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Cards on the table: A Western fiat money collapse, along the lines of Zimbabwe, Venezuela, or Weimar hyperinflation, despite unsustainable deficit spending and un-payable government debt, is not something I think we are likely to see.
Many more knowledgeable souls than myself deem it inevitable, but more probable in my view is just the continued debasement of currency and the erosion of its value, so that, with the incremental effects of compounding, a generation from now fiat will have lost another 90% or more of its purchasing power.
Heck, the pound has already lost a third of its value just this decade. Since the beginning of the century, it has fallen by over 90%.
I guess that constitutes collapse. It all hangs on how you define collapse, I suppose, and over what timeframe.
Yet, there's one scenario I can envision that could lead to a more rapid collapse, and it's one we might even be careering towards: war.
If tensions between East and West escalate into full-blown conflict, you can be sure the East will attack Western currencies, just as the US weaponized banking and the dollar following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
China has lots of gold, as we know, much more than it says it does. Russia has plenty. Shanghai Cooperation Nations are all accumulating. US gold has not been audited for decades, casting doubts over whether it even exists. As for British gold, I wonder what happened to that! In short, Western fiat money is extremely vulnerable should the East decide to attack it. (For the time being at least, I don’t expect it to: China has some $3.25 trillion in reserves, and another $800 billion in US Treasuries. Why collapse their value?)
But whether Biden or Trump wins in the US elections this autumn, neither is going to balance the books. Nor will Labour here in the UK. So you know that both the pound and the dollar are going to see their value steadily eroded for the next five years. Deficit spending will continue and debts will increase.
Indeed, outside of a full-on deflationary tightening or collapse - I mean Paul Volcker in 1980 scale tightening - it is impossible for fiat money to see its purchasing power grow. Supply is going to increase, and purchasing power will decline. This is built-in, inherent, and inevitable. Hence why I advocate owning alternative, non-government money - gold and bitcoin.
Today, I want to explore a scenario in which Western currencies come under attack and are forced to back their currencies with gold. I understand Russia briefly did this in March 2022. In other words, what happens to the gold price if gold gets remonetized?
Similarly, we’ll explore potential bitcoin prices in the event of hyperbitcoinisation (where bitcoin becomes the dominant global money).
The Remonetisation of Gold
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I have a friend from school who is obviously gay. We’ve all known it for a long time, yet, for whatever reason, he has never been able to come out. He has never been able to admit to himself what is so apparent to everyone else. He’s miserable. Has been for years.
I’m not sure if I were gay, if I would be able to come out.
I have actually tried to be gay. Well, sort of. In the dark years of my late 30s and divorce, I thought a couple of times being gay might save me from having to deal with the alien species that is woman, so I tried watching gay porn. I was just bored by it. Within a few minutes I was looking at second-hand cars on Autotrader. I have never found men remotely attractive, even if I can admire a beautiful male physique. The only time I might possibly waver is if they are all dolled up in drag, with glamorous dresses, heels, breasts, makeup, wigs, and all the rest of it. But take the wig off and any spell is broken.
In any case, to come out as gay requires coming to terms with the truth. I think it is a very brave thing to do.
I think that’s why so many great social commentators and comedians are gay. Never mind the obvious love of performing and attention; why, for example, a disproportionately large number of actors and dancers are gay. (By disproportionate, I mean the ratio of gay to straight increases in acting and dancing relative to what it is across the broader population). I mean, because of this phenomenon, whereby gay people are able to speak truths; in many cases, truths that straight people are unable or too shy or polite or repressed to express. How often, for example, when watching a gay performer, does the word “outrageous” burst out of the mouths of those watching, often accompanied by a gasp and the hand going over the mouth? Yes, what they are doing or saying may be outrageous, but it is usually outrageous because it is an unspoken truth.
The act of coming out is enabling because it requires tremendous honesty. That honesty is then carried into other areas of life. I’m sure that’s why, for example, Douglas Murray, is able to say the things that many of us are thinking, but few of us dare articulate. Coming out teaches you to be truthful, and truth is power.
Even an entertainer like Kenny Everett was so baring of his soul, thereby revealing his vulnerability; I’m sure that is one of the reasons he was so loved. Also, because he was so funny; but often being funny is just being truthful where a subject is taboo.
In my immediate circle, it is usually my gay friends who are the boldest. I immediately think of comedian Scott Capurro, who has been in the news quite a bit recently for upsetting people. The reason Scott upsets people so regularly is that so much of what he says is so close to the bone. If it were me, I would pull back. But Scott, like so many gay people, is fearless.
Many of the greatest warriors in the ongoing culture wars are gay. I’m sure it is for the same reason: in this age of increasing censorship, the importance of speaking truth is ever more needed, and gay people are not scared of the truth. They have learnt to come to terms with it
What’s more, a lot of gay people feel like outsiders, even if we live in much more inclusive times compared to say a century ago. So perhaps, by speaking truths, they do not feel there is as much risk to them as to someone on the inside. Or maybe, by being an outsider—whether by sexuality, or by something else (race, political belief, whatever)—you are forced out on a limb, and that in itself is bracing.
They say the fool was often the only one who spoke truth to Power. I bet a lot of the time the fool was gay.
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I wanted to take a look at the gold price today. As I'm sure you are aware, it has been extraordinarily strong in recent weeks.
$2,100/oz, or just below, was resistance for four long years. Each attempt - and there were at least three - to get through that level stuttered and stalled. Then, last month, after a false break late last year, we broke out. Gold has not looked back, suddenly putting on over $200 and behaving like something out of the spivvier end of the cryptocurrency markets.
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All four of my children were born at home. I feel extremely fortunate about this - they should too. Four wonderful experiences. I will forever be in debt to Louisa and Jolie.
