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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com
Heads up: there is now a video version of last week’s predictions piece, if you fancy:
Onwards …
I am bullish on America.
For all its failings, I think it’s still, as comedian Lewis Schaffer is forever telling me, “the greatest country in the world.”
The new administration has huge hurdles ahead of it - not least sorting out the excess spending on its military-industrial complex and atrocious healthcare system, though perhaps "system" is not the word I should be using. The administration also faces considerable resistance from its ideological opponents who prevail in the deep state.
But if Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK, et al. get just a third of the stuff they have planned over the line, then the economy is going to boom like hell. There is a lot of money in that country, a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, and a lot of opportunity. Just the size of the US alone means it is, in itself, an enormous market.
However, while the economy and the stock market are bedfellows, they do not always march forward hand in hand. How often this century have we seen stock markets boom while life for the ordinary working person becomes ever harder? Inflation, for example, eats away at his effective earnings, and he struggles to keep up, while the same inflationary dynamic actually pushes up stock markets.
The reverse can also apply. There might be an economic boom "on the street," but stock markets, on the other hand, might be flat. Perhaps they already advanced a year ahead of the boom in anticipation. Perhaps life made better for the American worker by, say, tariffs does not suit global companies like Apple, and so stock prices retreat.
So, while I am bullish on America, am I bullish on US stocks?
I must confess to being rather more ambivalent, as there are a number of headwinds and warning signs.
Let’s look at some of them.
First, there is the small (by that I mean large) matter of the US dollar.
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Enjoy!
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Here’s the original article if you prefer to read or listen”
If you are buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
And
If you haven’t already, take a look at my buddy Charlie Morris’s monthly gold report, Atlas Pulse. It is, in my view, the best gold newsletter out there, and, best of all, it’s free. Sign up here.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe -
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ICYMI (there were problems with the site mid-week), check out my forecasts for 2025, always one of my more popular pieces of the year.
He has invented an entirely new digital system of money with the potential to change the world as we know it. He has watched it grow to a market cap of over two trillion dollars, with as many as 100 million users worldwide, including actual nations, and the US President promising a strategic bitcoin reserve in his 2024 election campaign.
He has half the internet nosing about and trying to figure out who he is. His own coins are worth about $100 billion, making him one of the richest people on earth.
Yet he has managed to stay completely unknown and anonymous. It is almost unbelievable.
Never mind Big Foot, the Mary Rose or the Loch Ness Monster, the mystery of ‘Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?’ is perhaps the greatest mystery the world has ever known - or not known.
There have been thousands of investigative attempts, articles, blog posts and discussion groups involving probably millions of man hours dedicated to pinning down this man, with names bandied about from Elon Musk to little known computer scientists. They have all failed. Satoshi’s identity is as bulletproof as his code.
For my 2014 book, Bitcoin: the Future of Money?, from which today’s piece is taken, I ventured on the same doomed journey. I spent many months poring over the 80,000 words Satoshi wrote in the three years he was active online, looking for clues. What unusual words did he use? Does he make any spelling mistakes? Does he have any quirky grammatical habits? I analysed it in such detail I can tell you where he places brackets, how he uses hyphens, even how many spaces he uses after a full stop and how that changed – all in the hope of finding idiosyncrasies that appear in the writing of other Cypherpunks - clues which might lead me to him.
Profiling a genius – some broad brushstrokes
‘I’ve had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.’ Hal Finney
Satoshi reached such high levels of expertise in so many different fields that many believe he can’t possibly be one person. He is a polymath. It is not just the breadth and depth of his knowledge, but, more importantly, its specificity that makes him unique.
In order to first conceive a new system of electronic cash, one would have to have thought extensively about the nature of money and its history. Money is a subject that has found more interest in the last few years with the emergence of bitcoin, the 2000s bull market in gold, the financial crisis and the growth of libertarianism, but, in 2007–8, when bitcoin was conceived and first introduced, books and academic papers on the subject were few and far between. The subject did not have broad appeal.
How many of those who cared actually had the ability to design a system like this? It is one thing declaring what needs to be done; it is another putting it into practice.
Satoshi must have had expertise in computer coding, mathematics, databases, accounting, peer-to-peer systems, digital ownership, law, smart contracts, cryptography and monetary history.
He had to have had experience in academia. The act of submitting a white paper, its presentation, the impeccable referencing – it all denotes academia, even government.
It’s also easy to infer from the way bitcoin was launched that Satoshi had experience in open-source tech start-ups.
The resilience of the code suggests he had computer hacking experience. Moreover, his ability to keep his identity hidden, despite the fact that half the internet is trying to figure out who he is, suggests significant practical experience in staying anonymous. It also means he has the trust of those who know him, if anyone did, to keep his secret.
Then there’s the matter of his prose. It is consistent and of such a high standard it seems he must have had experience as a writer – perhaps he was a blogger, an academic or an author. He was also quite humble and dismissive of his ability in this regard. ‘I’m better with code than with words’, he said.
It’s clear from his posts that he had the awareness to see shortcomings in his system, and the patience not to try to do too much too quickly. He had the foresight to perceive problems before they arose and the meticulousness to prepare for them. He appears to have remained calm and measured in the face of difficulty, but also of his own success. He treated those two imposters just the same. Signs of arrogance are hard to find.
Then there’s the way that bitcoin was introduced to the world.
PR, like economics, is not an exact science. Sometimes something gains traction, sometimes it doesn’t – and there’s no explaining why. Bitcoin has been a PR masterstroke. The coverage it has received has been enormous. It gets more publicity than gold, which is the oldest form of money there is. Satoshi cannot take all of the credit for this, but he has to take some of it. He understood when to make his ideas known, at what point to release his creation into the open-source world and he had the self-efacement to let go of it for others to develop. He promoted his idea with huge under-statement – but the scheduled creation of bitcoins meant there would be no shortage of bitcoin-holders to do the promoting for him.
So we can add an understanding of both PR and psychology to his list of qualities. His knowledge of how people on the internet, in the open source world and in large institutions work, allowed him to progress his creation.
Finally, he has a certain honesty. Despite Bitcoin’s similarities to a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, he never pumped-and- dumped his creation. Tempting though it must have been, he never sold the bitcoins he mined. That also suggests he already had money.
There are not many people like this.
From mathematics to computer programming to economics and monetary history to politics to PR and psychology to cryptography to business acumen and vision to plain old written English – in all of these fields he excelled. To cap it all, he’s probably good-looking too.
It’s early in history to be drawing this sort of comparison, I know, but there are many parallels between Satoshi and Isaac Newton. Newton was a brilliant scientist and mathematician, of course, and an alchemist. But he was also Master of the Royal Mint. He redesigned England’s monetary system, putting us onto the gold standard on which Britain’s colossal progress during the next 200 years was built.
If you haven’t already, take a look at my buddy Charlie Morris’s monthly gold report, Atlas Pulse. It is, in my view, the best gold newsletter out there, and, best of all, it’s free. Sign up here.
First instinct
Many believe that Satoshi was Hal Finney, the veteran programmer, who invented reusable proof of works, one of the models on which bitcoin was based. This was my first instinct. Often such “first instincts”, for reasons I cannot begin to explain, prove correct.
When Satoshi first announced bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, nobody replied. The message was ignored for two days. In the short-attention-span land of the web, two days is a long time to wait for some feedback on something you’ve spent 18 months working on. Two days is a long time to wait when you might have nailed something Cypherpunks had been dreaming about for 20 years.
The first reply came from Finney. Was he replying to himself in order to generate some interest and discussion – to bump his thread? Replying to your own posts, known as ‘sock-puppeting’, is not uncommon.
Let us pursue this line of thinking a little further.
Finney was born in 1956 – in that same two-year golden window as so many computer-scientist geniuses that would change the world (from Bill Gates to Tim Berners-Lee to Steve Jobs) were born – and spent his life working on cryptographic systems. He was number two to Phil Zimmerman, the pioneer in the field, for many years at the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) Corporation, where they developed the most widely used email encryption software in the world.
Such were his beliefs in privacy, freedom, and Cypherpunk, Finney was known to spend many nights writing and developing code for free, just because he believed in the work.
In 1993, he published the paper, ‘Detecting Double-Spending’. Solving the double-spending problem (ensuring the same money cannot be used twice) was, of course, the key problem with digital cash. It was what Satoshi was so excited about when he proposed Bitcoin. In 2004, Finney developed the ‘reusable proof-of-work’ (RPOW) system, which coders regarded as a brilliant step forward – but his system never saw any economic use until b itcoin.
Finney is one of the few people to have the background and expertise to have developed bitcoin – but he is also an obvious person to take an immediate interest.
In his very first reply to Satoshi’s announcement, he wrote:
“As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.”
The comment shows extraordinary insight. Many now see this “amusing thought experiment” as inevitable. But could it also be somebody trying to get others excited? Very possibly.
(By the way, ‘thought experiment’ is an expression Satoshi himself uses – though it is not uncommon in coding circles).
Of the many names touted as Satoshi, Finney’s writing style is one of the few that match. The major difference is Satoshi used British spelling and Finney does not. There is a similar calm, understated tone, similar use of language, similar punctuation habits: two spaces after a full stop. In stylometrics tests carried out by John Noecker Jr., chief scientific officer at text analysis experts Juola & Associates, Finney consistently scored high. (However, veteran cypherpunk blogger, Nick Szabo, scored higher).
Then I noticed both Finney and Satoshi had ‘@gmx.com’ email addresses. (GMX is a free email provider based in Germany. Many Germans use GMX, while Americans and British tend to gravitate towards Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo. Today they would probably gravitate towards P rotonmail). Was this just coincidence – or was it a clue?
