The current tax legislation isn’t some thoughtful reform to benefit Americans. It’s a quickly planned looting through a broken window in our nation’s character. – John Hussman
John Hussman wrote a must-read essay titled: “Three Delusions: Paper Wealth, A Booming Economy and Bitcoin (link).” The crypto/blockchain delusion has exceeded the absurdity of the dot.com and housing bubble eras. I was shorting fraud stocks happily in both eras. I’m short a company now called Riot Blockchain. If you look at its description in Yahoo Finance, it bills itself as a developer of technologies applied to animal (“non-human”) medicine. It recently changed its name to Riot Blockchain from Bioptix Inc. Prior to calling itself Bioptic Inc, it called itself Venaxis. Just the name change to Riot “Blockchain” moved the stock from $4 to $40…insanity.
The Company changed its name in early October to Riot Blockchain. Based on this, Canaccord was more than happy to fleece investors by raising $37 million for Riot in a private placement. But that’s okay I guess because one has to be a “sophisticated” investor with the financial qualifications to have your money taken from you by Wall Street and Bay Street in order to invest in private placements.
Fundamentally this system is dissolving. The Government economic data, like GDP, CPI and employment is worthless. The numbers produced by the Government are rigged to support political propaganda about the economy and the financial system. Economic reports released by the private sector generally contradict the Government’s reports.
Silver Doctors invited me to participate in their weekly Metals & Markets podcast. We chatted about gold, cryptocurrencies and the economy. Gold is currently the only asset that has not participated in this “Irrational Exuberance 2.0.” Of course, gold ran from $250 to $1900 from 2001 to 2011. We discuss why now is time to move investment funds back into gold for its next cyclical bull move in the context of a much bigger secular bull market in real money:
If you are interested in finding junior mining stock ideas, as well as relative value trade ideas in larger cap mining stocks, click here to learn more about the Mining Stock Journal. New subscribers get a copy of all of the back-issues with their subscription.
The current superstitious faith in cryptocurrencies is merely a 21st century rehash of the ancient lunacy of Gnosticism, the belief that there is no objective reality and that an elect minority of spiritually more highly evolved persons are destined to transcend all limitations of matter upon spirit. Which is exactly what Lenin and the Soviet Communists magically believed, and failed.
Yes, and the masses looking for those enlightened ones to lead them to the promised land. The Life of Brian for some reason comes to mind. Maybe because I find these CB geniuses to be Pythonesque in their unintentional comedy routines, such as Yellen last week, spouting nonstop gibberish to the adoring audience of mainstream media script readers. The only question I didn’t hear was whether she was the new Messiah.
One thing is clear, folks. This insanity is only going to grow or at best will plateau for a bit before growing further. Most of us who visit this blog have above average IQ and are appalled at what’s going on but guess what, our opinion doesn’t matter. TPTB germinate an absurd idea, plant it, nurture it and do whatever it takes to popularize it. Without the implicit support and regulatory authorities how the f would this insanity have reached its current level? How is it that betting on the outcome of a sporting contest is illegal in the US but betting on a so called virtual currency backed with nothing, backed by nobody and used by criminals to move money around not illegal? If TPTB wanted to shut this pyramid scheme down, they would have shut down any and every website dealing in cryptos overnight. But for whatever nefarious purpose, they keep it alive. I won’t be shocked if Bitcoin trades in 6 figures in a year. I myself have never “invested” in any cryptos and probably never will. It is impossible to guess the end game of this and I don’t want to be left holding the bag when something happens.