When, twenty-four years ago, my then wife, Louisa, told me she wanted to give birth to our first child at home, I thought she was off her rocker, but I gave her my word that we would at least talk to a midwife, and we did just that. Within about five minutes of meeting Tina Perridge of South London Independent Midwives, a lady of whom I cannot speak highly enough, I was instantly persuaded.
Ever since, when I hear that someone is pregnant, I start urging them to have a homebirth with the persistence of a Jehovah’s Witness or someone pedalling an upgrade to your current mobile phone subscription.
I even included a chapter about it in my first book Life After the State - Why We Don’t Need Government (2013), (now, thanks to the invaluable help of my buddy Chris P, back in print - with the audiobook here [Audible UK, Audible US, Apple Books]).
I’m publishing that chapter here, something I was previously not able to do (rights issues), because I want as many people as possible to read it. Many people do not even know home-birth is an option.
I’m fully aware that, when it comes to giving birth, one of the last people a prospective mum wants to hear advice from is comedian and financial writer, Dominic Frisby. I’m also aware that this is an extremely sensitive subject and that I am treading on eggshells galore. But the word needs to be spread. All I would say is that if you or someone you know is pregnant, have a conversation with an independent midwife, before committing to having your baby in a hospital. It’s so important. Please just talk to an independent midwife first.
With that said, here is that chapter. Enjoy it, and if you know anyone who is pregnant, please send this to them.
We have to use fiat money, we have to pay taxes, most of us are beholden in some way to the education system. These are all things much bigger than us, over which we have little control. The birth of your child, however, is one of the most important experiences of your (and their) life, one where the state so often makes a mess of things, but one where it really is possible to have some control.
The State: Looking After Your First Breath
The knowledge of how to give birth without outside interventions lies deep within each woman. Successful childbirth depends on an acceptance of the process.
Suzanne Arms, author
There is no single experience that puts you more in touch with the meaning of life than birth. A birth should be a happy, healthy, wonderful experience for everyone involved. Too often it isn’t.
Broadly speaking, there are three places a mother can give birth: at home, in hospital or – half-way house – at a birthing centre. Over the course of the 20th century we have moved birth from the home to the hospital. In the UK in the 1920s something like 80% of births took place at home. In the 1960s it was one in three. By 1991 it was 1%. In Japan the home-birth rate was 95% in 1950 falling to 1.2% in 1975. In the US home-birth went from 50% in 1938 to 1% in 1955. In the UK now 2.7% of births take place at home. In Scotland, 1.2% of births take place at home, and in Northern Ireland this drops to fewer than 0.4%. Home-birth is now the anomaly. But for several thousand years, it was the norm.
The two key words here are ‘happy’ and ‘healthy’. The two tend to come hand in hand. But let’s look, first, at ‘healthy’. Let me stress, I am looking at planned homebirth; not a homebirth where mum didn’t get to the hospital in time.
My initial assumption when I looked at this subject was that hospital would be more healthy. A hospital is full of trained personnel, medicine and medical equipment. My first instinct against home-birth, it turned out, echoed the numerous arguments against it, which come from many parts of the medical establishment. They more or less run along the lines of this statement from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology: ‘Unless a woman is in a hospital, an accredited free-standing birthing centre or a birthing centre within a hospital complex, with physicians ready to intervene quickly if necessary, she puts herself and her baby’s health and life at unnecessary risk.’
Actually, the risk of death for babies born at home is almost half that of babies born at hospital (0.35 per 1,000 compared to 0.64), according to a 2009 study by the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence reports that mortality rates are the same in booked home-birth as in hospitals. In November 2011 a study of 65,000 mothers by the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (NPEU) was published in the British Medical Journal. The overall rate of negative birth outcomes (death or serious complications) was 4.3 per 1,000 births, with no difference in outcome between non-obstetric and obstetric (hospital) settings. The study did find that the rate of complications rose for first-time mums, 5.3 per 1,000 (0.53%) for hospitals and 9.5 per 1,000 (0.95%) for home-birth. I suspect the number of complications falls with later births because, with experience, the process becomes easier – and because mothers who had problems are less likely to have more children than those who didn’t. The Daily Mail managed to twist this into: ‘First-time mothers who opt for home birth face triple the risk of death or brain damage in child.’ Don’t you just love newspapers? Whether at home or in the hospital there were 250 negative events seen in the study: early neonatal deaths accounted for 13%; brain damage 46%; meconium aspiration syndrome 20%; traumatic nerve damage 4% and fractured bones 4%. Not all of these were treatable.
There are so many variables in birth that raw comparative statistics are not always enough. And, without wishing to get into an ethical argument, there are other factors apart from safety. There are things – comfort, happiness, for example – for which people are prepared to sacrifice a little safety. The overriding statistic to take away from that part of the study is that less than 1% of births in the UK, whether at hospital or at home, lead to serious complications.
But when you look at rates of satisfaction with their birth experience, the numbers are staggering. According to a 1999 study by Midwifery Today researching women who have experienced both home and hospital birth, over 99% said that they would prefer to have a home-birth in the future!
What, then, is so unsatisfying about the hospital birth experience? I’m going to walk through the birthing process now, comparing what goes on at home to hospital. Of course, no two births are the same, no two homes are the same, no two hospitals are the same, but, broadly speaking, it seems women prefer the home-birth experience because: they have more autonomy at home, they suffer less intervention at home and, yes, it appears they actually suffer less pain at home.
When mum goes into labour, the journey to the hospital, sometimes rushed, the alien setting when she gets there, the array of doctors and nurses who she may never have met before, but are about to get intimate, can all upset her rhythm and the production of her labour hormones. These aren’t always problems, but they have the potential to be; they add to stress and detract from comfort.