Why did Satoshi disappear?
In December 2010, Satoshi made his final post and then disappeared from the internet.
Why?
Perhaps to protect his anonymity in the face of rising interest from the media and, more significantly, the authorities: to protect his own safety as the WikiLeaks panic began to erupt. (After Wikileaks was shut out of the financial system, many began sending it bitcoin. The effect, ironically, was thus to make it an extraordinarily wealthy organisation).
But there is also the possibility that he disappeared because he was ill.
In 2009, Finney was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the same disease from which Stephen Hawking suffered. It is, for the most part, fatal and claims its victims within two to five years. ‘My symptoms were mild at first,’ he says, ‘and I continued to work, but fatigue and voice problems forced me to retire in early 2011. Since then the disease has continued its inexorable progression.’ Finney, eventually died in August 2014.
In March 2013 he said, ‘Today, I am essentially paralyzed. I am fed through a tube, and my breathing is assisted through another tube. I operate the computer using a commercial eye-tracker system. It also has a speech synthesizer, so this is my voice now. I spend all day in my power wheelchair. I worked up an interface using an Arduino so that I can adjust my wheelchair’s position using my eyes. It has been an adjustment, but my life is not too bad. I can still read, listen to music, and watch TV and movies. I recently discovered that I can even write code. It’s very slow, probably 50 times slower than I was before. But I still love programming and it gives me goals.’
Could a terrible illness be the reason Satoshi withdrew?
Finney was one of the first to mine bitcoins. What did he do with them?
I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me. In retrospect, I wish I had kept it up longer, but on the other hand, I was extraordinarily lucky to be there at the beginning. It’s one of those glass half full, half empty things.
The next I heard of Bitcoin was late 2010, when I was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value. I dusted off my old wallet, and was relieved to discover that my bitcoins were still there. As the price climbed up to real money, I transferred the coins into an offline wallet, where hopefully they’ll be worth something to my heirs. Those discussions about inheriting your bitcoins are of more than academic interest. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech-savvy. I think they’re safe enough. I’m comfortable with my legacy.
Finney sold many of his bitcoins in order to pay for medical care, many at around $100. Satoshi never moved his.
If you are buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
We are all Satoshi
Finney was a key player in the development of Bitcoin, no doubt. He was one of the first to ask real questions. He managed to understand from the start the inner workings of the Bitcoin protocol and its potential. He explored the weaknesses in the Bitcoin code – one of them is even named 'the Finney Attack'. He had many exchanges with Satoshi on the Bitcoin forums as they progressed the code and developed new versions. He asked question after question. But these very exchanges show there were two people talking. On January 10th, 2009, for example, Finney publicly complained to Satoshi that Bitcoin had crashed when he tried to receive a transaction. If it was his own code, and he was transacting with himself, he would surely have quietly fixed it himself.
Moreover, coders all agree that Finney's coding style – and the style of the comments written in the code – is different from Satoshi’s. Also, Finney preferred to code in the language C, whereas Bitcoin is coded in C++. This is something Finney himself confirms: 'I’ve done some changes to the Bitcoin code, and my style is completely different from Satoshi’s. I program in C, which is compatible with C++, but I don’t understand the tricks that Satoshi used.'
Shortly before the publication of this book, the Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg published an interview with Hal Finney. Finney was now too ill to even speak – he could only raise his eyebrows to say yes. His son showed Greenberg fifteen email exchanges between Satoshi and Finney from January 2009. They mainly focused on bugs Finney had found in the code, to which Satoshi replied with fixes - and notes of thanks.
Greenberg was also shown Finney's bitcoin wallet – with the transfers between Satoshi and Finney made back in 2009. As Greenberg notes, the wallet evidence and the Gmail timestamps in the emails would have been hard to forge.
To cap it all, there is the fact that in 2009, at precisely the same moment Satoshi sent time-stamped e-mails, Finney, a keen runner, was photographed in the middle of a ten-mile race. Nobody, not even Satoshi Nakamoto, can be in two places at once.
Bitcoin could not have happened without the work of Finney.
If Satoshi Nakamoto was several people, Finney might have been one of them. But if Satoshi is an individual, Hal Finney was not him.
This is an extract from my 2014 book, Bitcoin: the Future of Money? I hear the audiobook’s excellent. ;)
If you missed them (there were problems with the site midweek), check out my forecasts for 2025.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe -
Bitcoin to $200,000k anyone? Sterling to crash? The US dollar to 20 year highs? As for silver …
OK, folks. It’s predictions time.
As ever, the eternal conflict applies: the more outlandish the prediction, the more entertaining it is to read about - but the less likely it is to actually happen.
On these pages, we attempt to strike a balance.
Here are 15 things to look out for in 2025.
Here is a video version of this article, if you prefer:
1. The long overdue correction in the UK housing market finally begins.
“Record Boxing Day bounce,” says Rightmove. Read beyond the headline and you get this: “Our data shows a 26% increase in the number of new properties listed for sale compared to Boxing Day 2023, which previously held the record.” They’re trying to spin more sellers.
More sellers means more supply.
Meanwhile… houses are overpriced. The economy is not booming, so people have less money. Labour’s higher taxes also mean buyers have less capital to spend. Higher mortgage rates mean there is less money to borrow, and, thus, less newly created money to come into the market and prop up prices.
The rich are not coming to Britain - they are leaving, if they haven’t already left.
More supply of houses, but less money to buy them with.
Meanwhile, stamp duty is a massive deterrent to buyers. Never mind people choosing not to move because of it, anyone buying a second or third home - they’re as good as gone: who is going to pay 5% stamp duty for a second or third home? Not many people, I wouldn’t have thought.
More supply, less money, fewer buyers.
Then there is the general perception of the economy. Psychologically, people are not feeling rich, nor are they bullish about the economy, meaning fewer people will take the plunge.
What about investment from overseas?
See my earlier comment about stamp duty. The cost of buying drives away investment.
Moreover, the UK is not currently well looked upon. Rich Americans, for example (normally a good source of buyers), are not going to pile in given, one, the costs of buying and, two, how the UK is currently perceived over there.
Then Labour are going to loosen planning laws and build a whole load more houses - well, they say they are - meaning even more supply.
As if that wasn’t enough, 2026 is the year the 18-year-cycle in property turns down.
If houses don’t turn down this year, I’ll declare this market permanently immune.
2. Keir Starmer survives
His premiership is already looking dicey. It’s one crisis after another, and it’s difficult to see how he survives, especially with all the rape gang stuff.
However, I think short-term PMs became a bit normalised in the Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak era. Cameron went because of Brexit. May went for the same reason. Johnson got his landslide, handed to him by Farage, but then Covid came along, and Johnson, under a lot of pressure from the Left, got the shove from Tory MPs with whom he was never particularly popular anyway, worried about their seats. Not having been elected, Truss and Sunak were toast before they even started.
None of that applies to Starmer. I admit he is looking shaky, particularly under this extraordinary pressure from Elon Musk. But I still think it’s too early for Labour MPs, worrying about their seats, to give him the shove, and it’s normal for a PM to last the full term - what happened under the Idiots Tories was not normal - so somehow Starmer survives the year.
3. Gold hits $3,000.
I’m not wildly bullish about gold at the moment, at least in US dollar terms, though I still think it is absolutely essential you own some. One, because at some point the China gold story is going to hit the mainstream, and suddenly there will be a scramble for gold. It probably won’t be this year, but you never know, and gold is one particular lifeboat you want to have ready in advance.
Second, if you are in the UK, I think sterling has problems - more on this in a moment - and your wealth is much better stored in shiny yellow metal than it is in British government digital stuff. (You would normally say British government paper, but it isn’t paper anymore).
On which note, if you are buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
And
If you haven’t already, take a look at my buddy Charlie Morris’s monthly gold report, Atlas Pulse. It is, in my view, the best gold newsletter out there, and, best of all, it’s free. Sign up here.
$3,000 - landmark number though it is - is only 12.5% higher than where we are. We could easily see that by June.
4. Microstrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) becomes a top 100 company by market cap.
Currently, Deutsche Telecom (market cap US$145 bn) is 100th. Microstrategy is $85 billion at time of writing. It joins the elite. What a pick this has been for readers.
5. Bitcoin …
I was in Miami on New Year’s Eve at Michael Saylor’s - strictly on reconnaissance, of course - and one thing I learned there was that roughly half of corporate donations during the 2024 Presidential Election - $245m according to the Federal Election Commission - came from the crypto industry. Coinbase alone contributed $75 million.
I’m a beneficiary, so I’m not complaining, but, really, you have to say, buying such favour is more than a little dodgy, even if that is how the world works and has almost always worked.
But it means the likelihood of the Republicans delivering on their pledge for a strategic bitcoin reserve is likely.
The US isn’t going to buy a million coins straight away, but it may well buy 3-400,000 in year one. That sends bitcoin a lot higher.
The prediction?
It goes to $200,000 then crashes.But then it crashes. Cos that’s always what happens.
6. Sterling has big problems.
We spend too much. We make too little. We have an incompetent Chancellor, who is something of a stranger to the truth. We have too much unpayable debt. We are on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
My eight-year cycle has turned down. This is the year it hits the skids.
A sterling crisis will hurt house prices too.
7. X thrives, Blue Sky dies, Blogging Blue Skies
Blue Sky is just a left-wing tantrum, same as Parler and Gettr, a few years back, were right-wing tantrums. It won’t last. People gravitate to where speech is freest - with a little bit of large network thrown in. I am a huge, huge Elon Musk fan. I think he is a force for immense good (finally, the rape gang story is getting the attention it deserves), though perhaps the algorithms have made Twitter/X a little too much the Elon show. Nevertheless, Twitter/X is highly addictive, it is where the narrative is set, and those who have stomped off will mostly return.
