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  • Good Sunday morning to you,

    I am putting back my promised piece on gold miners until mid-week, so keep a look out for that.

    Meanwhile, Life After the State - Why We Don’t Need Government (2013), my first book, and many readers’ favourite, which fell out of print last year, is now, thanks to the invaluable help of my new buddy Chris P, back in print (Amazon, Apple Books), with the audiobook here (Audible, Apple Books).

    I’m very proud of the some of the reviews it had - “A brilliant book,” Steve Baker; “A must read,” Merryn Somerset Webb; “Something extraordinary,” James Harding; “Incredibly readable", Al Murray and so on.

    But, as is often the way, my favourite review came from a “random on the internet”, an Amazon reviewer: “The most important book I have read in a long time. I’ve just bought five extra copies, and plan to force it on all I meet, in the manner of a Jehovah’s Witness.” :)

    Today, for your Sunday morning thought piece, I thought I’d publish a short extract. I hope you enjoy it.

    (First edition paper backs are now trading hands, by the way, for over £200. No hardbacks for sale - so all those who helped fund it back in the day, if you’ve still got your copy it’s worth something).

    In the 1990s, when I was in my twenties, I was mad about Latin America. I loved the people, the tropical weather, the forests, the mountains, the beaches, the language, the ancient history – and I was nuts about the music. All I wanted to do was go there and have adventures. Every year I would catch a cheap Boxing Day flight and come back at the beginning of February. I went to all sorts of wonderful places: Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Honduras and, in 1996, Cuba.

    This wasn’t at the height of Cuban repression. Fidel Castro was still president and the very worst of the poverty that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was now behind it. But the country was still desperately poor.

    Havana was an amazing place, full of contrasts. The only cars were either huge American classics – symbols of booming 1950s USA that looked like something off the set of Back to the Future – or dour and bleak Ladas that had been imported from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s, symbolic of the Cold War and communism. There were magnificent Art Deco or Art Nouveau buildings, yet there’d be a hole in the roof, or part of it had fallen down. There were pro-Castro symbols and slogans everywhere you looked, but the walls on which they were painted would be crumbling. The entire city looked like it needed re-rendering.

    After one obligatory, over-priced night in a government hotel, I found a room in a Havana apartment belonging to a well-educated Cuban family. Luis was a political economist and a professor, no less; Celia was a doctor. They had three young children: two girls and a boy.

    I had gone to Cuba with preconceived notions about what an amazing place it was. Any problems it had were entirely due to sanctions and other American punishments, I thought. It had the best health service in the world, the best education in the world and was a shining example to the greedy West on how things could be run. I don’t know where I got those ideas from – conversations at university, probably – but Luis quickly put me right.

    ‘What is the point of a great hospital, if there is no medicine?’ he would whisper to me. ‘What is the point of great schools when you have no paper?’ I didn’t have an answer.

    I say whisper. Criticism, even indoors, was always whispered. Many Cubans would loudly declare how wonderful the regime was, surreptitiously look about to check no potential informant was in earshot, then come up close and whisper, ‘I hate Castro’ – or something along those lines. So oppressive was the regime that paranoia, secrets, denial and deception permeated every area of life. People didn’t dare to be honest. They were too scared of what the repercussions might be.

    Some Cuban friends of mine in London had told me before I left, ‘You need dollars. You can’t buy anything with pesos.’ I was a pretty intrepid explorer in those days and dismissed this advice. I thought I’d be able to get off the beaten track into the real Cuba, where I could use pesos like real Cubans. But my friends were right. You couldn’t. There was, simply, nothing available to buy with pesos. There were no shops or businesses that accepted pesos, except the odd street stall that sold ice cream or bits of cooked dough, loosely described as pizza. Cubans got their bread and other essentials with ration books and a lot of queuing.

    Western goods did exist. Clothing, electrical and hardware goods, and food and drink – Havana Club rum, beer, cheese and cured meats, for example – were sold in grey, colourless supermarkets. The supermarkets were not at all cheap and, despite the fact that they were state-run, would only accept US dollars – one of the many hypocrisies I would encounter.

    So the only way anyone could buy anything was with US dollars at a state-run store. However, most people were employed by the government in some way or other, and paid in Cuban pesos. So how did they get dollars?

    The answer was: from tourists.

    Luis and Celia got their dollars renting out a room to people like me. Most Cubans didn’t have the option of an apartment with three bedrooms. (Luis’s parents had somehow managed to avoid it being expropriated.) Some were lucky enough to have the use of a car and could be taxi drivers. But this was another option that was only available to a tiny few – there was no manufacture of cars and no import trade. You, or more likely your parents, would have somehow had to have acquired a car way back when, and kept hold of it. There were a few restaurants and bars scattered about, and a tiny, well-connected elite could become waiters. Where did that leave everyone else?

    As an economist and a doctor, you’d expect Luis and Celia to be a fairly wealthy couple. And by Cuban standards they earned good salaries – about 500 pesos a month each. The official exchange rate was one peso to the dollar, thus they earned the equivalent of $500. The unofficial rate, however – the real market rate – was 20:1, so Luis and Celia’s 500 pesos amounted to about $25. A pair of jeans in the supermarket cost twice that. But, remember, you couldn’t actually buy anything with pesos.

    One night’s rent from me was more money than Luis, with a PhD, would earn in an entire month. A taxi driver might land that figure in two or three fares. On a good night, a waiter might earn that in tips. But the big money was in selling sex. If she found a generous boyfriend, a prostitute – a ‘jinetera’, as they were called – could earn many times that in one night.

    More than any of the other European nations, it was Italy that seemed to have caught the Cuba bug. My flight out was full of Italians. All over Havana there were Italians. They loved Cuba. I naively thought it might have to do with the historical links between Italy and communism, but wandering around Havana I soon saw another reason. The Italian men loved the black Cuban women – and vice versa, it seemed. Everywhere you looked you’d see stylish Italian men arm in arm with young Cuban black girls, their paid girlfriends for the two weeks they spent there.

    Cuban men were selling their bodies too. A rather plump Greek- English woman I knew in her late forties married a beautiful (yes, beautiful) man – a ‘jinetero’ – at least 25 years her junior. I had to deliver some money to him for her. I was amazed when I met him. He looked like a young Sidney Poitier. She looked like a chubby, middle- aged Bette Midler. A most unlikely couple.

    In some cases, I’ve no doubt, couples fell in love. Marriages and families may have resulted. Cuba is a famously sexual country. I expect that many of the jineteras derived some occasional pleasure from their work. But, in most cases, the reality was rather more dark and sinister. Their economic circumstances meant that these people felt they had no other option but prostitution, if they wanted to improve their lot.

    It’s hard to believe just how widespread ‘jineterismo’ was, and probably still is. There has been no formal study, but anecdotally it appears that more than 50% of Cuban women below 50 have practised prostitution at some stage – if not with a tourist, then with another Cuban.

    ‘Everyone is jinetera,’ said Luis. ‘Look around. Everyone. Jinetero, jinetera. Look what Fidel has done to our country. Look what he has done to our people’.

    We were sitting on the Malecón – the wall which runs along the Havana sea front – watching good-looking jineteros and jineteras attempting to snare a tourist. Of all the Latin American countries I visited, I found I had the most intense conversations in Cuba. This was one of them. I transcribed it into my diary later that night. ‘I don’t want my children to be a doctor like their mother, or a political economist like me. What is the point? MD, PhD, a month’s work and I cannot buy a pair of shoes.’ Luis continued: ‘Useless life. A much better life for my son is if he is a taxi driver or a waiter. Then he can get dollars. Maybe he can get a tourist to fall in love with him. And my daughters? I tell you a secret. I pray my daughters will be beautiful. Every father does. So they can have tourist boyfriends, have money, maybe marry a tourist, and get out of here. That is why every Cuban father wants his daughter to be a jinetera. Jinetera – that is the best life you can have here, that is how you survive, that is how you escape. Thank you, Fidel!’

    I don’t know what the motivation behind Castro’s great revolution was or why he and his cohorts made the economic and political choices they did – lust for power, political idealism, or, maybe, just to get rid of Batista. It seems his decision to ally himself with the Soviet Union was, at least initially, more of a reaction to US aggression and sanctions than any deep Marxist sentiment. I very much doubt their intention was the eventual consequence: a society so imbalanced and distorted that taxi drivers and uneducated young people could earn, in one night, many times more than a professor, a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer might earn in a month; where the large majority of young girls in Havana were selling their bodies for dollars, and where every Cuban father wanted his daughter to be a jinetera.

    Cuba was probably my first lesson in the Law of Unintended Consequences. And my story illustrates many of the themes of this book: the power of the state; how the state interferes in people’s lives; how political decisions, often made out of expediency, even if benevolent, can have such grave and unexpected repercussions; why the freedom to trade and exchange is so important; and how, if you limit that freedom, you limit people’s possibilities.

    The useless peso, moreover, was my first experience of how essential a properly functioning system of money is to a society, and what can happen when politicians start to use money as a political tool.

    Life After the State is available at Amazon, Apple Books and all good bookshops, with the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops.

    Until next time,

    Dominic

    PS If you missed my report into buying gold, it is here:

    (Any issues downloading the PDF, please reply to this email or try this link).



    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
  • Good morning to you,

    I am going to be sending out two pieces in fairly quick succession: first, today’s, some commentary on the latest bitcoin price action, and then another, tomorrow hopefully, about gold mining.

    It looks like bitcoin (currently $67,000, down from highs of $73,500) is now “enjoying” a correction.

    Microstrategy (NDX:MSTR) has 5xd, since we covered it in the summer, and some profit-taking is inevitable.