At home, mum is in a familiar environment, she can get comfortable and settled, go where she likes and do what she likes. Often getting on with something else can take her mind off the pain of the contractions, while in hospital there is little else to focus on. At home, she can choose where she wants to give birth – and she can change her mind, if she likes. She is in her own domain, without someone she doesn’t know telling her what she can and can’t do. She can change the light, the heating, the music; she can decide exactly who she wants at the birth and who ‘catches’ her baby. She can choose what she wants to eat. She will have interviewed and chosen her midwife many months before, and built up a relationship over that time. But in hospitals she is attended by whoever is on duty, she has to eat hospital food, there might be interruptions, doctors’ pagers, alarms, screams from next door, whirrs of machinery, tube lighting, overworked, resentful staff to deal with, internal hospital politics, people coming in, waking her up, and checking her vitals, sticking in pins or needles, putting on monitor belts, checking her cervix mid-contraction – any number of things over which mum has no control. Mums who move about freely during labour complain less of back pain. Many authorities feel that the motion of walking and changing positions can even enhance the effectiveness of the contractions, but such active birth is not as possible in the confines of many hospitals. Many use intravenous fluids and electronic foetal monitors to ensure she stays hydrated and to record each contraction and beat of the baby’s heart. This all dampens mum’s ability to move about and adds to any feelings of claustrophobia.
In hospital the tendency is to give birth on your back, though this is often not the best position – the coccyx cannot bend to help the baby’s head pass through. There are many other positions – on your hands and knees for example – where you don’t have to work against gravity and where the baby’s head is not impeded. On your back, pushing is less effective and metal forceps are sometimes used to pull the baby out of the vagina, but forceps are less commonly used when mum assumes a position of comfort during the bearing-down stage.
This brings us to the next issue: intervention. The NPEU study of 2011 found that 58% of women in hospital had a natural birth without any intervention, compared to 88% of women at home and 80% of women at a midwife-led unit. Of course, there are frequent occasions when medical technology saves lives, but the likelihood of medical intervention increases in hospitals. I suggest it can actually cause as many problems as it alleviates because it is interruptive. Even routine technology can interrupt the normal birth process. Once derailed from the birthing tracks, it is hard to get back on. Once intervention starts, it’s hard to stop. The medical industry is built on providing cures, but if you are a mother giving birth, you are not sick, there is nothing wrong with you, what you are going through is natural and normal. As author Sheila Stubbs writes, ‘the midwife considers the miracle of childbirth as normal, and leaves it alone unless there’s trouble. The obstetrician normally sees childbirth as trouble; if he leaves it alone, it’s a miracle.’
Here are just some of the other interventions that occur. If a mum arrives at hospital and the production of her labour hormones has been interrupted, as can happen as a result of the journey, she will sometimes be given syntocinon, a synthetic version of the hormone oxytocin, which occurs naturally and causes the muscle of the uterus to contract during labour so baby can be pushed out. The dose of syntocinon is increased until contractions are deemed normal. It’s sometimes given after birth as well to stimulate the contractions that help push out the placenta and prevent bleeding. But there are allegations that syntocinon increases the risk of baby going into distress, and of mum finding labour too painful and needing an epidural. This is one of the reasons why women also find home-birth less painful.
Obstetricians sometimes rupture the bag of waters surrounding the baby in order to speed up the birthing process. This places a time limit on the labour, as the likelihood of a uterine infection increases after the water is broken. Indeed in a hospital – no matter how clean – you are exposed to more pathogens than at home. The rate of post-partum infection to women who give birth in hospital is a terrifying 25%, compared to just 4% in home-birth mothers. Once the protective cushion of water surrounding the baby’s head is removed (that is to say, once the waters are broken) there are more possibilities for intervention. A scalp electrode, a tiny probe, might be attached to baby’s scalp, to continue monitoring its heart rate and to gather information about its blood.
There are these and a whole host of other ‘just in case’ interventions in hospital that you just don’t meet at home. As childbirth author Margaret Jowitt, says – and here we are back to our theme of Natural Law – ‘Natural childbirth has evolved to suit the species, and if mankind chooses to ignore her advice and interfere with her workings we must not complain about the consequences.’
At home, if necessary, in the 1% of cases where serious complications do ensue, you can still be taken to hospital – assuming you live in reasonable distance of one.
‘My mother groaned, my father wept,’ wrote William Blake, ‘into the dangerous world I leapt.’ We come now to the afterbirth. Many new mothers say they physically ache for their babies when they are separated. Nature, it seems, gives new mothers a strong attachment desire, a physical yearning that, if allowed to be satisfied, starts a process with results beneficial to both mother and baby. There are all sorts of natural forces at work, many of which we don’t even know about. ‘Incomplete bonding,’ on the other hand, in the words of Judith Goldsmith, author of Childbirth Wisdom from the World’s Oldest Societies, ‘can lead to confusion, depression, incompetence, and even rejection of the child by the mother.’ Yet in hospitals, even today with all we know, the baby is often taken away from the mother for weighing and other tests – or to keep it warm, though there is no warmer place for it that in its mother’s arms (nature has planned for skin-to-skin contact).
Separation of mother from baby is more likely if some kind of medical intervention or operation has occurred, or if mum is recovering from drugs taken during labour. (Women who have taken drugs in labour also report decreased maternal feelings towards their babies and increased post-natal depression). At home, after birth, baby is not taken from its mother’s side unless there is an emergency.