Elsewhere, people don’t watch films like they used to - I went to the cinema the other day and it was pants. They don’t read books like they used to - they tend to pick their phone up first. But when they grab their phones, in amongst the doom scrolling, they do read articles and essays. So blogging - and platforms like Substack, where speech is also free - thrive too.
8. The S&P500 Rises 10%
Year one of the electoral cycle is traditionally the weakest (year 3 is best), but the S&P has a decent year nonetheless.
9. Oil ranges.
Oil does not crater, as many predict, with the Trump-inspired increased US production. But nor does it moonshot. A $60 to $90 range - something like that.
10. Small Caps Thrive
Small is beautiful and small caps make a welcome return. I know I’m a broken record on this one, but one day it will happen. Probably when my back is turned.
11. The US Dollar Index breaks out to 20-year highs.
Somewhere near 117-8 is the high.
12. The BRICS don’t come out with a proper US dollar alternative … yet
13. Silver disappoints … as always
$33 is the high, $22 the low.
14. Despite all the crap, the world becomes a better place to live.
We live longer, we eat better, tech keeps improving things. We advance. AI makes us more productive and betters living standards.
15. Your Bruce-y bonus sports prediction.
Liverpool win the league and the three promoted teams Ipswich, Southampton, and Leicester all go back down. I’ve stopped following football, but that’s what my son told me would happen.
Happy New Year everyone. I hope the Universe grants you everything you are hoping for and more.
I’ll come back and mark these at the end of the year. 2 points for a hit, 1 point for an ok, 0 for a miss, and -1 for an epic fail.
Until next time,
Dominic
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe -
Last year I did one of those Landmark Forum personal development courses, which, by the way, I recommend.
One of the takeaways was that one should publicly declare one’s goals and aspirations. In doing so, several things happen.
You make yourself more accountable. Knowing that others now know your goals pushes you to take stronger action to achieve them. You thus become more committed to them. The act of public statement also solidifies goals both in your mind and in the public perception, thereby moving them beyond an abstract idea to something more concrete. The act of articulating goals also clarifies what it is you are actually looking for and may even give you new insights.
Support networks can also emerge: friends, family, peers, contacts are more likely to help in some way, if they know what you are trying to achieve. They might introduce you to helpful people. Those who have been down similar paths might be able to offer advice, assistance or collaboration.
You will have something to keep referring back to, better enabling you to track progress, which will further reinforce the whole thing.
Finally, making such a declaration makes you vulnerable, but that is actually empowering and liberating. It reduces internal conflict; while others might empathise and want to help you for your honesty.
With all this in mind, I thought I would share my New Year resolutions with you. I hope you find some interest, amusement or even motivation in them.
Some are quite personal, but for reasons stated above, I’ve decided to post them anyway. I hope it is not TMI.
I always tend to overdo it with my resolutions - reach for the sky and then, even if you fall short, you still end up pretty high.
So here they are:
Health, Body & Mind
* Stay fit and strong. Weights two or three times a week. Something aerobic two or three times a week. Plenty of stretching. Daily deadhangs, pelvic floors, breathing and neck exercises.
* Keep drinking less.
* Fast once a week.
* Eat more protein.
* Get good at lucid dreaming. (Lucid dreams are when you are aware you are in a dream, while you dream - dreaming is something I have got very interested in of late).
* Read at least 15 books. I read a fair bit, but most of it is online. I hardly seem to read actual books any more - my phone always takes priority. Put this right.
* Try and do some mindfulness meditation stuff once per week.
Money
* Invest well and grow my net worth - and the net worth of Flying Frisby readers - by at least 20%.
On which note, if you are buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
Work & Career - Laughter, Acclaim, Opportunity
* Continue producing consistent, interesting content for this Substack and grow it - both subscribers and revenue - by 25%.
Apropos of which, why not subscribe?
* Get better at PR and marketing, significantly grow my online presence - both as comic and commentator - and build a bigger following. ( I have a plan here).
* Finish my musical about the Peasants’ Revolt.
* Write my Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
* Write stage and screen adaptations of Kisses on a Postcard.
* Make something significant happen with Kisses on a Postcard. I’ve put that in bold because it is perhaps the most important of all to me. We are talking about something that could be as big as Oliver! or The Sound of Music, if there are any producers reading this.
* Try and get some comedy gigs in the US and grow a presence there
* Get more gigs and better gigs in the UK, working towards a full-scale tour.
* Keep writing the songs, making people laugh and produce another album by year end (I try and produce one a year).
* Get my new book, The Secret History of Gold, as good as possible; and market it as well as possible, especially in China and the US. (It’s due out in August).
* Practice my uke and singing most days and get better at both.
A lot of asks: I think I might be going against everything I said here on Wednesday.
Enjoying this article? Then why not subscribe …
Love and Family
* Be the best father I can be to Samuel, Eliza, Lola and Ferdie. Set a good example. Love them unreservedly. Help them fulfil their potential. Spend more time doing memorable things with all of them, but especially Eliza and Ferdie, as they lost out a bit this year.
* Find a nice place to live and settle down happily with Miss Downing in a lasting, fulfilling relationship.
* Be a good son to my mother, and justify the unreserved love she has shown in me.
Not a lot then.
I realise I am asking a lot of both myself and the universe, but the whole point of these resolutions is to be bold.
I’m not going to say I won’t achieve all these goals, as that defeats the purpose (I never manage all of them but I’M NOT GOING TO SAY THAT). If nothing else, at least I’ll have something interesting to write about this time next year.
This isn’t all about me. What about you? What are your goals? What are they? Let’s discuss them in the comments.
I wish you a 2025 packed with happiness, growth, fulfilment, success and—fingers crossed—lucid dreams.
Dominic
Tell someone about these resolutions.
PS A few final bits and pieces:
* If you haven’t already, take a look at my buddy Charlie Morris’s monthly gold report, Atlas Pulse. It is, in my view, the best gold newsletter out there, and, best of all, it’s free. Sign up here.
* If you missed my New Year piece, it’s a good one. Here it is:
* I recorded this interview with Rob Moore the other day, which you might enjoy:
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe -
I was at a big family function on Christmas Eve, where I ran into my brother-in-law, who used to be a world champion boxer.
David Haye is his name. Way back when, his sister and I were married, and he is uncle to my two oldest children. I don’t know if that makes him former brother-in-law. Whatever.
I still maintain that the world doesn’t quite know what an exceptional boxer David was. His speed and power were second to none. The wins in France against Jean-Marc Mormeck to win the cruiserweight World Title, after being knocked down in the fifth, and then in Germany against the unbeaten Russian Nikolai Valuev, who at 23.4 stone and 7 feet, was the largest heavyweight in history, were two of the greatest British overseas wins ever.
In winning both cruiserweight and heavyweight world titles, he achieved something only two other boxers, Evander Holyfield before him and Oleksandr Usyk after, have managed. That tells you how good he was. Yet, he is not quite seen in the same light as those other two, largely because of injuries and losses later in his career.
I’ve known David since he was 16, and he was going to be the heavyweight champion even then. It was almost all anyone in the family talked about.
What I always most admired about him is his singularity and clarity of purpose; that and his breathtaking, fearless honesty. He hides nothing. He tells it like he sees it and then lives with the consequences. Jordan Peterson would be proud.
It’s that singularity of purpose - that winning mentality - I want to talk about today.
As a youngster, David used to spar with a fighter who was naturally more gifted but never made it through the amateur ranks. “He would rather be the guy who could have made it,” David used to say. “The guy sat in the pub 10 years from now telling everyone he could have made it. He would rather be that than take the necessary risks and make the necessary sacrifices to actually make it.”
I was always incredibly struck by that attitude.
Burn the ships: have no plan B
We all met up at David’s mum and dad’s, my old in-laws, on Christmas Eve. All our kids were there, and it was a lovely family do. David’s son, Cassius, who is 16, is turning out to be quite the tennis player. I reminded them of a story from when Cassius was seven or eight.
We were having lunch, and I said that tennis was a great sport to get good at because, unlike, say, football, if it doesn’t work out, you can always get a job as a tennis coach. You can go anywhere in the world and have a pretty nice life.
I looked to my right and saw David fuming, “What are you telling him that sh*t for? Why are you putting those kinds of doubts in his head?”
I was thinking like a risk-manager, I guess. The sports stars of old always used to get a trade first. Not so David.
His mentality reminded me of a story about Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, which I tell in my new book on gold to be published later this year. Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519. His purpose was to find gold and to conquer. He had 508 soldiers and 11 ships. On landing, he scuttled 10 of them. It meant there was no escape. His men now had to win - or die.
Speaking of gold, have you signed up for Charlie Morris’s monthly gold report, Atlas Pulse? It is, in my view, the best gold newsletter out there, and, best of all, it’s free. More here.
Later that night, David and I back-and-forthed on texts a bit, and I told him the Cortés story. And so we come to the point of today’s missive - and it’s an appropriate one, given we are in the season of New Year's resolutions.
David sent this message back in reply, which I think is one of the most brilliant texts - about winning, clarity, singularity of purpose - I have ever received. So I publish it in full here:
Yes, I’ve heard the same story, and it’s a lesson that resonates deeply with me—not just in the abstract, but in how I’ve lived my life and shaped the mindset of my children. When Cortés sank his ships, he left his men with no option but to succeed. That’s not just a story of conquest; it’s a metaphor for the winning mindset. When there’s no retreat, no Plan B, the path becomes clear. The mind and body focus completely on achieving the one goal that matters.