    My own strategy though is to HODL. I don’t think this is the end of the cycle. Longer term I think bitcoin goes higher, even if it is short-term overbought and over-heated. I know of no strategy that has consistently beaten HODL, so that is what I am going to continue to do

    There is an expression you will have heard me use from time to time: “from false moves come fast moves in the opposite direction”. Sometimes you will see a move above an old high, a “false breakout”, before a market reverses. At the moment the breakout above the old high to $73,500 then the reversal looks like it could be one of those. It may do that. It may not. You never know. But the risk with bitcoin is not having a position.

    My preferred interpretation is: “ongoing correction in a bull market”.

    But these are the kind of doubts that haunt you when climbing the wall of worry. There is nothing a bull market likes to do more than throw you off. Hence HODL.

    It has been said before, but I say it again: were you to sell your bitcoins for pounds dollars or euros, you would effectively be swapping a technologically superior form of money for one that is technologically inferior. When looked at in these terms, selling bitcoin for fiat makes little sense. When bull markets come along you always kick yourself for not owning enough bitcoin, so, again, HODL.

    I met a city friend of mine at a drinks party last night and he was telling me how many institutions are buying $200,000 btc September call options: that means some traders in institutions are, in effect, making leveraged bets that bitcoin will be $200,000 in 6 months time.

    Buying such high risk, out-of-the-money calls could be seen as symptomatic of excess bullish sentiment. It signals irrational exuberance. It signals catch-up trade - trying to make up the money you missed out by not being positioned sooner. But that institutional money, with all the information it has about order-flows and all the rest of it, is making such bets is also a bullish sign.

    I, for one, hope those call options come good.

    Altcoin Season is Upon Us - or It Was

    Finally, another anecdote from earlier in the week, which shows just how hot things were getting, this one about altcoin season. Fortunes, sometimes life-changing fortunes, get made and lost, though mostly lost, in altcoin season. It was upon us.

    My son’s mate from uni, age 23, is now a trader. On Tuesday he was bragging on their Snapchat about a win he just had. LocalAI - I have no idea what that is - began trading on Monday. On Tuesday it was up over 17,000%. You read that right. On a Tuesday.

    I took a look at it on Wednesday. It had just fallen over 60%.

    The following day it nearly tripled, before falling 50% again.

    Nuts!

    How to navigate it all? It’s a full-time job keeping up with what’s going on in the altcoin world and they are not something I know a great deal about, I’m relieved to say. I’m familiar with about ten. Fortunately, I know a man who does. So let me take this opportunity to recommend Charlie Morris’s Bytefolio. Charlie is a former fund manager from HSBC, who ran the billion-dollar Absolute Return fund for 20 years. He also wrote the extremely popular Fleet Street Letter for many years, before handing it over to Nigel Farage and his team. Charlie now runs a suite of letters at Bytetree. He was early to the bitcoin story, back in 2014. He has almost unrivalled knowledge of portfolio management and asset allocation, of technical analysis and trend following, and he applies it to the world of crypto and altcoins. So take a look and see what you think - you get the first month free. The crypto letter is ace, but I also like his more mainstream Multi-Asset Investor and his speculative Venture too.

    Right, I’ll be back very soon, tomorrow hopefully, talking gold mines. Will I ever learn?

    Until then,



    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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  • Good Sunday morning to you,

    We have a pot pourri of offerings for you today.

    First, I posted the above sketch on Twitter yesterday and it struck a nerve. I thought you might also enjoy it on here. It’s eight years since I recorded it, but it is still as apposite as ever.

    In other, more serious news, I met with Campbell Smyth, Chairman of Fitzroy Minerals (FTZ.V), yesterday, and we have a long old chinwag about the state of the mining and metals markets. You can listen to that interview here or on your podcast app:

    Trees of Life

    And, finally, my buddy Mark O’Byrne, formerly of Irish bullion dealer, Goldcore, got in touch about his new and rather beautiful coins: Trees of Life, they are known as, and they are available in both gold (0.1 oz and 1 oz) and silver (silver 1 oz). He sent me a couple of the silver ounce coins to review and they are really rather beautiful.

    Here is a pic:

    Let me help out a mate and give them a little plug.

    On one side is the Tree of Life, a symbol, common to many religions and mythologies, not least Celtic and Nordic, of balance, fertility, wisdom and strength.

    On the other side is the Rising Sun, symbolising dawn, a new day, new beginnings and the end of darkness. There is the Harp, Éire’s sacred musical instrument and national emblem. (Ireland is the only nation in the world that has a musical instrument as its national emblem - bet you didn’t know that). And there is the Tri Spiral. This spiral is carved onto a large stone at the back of the tomb of Newgrange, one of Ireland (and indeed the Earth’s) oldest and most sacred places, thought to pre-date both Stonehenge and the Pyramids.You can find out more about these coins, likely, I would have thought, to become collectors’ items at Tara Coins.

    With St Patrick’s Day little more than a week away, these should make lovely gifts. Order yours at any of:

    * GoldBank in Ireland

    * Merrion Gold in Ireland

    * Bullion By Post in the UK

    * APMEX in the US

    * Bullion By Post in the US

    * Celtic Gold in Germany:

    Enjoy your Sunday,

    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
  • Campbell Smyth, Chairman of Fitzroy Minerals (FTZ.V), joins me to talk about the state of mining and metals.

    Lots of interesting insights in to copper, gold, lithium, oil and other essential commodities.



    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 is off on one its runs, it seems. Congratulations to all who bought and held.

    It is now trading at all-time highs in 30 different currencies around the world, currencies representing more than 60% of the world’s population. How about that for a thought?

    From China and India to Congo and Sudan, it’s like a Noel Coward song.

    In US dollars, we are flirting with $60,000, still roughly 15% from the peak of US$69,000, the all-time high back in late 2021.

    In British pounds, the all-time high was around £48,000. We are touching that now.

    Meanwhile, Microstrategy (NDX.MSTR), which we suggested as a means to play bitcoin via a traditional broker, and avoid the FCA-created headaches of buying and investing bitcoin in the UK, is going great guns. $960 now. It was $350 when we first recommended it in the summer.

    Is it too late to buy?

    No.

    I haven’t been asked on TV to talk about it yet. See me on the box, then you can start getting concerned that the top is near.

    (Here’s one from BBC Daily Politics towards the end of a previous cycle. Chief Economist Dr Savvas Savouri. LOL)

    There is no doubt that the market is hot, hot, hot at the moment, and when markets get this hot, that usually means it’s time to back off. Cripes, the amount of excitement on social media is screaming run away. But bitcoin is like one of those metals - tungsten or tantalum - which can withstand abnormally high levels of heat. The evidence of previous bull markets is that bitcoin gets overbought and stays overbought.

    It’s usually better to buy when the markets are quiet, when nobody cares. But that is not where we now are.

    I have repeatedly argued that the risk with bitcoin is not owning it; it is not owning it. That hopefully makes sense in print. The potential of this thing is so abnormally huge, why would you not want to have a position?

    We are talking about the most technologically brilliant system of money ever invented. Own a piece of the pie.

    Why bitcoin will supercede other monies

    Remember the old rhyme:

    Money is a matter of functions four:A medium, a measure, a standard and a store.

    National currencies are a good-ish medium of exchange - within national borders. But even then, they have their shortcomings. They are useless for micropayments. The smallest amount you can pay in the UK is 1p. Most banks and credit card companies won’t even process amounts that small. Even medium-sized transactions can be problematic. I wasted about an hour of my life this morning on the phone to Lloyds Bank as their security blocked a transfer of £3,950 that I was trying to make. In the grand context of things, that is not a huge sum, but Lloyds’ alarms went off and that was it. One hour gone. (During my peak productive time too. That’s one of the reasons this missive is late).

    But for cross-border transactions, national currencies are crap. Forex fees, paperwork, slow transaction speeds. If I want to send a payment to someone who operates with a different currency of, say, £1, via a bank, the costs are prohibitive. Revolut is about my only option - and that has issues. If I want to send a micropayment of, say, one-tenth of a cent, it is just impossible. But industries based around micropayments are a huge area of potential growth, especially in a world of artificial intelligence and the internet of things: streaming, apps, games, in-app and in-game purchases, rewards, likes, donations, tipping, credit card verification, identity verification, wifi access, public document access, libraries, parking, phone calls, public transport, pay-per-use in cloud computing, exchange of or access to information via the internet of things, content licensing, ad-free browsing, access to news and journalism. These are all areas that will see enormous use for micropayments.

    National currencies do not enable the micropayments economy, they are a barrier to it, especially across borders.

    At then other end of the scale, somebody just transferred the bitcoin equivalent of $1.3bn for a fee of $2. It took a minute or two. No forms, permits or declarations were required.

    You can send huge amounts or tiny amounts of money across borders for a fraction of the effort. Bitcoin is a good medium of exchange for the internet. It will only get better.

    You should subscribe to this letter. It’s really good.

    And what a store of value!

    The pound has lost a third of its purchasing power just since 2020, according to Truflation. Since Jan 2020 bitcoin meanwhile has gone from £5,000 to almost £50,000. Which is the better store of value?

    Measured in the constant that is gold, the pound has lost 90% of its purchasing power just this century (Gold was £150/oz in 1999. Today it is over £1,500/oz). Meanwhile, since its inception in 2009, bitcoin has been the world’s best performing asset. So what if it’s volatile.

    Finally, we have the last two functions of money: measure and standard. A measure - in other words, a unit of account - needs to be constant to be effective. National currencies, because of the constant debasement, fail in this regard. Statisticians and economists have to resort to “inflation-adjusted dollars”, but not everybody agrees as to what inflation actually is, never mind the inflation rate.