As child development author, Joseph Chilton Pearce, writes, ‘Bonding is a psychological-biological state, a vital physical link that coordinates and unifies the entire biological system . . . We are never conscious of being bonded; we are conscious only of our acute disease when we are not bonded.’ The breaking of the bond results in higher rates of postpartum depression and child rejection. Nature gives new parents and babies the desire to bond, because bonding is beneficial to our species. Not only does it encourage breastfeeding and speed the recovery of the mother, but the emotional bonding in the magical moments after birth between mother and child, between the entire family, cements the unity of the family. The hospital institution has no such agenda.
The cutting of the umbilical cord is another area of contention. Hospitals, say home-birth advocates, cut it too soon. In Birth Without Violence, the classic 1975 text advocating gentle birthing techniques, Frederick Leboyer – also an advocate of bonding and immediate skin-to-skin contact between mother and baby after birth – writes:
[Nature] has arranged it so that during the dangerous passage of birth, the child is receiving oxygen from two sources rather than one: from the lungs and from the umbilicus. Two systems functioning simultaneously, one relieving the other: the old one, the umbilicus, continues to supply oxygen to the baby until the new one, the lungs, has fully taken its place. However, once the infant has been born and delivered from the mother, it remains bound to her by this umbilicus, which continues to beat for several long minutes: four, five, sometimes more. Oxygenated by the umbilicus, sheltered from anoxia, the baby can settle into breathing without danger and without shock. In addition, the blood has plenty of time to abandon its old route (which leads to the placenta) and progressively to fill the pulmonary circulatory system. During this time, in parallel fashion, an orifice closes in the heart, which seals off the old route forever. In short, for an average of four or five minutes, the newborn infant straddles two worlds. Drawing oxygen from two sources, it switches gradually from the one to the other, without a brutal transition. One scarcely hears a cry. What is required for this miracle to take place? Only a little patience.
Patience is not something you associate with hospital birth. There are simply not the resources, even if, as the sixth US president John Quincy Adams said, ‘patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish’. The arguments to delay the early cutting of the cord (something not as frequent in hospitals as it once was) are that, even though blood going back to the placenta stops flowing – or pulsing – non-pulsing blood going from the placenta into baby is still flowing. After birth, 25–35% of baby’s oxygenated blood remains in the placenta for up to ten minutes. With the cord cut early, baby is less likely to receive this blood, making cold stress, infant jaundice, anaemia, Rh disease and even a delayed maternal placental expulsion more likely. There is also the risk of oxygen deprivation and circulatory shock, as baby gasps for breath before his nasal passages have naturally drained their mucus and amniotic fluid. Scientist W. F. Windle has even argued that, starved of blood and oxygen, brain cells will die, so cutting the cord too early even sets the stage for brain damage.
Natural birth advocates say it is vital for the baby’s feeding to be put to the breast as soon as possible after birth, while his sucking instincts are strongest. Bathing, measuring and temperature-taking can wait. Babies are most alert during the first hour after birth, so it’s important to take advantage of this before they settle into that sleepy stage that can last for hours or even days.
Colostrum, the yellow fluid that breasts start producing during pregnancy, is nature’s first food. is substance performs many roles we know about and probably many we don’t as well. Known as ‘baby’s first vaccine’, it is full of antibodies and protects against many different viruses and bacteria. It has a laxative effect that clears meconium – baby’s black and tarry first stool – out of the system. If this isn’t done, baby can be vulnerable to jaundice. Colostrum lines baby’s stomach ready for its mother’s milk, which comes two or three days later, and it meets baby’s nutritional needs with a naturally occurring balance of fat, protein and carbohydrate. Again, with the various medical interventions that go on in hospitals, from operations to drug-taking to simply separating mother and baby, this early breast-feeding process can easily be derailed. Once derailed, as I’ve said, it’s often hard to get back on track. I am no scientist and cannot speak with any authority on the science behind it all, but I do know that nature, very often, plans for things that science has yet to discover.
Once upon a time, when families lived closer together and people had more children at a younger age, there was an immediate family infrastructure around you. People were experienced with young. If mum was tired, nan or auntie could feed the baby. Many of us are less fortunate in this regard today. With a hospital, you are sent home and, suddenly, you and your partner are on your own with a baby in your life, and very little aftercare. When my first son was born I was 30. I suddenly realized I had only held a baby once before. I was an only child so I had never looked after a younger brother or sister; my cousins, who had had children, lived abroad. Suddenly there was this living thing in my life, and I didn’t know what to do. But, having had a home-birth, the midwife, who you already know, can you give you aftercare. She comes and visits, helps with the early breastfeeding process and generally supports and keeps you on the right tracks.
It’s so important to get the birthing process right. There are all sorts of consequences to our health and happiness to not doing so. And in the West, with the process riddled as it is with intervention, we don’t. We need to get birth out of the hospital and into an environment where women experience less pain, lower levels of intervention, greater autonomy and increased satisfaction.
A 2011 study by a team from Peking University and the London School of Hygiene found that, of 1.5 million births in China between 1996 and 2008, babies born in hospitals were two to three times less likely to die. China is at a similar stage in its evolutionary cycle to the developed world at the beginning of the 20th century. The move to hospitals there looks inevitable. Something similar is happening in most Developing Nations.
In his book A History of Women’s Bodies, Edward Shorter quotes a doctor describing a birth in a working-class home in the 1920s:
You find a bed that has been slept on by the husband, wife and one or two children; it has frequently been soaked with urine, the sheets are dirty, and the patient’s garments are soiled, she has not had a bath. Instead of sterile dressings you have a few old rags or the discharges are allowed to soak into a nightdress which is not changed for days.
For comparison, he describes a 1920s hospital birth:
The mother lies in a well-aired disinfected room, light and sunlight stream unhindered through a high window and you can make it light as day electrically too. She is well bathed and freshly clothed on linen sheets of blinding whiteness . . . You have a staff of assistants who respond to every signal . . . Only those who have to repair a perineum in a cottars’s house in a cottar’s bed with the poor light and help at hand can realize the joy.