That same principle was drilled into me from an early age. My dad told me I could box aged 10, but only if I was the best. There was no room for half-hearted effort or second thoughts. From the moment I said I wanted to be the heavyweight champion of the world—the pinnacle of the sport—every decision I made aligned with that goal. There was no ambiguity, no backdoor exit. Winning wasn’t just a possibility; it was the only outcome.
That’s the mindset I’ve passed on to Cassius and Kingston. He wants to be the best tennis player in the world, and he knows what that means: living full-time in Spain, training in the blazing heat on clay courts, and pushing his body and mind to the limit every single day. He understands, like I did, that greatness demands clarity and sacrifice. It’s about burning the ships—eliminating all distractions and doubts—so there’s only one way forward.
Winning isn’t an accident or a stroke of luck. It’s the result of relentless dedication and a mindset hardwired from the very start. It’s about creating an environment where success is the only option, so the journey becomes as clear as the destination. That’s how champions are made—whether in the ring, on the court, or in life.
Share this message with a friend.
We don’t all want to be number one. Many of us are content with what we have. But if you are serious about becoming top dog, then that text message - from someone who has been there and done it - should be put to memory.
I look at my own life, and I’m the very opposite: jack of all trades, master of none. Comedian and financial blogger. What - how does that work? I've also been: prolific voiceover artist, podcast host, TV presenter, actor, author of three books, boxing ring announcer (for Hayemaker Boxing - who says nepotism doesn’t exist?), and a million other things I can’t remember. Even within comedy, my career is disparate: comic songs, stand-up, MC, witty raconteur, lectures with funny bits. Gold or bitcoin - which is it? Why not both...
I’m occasionally asked why I am not more well known than I am. There’s your answer. I do too many things quite well instead of excelling at one.
I think it’s partly because I get interested in stuff. But it’s also a defensive thing, I’m sure. If one doesn’t work out, I’ve always got the other to fall back on.
Here is one of my resolutions for 2025: do fewer things better.
What do you think? Please post your thoughts in the comments below.
Happy new year, everyone. Let’s hope it’s a belter.
Buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times? I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
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Interview recorded at Labit 2024 in Buenos Aires with Matyas Kuchar, who organises Bitcoin Prague, Europe’s biggest bitcoin conference.
A pleasant chat about the state of bitcoin, and, in particular, how far advanced bitcoin adoption is in the Czech Republic.
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Every January, I like to make some predictions about the year ahead. Then, in my final post of the year, which this will probably be, I go back and review them. That’s what we are doing today.
Before I begin, just a couple of things:
* In case you missed it, check out Friday’s piece on North American tax loss selling. It has 9 ideas for short-term trades, which could come good by February.
* And there is now a video version of "The Chainsaw and the Swamp: A Tale of Two Economies" for your Sunday morning viewing pleasure.
Right. Here we go …
Predictions are funny things. The more outlandish the prediction, the more entertaining the copy, but the less likely it is to actually happen. What is more important: getting lots of eyeballs or being right?
I like this exercise because it demonstrates just how much perspective can change over time. While we can change strategy as events develop, what I wrote a year ago does not, so when you look back at stuff you got wrong, you can look foolish, even if you changed tack in real time. On the other hand, if you got stuff right, people go - well that was obvious.
So the rules of my little game are this: I score two points for a direct hit, one for a good call, zero for a miss, and minus one for a "David Lammy on Mastermind" fail.
I made 15 predictions. Here they are:
1. The Great Decline goes on.
I was pleased with this one, even if it was rather negative.
“Everywhere the state’s tentacles reach remains a drain on productivity. Our once-great institutions continue to fall apart, like zombie meth addicts, stumbling towards dysfunction... The ordinary worker desperately trying to improve his lot is bled dry by taxes, inflation, housing costs, and the voracious state monster. Fiat loses yet more of its purchasing power. The South Africanisation of everything continues.”
Gosh, it’s depressing and negative. Things may be changing on the other side of the pond, but they are not in Europe. Two points.
2. Gold breaks out to new highs and goes to $2,400.
And some. $2,790 was the high. We’re now at $2,620. Two points.
3. Bitcoin goes to new highs as well.
Yup. We are at $98,000 as I write. $108,000 was the high. Two points.
4. For reasons I don’t understand, ethereum outperforms bitcoin.
Ethereum always seems to move later in the cycle and by more, hence the prediction. But in 2024 bitcoin outperformed. Zero points.
5. The US dollar trends sideways.
It didn’t. The US Dollar Index began the year at 100 and ended about 8% higher around 108. Another big fat zero.
6. Sterling has problems.
Cable began the year at around $1.27 and it’s now at $1.25, having been as high as $1.34. So it’s down a bit. But the eight-year cycle low that I am looking for has not materialized. I’m sure it’s coming, but zero points.
7. The Tories are eviscerated.
Pleased with this one.
They had their chance and they blew it. Come the General Election this year, the voters are unforgiving. … The SNP is similarly annihilated. The shortcomings of our political system are there for all to see. But nothing that needs to change does.
Roughly 80% of the country did not vote Labour, yet they got 63% of the seats. Incredible. And they call it democracy. Two points.
8. Uranium to hit $125/lb.
Nope. The highest it got was $105/lb, and that was in January. It spent the rest of the year declining; it's now at $73. Minus one. Totally wrong.
9. Fast and processed food companies have problems.
I think I am early to this. Let’s see what RFK does. But, by way of proxy, McDonald's is flat on the year; Burger King (Restaurant Brands International) is down 14%; KFC is off about 10%.
Good call. Two points.
Seed oils are losing.
10. Good year for the Japanese yen.
It has to go up sometime right? It’s so cheap.
Nope. It went down. Minus one.
11. The S&P500 has a good year.
I’ll say. It’s up 25%. Way above expectation. Two points.
12. Small caps outperform.
Apart from a brief spell in summer, they didn’t. It feels like they are starting to, but nope. Zero points.
13. UK house prices. Atrophy and stagnation, but no meltdown
That feels about right. About 50% of stuff on the market isn’t selling, apparently. I’m not surprised; the cost of moving is so high. Two points.
14. Silver. Can it stage a meaningful rally above $30?
Nope, I said. It went to $34 in October. Now it’s $29. Was that rally meaningful? Well, it did better than I thought it would. Zero points.
15. Liverpool win the league; Sheffield United, Burnley, and Luton are relegated.
Got the losers right but not the winners. 1 point.
All in all, not a great showing. 13 points.
Oddly enough, whenever I score low on the predictions, I have a much better year in the portfolio. That was the case this year, where we have had some real winners in the Flying Frisby: bitcoin and MicroStrategy, obviously, but also Lightbridge and Novavax too. Meanwhile, the low-risk Dolce Far Niente portfolio is rocking it.
Happy Christmas everyone. Thank you for being a subscriber.
And why not gift someone a subscription this Christmas?
I’ll have some predictions for 2025 early in the new year.
Until next time.
Dominic
PS Don’t forget:
* In case you missed it, Friday’s piece on North American tax loss selling has 9 ideas for short-term trades, which could come good by February.
* Plus the video version of "The Chainsaw and the Swamp: A Tale of Two Economies" for your Sunday morning viewing pleasure.
Become enlightened.
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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
There is a video version of this article here, if you prefer.
Here is the world I think we are heading into over the next couple of years.
On one side of the Atlantic, we have Argentina and its new president, Javier Milei, taking a chainsaw to the state in every conceivable way. I was there last month and I fell head over heels in love with the place. Every day it seems another state body is having its budget cut.
It’s like everything I argued for all those years ago in Life After the State - Why We Don’t Need Government is suddenly happening in the real world, and it is wonderful.
The result of all this is an economic boom that is starting to take everyone’s breath away – even free market acolytes are surprised.
You must invest in Argentina. You must have a position. What is happening there is equivalent to Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, China at the turn of the 21st century, or the UK and US at the beginning of the Reagan-Thatcher era.
With libertarianism being the dominant belief system of the Internet, and Milei, the poster boy for anarcho-capitalism, an internet sensation, you can rest assured that Argentina’s success story is not going to be kept a secret. The Internet is going to let everyone know about it.
Then to the north, we have the USA. Who was the first foreign leader to be invited to meet President-elect Donald Trump? You betcha. It was Javier Milei. That tells us where things are going.
We have passionate libertarians Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy taking the knife to government and the deep state – I cannot emphasise enough how gripping a belief system libertarianism is once it takes hold - look what it’s done to me - and it has clearly taken hold of these two.
We also have a Trump administration that is much more organised and wiser than the previous incarnation, as well as more state shrinking. It knows who its enemies are and it seems ready for them.
The US may be “minarchist-light” compared to Argentina, but even so, an economic boom is coming to this most entrepreneurial of countries. A lot of people are going make a lot of money.
So you must also have a position in the US. It is already the world’s biggest economy. How much is it going to grow with so many bureaucratic barriers of state removed?
The Stagnant Side of the Street
Then we turn to the other side of the Atlantic. “The stagnant side of the street” to misquote the song.
Here in the UK, we have gone the other way. We are increasing taxes. We are increasing state spending. We are growing government, and, in doing so, creating more barriers to innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship. Most of Western Europe is the same. These are countries run by blobs, by regulators and planners for regulators and planners, by technocrats who know better than you.
Here’s an example of the government helping. On 6 October 2020, when the FCA announced it was clamping down, bitcoin was $10,000. Today it's $97,500. I make that $87,500 per coin of gain that the UK citizen has been protected from. Great job guys. The UK was once at the vanguard of this breakthrough technology. Satoshi used English spelling, he quoted the Times. He may well have been British. Now we are bringing up the rear.