    Bitcoin has not attained widespread unit of account status yet, but its finite supply will, eventually, make it a more constant unit. As for standard, that is coming too - whether as a standard of deferred payment or a standard as in the gold standard. Its independence and ever-increasing purchasing power will see to that. But this evolution, even if inevitable - technology is destiny, after all - will take many years yet, which is another reason I argue that it is not too late to take the orange pill.

    By the way, there are many people who are so sure that bitcoin is going to a million dollars, they are now measuring the bitcoin price thus: $0.05m. How about that for a unit and a standard?

    The point I am eventually trying to get to is this. Institutions and individuals tend to hold their savings in fiat dollars, pounds, euros, or yen. Corporations keep their treasuries in fiat. In doing so, even with interest, you are losing 5 to 10% per annum to currency debasement. This is guaranteed. Imagine being a Japanese corporation holding your treasury in yen.

    Michael Saylor, meanwhile, in keeping the corporate treasury of Microstrategy in bitcoin, indeed issuing paper to buy more bitcoin, has 10xd his company's valuation in four years. Microstrategy has gone from a $1.4bn to a $14bn market cap. Do you not think other CEOs will follow suit?

    Bitcoin is becoming an an online savings vehicle, the default online savings vehicle - ahead of fiat. When other large corporations and billionaires start keeping their treasuries in bitcoin as a norm - we are still a few years from that - then is when the price moonshots and hyperbitcoinisation happens.

    Of course, hyperbitcoinisation may not happen. Then again: maybe it will.

    Where and when does this bull market end?

    I have mentioned before: there are four typical phases to a bitcoin cycle.

    * There’s the Quiet Accumulation. Few outside of the bubble of ardent bitcoiners take notice, as it discreetly creeps up.

    * The Frenzy and Blow-Off Top. The price rises accelerate. There is a rush to buy. The media is all over it. Everyone on social media is crowing. There’s a huge row about whether bitcoin is in a bubble or not. See 2013, 2017 and 2021 for more details.

    * The Monster Correction. Bitcoin loses over 70% of its value. Economists who missed the boat go on telly and declare they were right, ignoring the fact that the price to which bitcoin corrected to is several hundred percent above where the quiet accumulation phase began.

    * The Frustrating Consolidation. Bitcoin goes into a period of range trading, consolidating the gains of the previous bull market. This is a period of relative quiet, at least by bitcoin standards. There are rallies that get many excited, but prove to be false dawns. Investors get frustrated by the grinding action. The media loses interest. Many forget about it, and so we gradually drift into another Quiet Accumulation phase.

    We are now in the early stages of phase two. This typically comes around halvings, but the ETFs appear to have brought it forward.

    So what’s next and when does this bull market end?

    There are some obvious numbers to look for. $69,000, the old high. There will be resistance there. As we move towards that number we can expect some selling. Expect volatility.

    Bt after $69,000, everyone who ever bought bitcoin ever and held is in profit. How about that for a thought?

    Then $100,000. It is such a big, round number - like $1,000 and $10,000 before it. I’m inclined to think we get there this year.

    On the downside there should be some support around $52k with the next line in the low- to mid-40s.

    Bitcoin bear cycles (stage 3 above) tend to last about a year, consolidations about another year. Bull markets tend to last two to three years. This one began 15 months ago. There will be wild whipsaws on the way, but I suggest this phase has a good year to go before it’s done.

    Three years ago $69,000 felt too expensive. It doesn’t anymore. I think this bull market ends with bitcoin at six figures.

    The evidence of previous bull markets is that we overshoot to the upside. But don’t expect not to get thrown about along the way.

    A final thought

    I first heard about bitcoin in December 2010. It was 20c. I didn’t really look into it; I just thought it sounded like a cool idea. When I came around to the idea of buying, the price kept going up. I got outbid for some physical bitcoins on eBay, I remember.

    I couldn’t bring myself to buy something after it had doubled and tripled. It went to $32. Then it corrected all the way to $2. I still didn’t buy. I had lost interest I think.

    People were giving me coins at this stage. Trying to get me into it. Then the price started going up again. It went to $200 then $1,200. I ended up writing a book about it. Even though I had a position, I never put the amount of money I should in because I couldn’t bring myself to buy something that had gone up so much.

    I could be a stupendously rich billionaire now, but I was scared off by the price rises. I’m fine by the way. You don’t need to worry about me. But I have a fraction of what I might have had. I got hacked as well but that’s another story.

    In December 2017, with bitcoin at $5,000, I went on the BBC Daily Politics show to talk about it. Over the next month, it quadrupled to $20,000, before going into one of its bear phases.

    Even buying at the very top of that cycle, you would still have tripled your money.

    Moral of all this: don’t be put off by the rising price.

    Here’s that interview again. There’s a lot to be learned from it:

    My 2023 guide to buying bitcoin is here. I’ll put an updated one together in the next few days.

    If you liked this article, please subscribe to the Flying Frisby. It’s really good.



    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
  • You might have seen in the news a couple of days back that, to make Britain’s unaffordable housing affordable, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and the Treasury are considering a scheme whereby people can buy homes with a deposit of just 1% and get a 99% mortgage.

    Thus, in theory, you could buy a one million pound home with just a ten-grand deposit.(I expect they will cap it below that level, but you get the point).

    It has become a cliché of the internet, but we say it anyway: “what could possibly go wrong?” It’s good to see the lessons from 2008 have been learned.

    Who would guarantee these loans should the buyer default? You would. You probably didn’t know this, but you’re already guaranteeing £4 billion under the existing mortgage guarantee scheme. You could soon be guaranteeing a whole lot more.

    Remember how they used taxpayer money to bail out the banks in 2008 and it was called “socialism for the rich”? This is the same thing, except this time they are bailing out the housing market.

    The Tories have this annoying (and mendacious) habit of leaking a policy to the press before it is actually policy to see how it goes down. I say mendacious because it is misleading. If they had any actual first principles by which they operated, then they would not do this. Instead, what sets policy is what Tories think might make them popular.

    In any case, I would hope this is another one of those test-the-water leaks, rather than something we will see come the next Budget in March, because it will send prices higher, just like its predecessor Help To Buy did, and that is the last thing we want. The solution to unaffordable housing is lower prices, not more debt.

    But regardless of whether the scheme gets the go-ahead or not, it still tells us all we need to know about how the Blob is going to fix Britain’s housing crisis: it isn’t.

    Instead, it’s going to come up with increasingly innovative ways to bring more debt into the market and thereby send prices even higher.

    It was the same after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. There was a chance to let the whole thing reset. Instead, we got suppressed interest rates, Quantitative Easing and then Help To Buy, all of which protected the already-haves at the expense of the have-nots.

    Labour won’t make a jot of difference, by the way. It is just as bereft of first principles. That is how Keir Starmer is going to win the next General Election: by not standing for anything. Not that it matters who wins. The Blob still runs the place.

    The destructive effects of high house prices

    It makes me weep what high house prices have done to this country. I see an entire generation, if not two, psychologically damaged, almost beyond repair, because they cannot afford somewhere decent to live.

    They feel inadequate. They delay starting families, or have smaller families, or have no children at all because they cannot afford anywhere to house them. They then hate themselves because they have no children.

    The result of smaller families later in life is population decline. The Blob then says there aren’t enough young people and opens the doors to mass immigration. Guess what happens then? Cheap imported labour pushes wages down, but increases demand for housing and essential services. State systems are too slow to adapt. Housing gets even more unaffordable. It is the most vicious of vicious circles.

    Locals are then told that priority in the workplace must be given to the newcomer because diversity. Complain and you are racist. Your history is bad, by the way. And you wonder why everything is such a clusterfook.

    Why do you think so many young people are so nihilistic? Because deep down they know they are never going to be able to afford anywhere decent to live, never mind pay off their student loans or have a family. They are, effectively, excluded from society. But stop drinking lattes and work harder.

    Who do you know who can afford to buy somewhere where they grew up? I know I can’t, and I’m part of the One Percent. It’s the opposite of progress. When people can’t afford to live where they gre w up, they lose touch with their roots, their traditions, their culture, the very land. And you wonder why we have lost touch with who we are.

    All because of stupid house prices.

    Houses themselves are not that expensive. Look here’s a 1,400 sq ft, 4-bed house with a 145 sq ft porch for £45,000. Delivery in six weeks.

    Looks nice, no? (You’ll need someone to put it together).

    The issue is land, and it’s a needless issue that goes all the way back to one of the most insidious and stupid bits of legislation ever enacted, The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947.

    When you create debt, you create money. The more money you bring into a market, the higher prices go. See student loans for more details. When that market is limited in how much it can expand, which is the case with UK housing because of restrictive planning laws, you get our situation where houses have gone up by three and half times more than wages.

    All the Treasury is doing with this policy is finding new ways to get more money into this market. There is only one way that will send house prices. It will only make things worse.

    The solution to unaffordable housing is lower prices. The Blob will not let that happen.

    By all means prop up the housing market. The cost will be your country.

    Further reading on the housing market:

    * Why Houses Cost So Much

    * What Really Causes Inflation

    * A Solution



    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
  • The self-improvement industry is just enormous. It’s worth $41 billion worldwide says this report, but, by the time you factor in everything from health and diet to training and education to media, I think it’s much, much bigger than that.

    We are almost all of us looking to improve ourselves in some way. We might spend fortunes and hours getting fit, strong or supple. We might spend ages making ourselves look beautiful. It never ceases to amaze me how long my eldest daughter can spend getting herself ready for work. She’s only going to work! We might spend hours reading or listening podcasts about how we can improve our performance, our habits or our psychology. Of Amazon’s best selling books last year three of the top ten can be filed under self-improvement (Atomic Habits by James Clear and two Nathan Anthony books on healthy eating).