Most homes in the developed world are no longer as he describes, if they ever were, except in slums. It would seem the evolution in the way we give birth as a country develops passes from the home to the hospital. It is time to take it away from the hospital.
Why am I spending so much time on birth in a book about economics? The process of giving birth is yet another manifestation of this culture of pervasive state intervention. (Hospitals, of course, are mostly state run.) It’s another example of something that feels safer, if provided by the state in a hospital, even if the evidence is to the contrary. And it’s another example of the state destroying for so many something that is beautiful and wonderful.
What’s more, like so many things that are state-run, hospital birth is needlessly expensive. The November 2011 study of 65,000 mothers by the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit looked at the average costs of birth in the NHS. They were highest for planned obstetric unit births and lowest for planned home-births. Here they are:
* £1,631 (c. $2,600) for a planned birth in an obstetric unit
* £1,461 (c. $2,340 for a planned birth in an alongside midwifery unit (AMU)
* £1,435 (c. $2,300) for a planned birth in a free-standing midwifery unit (FMU)
* £1,067 (c. $1,700) for a planned home-birth.
Not only is it as safe; not only are people more satisfied by it; not only do the recipients receive more one-to-one – i.e. better – care; home-birth is also 35% cheaper. Intervention is expensive.
So I return to this theme of non-intervention, whether in hospitals or economies. It often looks cruel, callous and hard-hearted; it often looks unsafe, but, counter-intuitively perhaps, in the end it is more human and more humane.
When you look at the cost of private birth, the argument for home-birth is even more compelling. Private maternity care is expensive. For example, in summer 2012, a first birth at the Portland Hospital in London costs £2,880 (about $4,400) for a normal delivery and £3,790 (about $5,685) for an elective caesarean and for the first 24 hours of care. Additional nights in a standard room cost around £1,000 (about $1,500). You also have to allow for the fees charged by your private consultant obstetrician, which might be £3,000–£4,000 ($4,500– $6,000). So, in total, a private birth at a hospital such as the Portland could cost £7,500–£10,000 ($10–$15,000). There will be some saving if you opt for a ‘midwife-led delivery service’ or ‘midwife-led care’. In this instance, you will still have a named obstetrician, but he or she will see you less often, and the birth may be ‘supported by an on-call Consultant Obstetrician’. London midwives charge £2,500–£4,000 (c. $4–6,000) for about six months of care from early pregnancy to a month after birth. The comparative value is astounding, I would say.
To have a planned home-birth on the NHS is possible, but can be problematic to arrange, depending on where you are based. Most people, after they have paid taxes, do not now have the funds to buy a private home-birth, so they are forced into the arms of government health care, such is the cycle at work.
I was first introduced to the idea of home-birth by my ex-wife, Louisa, something for which I will forever be grateful. She hated hospitals due to an earlier experience in her life and only found out about alternatives thanks to the internet. I, as well as my friends and family, thought Louisa was insane. But she insisted. And she was right to.
Our first son was actually two weeks and six days late. Because he was so late, we were obliged to go to the hospital, which we did, after two weeks and five days. We were kept waiting so long in there, we decided to go and persuaded an overworked nurse that we were fine to go and we left. The confused nurse was glad to have one less thing to think about. The next day Samuel was born: a beautiful and wonderful experience that I will never forget, one of the happiest days of my life – exactly as nature intended.
Simply talking to people that have experienced both home-birth and hospital birth, or reading about their experiences, the anecdotal evidence is compelling. Home-birth may not be for everyone – I’m not suggesting it is. Birthing centres seem a good way forward. But a hospital birth should only be for emergencies. Childbirth is a natural process that no longer requires hospitalization, except in those 1% of situations where something goes seriously wrong. If it does go wrong and there is an emergency, call an ambulance and be taken to hospital – that is what they are for.
Returning to the original premise of Natural and Positive Law, it’s pretty clear which category hospital birth falls into. Hospitals do things in the way that they do because of the pressures they are under, not least the threat of legal action should some procedural failure occur. Taking birth back home and away from the state reduces the burden of us on it and of it on us.
Life After the State - Why We Don’t Need Government (2013) is now back in print - with the audiobook here: Audible UK, Audible US, Apple Books.
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 promised, here is my updated guide to buying and investing in gold. I really think it is important that you own some, given what governments are doing to currency.
I have also made this available as a PDF, which you can download here:
(If that PDF doesn’t work, try this link)
Also, there are still a couple of tickets for my musical comedy show this Friday April 5 in Guildford. And on Tuesday April 9, I’m talking money, tax, gold - all that stuff - at the IEA with Tom Clougherty. Entry is free. If you fancy it, here is the link).
We are living in a world of uncertainty. There is inflation, war, political discontent, financial instability and, perhaps most concerning of all, state incompetence everywhere you look. The case for owning gold, for having wealth stored outside the system, where it is nobody else’s liability, is as strong as it has ever been.
There is old Wall Street adage: “Put 10% of your net worth in gold, and hope it doesn’t go up.” If gold is going up, it usually means there are problems elsewhere.
The adage applies now, as much as it did when it was first coined many decades ago.
How to invest in gold.
There are five ways:
* You can go old school and buy bullion - coins or bars.
* You can buy gold stored in vaults in places like London, Jersey, Zurich or Singapore. This gold is allocated to you.
* You can buy ETFs via your stock broker. These are funds that store gold. The price of the fund tracks the gold price, and you own shares in the fund. (See footnote 1, if you need to understand what an ETF is).
* You can buy gold companies - refiners, royalty companies, miners and so on.
* You can buy futures, options, CFDs or spreadbets.
