John Rubino's Substack

The biggest challenge for aspiring long-term investors is the long-term part. That’s because Mr. Market is a manic/depressive who likes nothing more than torching paper profits via brutal corrections. Gold and silver are obvious examples.

The US government has been trying to minimize its interest expense by borrowing at the short end of the yield curve, where rates are lower. The result? Massive amounts of Treasury paper must be rolled over each year. The current number is $8 trillion. Apparently, the plan was to cut short-term interest rates back to zero, where all those 3-month Treasuries could be rolled over for free, thus shrinking interest expense even as debt continued to soar. But that’s not gonna happen.

Modern vehicles had already become “rolling surveillance devices” by the beginning of this decade. But that’s just the start. Much more dystopian tech is in the pipeline. Consider the following, from a couple of recent X posts: In new patents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (Serial No. 20250104469), Ford is envisioning a future where your pickup turns into a rolling police station.

Among the recurring questions subscribers submit, the most common involve the concept of “dollar collapse.” A prominent stockbroker, in fact, recently posed a version of this question in a note to his customers: When [analysts] warn that fiat currencies are dying, the logical follow-up question — one that almost never gets answered — is: dying relative to what, exactly? In other words, if the dollar is collapsing, what is it collapsing against?

President Trump is auditioning candidates for Fed chair (to take office in May 2026), with the main criteria apparently being who will cut rates fastest and deepest. So consider a near-zero Fed Funds rate a given for the coming year. But that’s just the beginning of a very complex process.

Once again, the regional banks are in trouble. This time, the crisis began with several commercial/industrial loan defaults and is progressing into yet another multi-billion-dollar bailout via the repo market. Here’s a concise X post with the details: Echo 𝕏@echodatruth While Everyone’s Distracted… Most people have no idea what just happened.

It seems that (surprise!) the US government has been systematically overstating job growth and then (when no one was looking) revising the numbers down to much lower, more ominous levels. The following chart shows the size and consistency of those revisions, resulting in over a million fewer jobs than initially reported. And it’s still happening. In Jun…

A few months ago, King’s College professor David Betz caused a stir by predicting that mass immigration would lead to civil war in the UK. Since then, things have been accelerating: A court allowed the UK government to house effectively unlimited numbers of migrants in hotels, despite growing unrest in affected communities. A government study of “migrant rape gangs” concluded that they are indeed real, and in the past were covered up by police and local officials who feared being called racist.

There are a lot of “xx priced in gold” charts floating around, most of which show that stocks, houses, and pretty much everything else aren’t actually going up in real (i.e., gold-adjusted) terms. They only appear to be in bull markets because we’re measuring them with declining fiat currencies. Here’s an unusual example: The Porsche 911 sports car has seen massive deflation so far in this century when priced in gold, as the metal has risen faster than the car’s sticker price.

After the past year’s epic run, you’d think gold would have displaced at least some other assets in mainstream investors’ portfolios. But apparently not. These two charts have been making the rounds on X, showing that during the previous decade’s gold bull market, gold-related ETFs saw their share of “implied allocations” rise dramatically. But that hasn’t yet happened in the current bull market, as both gold and gold miner ETFs seem to be an afterthought for the average investor.