    But there is one thing we don’t seem to spend any time trying to improve, and that is how we speak

    Occasionally, clips of people being interviewed way back when appear on Twitter or Facebook. Just ordinary folk. What is so amazing to me is just how beautifully people spoke.

    Compare that to the noises that come out of some peoples mouths today: the awful vowel sounds, the poor diction, even the language itself is frequently just so ugly.

    Even actors and broadcasters, who are supposed to be professional speakers, are mostly dreadful. Little priority is given to excellence in voice and speech. When I hear actors in period dramas, I want to despair. Leading politicians are mostly awful. Listen to Rishi Sunak: the Prime Minister’s voice is puny.

    I had a father who was a theatrical, obsessed with the spoken word and I guess that has always made me look at the world - or should I say listen to the world - from that angle. He and I used to work together loads on various exercises. Then at drama school we spent hours and hours on voice and speech: humming, singing, diction exercises - exercising your tongue with little bits of wood between your teeth to stretch it (I can’t even remember what those bits of wood are called. Edit: bone props - thanks to reader Nicholas Benson).

    “Articulatory agility is a desirable ability manipulating with dexterity the lips, the teeth and the tip of the tongue”. We had to say that over and over.

    I guess that stood me in good stead because voiceovers became my primary source of income for 25 years. But even I don’t think I’ve done a voice or speech exercise in over a decade, and when I catch myself speaking I often think, “sloppy”.

    Elocution lessons were a big thing once upon a time. People would actively try to improve the way they spoke in order to improve their situation. I guess, because of microphones and amplified sound, the need has gone away, though we are still judged on how we speak.

    I know that there are plenty of voice and speech coaches today, but in general, this is one area of self-improvement that doesn’t seem to have taken off. How I wish it would.

    How often do you see somebody, who looks absolutely magnificent, only for them to open their mouth and then something horrendous comes out?

    But if you should criticise somebody’s voice or speech, that makes you a snob. “They can’t help how they speak,” comes the retort. Yes, they can. Voice and speech are physical skills. They improve with exercise. In the same way that we have a culture of exercise and sport, I wish we had a culture of improving our voice and speech as well.

    It would make such a difference.

    Never mind free speech. Let’s have some good speech.

    Until next time,

    Dominic

    PS Don’t forget my two shows this week on Feb 14th and 15th at the Museum of Comedy in London. All about gold. And delivered with impeccable diction.

    If you are looking to buy gold in these uncertain times, let me recommend the Pure Gold Company, with whom I have an affiliation deal. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. More here.

    And, if you missed it, here is something interesting from earlier in the week:



    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
  • This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com

    Russia has been buying military drones from Iran and it has been paying for them with gold.

    This story seems to have gone largely unnoticed, but for those of us interested in the developing narrative that is de-dollarisation, this story has ramifications.

    A quick word about gold and national currencies

    We all know gold retains its role as store of value - otherwise central banks would no longer keep it, nor would ETFs be a thing. This is never going to change, by the way. Gold has always been and will always be used as a store and display of value.

    But gold has never been much of a medium of exchange, except for high value transactions. This role usually fell to silver and other metals. Under the classical gold standards of the 19th century gold did find some use. The old pound coin - aka the sovereign - was 22 carat gold, for example, and national currencies were supposed to be interchangeable with gold. But any role gold had then has gone now. Except in extremis, such as in times of war, when gold finds function as a money of last resort, gold has not been used as currency, as a medium of exchange, for over a hundred years.

    The remonetisation of gold, and the inevitable resulting official upwards revaluation, as governments tie their currencies to it once again to shore up their value, has been the dream of many a gold bug for many a year

    In order to free themselves from the clutches of the US and its banking system, those countries that make up the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (most of Asia) have long since wanted a settlement currency that is not the US dollar. The problem is what?

    Which national currency can the likes of China, India, Russia, Iran and the various stans all agree on and trust in?

    One possible solution is the internationally recognized money that is the shiny yellow stuff. Another is the rather less shiny, digital equivalent.

    That gold has been used to settle a large debt between two SCO nations is, therefore, a very significant development. It may just be an “extremis” case, resulting from sanctions on Iran and Russia. It may also be a step in the direction of remonetisation.

    Our misleading media

    First, let me clear up the fake news.

    I first spotted the story at Ross Norman’s site Metals Daily and, with Ross’s kind help, have since done some digging.

    “Moscow paid billions in gold bullions to Iran for Shahed drones, leaked documents reveal” says the headline at Indian news site, First Post. “Leak reveals minister's claim that $1.75 billion contract was signed for 6,000 Shaheds and Kremlin ‘paid in literal gold’”, says the subtitle at the Telegraph. (Versions of this story are eyebrow-raisingly similar, leading me to think one has copied and pasted it from the other. But in doing so, with so little vetting, they have also copied and pasted what is misleading).

    Here is Andrew Buncombe in the Telegraph:

    ‌”Moscow signed a $1.75 billion contract for 6,000 of the unmanned aerial vehicles from an offshoot of the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) last year, according to leaked documents posted online by a hacker group called the Prana Network.

    ‌It reportedly paid in gold bullion, shipping more than two tonnes to the manufacturer Sahara Thunder.”

    The thing is - and what neither journalist appears to have noticed - is that two tonnes of gold do not amount to $1.75 billion. Two tonnes are around $130 million.

    Some digging leads us to Defence Blog (edit: this site has since gone down) and then the original source for the story, in Ukranian, at news agency Militarnyi. The short of it is that a group of hackers, Prana Network, infiltrated the emails of Iranian company “IRGC Sahara Thunder”.

    Moreover, the maths reported at the Telegraph and elswehere are out (I can talk). Russia, it seems has a licence to construct up to 6,000 drones using Iranian parts within 30 months at a price of around $193,000/unit, or $290,000 per unit when ordering 2,000. But, as reader L has pointed out, 6,000 units at $193,000/unit only equates to $1.16 billion. Only at $290,000/unit you arrive at the $1.75 billion figure.

    But the important takeaway is this. Russia has been conducting financial transactions and payments with Iran in gold. In February 2023, the Russian organization “Alabuga Machinery” transferred 2.06 tonnes of gold bars to Sahara Thunder. We presume this is as payment for services and goods.

    So the story is slightly different, but the point is the same. Russia and Iran have been using gold as currency.

    What else, one wonders, has Russia been using gold to buy? And off whom?

    The shortcomings of gold in international trade

    To use gold is a long-winded way of doing business. Gold is heavy. There are security issues. They will have had to fly it over. (The logistics of transporting gold are one reason bitcoin will probably win the battle to be the default settlement currency outside of the banking system).

    Under classical gold standards, gold ownership could be transferred without the gold ever having to leave the vaults of trusted banks in London, New York and Switzerland. But if the SCO is to start using gold as currency, it is going to need a trusted third party to hold the gold, to save constantly having to transport it. Of course, Shanghai will have a role in this. Singapore may as well. But I would have thought an extremely likely candidate to play the role of Switzerland will be the United Arab Emirates. It is already the world’s second largest exporter. It’s yet another reason to be long Dubai - as well as gold.

    If you are looking to buy gold in these uncertain times, let me recommend the Pure Gold Company, with whom I have an affiliation deal. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. More here.

    Don’t forget my two shows next week on Feb 14th and 15th.

    If you would like to come, I have two pairs of tickets to give away to paying subscribers for February 14th - Valentine’s Day. The first two people to email - they are yours.

    So to other business …

  • In his book Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley argues that Homo sapiens overtook the stronger Neanderthals and, indeed, the rest of the animal kingdom, to become the dominant species on earth, by doing something no other animal does – by exchanging things. “There was a point in human pre-history,” he says, when “people for the first time began to exchange things with each other, and that once they started doing so, culture suddenly became cumulative, and the great headlong experiment of human economic “progress” began. Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution.”

    This applies not just to the exchange of objects, but the exchange of ideas, knowledge and information, of skills and services – just about anything. “If I catch the food, you cook it” means that I could specialize in catching – and become better at it – while you specialize in cooking and become better at that. With my superior catching and your superior cooking we both now enjoy considerably better lifestyles. Mankind also progresses through the subsequent improvement of catching and cooking techniques, which are then passed on to t he next generation.

    There is an exchange taking place right now. You are reading my material. I benefit from your eyeballs and the increased awareness of my work that every writer so desperately craves. You are benefitting from my words in that you might find entertainment, interest or wisdom in them.

    We are only able to do what we do today because of what was done in the past. It is only because of the cumulative work of millions of people – from Steve Jobs to Alan Turing to Shakespeare to millions of people who I’ll never know or even hear of – that I am able to write this essay on this Mac. I don’t know how to build a Mac, I don’t know how to extract the oil necessary to manufacture its component parts; I can’t make paper or ink or printing presses, yet, because of the cumulative effects of the exchanges of millions of people, I’m now able to exchange my work – itself the product of studying the work of many others – with you.

    The collective intelligence of mankind is far, far greater than what can be held in the mind of even the brightest individual that ever lived. That collective intelligence keeps on growing. There is no limit to it. ‘The extraordinary thing about exchange,’ says Ridley, ‘is that it breeds: the more of it you do, the more of it you can do. And it calls forth innovation.’ The more we exchange, the more we progress. This accumulation of intelligence over generations has led to a situation where, even a hundred years ago, to quote the French philosopher Ernest Renan, ‘The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life’.