It is just so much harder and more expensive to do anything entrepreneurial in the UK, whether it’s setting up a business in the first place, hiring, the taxes you have to pay, the cost of regulation and compliance, or the exorbitant cost of housing and property, which drains capital that could be better invested elsewhere.
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Prime Minister Keir Starmer is currently in the Gulf trying, as he says, to secure investment for the UK. “This government will build on partnerships that drive our mission to kickstart economic growth and put money back in working people's pockets,” he said yesterday. It’s obvious that he thinks economic growth comes from government rather than the private sector. He actually thinks government spending is going to help. He does not realize because spending inevitably leads to higher taxes, and taxes stifle growth.
I bet if you listed ten businesses and said which of these are wealth-creating and which are just wealth-extracting, he would not know the difference: it is not a thought process his mind would ever entertain. Yet the difference between the two is everything. Subsidised green energy is wealth extracting, compliance is wealth extracting, manufacturing (as long as it’s not wind farms) and tech are mostly wealth creating. One builds wealth that did not previously exist - everybody wins - making stuff, growing stuff - the other is zero sum: it extracts wealth that already exists and sends it somewhere else - only the extractor and the recipient win. The guy who built the wealth in the first place loses.
The most basic rule of taxation – you really should read Daylight Robbery – is that higher taxes and higher tax rates do not lead to greater government revenue. This administration does not get that most basic concept, which has existed for as long as there have been taxes (ie all of civilization). How can they be so stupid I’ve no idea, but they lead us.
To invest in the UK is to invest in stagnation and regulation. That is not proper investment or wealth creation.
The rest of Western Europe is no better.
In addition, we are experiencing colossal levels of discontent, unprecedented migration, two-tiered justice, two-tiered welfare, rising crime, the disappearance of previously high-trust societies, and rising social tension.
But thanks to the Internet, the stupidities of UK and European policies will continue to be laid bare to all. No amount of censorship is going to hide it. In any case, X has already killed censorship. Other platforms must now stop censoring, if they want to stay relevant. On the Internet people gravitate where speech is free-est.
Meanwhile, such is the nature of memes, people are going to relentlessly take the piss, especially from the other side of the pond. Comedy is a powerful tool. Day after day, the meme-makers, led by Elon Musk himself, are going to expose Keir Starmer and his deluded team, never mind the EU and other technocrats, for the fools they are.
The exposure the Internet brings will cause this technocratic left to backpedal a little – Starmer, as we saw from his 19th relaunch speech last week, has already started – though it will not be anywhere near enough. We need our own Javier Milei.
But it is all is only going to exacerbate the current trend: long America, short the UK and Europe.
So What To Do Now?
I ran into one of the UK’s most successful investors at a party last week. He told me he has moved everything he can out of sterling and out of the UK.
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If you are looking for some entertaining Christmas presents, we have some celebratory “One of the 17 Million” Brexit mugs, my new album and other goodies for sale in the Dominic Frisby Shop. Take a look.
Something positive for you this Sunday morning - and why we should be grateful for government incompetence
The idea of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), money that governments and their planners will be able to programme, rightly fills many of us with an Orwellian sense of dread.
“Did you not have the vaccine? Oh, well then you don’t qualify for the next payment.”
“Have you been saying wrong things on social media? Then you don’t get the good loan rates.”
“We suspect that you might not have paid the right rate of tax, therefore we are deducting what we think you owe and it’s up to you to prove otherwise. You want the money back? Please hold …. Your call is important to us.”
CBDCs allow for almost unimaginable interference in our lives, intrusions on our privacy and liberty, never mind meddling in the economy. Chinese social credit scores would be just the start of it.
When you combine the instincts of, say, the current Labour administration to intervene, together with its incompetence, the ramifications are truly horrifying.
Some say CBDCs are inevitable. Technology is destiny and all that. I’m a bit more optimistic.
Hete’s why.
CBDCs have been piloted in numerous countries and fully implemented in:
* The Bahamas - the "Sand Dollar"
* Nigeria - the "eNaira"
* Jamaica - "JAM-DEX"
* The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union
Nowhere has got them to work. The Bahamas is generally touted as the CBDC success story. My buddy, Dave Skarica, who lives there says, “LOL. I have never seen one person use it.”
Why have they failed? People don’t use them. When they do use them, they don’t work. People prefer the legacy systems they know.
CBDCs are yet another government IT project that is doomed to fail.
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You might say the internet was a government IT project. It was . The U.S. government - via ARPA and later DARPA - provided crucial funding that led to the development of key protocols like TCP/IP. But the Internet succeeded because of the immense infrastructure that millions of people, mostly working in their own self-interest, since built over many decades on top of it.
Our modern system of debt-based fiat money should long since have imploded under the weight of all the abuse and debasement successive governments have heaped upon it. But it has survived, indeed thrived as a medium of exchange, albeit a terrible store of wealth, because of the incredible fintech architecture that has been built on top of it, again by millions of people over many decades mostly acting in their own self-interest. That architecture is probably what has saved the system.
Fiat money is just promissory - worse than that it is a promise of something that isn’t even there - but the incredible advances in communication technology that we have seen in the last 150 years - telecommunications, digital technology and all the rest of it - have all enabled the sending and recording of those promises. The fortunes that have been invested have all helped the system evolve and indeed preserved it.
Fiat money worked as countries gradually abandoned gold standards over the course of the 20th century because they were the only currencies citizens knew. The payment and saving infrastructure was already built and normalised. The coins and notes and cheques and bank accounts all functioned perfectly well, and there were no alternatives. The removal of the gold backing did not really impact the overall architecture.
Government currencies worked in the first place because they were based on gold and silver, which everybody already used and instinctively knew had value. When they weren’t debasing their money, rulers, or those working for them, often actually improved the system: coinage, for example, certified the amount of precious metal in a coin and the ruler’s stamp legitimised it. Money was based on something people already knew and used and understood.
Not so CBDCs. They have no existing infrastructure around them, nor is their use normal.
Governments will not be able to design anything decent. They will need the private sector to do that, and this will take many years, perhaps decades before it gets as good as the infrastructure around existing payment systems. It would also take many years and lots of nudges for people to change habits
The private sector is not going to invest the required amount of money in payment systems if people are not going to use it, so you will end up with a situation, a bit like green energy, where governments will have to spend billions subsidising it in order to make it work, but the actual energy you get is not as good as that provided by fossil fuels: unreliable, more expensive and more damaging to the environment. There will not be the same green arguments - 10 years to save the planet and all that - to justify the spending. The scope for corruption and crony capitalism will be enormous. Again.
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None of this will stop governments trying it, of course. Citizens might slowly start to use the system, particularly if they get free handouts, but it will be a long time before CBDCs reach a level where they compete with existing payment systems. At this point fiat money as we now know it probably won’t exist anyway. We tend to forget, but most nations as we currently know them are only about 200 years old. Many won’t exist in 50 or 100 years time. They’ll go bankrupt and break apart. What will happen to their money?
There is the possibility of demanding that taxes are paid in CBDCs, I suppose, but again this opens up so much scope for outcry, waste and inefficiency, I just can’t see it working.
People within the blob look at bitcoin and admire it and think they can copy it, but even bitcoin is what it is, not so much because of Satoshi Nakamoto’s genius invention, but because of the way hundreds of thousands of people in the free market embraced it and built on top of it. The reason they did was, again, self-interest: the value of bitcoin kept going up. Every bit of bitcoin fintech, every podcast, every tweet - every transaction. They all help the bitcoin price. It’s a colossal open-source contribution and movement. There is not the same incentive with CBDCs. Their value is never going to go up. Quite the opposite. Their value will fall as governments issue more and more of them. There is not the same incentive.
To have any chance of working, CBDCs will require billions and billions of subsidy. Most governments do not have the resources. They are already bankrupt. They will struggle to justify the expense. Health or welfare or pensions or something will be deemed more important.
Plus they will meet with huge resistance from the freedom-fighters and possibly even the media .
None of this will stop them trying of course. But on this issue at least you can sleep soundly. CBDCs are one Orwellian nightmare that is not going to work.
They will end up yet another failed government IT project.
All ye from the future look back on this ‘ere prescient article and marvel at my foresight.
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Tell your friends about this amazing article.
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“If once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.”Rudyard Kipling
The winter of 406-407 was bitterly cold across Europe. The Rhine froze over, enabling hordes of Vandals, Alans - I love the fact that there was a tribe of Alans - and Suebi to make their way across the river, and into the Roman empire. They were violent with hunger, from the cold and greedy for what they had admired for so long on the other side.
The response from Rome was slow, weak and inadequate.
In Britain, Rome had already lost the north and west to warlords. The Roman armies in Britain, who, at best, had been paid with debased money, feared these Germanic tribes would cross into Britain next, so, led by Constantine III, who declared himself “Western Roman Emperor”, they made their way across the Channel and into Gaul, leaving ‘Britannia’ to fend for itself. We do not really know if it was Rome that gave up Britain, or Britain that gave up Rome, but, either way, the Dark Ages had well and truly begun.
Gold , silver and bronze coins had been widespread under the Romans. They were used to pay taxes, and often re-minted to pay the army and the civil service. But after Constantine III’s departure, few coins were either minted or imported. Judging by the numerous hoards found from the period, many people buried their money - presumably to keep it safe in this unruly new environment of no military protection and merciless invasion from Angles, Saxons and other tribes from the continent. With the lack of new supply, existing coins were re-used. Clipping - cutting off the edges to steal metal - became widespread. The previously vigorous late Roman monetary system crumbled. It was not for another 200 years that minting properly started up again.