I’m not talking today about buying mining companies (if you are interested in mining companies, consider a paid subscription, as gold mining companies are one of my areas of expertise). Nor am I talking about futures, options, CFDs or spread betting the gold price. Neither is safeguarding your wealth. They are speculation. In the right market they can make you a lot of money. In the wrong market, they can also lose you a lot.
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Today we are talking about old school, physical gold
I’ll put to one side arguments about whether gold is a good investment or not (I think it is), and whether I think it is going up or down. I’ll simply explain what is the easiest, cheapest and, perhaps above all, safest way to buy gold.
A note on ETFs
ETFs are a simple way to get exposure to the gold price. It’s not really the same as owning actual metal, so the purists tend to veer away from ETFs, though institutions like them, as do traders. ETFs are easy to buy and sell. You buy an ETF just as you would buy any stock or share through your broker. London-listed gold ETFs include RMAU.L and PHAU.L. The world’s biggest is the NYSE-listed GLD. Costs - for example storage - are baked into the price.
To buy an ETF, you need an account with a broker, such as Hargreaves Lansdown or Interactive Investor. You deposit money and buy through them.
I steer away from ETFs mainly because they are too easy to get shaken out of. When you buy physical gold, to sell can be a bit of an undertaking, so it’s less likely to be done on a whim. Owning physical turns you into a long-term investor. It may be that you never sell at all and end up passing the gold on to your heirs.
So where do you buy gold from?
I’ve used many bullion dealers over the years. The dealer I like most, and with whom I have an affiliation deal, is the Pure Gold Company. Premiums are low. Quality of service is high. You get to deal with a human being. You can take delivery of your gold or store it online with them in their vaults. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe. (If you speak to them, tell them I sent you).
In theory, there is not a great deal of difference between an ETF and storing your gold online with a bullion dealer. Both are extremely convenient, whether for buying or selling. Both give you exposure to the gold price. But I favour the storing-it-with-a-bullion-dealer route, as, somehow, you are less likely to sell. ETFs make it too easy to sell and so weaken your hands.
Where are you going to put your gold?
Once you’ve decided where to buy your gold, the next question is: where to put it? Different people with different circumstances have different solutions.
Some people have a safe at home and keep their gold there. Some keep their gold in safety deposit boxes. Others never take delivery at all, and keep it safely stored in a vault with the dealer in sensible places like Zurich, Jersey, London or Singapore.
I’m not convinced homes in our “vibrant” British cities are safe, so these are not options I would take, but ... I know one guy that has all his gold stored in a sock in his loft. I know another that has buried it in his garden, and only his close family know the location - he has quite a bit of land. I know another that keeps his gold and silver in plain sight - he uses the bars as doorstops. Nuts you may say, but how about this? He got burgled and the burglars didn’t take the bars. They obviously thought they were just doorstops.
If - and only if - you have somewhere safe to store it, I’m a great advocate of taking delivery. You get to handle your metal. There are lots of fantastic different coins from around the world to buy - Chinese Pandas, South African Krugerrands, American Eagles, Austrian Philharmonics, Canadian Maples, Australian Kangaroos. The bars are nice too. It’s good to handle gold. But I refer you to my above comment about cities today. I’ve also heard about homes being burgled by people with metal detectors - but I gather this is mostly an Asian-on-Asian crime. For now.
What about tax?
Competition amongst ETFs and bullion dealers has conspired to drive down prices, much to the benefit of the consumer. But there is one enormous cost that neither of these methods are able to avoid - tax.
When you sell, you are incurring a Capital Gains Tax (CGT) event - 20% in the UK for higher rate tax-payers and 10% for lower. That’s an unavoidable 10 or 20% erosion of any profit.
But there’s another method of buying gold (and silver), which, quite legally, avoids this cost altogether. There is a slightly higher premium to spot when you buy, but we are talking about a tiny amount, nothing like 20% CGT. Given the potential savings involved, it’s surprising that more UK investors don’t buy their gold and silver in this way. The method I’m describing, if you haven’t already figured it out, is to buy sovereigns and Britannias.
The gold sovereign used to be the pound coin. Imagine that - a pound coin made of solid gold. It was the pound coin from 1816, after the Great Recoinage, until 1932, when the UK finally abandoned its gold standard. Until then, the pound really was “as good as gold”. 22 carat gold to be precise – that’s about 92% purity. A sovereign weighs about 7gs, which is around a quarter of an ounce, the same weight as a 2p piece.
Such is the devaluation of currency that has taken place over successive generations in the UK, it now takes well over 400 pound coins to buy one of these old pound coins.
Despite no longer being on the gold standard, the Royal Mint began producing sovereigns again in 1957 and continues to the present day. A large number of them are actually minted in that well known British heartland, Delhi. (That’s because there is a huge market for them in India).
Technically these coins are legal tender, so they are exempt from CGT.
As sovereigns are so common, the numismatic value is very low. You can pick up 100-plus-year-old Victorian coins at a few percent over spot. You get the history for free. And you can buy them from most dealers, including, of course, the Pure Gold Company.
The main exception is the 1937 sovereign struck for Edward VIII. As he abdicated, the coins were never circulated. One sold in 2014 for over half a million quid. That’s some premium.
Gold Britannias – which are an ounce in weight – only began to be issued in 1987. But they too are considered coins of the realm. Despite the fact that an ounce of gold is £1,800, the face value of a Britannia is £100. Don’t ask me how that works. I’m sure there’s a reason. But, as coins of the realm, they too are exempt from CGT.
The Royal Mint began producing silver Britannias in 1997. They also weigh an ounce. They have a face value of £2 (an ounce of silver is about £16) and are also exempt from CGT.