    But the reverse applies as well. The less we exchange, the less we progress. Exchange is limited under oppressive, totalitarian or bureaucratic regimes, which is why they are overtaken by freer neighbours. When we stop exchanging altogether, there is regression.10,000 years ago, as Ridley argues, rising seas cut off Tasmania from mainland Australia. Isolated, the possibilities for exchange diminished. Technologically, the Tasmanian people actually regressed.

    It follows, therefore, that for individuals, families, communities, nations – indeed mankind – to prosper and progress, conditions need to be as conducive as possible for trade and exchange. It really is that simple. That should be the primary agenda of every policy-maker and leader in the world: to create an environment conducive to exchange. This means a marketplace where, from tax to tariff to bureaucracy, there are as few barriers to exchange as possible. It means a marketplace where there is trust and confidence. It means a market in which ownership of property is secure. It means a marketplace where participants can operate without coercion or crime; where good practice is rewarded with success and bad practice meets with failure. It also means a marketplace whose medium of exchange – money – is dependable.

    I’m talking, of course, about a free market.

    Until next time,

    Don’t forget to check out Wednesday’s piece, if you missed it:



    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’ve had it beaten into me from an early age how important it is to write clearly and simply. My father, himself a writer, drilled it into me. In my teenage years and into my 20s, we used to work together like mad on things I had written, trimming them down, rephrasing, editing, and he would always talk about the importance of clarity, as he taught me the craft of writing. “Make it easy for the reader,” he would say.

    As I’ve said many times, the discipline of comedy also forces clarity. If the audience doesn’t understand, they don’t laugh and you die.

    But in academia and across the financial world, and probably elsewhere, no such discipline applies. In fact, it often pays not to be clear. In the case of finance, if you can obfuscate a little, you are less likely to be caught out or have things thrown back at you. Former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who could speak in total gobbledygook if he needed, called what he did “purposeful obfuscation”. How right was George Orwell, another clear speech advocate, when he said “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity”.

    In the case of academia, unreadable sentences and long words can make you look cleverer than you actually are.

    There are so many books that have become wildly popular, which I’ve tried to read, and found unreadable. Thomas Pickety’s Capital In The 21st Century, for example. In the past I’ve tried and failed with James Joyce, Umberto Eco (except for The Name of the Rose), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Melville, Salman Rushdie, Joseph Heller, Stephen Hawking, Ayn Rand, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and more. Let’s be honest I’ve tried and failed to complete Homer, Dante and the Bible (King James version), as well. Maybe I lack persistence, but a large part of me thinks, “if you haven’t made the effort, why should I?”

    Picketty’s book sold millions of copies, but the stats from Amazon showed that hardly anyone actually finished it. It became one of those books that was cool to talk about having read, without anyone actually heaving read it. I settled for the Wikipedia entry - and I’m not even sure I finished that.

    Subscribe to this amazing publication and all your ailments will be cured.

    I’m currently working on a new book about gold and so I find myself reading a lot more than usual, as I research. Here is something, I’ve observed. Often you will stumble across a website where the writer has put some history or science or economics in beautifully clear and simple language. To do that takes effort. Such websites can become the most fantastic reference points. But sometimes because something is so simply written, I somehow think that by citing it - as I should - it doesn’t reflect very well on me. But cite some unreadable academic trove and that makes me look clever - even if I haven’t actually read it.

    As people who have read my books will know, I am pretty scrupulous about my citations. But if I find myself drawn to the temptation, for sure others will be too. People will cite the stuff they haven’t actually read, and not cite the stuff they have read. The unclear, pompous, badly written stuff with long words and endless sentences ends up getting the recognition, while the better, simpler stuff, where the writer has worked harder to make it easier for the reader, gets overlooked and even plagiarised. It’s the opposite of a virtuous circle.

    It’s another symptom of the midwit-dominated society in which we live, I suppose. The flannel gets the acclaim, the clear and simple stuff at either end of the bell curve not so much.

    We all think that we are not getting the credit we deserve. But I do sometimes wonder if perhaps I had worked less hard to make my stuff readable, I would have got more recognition - especially from the establishment (whatever that is). I’ve had so much stuff plagiarised over the years: books and articles, jokes and stand-up routines, even a film I helped write. It leaves a very sour taste in the mouth. But I don’t think I’ll ever bring myself to deliberately write unreadable stuff. I’m too programmed to try and keep things clear. Ah, the crosses we have to bear.

    On reading this, my girlfriend said I need to read the book The Four Agreements. Those agreements are: "Be impeccable with your word", "Do not take anything personally", "Do not make assumptions" and "Always do your best". She may have a point.

    It had better be clearly written …

    Tell your mates about this amazing article.

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.



    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 have been in California - Riverside, LA and Palm Springs - for the last month, helping out with a family issue over there. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts I had about the golden state, where, as wealth and poverty collide, there are two very different realities.

    My first wake up call was in the supermarket - Stater Bros. Just how expensive has the US has become, especially for a European with weak currency. I used to think America was cheap. You think food prices in the UK are bad. I’d say they are twice as expensive in California, if not more. $4.99 for four large onions and they weren’t even organic onions. Fruit, veg, fish, meat. Name your staple. The US ain’t cheap any more.

    Obviously, exchange rates are a factor and the pound, at $1.27, is not exactly strong, if one thinks back to the heady days north o f two bucks. But currency aside, ordinary living is getting very expensive for our transatlantic cousins. (Houses are no longer cheap either, for what it’s worth).

    Fuel, on the other hand, is around $4.80/gallon, which works out around £1/litre, compared to £1.45-50/litre over here. Americans are still complaining about it though. For them that’s expensive. Guess it is when you factor in how big their cars are.

    (Gosh, I enjoyed living under US weights and measures, or as they call them English weights and measures. They are so much more intuitive than metric. More on that here, if you want to see my lecture on the subject).

    Second hand cars also seemed cheap, by the way, though my finger is not really on the pulse. I was just strolling round the classic car shops in Palm Springs, where you can pick up a Rolls Royce Corniche in attractive beige (I didn’t realise there was such a thing) for $50k. That felt to me like less than you would pay here. Also, in Palm Springs people will tell you how nice your car is. Here they’ll just nick it.

    The roads, by the way, are very crowded indeed, and boy are freeways manic.

    Palm Springs was like a dreamland. Sheltered from the cruel realities that are inflicting the rest of the world, the news feels a long way away. But there was a very different story in LA, 90 minutes up the road. My kids wanted to see Skid Row (where many drug addicts and homeless have taken root), so we drove around there for a bit. Even in a car with the locks on, I did not feel comfortable at all halted at traffic lights. I once had a run-in with a group of homeless people on a freezing winter’s day in Hillbrow, Johannesburg - an experience I will never forget, and a story for another day. This reminded me of that. (Later, a Lyft driver told us Skid Row is by no means as bad as it gets. Places like Watts and Compton are too dangerous to even drive through).

    Skid Row borders on Downtown LA and, at the turn of a corner, you suddenly see all kempt streets and offices. The juxtaposition is stark.

    From there we went to the Walk of Fame for a stroll, where, within a few minutes of getting out of the car, we were almost knocked over by a huge (and I mean heavy weight world champion, 6 foot 8 basketball player huge) homeless black man with a very loud voice, running down the street, screaming platitudes at a much smaller, richly dressed and armed black man, who was chasing him, yelling at him to never be seen round here again.

    This was all in the first hour. My younger daughter (aged 19) turned to me and said she had never felt so unsafe in any city ever.

    She had a point. The drug addicted homeless seemed to be everywhere. Surely the sheer weight of numbers means something. In Venice, we watched a Latino man with a t-shirt stolen from TJ Max spend 10 minutes attempting to scan the bar code from the label of the stolen shirt onto the button at a pedestrian crossing, while the machine repeatedly told him to “wait”. Finally, exasperated, he threw his hands in the air and walked straight into the road to be hit by a passing car (fortunately not injured).

    The following day we visited Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It is so wealthy, clean and curated, it is verging on the make believe. There, you are abnormal if you haven’t had cosmetic surgery of some kind. Was ever there such a fairy land of a place.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen such extreme poverty and wealth so immediately juxtaposed as in LA. Something ain’t right, as the saying goes, and, I dare say, something’s going to give. It was probably my imagination, projecting fears and biases, but at times it felt like we were just a couple of short steps away from breakdown: a city on the brink. My general theory, or rather Alex McCarron’s theory which I’ve adopted, of the South Africanisation of everything applies here too.

    The following day we hung out in West Hollywood and Silvertown, where, I should say, things felt more normal, whatever that means. I really liked the vibe. Best of all, I liked the canals around Venice. They are just glorious. Almost as nice as the River Thames upstream.

    As for LA’s future, well… The city was built on the movie industry. Who watches movies any more? I have been to the cinema once since Covid. I used to go all the time. My kids don’t go either. Most of their viewing time is on their phones, and of that the moving picture allocation goes on YouTube and Tictoc. (I know, I know). Films are for boomers, but even my mum hardly watches any now. Perhaps, then, LA goes the way of another city that lost its main industry: Detroit. It’s not impossible, I suppose. On the other hand, there is so much capital in LA, it seems unlikely. South Africanisation, as I say, is the most likely.

    In any case, LA is a city that is not working for a lot of people, even if it is for a few.

    I would not be in a rush to invest capital there - unless it’s in some kind of security company.

    On a happier note, here for your entertainment is a photo of the kids and me on a hike in the mountains around Palm Springs. I don’t normally post pics of the fam, but I liked this one.

    (Those wind turbines in the background, by the way, are a blot of the landscape and, in the three weeks I was there, barely turned).

    Until next time,

    Dominic

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.