The Anglo-Saxon invaders initially used gold more for adornment rather than as currency. Though there are examples of earlier Anglo-Saxon coins, King Eadbald of Kent was the first Anglo-Saxon whose name we actually know to mint coins. This was around 625AD - small, gold coins called scillingas (shillings), modelled on coins from France. Numismatists now call them thrymsas.
As the century progressed, these coins grew increasingly pale, until there was very little gold in them at all. From about 675, small, thick, silver coins known as sceattas came into use in all the countries around the North Sea, and the gold shilling was superseded by the silver penning, or penny. As money, gold fell out of use almost altogether, though silver had something of a boom.
It is thought the word ‘penny’, like the German ‘pfennig’ derives from the pans into which the molten metal for making them was poured. ‘Pfanne’ is the German for ‘pan’. Another theory is that it derives somehow from the denarius, as the symbol for the penny used to be the d. Likely a bit of both.
The Mercian King Offa, he of dyke fame, who reigned for almost 40 years from 757 to 796, must be one of the greatest Anglo-Saxon kings, certainly the greatest of the 8th century. As well as his dyke, which protected his kingdom from Welsh invaders, and provided a barrier by which he could collect duties, he is credited for the widespread adoption of the silver penny and pound as a unit of account (though the pound was in use before his reign, he still gets the credit). His coins, with portraits and intricate designs, were as accomplished as anywhere in Europe at the time. His system, though probably imported from Charlemagne and the Franks, for reasons which will become clear, almost certainly dates back to the Romans. 12 silver pence equalled a scilling. 20 scillingas, or 240 pennies (12 x 20), equalled a pound weight of silver. Thus did the pound we still use today get its name - it was, simply, a pound weight of sterling silver.
The Latin word for a "pound" is libra and the pound sign, £, is a stylized writing of the letter L. The d meanwhile used for pence comes from the Latin denarius. The roots of the British system of money are Roman.
Offa’s system remained standard until at least the 16th century and, in many ways, until decimalization in 1971. You had to add up each unit of currency separately in this format: £3.9.4, which would be spoken "three pounds, nine shillings and four pence," or "three-pounds, nine and four." To add, you would calculate each unit separately, then convert pence to shillings, leaving leftover pence in the right column. Then convert the shillings to pounds (with leftover shillings in the middle column). And then add up the total pounds. It sounds complicated when you explain it, especially to those oriented in metric, but, like all traditional measures, it is quite intuitive in practice.
On this note, have you seen my lecture about weights and measures? It’s superb!
Offa’s systems were gradually consolidated over the subsequent centuries, especially as the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain began to merge. In the 860s, for example, the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex formed an alliance by which coinage of a common design could circulate through both of their lands.
The Viking invaders found coinage systems far more sophisticated than their own, and the Danegeld, the protection money with which they were bought off, was paid in silver pennies. I had always thought the “geld” in Danegeld meant “gold” but in fact it means yield, and the Viking invaders demanded this tribute wherever in Europe they ravaged.
Buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times? I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
The Danegeld system was quite efficient - on both sides. For the invaders, they were often paid more than they could raise by looting, without having to fight. For the locals, the ravaging was avoided, although, as Rudyard Kipling noted in his poem on the subject, “if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.”
The Danegeld probably also motivated improvements to Anglo-Saxon coinage. To pay his own soldiers, to build forts and ships, and to pay Danegeld, Alfred the Great increased the number of mints in his realm to at least 8. His successor Athelstan had 30 and, to keep order, passed a law in 928 stating that England should have just one currency. Ever since, there has been just one. This was many centuries before standardisation in France, Germany, or Italy.
When William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England in 1066, he succeeded where his Viking ancestors had failed for over 270 years, in that he managed to conquer all of England. It meant he took control of English coinage, which was far superior to that of his homeland. William’s coins, struck back in Normandy, are remarkable for how poor they are, compared to their English counterparts.
He had at least seven types of English pennies struck with his name on, enabling him to achieve the rebrand that was so important to him. No longer was he William the B*****d, as he was then known. Now he was William the Conqueror. He let the world know through his coins. It worked: that is how we still know him today.
It is a little ironic that the pound should be so named for its silver. Because, from the time of Isaac Newton and the founding of the Bank of England, silver had very little to do with the pound. Only gold.
That story is told here:
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It’s difficult to look beyond bitcoin and MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) at the moment, the later in particular. Nobody expected this, not even Chairman Michael Saylor. The returns have been astonishing. A couple of readers have reported to me that the gains have been life-changing. Wow! What an email to receive.
It’s easy to get hubristic when you have a big win. Instead, let us express gratitude for the good fortune that has smiled upon us.
But look beyond we must, and so today I want to look at what I can only describe as a stealth bull market - natural gas. The price is creeping up, and few are talking about it.
Natural gas is a bit like silver: if it can disappoint, it will. So we begin this piece with that reminder. Natural gas has broken the soul of many a wiser man than me.
On the other hand, the next five years look pretty positive.
It’s obvious that the world is going to go nuclear now, and that Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are going to provide the power AI so badly needs. However, it will be a good five years before they on stream, so what is going to provide the power in the interim?
The answer is natural gas.
There is a problem, however: Supply.
America's Gas Wells Are Drying Up
The North American Shale Gas Revolution dramatically changed the outlook for fossil fuels. Peak Oil was a huge theme leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, and then it disappeared, almost overnight.
Between 2005 and 2020, US natural gas production grew by 90%, with shale accounting for the bulk of it. In 2005, shale gas made up about 5% of US natural gas production; by 2020, it was over 75%. By 2017, the US had become a net exporter, especially of more transportable liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The price, meanwhile, plummeted. Good for consumers!
Here’s the long-term chart so you can see those price declines since 2005. From almost $16 to $3.50 today (as low as $1.50 earlier this year, where it has formed an attractive double bottom - you know how I like those).
Obviously, we in the UK and Europe pay way more for our natural gas than they do in North America. It’s so dumb; we have enough to supply ourselves in the UK. But we don’t because fracking is deemed environmentally damaging. So we import gas from abroad, which is produced by, you guessed it, fracking. I guess if it is fracked somewhere else, it’s less harmful. Not
Then there are the transport costs and the environmental costs that come with that.
Anyway …
Spanning Ohio, New York, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Marcellus is the largest natural gas-producing field in the United States, contributing over 25% of production. In 2010, output was 2 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d). By 2023, it exceeded 35 bcf/d, but production has been falling for almost a year now. We are currently at 26.7 bcf/d
The next largest is Haynesville, in Louisiana, Texas, and parts of Arkansas. Extraction costs here are higher, and production stands at 16 bcf/d, but it is slowing here too, according to analysts Goehring & Rozencwajg.
One of the few areas of growth is the Permian Basin, in Texas and New Mexico, currently around 23 bcf/d, but even there, growth is modest.
Now, it might be that the reason for stagnating growth is low prices - they often are - and higher prices will result in increased production. They usually do. That is the way with commodities.
But natural gas prices have already doubled this year, and they keep on creeping up.
The other interpretation is that the North American Shale Gas Revolution has passed its peak.
With America’s new president, you can expect plenty more investment in production than under the Democrats, and that should bring the price down, but the gas price has actually risen - from $2.70 to $3.50 - since the election.
It might also be that Russian gas taps come back online to the EU sometime next year, which means America will lose its new market.
But all of this conjecture is factored into the price. And that is rising.
How to invest all this
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Let’s start with some headline stats which emerged this week.
* The number of migrants to Britain has doubled since Covid.
* 747,000 “permanent-type” migrants moved to the UK last year, the OECD said, up from 488,400 in 2022.
* This marks a 53% year-on-year rise.
* The four countries seeing the biggest surge in migration are the UK, South Korea, Australia, and the United States.
* Note: Three of those four countries are English-speaking. This is something I have long argued: the UK will inevitably see higher than average migration levels because people prefer to go where they can speak the language, and more people have some English than other languages.
Meanwhile, our birth rate has dropped to 1.4 children per woman, the lowest on record.
The net result is that the demographics of this country are changing dramatically and rapidly. Different people means a different culture.
The demographics of primary schools
Migration measures, particularly illegal migration, are not entirely accurate. If someone has entered the country covertly, for example, there's often no record. Nor are censuses entirely accurate. Some don’t fill the census in, many don’t fill it in accurately, especially if here illegally, if they don't understand what it is, or if someone is claiming the single person council tax discount. There is a lot of scope for double counting for people with multiple addresses - students and so on.
However, pretty much everyone who has kids sends them to school. There is no hiding, no double counting and so on, so the numbers you get from the schools’ census are pretty accurate.
White British now make up 61% of UK primary school kids. 37% are of minority ethnic background. The remaining 2% are unclassified. (In secondary schools, minority ethnic accounts for 36.6%).
Minority ethnic includes Asian (13.4% of primary school kids), White non-British (8%), Black (6.5%), and Mixed (7.8%).
Bear in mind that these figures are for the whole UK. This includes primary school kids in remote rural areas, where British ethnicity will likely comprise over 90%.
White British was at 64.9% in 2020-21 and minority ethnic at 33.7%. The numbers are changing fast. From 65 to 61% in three years.
Ten years ago it was 70%.
This 61/37 ratio compares with 85/15 in 2002.
Previously, I extrapolated that White British would be a minority in primary schools by 2035. But with the current trends, especially considering that migrants tend to have larger families than locals, white British could become a minority in primary schools as soon as 2030, or just after.
The demography of primary schools will, within a generation, reflect the demography of the country.
I doubt this is what the majority of British people want.
But it's not a topic that's being discussed, let alone addressed, in the echelons of power. Instead, it's being brushed under the carpet.
