an American steel company??!? But it was just one of the first of many, many more acquisitions to come. Within a few years, Japanese companies and investors had bought up large chunks of prime US real estate, major companies, and just about any US asset they could get their hands on. Sony bought the iconic Columbia Pictures (which had recently released cinematic gems like Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid). Japan’s Bridgestone Corp. snapped up the legendary Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. Mitsubishi bought 51% of the world famous R

On August 4, 1964, two US Navy destroyers were conducting intelligence patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam, when the task force commander grabbed the radio and reported that they were under attack by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The news traveled very quickly all the way to the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara briefed President Lyndon Johnson on the situation. They demanded retaliation. And only a few days later, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution… which essentially authorized full blown military conflict in Vietnam. The only problem, of course, is that the supposed August 4th attack in the Gulf of Tonkin never actually happened. McNamara himself admitted decades later that the attack was made up, and a declassified report from the Nati

You see, the subsidies from the Defense Production Act are worth $10,000 or more per car. Manufacturers are desperate to get their hands on those subsidies. Because noncompliant manufacturers will have to charge $10,000 more for the same car. Whichever manufacturer is the first to produce a 100% Made-in-the-USA EV will dominate the entire market. And there’s simply no way that U.S. car manufacturers that don’t qualify for the credits can stay alive. So there’s nothing they won’t do to get their hands on U.S.-mined lithium. Now, that includes outright purchasing lithium mines to keep competitors from snatching them up first. For example, General Motors has invested $650 million to develop a mine in Nevada. It’s literal vertical integration—and it’s making lithium mines the hottest commodity

The United States used to have a strong grip on the global lithium supply. In 1996, the U.S. produced over a quarter of the world’s lithium. A quarter century later, it’s at less than 1%. The grand total of lithium mines producing in the U.S. now? One. The actual production number is so embarrassing it’s withheld on U.S. Geological Survey reports. Meanwhile, lithium has transitioned from barely-used metal to vital energy component. But it’s estimated that the solitary Silver Lake mine, located in Nevada, produces enough lithium for about 80,000 EVs. That’s less than 1% of what the U.S. will need by 2030—for EVs alone. And that doesn’t even include the demand from utility-scale battery storage to make the switch to renewables. In other words, Silver Lake is a puddle. The United States despe

The country that controls the global refined lithium supply will be the superpower of the 21st century. And it’s only a matter of time before that country emerges. Right now, 96% of lithium is mined in just four countries: Australia, Chile, Argentina, and China. But that’s deceptive. Because the countries that have the lithium don’t necessarily own the lithium. You see, China is never content with its own resources. And it is rapidly moving to corner the global lithium market—in a bid to become the only powerful electro-state in the world. To get there, China has systematically steamrolled its way into the other three major lithium mining countries. The second-largest lithium reserve in the world, located in Australia, is underwritten by Ganfeng Lithium, a Chinese company. Greenbushes, the

When Sextus Julius Africanus was born in the city of Jerusalem around the year 160 AD, the Roman Empire was still near the peak of its power. By the time Sextus was born, Antoninus Pius had ruled the empire with a steady hand for more than twenty years; his reign was peaceful and highly effective, and he left behind a strong economy and vast public treasury. The following year in 161 AD, when Sextus was still just a baby, Marcus Aurelius became emperor and ruled wisely for nineteen years as an assiduous, diligent philosopher king. Sextus was a young man just starting to make his way in the world when Marcus Aurelius passed away in 180 AD. And this is when things really started to unravel in Rome. Marcus Aurelius was followed by his complete dirt bag of a son, Commodus (who was probably eve

In the late summer of 408 AD, a barbarian army under the command of Alaric, king of the Visigoths, set out on a leisurely march across the Italian countryside towards the city of Rome… so that he could burn it to the ground. Alaric had been promised money by the Roman government in exchange for a military alliance between Rome and the Visigoths; but just before the money was supposed to have been paid, the Romans canceled the deal. Talk about a bonehead move. Alaric was a decorated warrior at the head of a powerful army. And the Western Roman Empire, by comparison, was barely even functional anymore. The government was bankrupt, the currency was a joke, the economy was in the dumps, the military was weak, the borders were nonexistent… and there was no sense of unity in Roman society. So it

Imagine you have a chocolate bar... You can touch it, hold it, and even take a bite from it. That chocolate bar is like real gold that you can physically see and hold in your hand. Now, instead of a real chocolate bar, imagine there's a picture or a certificate that says you own a piece of that chocolate bar. This piece of paper represents chocolate that you don't actually have - physically - in your possession. In the same way, the paper gold market is a system where people can buy and sell gold without actually owning the physical gold. It works like this: Instead of buying real gold bars or coins, you can buy pieces of paper or digital certificates that represent a certain amount of gold. These pieces of paper or certificates are like promises that say, "Hey, you own this amount of gold

At 11:15am on July 7, 1919, a US Army convoy consisting of 81 military vehicles departed Washington, DC for a perilous journey to San Francisco. The army convoy wasn’t responding to an emergency or preparing for battle. In fact, since World War I had just ended, the United States was shifting focus back to its own domestic challenges. And one of those challenges was the pitiful state of America’s road network. There were hardly any roads in the US back in the early 1900s, and most of the ones that existed weren’t paved. That was actually the entire purpose of the Army’s 3,251 mile cross-country convoy: to demonstrate just how BAD the roads really were. Among the convoy’s participants was a 28-year old Army officer named Dwight Eisenhower, and he wrote extensively about the journey. He obse

Remember, the Federal Reserve is supposedly pulling out all the stops right now to tame inflation. And as part of that campaign, they’ve been aggressively raising interest rates for more than a year without any regard or even awareness for the consequences. Just three days before Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse back in March, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve told Congress that everything in the financial system was just fine. Yet SVB went bust (three days later) in large part BECAUSE of the Fed’s interest rate hikes; the bank had bought $120 billion worth of US government bonds, most of that in 2020 and 2021. Now, US government bonds are supposed to be the ‘safest’ asset class in the world. But even government bonds lose value when interest rates rise; this is the immutable law of the bo

George Washington was already on his heels in late 1777. The British army had recently taken New York and Philadelphia, plus Washington had suffered recent defeats at the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown. Washington knew that unless he could regroup, rearm, and retrain his beleaguered forces, the fledgling American Revolution could soon be lost. So on December 19, 1777, his army of 12,000 marched to their winter encampment site in southeastern Pennsylvania-- an area known as Valley Forge. According to George Washington himself, his men lacked clothing, shoes, food, blankets, etc. giving rise to an almost mythological level of suffering that winter. And it’s true-- conditions were incredibly harsh. There were very few supplies available, and nearly 1 out of every 5 soldiers died from di