    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
  • (If you prefer, you can watch this article in video form here)

    The youngster setting out on life in the west has a major problem. We live in a society that penalises hard work. Punitively and relentlessly.

    As Daylight Robbery readers will know, over the course of a life, half of everything a typical worker earns will be taken from him by the government. More if you factor in inflation.

    People think a house is the most expensive purchase you will ever make. It isn’t. It is, by far and away, your government. And it’s a forced purchase as well.

    Not only is the produce of your labour confiscated, it is spent on things on which you may often be philosophically opposed: wars, waste, masks, rainbow road crossings, corruption, human rights lawyers, Stonewall. I could go on.

    But that is the bind in which the western citizen finds himself. It is the price he must pay for a civilised society.

    So the typical worker finds himself working hour upon hour merely to stay afloat, his produce confiscated, week in week out. We can’t all be Elon Musk, much as we would like to be. Unless you have a very well paid job indeed, this is your reality. It is very hard to get on. You are trapped.

    To make it worse, the money you are paid in also loses its value. Relentlessly. Thus what you got to keep is taken from you too.

    This will remain your reality, unless you change it.

    One solution, as I outline here, is to convert as much of your pay as possible into strong currency, but with 50% of your earnings constantly confiscated it is still a rough deal. (And don’t say income taxes are lower than that, I know they are. There are many other taxes we must pay too.)

    So what to do?

    The answer is leave. Go somewhere where taxes are lower and the currency is stronger. Then you will be rewarded for your labour. And through your labour, you might actually be able to save and improve your lot.

    I have never been crazy about Dubai. I’ve always found the place a bit false. It lacks culture. I prefer places that are a bit more organic. I’d rather be in a quaint English village with an old pub and a beautiful church, wandering through the City with its mysterious, historical back alleys or lounging in some terracotta Mediterranean villa. What’s more, the thought of the slave labour on which Dubai was built makes me feel very uncomfortable.

    In my stand-up act I sometimes do a joke: “as a stand-up you need some ready-made put-downs in case you have problem people in the audience, so I have been working on my put-downs, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is … You look like the sort of person that likes Dubai.” (Some audiences - usually cultured ones - love that joke, others are baffled by it)

    But all that said, every time I have been to Dubai I have had a good time. A very good time in fact. And I have always been well looked after.

    But here’s the thing. There is no Income Tax in Dubai. VAT is just 5%. There is no Stamp Duty. There is no TV tax. There is no Council Tax. Petrol is cheap. Corporation tax is much lower. Booze, fags and sugary drinks face 50% excise duties. But who cares? You drink too much anyway.

    As for the money you are paid in, UAE dirham, well, that’s pegged to the US dollar. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than the pound.

    So go the UAE, work, keep what you earn and, even in a relatively low-ranking job, in five years you will suddenly you’ll find yourself in a very different, much stronger position than if you had stayed in UK, Europe or any high tax jurisdiction.

    Look at how crap our governments are. Why enable them?

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.



    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
  • If you prefer to read this piece, you can do that here.

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.



    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
  • If you prefer, you can read or listen to this piece here.

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.



    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
  • It’s that time of year again.

    Time to get out the crystal ball and tell you precisely what is going to happen in the next 12 months.

    Here are 15 predictions for 2024.

    Remember the rules of the game: I score 2 points for a direct hit, 1 for a good call, zero for a miss and minus one for a “David Lammy on Mastermind” fail. As I do every year, I shall come back and mark my homework next December.

    New years are fairly arbitrary things. January 1st rarely marks an actual turning point. Trends that were trends in the autumn and winter tend to continue into January, February and beyond, until they dissipate and run out of steam.

    There are occasional dramatic events, but life is mostly a gradual process. It’s only when you jump back or forward 12 months that things look so different. This time last year the S&P500 was struggling to the point that many saw a meltdown coming. We got no such thing - in fact, quite the opposite. The stock market rose 25% in one of its best years ever.

    20 years ago, if you could step forward and see, I don’t know, the state of our institutions, or the demographics of your capital city, you’d risk having some kind of cerebral haemorrhage. Change is gradual, it is the incremental effects of tiny change compounded over time that are so formidable.

    We’ll start, however, with an ongoing gradual process that I don’t see reversing in 2024.

    1. The Great Decline goes on.

    It may not feel like it in this Great Decline, but life generally, believe it or not, is getting steadily better, at least from a technological point of view.

    But technology is subject to the improving forces of competition and free markets, our systems of government are not. They are from a different era and should be obsolete, but they persist. They are not improving but stultifying.

    The prediction: 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. (I’m going to write a song called Nothing Works Anymore). The New Woke Religions of Climate Change, the NHS and White=Bad endure, exhausting resources and minds. 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.

    2. Gold to new highs. $2,400 here we come.

    It’s not all bad, however. This is a good year for the anti-fiat trades. Gold breaks out. Finally.

    3. Bitcoin goes to new highs as well.

    The barrier that is the all-time high at $69,000 falls. The ETF, the halving, the money printers and the tech itself all play their part. If there is one thing bitcoin has taught me, it is never to underestimate how high it can go.

    4. But ethereum, for reasons that escape me, outperforms bitcoin.

    I wrote what is generally agreed to be one of the first books about crypto. But the industry has moved so fast, I am mostly baffled by it. What are most of these coins actually for? But one observation I have made is that ethereum always seems to move later in the cycle, and by more. Why should this time be different?

    5. The US dollar trends sideways.

    The US dollar has been trending sideways for over a year now, frustrating bull and bear alike. It should be lower. I’m in the US at the moment and it feels very expensive: food is almost twice as expensive as in the UK, I’d say. But the dollar is the best house in a bad fiat neighbourhood. Prediction: it continues to range-trade.

    6. Sterling has problems.

    According to my eight year cycle of the pound - something in which I am steadily losing confidence - this should be the year the pound hits rock bottom. What is the catalyst? Gilt issues, perhaps. Unsustainable deficits. Something political is another likely answer, given this is an election year. On which note …

    7. The Tories are eviscerated.

    They had their chance and they blew it. Come the General Election this year, the voters are unforgiving. Few vote Tory. But voters also know that Labour is just as bad, so Labour does not win by anything as much as it should. There are lots of protest votes and no votes. The SNP is similarly annihilated. The shortcomings of our political system are there for all to see. But nothing that needs to changes. (See prediction one)

    8. Uranium keeps on going up.

    There’s a supply squeeze. We have been warning about it. Regime change in Russia could fix it. Don’t see that happening. Taking out the old highs at $140/lb is not so impossible. But let’s aim low to avoid disappointment. Uranium hits $125/lb in 2024.

    9. Fast and processed food companies have problems

    The food industry has got two problems on its hands. One is the weight loss drugs, the most famous example of which is Ozempic. A lot of people are taking it and that means a lot of people are eating a lot less. Two is the rise of anti-seed-oil narratives. More and more studies are showing the link between seed oils and obesity, cancer and other modern illnesses. This narrative is spreading. At some point the mainstream will start regurgitating it. There could be legal suits.

    West-centric fast and processed food companies have a problem on their hands. Those that market into developing markets less so, as they will continue to have that outlet. Timing the short will be everything.

    Tell your mates.

    10. A good year for the Japanese yen.

    It’s as cheap as it’s been for a very long time. That’s something that reverses in 2024. My pick of the forex trades, for reasons of Frisby’s Flux, is long the yen against the pound, but there are opportunities against the dollar too.

    11. The S&P500 has an decent year

    But nothing like the year it had in 2023. We see gains somewhere close to 10%, perhaps a little bit below.

    12. Smallcaps make a welcome return

    After several years of underperformance, small caps start to outperform large again.

    13. House prices

    The UK housing market is caught between a rock and a hard place. It stays there. Atrophy and stagnation, many sellers refusing to reduce prices, buyers reluctant to pay up, lots of gazundering. But no meltdown yet.

    14. Tears of the moon keep on crying.

    Can silver stage a meaningful rally above $30 in 2024? Nope. It’s silver.

    You really should subscribe to this amazing publication.

    15. Liverpool win the league.

    Finally your Bruce-y Bonus sports prediction. Liverpool win the league, Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton all go down.

    That’s it.

    Thanks very much for reading and supporting the Flying Frisby. Have a wonderful 2024!

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.



    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
  • Shortly after my father died, I remember saying to my eldest daughter: where do thoughts go? What happens to them?

    My father was a writer, so many of the thoughts he had he wrote down and preserved in some way. But what happened to all the ones he didn’t record over the course of his life? Is that it - they are just gone?

    Studies suggest a typical person has 7,000 thoughts a day. Others put that number ten times higher at 70-80,000. That seems a lot to me. (Some people, from what I can see, don’t even reach double figures).

    80,000 thoughts/day would work out at close to one thought per second. It depends how you define what a thought is, I guess. Many thoughts are repetitive: we have the same thought over, often because we forget we have had it.

    But whether 7,000 or 70,000, we have a lot of thoughts. So …

    Of those many thoughts you have each day, how many do you actually recognise or acknowledge? A tiny percentage.

    Of those thoughts you do recognise, how many do you then articulate or speak aloud in some way? Again a tiny percentage. We are at a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage.

    Of those thoughts that you articulate, how many do you actually record - perhaps write down? Of those you record, how many do you act on and and turn into something? An even tinier percentage.

    So, of all the thoughts we have, a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage get recorded, and an even tinier percentage actually become something.

    Now let’s extrapolate that over a life. A typical lifespan is 27,000 days. That makes 189 million or 1.89 billion thoughts over the course of your life (depending on whether you are a 7,000 or 70,000/day person).