Sovereigns are not the most beautiful coins in the world - Britannias are nicer - but both make for a considerable saving on CGT (assuming you have made a gain when you come to sell - of course, there is no guarantee of that).
Thank you very much for reading this report. Good luck with your investments. Remember the adage: “Put 10% of your net worth in gold, and hope it doesn’t go up.” If gold is going up, it usually means there are problems elsewhere.
Once again my recommended bullion dealer is the Pure Gold Company. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. You can take delivery of your gold or store it online with them in their vaults. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them in their vaults.
Until next time,
Dominic
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With gold hitting new highs yesterday and the importance of owning some, in my view, as paramount as ever, I am going to send out my report on how to buy gold later today or tomorrow. If it is old hat to you, please just ignore the email.
If you prefer, you can also download the PDF version here:
(If that PDF doesn’t work, try this link)
In the meantime, today I want to take a look at oil. It is having a nice, quiet run.
What fossil fuels have made possible
There were some really interesting comments following this week’s Sunday morning thought piece about declining birth rates. You lot are clever.
My argument is that unaffordable housing has been a major cause of declining birth rates: people are having smaller families later in life, for the simple reason that they cannot afford anywhere to live. Dan Shaw replied as follows:
For the housing cost argument to be credible, it needs to explain what has changed. Basic necessities, including housing, have consumed the vast majority of people’s incomes until very recently in the developed world. They still do for most people today in the global south (where birth rates are also falling). Fiat inflation is undoubtedly eroding real income in the developed world, but it is only regressing disposable income towards historic norms when people were happy to start families. Why will people not start families when they have roughly the same wealth, in real terms, as their greatest generation (great) grandparents? Why are people in the global south, who have never seen Western wealth, also not having children?
Let’s put aside the issue of birth rates - they is not the focus of today’s piece, but Sunday’s. Instead let us ask: what was it that created this unique period in the 20th-century West, when ordinary middle-class people could afford housing and other basic necessities, and still have plenty of income left over for cars and other luxury items? It goes against almost all of history.
The answer must surely be fossil fuels. The energy they granted made us incredibly productive. It made 20th-century progress possible.
Today a variety of factors are undermining that: fiat money and the debasement of currency; restrictive planning laws and overregulation; and of course, a needless focus on other, more inefficient and wasteful energy sources.
The world seems to be slowly coming to its senses regarding fossil fuels, thank goodness, and, like them or not, they are clearly going to have an enormous role to play in powering economies for, at a guess, at least a hundred more years or until a superior form of energy is found. This is why they make up a core 10% of the Dolce Far Niente portfolio.
Whether it’s mines, farms, or factories, trucks, cars, boats, trains, or planes, or heating and cooling, we need fossil fuels, and they are going to make life a lot better for a lot of people.
Global economies seem to be ticking over reasonably well and finding their feet again. In particular, Chinese manufacturing data seems to be quietly improving. China and India are certainly growing consumption. Attempts to electrify western economies, well-meaning though they may be, seem to be coming apart, meanwhile. In short, oil demand is on the up.
This is confirmed by the latest oil market report from the International Energy Agency, which says: “Global oil demand is forecast to rise by a higher-than-expected 1.7 mb/d in 1Q24 on an improved outlook for the United States and increased bunkering” (refueling of cargo vessels). Meanwhile: “World oil production is projected to fall by 870 kb/d in 1Q24 vs 4Q23 due to heavy weather-related shut-ins and new curbs from the OPEC+ bloc.”
The combination of falling production and increased demand is what has led to higher prices.
Here’s Brent crude over the last two years, and you can see that nice solid low around $72.50, and the recent run from December to today’s price of $88.
The seasonal patterns favour a continuation of this run for at least another few weeks. January to May tends to be the best time of year to be long oil. Things tend to get dicey in the autumn. (Though beware of attaching too much importance to seasonals; they are more an additional rather than core reason for an investment decision).
Oil is still relatively cheap
I have two very interesting long-term charts to show you next.
First, is the long-term ratio between gold and oil. When this chart is high, oil is expensive relative to gold. When low, as is the case now (to an extent), oil is cheap relative to gold.
On a long-term basis, of the two, you probably have to say oil is the better bet. It’s not often you will hear me say that! To be clear: I advocate owning both.
This next chart is also interesting from a very long-term perspective. It shows energy as a percentage of the S&P500.
This has been creeping down for years - ever since $150 oil in 2008, but it has been creeping back up since Covid. You might validly argue that because of the emergence of new tech, new tech companies, and improved productivity, energy as a percentage of the S&P500 will inevitably go lower. That is certainly the evidence of the last 16 years. But you could equally make the case that energy is both essential and undervalued. In my view, it’s a bit of both.
So how to play all of this?
Simple ways include the likes of Shell (SHEL.L) and BP (BP.L), with Guinness Global Energy (ISIN 0P0000SV1G.L) another, more diversified possibility.
If you are looking for something at the spicier end of the market, then I challenge you to find a better report than this one by Dr. John from last autumn, in which he identifies his picks of the North American oil and gas juniors.
So to my vehicle of choice, and the one we hold in the Dolce Far’ Niente portfolio:
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Back in 2011, a landmark study by the United Nations Population Fund warned that the global population would reach 15 billion by the end of the century, “putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates.”
Cue lots of subsidies, initiatives, hand-wringing, wasted money, damaging narratives, damaging policy, and articles in the Guardian.
Here we are today, and suddenly the issue is population decline. By 2100, 97% of the world’s countries will have a shrinking population, according to a study published in The Lancet, leading to “staggering social change”. The Telegraph followed with a ludicrously sensationalist headline: "World population to fall for the first time since the Black Death."