Well, it will soon be too late. This is an urgent and pressing issue. Without wishing to sensationalise, the future of the British people and their homeland really is at stake.
Demography is destiny after all.
You really should subscribe to the Flying Frisby.
If you are thinking of buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
More on this:
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Today, we are going to look at gold, bitcoin, and our way of playing it, MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR), which has now 10xd (!) since we first covered it last year. Amazing.
Finally, there'll be a short update on gold miners. Remember them?
Let’s start with gold.
Gold - and most other metals - has been hit since the U.S. election last week. It’s down $200, or about 7%, with U.S. dollar strength being a big factor (the dollar has been storming higher since October).
While I think this bull market might be punctured, as I put it last week, and that gold probably has a bit further to fall, I am not unduly worried. 2024 has hitherto been a great year for gold, and it remains an essential long-term core holding.
It is an even more essential holding for UK investors. I think sterling has big problems ahead of it, and gold serves as your hedge against crap governments.
If you are thinking of buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
Labour or Tory - I’m no fan of either.
They’re both as bad as each other, in my view. The less government there is, the better things run. But that's irrelevant idealism. Of greater concern here is reality: there has never been a Labour Government that did not devalue sterling.
* Blair and Brown crashed sterling in 2007-8 (though until then their record was okay);
* Under Wilson, Callaghan, and Healey, we ended up going to the IMF in 1976. Callaghan and Wilson also devalued in 1967.
* Cripps and Attlee devalued in 1949.
* Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, which followed Labour from 1929-31, took us off the gold standard in 1931.
Why should this Labour Government be any different? If anything, it is even less competent. Sterling devaluation is coming. How exactly might not yet be clear. I rather suspect it’ll be an attempt to make us competitive against an ultra-streamlined US, but that’s just a guess. You must own some gold (and some bitcoin) in such an environment: non-government money.
Gold under Trump - What Gives? What’s coming?
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I’m sending out today’s missive a day later than usual because I wanted to see the market reaction to the US election results and leave a little time to digest it all.
Broadly speaking, I am happy with the result, and I believe the world will be a better place for it than the alternative. We’ll see less technocracy, less deep state , and less overseas intervention; more pro-energy, pro-Bitcoin, and pro-business policy; and a stance that’s anti-seed oil (go RFK!), anti-subsidised, environmentally harmful green quackery, and anti two-tiered, inequitable woke ideology.
Any administration that puts perhaps the most competent person alive, Elon Musk, in a prominent role, has got to be net positive.
But be careful what you wish for and of that. Donald Trump is not, as his most ardent supporters seem to think, going to save the world, nor any such. You need to fix money and tax to do that, and while he might tweak the latter, there will not be wholesale reform. And he is going to print lots of the former. Trump will run deficits, US debt will grow as a result and the nefarious consequences of fiat will take other forms.
If there are financial problems looming for the US, I suspect their roots lie in the bond markets, where yields are rising.
In short, the better alternative won. There will be more opportunity in the US than there otherwise might have been, but Trump is no Javier Milei. America isn’t yet ready for that.
The initial market reaction give us some insight into where things are headed in the next few months.
If you are thinking of buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
How did markets react?
First up, and something I’m particularly pleased about: bitcoin has broken to new highs, hitting $75,000 yesterday. I’m particularly pleased because new highs in bitcoin usually bring a lot of noise. This time, the noise got drowned in the election frenzy, which means there’s plenty more hype in the tank.
Our chosen vehicle for bitcoin exposure, MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), is now north of $250. This has been an incredible win for readers, as we first covered it last year at an adjusted $35. It’s risen 8x, compared to bitcoin’s 150%—that’s some outperformance.
I wrote back in September that Q4 is usually bitcoin’s best season, and that is bearing out.
Stock markets also rose, as you would expect with someone as pro-business as Trump. The Dow rose 3.5%, the S&P 500 climbed 2.5%, and the Nasdaq about 2.6%.
During Trump’s last presidency, stock markets more than doubled, though with two major wobbles along the way, one due to Covid. Something similar this time around is not an unreasonable expectation—unless you subscribe to this view. If so, that would take the S&P 500 to around 12,000. Quite the number.
What I found especially encouraging was the outperformance of small caps. The Russell 2000 was up 6%. Small caps have underperformed for years and are due for a run. Trumponomics clearly suits them.
An interesting tidbit: Trilogy Metals (TSX: TMQ), a mining company I follow with two promising copper assets in Alaska, the development of which were blocked by the Biden administration on environmental grounds, saw its price rise 108% yesterday . Investors seem confident it will now get the green light.
I expect similar stories across the mining, oil, and gas sectors. This is a time to be investing in the USA.
On the other hand, commodities, especially metals, sold off. Copper fell 3%, with zinc and iron ore dropping by similar amounts. Crude couldn’t make up its mind: it came down a bit, then rallied, then ended the day flat. Natural gas was similarly indecisive
Gold, silver and platinum all sold off, as the US dollar itself rallied quite sharply, rising 1%. Gold was off almost 3%, silver by almost 5%. Not good, though mostly a reaction to the dollar. Looks like those particular bull markets are, for the time being, punctured. That’s not me telling you to sell your gold by the way. Don’t. You are going to need it. Particularly if you are British.
Which brings me to the UK and last week’s budget.
I promised you my thoughts on it.
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I am travelling this weekend so today’s thought piece is a conversation, which Mining Network recorded last week week between veteran gold guru, Alasdair Macleod, and myself.
It’s heavyweight goldbug stuff. I hope you enjoy it.
You can watch it below, but I have also ripped the audio so you have the option to listen to that if you prefer to escape the clutch of your screens.
If you are thinking of buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
I’ll be MCing this year’s Moneyweek Summit this coming Friday November 8th. Readers of the Flying Frisby can get a 20% discount by entering the code FRISBY20
And if you are interested in hearing more from Alasdair, he has a Substack too.
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I’m in Buenos Aires this week, so I might be a little slow reporting on today’s budget, but I’ll come to it, don’t you worry.
Shortly before Covid hit, I became CEO of a Canadian company by the name of Cypherpunk Holdings (HODL.CN). I was very pleased with that ticker symbol—HODL. My idea. But I did not have a clue what would happen as a result …
I’m writing about the company today because, even though I stood down four years ago, I know a number of readers bought shares because I was the CEO. It’s quite a story.
Mining entrepreneur Marc Henderson controlled a shell company that had just received a large payout from the Mongolian government for some uranium assets it had seized illegally, as you do, and he wanted to use the opportunity to start a crypto business. We knew each other from way back, and he approached me because of my book.
He also brought in Canadian bitcoin entrepreneur Moe Adham, and Moe and I put together a proposal to become a privacy tech investment company.
We were both quite ideological about it. We had grave concerns about the increasing imposition on our privacy from both Big Brother and Big Tech. We felt it was only going to increase, and that therefore there would a need for privacy tech—anything from VPNs to private messaging apps such as Signal, to bitcoin and privacy coins. How right we were. Look at some of the stuff that went on during Covid.
Perhaps where we misjudged was that we thought there would be a large appetite for privacy tech amongst the general public as a result. It turns out most of the general public care more about convenience than they do about their privacy, at least online. In many cases, they don’t even realise what they are sacrificing.
Buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times? I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
Once we were up and running—and, believe me, there was a lot of compliance—I brought in my mate, bitcoin OG Jon Matonis, and we began the process of acquiring bitcoin. We would hold large amounts of bitcoin. (This was before Michael Saylor’s Microstrategy, which has been a big winner for the portfolio since we tipped it last summer it around $30 - now $220 - especially as bitcoin closes in on all-time highs).
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One of our key investors was poker champion Tony Guoga, who bought an enormous stake in the company and eventually joined the board to become Chairman.
I stood down shortly after my dad died in April 2020. (From a financial point of view, that was a mistake, as I would have several million options now with the stock itrading at two bucks).
But, despite the good work that the company was doing on the ground, the great investments it was making, and the phenomenal board, it just kept trundling along sideways, largely ignored by the investment community and trading at around half its NAV. Like a champ, Tony Guoga kept on buying stock, especially on dips, building up an enormous position. He owns about 35% of the company. Talk about management being aligned with the interests of the shareholders.
Recently, however, the company had a rebrand. With all the bitcoin ETFs, it was pointless holding bitcoin, they thought, and the company decided to focus instead on SOL, which lacks a mainstream investment vehicle. Sol Strategies Ltd became the new name, and, a few months earlier, they brought in a new CEO, Leah Wald, as well.
In the last fortnight, the shares have gone absolutely nuts—going from around twelve cents to above C$2. There have been several catalysts. First, Leah has made a number of well-received appearances in the media that have generated some interest in the stock. Second, it has become the easiest way to get exposure to SOL. Third, "HODL" is also the US ticker symbol for one of the bitcoin ETFs, and many Canadians, typing in HODL, accidentally bought this company instead. LOL.
Veteran traders will know the chart pattern the stock has played out. I believe it’s known as the hockey stick.
Just incredible. And look at the volumes that have come in.
The market cap of the company went from about C$17m to C$335 at the top of the market yesterday. Guoga’s stake alone went from about C$6m to north of C$115m.
For years, the company was trading at half its NAV of C$30. Suddenly it’s trading at ten times.
From a technical point of view, it shows just what can happen to a company after it builds all that cause trading sideways for many years. When it spikes, it can really spike.
I gather that it’s become something of a meme stock, so who knows when this will end? The algorithms have taken charge, especially on the US OTC markets where it also has a listing (CYFRF) and it is having daily swings of something like 30%.