    Now let’s extrapolate this across human history - all the thoughts that every human being has had ever. 117 billion lives have been lived, google tells me. 117 billion multiplied by 189 million or 1.89 billion is a lot of thoughts. What happened to them all? Where did they go? Where are they now? Is there some ethereal warehouse up the street where they are all stored?

    If those thoughts are now gone - unrecorded, unacted upon - what, then, was the point of having them?

    Recording my thoughts has always been something that’s obsessed me rather. Even as a child, I used to keep a diary and try to record as many of the things that I thought (the interesting ones, at least) as possible, especially as I worried I might never have that thought again. I’ve got piles of notebooks, not to mention the notes and voice files in my phone and on my computer. But I never go back through them and I doubt anyone else ever will, so I may as well have not bothered. Those thoughts are going to disappear, even though I wrote them down and attempted to preserve them. What was the point of having them?

    Park that thought for a moment, while I ask you a question.

    Why Christianity and Judaism succeeded where other religions failed

    Of the plethora of religions that existed around the Middle East three or four thousand years ago, why did Judaism survive, but none of the others?

    Is it because the Jews are God’s chosen people (as my Jewish friends constantly like to remind me every time I bring this question up)?

    Or is it because the Jews wrote theirs down?

    Other religions were passed on orally. Even better: the Jews inscribed their Ten Commandments in stone.

    Why did Christianity supersede all the pagan religions of Northern Europe during the Dark Ages? The Northmen were the superior force militarily, surely their pagan religions should have conquered too. With the likes of Odin, Thor and Loki, or the druidic religions of the Celts, many of those pagan religions were much cooler than Christianity. Why did Christianity conquer?

    Because the bible was written down. Pagan religions and traditions were passed on orally. It’s a much less reliable way of transferring thought.

    So you can see then both the power of preserving thought and the influence it can have on history.

    Please subscribe to this amazing publication.

    Do thoughts exist?

    Do thoughts have matter? This is a question that occupies the minds of philosophers far more profound than me. Thoughts must have some kind of matter, runs the argument, because it takes energy to have them. If we do a lot of thinking, we get tired. The brain uses at least 20% of the body’s energy, even though it makes up 2% of the body’s mass. Perhaps a thought is just a little parcel of energy.

    But, I ask again, what happens to thoughts after we have them? If we don’t record or articulate them in some way, are they just gone?

    Or is there some kind of ethereal depository where all thoughts get stored? Some kind of collective human consciousness warehouse that we haven’t discovered yet.

    I’m one of these people that thinks most invention is discovery. Just as Alexander Fleming did not invent penicillin, he discovered it, so did, say, Thomas Edison (and many others) not so much invent the lightbulb as discover the technology that makes lightbulbs work. Did man invent the wheel or did he discover it?

    My friend Low Status Opinions, who, as well as his brilliant Substack, writes jokes for famous comedians, says the act of writing a joke is not invention, rather it is pulling back the sand to see what’s there. The veteran commodities speculator Peter Brandt says something similar: a trade is a process of discovery. You place numerous trades, you manage your risk, and you discover which work.

    Today, with digital technology, our lives are taken out of the material world and into cyberspace. Of course, there are huge data centres that make it all function, but in a way this ethereal, digital world of the Internet, with all its social media, better represents our thoughts and the preservation of them than the paper and material world that preceded it.

    So is there some depository or warehouse of thoughts that we have not yet invented/discovered yet?

    The idea that we only use 10% of our brain’s capacity has been largely dismissed, but we definitely have latent brain power than we don’t use. Taking psychedelic drugs perhaps unleashes latent potential. There is “acquired savant syndrome”, when you can acquire often extraordinary scholarly capacity after a traumatic head injury. The most famous example of this is Jason Pladgett who was mugged and badly beaten up, then woke up to find he now had an ability to understand complex maths and physics that did not previously exist; he developed an astonishing ability to draw complex geometric shapes he had no previous understanding of. So there is for sure some untapped potential in our minds.

    I wish I knew how to tap into it without risking long-term damage. There are a gazillion ideas I have had for stories, shows, businesses, products, that I would love to realise in some way. Then again genius is 99% perspiration. Having the idea is the easy bit.

    But a Scottish audio producer friend had this to say when I bemoaned how ideas disappear. “Nature wastes nothing,” he said with the power only a Scottish accent with its articulated consonants can have. (It’s why they make such good football managers). “Nature wastes absolutely nothing. Everything gets used in some way.”

    He’s right. Nature is not like governments or corporations which can be incredibly wasteful. Nothing in nature gets thrown away. Everything gets used (it’s why I am so pro free markets and so anti-regulation and government. The free market is the closest economic rendition of the natural world that we have).

    Yes, nature wastes nothing. The process of thinking and having ideas, even if those ideas appear to disappear if we do not record or act on them - there is a purpose to it, even if we have not yet discovered what it is. What though?

    I guess if there’s a moral to today’s piece, it’s this: don’t keep your thoughts to yourself.

    What do you think? Where do thoughts go? If they disappear, what is the point of having them? Just for the few we do act on? Let’s discuss.

    Happy New Year! Thank you so much for reading and supporting this Substack.

    Until next time,

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.



    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 am very happily surprised by the success this Substack, the Flying Frisby, is having, and by the way it is growing.

    I’d like to say it’s all down to you. A lot of it really is: for reading and supporting this letter. Thank you.

    A lot of it is down to me too for writing it. Aren’t I wonderful?

    But a lot of it is down to the platform itself.

    I think Substack is great. I have encountered some of the most brilliant writing on here, stuff I don’t think I ever would found otherwise - either because it would have been in too remote a corner of the internet for me to have ever come across it, or because, without this platform, it might never have got written in the first place.

    In a virtuous loop, this centre of good writing is leading to more good writing. Free thought is leading to more free thought. Everywhere blossoms. It has become the most fertile platform for philosophy, commentary and the arts. It has created a virtuous circle. Hobbies are becoming livelihoods. Isn’t that great? With free everything, the internet devalued content. Substack reverses that. It’s OnlyFans for highbrow people.

    I used to think I was a brilliant forecaster of trends. I now realise it’s just that if I am thinking it, a lot of other people are thinking it too. But I’ve found I am putting more and more time and effort into Substack, both as a creator of content and a consumer of it. If I am, others are too. The platform will grow as a result, while both creator and consumer, buyer and seller, will benefit.

    On the other hand, I only have so much time. With more of it expended here, I find less time available for my other endeavours (and there are lots of them). I’m supposed to be writing a new book for example. How often when I sit down to write do I find myself knocking out a Substack instead. Creating content is addictive. When readers like it all sorts of dopamines go off

    My career, if you could call it that, has taken a surprise turn as a result of this Substack, which I only started it as a result of a chance conversation in the pub.

    This is all a lot of pre-amble to say how much I am enjoying writing this letter, how surprised I have been by its success and how grateful I am to you for both reading and supporting it.

    Thank you very much.

    I wish you all a wonderful 2024.

    Dominic

    PS If you missed my piece, How To Change Your Social Status, I made a video verson of it here:

    PPS And if you fancy a festive LOL, here’s me entertaining the masses at the Free Speech Union Christmas Bash.



    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
  • Here are all the links mentioned in the vid:

    * An Evening of Curious Songs on Tour

    * Show about gold in London Feb 14/15

    * Buy gold - Pure Gold Co

    * Bitcoin guide.

    If you prefer to read this article, you can do that 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
  • As long-time readers/sufferers will know, at the beginning of the new year I like to make some predictions for the 12 months ahead.

    The bolder the prediction, the more entertaining the copy, though the less likely it is to actually happen. Herein lies the eternal conflict at the heart of so much market commentary. What is more important: getting lots of eyeballs or being right?

    Today we mark our own homework. We look back at last year’s effort and we count up the points. The scoring system: 2 points for a direct hit, 1 point for a nearly right, 0 for a fail and minus 1, if the prediction is David-Lammy-on-Mastermind-level bad.

    (For those readers not familiar with David Lammy, he is a UK politician from the “everyone who does not agree with me is a Nazi” school of philosophy, who appeared on one of the UK’s flagship quizzes and was really, really bad).

    I like this exercise because it demonstrates just how much perspective can change over time. While we can change strategy as events develop, the copy from last year stays and back then things looked very shaky. The stock market was imploding, and the end was nigh. Now it all looks rather better.

    Next week I’ll put together some predictions for 2024, but here’s how 2023’s batch panned out.

    Subscribe to The Flying Frisby.

    * Brent crude oil, then at $80, to hit three figures. We felt commodities would have a good year with China’s re-opening increasing demand. It didn’t. The highest Brent got was $95. Zero points.

    * Copper would go to $4.80/lb, we said, on the same theme, and we were wrong about that too. It got to $4.30. Not quite Lammy-on-Mastermind levels of failure, but a big fat zero nonetheless.

    * Yield becomes a thing again. “With choppy, uncertain markets, but sticky inflation, investing for yield rather than capital growth becomes a much bigger theme in 2023.” It seems painfully obvious now, I can’t believe it wasn’t a year ago, but a lot of investors, particularly those with lots of capital, have been quite happy to take safe 5 or 6% yields. Two points.

    * S&P500. Things looked very dicey in the stock market this time last year. Many were declaring end of days. We said no such thing. It was “a classic recessionary bear market”, we argued. It looks obvious now. It wasn’t then. The S&P500, 3,800 at the time, would get back towards its old highs of 4,800. It has done just that. We are at 4,770. A big fat two points.

    * Emerging Markets outperform, we said. They didn’t. Zero.

    * Biotech becomes a thing again too, we said, thinking that after so many years of underperformance, perhaps it was due some time in the sun. Nope. While it has been extremely strong these last two months, it was flat over the year. Zero. (Don’t worry the predictions get better).