Cue, no doubt, lots more subsidies, initiatives, hand-wringing, wasted money, damaging narratives, damaging policy, though, perhaps not so many articles in the Guardian. The last thing that publication wants is westerners reproducing. Not white ones, anyway.
The problem is economic modelling. It is wrong as often as it is right. Tossing a coin or consulting a psychic is just as reliable. Economic models commonly rely on extrapolating trends, which can work for a bit - trend-following is a highly effective investment strategy, after all - but they are largely based on the assumption that current conditions will persist, when they usually don’t, particularly when projecting decades out. Something unforeseen happens, such as lots of people making decisions an economist didn’t expect, and this changes everything.
Yet such flawed models, even though nothing more than projections that only carry more weight than Mystic Meg because they were delivered on a spreadsheet by a bloke with a PhD, become the basis for huge and expensive decisions by policymakers. We have seen it with climate change, with Covid, with economic policy, and with anything the OBR touches. The consequences are sometimes really harmful to people: lockdown policy being the most obvious recent example. It was based on flawed data and it was deeply destructive. Net Zero is the next one. Everyone can see it, yet still policy-makers persist.
I was, broadly speaking, persuaded in the early 00s by the arguments that population growth was inevitable. I am less persuaded by the idea that we will now see population decline, though perhaps I shouldn’t be. Fertility rates are coming down: globally, between 1950 and 2021, they fell by more than half: from 4.8 children to 2.2 - and there is not a nation where they haven’t fallen. Annual global births peaked at 142 million in 2016, falling to 129 million by 2021.
But whatever. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. There could be a nuclear war and the population might sink below a billion. Global planning laws could be eased, just as the world abandons fiat money for gold and bitcoin, with the result that house prices come down, just as people realize that seed oils, processed food, and tap water have all been making them infertile, and, as a result, we suddenly get a population boom.
So much of this is economic. In Developing Countries, people tend to have fewer children as they get richer and live longer. Irony of ironies, in the richer, Developed World, the main reason people have fewer children is that they can’t afford them.
Italians, being Catholic, are associated with large families and lots of brothers, sisters and cousins. But when Elon Musk, himself a prolific reproducer, observed yesterday that Italian birth rates hit their lowest level since the country was unified in 1861, he got this reply:
The main reason people are not reproducing is expense. What is the biggest expense in your life? Your government. It takes roughly 50% of everything you will ever earn. The next biggest expense is a house, something few can afford. With less government and cheaper housing, westerners would pretty quickly start reproducing again. What government is going to stand for less of itself and cheaper houses? Not one that I can see, except maybe in Argentina.
The idea that government is going to fix a problem of its own creation. Please. It will only make it worse.
I do know that stuff often happens for reasons we can’t explain, so the last thing we want is the planners meddling, especially with something as significant as this, when their models are so flawed.
It doesn’t matter if the global population goes up or down; human beings will find a way of coping. We always do. The last thing we need is more government intervention based on spurious data.
So what if growth falls? GDP growth is a bogus measure, anyway. Dimwitted, short-sighted obsession with GDP has been one of the major reasons mass immigration has gone so unchecked, if not encouraged, with such terrible consequences to local culture, history, and tradition, never mind locals’ opportunity and earnings.
GDP focuses on quantity not quality. It neglects individual quality of life. It ignores income and wealth distribution. It ignores unaffordable housing and high levels of taxation (if anything high house prices are seen as a good thing). It creates societies based around spending and consumption, rather than making stuff and saving. It incentivises government activity - please, no more intervention - and short-termism. There are other better measures. Or, better still, take the John James Cowperthwaite positive non-intervention route and ban the Office of National Statistics altogether.
The Returning Soldier Effect.
After World War One - itself a monumental government cock-up - which saw the death of countless young men across Europe, the number of boys born relative to girls increased. It happened after World War Two as well. This phenomenon has been noticed so many times after wars that it now has its own name: the Returning Soldier Effect.
All sorts of explanations have been posited, ranging from changing female hormones during wartime to divine intervention to a surprisingly persuasive argument that "taller soldiers are more likely to survive battle and that taller parents are more likely to have sons".
On the other hand, it could just be Mother Nature. There is plenty that Mother Nature gets up to that we don’t even notice, let alone find a credible and proven explanation for. Yet she determines much of what we do, without us even realising it.
Our instincts come from Mother Nature. Our first instinct is survival: to find water, food, and shelter, for ourselves and then those close to us. Next is the survival of the species: the urge to have sex and reproduce with the best possible mate. These instincts come before nice houses, cars, and clothes. But even the urge for those derives from a need for safety and to make ourselves look more desirable to a potential mate - aka Mother Nature. We are animals.
At the birth of my children, I came away with the thought that a woman is nature’s vessel, subservient to the species as a whole.
So back to population levels: it really would not surprise me to discover that some kind of Natural Law is at work, in the same way that plants talk to each other, and it will deal with the population issue way better than any government.
But even if not, the human population will be what it is as a result of a plethora of individual decisions, many of which will be guided by Mother Nature, and many of which by economic circumstance. As the great man Cowperthwaite set, “A multiplicity of individual decisions will produce a better and wiser result than a single decision by a Government or by a board with its inevitably limited knowledge of the myriad factors involved, and its inflexibility.”
So please let’s keep Positive Law and meddlesome planners with flawed models out of this.
My first book, and many readers’ favourite, Life After the State - Why We Don’t Need Government (2013), 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 UKAudible USApple Books
And if you are in the Guildford neck of the woods this Friday, there are still some tickets left to my show, which, among other things, will feature me playing Elon Musk’s new favourite song. Bath on Saturday is sold out.
Thank you for being a subscriber to the Flying Frisby!
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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 …
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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.
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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 - Mostrar mais