It even makes Lightbridge (LTBR) look calm. Have you seen that, by the way? $14 yesterday. It was $3 a fortnight ago, when I wrote it up.
Another hockey stick:
My broker commented that it’s good to see some animal spirit has returned to the markets.
I’m just amazed at what algos can do to small-cap North American stocks. Talk about speculation.
Casino!
Let’s hope one day they discover AIM.
I don’t know if this kind of speculation signals a top. It’s pretty obvious to me Trump is going to win next week, so maybe that’s all priced in and markets pull back after the election.
Crash ahead?
On which note, I leave you with this crazy interview. It was recorded in March of this year, several months before the Trump assassination attempt in July, and yet predicts it with incredibly accuracy. He also predicts the weird weather, a Trump win, followed by a 1929 stock market crash. Watch a minute or two from around the 11-minute mark (it should start there). Nuts.
I bet there are a gazillion things he’s predicted which haven’t happened. But I still thought it was pretty amazing.
I probably shouldn’t even be sharing this stuff, but I remembered it last night it from a few months back and, with the election coming next week, I went back and re-watched it.
What do you make of it?
Let me know in the comments.
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(NB: At the end of this piece there is a short note on Lightbridge Corp (NASDAQ:LTBR), which has tripled since I covered it a fortnight ago).
I have suffered from asthma for as long as I can remember.
Others have it worse than me. I had always been able to manage it with drugs – salbutamol mostly – but, all the same, there was always that lurking thought that if I forget my inhaler and have an attack, I could be in trouble.
Then, suddenly, in my early 50s, it disappeared.
It is not uncommon to grow out of your asthma. It happens to a lot of people. But my asthma was not getting better; it was getting worse as I grew older. I can’t prove it, but I think I got rid of it. Here is what I did.
How Bad Was My Asthma?
As is quite common for people my age, I was not breastfed as a baby – science thought it knew better than Mother Nature – and the allergies I suffer from – the main ones being to animal hair and pollen, which result in hay fever and asthma – are a result of that, I’m sure. It’s part genetic too: my dad had asthma but grew out of it in his adolescence. None of my four kids, who I’m delighted to say were all breastfed, have it.
There were two main triggers: animal hair, cats especially, and exercise. Sometimes going from warm to cold (e.g., going outside in winter) would bring it on, and it was worse during the hay fever season.
As a child, we had cats – Persian ones too – and we didn’t get rid of them until I was nine. I can’t believe it took that long to figure out I was allergic to them; whenever I left the house, my asthma noticeably improved. But I took drug after drug every day, morning, noon, and night – Intal and Ventolin.
We moved and got rid of the cats, fortunately. As a teenager, I got quite strong and fit: I played a lot of rugby and football. I found I could get through matches without needing the inhaler at all. But cats would always destroy me. Within ten minutes of being in a house with cats, I would be wheezing. I was just so sensitive to them. Prolonged exposure would take a day or two to recover from.
It was so frustrating going to people’s houses and having to leave because of my asthma, or having to sit there and wheeze, while the owners scrabbled about putting the cat outside or hoovering. Made no difference. Every year on Christmas Eve, I would have the annual asthma attack when visiting my uncle and aunt.
As I got into my late 20s and 30s and the fitness of my youth waned – not helped by smoking too much weed at university – I found myself needing my blue inhaler (salbutamol) more frequently again to play sport.
By the time I got to my 40s, I often found myself getting wheezy for no apparent reason, and I was using the blue inhaler almost every day.
Doctors advised me to use the brown inhaler – QVAR (beclomethasone) – every day, rather than salbutamol, and the brown did indeed clear it up so that I didn’t have to use the blue. But I don’t like taking drugs every day, and every time I tried to wean myself off the brown, I found my asthma had got even worse. I was too dependent.
By my late 40s, I was quite overweight, and even though I did a lot of aerobic sport – running and football – I was heavily dependent on puffers.
We had a dog too, and even though it was a hypoallergenic poodle, I was still sensitive to its hair.
Alcohol made my asthma worse, especially red wine. Also, if I drank, there was always the risk I would then smoke, which of course made it bad the next day.
Here I am today, and I have not used a puffer in maybe two years. I play football most weeks, tennis sometimes, I run, and do sprint training and cycling, including hill training.
But this week came the acid test. I went for a drink at a some friends house, and they have a cat. I spent a very long evening there and did not leave until 3 AM. No puffer required. I went back the following day and spent several hours there. No puffer. Then again two days later (I really like these friends!). Still no puffer. My nose didn’t even run.
I could still feel the allergy. But I was not remotely wheezy.
For me, this is quite extraordinary. Fifty years of asthma have gone.
How Did I Do It? (Plus a Note on Lightbridge)
I’m going to spell out all the things I did. It might be that it was a combination of all of them.
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NB If you missed Sunday’s piece about what next to do with Lightbridge after its incredible rally - 3x in a week - it is here.
This week has the potential to be one of the most significant weeks in the history of money.
36 world leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, are meeting in Kazan, Russia for the BRICS summit. The main agenda of the summit is de-dollarization.
Even The Guardian has noticed. “One of the main aims of the summit,” it says, “will be to speed up ways to reduce the number of dollar transactions, and so mitigate the US ability to use the threat of sanctions to seek to impose its political will.”
I’m not convinced the 36 nations in attendance are quite ready to abandon the dollar, or even make overt declarations of war against it, but for sure we will gain insights as to where we are in the grand scheme of this inevitable move away. We will learn where we are with the alternative payment systems being developed, be it BRICS Pay or mBridge.
The most powerful weapon these nations have against the dollar is gold—far stronger than China’s yuan, or Russia’s rouble, or any other currency basket or crypto amalgam they come up with. Gold is universal money, and its value is understood by all. There has never been a global reserve currency that did not start out backed by gold. How ready these nations are to re-adopt it, we shall soon discover.
In any case, gold has been rallying relentlessly into the de-dollarisation story. We are at $2,740/oz now. Amazing. Perhaps this is a case of ‘buy the rumour, sell the news.’ Whatever. Could be in the short or even medium term. But that’s not the attitude. Owning physical gold is an urgent necessity at the moment. Things are just too precarious. You don’t want to be letting go of long-term core holdings on the basis of potential short-term movements.
I am watching developments closely.
If you are buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times, I recommend The Pure Gold Company. Pricing is competitive, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them. More here.
The Silver Surge: Is $50 the Next Stop?
In the meantime, ever unreliable silver has been playing catch-up. It’s gone through all that resistance around $30-33 and has, having done a near-perfect inverted head and shoulders, now broken up to $35. I think it’s going back to $50.
There is some resistance at $35, $37.50, and $44.
You know my views on silver. It’s the metal with the most potential yet, if it can find a way, it will always let you down.
Its natural price is 1/15th of the gold price, because there is only 15 times as much silver in the earth’s crust as there is gold. With gold at $2,700, silver “should” therefore be $180.
In fact, there is a case for silver to be higher than that because, while all the gold that has ever been mined remains, the silver does not—it has been consumed. So above-ground silver stocks do not reflect gold stocks.
The problem is that silver has long since been demonetised. It lost its monetary status when the world adopted gold standards after the various gold rushes in the second half of the 19th century. Without this official backing, silver is only going to be an industrial metal, albeit a precious one.
Gold may no longer be an official medium of exchange, but central banks still buy and hoard it, as do corporations and private investors. The Bank of International Settlements recognises it as a Tier 1 Capital Asset. The same does not apply to silver.
Silver, as we know, also has a multitude of industrial uses, which are only going to increase as the world gets more computerised and electric.
There is also some evidence of silver shortages—over 200 million ounces this year, a similar amount to annual jewellery demand.
Total annual silver demand is around 1.2 billion ounces—the second highest on record. 836 million ounces of that come from new mine supply, 180 million ounces from recycling, and the rest from sales of existing supply.
Demand looks something like this:
* 61% industrial (electrical, electronics, photovoltaics, photography & other)
* 17% Jewellery
* 5% Silverware
* 17% Investment
When silver moves, it moves fast, and it can turn on a sixpence, so it’s important not to get wedded to the silver story. The thing to remember about silver is, like errant girlfriends with personality disorders, if it can let you down, it will. The lovemaking will be unforgettable, you will have the time of your life, but, as sure as eggs are eggs, it will break your heart. Manage your risk.
As I say, there is not a lot standing in the way of silver and $50. In that scenario, the miners will go to the moon.
If it goes to $50, that will only be the third time in silver’s history it made it here—1980 and 2011 being the other two occasions. Third time lucky and all that. If it breaks above $50, there is nothing but blue sky above. Maybe it’ll go to $100 or even $180. It’s a maniacal metal.
Here’s that amazing long-term chart.
How am I playing it?
I may be cynical, but I also think you should always have a position in silver. Its potential is too huge.
I own a silver miner that is just coming into commercial production and therefore due a re-rating. It will make a fortune at $50 silver, but it doesn’t need $50 silver to work.
That company is …
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Here’s something a little different as your Sunday thought piece today - my Edinburgh “lecture with funny bits”. I hope you enjoy it.
It lasts 50 minutes, so next time you fancy a bit of “edutainment” give it watch.
The first part is available to all, and you can unlock the full experience by becoming a paid subscriber.
I was super-pleased with this one, as I think I might have mentioned ;)
Meanwhile, I wanted to share my thoughts about the amazing share price action we have seen in Lightbridge Corp (NASDAQ:LTBR). The stock really has exploded, more than doubling since I wrote about it last week. What was a $3 stock is now trading at $7.
Here’s the original piece, in case of interest - I covered it in in last Sunday’s thought piece on SMRs too.
The volumes are insane.
What to make of it all? And what to do next?
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