    * European banks have a good time of it too. They did. Up somewhere between 15 and 20%, depending on which measure you use. Even Deutsche Bank is up. Two points.

    * Bitcoin has a good year. Hard to think it was $17,000 a year ago. ”There are so many reasons to be bullish about bitcoin, yet sentiment could not be worse.” It’s tripled. Two points.

    * Silver, on the other hand, “fails to deliver yet again.” While many this time last year were saying $30 was on the way, we bitterly observed that “If you can count on anything in this cruel world, it’s that silver will let you down”. It began the year at $24 and, one year on, that is where we remain. $26 was the high. Two points.

    * US dollar. “Up and down” range-trading was our prediction for the US dollar, and that is what we got. Though the US dollar index ended the year at 101, we tentatively ventured that it would end higher than the 102 where it started. Just the one point.

    * Central Bank Digital Currencies. Delighted to be wrong about this one, as they are evil. “A nation with a population greater than 15 million rolls out its first CBDC,” we said. No nation did. (Nigeria doesn’t count, as it already had one). Zero points. (Here’s my comic song about CBDCs, if you haven’t already seen it).

    * Ukraine. Dominic Frisby is your first port of call for Ukraine War analysis, I know. But my outlook was “The Ukraine War will not end before October. There will not be a nuclear war and Vladimir Putin will still be Russia’s president by year end.” Even though Hamas took it off the front pages, it goes on. Two points.

    * Gold. It “retests its old highs around $2,080. But then it finds a way of being frustrating. It always does. It’s gold.” That is where we are. Two points.

    * Finally, sports. Man City win the league, I said, and they did. (At that point Arsenal were way ahead). Got that right, but the relegation I got wrong: Southampton, Wolves and Bournemouth were for the chop, but no. Wolves and Bournemouth both managed to stay up. Leeds and Leicester went down. One point.

    A grand total of 16 points. Not great, but not awful either. Kind of like my school reports.

    I hope you had a very Merry Christmas. I wish you good fortune, health, wealth and prosperity in 2024. May you make good decisions! May we all make good decisions.

    Thank so much for being a subscriber to the Flying Frisby. I really am very grateful.

    Subscribe to the Flying Frisby .

    Buying gold?

    Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. My recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.

    Live shows coming up

    If you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.

    And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.

    Here are the dates and places.

    * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.

    * Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

    * Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.

    * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

    * Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.



    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
  • You can, if you prefer, watch this article in video form here:

    I was having a coffee with an Anglo-Italian friend of mine the other day, and he began telling me about his grand-parents. They were “contadini”, which translates literally as “peasants”, though the term peasant does not have such pejorative connotations in Italy as it does here. They called themselves “mezzadri” or “sharecroppers”. A landowner allowed them to work his land, in exchange for half of everything they produced on it. The other half they got to keep. Selling that half of the produce was how they got money. My friend’s family had been doing this for generations, never actually breaking above that status to become landowners themselves.

    There are many parallels to the mediaeval serf, who had to work the land of his lord in exchange for his subsistence and protection. Just as the serf was the descendent of the Roman slave, so was the contadino the descendent of the serf, though contadini were not as subjugated, except by their circumstances.

    It is not so different to the plight of the young western worker today, particularly at the lower end of the pay scale, who has, by the time you factor in inflation and other taxes, half of everything he earns taken from him by the state, and is unable to buy a place to live.

    In any case, in 1966 Grandad left Italy and the peasant existence, followed by Grandma in 1967, and they came to work in England. With union law quite protective at the time, most Italians in the UK found themselves either setting up small businesses or working for other small businesses belonging to friends or family, especially in the catering industry. (My grandad, who was also Italian, ran a sandwich shop in Victoria). They were paid in British pounds, and largely in cash, on which they are unlikely to have paid much Income Tax.

    While the British pound was not exactly a beacon of fiscal rectitude, it was a lot better than the Italian lira, which suffered numerous devaluations and became something of a laughing stock currency. This meant that the money Grandad and Grandma were paid in kept its value, at least on a relative basis.

    Several years passed. My friends’ grandparents worked hard and saved. Then in 1970 they went back to Italy and bought themselves an apartment. It may only have been an apartment, but for the first time in the family’s history they owned property. They carried on working in the UK and by 1976 they were able to buy some of the land on which they had previously been contadini. Their social status had changed - from peasant to landowner.

    It was a common thing among Italian emigrants throughout the 20th century. When they went back home, they had so much more money than those who had stayed.

    They hadn’t had particularly good jobs in England. They were waiters. They were only able to do what they did for two reasons: one, the money they were paid in and saved in was so much stronger than the Italian lira; two, operating in the cash economy and receiving much of their income in tips, which were not taxed back then, they did not have 50% of the produce of their labour confiscated, whether by landowner, lord or state.

    There is an important message to this story, both about how society works and about how you should position yourself.

    The unspoken crime of the 20th and 21st centuries

    Actually, there are many crimes, let’s just say this is a big one. Not only are workers fleeced by the amount of tax that they have to pay (most of which is then wasted on government incompetence or worse), they are fleeced because the money they are paid loses its value.

    Owning property has been one of the few ways by which ordinary people have been able to protect themselves against the extraordinary currency debasement of the 20th and 21st century. As I constantly argue, property prices are a functon of money supply, and property is unaffordbale as a result of relentless money supply growth. So much newly created money goes into property, that houses have become financial assets, an effective hedge against currency debasement. As house prices have gone up, it feels like wealth has been created, but it is just an illusion. All that has happened is that property owners have been had that part of their portfolio shielded from the debasement.

    Storing your wealth in property proved a much better place to keep it than cash, be it sterling, lira, euro or dollar. Plus your main home goes untaxed, so you don’t get fleeced that way either.

    My Italian friend described his confirmation some 35 years ago. One family member gave him a gold sovereign. Another gave him twenty newly minted pound coins, which my friend still has in the original packaging. Which has kept its value? Those pound coins might have some collectors’ interest, but £20 buys you a heck of a lot less now than it did 30 years ago. The sovereign meanwhile has kept its purchasing power, as gold always does.

    When you work, you expend energy. The money you are paid for your expended effort is in effect stored energy to be used at some later stage. It is essential to an honest and functioning society that that expended energy keeps its potential. But it doesn’t.

    What can we do? We can’t change the system.

    But we can change ourselves.

    Consider all the work that you have done over the years. Imagine if you had converted what you were paid for it straight away from fiat into strong currency - be it gold or house. The value of your labour would have been preserved too, instead of eroded. With the cumulative savings, you’d be able to turn around today and buy things that were previously out of your reach, just as my friend’s grand-parents did.

    Now imagine that for all the work you’ve done over the last 10 or 15 years you had been paid in bitcoin. Or, on being paid in fiat, you had immediately converted the money into bitcoin. You would be extraordinarily wealthy now, so wealthy your entire social status would have changed. There are many who have done that. They converted their salary into bitcoin as soon as they were paid. Because they saved in a strong currency, they are now able not to work at all, if they don’t want to. They could probably buy the company they worked for. They can buy houses in a market that is otherwise affordable.

    There is a whole movement of people who are doing just that now. They will transform their lives as a result.

    Weak money weakens you

    You will not change your life or your status, if you keep your wealth in crap currency. Crap currency keeps you down. It makes you weak. Crap currency is a way of keeping people down. Many will think this is deliberate, a tool of suppression. It certainly used to be. Serfs were not allowed to handle gold or silver specie, once upon a time. Fiat has a similar effect, though by the back door.

    There are some economists who argue that it is good to have a weak currency. A weak currency attracts investment they say, especially from overseas. It might well attract investment, because people with stronger currencies can buy you and your country, you and your country’s labour and assets on the cheap. Why do you think so much of the UK is now foreign owned?

    Europe and the UK both look so cheap to Americans at the moment, because of the relative currency strength. I have American friends who tell me they thought London was supposed to be expensive. It is if you live here and you are paid in pounds, but if you have a strong currency it isn’t.

    A weak currency makes you weak. A weak currency makes your country weak.

    Switzerland has maintained the strength of its franc. Ordinary Swiss people have status, as result - a status that is above the status of someone from somewhere with joke money. There is a hierarchy among nations. It comes with the currency. With a weak a currency you lose status globally, you fall down the global hierarchy. Imagine being an Argentine or a Venezuelan or a Turk. Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world. Venezuela was extraordinarily wealthy in the 1980s. The Turks were once the Ottomans. Now they are all low status. Italy used to be the richest country in the world, as did Britain later on. With the serial devaluation of its lira, it became a laughing stock. The UK has become a weak nation, a nation in decline. Our money is weak.

    One of the first jobs of government should be to protect the value of the currency, because then you are protecting the value of your citizens’ labour. By defending your currency, you are defending your people. You are empowering them. But when your currency is weak, you weaken your people. Inflation is not just theft, it is debilitating. It is stealing from your people, weakening them, devaluing them, and taking away their power.

    The take-away from of all of this: save in strong currencies. You might live in a country with a weak currency. Not all of us cannot up sticks and go and live in Switzerland or El Salvador. But you can still convert your weak currency into strong, be it gold or bitcoin.

    Save in strong currencies. Over time it will change your life. And your social status.

    My friend, meanwhile, finds himself unable to buy a property in the UK. He has recently taken a leaf out of his grand-parents’ book, and emigrated, at least digitally: he’s putting everything he earns into bitcoin. Let’s see how he gets on.

    If you are considering buying gold, my recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. I have an affiliation deal. More here.

    Here is my latest piece on bitcoin, and my guide.

    If you are looking for Chrissie pressies and stocking fillers, then here is your place.



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